The Sea and the Jungle

by H. M. Tomlinson

There is no doubt the forest influences our moods in a way you at home could not understand. Our minds take its light and shade, and just as our little company, gathered in the Chief’s room at a time when the seas were running high, recalled sombre legends which told of foredoom, so this forest, an intrusive presence which is with us morning, noon, and night, voiceless, or making such sounds as we know are not for our ears, now shadows us, the prescience of destiny, as though an eyeless mask sat at table with us, a being which could tell us what we would know, but though it stays, makes no sign.

This forest, since we entered the Para River, now a thousand miles away, has not ceased. There have been the clearings of the settlements from Para inwards; but as Spruce says in his Journal, those clearings and campos alter the forest of the Amazon no more than would the culling of a few weeds alter the aspect of an English cornfield. The few openings I have seen in the forest do not derange my clear consciousness of a limitless ocean of leaves, its deep billows of foliage rolling down to the only paths there are in this country, the rivers, and there overhanging, arrested in collapse. There is no land. One must travel by boat from one settlement to another. The settlements are but islands, narrow foot-holds, widely sundered by vast gulfs of jungle.

The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element. Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveller cannot reach, and its unchanging surface, merged through distance into a mere reflector of the day, a brightness or a gloom, in his immediate vicinity breaks into a complexity of green surges; then one day the voyager sees land at last and is released from it. But we have not seen land since Serpa. There are men whose lives are spent in the chasms of light where the rivers are sunk in the dominant element, but who never venture within its green surface, just as one would not go beneath the waves to walk in the twilight of the sea bottom.

Now I have been watching it for so long I see the outer aspect of the jungles does vary. When I saw it first on the Para River it appeared to my wondering eyes but featureless green cliffs. Then in the Narrows beyond Para I remember an impression of elegance and placidity, for there, the waters still being tidal and saline, the palms were conspicuous and in profuse abundance. The great palms are the chief feature of that forest elevation, with their graceful columns, and their generous and symmetrical fronds which sometimes are like gigantic green feathers, and again are like fans. A tall palm, whatever its species, being a definite expression of life—not an agglomeration of leaves, but body and crown, a real personality—the forest of the Narrows, populous with such exquisite beings, had marges of straight ascending lines and flourishing and geometrical crests.

Beyond the river Xingu, on the main stream, the forest, persistent as a presence, again changed its aspect. It was ragged and shapeless, an impenetrable tangle, its front strewn with fallen trees, the vision of outer desolation. By Obydos it was more aerial and shapely again, but not of that light and soaring grace of the Narrows. It was contained, yet mounted not in straight lines, as in the country of the palms, but in convex masses. Here on the lower Madeira the forest seems of a nature intermediate between the rolling structure of the growth by Obydos, and the grace of the palm groves in the estuarine region of the Narrows. It is barbaric and splendid, easily prodigal with illimitable riches, sinking the river beneath a wealth of forms.

On the Madeira, as elsewhere in the world of the Amazons, some of the forest is on “terra-firma,” as that land is called which is not flooded when the waters rise. There the trees reach their greatest altitude and diameter; it is the region of the caáapoam, the “great woods” of the Indians. A stretch of terra firma shows as a low, vertical bank of clay, a narrow ribbon of yellow earth dividing the water from the jungle. More rarely the river cuts a section through some undulating heights of red conglomerate—heights I call these cliffs, as heights they are in this flat country, though at home they would attract no more attention than would the side of a gravel-pit—and again the bank may be of that cherry and saffron clay which gives a name to Itacoatiara. On such land the forest of the Madeira is immense, three or four species among the greater trees lording it in the green tumult expansively, always conspicuous where they stand, their huge boles showing in the verdant façade of the jungle as grey and brown pilasters, their crowns rising above the level roof of the forest in definite cupolas. There is one, having a neat and compact dome and a grey, smooth, and rounded trunk, and dense foliage as dark as that of the holm oak; and another, resembling it, but with a flattened and somewhat disrupted dome. I guessed these two giants to be silk-cottons. Another, which I supposed to be of the leguminous order, had a silvery bole, and a texture of pale green leafage open and light, which at a distance resembled that of the birch. These three trees, when assembled and well grown, made most stately riverside groups. The trunks were smooth and bare till somewhere near ninety feet from the ground. Palms were intermediate, filling the spaces between them, but the palms stood under the exogens, growing in alcoves of the mass, rising no higher than the beginning of the branches and foliage of their lords. The whole overhanging superstructure of the forest—not a window, an inlet, anywhere there—was rolling clouds of leaves from the lower rims of which vines were catenary, looping from one green cloud to another, or pendent, like the sundered cordage of a ship’s rigging. Two other trees were frequent, the pao mulatto, with limbs so dark as to look black, and the castanheiro, the Brazil nut tree.

