Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [191]
The rain thinned next day, enough for Roosevelt to spend most of the afternoon contemplating the Utiariti falls. He too was restless, but only Rondon—busying himself with preparations for Lauriodó’s trip down the Papagaio—knew what the reason was. Speaking as colonel to colonel, Roosevelt had confided that he was tormented by the possibility of the United States going to war with Mexico. President Wilson (whose health he had toasted on Christmas Eve, at dinner aboard the Nioac) had not, at last report, done anything to arrest the rapid deterioration in relations between the two countries. If hostilities broke out, Roosevelt wanted to be back in uniform and fighting for his flag, not lost to the world in a wilderness where the only armies were ropes of ants.
And where, after all, was the Rio da Dúvida? To the American team, it seemed to recede like a mirage westward, no matter how long each day’s trek. At their current rate of advance, slowed by storms, recalcitrant pack animals, and Rondon’s weighty marquees, they would not reach José Bonifácio for another three weeks. Meanwhile the Papagaio confronted him, running north in the direction he really wanted to go. Flecked and whitish-green, it accelerated toward its straight line of collapse. Lauriodó and Fiala would be enjoying that exhilarating momentum very soon.
Father Zahm salvaged some dignity, and saved himself and Sigg many days on muleback, by wangling two caminhão seats back to Tapírapoan. But the Americans were not around to bid him Godspeed. They set out for José Bonifácio on 4 February, leaving Rondon to dispatch his Papagaio crew and catch up with them later. Roosevelt began a new chapter of his book: From this point we were to enter a still wilder region, the land of the naked Nhambiquaras.
There followed three days of semi-progress as deluge after deluge turned the trail into a slough that eventually sucked the oxen to a halt. Browsable forage was scarce, and nine mules starved to death. The sodden plateau gave forth a myriad of bloodthirsty pium flies. They were about as easy to swat away as fog, and their bites left black spots that refused to fade. In order to continue writing, Roosevelt had to drape a cheesecloth over his helmet and wield his pencil with gloved fingers. “I must make good to Scribner,” he kept saying.
Kermit, Cherrie, and Miller agreed with him that the expedition was bogging down in more ways than one. It must convert to mule transport only. Roosevelt hiked back to make this recommendation to Rondon, in tones that brooked no disagreement. The last Brazilian tents must be abandoned. Rain or no rain, principals would have to sleep forthwith under the lightest possible covering, and the camaradas left to devise their own shelters. There was no question of carrying the big Canadian canoes any farther. Rondon’s requisitioned dugouts would have to do when they got to the Dúvida.
The carts were emptied and pack animals loaded only with essential equipment. Travel resumed at an improved pace (the telegraph lines undulating ahead on their numbered poles, eleven spans to the kilometer, each rise and fall counterpointed, lower down, by giant spiderwebs). After a couple of dry and bracing days the sky turned black. “It’s raining mournfully, dismally, and ceaselessly; in a sort of hopeless insistent way,” Kermit wrote his mother, in a letter unlikely to be mailed anytime soon.
Groups of Nhambiquaras materialized often, nude and gleaming in the downpour. They had quills jabbed through their septums and upper lips, and carried bows taller than themselves. Even the arrows were five feet long. Rondon gave them goodwill gifts while posting a constant armed guard. He said that they had killed some of his men in the early days of his pacification campaign. Generally they held aloof, but the detachment’s nightly halts drew them. They were fascinated by the sight of Roosevelt at work on his manuscript, crowding so close that he had to push them gently away.