The Sea and the Jungle Part 12

"Some vessels pa.s.sed down river, coming suddenly to view, a rush of paddles, and were gone, tootling their whistles. The work went on, mechanically. The clearing grew. The sheds spread one by one. The inventory was kept, the accounts were dealt with. There came a time when I was forced to remember that the steamer had not called for ten days.

We were running short of food. I had a number of sick, but no quinine.

The men, those quick, faithful fellows with the dog-like, patient eyes, they looked to me, and I was going to fail them. I made pills of flour to look like quinine, for the fever patients, trying to cure them by faith. I wrote a report to headquarters, which I knew would get me my discharge; I was not polite. There was no meat. We tried dough fried in lard. When I think of the dumb patience of those black fellows in their endurance for an idea of which they knew nothing, I am amazed at the docility and kindness inherent in common men. They will give their lives for nothing, if you don't tell them to do it, but only let them trust you to take them to the sacrifice they know nothing about.

"That went on for a month. We were in rags. We were starved. We were scarecrows. No steamer had been by the place, from either direction, for a month. Then a vessel came. I did not know the chap in charge. He seemed surprised to see us there. He opened his eyes at our gaunt crew of survivors, shocked. Then he spoke.

"'Don't you know?' he asked.

"Even that ridiculous question had no effect on me. I merely eyed him. I was reduced to an impotent, dumb query. I suppose I was like Jack the foreman, a gaping, silent, pathetic interrogation. At last I spoke, and my voice sounded miles away. 'Well, what do you want here?'

"'I've come for that steam shovel. I've bought it.'

"The man was mad. My sick men wanted physic. We all wanted food. But this stranger had come to us just to take away our useless steam shovel.

'I thought you knew,' he said. 'The Company's bought out. Some syndicate's bought 'em out. A month ago. Thought the Company would be too successful. Spoil some other place. There's no Company now. They're selling off. What about that steam shovel?'"

V

We had 5200 tons of cargo, and nearly all of it was patent fuel. This was to be put into baskets, hauled up, and emptied into railway trucks run out on the jetty alongside. We watched the men at work for a few days and nights, and judged we should be at Porto Velho for a month. I saw for myself long rambles in the forest during that time of golden leisure, but saw them no more after the first attempt. The clearing on its north side rose steeply to about a hundred feet on the hard red conglomerate; to the south, on the San Antonio side, it ended in a creek and a swamp. But at whatever point the Doctor and I attempted to leave the clearing we soon found ourselves stopped by a dense undergrowth. At a few places there were narrow footpaths, subterranean in the quality of their light, made by timbermen when searching for suitable trees for the saw-mill. These tracks never penetrated more than a few hundred yards, and always ended in a well of suns.h.i.+ne in the forest where some big trees would be p.r.o.ne in a tangle of splintered branches, and a deep litter of leaves and broken fronds. And that was as far as man had got inwards from the east bank of the Madeira river. Beyond it was the undiscovered, and the Araras Indians. On the other side of the river the difficulty was the same. The Rio Purus, the next tributary of the Amazon westward from the Madeira, had its course, it was guessed, perhaps not more than fifty miles across country from the river bank opposite Porto Velho; but no one yet has made a traverse of the land between the two streams. The dark secrecy of the region was even oppressive. Sometimes when venturing alone a little beyond a footpath, out of hearing of the settlement, surrounded by the dim tangle in which there was not a movement or a sound, I have become suspicious that the shapes about me in the half light were all that was real there, and Porto Velho and its men an illusion, and there has been a touch of panic in my haste to find the trail again, and to prove that it could take me to an open prospect of sunny things with the solid "Capella" in their midst.

We carried our b.u.t.terfly nets ash.o.r.e and went of a morning across the settlement, choosing one of the paths which ended in a small forest opening, where there was sunlight as well as shadow. Few b.u.t.terflies came to such places. You could really think the forest was untenanted. A tanager would dart a ray of metallic sheen in the wreckage of timber and dead branches about us, or some creature would call briefly, melancholy wise, in the woods. Very rarely an animal would go with an explosive rush through the leaves. But movements and sounds, except the sound of our own voices, were surprises; and a sight of one of the larger inhabitants of the jungle is such a rarity that we knew we might be there for years and never get it. Yet life about its various business in the woods kept us interested till the declining sun said it was time to get aboard again. Every foot of earth, the rotting wood, the bark of the standing trees, every pool, and the litter of dead leaves and husks, were populous when closely regarded. Most of the trees had smooth barks.

