1492

CHAPTER XIX

FOREST endless and splendid! We white men often saw no path, but the red-brown men saw it. It ran level, it climbed, it descended; then began the three again. It was lost, it was found. They said, “Here path!” But we had to serpent through thickets, or make way on edge of dizzy crag, or find footing through morass. We came to great stretches of reeds and yielding grass, giving with every step into water. It was to toil through this under hot sun, with stinging clouds of insects. But when they were left behind we might step into a grove of the gods, such firmness, such pleasantness, such shady going or happy resting under trees that dropped fruit.

We met no great forest beasts. There seemed to be none in this part of Asia. And yet Luis and I had read of great beasts. Dogs of no considerable size were the largest four-footed things we had come upon from San Salvador to Cuba. There were what they called utias, like a rabbit, much used for food, and twice we had seen an animal the size of a fox hanging from a bough by its tail.

If the beasts were few the birds were many. To see the parrots great and small and gorgeously colored, to see those small, small birds like tossed jewels that never sang but hummed like a bee, to hear a gray bird sing clear and loud and sweet every strain that sang other birds, was to see and hear most joyous things. Lizards were innumerable; at edge of a marsh we met with tortoises; once we passed coiled around a tree a great serpent. It looked at us with beady eyes, but the Indians said it would not harm a man. A thousand, thousand butterflies spread their painted fans.

The trees! so huge of girth and height and wherever was room so spreading, so rich of grain, so full, I knew, of strange virtues! We found one that I thought was cinnamon, and broke twigs and bark and put in our great pouch for the Admiral. Only time might tell the wealth of this green multitude. I thought, “Here is gold, if we would wait for it!” Fruit trees sprang by our path. We had with us some provision of biscuit and dried meat, and we never lacked golden or purple delectable orbs. We found the palm that bears the great nut, giving alike meat and milk.

By now Luis Torres and I had no little of Diego Colon’s tongue and he had Spanish enough to understand the simplest statements and orders. Ferdandina tongue was not quite Cuba tongue, but it was like enough to furnish sea room. We asked this, we asked that. No! No one had ever come to the end of their country. When one town was left behind, at last you came to another town. One by one, were they bigger, better towns? They seemed to say that they were, but here was always, I thought, doubtful understanding. But no one had ever walked around their country—they seemed to laugh at the notion—land that way, always land! On the other hand, there was sea yonder—like sea here. They pointed south. Not so far there! “It must be,” said Luis, “that Cuba is narrow, though without end westwardly. A great point or tongue of Asia?”

The Cubans were strong young men and not unintelligent. “Chiefs?” Yes, they had chiefs, they called them caciques. Some of them were fighters, they and their people. Not fighters like Caribs! Whereupon the speaker rose—we were resting under a tree—and facing south, used for gesture a strong shudder and a movement as if to flee.

South—south—always they pointed south! We were going south—inland. Would we come to Caribs? But no. Caribs seemed not to be in Cuba, but beyond sea, in islands.

Luis and I made progress in language and knowledge. Roderigo Jerez, a simple man, slept or tried the many kinds of fruit, or teased the slender, green-flame lizards.

We slept this night high on the mountainside, on soft grass near a fall of water. The Indians showed no fear of attack from man or beast. They could make fire in a most ingenious fashion, setting stick against larger stick and turning the first with such skill, vigor and persistence that presently arose heat, a spark, fire. But they seemed to need or wish no watch fire. They lay, naked and careless, innocent—fearless, as though the whole land were their castle. Luis tried to find out how they felt about dangers. We pieced together. “None here! And the Great Lizard takes care!” That was the Cuban. Diego Colon said, “The Great Turtle takes care!”

Luis Torres laughed. “Fray Ignatio should hear that!”

“It is on the road,” I said and went to sleep.

The second day’s going proved less difficult than the first. Less difficult means difficult enough! And as yet we had met no one nor anything that remotely favored golden-roofed Cipango, or famous, rich Quinsai, or Zaiton of the marble bridges. Jerez climbed a tall tree and coming down reported forest and mountain, and naught else. Our companions watched with interest his climbing. “Do you go up trees in heaven?”

This morning we had bathed in a pool below the little waterfall. Diego Colon by now was used to us so, but the Cuba men displayed excitement. They had not yet in mind separated us from our clothes. Now we were separated and were found in all our members like them, only the color differing. Color and the short beards of Luis Torres and Juan Lepe. They wished to touch and examine our clothes lying upon the bank, but here Diego Colon interfered. They were full of magic. Something terrible might happen! When Luis and I came forth from water and dried ourselves with handfuls of the warm grass, they asked: “Do they do so in heaven?” The stronger, more intelligent of the two, added, “It is not so different!”

