Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [202]
Kermit developed a fever of his own the following morning. It was 6 April, the thirty-ninth day of the expedition—or the eighty-fourth, counting back to its ascent of the Sepotuba—and almost every member was weak from malnutrition. Julio’s mysterious disappearance, after the deaths of Simplício and Paixão, had depressed the camaradas, while the principals dreaded that Roosevelt might die too.
“Am in a blue funk, as I have been for some time, to get out of the country,” Kermit wrote in his diary.
Roosevelt staggered through a second portage before the explorers reassembled at Bôa Esperança. They divided themselves between the two pontoons, with Rondon’s leading, and pushed out into the broadening river. The current took them, and for the first time in weeks, they felt a momentum that they did not have to slow.
Rondon and Lyra dared not make any more survey stops for fear of enraging Roosevelt. But they hit on a way of correlating canoe speed and compass swings within imaginary rectilinear tracts superimposed on the river. They were in the midst of this absorbing geometry when a voice from the bank shouted, “Tenente!”*
The sound of Portuguese coming out of a wilderness untrodden by white men bewildered them until they realized it was Julio’s voice. Desperate, apparently, for his own life, he had seen them coming downstream and crawled along a bough overhanging the water.
Rondon was too shocked to respond. He did not want to ruin his calibrations by stopping. Roosevelt’s pontoon was still some way behind. Julio would certainly hail that too. If ignored, he would try to catch up with the expedition at its next camp. Or a search party could be sent back.
After a record run of 36 kilometers, Rondon discovered another tributary of the Dúvida at almost eleven degrees of latitude. It poured in from the east over a bar of sparkling quartzite and swelled the main stream to a width of 120 meters. An abundance of uauássú palms soared above dense stands of rubber trees, signaling that Amazonas at last was near. Rondon named the new river the Capitão Cardoso, after a colleague who had died in the telegraph service, and pitched camp near the bar.
Here he waited for the rest of the expedition to arrive. When it did, Roosevelt’s fever appeared to be on the wane, but Kermit’s was worse. Julio, they said, had hailed them, but they too had not stopped. Rondon asked what they thought he should do.
Roosevelt had no doubt whatsoever. “The expedition is in a state of peril,” he said. “We must devote all our resources to safeguarding the lives of present members.” Julio had forfeited that membership. Nineteen half-starved men, many of them sick, were in urgent need of a return to civilization. The camaradas were exhausted. Some were practically naked, their clothes and underwear devoured by termites. Nobody yet knew where the Dúvida was headed. If Julio gave himself up, he would have to be fed, accommodated, and guarded night and day. It was out of the question to go back for him. “I absolutely do not consent!”
Kermit ventured to disagree. His father turned on him in rage.
“Shut up!”
Lyra murmured in Portuguese, “He thinks he is still President.”
Rondon, who seemed to have forgotten about letting Julio escape three days before, said that it was “the duty of a Brazilian officer, and of a man” to bring a murderer to justice.
Roosevelt’s anger ebbed as quickly as it had surged. He said he would defer to Rondon’s opinion. “Let the law of your country take its course.”
Julio did not show up that night, despite the inviting plume of smoke sent up by the camp fire. After breakfast the next morning, two soldiers were dispatched to where he was last seen. They returned late in the day to say that they had searched a radius of many kilometers, but failed