Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [193]
Leo Miller was aware of the drama of the moment. As an experienced field naturalist, he had seen many departures, but none to compare with this, involving one of the most valuable men in the world.
“THE VESSELS LAY SO LOW IN THE WATER THAT THEY NEEDED SIDE-FLOATS.”
Roosevelt prepares to descend the Dúvida, 27 February 1913. (photo credit i15.5)
Then with a parting “Good luck!” their dugouts swung into the current and were whisked away. For several minutes we stood on the fragile structure that bridged the unexplored river and stared at the dark forest that shut our erstwhile leader and his Brazilian companions from view; and then, filled with misgivings as to whether or not we should ever see them again, we turned our thoughts to the task before us.
* 22 January
CHAPTER 16
Alph, the Sacred River
Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets
The roaring of a world remade,
And all his ruin and regrets.…
And he may never dare again
Say what awaits him, or be sure
What sunlit labyrinth of pain
He may not enter and endure.
“WE WERE QUITE UNCERTAIN,” Roosevelt wrote at the top of his next batch of manuscript, “whether after a week we should find ourselves in the Gi-Paraná, or after six weeks in the Madeira, or after three months we knew not where.”
He noted the date, 27 February 1914, and their position at embarkation: twelve degrees one minute of latitude south, sixty degrees fifteen minutes of longitude west. One thing his travels down the Brazilian coastline, up the Paraguay, and across the sertão had given him was a physical sense of Brazil’s size, greater than that of the contiguous United States. It amounted to a Latin re-creation of his own country, as described in The Winning of the West: a young republic whose borders had only recently been established, and whose indigenous tribes were not all pacified. Nine-tenths of its population lived along the Atlantic littoral, walled off from the interior by an Appalachian-like range, the Serra do Mar. Railroads were beginning to snake northwest from Rio and São Paulo (Kermit had done his bit to extend them), but much of Mato Grosso was still, as its name indicated, a “great wilderness.”
Topographically, this other Brazil was an immense shield of sandstone, slightly ridged in the middle, rising to a western height of three thousand feet. One face drained southward into the vast basin of the Rio de la Plata, the other into the even vaster basin and floodplains of the Amazon. The watershed streams ran deep and abrasive, notching sharp valleys out of the sandstone until they bottomed out on crystalline granite, Brazil’s bedrock. Tributaries carved what looked like flat-topped mountains but were really remnants of plateau. On the torrid northern slope of the shield, some of these high residuals kept their temperate microclimates, while the trough beneath sweltered in an almost perpetual, fetid damp, teeming with the world’s greatest profusion of plant and insect life. There were so many varieties of mosquitoes in Amazonas that their contrasting whines produced harmony.
Roosevelt found himself floating down toward it now, borne on the Dúvida’s seasonal swell. The momentum would have been exhilarating if Rondon and Lyra had not kept stopping to survey every curve in the river. Kermit made himself useful to them in his lead canoe, jumping out onto any promontory that commanded an equal view up and downstream. He held up a sighting rod for as long as wasps would permit, while the Brazilians worked with a telemeter and compass to calculate distances and direction. All day long the laborious process repeated itself, bend by bend, station by station. “Kermit landed nearly a hundred times,” Roosevelt recorded, “and we made but nine and a third kilometers.”
The jungle was lovely to look at as it drifted