I said to Luis as we took path after breakfast, “It is borne in upon me that only from ourselves, Admiral to ship boy, can we keep up this heaven ballad! Clothes, beads and hawk bells, cannon, harquebus, trumpet and banner, ship and sails, royal letters and blessing of the Pope—nothing will do it long unless we do it ourselves!”

“Agreed!” quoth Luis. “But gods and angels are beginning to slip and slide, back there by the ships! We have the less temptation here.”

He began to speak of a sailor and a brown girl upon whom he had stumbled in a close wood a little way from shore. She thought Tomaso Pasamonte was a god wooing her and was half-frightened, half-fain. “And two hours later I saw Don Pedro Gutierrez—”

“Ay,” said Juan Lepe. “The same story! The oldest that is!” And as at the word our savages, who had been talking together, now at the next resting place put forward their boldest, who with great reverence asked if there were women in heaven.

Through most of this day we struggled with a difficult if fantastically beautiful country. Where rock outcropped and in the sands of bright rapid streams we looked for signs of that gold, so stressed as though it were the only salvation! But the rocks were silent, and though in the bed of a shrunken streamlet we found some glistening particles and scraping them carefully together got a small spoonful to wrap in cloth and bestow in our pouch of treasures, still were we not sure that it was wholly gold. It might be. We worked for an hour for just this pinch.

Since yesterday morning our path had been perfectly solitary. Then suddenly, when we were, we thought, six leagues at least from the ships, the way turning and entering a small green dell, we came upon three Indians seated resting, their backs to palm trees. We halted, they raised their eyes. They stared, they rose in amazement at the sight of those gods, Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe. They stood like statues with great eyes and parted lips. For us, coming silently upon them, we had too our moment of astonishment.

They were three copper men, naked, fairly tall and well to look at. But each had between his lips what seemed a brown stick, burning at the far end, dropping a light ash and sending up a thin cloud of odorous smoke. These burning sticks they dropped as they rose. They had seemed so silent, so contented, so happy, sitting there with backs to trees, a firebrand in each mouth, I felt a love for them! Luis thought the lighted sticks some rite of their religion, but after a while when we came to examine them, we found them not true stick, but some large, thickish brown leaf tightly twisted and pressed together and having a pungent, not unpleasing odor. We crumbled one in our hands and tasted it. The taste was also pungent, strange, but one might grow to like it. They called the stick tobacco, and said they always used it thus with fire, drinking in the smoke and puffing it out again as they showed us through the nostrils. We thought it a great curiosity, and so it was!

But to them we were unearthly beings. The men from the sea told of us, then as it were introduced Diego Colon, who spoke proudly with appropriate gesture, loving always his part of herald Mercury—or rather of herald Mercury’s herald—not assuming to be god himself, but cherishing the divine efflux and the importance it rayed upon him!

The three Indians quivered with a sense of the great adventure! Their town was yonder. They themselves had been on the path to such and such a place, but now would they turn and go with us, and when we went again to the sea they, if it were permitted, would accompany us and view for themselves our amazing canoes! All this to our companion. They backed with great deference from us.

We went with these Indians to their town, evidently the town which we sought. And indeed it was larger, fitter, a more ordered community than any we had met this side Ocean-Sea, though far, far from travelers’ tales of Orient cities! It was set under trees, palm trees and others, by the side of a clear river. The huts were larger than those by the sea, and set not at random but in rows with a great trodden square in the middle. From town to river where they fished and where, under overhanging palms, we found many Canoes, ran a way wider than a path, much like a narrow road. But there were no wheeled vehicles nor draught animals. We were to find that in all these lands they on occasion carried their caciques or the sick or hurt in litters or palanquins borne on men’s shoulders. But for carrying, grinding, drawing, they knew naught of the wheel. It seemed strange that any part of Asia should not know!

In this town we found the cacique, and with him a butio or priest. Once, too, I thought, our king and church were undeveloped like these. We were looking in these lands upon the bud which elsewhere we knew in the flower. That to Juan Lepe seemed the difference between them and us.

