So Luis with others of his kind, as Jango, Jico, and Manduco, became our friends, looking upon us with that respect mixed with contempt which is the attitude of those who see that you possess the mysterious arts of reading and of writing, but cannot see a horse’s footprint on hard ground; or if you lose yourself, have to avail yourself of what Luis referred to as “the one-handed watch the sailors use, which points the way to go.”
Much did Xavier talk of the Indians of the woods, the “Bugres,” as the Brazilians call them; about the “Botocudos,” who wear a plug stuck in their lower lip, and shape their ears with heavy weights in youth, so that they hang upon their shoulders; and much about those “Infidel” who through a blowpipe direct a little arrow at the travelling “Christians” in the woods, whose smallest touch is death. It then appeared his father (fica agora na gloria) was a patriot, that is, ’twas he who extirpated the last of all the “Infidel” from the forests where they lived. Most graphically did he tell how the last Indians were hunted down with dogs, and in a pantomime he showed how they jumped up and fell when they received the shot, and putting out his tongue and writhing hideously, he imitated how they wriggled on the ground, explaining that they were worse to kill than is a tapir, and put his father and the other patriots to much unnecessary pain. And as he talked, the woods, the fields, the river and the plain bathed in the sun, which unlike that of Africa does not seem weary of its task, but shines unwearied, looking as it does on a new world and life, shimmered and blazed, great lizards drank its rays flattening themselves upon the stones in ecstasy, humming-birds quivered at the heart of every flower; above the stream the dragon-flies hung poised; only some “Infidel” whom the patriots had destroyed seemed wanting, and the landscape looked incomplete without a knot of them in their high feather crowns stealthily stealing round a corner of the woods.
In the uncomprehended future, incomprehensible and strange, and harder far to guess at than the remotest semi-comprehended past, surely the Spanish travellers and their writings will have a value quite apart from that of any other books. For then the world will hold no “Bugres”; not a “Botocudo” will be left, and those few Indian and Negro tribes who yet persist will be but mere travesties of the whites: their customs lost, their lore, such as it was, despised; and we have proved ourselves wiser than the Creator, who wasted so much time creating beings whom we judged unfit to live, and then, in mercy to ourselves and Him, destroyed, so that no evidence of His miscalculated plan should last to shame Him when He thought of His mistake. So to this end (unknowingly) the missionary works, and all the Jesuits, those who from Paraguay through the Chiquitos, and across the Uruguay, in the dark Moxos, and in the forests of the Andes, gave their lives to bring as they thought life everlasting to the Indians—all were fools. Better by far instead of Bibles, lives of saints, water of baptism, crucifixes, and all the tackle of their trade, that they had brought swords, lances, and a good cross-bow each, and gone to work in the true scientific way, and recognized that the right way with savages is to preach heaven to them and then despatch them to it, for it is barbarous to keep them standing waiting as it were, just at the portals of eternal bliss.
And as we lingered at Cruz Alta, Christmas drew near, and all the people began to make “pesebres,” with ox and ass, the three wise men, the star of Bethlehem, the Redeemer (not of the Botocudos and the Bugres) swaddled and laid in straw. Herdsmen and negroes dismounted at the door, fastened their half-wild mules or horses carefully to posts, removed their hats, drawing them down over their faces furtively, and then walked in on tiptoe, their heavy iron spurs clanking upon the ground, to see the Wondrous Child. They lounged about the room, speaking in whispers as he might awake, and then departed silently, murmuring that it was “fermosisimo,” and getting on their horses noiselessly were gone, and in a minute disappeared upon the plain. Then came the Novena with prayer and carols, the prayers read by Xavier himself out of a tattered book, all the assembled family joining with unction in the responses, and beating on their breasts. Luis and all the slaves joined in the carols lustily, especially in one sung in a minor key long-drawn-out as a sailor’s shanty, or a forebitter sung in a calm whilst waiting for a breeze. After each verse there was a kind of chorus calling upon the sinner to repent, bidding him have no fear but still hold on, and thus exhorting him—
“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, áo pe da cruz
Fica nosso Senhor.”
