H. M. Tomlinson

“ For some reason we were visited to-day by an extraordinary number of butterflies. One large specimen was of an olive green, barred with black. Another had wings of a bluish grey, striped with vermilion. Helicons came, and once a morpho, the latter a great rarity away from the interior of the woods. At four in the afternoon the sky grew ominous. We had just time to notice the trees astern suddenly convulsed, writhing where they stood, and the storm sprang at us, roaring, ripping away awnings and loose gear. The noise in the forest round us was that of cataclysm. ”

“ The sun, just above the sharply dark rim of ocean, touched the sea, and sank. A thin paring of silver moon had the sky to itself. I went into the chart-room; and the old man who, grim and sour as you might think him, mellows into confidential friendliness when he has you to himself, spread his charts of the Spanish Main under the yellow lamp, which was a slow pendulum as she rolled, and he put his spectacles on his lean brown face, talked of unfrequented cays, and of the negro islands, and debated which route we should take. ”

“ The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow turgid flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a majestic forest was near to either beam. We were enclosed. And after we entered the Madeira my dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry way one does refer to a dread that has been long in the distance, and then one day takes shape, becomes material, and settles down with us. Its form, as you know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your simple mind has expected something with the lowering face of evil. ”

“ What a journey it would be from Ino in Bolivia, on the Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, on the Rio Putumayo; there is another “Odyssey” in a voyage like that. And think of the names of those places and rivers! When I take the map of South America now, and hold it with the estuary of the Amazon as its base, my thoughts are like those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over the furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he regards all he may of the trunk rising into the whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. ”

“ Our minds take its light and shade, and just as our little company, gathered in the Chief’s room at a time when the seas were running high, recalled sombre 199 legends which told of foredoom, so this forest, an intrusive presence which is with us morning, noon, and night, voiceless, or making such sounds as we know are not for our ears, now shadows us, the prescience of destiny, as though an eyeless mask sat at table with us, a being which could tell us what we would know, but though it stays, makes no sign. ”

“ Because the saloon is now hot beyond endurance, the steward has fixed a table on deck, and so, as we eat, we can see the jungle pass. That keeps some of our mind from dwelling over much on the dreary menu. The potatoes have begun to ferment. The meat is out of tins; sometimes it is served as fritters, sometimes we recognise it in a hash, and sometimes, shameless, it appears without dress, a naked and shiny lump straight from its metal bed. Often the bread is sour. The butter, too, is out of tins. Feeding is not a joy, but a duty. ”

“ The air was immobile; the air itself was the incumbent heat. The only shadows were under the mules’ bellies. Cruel and relentless noons! How the surveyors endured it, standing for long eyeing their exacting instruments in such a defeating glare, I do not know. At the end of each day my pigskin leggings were like wet brown paper with sweat, and my hands crinkled and bleached as though they had been in a soda bath.
We reached another and greater tributary of the Madeira, the Rio Jaci-Parana. Here there was a very extensive clearing as great as the one at Porto Velho. ”

“ We were still an ugly black bulk, as we were on the ditch water of Swansea, but our sea wagon had lost its look of squat heaviness. Even our iron ship was transmuted, such was the lift and radiance of Barbados and its sea, into the buoyancy of the unsubstantial stuff of that scene about us, the low hills of greenish gold so delicate under the sky of malachite blue that you doubted whether mortals could walk there. Bridgetown was between those hills and the sea, a cluster of white cubes, with inconsequential touches 361 of scarlet, orange, and emerald. ”

“ The ‘Capella’ left Para at three o’clock this morning, and continued up the Para River. Daylight found us in a wide brownish stream, with the shores low and indistinguishable on either beam. When the sun grew hot, the jungle came close in; it was often so close that we could see the nests of wasps on the trees, like grey shields hanging there. Between the Para River and the Amazon the waters dissipate into a maze of serpenting ditches. In width these channels usually are no more than canals, but they were deep enough to float our big tramp steamer. ”

“ I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in the pageant of humanity.
It is only on the “Capella’s” bridge that you feel the stagnant air which is upset by the steamer’s progress. There it spills over us, heavy with the scent of the lairage on the fore deck. The bridge is a narrow, elevated outlook, full in the sun’s eye, where I can get a view of the complete ship as she serpentines in her narrow way. On the port side of it the Skipper has a seat, and there now he sits all day, gazing moodily ahead. ”

“ Great London Town! It was true. If London shut off its good will that winch would stop, and the locomotives would come to a stand to rot under the trees, and the lianas would lock their wheels; and in a month the forest would have foundered the track under a green flood. Where the American accent was dominant, the jaguars would moan at night. That long wound in the forest would be annealed and invisible in a year. While it persisted, the idea could conquer and maintain.
“Yes, but it’s all chance,” said the Englishman.
“That uncertain and impersonal will controls us. ”

“ I see it now, one of those restricted forest openings to which we often went, the wall of the jungle all round, and some small attalea palms left standing, the green of their long plumes as hard and bright as though varnished. Nothing else is there that is green, except the weeds which came when the sunlight was let in by the axe. The spindly forest columns rise about, pallid in a wall of gloom, draped with withered stuff and dead cordage. Their far foliage is black and undistinguishable against the irregular patch of overhead blue. ”