Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [200]
Cherrie accompanied him on the high trek on 30 March. Roosevelt began to show signs of coronary stress. He kept sitting down and begging Cherrie to climb on ahead of him. But the naturalist was afraid to leave him unattended. Together at the crest, they looked north at a range of mountains unmarked on any map. The Dúvida (nobody had gotten used to calling it the “Roosevelt”) shone here and there amid the dark trees like an arrow of light. The way it vanished into the distance filled them both with foreboding.
When they descended to the camp that Kermit had hopefully established as a “port” overlooking the gorge’s worst rapids, Roosevelt had no strength left. He lay flat on the damp ground, trying to still the tumult in his chest. He could not begin to help his son with the canoes, nor Rondon in cutting a corduroy road beyond the last cataract. The most he could do, when he recovered, was wash Cherrie’s shirt for him.
As if in some vast conspiracy of fate, mountains, river, and weather combined to subject the expedition to its worst punishment yet. Rain drilled down as the men started work on the skidway. Kermit and Lyra stumbled around upstream in rotting shoes, roping the dugouts down meter by meter. One boat smashed, but the other five got safely to port. Then began the Sisyphusian labor of hauling them, and the rainwater they received, up Rondon’s muddy road.
By the time this operation was complete, April had begun, and all but three of the camaradas were broken in body or spirit. The expedition encamped halfway down the rapids. The deluge that night amounted to solid water. Its weight collapsed the only two shelters available to the principals—the little medical tent in which Roosevelt now slept alone, and the balloon-silk fly shared by his five colleagues. Wrapped in a damp blanket, he managed to get some sleep, but fears about him increased.
The following day’s advance amounted to less than three meters of aneroid “drop,” and subjected him to another portage. His cot was set up in a gorge even narrower than the one he had just quit.
“Worried a lot about father’s heart,” Kermit wrote in his diary.
THE NEXT MORNING Roosevelt had reason to believe he was in the valley of the shadow of death. The jawbone of a Pachydermata brasiliensis protruded from the sand. Rock walls that could have been sliced by civil engineers blocked the sky. Kermit and Lyra lost yet another canoe, reducing the flotilla once more to just two pontoons. A reconnaissance party came back with news of rapids continuing as far as the eye could see. Or the ear to hear: for four weeks now, the roar of broken water had sounded almost uninterruptedly ahead of them, like a pedal note denying any hope of final resolution.
Rondon took some men ahead to hack vines, while others, supervised by a huge black sergeant named Paixão, got the stores ready for transportation. Roosevelt was resting by the river when he noticed Julio de Lima, the pure Portuguese he had long recognized as a spoiler, drop his load, pick up a carbine, and walk off muttering. It was not unusual to see a camarada hunt, since everybody was half-starved. Julio alone remained fleshy and healthy-looking. He was a known food thief: Paixão had several times caught him in the act and beaten him. But his muttering today was peculiar.
Several minutes later, there was a shot outside the camp. Brazilians ran back shouting, “Julio mato Paixão!” Julio had killed Paixão. Roosevelt, careless of his leg, hurried to the scene of the crime with Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira. They found the sergeant dead in a pool of blood. Julio had shot him through the heart at point-blank range. A scurry of foot marks ran into the jungle, frantically circled, then disappeared down the gorge.
Roosevelt sent for Rondon and insisted on frontier justice. “We must go after Julio, arrest him, and execute him!”
Rondon saw that he was highly excited, and tried to calm