Black White/Chapter 8

OR several days after that we tramped the rolling hills of the Ventuari sabana, heading east, and gradually climbing. I had left my curial tied high by a long chiquechique rope, safe from any sudden rise of water following a storm, and my supplies well wrapped in plataní leaves inside the hut.

The Macos, delighted to find that I was leaving my heavy goods behind, were more than willing to pack the few things I wished to carry—hammock, cartridges, matches, tobacco, and a few machetes and looking-glasses intended for gifts or pay. The pair of Maquiritares divided between them White’s case and bag, and led the way. We had only to follow with our guns.

The guiding pair wound along at the bases of the sun-roasted hills, following animal paths at times, then abandoning them as they curved off in wrong directions. For about half of each day we would be tramping in the full glare of the sun, unprotected by the crooked little trees that grew thinly along the slopes. Then we would be in thick belts of forest through which usually flowed some small stream, and where we had to swing in half-circles to find rocky passes across the water, of which the Maquiritares knew.

Sometimes we climbed a small hill and stopped to breathe and look about, seeing mountains to east and west and south—rolling green ridges or sharp-cut precipices. Then we would go down and be hemmed in again by the hummocks until we met a narrow caño or, perhaps, a dead water in which lived the horrible culebra de agua—that huge snake which swallows men.

It would have been hot work, that tramping, if the northeast wind had not blown. But it did blow, fresh and steady, cooling the air and filling us with strength. And, except in the damp woods or at places where we met the winding river, there were no longer any mosquitoes. The air was too dry and the wind too cool to be to their liking. White put away his bandannas, and wore his helmet without a veil.

“Man, what a country!” he marveled one day as we stood on a hill-top, looking out over wide reaches of brown sabana and green forest, with a sweeping curve of the river shining blue among trees.

Near us a line of moriche palms stretched away like a long file of slim plume-hatted soldiers. Beyond rose the mountains, and above in a brilliant blue sky drifted great clouds white as foam. Miles upon miles of the Guayana upland lay around us, and nowhere in it could we see anything move.

“What a country!” he repeated. “I haven’t seen anything like it before. Been cooped up by woods or river-banks. This is royal! No bugs—a wind like wine—and what a view! It’s so beautiful it hurts!”

It was just that. To any man with an eye for beauty those wide reaches would have been wonderlands at any time; and to men who for endless weeks had been confined within walls of bush they seemed a paradise. I had been in the high Guayana sabana before, though not in this part of it; yet its changing masses of form and color, as I looked at them from different hills, stirred me as music does.

“Wonderful country,” I agreed. “Beautiful to the eye, comfortable to the body, rich in game, yet inhabited only by the tigre and the danta and such things. No man lives here. The Maquiritares are men of the forest, and live in the rain-swept mountains to the east.”

“The poor fools! They haven’t brains enough to appreciate this,” he said. “I’d like to live forever in a place like this.”

Studying him a minute, I smiled and said nothing.

“But yet I don’t know,” he added presently. “I’d get tired of it, I suppose. It’s like a beautiful woman—hits you hard at first, but after you’ve seen her awhile she gets to be the same old stuff all the time, and you’ve got to ramble on and find something new. Probably after I stayed here awhile and had all the fun I could I’d never want to see the place again. Well, let’s go.”

So we moved on.

Late that day we made camp, as usual, at the edge of a belt of woods, where we could hang our hammocks from trees and find plenty of wood for cooking. The Maquiritares and two of the Macos went into the forest to kill birds or beasts for the night meal, as they did each day. The other two Macos gathered wood and made all ready for the night, and we blancos bathed at a little stream where the water was clear and cool and no mosquitoes bit. Then we lay in our hammocks, smoked, and talked of whatever came to mind. It was in this talk that I learned something which made me understand him a little better.

He spoke in a careless way of his father, saying that unless he returned soon to Bolívar and sent a cable message to the States the “old man” would begin to worry about him. Talking on in a lazy manner, he let me know that his father was president of the company which had sent him down here; that he himself had traveled much while growing to manhood—in fact, he had toured around the world, and had seen so much of Europe that he was “sick of it;” and that he had taken_this trip to Venezuela more because it was something that “everybody hasn’t done” than because of any great interest in business. He also said his grandfather had made a fortune in gold-mines in the West of your United States, starting as a poor man and dying very rich.

“He was a husky old boy, grandpop was,” he laughed. “Right up to the day he died he could swear a blue hole through a stone wall, pack a load of whisky that would floor two ordinary chaps, and knock a man cockeyed with either fist. If he hadn’t been killed by a motor truck hitting his roadster he’d have lived to be a hundred, I’ll bet.

“They say he was a terror when he was a prospector out West, and from what I hear he must have been. For instance, right after he made his first strike some bad-men tried jumping his claim, and he got shot half to pieces; but the jumpers left that claim feet first. Folks didn’t bother him much after that.

“He kept my grandmother shocked all the time—she was one of our Eastern aristocrats, who married him after he’d made his pile. It just tickled him silly to have her give a swell dinner and dance, and then to knock her guests speechless with some fierce break that he made on purpose. People talk yet about the things he used to do.”

I laughed, but I thought too. And I saw several things. I saw that this man’s carelessness of real danger, and probably his strong build, came to him from that fighting grandfather; and that his wonderful skin and his anxiety over his looks probably came from the “aristocratic” side of his family. I saw, too, that he was an official of the company only because he was the president’s son; and that though he had stuck manfully to the work for which he had come to Venezuela, his only real object in life was to please himself. In all, I saw he was a mixture of “red blood’ and “blue blood,” as you Americans express it—and that the blue spoiled the red.

