So far on the river we have not met the famous pium fly. But the motuca fly is a nuisance during the afternoon sleep. It is nearly of the size and appearance of a “blue-bottle” fly, but its wings, having black tips, look as though their ends were cut off. The motucas, while we slept, would alight on the wrists and ankles, and where each had fed there would be a wound from which the blood steadily trickled.
The mosquitoes do not trouble us till sundown. But one morning in my cabin I was interested in the hovering of what I thought was a small, leggy spider which, because of its colouration of black and grey bands, was evasive to the sight as it drifted about on its invisible thread. At last I caught it, and found it was a new mosquito. In pursuing it I found a number of them in the cabin. When I exhibited the insect to the surgeon he did not well disguise his concern. “Say nothing about it,” he said, “but this is the yellow-fever brute,” So our interest in our new life is kept alert and bright. The solid teak doors of our cabins are now permanently fixed back. Shutting them would mean suffocation; but as the cabins must be closed before sundown to keep out the clouds of gnats, the carpenter has made wooden frames, covered with copper gauze, to fit the door openings at night, and rounds of gauze to cap the open ports; and with a damp cloth, and some careful hunting each morning, one is able to keep down the mosquitoes which have managed to find entry during the night and have retired at sunrise to rest in dark corners. For our care notwithstanding the insects do find their way in to assault our lighted lamps. The Chief, partly because as an old sailor he is a fatalist, and partly because he thinks his massive body must be invulnerable, and partly because he has a contempt, anyway, for protecting himself, each morning has a new collection of curios, alive and dead, littered about his room. (I do not wonder Bates remained in this land so long; it is Elysium for the entomologist.) One of the live creatures found in his room the Chief retains and cherishes, and hopes to tame, though the object does not yet answer to his name of Edwin. This creature is a green mantis or praying insect, about four inches long, which the Chief came upon where it rested on the copper gauze of his door-cover, holding a fly in its hands, and eating it as one would an apple. This mantis is an entertaining freak, and can easily keep an audience watching it for an hour, if the day is dull. Edwin, in colour and form, is as fresh, fragile, and translucent as a leaf in spring. He has a long thin neck—the stalk to his wings, as it were—which is quite a third of his length. He has a calm, human face with a pointed chin at the end of his neck; he turns his face to gaze at you without moving his body, just as a man looks backwards over his shoulder. This uncanny mimicry makes the Chief shake with mirth. Then, if you alarm Edwin, he springs round to face you, frilling his wings abroad, standing up and sparring with his long arms, which have hooks at their ends. At other times he will remain still, with his hands clasped up before his face, as though in earnest devotion, for a trying period. If a fly alights near him he turns his face that way and regards it attentively. Then sluggishly he approaches it for closer scrutiny. Having satisfied himself it is a good fly, without warning his arms shoot out and that fly is hopelessly caught in the hooked hands. He eats it, I repeat, as you do apples, and the authentic mouthfuls of fly can be seen passing down his glassy neck. Edwin is fragile as a new leaf in form, has the same delicate colour, and has fascinating ways; but somehow he gives an observer the uncomfortable thought that the means to existence on this earth, though intricately and wonderfully devised, might have been managed differently. Edwin, who seems but a pretty fragment of vegetation, is what we call a lie. His very existence rests on the fact that he is a diabolical lie.
Gossamers in the rigging to-day led the captain to prophesy a storm before night. Clouds of an indigo darkness, of immense bulk, and motionless, reduced the sunset to mere runnels of opaline light about the bases of dark mountains inverted in the heavens. There was a rapid fall of temperature, but no rain. Our world, and we in its centre on the “Capella,” waited for the storm in an expectant hush. Night fell while we waited. The smooth river again deepened into the nadir of the last of day, and the forest about us changed to material ramparts of cobalt. The pilot made preparations to anchor. The engine bell rang to stand-by, a summons of familiar urgency, but with a new and alarming note when heard in a place like that. The forest made no response. A little later the bell clanged rapidly again, and the pulse of our steamer slowed, ceased. We could hear the water uncoiling along our plates. The forest itself approached us, came perilously near. The Skipper’s voice cried abruptly, “Let go!” and at once the virgin silence was demolished by the uproar of our cable. The “Capella” throbbed violently; she literally undulated in the drag of the current. We still drifted slowly down stream. The second anchor was dropped, and held us. The silence closed in on us instantly. Far in the forest somewhere, while we were whispering to each other in the quiet, a tree fell with a deep, significant boom.
