‘May be,’ he said, ‘but it would be a long time before I got used to it. Look at my saddle!’ he went on to say; ‘it only weighs a fourth of yours. Still, I should like to try yours, not for real hard work—branding, lassoing, or rounding up cattle—but just to prance round the town on a good horse and charm the girls. That’s about what it’s fit for!’
That day, marked in the calendar of our memory as the ‘tiger day,’ our supper consisted of boiled rice and casabe. Somehow or other there had been no fishing. Yet we did not grumble; custom had taught us to be easily satisfied. We learned from Gatiño that within twelve miles from us the Atures ruins were to be found. Behind the thick forest which separates it from the river stands a short range of high cliffs. They are the last spur of the chain through which the Orinoco has drilled its way. At a height of 600 to 700 metres on the vertical wall, so straight and smooth that it seems to have been polished all over by the hand of man, there appear, carved in the very substance of the rock, a huge alligator and two human figures, standing near its head and tail respectively. All are of colossal dimensions. According to the measurements of other travellers provided with the required instruments, the length of the alligator exceeds 500 feet, and the human figures are of proportionate size. It is difficult to understand what sort of scaffolding was used to carry out this work at such a height, no support or traces of support of any kind in the rock being apparent; what instruments were used for the carving, and what purpose the whole work served: all this is very perplexing.
Footprints of human endeavour, thoughts of past generations entirely lost to our minds, left there in the midst of the forest, marking the passage of men who must have been powerful at a period so remote that only these traces remain. What more eloquent proof of the nothingness, the vanity, of our own ephemeral individual life!
The mere magnitude of the work carried out demonstrates that in those regions, totally deserted to-day, where Nature has reasserted her absolute sway, and where the wanderer has to fight for every inch of ground in the jungle and the thicket, there must once have been multitudes of men educated in certain arts—arts which in their turn must have been links in a chain of sequence indispensable to their own existence, as isolated effort in one direction would be incomprehensible. Nothing of those myriads of men survives beyond this dumb expression of their thoughts and aspirations.
Were those figures carved on that huge wall, on the virgin rock of the mountains, hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who knows? Who can tell?
With the rapidity inherent to human thought, my mind sped to the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, the buried cities of Ceylon, the excavated temples and palaces in Yucatan and elsewhere, wherever vestiges of vanished generations are found.
That sculpture on the rock on the shores of the Orinoco brought to my mind the dying lion cut into the granite on the banks of the Lake of Lucerne, as a symbol of respect and admiration to the loyalty and steadfastness of the compatriots of William Tell, who died for a cause upon which judgment has been passed in the minds of men and in the pages of history. I could not help thinking that perhaps when Macaulay’s famous New Zealander shall stand upon the broken arches of London Bridge to gaze at the ruins of St. Paul’s, when England and London shall have crumbled into potsherds, so in years to come some native of these Orinoco regions, then populous and civilized, may sail on the cool waters of Lucerne and interrogate the mute rock, anxious to know the allegory embodied in that dying lion holding in its claws the shield which bears the three secular lilies of old France. Even as the rock was mute to us, so shall the rock again be mute to him who thousands of years hence may question Thorwaldsen’s sculpture. The efforts of man are powerless against time and oblivion, even though they choose the largest, the most lasting manifestations of Nature for their pedestal.
Time passes grimly on. The endeavours of pride, of flattery, of gratitude, the emblems of glory, all become dumb and meaningless. Egyptian hieroglyphics, figures and signs carved in monoliths or pyramids or in the rock of the mountains, after the lapse of what, to the world, is but an instant, all become confused, vague, and undefinable. The seeker and the student find all those attempts to perpetuate the memory or the aspirations of men, now on the burning sands of the desert, now decked in the foliage and wealth of Nature, aggressively reasserting her empire, now in the naked summits of the uplifted mountains—yea, the seeker finds them all; but he knows not whether they be expressions of human pride anxious to survive the life of the body, or whether they be witnesses of servile flattery paying tribute to the mighty, or the grateful offering of nations to their heroes and their benefactors, or the emblem of some dim forgotten religion, whose very rites are as unintelligible to living men as is the mystic power which once gave them force.
CHAPTER XVI
With the accession of Gatiño and his family and Valiente and his men, our numbers had gradually increased, and the camp at night had quite a lively aspect. The men would tell their adventures, and conversation frequently turned on local topics. We had gradually drifted into practical indifference concerning the doings of that distant world to which we belonged, and towards which we were moving. Newspapers, letters, telegrams, the multifarious scraps of gossip, the bursts of curiosity which fill so great a part in the life of modern man, had totally disappeared as daily elements in our own. To tell the truth, I did not miss them greatly. I have always thought that the daily newspapers are thieves of time, and cannot but approve the system of a certain friend of mine, an Englishman, who, residing in New York, had no other source of information for the world’s news than the weekly edition of the Times. He was dependent on it even for the news of American life and politics.