The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  “We often read, in books of travels,” Bates remarks, “of the silence and gloom of the Brazilian forests. They are realities, and the impression deepens on a longer acquaintance. The few sounds of birds are of that pensive or mysterious character which intensifies the feeling of solitude rather than imparts a sense of life and cheerfulness.”

  And it is true that the jungle seems strangely silent, even when the air is full of sound; the sounds are like sounds from another sphere of consciousness, from a dream, and then suddenly they burst singly on the ear: the tree frogs and cicadas, the shattering squawks of parrots (there were two for a while, discoursing overhead), and the eerie flutings of birds whose appearance could scarcely be guessed at, all of these competing with the little squeaks and cries uttered by my companion, who, receiving no intimation of our insignificance, did not have the proper respect for this sort of cathedral. (I affected a sort of trance, not wholly false, and with a rapt expression disregarded her; and after a time, infected by the atmosphere despite herself, she became silent.) The sounds were remote because there was no sign of their authors, only the still jungle, and occasionally a shadow flicking where the sunlight filtered through above. But a little later, when my eyes had cleared, I saw the humbler creatures I have always known: the subtle gray and brown wood butterflies, the black ants (though these were twice the size of any I had seen at home), and a miniature tree-frog, cedar-colored. And in a clearing the birds showed themselves: bienteveo tyrants (this was the bird I saw the first time on top of a warehouse by the docks at Georgetown, British Guiana, a widespread and resourceful flycatcher which, according to W. H. Hudson in his Birds of La Plata, will cheerfully consume fish, fledglings, snakes, and mice to eke out its ordinary diet), and flycatchers similar to our western kingbird, and a blue tanager, and a clear-breasted thrush, and one of the blackbird tribe, a flashy black and yellow job, ivory-billed, with an insolent tone of voice. This is the river oriole. Here and there a butterfly of shocking colors, and nondescript lizards in the dry brush.

  There came a sudden avalanche of tropical rain, crashing to earth, and immediately, in a small stream, small fish like sun-fish leaped and whirled. A water snake, emerald-speckled on a throat distended by what must have been a still-live frog, swam clumsily away, disappearing into a black tunnel where the stream slipped into the jungle wall; at this moment, for the first time, the jungle came into focus for me. I could feel it, hear it, smell it all at once, could believe I was almost there.

  December 24.

  The forest increases in stature, it seems, as we ascend the river. There are fewer clearings, and the few caboclos standing on the bank as we go by, watching dispassionately as the wash from our wake bangs their frail canoes together, look darker to me, more Indian—though even a century ago, in Bates’s time, the tribes of the main river banks were already extinct or absorbed by the whites and Negroes. New birds continue to appear, including tropic kingfishers, one of them dark and tiny, with a white nape. In the river the floating debris is increasing, littering great areas of the expanse, but it is the jungle which changes most. A number of trees I have not noticed before, and especially one with a smooth purple-mahogany trunk—I’m told this is the purpleheart. The larger trees have aerial gardens of red-flowered epiphytes, Bromelia, and strange silver cylinders—these are hornets’ nests—hanging like Christmas ornaments; everywhere, fastened leechlike to the trunks, are the dark masses of white ants’ nests. The lowest branches of these trees must be fifty feet from the ground; in the evening light, its pale marble columns mysterious in the greens, the forest is truly beautiful; it is difficult to conceive of a lovelier forest in the world.

  Tonight is Christmas Eve.

  Christmas Day.

  Early on Christmas morning two brilliant macaws streamed out across the river in front of the ship, and in the fiery green of the dawn bank I saw an enormous white flower. I have not seen this flower before.

  We are not a religious ship, and, the Dutch missionaries having been left behind in Manaus, there was no formal worship. To soothe our savage breasts the captain played us carols on his phonograph, and a great variety of secular music as well, everything from cha-cha-cha to The Merry Widow. The music was absorbed attentively by a gathering of caboclos who convened on the bank and in their small canoes at the point near the mouth of the Urucu River where, toward noon, the ship dropped anchor in order that all her company might celebrate Christmas dinner together.