The people swarmed out upon us. When the first admiration was somewhat over, when Diego Colon and the two seaside men and the Cubans of the burning sticks had made explanation, we were swept with them into their public square and to a hut much larger than common where we found a stately Indian, the cacique, and an ancient wrinkled man, the butio. These met us with their own assumption of something like godship. They had no lack of manner, and Luis and I had the Castilian to draw upon. Then came presents and Diego Colon interpreting. But as for the Admiral’s letter, though I showed it, it was not understood.

It was gazed upon and touched, considered a heavenly rarity like the hawk bells we gave them, but not read nor tried to be read. The writing upon it was the natural veining of some most strange leaf that grew in heaven, or it was the pattern miraculously woven by a miraculous workman with thread miraculously finer than their cotton! It was strange that they should have no notion at all—not even their chieftains and priests—of writing! Any part of Asia, however withdrawn, surely should have tradition there, if not practice!

In this hut or lodge, doored but not windowed, we found a kind of table and seats fashioned from blocks of some dark wood rudely carved and polished. The cacique would have us seated, sat himself beside us, the butio at his hand.

There seemed no especial warrior class. We noted that, it being one of the things it was ever in order to note. No particular band of fighting men stood about that block of polished wood, that was essentially throne or chair of state. The village owned slender, bone or flint-headed lances, but these rested idly in corners. Upon occasion all or any might use them, but there was no evidence that those occasions came often. There was no body of troops, nor armor, no shields, no crossbows, no swords. They had knives, rudely made of some hard stone, but it seemed that they were made for hunting and felling and dividing. No clothing hid from us any frame. The cacique had about his middle a girdle of wrought cotton with worked ends and some of the women wore as slight a dress, but that was all. They were formed well, all of them, lithe and slender, not lacking either in sinew and muscle, but it was sinew and muscle of the free, graceful, wild world, not brawn of bowman and pikeman and swordman and knight with his heavy lance. In something they might be like the Moor when one saw him naked, but the Moor, too, was perfected in arms, and so they were not like.

We did not know as yet if ever there were winter in this land. It seemed perpetual, serene and perfect summer. Behind these huts ran small gardens wherein were set melons and a large pepper of which we grew fond, and a nourishing root, and other plants. But the soil was rich, rich, and they loosened and furrowed it with a sharpened stick. There were no great forest beasts to set them sternly hunting. What then could give them toil? Not gathering the always falling fruit; not cutting from the trees and drying the calabashes, great and small, that they used for all manner of receptacle; not drawing out with a line of some stouter fiber than cotton and with a hook of bone or thorn the painted fish from their crystal water! To fell trees for canoes, to hollow the canoe, was labor, as was the building of their huts, but divided among so many it became light labor. In those days we saw no Indian figure bowed with toil, and when it came it was not the Indian who imposed it.

But they swam, they rowed their canoes, they hunted in their not arduous fashion, they roved afar in their country at peace, and they danced. That last was their fair, their games, their tourney, their pilgrimage, their processions to church, their attendance at mass, their expression of anything else that they felt altogether and at once! It was like children’s play, renewed forever, and forever with zest. But they did not treat it as play. We had been showed dances in Concepcion and Isabella, but here in Cuba, in this inland town, Jerez and Luis and I were given to see a great and formal dance, arranged all in honor of us, gods descended for our own reasons to mix with men! They danced in the square, but first they made us a feast with hutias and cassava and fish and fruit and a drink not unlike mead, exhilarating but not bestowing drunkenness. Grapes were all over these lands, purple clusters hanging high and low, but they knew not wine.

Men and women danced, now in separate bands, now mingled together. Decorum was kept. We afterwards knew that it had been a religious dance. They had war dances, hunting dances, dances at the planting of their corn, ghost dances and others. This now was a thing to watch, like a beautiful masque. They were very graceful, very supple; they had their own dignity.

We learned much in the three days we spent in this town. Men and women for instance! That nakedness of the body, that free and public mingling, going about work and adventure and play together, worked, thought Juan Lepe no harm. Later on in this vast adventure of a new world, some of our churchmen were given to asserting that they lived like animals, though the animals also are there slandered! The women were free and complaisant; there were many children about. But matings, I thought, occurred only of free and mutual desire, and not more frequently than in other countries. The women were not without modesty, nor the men without a pale chivalry. At first I thought constraint or rule did not enter in, but after a talk with their priest through Diego Colon, I gathered that there prevailed tribe and kinship restraints. Later we were to find that a great network of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” ran through their total society, wherever or to what members it might extend. Common good, or what was supposed to be common good, was the master here as it is everywhere! The women worked the gardens, the men hunted; both men and women fished. Women might be caciques. There were women caciques, they said, farther on in their land. And it seemed to us that name and family were counted from the mother’s side.

