It was about the little wooden town itself, where the scarified earth was already sparsely mantled with shrubs, flowering vines, and weeds, and where the burnt tree stumps, and even the door posts in some cases, were freshly budding—life insurgent, beaten down by fire and sword, but never to its source and copious springs—that most of the butterflies were to be found. In a land where blossoms were few, these were the winged flowers. About the squalid wooden barracks of the negro and native labourers, which were built off the ground to allow of ventilation, and had a trench round them foul with drainage and evil with smells, a Colœnis, a scarlet butterfly with narrow, swallow-like wings, used to flash, and frequently would settle there. Over the flowering weeds on the waste ground there would be, in the morning hours, or when the sky was overcast, glittering clouds of the smaller and duller species, though among them now and then would stoop a very emperor of butterflies, a being quick and unbelievably beautiful to temperate eyes. After midday, when the sun was intense, the butterflies became scarce. When out of the shade of the woods, and stranded, at that time, in the hopeless heat of the bare settlement, we could turn into one of the houses of the officials of the company for shelter. These also were of timber, cool, with a verandah that was a cage of fine copper gauze to keep out the insects. All the doors were self-closing. The fewest chances were offered to the mosquitoes. There was no glass, for the window openings also were covered with copper mesh. Here we could sit in shaded security, in lazy chairs, and look out over the clearing to the river below, and to the level line of forest across the river, while listening to stories which had come down to Porto Velho from the interior, brought by the returning pioneers.
Porto Velho had a population of about three hundred. There were Americans, Germans, English, Brazilians, a few Frenchmen, Portuguese, some Spaniards, and a crowd of negroes and negresses. There was but one white woman in the settlement. I was told the climate seemed to poison them. The white girl, who persisted in staying in spite of warnings from the doctors, was herself a Brazilian, the wife of one of the labourers. She refused to leave, and sometimes I saw her about, petite, frail, looking very sad. But her husband was earning good money. It was a busy place, most of it being workshops, stores, and offices, with an engine and trucks jangling inconsequentially on the track by the shore. The line crossed a creek by a trestle bridge, and disappeared in the forest in the direction of San Antonio. The hospital for the men was nearly two miles up the track.
It was along the railway track towards the hospital, with the woods to the left, and a short margin of scrub and forest, and then the river, on the right hand, that I saw one morning in sauntering a few miles as many butterflies as there are flowers in an English garden in June. They were the blossoms of the place. The track was bright with them. They settled on the hot metals and ties, clustered thickly round muddy pools, a plantation there as vivid and alive, in the quick movements of their wings, as though a wind shook the petals of a bed of flowers. They flashed by like birds. One would soar slowly, wings outspread and stable, a living plane of metallic green and black. There was a large and insolent beauty—he did not move from his drink at a puddle though my boot almost touched him—his wings a velvety black with crimson eyes on the underwings, and I caught him; but I was so astonished by the strength of his convulsive body in the net that I let him go. Near the hospital some bushes were covered with minute flowers, and seen from a distance the countless insects moving about those bushes were a glistening and puzzling haze.
All that morning I had felt the power of the torrid sun, which clung to the body like invisible bonds, and made one’s movements slow, was a luscious benefit, a golden bath, a softening and generative balm; a mother heat and light whose ardent virtues stained pinions crimson and cobalt, and made bodies strong and convulsive, and caused the earth to burst with rushing sap, to send up green fountains; for so the palms, which showed everywhere in the woods, looked to me. You could hear the incessant low murmur of multitudinous wings. And I had been warned to beware of all things. I felt instead that I could live and grow for ever in such a land.