  The small salon, decorated by the captain himself, was festive in a heartbreaking sort of way, and there was even a small spruce tree, a renegade from the consignment of Christmas trees left at Saint Vincent. The odor of this humble evergreen, so crisp and strange in the damp, redolent atmosphere of the jungle river, brought me as close as I have come to homesickness—I caught myself easing up to it every little while and furtively inhaling. Past the branches of the spruce, through the bright porthole, could be seen the rapt faces of the halfbreeds on the steaming bank, and the tumbled mass of the jungle rising like a great engulfing wave behind them.

  The captain served rum to his passengers and officers in person (this is the custom, and later the officers would serve Christmas dinner to the stewards). He did his courtly best to make a party of it, and to my faint surprise succeeded, pouring our drinks lavishly and with grace. Emboldened by rum, and carried on at table by wine and port, we were able to don our paper hats and snap our snappers with some gusto. The chief engineer claimed the port bottle was his own, and when this claim was contested pointed at the lettering, crying out, “Me bloody name’s Fernandez, isn’t it?”; behind his head our young Ortega, the swiftest waiter in the world, produced a mask with red nose, mustache, and owlish glasses, and, crossing himself, clapped it suddenly on his own face.

  We feasted on ham and turkey of a kind, and there were grapes and nuts in place of the usual dessert “sweet,” a tapioca or semolina decked out, according to the joint daily inspiration of the cook and steward, in a variety of brilliant colors and exotic names, and resembling nothing so much, under the effects of the ship’s vibration, as a low marine organism, a community of hydroid animals, shuddering with life. This staple item was suppressed upon the Lord’s Day, but I have no doubt that naked masses of it, as yet unadorned, are cached somewhere about the ship, quaking away until tomorrow.

  The rest of Christmas remains a little hazy in my mind. The noon euphoria was followed, by those officers not on watch, by a humid afternoon of drinking and an access of somber homesickness. Even the chief, who earlier had appropriated the comic mask and kept popping up at portholes all over the ship, now complained bitterly that the company had not sent the ship a Christmas cable. “First ship I was ever on,” he grumped, “where they didn’t have the courtesy to send the lads a little message.” The third mate was snarling and unhappy, and the Second Engineer subsequently succumbed to the eulogies of Scotland, and the good life in the Far East as a tanker “mon,” for which he has become notorious on the Venimos. (In Haiti one afternoon, forgetting where he was, he abused the longshoremen in Chinese, and a week later, happening upon one of the only two Chinese in Barbados, he celebrated and “went adrift,” as these men say—he failed, that is, to appear aboard ship when his watch came around the following day—and this for the first time in twelve years at sea.) Unlike the Brazilian and Peruvian crewmen, who see their families on every run, the majority of the officers have not been at home in months and, in a few cases, years; though the morale of the ship is ordinarily high, there are two officers disliked cordially by the rest, and these resentments flowered on Christmas Day, in company with each man’s longings and eccentricities. Nevertheless, these men are generous and intelligent (the most intelligent are Sparks and the third engineer; at least, they thrash me regularly at chess), and on this long voyage—we are now thirty-five days out—I have made good friends among them.

  By nightfall morale had restored itself somewhat. There was a very comic and touching collection of absurd presents
which the captain presented to me with a speech at supper, and a fine evening of lusty singing on the afterdeck. “The Londonderry Air” bestirred the lightless jungle, and in the reflective silence afterward the air was tightened by the squeak of bats. Overhead stars livened the whole tropic sky, sparkling outward from the mast silhouettes and crowding down on the black horizons on all sides. Some of these stars, those off to the south, never rise above our night skylines in North America. It came as a start, that realization in the silent evening that these far, endless galaxies I was seeing for the first time in my life.

  December 26.