A corrugated trunk, like that of our elm, was exceptional. But when a bole had a rough surface it would be masked by the grey tenacious webbing of spiders; on one such tree we found a small mantis, which so mimicked the spiders that we were long in discovering what it really was. Many of the smooth tree trunks were striated laterally with lines of dry mud. These lines were actually tunnels, covered ways for certain ants. The corridors of this limitless mansion had many such surprises.

There were the sauba ants; they might engross all a man's hours, for in watching them he could easily forget there were other things in the world. They would move over the ground in an interminable procession.

Looked at quickly, that column of fluid life seemed a narrow brook, its surface smothered with green leaves, which it carried, not round or under obstructions, but upwards and over them. Nearly every tiny creature in that stream of life held upright in its jaws a banner, much larger than itself, cut from a fresh leaf. It bore its banner along hurriedly and resolutely. All the ants carrying leaves moved in one direction. The flickering and forward movement of so many leaves gave the procession of ants the wavering appearance of shallow water running unevenly. On both sides of the column other ants hurried in the reverse direction, often stopping to communicate something, with their antennae, to their burdened fellows. Two ants would stop momentarily, and there would be a swift intimation, and then away they would go again on their urgent affairs. We would see rapid conversations of that kind everywhere in the host. Other ants, with larger heads, kept moving hither and thither about the main body; having an eye on matters generally, I suppose, policing or superintending them. There was no doubt all those little fellows had a common purpose. There was no doubt they had made up their minds about it long since, had come to a decision communally, and that each of them knew his job and meant to get it done. There did not appear to be any ant favoured by the G.o.d of the ants. You have to cut your own leaf and get along with it, if you are a sauba.

There they were, flowing at our feet. 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. It never ceased to be remarkable that so little that was green was there. The few pothos plants, their shapely parasitic foliage sitting like decorative nests in some boughs half-way to the sky, would be strangely conspicuous and bright. The only leaves of the forest near us were on the ground, brown parchments all of one simple shape, that of the leaf of the laurel. I remember a stagnant pool there, and over it suspended some enamelled dragonflies, their wings vibrating so rapidly that the flies were like rubies s.h.i.+ning in obscure nebulae.

When we moved, the nymphs vanished, just as if a light flashed out. We sat down again on our felled tree to watch, and magically they reappeared in the same place, as though their apparition depended on the angle and distance of the eye. When a bird called one started involuntarily, for the air was so m.u.f.fled and heavy that it was strange to find it open instantly to let free the delicate sibilation.

In the low ground beyond Porto Velho up stream there was another place in the forest where sometimes we would go, the approach to it being through a deep cutting made by the railwaymen in the clay. This clay, a stiff h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s mottled rose and white, was saturated with moisture, and the helicon b.u.t.terflies frequented it, probably because it was damp; and a sight of their black and yellow, or black and crimson wings, spread on the clean plane of the beautifully tinted rock, was far better than putting them in the collecting box. The helicons are bold insects, and did not seem to mind our close inspecting eyes. Beyond the cutting was a long narrow clearing, with a giant silk cotton tree, a province in itself, on the edge of the forest. Looking straight upward we could see its foliage, but so far away was the spreading canopy of leaves that it was only a black cloud, the outermost sprays mere wisps of dark vapour melting in the intense brightness of the sky. The smooth grey trunk was heavily b.u.t.tressed, the "sapeomas" (literally, flat roots) ascending the bole for more than fifty feet, and radiating in walls about the base of the tree; the compartments were so large that they could have been used as stabling for four or five horses. From its upper limbs a wreckage of lianas hung to the ground. Beyond this giant the path rose to a place where the clearing was already waist high with scrub. Then it descended again to the woods. But the woods there were flooded. That was my first near view of the igapo. We had approached the trees, for they seemed free of the usual undergrowth, and pa.s.sed into the sombre colonnades. The way appeared clear enough, and we thought we could move ahead freely at last, but found in a few steps the bare floor was really black water. The base of the forest was submerged, the columns which supported the unseen roof, through which came little light, diminished down soundless distance into night. After the flaming day from which we had just come this darkness was repellant. The forest, that austere, stately and regarding Presence draped interminably in verdant folds, while we gazed upon it suspecting no new thing of it, as by a stealthy movement had withdrawn its green robe, and our sight had fallen into the cavernous gloom of its dank and hollow heart.

