He argued that the ups and downs of a given event were of little interest to him.
‘All that one need know,’ he said, ‘is the upshot, the crystallized fact, without wasting valuable time in the slow developments which, at times, are pure inventions of the editor—“padding,” as it is called. I am a little behind-hand at times,’ he remarked, ‘but at the end of the year I make it up, balance the account, and start afresh.’
Certainly if all the attention given to local news of no importance, or to descriptions of fires, crimes, and sundry topics which never change in essence and vary solely as regards names and secondary details, were devoted to studying something useful, the average mind of the great newspaper-reading nations would not have been degraded to the depths revealed by a glance at a collection of the newspapers and reading matter on the bookstalls of any railway-station in France, England, or the United States, where the flood of trash and sensationalism swamps and carries away with it public intelligence, or what stands for it.
Gautier used to complain of the curse of the daily press.
‘Formerly,’ he said, ‘every human being brayed in his own original asinine way. Now we only get variations on the leaders in their respective newspapers!’
The great French writer expressed the simple truth in a pointed way. The cheap press, like cheap liquor, is a public calamity.
Our men poured forth personal impressions of Nature. The world varies in size and in beauty in proportion to the eye and the mind that contemplate it. In Leal’s and Valiente’s conversation especially there was something like the voice of the forest and the murmuring waters. They had lived to some purpose in those deserts, and to them cities, railways, palaces, sea-going ships, and all the other methods of modern locomotion—material civilization, in fact—were as wonderful as the beauties and splendours of Eastern tales are to us.
Talking about tigers, Leal told us that they roamed all over those plains, especially on the banks of the Meta and the Orinoco, where the forests intersect breeding and grazing plains. The cattle-ranchers must be ever on the watch, and from instinct and experience the cattle acquire a natural spirit of defence without which the losses would be far heavier than at present.
Whenever the cattle scent the approach of the tiger, they crowd together, the young calves in the centre, the cows and young heifers covering them behind their bodies, and the bulls pacing around and outside the group like sentinels before a tent. There is no exaggeration in this tale. Leal assured us that he had himself seen these preparations on more than one occasion.
The tiger, whose daring and ferocity are multiplied tenfold by hunger, frequently attacks the group: then ensues a life and death struggle. The tiger tries to jump upon the bull sideways or from behind, whilst the bull strives to face the tiger constantly. As the latter is far more agile and can leap from a long distance, he frequently lands upon the bull, sometimes breaking his spine with the blow. If he misses, the bull gores him. Occasionally both animals die, the tiger in its death-struggle tearing the bull’s neck open with its claws.