  The Paraná de Manycão, a narrow channel cutting across a long bend in the river to the east of the Rio Juruá: a heavy rain this morning, and in the rain I saw three ivory-colored herons with black crests and head plumes and extraordinary bright blue bills. There are still new birds each day as we move westward—the hawks seem to change every few miles—and of the birds seen in the first days on the river only the black vulture, large-billed tern, river swallow, egrets, and green parrots are still in evidence. The mammals remain hidden, all but the bats and porpoises, and so do the crocodilians, but there are periodic swirls of some great fish.

  A young native, hunting with canoe and light spear in the arrow reeds. The ship starts up the egret he is stalking, and he stares at us impassively over his shoulder as he drifts astern. There are a few more of the large white Christmas flowers, and red flowers of the wild banana trees. And at last, a monkey, a large black one, hurling himself out of a high tree onto the lower canopy, where he scrambles a moment before disappearing among the leaves. With those shaken branches, the whole forest quite suddenly comes alive.

  December 27.

  Sometime tomorrow we shall reach Peru. There are more flowers here—yellow ones, and small red and pink-purple, growing on the vines—and a new yellow-flowered tree, quite large in size. A palm in this country, called the ubussu, has enormous fronds, like an outsize fern, which dance violently in the slightest air. Parasites and air plants are everywhere, some flowering and lovely, others grotesque; one tree has spheres, like linked coconuts, hanging down its trunk. I think this is the cannon-ball tree, Couroupita. Another tree, unnoticed until today, has bark gray with a greenish tint and very smooth, like the skin of some ancient dinosaur.

  Strange whirlpools and eddies increase along the banks; the river has risen markedly. The banks are clogged with snags and floating islands, and spinning logs which, moved slowly upstream in the eddies, look deceptively like animals. Some of the trees are caught on the bottom and yaw viciously in the current, and others sink mysteriously, to rise some distance away; the dull boom which shakes the ship when one of these trees is struck at the wrong angle is now periodic. A heavy bird with the head of a fowl and the flight of a vulture is common on the banks and floating debris—this is the camungo, or screamer, a great black and gray relation of the geese, with long spikes or horns on the shoulders of its wings.

  The animals come forward as we move upriver. This morning a group of four or five red howler monkeys, rusty in the sunrise light, observed us from the top of a tall tree, and this afternoon I saw a sloth. This unprepossessing mammal, long-armed, with an earless face like a husked coconut, was apparently roused out of its torpor by the ship; it was climbing upward and inward toward the trunk of its bare tree at top speed, which is to say, about as fast as a very old fireman on a ladder. Its dingy coat was green-tinted with algae and lichens, which serve it as a kind of camouflage; by the time it reached a crotch behind the trunk and hunched down, resembling some parasitic growth, the ship was already past; I observed its last precautions through binoculars.

  December 28.

  For the second straight day the river was shrouded in heavy fog in the night and early morning, retarding us. Gray weather, and the morale of the ship is now at a low ebb. All of us are drinking more, and the chief confesses—not entirely without his usual considerable charm—that he is sorry for himself. Probably it would not be far-fetched to say that the climate, abetting fatigue and drink, has brought home his age in a very painful way; he is to retire after this trip, and while he is longing to go home to his garden near Bristol, he is a man who loves life, or loved it once, and he sees in retirement some sort of admission of defeat.

  The third mate is also sorry for himself and angry at the world. In the beginning of the trip he was looking forward to Peru—I remember his enthusiasm on one blue day at sea, south of Bermuda—but now he cries out his hatred of the river and of “the stinking nay-tives,” the trees, and the humidity—it doesn’t matter what. He is a good-looking boy in his early twenties, with a wife in England and a child he has never seen, but there is more violence than love in him, and an unquenchable frustration that his natural assets have brought him nothing but responsibility. He speaks longingly of a trip in a sloop around the world, away from everything.