It was about the little wooden town itself, where the scarified earth was already spa.r.s.ely mantled with shrubs, flowering vines, and weeds, and where the burnt tree stumps, and even the door posts in some cases, were freshly budding-life insurgent, beaten down by fire and sword, but never to its source and copious springs-that most of the b.u.t.terflies were to be found. In a land where blossoms were few, these were the winged flowers. About the squalid wooden barracks of the negro and native labourers, which were built off the ground to allow of ventilation, and had a trench round them foul with drainage and evil with smells, a Colnis, a scarlet b.u.t.terfly with narrow, swallow-like wings, used to flash, and frequently would settle there. Over the flowering weeds on the waste ground there would be, in the morning hours, or when the sky was overcast, glittering clouds of the smaller and duller species, though among them now and then would stoop a very emperor of b.u.t.terflies, a being quick and unbelievably beautiful to temperate eyes. After midday, when the sun was intense, the b.u.t.terflies became scarce. When out of the shade of the woods, and stranded, at that time, in the hopeless heat of the bare settlement, we could turn into one of the houses of the officials of the company for shelter. These also were of timber, cool, with a verandah that was a cage of fine copper gauze to keep out the insects. All the doors were self-closing.

The fewest chances were offered to the mosquitoes. There was no gla.s.s, for the window openings also were covered with copper mesh. Here we could sit in shaded security, in lazy chairs, and look out over the clearing to the river below, and to the level line of forest across the river, while listening to stories which had come down to Porto Velho from the interior, brought by the returning pioneers.

Porto Velho had a population of about three hundred. There were Americans, Germans, English, Brazilians, a few Frenchmen, Portuguese, some Spaniards, and a crowd of negroes and negresses. There was but one white woman in the settlement. I was told the climate seemed to poison them. The white girl, who persisted in staying in spite of warnings from the doctors, was herself a Brazilian, the wife of one of the labourers.

She refused to leave, and sometimes I saw her about, pet.i.te, frail, looking very sad. But her husband was earning good money. It was a busy place, most of it being workshops, stores, and offices, with an engine and trucks jangling inconsequentially on the track by the sh.o.r.e. The line crossed a creek by a trestle bridge, and disappeared in the forest in the direction of San Antonio. The hospital for the men was nearly two miles up the track.

It was along the railway track towards the hospital, with the woods to the left, and a short margin of scrub and forest, and then the river, on the right hand, that I saw one morning in sauntering a few miles as many b.u.t.terflies as there are flowers in an English garden in June. They were the blossoms of the place. The track was bright with them. They settled on the hot metals and ties, cl.u.s.tered thickly round muddy pools, a plantation there as vivid and alive, in the quick movements of their wings, as though a wind shook the petals of a bed of flowers. They flashed by like birds. One would soar slowly, wings outspread and stable, a living plane of metallic green and black. There was a large and insolent beauty-he did not move from his drink at a puddle though my boot almost touched him-his wings a velvety black with crimson eyes on the underwings, and I caught him; but I was so astonished by the strength of his convulsive body in the net that I let him go. Near the hospital some bushes were covered with minute flowers, and seen from a distance the countless insects moving about those bushes were a glistening and puzzling haze.

All that morning I had felt the power of the torrid sun, which clung to the body like invisible bonds, and made one's movements slow, was a luscious benefit, a golden bath, a softening and generative balm; a mother heat and light whose ardent virtues stained pinions crimson and cobalt, and made bodies strong and convulsive, and caused the earth to burst with rus.h.i.+ng sap, to send up green fountains; for so the palms, which showed everywhere in the woods, looked to me. You could hear the incessant low murmur of mult.i.tudinous wings. And I had been warned to beware of all things. I felt instead that I could live and grow for ever in such a land.

Presently, becoming a little weary of so much strong light, I found it was midday, and looking back, there was the s.h.i.+p across a curve of the river. It was two good miles away; two intense, shadeless, silent afternoon miles. I began the return journey. An increasing rumbling sound ahead made me look up, as I stepped from tie to tie, and there came at me a trolley car, pumped along slowly, four brown bodies rising and falling rhythmically over its handle. A man in a white suit was its pa.s.senger. As it pa.s.sed me I saw it bore also something under a white cloth; the cloth moulded a childish figure, of which only the hem of a skirt and the neat little booted feet showed beyond the cloth, and the feet swayed limply with the jolts of the car in a way curiously appealing and woful. The car stopped, and the white man, a cheerful young doctor chewing an extinct cigar, came to me for a light. He stood to gossip for a few minutes, giving his men a rest. "That's the Brazilian girl," he said; "she wouldn't go home when told, poor thing."

