The water was always
running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and
hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and
the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of
Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, its
discoloured ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this
wilderness of Nature, a sixpence dropped on Sahara. He was a young man,
this was his first sight of the tropics, he came straight from England,
where Nature is hedged, ditched, and drained, into the perfection of
submission, and he had suddenly discovered the insignificance of man. For
six days they had been steaming up from the sea by unfrequented channels;
and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly. One saw one day a canoe,
another day a distant station, the next no men at all. He began to
perceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious hold
upon this land.
He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his devious
way to the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who ruled
over one big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition.
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