Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [185]
One evening this liquid landscape turned gold, and reflected a sunset of such prismatic beauty that Roosevelt exclaimed, “Wonderful, wonderful!” Off to port, the Serra Amolar loomed, its dark profile etched with rose, as if it was about to erupt. The immense curve of the sky, feathered with cirrus, was duplicated in the water. Priest and ex-president sat dwarfed and humbled in their deck chairs. They were unable to move until the radiance had burned itself out, and a crescent moon replaced the gold with silver. Both of them were storing up purple prose for publication. Zahm fancied that he heard, in the sound of the Paraguay churning astern, the “cadenced voice” of the mãe d’agua, or water-mother, that “beauteous siren of Brazilian fable,” whose mermaid-like body was enough to tempt a man to plunge into her element, and be lost forever.
As far as Kermit was concerned, the sooner Zahm took a dive the better. He thought his father’s friend was vain, lazy, and manipulative, a faux intellectual whose remarks sounded as though they had been memorized in the library at Notre Dame. But Zahm’s erudition was genuine. His quotations from Shakespeare and Dante and other poets in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese were accurate, if excessive. He was a master of historical geography, relating every squalid village or stone fort along the river to the annals of the Conquistadors.
As such, and for as long as this placid passage up the river lasted, Zahm was an ideal travel guide. That did not persuade Kermit that he would be of any use, once the expedition proper began. Sooner rather than later, Roosevelt—who tended to like people too readily, and discount their liabilities—was going to have to realize that this sedentary old cleric was de trop.
KERMIT DID NOT know it, but on passing through Corumbá (loud cries of “Viva”; the hot, mimosa-fragrant little city on holiday; its sole hotel proclaiming welcome in brilliant lights), Roosevelt had updated his last will and testament. He had no plans to die in Brazil. However, he was fatalistic enough to understand that a river named Doubt might not deliver him safely to the Amazon—assuming it flowed that far. If not, or if it proved too much for him, it could turn out to be the Styx.
On 5 January the Nioac reached São Luís de Cáceres, its last scheduled stop and the official point of departure for the expedition’s ascent to Mato Grosso. From now on, travel would be progressively more awkward: northward in boats up the Sepotuba, a rough affluent of the upper Paraguay, then, as hills and mesas crowded in, by mule and ox wagon westward across the sertão grasslands of the interior. Rondon estimated it would take them about seven weeks to reach the rise of the Dúvida, nearly five hundred kilometers from Cáceres as a crow flew. No man could guess how many more weeks they would need to trace the river’s full length, but they were unlikely to reach their final destination, Manáos, much before the beginning of April.
Father Zahm was sorry not to continue cruising along the less arduous itinerary he had originally planned. It had involved a minimum of marching, and a powered descent of the Tapajoz in the steel motorboats he had commissioned in Pennsylvania, with gay pennants conjoining the initials R and Z. Roosevelt had abandoned these expensive purchases after hearing that they were too heavy to be hauled across the sertão. Fiala’s sleek Canadian canoes were light enough, but they lacked the seating and storage space for a long river trip. Rondon, accordingly, had requisitioned some extra Indian-style dugouts to be held ready near José Bonifácio.
Roosevelt spent his last evening in civilization shopping and strolling around Cáceres. It was as Cubist a composition as anything he had seen at the Armory Show, with the added charm of being unpremeditated. The white-and-blue houses with their red tile roofs and latticed windows (through which an occasional pretty face could be seen, dark or pale), had probably not changed much since colonial days. They harked back architecturally even further,