This Madeira river had the look of very adventurous fis.h.i.+ng, and the Doctor had brought with him an a.s.sortment of tackle. The water was opaque, and it was deep. Its prospects, though the forest closed round us, were s.p.a.cious. It flowed silently, with great power, and its surface was often coiled by profound movements. The coils of the river, as we were looking over the side one morning, began to move in our minds also, and the Doctor mentioned his tackle. There was the forest enclosing us, as mute as the water, its bare roots clenched in aqueous earth. n.o.body could tell us much about the fish in this river, but we heard stories of creatures partly seen. There was one story of a thing taken from the very place in the river where we were anch.o.r.ed, a fish in armour which the natives declared was new to them; a fearful ganoid I guessed it, reconstructing it in vision from fragments of various tales about it, such as is pictured in a book on primeval rocks. There were alligators, too, and there was the sucuruju, which I could call the great water serpent, only the Indian name sounds so much more right and awful; and that fellow is forty feet long in his legend, but spoils a good story through reducing himself by half when he is actually killed. Still, twenty feet of stout snake is enough for trouble. I saw one, just after it was killed, which was twenty-two feet in length, and was three feet round its middle. So to fish in the Madeira was as if one's hook and line were cast into the deeps where forms that are without name stir in the dark of dreams. We got out our tackle, and the cook had an a.s.sortment of stuff he did not want, and that we put on the hooks, and waited, our lines carried astern by the current, for signals from the unknown. Yet excepting for a few catfish, nothing interrupted the placid flow of stream and time. The Doctor put a bight of the lime round his wrist, sat down, and slept. We had fine afternoons, broad with the wealth of our own time.

Old man Jim came aboard and saw our patience with amus.e.m.e.nt. He suggested dynamite, and no waiting. The river was full of good fish, and he would come next day with a canoe and take us where we could get a load. It was a suggestion which needed slurring, to look attractive to sportsmen. Jim took it for granted that we simply wanted fish to eat, and as many as we could get; and next morning there he was alongside with his big boat and its crew. Jim himself was in the stern, the navigator, and he was sitting on what I was told was a box of dynamite.

Now, there were two others of our company who, but the day before, were even eager to see what dynamite would send up from the bottom of that river; but when they saw the craft alongside with its wild-looking crew, and Jim with his rifle sitting on a power which could lift St. Paul's, they considered everything, and decided they could not go that day. I went alone.

I suppose men do plucky things because they are largely thoughtless of the danger of the things they do. As soon as I was sitting on the level of the water in that crazy boat, with Jim and his explosive, and beside him what whisky he had not already consumed, and saw under my nose the eddies and upheavals of the current, I knew I was doing a very plucky thing indeed, and wished I was high and safe on the "Capella." But we had pushed off.

Jim, with his eyes dreamy through barley juice, was the pilot, and there was a measure of confidence to be got from the way he navigated us past the charging trees afloat. There was no drink in the steering paddle, at least. But the sh.o.r.e was a long swim away; yet perhaps it would have been as pleasant to be drowned or blown-up as to be lost in the jungle.

We turned into a still creek, where the trees met overhead. Jim continued his course till the inundated forest was about us. The gloom was hollow, the pillars rising from the black floor were spectral, and our voices and paddles sounded like a noisy irruption among the aisles of a temple. The echoes fled from us deeper into the dark. But Jim was all unconscious of this; he but stopped our progress, and opened the box of cartridges.

I had never seen dynamite, but only heard of it. I understood it had unexpected qualities. Jim had a cartridge in his hand, and was digging a knife into it. I repeat, the flooded wilderness was round us, and below was the black deep. Jim fitted a detonator to a length of fuse, and stuck it in the cartridge. He was in no hurry. He stopped now and then for another drink. Having got the cartridge ready, with its potent filament, he tied four more cartridges round it. I put these things down simply, but my hand ached with the way I gripped the gunwale, and I could hear myself breathing.

Then Jim struck a match on his breeches, with all the fumbling deliberation of the fully ripe-brus.h.i.+ng the vine leaves from his eyes the better to see what he was doing-and he lit the fuse, after it had twice dodged the match. It fizzed. The splutter worked downwards energetically. Jim did not deign to look at it, though it fascinated me.