The roof of the woods lowered when we were steaming past the igapo. The igapo, or aqueous jungle, through which the waters go deeply for some months of the year, is of a different character, and perhaps of a lesser height—it seems less; but then it grows on lower ground. I was told to note that its foliage is of a lighter green, but I cannot say I saw that. It is in the igapo that the Hevea Braziliensis flourishes, its pale bole, suggestive of the white poplar, deep in water for much of the year, and its crown sheltered by its greater neighbours, so that it grows in a still, heated, and humid twilight. This low ground is always marked by growths of small cecropia trees. These, with their white stems, their habit of free and regular branching, and their long leaves, digital in the manner of the horse-chestnut, have the appearance of great candelabra. Sometimes the igapo is prefaced by an area of cane. The numberless islands, being of recent formation, have a forest of a different nature, and they seldom carry the larger trees. The upper ends of many of the islands terminate in sandy pits, where dwarf willows grow. So foreign was the rest of the vegetation, that notwithstanding its volume and intricacy, I detected those humble little willows at once, as one would start surprised at an English word heard in the meaningless uproar of an alien multitude.

The forest absorbed us; as one’s attention would be challenged and drawn by the casual regard, never noticeably direct, but never withdrawn, of a being superior and mysterious, so I was drawn to watch the still and intent stature of the jungle, waiting for it to become vocal, for some relaxing of its static form. Nothing ever happened. I never discovered it. Rigid, watchful, enigmatic, its presence was constant, but without so much as one blossom in all its green vacuity to show the least friendly familiarity to one who had found flowers and woodlands kind. It had nothing that I knew. It remained securely aloof and indifferent, till I thought hostility was implied, as the sea implies its impartial hostility, in a constant presence which experience could not fathom, nor interest soften, nor courage intimidate. We sank gradually deeper inwards towards its central fastnesses.

By noon on our first day on the Madeira we reached the village of Rozarinho, which is on the left bank, with the tributary of the same name a little more up stream, but entering from the other side. Here, as we followed a loop of the stream, the Madeira seemed circumscribed, a tranquil lake. The yellow water, though swift, had so polished a surface that the reflections of the forest were hardly disturbed, sinking below the tops of the inverted trees to the ultimate clouds, giving an illusion of profundity to the apparent lake. The village was but a handful of leaf huts grouped about the nucleus of one or two larger buildings with white walls. There was the usual jetty of a few planks to which some canoes were tied. The forest was a high background to those diminished huts; the latter, as we came upon them, suddenly increased the height of the trees.

In another place the shelter of a family of Indians was at the top of a bank, secretive within the base of the woods. A row of chocolate babies stood outside that nest, with four jabiru storks among them. Each bird, so much taller than the babies, stood resting meditatively on one leg, as though waiting the order to take up an infant and deliver it somewhere. None of them, storks or infants, took the least notice of us. Perhaps the time had not yet come for them to be aware of mundane things. Certainly I had a feeling myself, so strange was the place, and quiet and tranquil the day, that we had passed world’s end, and that what we saw beyond our steamer was the coloured stuff of dreams which, if a wind blew, would wreathe and clear; vanish, and leave a shining void. The sunset deepened this apprehension. There came a wonderful sky of orange and mauve. It was over us and came down and under the ship. We moved with glowing clouds beneath our keel. There was no river; the forest girdled the radiant interior of a hollow sphere.