Jan. 25. We had been under way for more than an hour when my eyes opened on the illuminated panorama of leaves and boles unfolding past the door of my cabin. The cicadas were grinding their scissors loudly in the trees alongside. I spent much of this day on the bridge, where I liked to be, watching the pilot at work. The Skipper was there, and in a cantankerous mood. The pilot wants us to make a chart of the river. He has given the captain and me a long list of islands, paranas, tributaries, villages, and sitios. Every map and reference to the river we have on board is valueless. A map of the river indicates many settlements with beautiful names; and at each point, when we arrive, nothing but the forest shows. How the cartographers arrived at such results is a mystery. This river, which their generous imaginings have seen as a tortuous bough of the Amazon, laden with villages which they indicate on their maps with marks like little round fruits, is almost barren. Every day we pass small sitios or clearings; maybe the map-makers mean such places as those. Yet each clearing is but a brief security, a raft of land—the size of the garden of an English villa—lonely in an ocean of deep leaves, where a rubber man has built himself a timber house, and some huts for his serfs. It will have a jetty and a huddle of canoes, and usually a few children on the bank watching us. We salute that place with our syren as we pass, and sometimes the kiddies spring for home then as though we were shooting at them. Or we see a little embowered shack with a pile of fuel logs beside it, and a crude name-board, where the river boats replenish when traversing this stream, during the season, for rubber. Our pilots have much to say of these stations, and of all the rubber men on the river and their wealth. But away with their rubber! I am tired of it, and will keep it out of this book if I can. For it is blasphemous that in such a potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be dwelt upon—as it is in the states of Amazonas and Para—as though it were the sole act of Providence. The Brazilians can see nothing here but rubber. The generative qualities of this land through fierce sun and warm showers—for rarely a day passes without rain, whatever the season—a land of constant high summer with a free fecundity which has buried the earth everywhere under a wild growth nearly two hundred feet deep, is insignificant to them. They see nothing in it at all but the damnable commodity which is its ruin. Para is mainly rubber, and Manaos. The Amazon is rubber, and most of its tributaries. The Madeira particularly is rubber. The whole system of communication, which covers 34,000 miles of navigable waters, waters nourishing a humus which literally stirs beneath your feet with the movements of spores and seeds, that system would collapse but for the rubber. The passengers on the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk is of rubber. There are no manufactures, no agriculture, no fisheries, and no saw-mills, in a region which could feed, clothe, and shelter the population of a continent. There was a book by a Brazilian I saw at Para, recently published, and called the “Green Hell” (Inferno Verde). On its cover was the picture of a nude Indian woman, symbolical of Amazonas, and from wounds in her body her blood was draining into the little tin cups which the rubber collector uses against the incisions on the rubber tree. From what I heard of the subject, and I heard much, that picture was little overdrawn. I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in the pageant of humanity.