The Admiral had solemnly laid it upon us to discover the polity of this new world. If they held fief from fief, then at last we must come through however many overlords to the seigneur of them all, Grand Khan or Emperor. We applied ourselves to cacique and butio, but we found no Grand Seigneur. There were other caciques. When the Caribs descended they banded together. They had dimly, we thought, the idea of a war-lord. But it ended there, when the war ended. Tribute: He found they had no idea of tribute. Cotton grew everywhere! Cotton, cassava, calabashes, all things! When they visited a cacique they took him gifts, and at parting he gave them gifts. That was all.

Gold? They knew of it. When they found a bit they kept it for ornament. The cacique possessed a piece the size of a ducat, suspended by a string of cotton. It had been given to him by a cacique who lived on the great water. Perhaps he took it from the Caribs. But it was in the mountains, too. He indicated the heights beyond. Sometimes they scraped it from sand under the stream. He seemed indifferent to it. But Diego Colon, coming in, said that it was much prized in heaven, being used for high magic, and that we would give heavenly gifts for it. Resulted from that the production in an hour of every shining flake and grain and button piece the village owned. We carried from this place to the Admiral a small gourd filled with gold. But it was not greatly plentiful; that was evident to any thinking man! But we had so many who were not thinking men. And the Admiral had to appease with his reports gold-thirsty great folk in Spain.

We spent three days in this village and they were days for gods and Indians of happy wonder and learning. They would have us describe heaven. Luis and I told them of Europe. We pointed to the east. They said that they knew that heaven rested there upon the great water. The town of the sun was over there. Had we seen the sun’s town? Was it beside us in heaven, in “Europe”? The sun went down under the mountains, and there he found a river and his canoe. He rowed all night until he came to his town. Then he ate cassava cakes and rested, while the green and gold and red Lizard [These were “Lizard” folk. They had a Lizard painted on a great post by the cacique’s house.] went ahead to say that he was coming. Then he rose, right out of the great water, and there was day again! But we must know about the sun’s town; we, the gods!

Luis and I could have stayed long while and disentangled this place and loved the doing it.

But it was to return to the Admiral and the waiting ships.

The three tobacco men would go with us to see wonders, so we returned nine in number along the path. Before we set out we saw that a storm threatened. All six Indians were loth to depart until it was over, and the cacique would have kept us. But Luis and I did not know how long the bad weather might hold and we must get to the ships. It was Jerez who told them boastfully that gods did not fear storms,—specimen of that Spanish folly of ours that worked harm and harm again!

We traveled until afternoon agreeably enough, then with great swiftness the clouds climbed and thickened. Sun went out, air grew dark. The Indians behind us on the path, that was so narrow that we must tread one after the other, spoke among themselves, then Diego Colon pushed through marvelously huge, rich fern to Luis and me. “They say, ‘will not the gods tell the clouds to go away?’” But doubt like a gnome sat in the youth’s eye. We had had bad weather off Isabella, and the gods had had to wait for the sun like others. By now Diego Colon had seen many and strange miracles, but he had likewise found limitations, quite numerous and decisive limitations! He thought that here was one, and I explained to him that he thought correctly. Europeans could do many things but this was not among them. Luis and I watched him tell the Cubans that he, Diego Colon, had never said that we three were among the highest gods. Even the great, white-headed, chief god yonder in the winged canoe was said to be less than some other gods in heaven which we called Europe, and over all was a High God who could do everything, scatter clouds, stop thunder or send thunder, everything! Had we brought our butio with us he might perhaps have made great magic and helped things. As it was, we must take luck. That seeming rational to the Indians, we proceeded, our glory something diminished, but still sufficient.

The storm climbed and thickened and evidently was to become a fury. Wind began to whistle, trees to bend, lightnings to play, thunder to sound. It grew. We stood in blazing light, thunder almost burst our ears, a tree was riven a bow-shot away. Great warm rain began to fall. We could hardly stand against the wind. We were going under mountainside with a splashing stream below us. Diego Colon shouted, as he must to get above wind and thunder. “Hurry! hurry! They know place.” All began to run. After a battle to make way at all, we came to a slope of loose, small stones and vine and fern. This we climbed, passed behind a jagged mass of rock, and found a cavern. A flash lit it for us, then another and another. At mouth it might be twenty feet across, was deep and narrowed like a funnel. Panting, we threw ourselves on the cave floor.