“Is your father like your grandfather?” I asked.

I got the answer I expected.

“Oh, no. He takes after my grandmother’s side of the family. Very much of a city man, you know, and fond of society. He thinks I’m terribly wild, and he’s all the time afraid I’ll do something to disgrace him. Poor dad!”

He laughed again. Then he sat up suddenly.

“What’s this?” he demanded..

I looked, and I too sat up.

Our hunters had returned, bring a pauji and a couple of pavas. But where four Indians had gone out, seven had come back.

One of the Maquiritares, smiling, came up and explained. Farther in the forest, he said, the hunters had come on a caño, and there they had found a little camp with three men in it. These men were Maquiritares from the Caño Cerbatana, farther up and on the other side of the Ventuari, who had paddled down here to hunt baquidos—wild hogs. Now they had come with our men in order to see Loco León, of whom they had heard.

I was glad to meet new friends from the Caño Cerbatana, I said, and they should come forward. The three, who had been standing back and looking me over, did come forward when told. Did they speak Venezolano? They made no answer; only smiled and looked at one another. I saw that they spoke no tongue but their own, which I never have learned—it is a very hard language, and few men know it.

So I gave them a little tobacco and motioned for them to squat while the food was made ready, intending then to ask a few questions through the Maquiritares who spoke Spanish. They leaned their weapons against trees, took little rolls of cocomono bark from their ear-lobes—all Maquiritares pierce their ears—and, with my tobacco, made cigarros. Then they squatted in silence, looking at me and White.

Now, I never had seen Maquiritares like them—that is, with such skins. Instead of the clean light-brown skins usually seen among those people, they had hides of dirty black. No, not like the skins of negroes— not an even, shiny black. These men looked as if they had been thickly powdered with chimney-soot and then thrown into water, leaving a washed-out black all over them. As they wore only the usual tiny clout of the Maquiritares, I could see that they were entirely covered with that color, from thick hair to wide-spread toes.

“Good Lord, what a rotten dirty bunch!” said White. “Look like a gang of coal-heavers. How do they get that way?”

“I do not know,” I confessed. “The Maquiritares are a clean people. I will ask later on.”

When we had eaten and the Indians were hanging around us in their hammocks—the newcomers had brought their nets with them—I talked through the mouths of the Spanish-speaking Maquiritares. First, knowing that cerbatana means “blow-gun,” I asked why the caño of the black men was so named. They said it was because there grew both the chusti cane used for the bore of the blow-guns and the maui wood used for the outer case, so it was a fine place to make cerbatanas. Did many people live there? No, they said; only one very small house of them. Was the hunting good there? Not so good. It was in the sabana, and the hunting was better in the thick hills beyond. Were the people of Caño Cerbatana sick? No, they were very well.

“Then why do they have black skins?” I demanded. “If they have no sickness, why are their skins not clean like those of other Maquiritares?”

There was a long pause. The Indians looked at one another, but said nothing. Then I thought perhaps these men had painted themselves dark in order to hunt better, just as they all paint their legs with wavy red stripes of onorte to keep snakes from biting them. I asked if that was it.

“No,” one answered slowly. “It is not paint.”

“Then is it dirt?”

“No!” He seemed a little offended.

“It is not dirt—it is not paint—it is not sickness? Then what?”

There was another pause.

“I, Loco León, your friend, ask you,” I reminded them.

After a little more time the answer came.

“It is in the skin itself.”

“Oh.” I studied the black men again. “They were born with such skins? They are all of one mother?”

“No. They were born as we were. They are not brothers. Their skins were made black when they became men.”

“But why? How?” I persisted.

Once more there was a silence. I began to feel that I was asking about some secret of the Uayungomos which should not be told to whites. But at length came this reply:

“Their blood was changed. There was put into a gourd of cold yucuta—manioc and water—the blood of two black creatures not the same—a black dog and a wild turkey, or a mono viudita—widow monkey—and a pato real. Then the men drank it. In one day they had fever. In three days they turned black. They can never turn light again.”

I stared at the man, and he looked steadily back at me. Then he spoke in his own language to the blackened ones. They nodded together, and all looked at me, as if to say this thing was true.

“Well, I’m stumped!” muttered White, who had followed the Spanish talk. “Can this be possible?”

“Many things are possible to the Indians, señor, of which we whites know nothing,” I told him. Then I asked the man:

“But why was this done?”

This time I got no answer at all. They quietly curled up in their hammocks and closed their eyes. Without telling me that this was not my business, they left me to realize it for myself. And, knowing that when they did not choose to answer they never would, I asked nothing further.

White suddenly turned his back to them.

“Savages!” he said. “Absolute savages. Imagine these men deliberately making themselves hideous for life like that! All for some fool Carib idea, of course. Think they’re making themselves invisible to enemies, maybe, or something of the sort. I’d rather die by slow torture than do such a thing to myself. I don’t want to look at ’em any more. Br-r-r! Good night!”

“Buen’ noche’,” I answered. And no more was said.

For a time I lay wondering about those blackened skins, and I thought of a number of things which later were to come back to me. But presently I forgot all about them while listening to the coughing snarl of a tigre somewhere out in the dark forest. After the beast grew silent I shut my eyes and thought no more about anything.