It is only on the “Capella’s” bridge that you feel the stagnant air which is upset by the steamer’s progress. There it spills over us, heavy with the scent of the lairage on the fore deck. The bridge is a narrow, elevated outlook, full in the sun’s eye, where I can get a view of the complete ship as she serpentines in her narrow way. On the port side of it the Skipper has a seat, and there now he sits all day, gazing moodily ahead. The dapper little pilot stands centrally, throwing brief commands over his shoulder into the open window of the wheelhouse, where a sailor, gravely chewing tobacco, his hands on the wheel, is as rapt as though in a trance. I think the pilot finds his way by divination. The depth of the river is most variable. In the dry season I hear the stream becomes but a chain of pools connected by threads which may be no more than eighteen inches deep, the rest of its bed being dry mud cross-hatched by sun cracks. The rains in far Bolivia, overflowing the swamps there, during some months of the year increase the depth of the Madeira by forty-five feet. The local rainy season would make hardly any difference to it. The river is fed from reservoirs which stretch beneath the Andes.
There is rarely anything to show why, for a spell, the pilot should take us straight ahead in mid-stream, and then again tack to and fro across, sometimes brushing the foliage with our shrouds. I have plucked a bunch of leaves in an unexpected swoop in-shore. And the big timber comes down afloat to meet us in a never-ending procession; there are the propellor blades to be thought of. I see, now and then, the swirls which betray rocks in hiding, and when dodging those dangerous places the screw disturbs the mud and the stinks. But the pilot takes us round and about, we with our 300 feet of length and 23 feet draught, as a man would steer a motor car. To aid it our rudder has had fixed to it a false wooden length. The “Capella” is a very good girl, as responsive to the pilot’s word as though she knew that he alone can save her. She stems this powerful current at but four knots, and sometimes we come to places where, if she hesitated for but two seconds, we should be put athwart stream to close the channel. And what would happen to us with nothing but unexplored malarial forest each side of us is not useful to brood on. Occasionally the pilot, grasping the top of the “dodger,” stares beyond us fixedly to where the refracted sunshine is blinding between the green cliffs, and gives quick and numerous orders to the wheelhouse without turning his head. The Skipper gets up to watch. The “Capella” makes surprising swerves, the pilot nervously taps the boards with his foot.... Then he says something quietly, relaxes, and comes to us blithely, the funny dog with a nonsense story, and the Skipper sinks couchant again. Once more I watch the front of the jungle for what may show there. Seldom there is anything new which shows. It is rare, even when close alongside, that one can trace the shape of a leaf. There are but the conspicuous grey nests of the ants and wasps. Yet several times to-day I saw trees in blossom; domes of lilac in the green forest roof. Again, to-day we put up a flight of hundreds of ducks; and another incident was a blackwater stream, the Rio Mataua, the line of demarcation between the Madeira’s yellow flood and its dark tributary being distinct.
Jan. 26. The forest is lower and more open, and the pao mulatto is more numerous. We saw the important village of Manicoré to-day, and Oncas, a little place within a portico of the woods which was veiled in grey smoke, for they were coagulating rubber there. For awhile before sunset the sky was scenic with great clouds, and glowing with the usual bright colours. The wilderness was transformed. Each evening we seem to anchor in a region different, in nature and appearance, under these extraordinary sunset skies, from the country we have been travelling since daylight. Transfiguration at eventime we know in England. Yet sunset there but exalts our homeland till it seems more intimately ours than ever, as though then came a luminous revelation of its rare intrinsic goodness. We see, for some brief moments, its aura. But this tropical jungle, at dayfall, is not the earth we know. It is a celestial vision, beyond physical attaining, beyond knowledge. It is ulterior, glorious, transient, fading before our surprise and wonder fade. We of the “Capella” are its only witnesses, except those pale ghosts, the egrets about the dim aqueous base of the forest.
Darkness comes quickly, the swoop and overspread of black wings. The stopping of the ship’s heart, because the pulsations of her body have had unconscious response in yours, as by an incorporeal ligament, is the cessation of your own life. At a moment there is a strange quiet, in which you begin to hear the whisper of inanimate things. A log glides past making faint labial sounds. You are suddenly released from prison, and float lightly in an ether impalpable to the coarse sounds and movements of earth, but which is yet sensitive to the most delicate contact of your thoughts and emotions. The whispering of your fellows is but the rustling of their thoughts in an illimitable and inviolate silence.