Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro tried to find the glittering capital of Manoa, which El Dorado had gradually become. For these buccaneers who set out with an arrogant army to conquer the Cinnamon Country, nature became the supreme fact of existence. Famine, perpetual rain, fevers, strange insects, and reptiles attacked them. Their expeditions could but end in the murder of each other. They followed the example of all life in the jungle.
Doctor Middendorf says that the Amazon was named for the Coniapuyara, a race of big women leaders, whom the Spaniards found. Condamine assures us that light-skinned Amazons lived there. Raleigh, while searching for Manoa, is said to have first reported them, though he found them by going up the Orinoco. The distinguished scientist Ulloa, who went to South America in 1758, says it is “an undoubted truth that there had been formerly several communities of women who formed a kind of republic, without admitting any men into the government.” Well, at least there is nothing either to prove or disprove it. A recent report of the Geographical Society of Lima gives a far less picturesque explanation of the naming of the Amazon, to the effect that “the tribe of the Nahumedes were thought to be Amazons on account of their long hair and the cushma, a long, sleeveless garment which they wore.”
Close upon the adventurers came the Jesuit missionaries, who burned to save from hell-fire the strange human beings they might find lurking in the forest depths. One Jesuit father, Fritz, spent fifty years (1680-1730) on the Amazon, trying to connect the aborigines by the introduction of a common language. These missionaries left no ruins like those in Paraguay, the Jesuit State, but their teachings are visible in savage traditions. They transformed Bible stories to fit jungle needs.
“A Murato was fishing in a lake of Pastasa, when a little lizard swallowed his hook. The fisherman killed it, the mother of the lizards was much angered and with her tail slashed the water in such a way that it overflowed the entire vicinity. All were drowned except one, who climbed into a small pivai palm, and hung there several days under a perpetual darkness. From time to time a fruit of the pivai palm fell, but always upon the water, until one day he heard the plump of the fruit upon dry ground. He got down from the tree, made a house and farm, and with a little piece of his flesh, which he planted in the earth, made for himself a wife, by whom he had many children.”
The commercial age is now having its fling. It is attempting to subdue the jungle. The rubber hunters are not seeking paradise. They are not looking for legendary kingdoms, nor are they wishing to save the souls of beings of whose existence they are not even persuaded. Rubber is a valuable product. So are other things concealed in jungle depths. Dark crimes can also be hidden in the half-light, covered close under the thick veil which shrouds the land of mystery.
This Peru, approachable from the Atlantic, the “monstrous thicke wood” of the early travelers, still remains undisturbed. Illimitable it is as you gaze down upon it, stretching away one unbroken forest to the faint blue horizon, without a single natural approach except the waterways. Lying close below the austere mountain-tops is a luxuriant world of vegetation; wide stretches of unpreëmpted soil, sparseness characteristic of polar regions hangs just above a tropical phantasmagoria of growth. Shifting cloud-shadows and wandering rainbows flit and interchange over the jungle like the play of colors on a peacock’s neck.
Though we know that there are no mighty civilizations of human making, there are no streets of gold with ruby walls, yet within the imperturbable recesses are strange races and wonders of plant and animal life which may interpret whole domains of knowledge. Nature’s secrets are still locked up in this prolific laboratory. Though we know that no great race of kings holds sway, yet it is certain that here is a chance to study in the wild tribes the growth of human language—beginning with the poor Inje-inje, who has not more than a bird’s speech, and whose needs are no greater than his speech would suggest.
CHAPTER II
TOWARD THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
From the mountain-tops the stream leads toward the east over the Eyebrows of the Jungle, La Ceja de la Montaña, letting loose a deluge from its black clouds. Caught between walls of red and black striped rock, the valley grows deeper and hotter and filled with mist. The water accumulates brightly colored pebbles. It rolls over ungathered bits of gold in its sand and rushes them along with slivers of glistening mica. All about is the sound of springs “whose waters moss has turned aside.” Buried in luxuriant vegetation, it slides on beneath thickets of guava, golden cassia, and red-leaved tilandsia bushes, hung with rank passion vines, whose ripened fruit, the crackly granadilla, lies everywhere upon the ground. A mammoth iguana, munching the flesh-colored bignonias, falls occasionally from the tree-tops.
Small, richly plumed parrots nest in the rock walls. A whole book might be written about the parrots, various as vegetation itself, flashing multi-colored light as they scream through the air-spaces. There is the toucan, turning his bill with its accessory head around to gloss his splendid plumage in a ray of sunlight. At the other end of the scale are the meek little green parroquets with perpendicular bills, hardly larger than sparrows, which go in pairs and move in parallel lines. Every variety keeps together, each to its kind.