Harry Alverson Franck

“ For days to come I might fight my way through the encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut for miles around to see if by any chance the lost property could have rolled thither. More than once such a hunt brought me out on the water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles of impenetrable jungle behind and above chanting with invisible life, to the right the filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges dimly outlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and all Gatun and its immense works and workers below and before me. ”

“ Outside each uninspiring town was an ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy islands. ”

“ A metleek is only a cent. Yet, as you pass through the streets of Damascus, the constant calling for it sounds like a multitude searching the wilderness for a lost child. “Metleek!” cries the seller of flat loaves, on the ground at your feet. “Metleek!” screams the wandering bartender, jingling his brass disks. The word is shouted commandingly from the peddler whose novelty has attracted a crowd, fiercely from the angry-looking fellow whose stand has been deserted, pleadingly from the crippled beggar, who threads his way with astonishing swiftness through the human whirlpool. ”

“ Then there is Xanicho, pitched high in mound-shape, suggestive of Capri, rocky, bare, reddish-brown, and about its bottom, like a narrow band on a half-sunken Mexican hat, a long thin town of white walls and tiled roofs visible in all detail, a church towering above the rest to form the bow of the ribbon. It is strange how the human plant grows everywhere and anywhere, even on a patch of rock thrust forth out of the sea. ”

“ From all the crowded city rises the hum of busy, bucolic life, yet not noisily, for the general tone is peaceful industry and a phlegmatic preoccupation. Now and again the hollow boom of a wooden gong rises and dies away in one of the sacred temples. As the shadows lengthen, bare-legged workmen, a cheek swollen with a cud of coca, mount up the breakneck terraces below, waving with Indian corn or purple with potato-blossoms, pass silently along the brow of the intihuatana hill, and hurry unhurriedly on to their cobble-stone huts in the crowded outskirts. ”

“ Many of these bring with them machetes, others catch up clubs, handsful of brush, the tops of banana plants, and fall to threshing the flames, which by this time are crackling like the tearing up of thousands of parchments. Men on horseback race up and down the open lanes, directing the fighters, ordering the cutting of a new guardaraya there, commanding the lighting of a back-fire yonder. The air is full of black bits of cane leaves, the sun is obscured by the grayish-brown smoke which envelops all the struggling, shouting multitude and covers the field with an immense pall. ”

“ It was a fitful, blustery day, with a high wind that rocked and tossed us about like a dory on a heavy sea; moreover, at irregular intervals averaging perhaps a minute apart the machine struck an air current that bounced us high off our precarious perches in the cockpit as a “thank-you-ma’am” tosses into one another’s laps the back-seat passengers in an automobile. The sickening drop just beyond each such ridge in the air road gave one the same unpleasant sensation of vacancy in the middle of the body that comes with the too sudden descent of an elevator. ”

“ To endeavor to make headway against the surging multitude is much like attempting to swim up the gorge of Niagara. Long lines of camels splash through the human stream, utterly indifferent to the urchins under their feet. Donkeys all but hidden under enormous bundles of fagots that scrape the buildings on either side, asses bestraddled by foul-mouthed boys who guide the beasts by kicking them behind either ear and urge them on by a sound peculiar to the Arab—a disgusting trilling of the soft palate—dash with set teeth out of obscure and unexpected side streets. ”

“ One could not but wonder how it feels to be hopelessly ruined in body early in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not a whistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting away in the jungle.
Under the beautiful royal palms beyond, all bent inland in the constant breeze are park benches where one can sit with the Atlantic spreading away to infinity before, breaking with its ages-old, mysterious roll on the shore just as it did before the European's white sails first broke the gleaming skyline. ”

“ It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs, bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills, like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength and energy. ”

“ Spreading over a dead-flat, half-sandy, jungled plain, its right-angled streets are deep in reddish sand in which not only its shod feet—by no means in the majority, though the upper class is almost foppish in dress—but even the solid wooden wheels of its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry to lend its strident voice, though the town boasts three “steam establishments” for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the whispering jungle. ”

“ Only adults with infants in arms were permitted inside the ropes; the jet-black sea of small faces was unbroken clear around the wide seething circle. It was hard to believe that there were so many piccaninnies in the world, to say nothing of the mere half-island of Haiti. Outside the ropes an immense throng of adults, mingled with better-dressed children without tickets, was shrieking a constant falsetto tumult that made the ear-drums of those in the focus of sound under the tree vibrate as if their ears were being incessantly boxed. ”

“ Climbing, clinging, and circling through a wilderness of undergrowth amid the vast forest of still, dense-green pines, but with such views of the valley of Mexico and the great snow-clads as to reward any possible exertion, we flanked at last the entire canyon. In the forest itself every inch of ground was carpeted with thick moss, more splendid than the weavings of any loom of man, into which the feet sank noiselessly. ”

“ Everywhere the climbing and creeping plant life was so thick and interwoven that our feet could not reach the ground. Often, when we tried to plunge through a thicket, we were caught as if in a net. It was impossible to get through, and we crawled out with torn garments and bleeding hands and faces to fight our way around the spot. We were now in the very heart of the mountains. Range after range appeared, covered with unbroken jungle. From the top of every mountain there spread out before us an endless forest of teak and bamboo matted together with the wildest undergrowth. ”

“ Chinamen tumbled out through every open doorway, out of every hole in the surrounding shop walls; they sprang up from under the buildings, dropped from the low roofs, swarmed out of the alleyways, for all the world like rats; screaming, yelping, snarling, clawing the air as they ran, their cues streaming behind them. In the twinkling of an eye the mob at our heels had increased to a hundred. We refused to sacrifice our dignity by running. The frenzied Celestials scratched us savagely with their overgrown finger nails, caught at our legs, spattered us with mud. ”

“ A few tobacco patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out of existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing the pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayagüez drags slowly by, new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San Germán, with its vista of grazing cattle and its pepinos gordos, reddish calabashes clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, there is little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble into Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun to dry. ”

“ Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? ”

“ However baffling its story, it is not difficult for one who has wandered along the Andes to build up a picture of the living city of the past as he sits here in the declining day, lulled yet excited by the ceaseless music of the Urubamba far below, mysterious, Indian-like in its impassiveness, as if it knew, but were sworn forever to guard, the secret it has girdled with its impregnable precipices for unknown centuries. Before the inner eye the many stone stairways take on life. ”

“ A vast mountain wall rose before me, and a sharp rocky trail at times like steps cut by nature in the rock face led up and up and still forever upward. A score of times I seemed to have reached the summit, only to find that the trail took a new turn and, gathering up its skirts, climbed away again until all hope of its ever ceasing its sweating ascent faded away. After all it was perhaps well that only a small portion of the climb was seen at a time; like life itself, the appalling sight of all the difficulties ahead at once might discourage the climber from ever undertaking the task. ”

“ Turns so sharp we rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and the forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil. But life there was none, except the rampant green dying plant life in every direction to the horizon. There were not even birds, other than now and then a stray snow-white slender one of the heron species that fled majestically away across the face of the nurtureless waters as we steamed—no, gasolined down upon it. ”