He slowly scratched his back with his disengaged hand, and gazed absently into the forest.

The spark and its spurts of smoke were now near the bottom. Jim changed the menace into his right hand, in order to reach another part of his back with his leisurely left. His eyes were still on the forest. I kept swallowing.

"Jim," I said eagerly-though I did not know I was going to speak-"don't-don't you think you'd better throw it away now?"

He regarded me steadily, with eyes half shut. The spark spurted, and dropped another inch. He looked at it. He looked round the waters without haste. Then, and I could have cried aloud, he threw the shocking handful away from us.

It sank. There were a few bubbles, and we sat regarding each other in the quiet of a time which had been long dead, waiting for something to happen in a time to come. At the end of two weeks the bottom of the river fell out, with the noise of the collapse of an iron foundry on a Sunday. Our boat tried to leap upwards, but failed. The water did not burst asunder. It vibrated, and was then convulsed.

Dead fish appeared everywhere, patches of white all round; but we hardly saw them. There was a great head which emerged from the floor, looking upwards sleepily, and two hands moved slowly. These quietly sank again.

The tail of the saurean appeared, slowly described a half circle, and went. The big alligator then lifted itself, and performed some grotesque antics with deliberation and gravity. Then it gathered speed. It rotated, thrashed, and drummed. It did all that a ten-horse-power maniac might. I think the natives shrieked. I think Jim kept saying "h.e.l.l"; for I was conscious only with my eyes. When the dizzy reptile recovered, it shot away among the trees like a torpedo.

We went home. That night I understand the second mate was kept awake listening to me, as I slept, bursting into spasms of dreadful merriment.

When you are lost in the map of a country that is beyond the worn routes, trying to discover therein the place name which is the most secluded and inaccessible, if the map should happen to be that of South America, then your thought would naturally wander to the neighbourhood of San Antonio of the Rio Madeira. There you stay, to wonder what strange people and rocks and trees are to be found at San Antonio. It looks remote, even on the map. The sign which stands for the village is caught in a central loop of the mesh which is the river system of the Amazon forest. San Antonio must be beyond all, and a great journey. It is far outside the radius. And that would be enough, to be beyond the last ripple of the traffic and at peace, where that dark disquiet, that sombre emanation which rises from the soured earth where myriads have their chimneys, their troubles and their strife, staining even the morning and the morning thought, is no more. A place where the light has the clarity of the first dawn, and one might hear, while sure of absolute solitude, the winding of a strange horn, and suspect, when coming to an opening in the woods, the flight of a s.h.i.+ning one; for somewhere the ancient G.o.ds must have sanctuary. A land where the rocks have the moss of unvisited fastnesses, and you can snuff the scents of original day.

Where we were anch.o.r.ed, San Antonio was in view, about five miles up stream. Where at the end of that reach of river a line of tremulous light, which we thought was the cataracts, bridged the converging palisades of the jungle, in the trees of the right bank it was sometimes easy to believe there was a glint of white buildings. But looking again, to rea.s.sure your sight, the apparition of dwellings vanished. At night, in the quiet, sometimes the ears could detect the shudder of the weighty rapids by San Antonio; but it was merely a tremor felt; there was no sound. The village remained to us for some time just that uncertain gleam by day, and the rapids but a minute reduction of a turmoil that was far. For in that languorous heat we counted miles differently, and it was pleasanter to suspect than to go and prove, and much easier.

One day I went. When in a small boat the jungle towered. The river, too, had a different character. From the sh.o.r.e, or from the big "Capella,"

the river was an expanse of light, an impression of s.h.i.+ning peace.

Whenever you got close to its surface it became alive and menacingly intimate. Our little boat seemed to roll in the powerful folds of a monster which wallowed ponderously and without ceasing. The trees afloat, charging down swiftly and in what one felt was an ominous quiet, stood well above our tiny craft.

We steered close in-sh.o.r.e to avoid the drifting wood and the set of the current. The jungle's sheer height, confusion, and intensity were more awesome than when seen from the steamer. Not many of the trees were of great beam, but their consistent height, with the lianas in a wreck from the far overhanging cornice, dwarfed our boat to an unimportant straw.

At times the forest had a selvage of cane, and growths of arrow gra.s.s, bearing long white plumes twelve feet above us, and a pair of fan-shaped leaves resembling palm leaves.

