Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [201]
“In my country, whoever kills has to die.”
“It’s useless to pursue Julio,” Rondon said. “A man vanishing into the forest like that.… You’ve a better chance finding a needle in a haystack. Meanwhile, he deserves his fate.”
Roosevelt’s concern was that Julio, having gone berserk, might return under cover of darkness and steal food or kill someone else. But when the murder weapon was found further on, he accepted that the second alternative was unlikely.
França, the cook, was confident that Paixão’s ghost would seek revenge. He darkly observed that the sergeant had died falling forward. That meant the killer was doomed. “Paixão is following Julio now, and will follow him till he dies.”
Roosevelt quoted this remark in his account of what had happened. The writer in him responded to the expedition’s second funeral ceremony.
The murdered man lay with a handkerchief over his face. We buried him beside the place where he fell. With axes and knives the camaradas dug a shallow grave while we stood by with bared heads. Then reverently and carefully we lifted the poor body which but half an hour before had been so full of vigorous life. Colonel Rondon and I bore the head and shoulders. We laid him in the grave, and heaped a mound over him, and put a rude cross over his head. We fired a volley for a brave and loyal soldier who had died doing his duty. Then we left him forever, under the great trees beside the lonely river.
LATE THE FOLLOWING afternoon, Roosevelt felt the first, unmistakable symptoms of Cuban fever. He had to endure a hailstorm, and further heart tremors, as he limped a few hundred yards down the boulder-strewn gorge to a new camp at the foot of the rapids. His colleagues saw that he was very ill and pitched his tent in the driest spot possible, a stony slope that shed at least some rain. Roosevelt was unconscious of the tilt as he took to his cot and the malaria hit him with full force. His temperature rose to around 104°F. He became delirious, reciting some lines of Coleridge over and over again:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Kermit, Cajazeira, and Cherrie took turns watching over him. The doctor laced him with quinine, at first orally, and when that had no effect, by injection straight into the abdomen.
In terror, Kermit registered the details of that night. “The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth underfoot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out sky and trees and river.” If his father was the epic hero Kermit believed him to be, then nature seemed to be in a state of hysteria at the prospect of losing him.
Toward dawn the quinine brought Roosevelt’s temperature down, and he summoned Cherrie and Rondon. The Brazilian was taken aback at his grim expression as he said, “The expedition cannot stop. On the other hand, I cannot proceed. You go on and leave me.”
He grew agitated when he saw they would not obey him. Rondon countered with a gentle appeal to his sense of responsibility.
“Let me point out that this is called the ‘Roosevelt-Rondon’ expedition, so we cannot possibly split up.”
A reconnaissance after breakfast brought semi-encouraging news. There were two more rapids in the offing, but beyond them was a large affluent which gave promise of smooth water further on. If Roosevelt could stand another forty-eight hot, humid hours in the sunless gorge, he would see why Rondon had named the confluence “Bôa Esperança,” place of good hope. There, the expedition might at last become waterborne again.
That day’s portage proved to be a long one. Roosevelt’s temperature resurged. His leg showed signs of erysipelas, a hot, shiny, streptococcal inflammation of the skin. He labored past the first rapid with ineffective help from Cherrie and Lyra, both of whom had dysentery.