  A solitary red howler in the morning, perched disconsolately on a long limb, and at evening great flights of green and white parakeets, birds by the thousands, their electric screeching clearly audible above the engine even at a distance. They bank and whirl among the trees in bands of four or five hundred, perpetually excited. There are also large black and yellow river orioles, and here and there the trees bear dozens of their hanging fiber nests, some of these three feet in depth.

  December 29.

  Last night the Venimos arrived at the Brazilian frontier post of Benjamin Constant (called formerly, I have read, Remate de Males, or “Culmination of Evils”), on the Javarí River; the first sight of Peru was a light across the void of jungle darkness. We then moved on to the military post of Tabatinga, and finally to the border village of Ramón Castillo in Peru; at one point, under flashes of slow lightning which illumined the horizons, the faceless corners of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia could be made out simultaneously ( I got up out of my berth to observe this minor marvel, but I can’t really say I got much out of it).

  This morning Peru lies to port and Colombia to starboard. The Colombian foothold on the Amazon (between Manaus and Tabatinga the river is called the Solimōes, and in Peru the Marañón, but it is still Amazonas, “El Río Mar” ) is small, and the jungle here seems low and scrubby. Colombia is left behind in the middle of the morning, its one distinctive feature a delicate pearl-gray hawk with a black and white barred tail, which circled out across the bow before sliding back over the trees. I have not seen this species before, and because I think of it at this moment as Colombian, I hope unreasonably that I shall not see it again.

  December 30.

  The weather remains overcast and somber and very cool for the equator—72 degrees plus at times. Without sun the jungle assumes a monotone and oppressive aspect; even the bird activity seems diminished. Tonight the ship arrives at Iquitos, forty days out of New York, and though she has been comfortable and pleasant, I can’t say I’ll be sorry to leave her. But I shall miss my friends; the chief came this morning and gave me his address, asking me to visit him, and I certainly hope I shall.

  December 30–January 2.

  The town of Iquitos lies some twenty-three hundred miles upriver, and less than three hundred feet above sea level. To a lesser extent than Manaus it has the boom-and-bust aspect derived from better times; its few large houses seem out of place and incongruous on the dirt side streets. Nevertheless, the town, overlooking a wide curve in the river, remains Peru’s chief port on the Amazon; as in Manaus, a part of its community, called Belén, is afloat.

  While in Iquitos I celebrated nightly with the ship’s officers our arrival in Peru. One of these four nights was New Year’s Eve, and this was spent largely at the house of four very young Peruvian girls, friends of my own friends on the ship. (Some seamen here also have informal Indian “wives,” and one was presented upon his arrival with a baby girl, alleged to be the fruit of his last voyage; he played the proud father with good grace until someone suggested that he use his arithmetic.) These ecstatic sisters, with their mother and aunts
, baby brothers and sisters, and a puppy which, to the naked eye, was perfectly round in shape, welcomed four or five of us with beer and wine, firecrackers, a chicken-and-rice dish, dancing, and a great amount of innocent hospitality, and I shall remember that family warmly for a long time.

  Iquitos, like the other river towns, has its share of wanderers, including an ambiguous German guide whose history—some of it conflicting, but all of it propagated by himself—includes a period spent in North Africa as driver to General Rommel. On the subject of wildlife and Indians this man seemed fairly dependable; he affirmed the virtual disappearance of the manatee and river otter and the fact that the caimans are shot on sight for their hides. The shops in Iquitos are jammed with stuffed crocodilians, which, understandably, do not sell well as items of interior decoration; nevertheless, they continue to be slaughtered. One sees another aspect of the North American pattern, with the Indians, for a tiny gain, hastening the decline of the natural resources they depend on. (Some of the waste, it must be said, is of their own devising: they destroy many more fish than they can use by grinding the barbasco plant in the bottom of a dugout, which is then overturned in a lake or stream. The poisonous barbasco—the source of rotenone, used in insecticides, and first described by La Condamine—litters the surface with dead and dying creatures. This practice is against the law, but again, the law is all but unenforceable.)