“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in, an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”
The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore, always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving “fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians” has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour, and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of which Langrey chanted as we approached them:
It’s go’n’ drownded me,
An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’,
EE-tah-nah-meeee!
For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls, and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid, yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me of sleep.
Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with any three average American boys of the same age, who would have considered such a trip a lark.
To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected. During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods, we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata” companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve, under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness. The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’ drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad, placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata” camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer, would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville.
Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a hint of news from it.
Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and “cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,” interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as “t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly more both in time and money.