"There was a question at night as to whether our pilots would anchor or not. They decided to go on. We did not go the route of Bates, _via_ Breves, but took the Parana de Buyassa on our way to the Amazon. It was night when we got to the Parana, and but for the trailing lights, the fairy mooring lines of habitations in the woods, and what the silent explosions of lightning revealed of great heads of trees, startlingly close and monstrous, as though watching us in silent and intent regard, we saw nothing of it."
Once I knew a small boy, and on a summer day too much in the past now to be recalled without some private emotion, he said to his father, on the beach of a popular East Anglian resort, "And where is the sea?" He stood then, for the first time, where the sea, by all the promises of pictures and poems, should have been breaking on its cold grey crags. "The sea?" said the father, in astonishment, "why, there it is. Didn't you know?"
And that father, being an exact man, there beyond appeal the sea was. And what was it? A discoloured wash, of mean limit, which flopped wearily on some shabby sands littered with people and luncheon papers. Such a flat, stupid, and leaden disillusion surely never before fell on the upturned, bright and expectant soul of a young human, who, I can vouch, began life, like most others, believing the noblest of everything. It was an ocean which was inferior even to the bathing-machines, and could be seen but in division when that child, walking along the rank of those boxes on wheels, peeped between them.
You will have noticed with what simple indifference the people who really know what they call the truth will shatter an illusion we have long cherished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, those honest folk cannot be blamed for poking their feet through fine pictures they did not know were there.
I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long cherished. I was leaning to-day over the bulwarks of the "Capella," watching the jungle pass. The Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the Para River, and was waiting for our vessel to emerge from that stream, as through a narrow gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the greatest river in the world, the king of rivers, the Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and saw some herons, and the ciganas, and once a sloth which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt, was as distant as London. The silence, the immobility of it all, and the pour of the tropic sun, were just beginning to be a little subduing. We had come already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, a very great deal of this forest; and it never varied.