Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/170

160 low roar of the breakers outside the bar, and the ceaseless flapping of the idle rudder against the sternpost. The air was mild; and no fear of marsh miasma deterred the crew from taking their rest where they lay, each prone on his face along the deck. That negroes always sleep face downwards is a fact long since observed by Tom Cringle, or rather Michael Scott of Jamaican celebrity; whether his further conjecture that this accounts for the flatness of their noses be correct, let Darwin decide. Night dews, so much and so justly dreaded in many parts of the East Indies, seem to be of little account in these Indies of the West; this, to venture a guess of my own in turn, may perhaps be owing to the much lesser degree of variation here occurring between the diurnal and nocturnal temperature. So we waited while our boat's prow pointed steadily up stream, in a weird solitude that looked as if it were the world's outer frontier land, and the great river the portal to mysterious and unexplored regions beyond.

Morning broke at last. The tide turned, and flowed in, while a fresh breeze, with a sprinkling of light showers on its wings, blew from the east, as we hoisted sail for the port of our destination. Very soon it became evident, from the objects around us, that the drear loneliness we had just left behind extended no farther than the immediate margin of the shore, and that we were in reality entering on a region of industry, prosperity, and life.

What a relief was the change after two days' uniformity of turbid water, with nothing but mangrove-grown mud-banks for a horizon! With breeze and tide in our favour, we now went briskly on, while, bend after bend, the river unfolded to our gaze the treasures that lined its banks, more varied and more abundant at every turn. Joyfully I welcomed first one, then two, then several tall factory-chimneys, each flaunting on the air its long grey smoke-pennon, silvered in the level sunbeams; then appeared glimpses of clustered roofs and brick walls through the tall trees planted beside them; boiling-houses, distilleries, overseers' dwellings; and, not far removed from each group, rose the tall gabled roof of the Dutch-built residence for manager or proprietor, half-screened amid the shades of its garden grove. Under a bright sun, mixed up with glittering foliage, overtopped by graceful palms, and canopied by the most dazzling of skies, even roofs and chimneys combine with the beauty around them, and become part of it in their turn. Or else it was a long row of cottages, evidently pattern-built, that announced the presence of coolies, Indian or Chinese, and implied the prosperity of those who could afford to employ such; while the less regular rooflines scattered amid the thick garden bushes told of creole or Surinam-born negro labour. Or roofs .and sheds, but without the accompaniment of factory and chimney, just visible among the boughs of what the inexperienced eye might take for a natural-grown forest, marked the cocoa estate, scarcely less lucrative in Surinam than the cane-field; or perhaps it is a wide green expanse of plantain leaves — colossal plantains these — or the belfry of a Moravian schoolhouse, that shows over the bank; canoes, too — some mere hollowed tree-trunks, some of larger construction — covered barges, six-oared pleasure-boats, sloops with shoulder-of-mutton sails, become more and more frequent.

So we sailed on, and before long came on one of the grandest sights that nature affords, the junction of two mighty rivers. For here, at a distance of some eight or nine miles from the sea, the Surinam and the Commeweyne Rivers meet together; the former from the south, the latter from the east. It was on their united waters that we had sailed thus far. The Surinam, which has, like the Demerara, given its name to an entire region, is navigable by vessels drawing ten feet of water for a distance of about one hundred miles up stream; higher yet, rocks and rapids permit only canoes to pass. Its sources lie hid among the forests of the equatorial mountain land that forms the watershed of the valley of the Amazon, four or five degrees farther still to the south; its breadth for the last forty miles, before junction with the Commeweyne, averages above half a mile, its depth from thirty to sixty feet. It is the main artery of the colony, which indeed was for many years limited to the immediate neighbourhood of its banks. The Commeweyne, of shorter course, but here, at the junction point, little if at all inferior in breadth and depth to the Surinam itself, runs on an inland parallel with the eastern coast for a distance of some forty miles; farther up a number of smaller rivers — the Cottica, the Perica, and others — deep, though narrow streams, unite their waters to form the main trunk.

On the point which divides the two great rivers, a Hindoo ruler of the good old times, and before the unkind interference of a low-caste government had, Paul-