Christmas Day found us all at mass in the little church, horses and mules being tied outside the door to the trees in the plaza, and some left hobbled, and all waiting as if St. Hubert was about to issue forth and bless them.
Painfully and long, the preacher dwelt upon the glorious day, the country people listening as it were new to them, and as if all the events had happened on the plain hard by. In the evening rockets announced the joyful news, and the stars shone out over the woods and plains as on the evening when the bright particular star guided the three sheikhs to some such place as was the rancho of our host.
Christmas rejoicings over, a month sped past and found us still, so to speak, wind-bound in the little town. No one would buy our horses, some of which died bitten by snakes. It was impossible to think of going on, and to return equally difficult, so that there seemed a probability of being obliged to pass a lifetime in the place. People began to look at us half in a kindly, half contemptuous way, as people look in general upon those who fail, especially when they themselves have never tried to do anything at all but live, and having done it with considerable success look upon failure as a sort of minor crime, to be atoned for by humility, and to be reprobated after the fashion of adultery, with a half-deprecating laugh. Sometimes we borrowed ancient flint-lock guns and lay in wait for tapirs, but never saw them, as in the thick woods they move as silently as moles in sand, and leave as little trace. Luis told of how, mounted on a half-wild horse, he had long ago lassoed a tapir, and found himself and horse dragged slowly and invincibly towards a stream, the horse resisting terrified, the “gran besta” [51] apparently quite cool, so that at last he had to cut his lasso and escape from what he called the greatest peril of his life; he thought he was preserved partly by the interposition of the saints and partly by a “fetiço” which, in defiance of religion, he luckily had hanging round his neck.
Just when all hope was gone, and we thought seriously of leaving the horses to their fate, and pushing on with some of the best of them towards Rio, a man appeared upon the scene, and offered to buy them, half for money and half “a troco,” that is barter, for it appeared he was a pawnbroker and had a house full of silver horse-gear, which had never been redeemed. After much bargaining we closed for three hundred dollars and a lot of silver bridles, spurs, whips, and other stuff, after reserving four of the best horses for ourselves to make our journey back. At the head of so much capital our spirits rose, and we determined to push on to Paraguay, crossing the Uruguay and Parana, ride through the Misiones, and at Asuncion, where I had friends, take ship; aguas abajo, for the River Plate. We paid our debts and bid good-bye to Xavier, his wife and sallow daughters, and to all the slaves; gave Luis a silver-mounted whip, bought some provisions, put on our silver spurs, bridles, and as much as possible of the silver gear we had become possessed of, and at daybreak, mounted upon a cream-and-white piebald, the “Bayo Overo,” and a red bay known as the “Pateador,” leading a horse apiece, we passed out of Xavier’s “potrero,” [52] and started on the road.
During the last few days at Xavier’s we had taught the horses we intended to take to Paraguay to eat Indian corn, fastening them up without any other food all day, and putting salt into their mouths. The art once learnt, we had to stand beside them whilst they ate, to keep off chickens and pigs who drove them from their food, the horses being too stupid to help themselves. If I remember rightly, their ration was eight cobs, which we husked for them in our hands, blistering our fingers in the process as they had been burned. But now the trouble of the process was repaid, the horses going strongly all day long. We passed out of the little plain, skirted a pine-wood, rode up a little hill, and saw the country stretching towards the Uruguay, a park-like prairie interspersed with trees. Cruz Alta, a white patch shining against the green-grey plain encircled with its woods, was just in sight, the church-tower standing like a needle in the clear air against the sky. Half a league more and it dropped out of view, closing the door upon a sort of half Bœotian Arcady, but remaining still a memory after twenty years, with all the little incidents of the three months’ sojourn in the place fresh, and yet seeming as they had happened not to myself, but to a person I had met, and who had told the tale.