Five Nights: A Novel

by Victoria Cross

"Oh yes, quite easily; they have a little kitchen here."

In the forepart of the boat the Indians had fixed a piece of tin with a few bricks round it, forming a hearthstone and stove. On this they cooked their own food as their surrounding pots and kettles shewed. A few embers from their last cooking glowed still between the bricks. Suzee leant over them, blew them into a blaze and then set our kettle on, getting out her little cups and saucers and ranging them on the floor of the boat.

I sat back and watched her. The whole scene was a delightful one and rivalled the one I had noted at starting. The gleaming water spread itself in large flat mirrors on every side, and the trees standing in it reflected beneath, and reaching up to the lofty roof of overarching, interlaced boughs above us, gave the effect of a hall of a thousand columns. The adobe house of the fruit-seller seemed standing on a precarious island, so high had the floods risen round it, and numerous empty baskets and crates, evidently lifted from their moorings on the bank, drifted slowly about on the silvery tide. Our boat itself was a lovely object with its fairy lines, its thread of smoke going up from it, and the little Oriental figure bending over the red embers in its prow.

We lunched and had our tea in this cool retreat of softened light, and knew the sun was beating with its murderous noonday glare just without. The boatmen came back after an interval with a huge load of mangoes which they piled into the boat, and offered us sixty for five cents. I gave them the five cents and took two or three of the fruits for myself and Suzee. Then the moorings were undone, the men jumped in, and paddled us swiftly onwards. The proprietor of the adobe hut came to the edge of his grove and saluted, as we passed by on a rapid current; then he and hut and mangoes all glided from us, quickly as a dream, and we were borne forward through the wonderful maze of trees over the tranquil sheets of water.

All through the golden Mexican afternoon we descended the river, down, ever downwards, to the sea. Sometimes in the deep green shadows of overhanging trees, passing through the heart of a forest; sometimes out in the burning open beneath the clear blue of the sky, between flat plains of open country; sometimes on the breast of wide lakes; sometimes between high banks, where the boat went dizzily fast and the waters passed the paddles with a sharp hiss as we rushed on; and each of those moments was a delight to me, and even Suzee seemed affected by the beauty and the poetry of the river, for she leant against me silent and absorbed and her eyes grew soft and dreaming as the visions on the golden banks swept by; fields of sugar-cane and maguey, coffee plantations with their million scarlet berries, waving banana and palm, masses of delicate bamboo rustling as the warm breeze stirred them.

As the day melted into evening, the sky flushed a deep rosy red and seemed to hang over us like a great hollowed-out ruby glowing with crimson fires. The waterway of the river before us turned crimson, and all the ripples in it were edged and flecked with gold. The great lagoons, when we passed through them now, reflected the peace of the painted skies and the marsh lilies floating on their surface became jewels set in gold as the water eddied round them.

In half an hour the glory faded, leaving a transparent lilac sky over which the darkness closed with all the swiftness of the tropics.

As we neared the sea and the warm salt breath came up to us we saw the light over the Market Square in Tampico and the masses of soft shadow of the trees in the Plaza.

Frail, wooden boat-houses, with shaky landing-stages built out over the water, lined the banks on either side, and at one of them our boatmen suddenly drew in, and we disembarked in the soft darkness, suffused with the red light from the square and vibrating with the music from a band playing there behind the trees.

We got out and walked along the river-bank towards the seashore, where the sea lay calm and still, its black, gently heaving surface reflecting the light of the stars. Where the river debouched, there was a sheltered cove of fine white sand, and here every species of gaily painted craft was drawn up. The light from the Market Square, ablaze with lamps, reached out to it and shewed boat after boat of fantastic shape and colour, with striped awnings fixed on bamboo poles over their centre, lying in the shelter of the palm-trees that fringed the cove. We rounded the slight promontory on our left hand and came full into the light of the animated town.