Down the Orinoco in a Canoe

by Santiago Pérez Triana

During the month of January the turtles begin to lay their eggs. Our attention was called to a specially bright star in the horizon, which the men asserted only appeared in that month of the year. It was called the star of the terecayes. The terecay is a small species of turtle, and much prized, and with reason, on account of its exquisite flesh. On more than one occasion, quite unexpectedly, the canoes would be steered ashore, the men would jump on the sand and run as if guided by some well-known landmark. After a few yards they would stop, and, digging in the sand with their hands, would extract a nest full of terecay eggs, the contents varying from fifty to over a hundred. Their experienced eyes had seen the tracks of the terecay on the sand. These turtles, like all others, lay their eggs once a year on the sand, and cover them up carefully, leaving the cares of motherhood to the forces of Nature. Once hatched in this fashion, the young turtles must shift for themselves, and their instinct tells them that their numerous enemies lie in watch for their awakening to active life. The moment they break the shell they make as quickly as they can for the neighbouring waters, where they are comparatively safe.

If the inhabitants of those regions lack book-learning and knowledge of things in which their more civilized fellow-creatures are versed, Nature and the life which they lead have given them a keenness of sight, of hearing, and of touch far beyond the average citizen of town and village. I often noticed of an evening, as the canoes were being tied and hoisted halfway out of the water, that the men walking along the beach would mutter to themselves, or call the attention of their fellows to the sand, which to me seemed smooth and uniform. Pointing to the ground, they would say, duck, turtle, tapir, alligator, wild-boar, deer, tiger, and so forth. The tracks which they saw were, so to speak, the visiting-cards of animals which had spent the day on the beach where our camp was pitched at night.

When we first came in contact with a real wild Indian I experienced a feeling very difficult to describe.

Here was a being whose appearance was identical with our own, save for details of colour of skin and other trivial distinctions which could not affect the essential organic elements; yet he awakened within us a curiosity akin to that with which we gaze at a wild animal in some zoological garden. What a deep gulf yawned between that forlorn brother and ourselves! The work of generations, the treasures heaped up by man for man during centuries of struggle and endeavour, hopes and fears, disappointments, traditions, ideals, conventionalities, all that constitutes civilization; the higher belief in a Supreme Being, the evolution of habits, the respect for established laws and regulations, the reverence for sacred things—all that world essential to us was as naught, absolutely non-existent, for that naked fellow-creature who stood before us, unprotected, lost amid the forest in a climate unfavourable to man. There was no one to help him, or make any effort to improve the natural forces within him, none to lift his soul into a higher and better world. Curiosity gave way to pity. The labour of the missionary—of the ideal missionary—became holier and greater in my eyes. Here was a field of promising harvest for a real worker.

One clear and fragrant night, when all the camp slept, the bonfires half out, the river a few feet off, as I lay awake thinking of the world to which we belonged, so different from our present surroundings, so distant that it seemed a far-off cloud in the sky, something that had gone by, and which could never be reached again, I suddenly remembered the words uttered by one of our men when we landed that afternoon upon the beach. He had clearly enumerated a long list of animals whose tracks were upon the very sand covered by my body. Logic took possession of my brain with overpowering rapidity. The alligator, the tiger, and their numerous companions have visited this beach; they may again visit it during the night. What is to hinder them from doing so; and in that case, what is to protect me from their attack? Little did I care for the wild-boar, the tapir, or the deer—I knew they would be as scared of me as I was of the other animals; and so, after this attack of fright, my imagination worked till the sweat began to run clammy on my forehead. It seemed to me that from the neighbouring forest a veritable Noah’s-ark of living, rushing, roaring, famished beasts, multiplied by my fancy, and numerous as the progeny of Gondelles, came upon us. I almost felt the hot breath and saw the glistening eyes of the tiger outside the thin partition of cotton of my mosquito-bar, heard the awkward shamble of the alligator’s body, and felt the unpleasant, musky odour of the huge lizard an instant before it crushed my bones between its jaws. Unable to master myself, I sat upright, and would have yelled from dread but for the spectacle that met my eyes in the moonlight, flooding the surrounding scene. There to right and left of me snored all my companions; the river shone brilliantly, the breeze blew softly, no one stirred. This absence of fear on the part of those who were perfectly familiar with all the dangers of the region reassured me completely. Oh blessed snores and valiant snorers! My peace of mind returned, and, lying back upon my sandy couch, I lustily joined the tuneful choir.

Community of danger constitutes the most acceptable guarantee; no man ever thinks of ascertaining who drives the locomotive that is to whirl him and hundreds of his fellow-creatures at lightning speed through glade and forest, over bridge and under tunnel; no man questions the capability of the captain responsible for the steamship and for the lives of thousands of his fellow-men; the most distrustful of us never gives a thought to these points. Why? Because we know that the driver or the captain, as the case may be, stakes his own life. Each humble boatman who listened to Cæsar’s proud assurance that the skiff could not sink because it carried him and all his fortunes equalled Cæsar in self-esteem, for the lives of those poor mariners were as dear to them as Cæsar’s life could be to him. The truth of my assertion that community of danger constitutes the acceptability of a given guarantee is demonstrated when, for instance, a traveller entrusting his life on a railway or a ship to the agent of a company advances or lends money to the same company. Then comes the hour of discrimination. All the appliances invented by that most wonderful engine of human ingenuity, the law of commerce, which in its numerous forms rules the world paramount and supreme, are brought to bear. No one’s word is accepted as sufficient; documents, signatures, seals, formalities, numerous and complicated, are employed as a delicate proof of the trust that the man of the world ever places in the good faith of his brother before God. This suspicion is responsible for an enormous amount of expense and trouble which, were good faith more abundant or were belief in its existence general, might be applied to relieve misery and sorrow. If the action of humanity all the world over in this dreary endeavour to protect man from the rascality of man be justified, we are, indeed, not very far removed in truth and in essence from the savages of the forest, who seize what they need and prey upon each other according to the dictates of nature. If beauty be but skin-deep, civilization is not more profoundly ingrained, and the smallest rub reveals the primitive ravening beast. Yet I may be mistaken; perhaps it is not distrust which begets all those precautions, but something so noble that I dare not presume to divine, much less to understand, it.