The storm prevailed through the rest of this day and far into the night. “Hurricane!” said the Cubans. “Not great one, little one!” But we from Spain thought it a great enough hurricane. The rain fell as though it would make another flood and in much less than forty days. We must be silent, for wind and thunder allowed no other choice. Streams of rain came into the cavern, but we found ledges curtained by rock. We ate cassava cake and drank from a runlet of water. The storm made almost night, then actual night arrived. We curled ourselves up, hugging ourselves for warmth, and went to sleep.

The third day from the town we came to the sea and the ships. All seemed well. Our companions had felt the storm, had tales to tell of wrenched anchors and the Pinta’s boat beat almost to pieces, uprooted trees, wind, lightning, thunder and rain. But they cut short their recital, wishing to know what we had found.

Luis and I made report to the Admiral. He sat under a huge tree and around gathered the Pinzons, Fray Ignatio, Diego de Arana, Roderigo Sanchez and others. We related; they questioned, we answered; there was discussion; the Admiral summed up.

But later I spoke to him alone. We were now on ship, making ready for sailing. We would go eastward, around this point of Asia, since from what all said it must be point, and see what was upon the other side. “They all gesture south! They say ‘Babeque—Babeque! Bohio!’”

I asked him, “Why is it that these Indians here seem glad for us to go?”

He sighed impatiently, drawing one hand through the other, with him a recurring gesture. “It is the women! Certain of our men—” I saw him look at Gutierrez who passed.

“Tomaso Passamonte, too,” I said.

“Yes. And others. It is the old woe! Now they have only to kill a man!”

He arraigned short-sightedness. I said, “But still we are from heaven?”

“Still. But some of the gods—just five or six, say—have fearful ways!” He laughed, sorrowfully and angrily. “And you think there is little gold, and that we are very far from clothed and lettered Asia?”

“So far,” I answered, “that I see not why we call these brown, naked folk Indians.”

“What else would you call them?”

“I do not know that.”

“Why, then, let us still call them Indians.” He drummed upon the rail before him, then broke out, “Christ! I think we do esteem hard, present, hand-held gold too much!”

“I say yes to that!”

He said, “We should hold to the joy of Discovery and great use hereafter—mounting use!”

“Aye.”

“Here is virgin land, vast and beautiful, with a clime like heaven, and room for a hundred colonies such as Greece and Rome sent out! Here is a docile, unwarlike people ready to be industrious servitors and peasants, for which we do give them salvation of their souls! It is all Spain’s, the banner is planted, the names given! We are too impatient! We cannot have it between dawn and sunset! But look into the future—there is wealth beyond counting! No great amount of gold, but enough to show that there is gold.”

I followed the working of his mind. It was to smile somewhat sorrowfully, seeing his great difficulties. He was the born Discoverer mightily loving Discovery, and watching the Beloved in her life through time. But he had to serve Prince Have-it-now, in the city Greed. I said, “Senor, do not put too much splendor in your journal for the King and Queen and the Spanish merchants and the Church and all the chivalry that the ended war releases! Or, if you prophesy, mark it prophecy. It is a great trouble in the world that men do not know when one day is talked of or when is meant great ranges of days! Otherwise you will have all thirsty Spain sailing for Ophir and Golden Chersonesus, wealth immediate, gilding Midas where he stands! If they find disappointment they will not think of the future; they will smite you!”

I knew that he was writing in that book too ardently, and that he was even now composing letters to great persons to be dispatched from what Spanish port he should first enter, coming back east from west, over Ocean-Sea, from Asia!

But he had long, long followed his own advice, stood by his own course. The doing so had so served him that it was natural he should have confidence. Now he said only, “I do the best I can! I have little sea room. One Scylla and Charybdis? Nay, a whole brood of them!”

I could agree to that. I saw it coming up the ways that they would give him less and less sea room. He went on, “Merchandise has to be made attractive! The cook dresses the dish, the girl puts flowers in her hair.... Yet, in the end the wares are mighty beyond description! The dish is for Pope and King—the girl is a bride for a paladin!”

Again he was right afar and over the great span. But they would not see in Spain, or not many would see, that the whole span must be taken. But I was not one to chide him, seeing that I, too, saw afar, and they would not see with me either in Spain.