A hovel, masquerading as the “Pensão da Mulata,” had all its rooms occupied—several times each, in fact—but was sure it could accommodate me, for what was the hanging of one more hammock? The place was too mulatto-ish even for my adventurous taste, however, and by appealing to the station agent I was taken to a shop kept by a Gallego and his Andalucian wife, who furnished food and hammock-hooks to “persons of a certain class,” into which I evidently fell, for I got a room in which only a bed was lacking and was served a tolerable supper. My hosts did not run a hotel, they explained, because to do so they would have to hang out a sign and pay a heavy government license and tax. With only the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock to cover me, I slept little from midnight on because of the cold, abetted by frequent deluges. The Gallego had given many solemn promises to wake me, but had shown no signs of carrying them out up to the time I was dressed and ready to push off. A fine pickle I should have been in had I missed the only train for four days. My bill having been paid the night before, I stepped noiselessly out the window and let them sleep on, hurrying through the fading light and the swampy streets to the station. At least there was the satisfaction of knowing that I would never have to catch another Brazilian train. That night, after a mere thirty-five hours’ absence, I found my shoes, valise, even the band of my hat covered with green mold in my airy room at the “Café da Paz.”

The end of my engagement with the Kinetophone was nearer than I had expected. After several communications to the man who held the theatrical monopoly of Manaos, Vinhães had at last received a cable in code which we deciphered as “Nous réfusons toute proposition.” Very Parisian, of course, and definite in any language. The fact was, according to every test we could give by absent treatment, that Manaos was deader than Pará. The latter has at least its shipping and its supplying of the interior, but the exotic city of the Amazonian wilderness depends for its existence almost solely on rubber.

The rivalry between the two cities of the Amazon has always been acute, and Pará was chuckling with tales of its rival’s come-down in the world. Manaos, the Paraenses asserted, always copied their improvements, and would ruin itself rather than admit it was not Pará’s equal. When Pará formed a zoo, Manaos immediately followed suit. Then rubber fell and the zoo-keeper came to the state minister in charge and said, “S’nho’, falta comida pa’ os bichos.” “No food for the animals, eh? Well, I tell you what you do. Listen”—but the story is worth the telling only in the language of the scornful, sarcastic Paraenses—“Olhe, vocé mata tal bicho e da á comer aos outros, ouvioú.” “Sim, s’nho’,” replied the zoo-keeper, and he went away and killed such and such an animal and fed it to the others, even as he had been ordered. A day or two later he came back with the same story, and went home to apply the same solution. This was repeated for weeks, until only the jaguar was left. The minister stared at the zoo-keeper for a long time when he came to report this state of affairs, and scratched his head in perplexity. Then, a brilliant idea suddenly striking him, he cried: “Olhe, então vocé solta o tal onça!” Whereupon the keeper bowed his head and went back to turn the jaguar loose, even as the minister had commanded, and thus ended the Manaos zoo. That of Pará was bidding fair to suffer a like, if more humane fate, for all the facetiousness of the Paraenses at the expense of their poverty-stricken brethren up the river. Two years now the ragged, barefoot employees of the Pará zoo had been mainly dependent upon the charity of the Austrian women in charge of it, and there was even then a man sitting across the table from us who had come down to carry the most valuable of its birds and mammals back to the Bronx.

April 21st, national holiday of Brazil in honor of the drawing and quartering of Tiradentes, is now doubly famous as the exact date on which I last ran a Kinetophone show. I have said that it rained every night during our Pará engagement, but that afternoon the sun beat down with equatorial fury. In the sheet-iron booth under the sheet-iron roof the sweat streamed down into my eyes until I could not make out the projection on the canvas, and the crank rubbed the skin off the inside of several fingers. That night, in honor of the occasion, I put on a “GREAT DOUBLE PROGRAM” so that nearly all my old film-friends came out upon the screen to do their turns and give me a chance to bid them farewell. The next afternoon “Tut” and I went out and pulled down the show, and the travel-worn trunks disappeared forever from my sight as they were rowed out to the Ceará, now on her return voyage. Because she was taking with her also the state senator and the archbishop of Pará, the military band and great mobs of populares came down to the wharf, giving us the sensation of making a holiday of our parting when “Tut” stepped into a rowboat and slipped away into the humid night toward the port-holes reflected on the placid bosom of the river.

With him went Vinhães, one Brazilian whom I had found strictly honorable in all his dealings. Naturally, as our engagement in Pará was over, the rains had abruptly ceased. Turned out upon the world alone again for the first time since I had joined Linton in Rio more than eight months before, I wandered idly along the streets, wondering what on earth I could do to pass the evening. Almost unconsciously my steps carried me back to the “Bar Paraense,” but there was only a pitiful audience of twenty or so, and most of those sat in the second-class seats watching an inexcusable mess of screen rubbish. I took refuge in my room and whiled away the time making a final report on our tour. Out of 221 days, we had played 196, losing the rest in traveling or holidays, giving 40 matinées, or 236 performances of an average of nearly three sessions each. We had appeared in 49 theaters in 29 towns of 11 states, and had failed on only one contract,—that at Itajubá, where a disrupted railroad had forced us to remain an extra day in Ouro Fino. Our total income had been 54,665,000 reis, of which my own share had been 6,882,000. Though it was months later before I again had news of my adventurous ward, the Kinetophone maintained its high American reputation to the end. Beginning in Natal, “Tut” not only fulfilled all the contracts I had arranged for his return trip, but carried the “eighth marvel” clear down to Rio Grande do Sul—a remarkable feat in view of the fact that he made the rest of the tour entirely alone, training local talent in each town to put on and take off the phonograph records. That tour de force made me wonder if, after all, my own services had been mainly ornamental.

CHAPTER XIX
UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA

It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America. Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos.

On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a gaiola, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers never suspect. The Andirá was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small, the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with a network of redes in all colors.

“Todo é à vontade, senhores,” said the captain, “Aqui nada está prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo;” and with nothing prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into nothingness.

Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too, seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many slender palms which I took to be the carnauba, though they turned out to be the burity. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden tamancos wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad, strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop, an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it stood a large cachaza-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the Andirá. A group of reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the grassy yard beyond the distillery.