The Sea and the Jungle

by H. M. Tomlinson

III

On the morning of the 23rd January, while we were still considering, seeing what the sun was like, and the languid air, and that we were reduced to tinned beans, fat bacon, and butter which was oil and flies, whether it was worth while to note our breakfast bell—the steward stood swinging it, with the gravity of a priest, under the break of the poop—a shout came from the bridge that the Rio Madeira was in view.

As far back as Swansea we had heard legends of this stream, and they were sufficiently disturbing. When we arrived at Para we heard more, and worse. The pilot we engaged there called the Madeira the “long cemetery.” At Serpa, for the first time, we saw what happened to frail humanity when it ventured far on the Madeira. One day a river steamer came to Serpa, with a cargo of men from San Antonio. The river steamers of the Amazon are vessels of broad beam and shallow draft, painted the dingy hue of the river itself, and they have two tiers of decks, open-air shelves, between the supports of which the passengers sling their hammocks. The passengers do not sleep in bunks. This paddleboat came throbbing towards where we were at anchor. It was night, and she was unseen, a palpitation in the dark accompanied somehow by a fountain of sparks. Such boats burn wood in their furnaces. When her noise had ceased, and her lights imperceptibly enlarged as the current dropped her down abeam of us, a breath of her, a draught of air, passed our way. I am more familiar now with the odour malaria causes, but then I thought she must have a freight of the dead. She anchored. We could see her loaded hammocks in the light of the few lamps she carried. Through the binoculars next morning I inspected with peculiar interest the row of cadaverous heads, with black tousled hair, lemon-coloured skins, open mouths and vacant eyes, which stared at us over her rails. Each looked as though once it had peered into the eyes of doom, and then was but waiting, caring nothing.

There, ahead, was the Madeira now for us. We were then nearly a thousand miles from the sea, well within South America. But that meeting-place of the Amazon and its chief tributary was an expanse of water surprising in its immensity. As much light was reflected from the floor as at sea. The water was oceanic in amplitude. The forest boundaries were so far away that one could not realise, even when the time we had been on the river was remembered as a prolonged monotony, that this was the centre of a continent. The forest on our port side was near enough for us to see its limbs and its vines; but to the south-west, where we were heading for Bolivia, and to the north, the way to the Guianas, and to the east, out of which we had come, and to the west, where was Peru, the land was but a low violet barrier, varying in altitude with distance, and with silver sections in it, marking the river roads. In the north-west there was a broad silver path through the wall, the way to the Rio Negro, Manaos, and the Orinoco. In the south the near forest, being flooded, was a puzzle of islands. As we progressed they opened out as a line of green headlands. The Madeira appeared to have three widely separated mouths, with a complexity of intermediate and connective minor ditches. Indeed, the gate of the river was a region of inundated jungle. One began to understand why travellers here sometimes find themselves on the wrong river.

Our bows turned in to the forest wall, and for a few minutes I could not see any way for us there. The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow turgid flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a majestic forest was near to either beam. We were enclosed. And after we entered the Madeira my dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry way one does refer to a dread that has been long in the distance, and then one day takes shape, becomes material, and settles down with us. Its form, as you know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your simple mind has expected something with the lowering face of evil. Lo! evil has even bright eyes. Its nature, its dark craft which you have dreaded, is not seen, and your mind grows light with surprise. What, only this, then?

I never saw earth look more resplendent and chromatic than on the day when we entered that river with a bad name. Presently, I thought—here was a brief resurgence of the old gloom which had shrouded my conjectural Madeira—I might be called upon to pay the price for this surprising gift of intense colour, light, and luscious heat, for the quickening of the blood, as though the tropic air were a stimulant as well as a narcotic. Well, it does seem but fair, if chance, being happy, gives you a place in the tropics, to expect to have less time there than is given for the job of eking out a meagre existence in the north. It would not be right to look for gain both ways. (You will have noticed already, I suppose, that I have not been on the Madeira fifteen minutes.) This, I thought, as I walked to and fro on the “Capella,” is different from that endurance, bitter and prolonged, in the land where there is no sun worth mentioning, where the north-east wind blows, where the poor rate is so and so in the pound (and you are one of the fortunate if you pay it), and Lord Rosebery lectures on Thrift. I mentioned this to the Doctor. He did not remove his pipe from his mouth.

Because (the idea dawned on me as I sank into a deck chair beside the surgeon under the poop awning, and borrowed his silver tobacco-box), because, as to thrift and parching winds, abstinence and prudence, and lectures by the solemn on how to thin out your life in cold climates where all that is worth having is annexed, why praise a man who is willing to deprave his life to sand and frost? There in merry England the poor wretch is, where the riches of earth are not broadcast largess as I see they are here, but are stacked on each side of the road, and guarded by police, leaving to him but the inclement highway, with nothing but Lord Rosebery’s advice and benediction to help him keep the wind out of the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak consideration that he may swink all day for a handful of beans, or go without. What is prudence in that man? It is his goodwill for the police. To be blue nosed and meek at heart, and to hoard half the crust of your stinted bread, is to blaspheme the King of Glory. Some men will touch their crowns to Carnegie in heaven.

Thrift and abstinence! They began to look the most snivelling of sins as I watched, with spacious leisure, the near procession of gigantic trees, that superb wild which did not arise from such niggard and flinty maxims. Frugality and prudence! That is to regard the means to death in life, the pallor and projecting bones of a warped existence, as good men dwell on courage, motherhood, rebellion, and May time, and the other proofs of vitality and growth. Now, I thought, I see what to do. All those improving lectures, reform leagues, university settlements, labour exchanges, and other props for crippled humanity, are idle. It is a generative idea that is wanted, a revelation, a vision. It would be easier and quicker to take regiments of folk out of Ancoats, Hanley, Bethnal Green, and the cottages of the countryside, for one long glance at the kind of earth I see now. The world would expand as they looked. They would get the dynamic suggestion. In vain, afterwards, would the monopolists and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to drown the noise of chain forging at the Westminster foundry. Not the least good, that. The folk would not hear. Their minds would be absent and outward, not locked within to huddle with cramped and respectful thoughts. They would not start instinctively at the word of command. They would begin with dignity and assurance to compass their own affairs, and in an enormous way; and they would make hardly a sound as they moved forward, and they would have uplifted and shining eyes. (“Then you think more of ’em than I do,” said the surgeon.)

It would be no use, I saw clearly, sending the folk to Algeria, Egypt, or New York. Such places never betray to the traveller that our world is not a shapeless parcel of fields and buildings, tied up with bylaws, and sealed by the Grand Lama as his last act in the stupendous work of creation. There it is, an angular package in the sky, which the sun reads, and directs on its way to heaven in advance of its limited syndicate of proprietors.

Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the earth as a great and shining sphere. There were no fences and private bounds. I saw for the first time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our ambit. That bare shoulder of the world effaced regions and constellations in the sky. Our earth had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living body. The abundant rain was vital, and the forest I saw, nobler in stature and with an aspect of intensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, rose like a sign of life triumphant.