Presently, becoming a little weary of so much strong light, I found it was midday, and looking back, there was the ship across a curve of the river. It was two good miles away; two intense, shadeless, silent afternoon miles. I began the return journey. An increasing rumbling sound ahead made me look up, as I stepped from tie to tie, and there came at me a trolley car, pumped along slowly, four brown bodies rising and falling rhythmically over its handle. A man in a white suit was its passenger. As it passed me I saw it bore also something under a white cloth; the cloth moulded a childish figure, of which only the hem of a skirt and the neat little booted feet showed beyond the cloth, and the feet swayed limply with the jolts of the car in a way curiously appealing and woful. The car stopped, and the white man, a cheerful young doctor chewing an extinct cigar, came to me for a light. He stood to gossip for a few minutes, giving his men a rest. “That’s the Brazilian girl,” he said; “she wouldn’t go home when told, poor thing.”
This Madeira river had the look of very adventurous fishing, and the Doctor had brought with him an assortment of tackle. The water was opaque, and it was deep. Its prospects, though the forest closed round us, were spacious. It flowed silently, with great power, and its surface was often coiled by profound movements. The coils of the river, as we were looking over the side one morning, began to move in our minds also, and the Doctor mentioned his tackle. There was the forest enclosing us, as mute as the water, its bare roots clenched in aqueous earth. Nobody could tell us much about the fish in this river, but we heard stories of creatures partly seen. There was one story of a thing taken from the very place in the river where we were anchored, a fish in armour which the natives declared was new to them; a fearful ganoid I guessed it, reconstructing it in vision from fragments of various tales about it, such as is pictured in a book on primeval rocks. There were alligators, too, and there was the sucuruju, which I could call the great water serpent, only the Indian name sounds so much more right and awful; and that fellow is forty feet long in his legend, but spoils a good story through reducing himself by half when he is actually killed. Still, twenty feet of stout snake is enough for trouble. I saw one, just after it was killed, which was twenty-two feet in length, and was three feet round its middle. So to fish in the Madeira was as if one’s hook and line were cast into the deeps where forms that are without name stir in the dark of dreams. We got out our tackle, and the cook had an assortment of stuff he did not want, and that we put on the hooks, and waited, our lines carried astern by the current, for signals from the unknown. Yet excepting for a few catfish, nothing interrupted the placid flow of stream and time. The Doctor put a bight of the lime round his wrist, sat down, and slept. We had fine afternoons, broad with the wealth of our own time.
Old man Jim came aboard and saw our patience with amusement. He suggested dynamite, and no waiting. The river was full of good fish, and he would come next day with a canoe and take us where we could get a load. It was a suggestion which needed slurring, to look attractive to sportsmen. Jim took it for granted that we simply wanted fish to eat, and as many as we could get; and next morning there he was alongside with his big boat and its crew. Jim himself was in the stern, the navigator, and he was sitting on what I was told was a box of dynamite. Now, there were two others of our company who, but the day before, were even eager to see what dynamite would send up from the bottom of that river; but when they saw the craft alongside with its wild-looking crew, and Jim with his rifle sitting on a power which could lift St. Paul’s, they considered everything, and decided they could not go that day. I went alone.
I suppose men do plucky things because they are largely thoughtless of the danger of the things they do. As soon as I was sitting on the level of the water in that crazy boat, with Jim and his explosive, and beside him what whisky he had not already consumed, and saw under my nose the eddies and upheavals of the current, I knew I was doing a very plucky thing indeed, and wished I was high and safe on the “Capella.” But we had pushed off.
Jim, with his eyes dreamy through barley juice, was the pilot, and there was a measure of confidence to be got from the way he navigated us past the charging trees afloat. There was no drink in the steering paddle, at least. But the shore was a long swim away; yet perhaps it would have been as pleasant to be drowned or blown-up as to be lost in the jungle. We turned into a still creek, where the trees met overhead. Jim continued his course till the inundated forest was about us. The gloom was hollow, the pillars rising from the black floor were spectral, and our voices and paddles sounded like a noisy irruption among the aisles of a temple. The echoes fled from us deeper into the dark. But Jim was all unconscious of this; he but stopped our progress, and opened the box of cartridges.