Jules Verne (8 page)

"Now, then," interrupted Benito, "you did not come here to exchange
loving speeches, I imagine. Just forget for a few hours that you are
engaged."

"Not for an hour—not for an instant!" said Manoel.

"Perhaps you will if Minha orders you?"

"Minha will not order me."

"Who knows?" said Lina, laughing.

"Lina is right," answered Minha, who held out her hand to Manoel. "Try
to forget! Forget! my brother requires it. All is broken off! As long
as this walk lasts we are not engaged: I am no more than the sister of
Benito! You are only my friend!"

"To be sure," said Benito.

"Bravo! bravo! there are only strangers here," said the young mulatto,
clapping her hands.

"Strangers who see each other for the first time," added the girl; "who
meet, bow to—"

"Mademoiselle!" said Manoel, turning to Minha.

"To whom have I the honor to speak, sir?" said she in the most serious
manner possible.

"To Manoel Valdez, who will be glad if your brother will introduce me."

"Oh, away with your nonsense!" cried Benito. "Stupid idea that I had! Be
engaged, my friends—be it as much as you like! Be it always!"

"Always!" said Minha, from whom the word escaped so naturally that
Lina's peals of laughter redoubled.

A grateful glance from Manoel repaid Minha for the imprudence of her
tongue.

"Come along," said Benito, so as to get his sister out of her
embarrassment; "if we walk on we shall not talk so much."

"One moment, brother," she said. "You have seen how ready I am to obey
you. You wished to oblige Manoel and me to forget each other, so as not
to spoil your walk. Very well; and now I am going to ask a sacrifice
from you so that you shall not spoil mine. Whether it pleases you or
not, Benito, you must promise me to forget—"

"Forget what?"

"That you are a sportsman!"

"What! you forbid me to—"

"I forbid you to fire at any of these charming birds—any of the
parrots, caciques, or curucus which are flying about so happily among
the trees! And the same interdiction with regard to the smaller game
with which we shall have to do to-day. If any ounce, jaguar, or such
thing comes too near, well—"

"But—" said Benito.

"If not, I will take Manoel's arm, and we shall save or lose ourselves,
and you will be obliged to run after us."

"Would you not like me to refuse, eh?" asked Benito, looking at Manoel.

"I think I should!" replied the young man.

"Well then—no!" said Benito; "I do not refuse; I will obey and annoy
you. Come on!"

And so the four, followed by the black, struck under the splendid trees,
whose thick foliage prevented the sun's rays from every reaching the
soil.

There is nothing more magnificent than this part of the right bank of
the Amazon. There, in such picturesque confusion, so many different
trees shoot up that it is possible to count more than a hundred
different species in a square mile. A forester could easily see that
no woodman had been there with his hatchet or ax, for the effects of a
clearing are visible for many centuries afterward. If the new trees are
even a hundred years old, the general aspect still differs from what
it was originally, for the lianas and other parasitic plants alter, and
signs remain which no native can misunderstand.

The happy group moved then into the tall herbage, across the thickets
and under the bushes, chatting and laughing. In front, when the brambles
were too thick, the negro, felling-sword in hand, cleared the way, and
put thousands of birds to flight.

Minha was right to intercede for the little winged world which flew
about in the higher foliage, for the finest representations of
tropical ornithology were there to be seen—green parrots and clamorous
parakeets, which seemed to be the natural fruit of these gigantic
trees; humming-birds in all their varieties, light-blue and ruby red;
"tisauras"
with long scissors-like tails, looking like detached
flowers which the wind blew from branch to branch; blackbirds,
with orange plumage bound with brown; golden-edged beccaficos; and
"sabias,"
black as crows; all united in a deafening concert of shrieks
and whistles. The long beak of the toucan stood out against the golden
clusters of the
"quiriris,"
and the treepeckers or woodpeckers of
Brazil wagged their little heads, speckled all over with their purple
spots. It was truly a scene of enchantment.

