It is simple for the traveller to pull the canoe to the bank of one of the upper tributaries of the great river, to land, to part the screen of bushes, and to pass beyond—into the obscurity of barbarism. It is a simple feat, yet eventful. A thousand yards away from the safe thoroughfare of the main stream the explorer is lost, overwhelmed in the extravagance of vegetation. Denied a pathway, a landmark, a horizon, or a sky, he has less to guide him than the castaway on the ocean or the wanderer in the Sahara. His most definite course can only be from river-bed to river-bed. To direct him on his way the trees offer no aid to help him, the forest provides but little sustenance.
Every traveller in the bush lives in the constant dread of being lost. Desertion, unexpected, unforeseen, is common with the Indians. They leave without ascertainable cause at the cost of their pay, at the risk of their lives. In a watch of the night they depart, and although the country be swarming with their blood-enemies, they vanish into the forest and are no more seen.
In time the civilised man, with no other than such barbaric companions, turns at the thought of them, is nauseated by their bestiality, longs for relief from their presence. Then he wanders away, ever so little a distance into the bush, to be alone and to think. He happens upon a stream—that is so simple a by-path, so obvious a guide. He wanders light-footedly up its bed in search of that ego which had begun to elude him. The surroundings interest him. The water comforts his feet. The silence casts him back upon himself. He thinks, computes, and the solitude assists his introspection. He recovers his perspective, replaces the comrades of his bush-life in their proper places—the glass-fronted cupboards of an anthropological museum. His self-respect regained, he pauses to admire his new-found horizon.
Trees hem him in on every side. A little way up the stream is a narrow slit of sunlight, a little way down a narrow canopy of sky. All else is vegetation. The solitude no longer tempts him, but mocks as he contemplates his surroundings. Yet to doubt is to be ridiculous. It is all so simple; it took so long to come here up the stream; the same number of hours or minutes will take him back again to the spot he marked, and so to the camp.
The difficulties begin with the return journey. He questions the hour of leaving the bearers, the rate of march, the time spent in lazy consideration. One tree is so like another tree, one river vista but the duplicate of the last. Reeds, weeds, and bush now offer nothing distinctive; their former individuality appears to be lost. The trail must have been passed. He shouts, diffidently at first, eventually with hysteria. He fires a rifle, and the bush but re-echoes the sound. The hundreds of miles of forest on every side press together, and the signal is shuttlecocked between. The very echoes seem to him muffled, like the drums at a soldier’s funeral. The traveller is lost.
The realisation is a strange psychological phenomenon. It forces the self-reliant European on his knees to pray; drags him to his feet to blaspheme; throws him on his face to weep. This admission may come strangely to the well-housed British ratepayer. It may sound like a confession of unfathomable cowardice. It is far easier for the arm-chair philosopher to imagine the stoicism of the Indians than to reproduce the neuroticism of his European counterpart. Things are so different when the conception of the Amazonian bush is the memory of the tropical houses in Kew Gardens.
One day I was lost alone. When I realised it I shouted, then fired half-a-dozen rounds from my rifle, and laughed. It was the laugh that brought me to my senses—that way lay madness. The reaction to calm was stupendous. Life was dependent upon self-control and clarity of judgment. I counted my rounds, remembered all I had eaten that day, and settled myself to think. We had crossed a stream, and my boys had been left quenching their thirst. I took the lie of the land, and found a path leading downwards. It must go to water. It did in fact take me to a stream, and I trudged wearily in the bed of it; then, after two fruitless hours of growing despondency, turned and went down, to find, as darkness was closing in, Brown and his party. That night I had fever, and talked in my sleep. And John Brown was lost for five and a half months. Good God!
There is one last experience of the bush—starvation. The man who has not starved can never enter into the feelings of his brother who, with blood-shot eyes and shaking fingers, has groped about the fallen leaves for a lizard or a frog. I can answer for it that those who have starved never again may express the sensation. It has become the memory of a nightmare.