The sound of the cataracts increased, and a barrier grew in height athwart the Madeira. Mounting high right ahead of us at last was a ma.s.s of granite boulders, with broad smooth surfaces, having the structure of gigantic masonry in ruin which weathered plutonic rock so often a.s.sumes.

Beyond the barrier the river was plainly above our level. It was seen, resplendent as quicksilver, through the crenellations of the black rocks. One central ma.s.s of rock, higher than the rest, had a crown of dark and individual palms, standing paramount in the upper light. Yet, with that gleam of wide river behind, no great rush of water broke there. A few fountains spurted, apparently without source, and collapsed, and pulsed again. The white runnels of foam which laced the contours of the piled boulders gave the barrier the appearance of being miraculously uplifted, as though one saw thin daylight through its interstices. Not till the village was in view did we see where the main river avoided the barrier. The course here was looped. Above the barrier the river turned from the right bank, and heaped itself in a smooth steep glide through a narrow pa.s.s against the opposite sh.o.r.e, the roaring welter then running obliquely across the foot of the rocks to the front of San Antonio on the right bank again. The forest beside the falls seemed to be tremulous with continuous and profound underground thunder.

The little huddle of San Antonio's white houses is on slightly rising ground, and the lambent green of the jungle is beside them and over them. The foliage presses the village down to the river. Like every Amazonian town and village, it appears, set in that forest, as rare a human foothold as a s.h.i.+p in mid-ocean; a few lights and a few voices in the dark and interminable wastes. So I landed from our little craft elated with a sense of luckily acquired security.

The white embowered village, the leaping fountains and the rocks, the air in a flutter with the shock of ponderous water collapsing, the surmounting island in mid-stream with its coronet of palms, the half-naked Indians idling among the Bolivian rubber boats hauled up to the foresh.o.r.e below, the unexplored jungle which closed in and framed the scene, the fierce sun set in the rounded amplitude of the clouds of the rains, made the tropical picture which was the right reward for a great journey. I had come down long weeks of empty leisure, in which the mind got farther and farther away from the cities where time is so carefully measured and highly valued. The centre of the ultimate wilderness was more than a matter of fact. It was now a personal conviction which needed no verification.

The village had but one street. There were two rows of houses of a single storey, built of clay and plaster, dilapidated, the whitewash stained and peeling, every house open and cavernous below, without doors, in the way of Brazilian dwellings, to give coolness. The street was almost deserted when we entered it. A few children played in the shadows, and outside one house a merchant in a white cotton suit stood overlooking the scales while the half-breeds weighed b.a.l.l.s of rubber; for this town is in the midst of the richest rubber country of the world, and all the wealth of the rivers Mamore, Beni, and Madre de Dios comes this way. And that was why, as we idled through its single thoroughfare, some dark girls came to stand at the house openings, dressed in odorous muslin, red flowers in their s.h.i.+ny black hair, and their smiling eyes full of interest in us. The rough road between the dwellings was overgrown with gra.s.s, and in the centre of it, partly hidden by the gra.s.s, was the line laid long ago by the railway enterprise which ended so tragically. To-day the rubber men use it as a portage for their boats. There were several inns, half-obliterated names painted on their outer walls. They had crude interior walls of mud, and floors of bare earth. In such an inn would be a few iron tables and chairs, and there a visitor might drink from bottles which at least bore European labels, though the contents and cost were past all European understanding. I forgot to say that by the foresh.o.r.e of this little village is the head depot of a great rubber house, a building apparently out of all proportion to the size of San Antonio. But I looked on that place with the less interest, though from what my native companion told me the head of the house is a monarch more absolute and undisputed in this wild country than most eastern kings are to-day.

I was more interested in the huge boulders of smooth granite which rose strangely from the street in places, and broke its regularity. These rounded and n.o.ble rocks often topped the houses. What man had built looked mean and transitory beside the poise and fine contours of the rocks. The colony of giant rocks had a look of settled and tranquil solidity, a friendly and hospitable aspect. They might have been old friends which time had proved; the houses beside them were alien by contrast. I felt that San Antonio had merely imposed itself on them, that they tolerated the village because it was but an incident; that they could afford to wait. When I saw them there I recognised the village of my map. I climbed to the summit of one, over its weather-worn shelves. It had a skin of lichen, warm in the sun and harshly familiar.

The curious hieroglyphics of the lichen were intelligible enough, and more easily read than the signs on the walls of the inns. I learned where I was; and knew that when the day of the great rubber house had long pa.s.sed, my village would still be there, and prospering.