With regard to the reptiles, though these abound, they seek rather to avoid than to court notice, and are by no means the danger to life that the ignorant imagine. Naturally the naked Indian is more exposed to any peril there may be than the better protected white man, and if a snake be trodden on it will promptly turn and bite the unshod foot of the aggressor. But no snake, so far as I have observed, will attack a human being unmolested, not even the boa constrictor; nor would the anaconda, the great water snake, though all Indians are very afraid of it. I do not think that even the venomous labarria ever bites a man unless first disturbed.
Alligators in the Issa and the Japura are small, rarely seen, and never formidable. The dangerous jacare, that huge monster of the lower rivers, is unknown here. But of fierce and poisonous fish I shall have somewhat to say later. Curiously enough, despite the swampy nature of the ground, I never met with any leeches, though Bates mentions a red, four-angled species he found to be abundant in the marshy pools at the juncture of the Japura and the Amazon.[18] Frogs and toads are the most abundant reptiles. They exist in thousands and are of all sizes, though I have never seen any of dimensions that Spruce speaks of—“as big as a man’s head.”[19] At night near any stream huge frogs keep up a constant and fearful noise, and even at midday, when a silence that may be felt enfolds the tropical woodland, their chorus is only subdued, not stayed.
This silence of the forest is a very real thing, a quality that does not lessen by acquaintance. On the contrary it grows more real and more oppressive. A strange gloom and a strange stillness hold the bush. They give the impression that there is nothing animate in all the vastness, no life other than that of the overwhelming, all-triumphant vegetation. It is possible to journey for days and never see a human being. A sound, be it but the cracking of a twig, startles in the forest. Then, suddenly, the vibrant quiet will be broken by a shrill scream. Some creature has been done to death. The cry dies to a moan, and the low murmur that is hardly sound, the drone of the unseen but abundant life, once more makes up the silence that pulses tormentingly on ear and brain, till night again wakens the birds and the beasts of the wild, and the murmur grows and deepens to the full volume of confused sound made by the forest’s busy life.
At the break of day, and again at the going down of the sun, the howling monkeys, if they be in the neighbourhood, startle the echoes with their raucous yelps. Sunrise is, indeed, the signal for absolute pandemonium. Toucans start an endless chattering that rises now and again to a far-reaching scream. The trumpeter birds make extraordinary noises. With them may be joined in a chorus of discord the macaws and the parrots of the district, and the chorus is punctuated at night by the mournful cry of a large night-jar.
But, for the most part, the birds and the beasts go about their business silently. They seek neither to disturb their victims nor to advertise their own doings and so attract those with sinister designs against themselves. In the bush silence is a better policy than honesty.
Picture all this, and try to understand the bush life in Amazonia. It will explain much of the unwritten and unwritable story of the inhabitants of these wilds. For the traveller the day is easily summarised: the awakening at sunrise, followed by a bath in the nearest stream, and a meal of what was left over-night; the trail, the worst in the world; the slow progress that jars on the nerves; the never-ending, impenetrable forest; the narrow path that has to be widened; the stumbles, the falls, the whipping of the face and arms by innumerable twigs; the ever-ready liana that catches the foot of the careless walker; the stinging ants that shower down on face and neck when a tree is accidentally shaken; the greenheart and other rods that pierce the feet and legs; the thorns innumerable, and the fine palm-spines on which a hand is transfixed when put out to save a fall; the end of the trek, a bath to get rid of the litter of mud and vegetable filth; dinner, of sorts; and a hammock under a shelter so poor that it will not prevent the driving and inevitable rain from chilling the sleeper to the bone. Imagine the state of fatigue to mind and body when one cries, “Thank God, I have got so far to-day. I could not repeat to-day’s labours. I could not go back on my own open trail, or go through the same to-morrow.” And so crying one knows that to-morrow and the trail must come. Even in fancy you will feel the pressure on your chest, the pressure behind you. It demoralises utterly.
There is a gruesome depression that is almost physical, produced by solitude on a small island, when all other land is out of sight. The bush to me is worse. The oppression is as of some great weight. A light heart is impossible in an atmosphere which the sunshine never enlivens, that is beaten daily back to earth by rain, where the air is heavy with the fumes of fallen vegetation slowly steaming to decay. The effect of the impenetrable thickets around, the stifling of the breath, is all mental, doubtless; but it must react physically on the neurotic subject.
This depression, this despondency, may seem incredible to those who have never experienced anything similar, who are ignorant of the innate malevolence of the High Woods. But in truth there is nothing in Nature more cruel than the unconquered vegetation of a tropical South American forest. The Amazonian bush brings no consolation. It is silent, inhospitable, cynical. It has overcome the mastodon and the megatherium, the prehistoric camel and the rhinoceros. It has reduced its rivals of the animal kingdom to slimy alligators and unsightly armadilloes, to sloths and ant-bears. The most powerful tenant of its shades is the boa constrictor, the most majestic the jaguar. Man is a very puny feature in the Amazonian cosmos.
The sense of one’s insignificance is the first lesson of travel in the bush. In the beginning the discovery amuses the adventurer. Later, he resents the implied superiority of the fixed and nerveless plants which barricade his progress. In the end, he hates the bush as though it were a sentient being. Yet the component parts of the bush are familiar to all at home: we coddle them in our gardens, and nurse them tenderly in our glass-houses. But in the Amazons they unite to form a horrible, a most evil-disposed enemy. They obscure the sun from the earth, condemn one to existence in a gloomy, stifling half-light. They constrict the world to a path laboriously hacked through jealous undergrowth. They stab with hidden snags, and strangle with deftly poised lianas. In their most hurtful mood they poison with a touch.[20]
The Amazonian forest is no glorified botanic garden. Its units are not intelligently isolated and labelled. There is but a monotonous tangle of vegetation through which the traveller cuts his way to daylight and perspective in a river-channel. One rarely sees a blossom or a fruit. Within that tangle, however, is the whole varied life of the tropical jungle. It may be difficult to distinguish specimens through the superimposed mass of extraneous vegetation; it may be impossible to catch a glimpse of a living creature throughout a day’s march; but the flowers are there in their thousands, and a myriad of eyes have noted each blundering movement of the wayfarer. It is no part of the philosophy of the bush to force even the most reckless of animals into needless publicity.