Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out, swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me and splendid chances of falling out among pirainhas, if not alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a hundred feet or more aloft.
The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys, black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour. There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact. As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao. It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum” sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives, but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to restore my warmth.
All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and, broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price; but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects, shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless forest the night before.
The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions, had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings, with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.”
We swung our hammocks under a new thatched roof over a split-palm floor on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow, where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English; but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back into the ways of their ancestors.
Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box, well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail Train.
The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills, and paddled us down to Rupununi
Two of my second crew of paddlers