But all were silent and went into hiding when above the tops of the
trees there grated like a rusty weathercock the
"alma de gato"
or
"soul of the cat," a kind of light fawn-colored sparrow-hawk. If he
proudly hooted, displaying in the air the long white plumes of his tail,
he in his turn meekly took to flight when in the loftier heights there
appeared the
"gaviao,"
the large white-headed eagle, the terror of the
whole winged population of these woods.

Minha made Manoel admire the natural wonders which could not be found
in their simplicity in the more civilized provinces of the east. He
listened to her more with his eyes than his ears, for the cries and the
songs of these thousands of birds were every now and then so penetrating
that he was not able to hear what she said. The noisy laughter of Lina
was alone sufficiently shrill to ring out with its joyous note above
every kind of clucking, chirping, hooting, whistling, and cooing.

At the end of an hour they had scarcely gone a mile. As they left the
river the trees assumed another aspect, and the animal life was no
longer met with near the ground, but at from sixty to eighty feet above,
where troops of monkeys chased each other along the higher branches.
Here and there a few cones of the solar rays shot down into the
underwood. In fact, in these tropical forests light does not seem to
be necessary for their existence. The air is enough for the vegetable
growth, whether it be large or small, tree or plant, and all the heat
required for the development of their sap is derived not from the
surrounding atmosphere, but from the bosom of the soil itself, where it
is stored up as in an enormous stove.

And on the bromelias, grass plantains, orchids, cacti, and in short all
the parasites which formed a little forest beneath the large one, many
marvelous insects were they tempted to pluck as though they had been
genuine blossoms—nestors with blue wings like shimmering watered silk,
leilu butterflies reflexed with gold and striped with fringes of green,
agrippina moths, ten inches long, with leaves for wings, maribunda bees,
like living emeralds set in sockets of gold, and legions of lampyrons or
pyrophorus coleopters, valagumas with breastplates of bronze, and green
elytræ, with yellow light pouring from their eyes, who, when the night
comes, illuminate the forest with their many-colored scintillations.

"What wonders!" repeated the enthusiastic girl.

"You are at home, Minha, or at least you say so," said Benito, "and that
is the way you talk of your riches!"

"Sneer away, little brother!" replied Minha; "such beautiful things are
only lent to us; is it not so, Manoel? They come from the hand of the
Almighty and belong to the world!"

"Let Benito laugh on, Minha," said Manoel. "He hides it very well, but
he is a poet himself when his time comes, and he admires as much as
we do all these beauties of nature. Only when his gun is on his arm,
good-by to poetry!"

"Then be a poet now," replied the girl.

"I am a poet," said Benito. "O! Nature-enchanting, etc."

We may confess, however, that in forbidding him to use his gun Minha
had imposed on him a genuine privation. There was no lack of game in
the woods, and several magnificent opportunities he had declined with
regret.

In some of the less wooded parts, in places where the breaks were
tolerably spacious, they saw several pairs of ostriches, of the species
known as
"naudus,"
from four to five feet high, accompanied by their
inseparable
"seriemas,"
a sort of turkey, infinitely better from an
edible point of view than the huge birds they escort.

"See what that wretched promise costs me," sighed Benito, as, at a
gesture from his sister, he replaced under his arm the gun which had
instinctively gone up to his shoulder.

"We ought to respect the seriemas," said Manoel, "for they are great
destroyers of the snakes."

"Just as we ought to respect the snakes," replied Benito, "because they
eat the noxious insects, and just as we ought the insects because they
live on smaller insects more offensive still. At that rate we ought to
respect everything."

But the instinct of the young sportsman was about to be put to a still
more rigorous trial. The woods became of a sudden full of game. Swift
stags and graceful roebucks scampered off beneath the bushes, and a
well-aimed bullet would assuredly have stopped them. Here and there
turkeys showed themselves with their milk and coffee-colored plumage;
and peccaries, a sort of wild pig highly appreciated by lovers of
venison, and agouties, which are the hares and rabbits of Central
America; and tatous belonging to the order of edentates, with their
scaly shells of patterns of mosaic.

