There under the blue heaven, with the broad winding river at our feet, close by the dense, darkening forest that lay behind us, its branches overhead forming a panoply of green, studded with the gold and yellow and blue flowers of the numerous creepers, we performed the ceremony of baptism, initiating the young savage into the Church of Christ our Lord with a feeling of deep reverence, intensified by our own sense of ignorance. Let us hope that the solemnity of the act, which flashed before us like an unexpected revelation, compensated for any involuntary informality.
But after the water had been poured on the babe’s head, and the ceremony had, as we thought, come to an end, the mother would not take her child back. She had evidently seen other baptisms, and our christening was not up to her standard. She made us understand that on former occasions ‘book reading’ had taken place: such was Leal’s interpretation of her words.
We had come to look upon this Indian woman as an expert critic. Through unpardonable neglect, which to this day I cannot explain satisfactorily, we had neither a breviary nor a prayer-book with us, so we laid hands on the next best thing, bearing in mind what a stickler for detail this Indian woman had proved to be. A book of poems, an anthology of Spanish poets, gilt-edged and finely bound, stood us in good service. Alex opened it at random, and read a short poem with due and careful elocution for the edification of the new little Christian.
The ceremony had to be performed eight or ten times. After the third child we gave them only one stanza apiece, as our ardour was somewhat chilled.
When all the children had been christened, the chief claimed the ‘usual’ gifts. He soon explained to us that it was customary for the missionaries to make presents to the parents of the children newly baptized. I had begun to admire the zeal of these mothers in quest of a higher religion for their children; this demand showed that their fervour was accompanied by greed, being thus of the same nature as that species of ‘charity with claws’—the Spanish caridad con uñas. Trifles were distributed amongst the mothers, and the tribe disappeared, rejoicing in their possessions, for to these folk the things were no trifles, and, let us hope, exultant in the acquisition of eight or ten buds destined to bloom into Christian flowers.
History doth indeed repeat itself, and humanity imitates humanity heedless of time and space. If I remember rightly, Clovis, justly anxious for the conversion of his legions to Christianity, presented each dripping warrior after baptism with a tunic—a most valuable article in those days, when Manchester looms did not exist and all weaving was done by hand. Those pious paladins, it is said, were like our Indian friends of the Vichada, always ready to be rechristened on the same terms as before—that is to say, in exchange for a new tunic. Yet, for all their sameness, things do somehow change with time. In these two instances we have the Church as a donor, and the new proselyte as a receiver of presents more or less valuable. Once the conversion fully assured, what a change in the parts within a few generations! The Church gives naught; at least, it gives nothing that is of this world. On the contrary, it takes all it can; the people are led to heaven, the poorer the easier, for in the kind and capacious bosom of Mother Church they are to deposit all worldly goods which might hamper their flight to higher regions. A beautiful and wonderful evolution, and we had not far to go to see it in full play and force. The savages of the Colombian plains are still in that primitive pitiful state when they have to be bribed, so to say, into the fold of the Church; many of the civilized people in the towns and cities obey and respect that Church which holds sway supreme over them in life and in death, guiding, controlling, saving them. Happy the nations where the chosen and appointed servants of the Most High, disciplined into some sort of priesthood or other, undertake the pleasing task of saving their reluctant fellow-men at the latter’s expense, but with the sure and certain faith of those who know that they are working for justice and for the happiness of their fellows, though these may choose to deny it. Happy, thrice happy, lands where the invasion of diabolical modern ideas has been baffled, and the good old doctrine of abject submission still rules!
CHAPTER XIII
Whenever we started afresh in the morning, or after any temporary halt, the man at the prow of the canoe would call out, ‘Vaya con Dios,’ and the man on the stern, who steered with a paddle far larger than the others, would reply, ‘y con la Virgen’ (‘God go with us,’ ‘and the Virgin,’ respectively). The fair Queen of Heaven, being thus commemorated, piety was wedded to chivalry.
The days followed each other in seemingly endless succession, like the windings of the river. Familiarity with the ever-varying aspects of Nature begot a sense of monotony and weariness. The forests and the prairies, dawn and sunset, the whole marvellous landscape, passed unheeded. We longed to reach the main artery; the Orinoco was our Mecca, apparently unattainable. Fishing and hunting had lost zest, and become simple drudgery, indispensable to renew our provender, as in the long journey nearly all our stores were exhausted.
Raoul and Leal frequently shot at the alligators, which, singly, in couples, or in shoals, basked in the sun in a sort of gluttonous lethargy, with hanging tongues and half-closed eyes. The huge saurians, when hit, would turn over and make for the water, except on rare occasions when the bullet entered below the shoulder-blade, this being a mortal wound.