He seemed to like to talk about their adventures. They had been paddling all one day, he said, and were paddling still, as night settled down upon the Amazon. Suddenly there was a whirring sound like a great cataract.
“Paddle for your life,” shrieked the guide, and swinging the canoe about, they fled down-stream.
The whirlpool! Its encounter the greatest calamity that can befall a traveler upon the Amazon! No craft, however strong, once caught by the outermost edge of a whirlpool, can escape. Whether it is caused by a sudden squall brushing through the forest or a piece of the bank falling in, is not known. It is certain only that a whirlpool never occurs twice in the same place.
“Death in that region,” he went on, “is commoner than life. There is a horrible beast which the natives call a flying snake, with a blue head and a long prong upon it. It flies sting foremost. You are sauntering from your hammock to your cabin door. The thing flies against you, and presto! you fall with the poison of his contact, and another grave must be dug on the sposhy banks of the Amazon.
“In Iquitos a woman bears a friend a grudge. She pays the police a small sum, and the next time her friend emerges, she is bound by the guardian of the peace, beaten until she falls, and is carried home to die. Prisoners there are allowed to order their own meals,” he added.
Then came stewed guavas, served with whirls of white of egg and pink and white pellets.
II
Nearly everybody makes collections in Lima. In the ancient house of a marquis, with its court fountain, bougainvillea, and tall Norfolk Island pine, were benches of ebony with lower rounds worn into hollows by the feet of nuns; embroidered muslin stoles; queer manuscripts; tortoise-shell combs tall enough to be filled in with flowers; silver porringers; and a point lace parasol with a carved ivory handle—all relics of vice-regal days.
One room was musty as seventeen mummies could make it. Fifteen soles, they told us, was the price of a mummy. There were ancient, inlaid chests filled with cases of butterflies from beyond the mountains, huge snake-skins, overgrown orioles’ nests, necklaces of mummies’ teeth, and carved cases of huacos dug from Yunca grave-mounds—the pottery of mummies. Partly filled with water and rocked back and forth, the quaint things gave forth the same little half-whistle, half-sigh which notified their owners a thousand years ago that the precious water was being stolen. A soft bubbling, somewhere within the clay form, was supposed to imitate the voice of the animal painted on the outside. The liquids were meant to refresh a thirsty mummy on his death journey. He still holds his aching head. But the varnished lips were never parted, and the gurgling liquid of smoky flavor has never been sipped.
These jars were the ephemeral tablets on which a whole people chose to leave records of itself. The work of their hands can be held in ours. We can look into the staring Indian faces or upon the weird animals which pleased them, shining under a glaze which is the forgotten accomplishment of those remote tribes.