And truly Benito showed more than virtue, and even genuine heroism, when
he came across some tapirs, called "antas" in Brazil, diminutives of the
elephant, already nearly undiscoverable on the banks of the Upper Amazon
and its tributaries, pachyderms so dear to the hunters for their rarity,
so appreciated by the gourmands for their meat, superior far to beef,
and above all for the protuberance on the nape of the neck, which is a
morsel fit for a king.

His gun almost burned his fingers, but faithful to his promise he kept
it quiet.

But yet—and he cautioned his sister about this—the gun would go off in
spite of him, and probably register a master-stroke in sporting annals,
if within range there should come a
"tamandoa assa,"
a kind of large
and very curious ant-eater.

Happily the big ant-eater did not show himself, neither did any
panthers, leopards, jaguars, guepars, or cougars, called indifferently
ounces in South America, and to whom it is not advisable to get too
near.

"After all," said Benito, who stopped for an instant, "to walk is very
well, but to walk without an object—"

"Without an object!" replied his sister; "but our object is to see, to
admire, to visit for the last time these forests of Central America,
which we shall not find again in Para, and to bid them a fast farewell."

"Ah! an idea!"

It was Lina who spoke.

"An idea of Lina's can be no other than a silly one," said Benito,
shaking his head.

"It is unkind, brother," said Minha, "to make fun of Lina when she
has been thinking how to give our walk the object which you have just
regretted it lacks."

"Besides, Mr. Benito, I am sure my idea will please you," replied the
mulatto.

"Well, what is it?" asked Minha.

"You see that liana?"

And Lina pointed to a liana of the
"cipos"
kind, twisted round a
gigantic sensitive mimosa, whose leaves, light as feathers, shut up at
the least disturbance.

"Well?" said Benito.

"I proposed," replied Minha, "that we try to follow that liana to its
very end."

"It is an idea, and it is an object!" observed Benito, "to follow this
liana, no matter what may be the obstacles, thickets, underwood, rocks,
brooks, torrents, to let nothing stop us, not even—"

"Certainly, you are right, brother!" said Minha; "Lina is a trifle
absurd."

"Come on, then!" replied her brother; "you say that Lina is absurd so as
to say that Benito is absurd to approve of it!"

"Well, both of you are absurd, if that will amuse you," returned Minha.
"Let us follow the liana!"

"You are not afraid?" said Manoel.

"Still objections!" shouted Benito.

"Ah, Manoel! you would not speak like that if you were already on your
way and Minha was waiting for you at the end."

"I am silent," replied Manoel; "I have no more to say. I obey. Let us
follow the liana!"

And off they went as happy as children home for their holidays.

This vegetable might take them far if they determined to follow it to
its extremity, like the thread of Ariadne, as far almost as that which
the heiress of Minos used to lead her from the labyrinth, and perhaps
entangle them more deeply.

It was in fact a creeper of the salses family, one of the cipos known
under the name of the red
"japicanga,"
whose length sometimes measures
several miles. But, after all, they could leave it when they liked.

The cipo passed from one tree to another without breaking its
continuity, sometimes twisting round the trunks, sometimes garlanding
the branches, here jumping form a dragon-tree to a rosewood, then from
a gigantic chestnut, the
"Bertholletia excelsa,"
to some of the wine
palms,
"baccabas,"
whose branches have been appropriately compared
by Agassiz to long sticks of coral flecked with green. Here round
"tucumas,"
or ficuses, capriciously twisted like centenarian
olive-trees, and of which Brazil had fifty-four varieties; here round
the kinds of euphorbias, which produce caoutchouc,
"gualtes,"
noble
palm-trees, with slender, graceful, and glossy stems; and cacao-trees,
which shoot up of their own accord on the banks of the Amazon and its
tributaries, having different melastomas, some with red flowers and
others ornamented with panicles of whitish berries.

But the halts! the shouts of cheating! when the happy company thought
they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back and
disentangle it from the knot of parasitic plants.

"There it is!" said Lina, "I see it!"

"You are wrong," replied Minha; "that is not it, that is a liana of
another kind."