CHAPTER XI

Though several years have elapsed since my journey across those wild vast regions, the remembrance of them is most vivid and clear in my mind. It seems to me that everything in that period of my life, landscape and human beings, forest and plain, stream and cloud, mountains and breezes, all, all are still alive; they form part of the panorama or scene wherein my memory keeps them immortal, abiding for ever as I saw them, though unattainable to me. What was, is; what was, must be; so I imagine. Memory is in this respect like the artist. The sculptor or the painter seizes one moment of life, fashions and records it in marble or in bronze, in line or colour, and there it remains defying time, unchanging and unchangeable. The gallery of the mind, the vast storehouse of the past, is infinite. It keeps in its inmost inexhaustible recesses the living record of our life, the tremulous shadowy hues of early night deepening into the dark, the glory of the rising sun casting its veil of light upon the waves, the sensation of the breeze as it fans our heated brow after an anxious night, the thunder of the ocean or the deafening tumult of frenzied crowds in hours of national misfortune or universal anger, the last parting word or look of those who are gone before, the blithe greeting of him who comes back to us after years of absence and of sorrow: all these manifestations of life, the ebb and flow of joy and happiness, of pain and grief, stand individualized, so to speak, in the memory, and nothing, save the loss of memory itself, can change them. Nothing so dear to the heart as those treasures; against them time and the vicissitudes of life are powerless—even as the lovers and the dancers and the singers and the enchanted leafy forest in Keats’ ‘Grecian Urn.’ That love will know no disappointment. Sweet as songs heard may be, far sweeter are those unheard of human ear; beautiful as are the green boughs of the forest, far lovelier are those whose verdure is imperishable, whose leaves will know no autumn; and sweeter than all melody, the unheard melody of those flutes, dumb and mute in the infinite harmony which man can imagine, but not create. Our own mind keeps that record of the past; hallowed and sacred should it be, for therein our sorrow may find relief, and our joy purity and new strength.

Beautiful indeed were our days. Gliding softly over the waters, we would read, and there, in forced and intimate communion with Nature, would seek our old-time friends the historians, the poets, the humbler singers that had charmed, or instructed, or taught us how to live. The lessons of history seemed clearer and more intelligible, the puissant and sonorous voice of poetry sounded fitly under that blue sky in the midst of those forests, even as the notes of the organ seem to vibrate and echo as in their very home, under the fretted vault of some Gothic temple. The majesty of surrounding Nature lent an additional charm to the voice of the great ones who had delivered a message of consolation and of hope to mankind. We lived now in Rome, now in Greece, now in modern Europe, and frequently the songs of our own poets filled our minds with joy, as the twitter of native birds when the sun rose and the morning sparkled, bedewed with jewels that night had left on leaves and flowers.

One day, when we had grown expert in bargaining with the Indians, shortly before sunset a solitary Indian paddled towards our camp. He had been attracted by the novel sight. We had learnt that within the memory of living man no such large convoy as ours had passed through those waters; groups of eight or ten men in one canoe were the largest ever seen—at least, the largest groups of strangers. Here was a small army, with two large canoes and great abundance of strange and wonderful equipment—boxes, trunks, weapons, cooking utensils, many men with white faces and marvellous strange array; indeed, enough to attract the attention and curiosity of any child of the forest. The canoe upon which the Indian stood was barely six feet in length—so narrow and shallow that at a distance he seemed to stand on the very mirror of the waters. He carried a large paddle, shaped like a huge rose-leaf somewhat blunted at the end, and with a very long stem. He plunged this gracefully in the water on either side, seeming hardly to bend or to make any effort, and in feathering there appeared a convex mirror of liquid glass, upon which the sunlight fell in prismatic hues each time that his paddle left the water. He drew near, and stood before us like a bronze statue. He was stark naked, save for a clout round his loins. On his brow was a crown of tiger-claws surmounted by two eagle feathers. Across his neck, hung by a string, was a small bag of woven fibre containing a piece of salt, some hooks made of bone and small harpoons which could be set on arrows, and two hollow reeds about an eighth of an inch in diameter and four or five inches long. By means of these reeds the Indians inhale through their nostrils an intoxicating powder, in which they delight. The man was young, powerfully built, about five feet ten in height, and well proportioned; his teeth glistening and regular; his eyes black and large, gleaming like live coals; he was a perfect incarnation of the primitive race, and the hardships and exposure of his past life had left no more trace on him than the flowing waters of the river on the swan’s-down.