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What poor limited fools, after all, were the best of the working men how incapable of working out any serious problem, of looking beyond their own noses and the next meal! Was he to spend his life in chronic battle with them a set of semi-civilised barbarians his countrymen in nothing but the name? And for what cause to what cry?
The appearance of the bee-hunters had warned us that there were natives about, and we had been cautioned against trusting them. We heard that they had at different times murdered a number of unfortunate hut-keepers and shepherds up the country, so that we were inclined to form very unfavourable opinions of the aborigines. Toby, to be sure, was faithful enough, but then he was semi-civilised.
They were very numerous in the still bays, where the huddled crowds jostled together, to the great rattling of their coats of mail, as the steamer passed. The natives at once despise and fear the great cayman. I once spent a month at Caicara, a small village of semi-civilised Indians, about twenty miles to the west of Ega.
The body is then bent double until the knees touch the chin this to represent a baby before birth; and in this cramped position the late warrior is crammed into his grave, until, according to a semi-civilised boy that I knew, he is called to the happy hunting grounds, where he changes colour! "Black fella tumble down, jump up white fella."
The same thing is true of old Mexico and Peru, and of all the semi-civilised or savage peoples who have developed a definite cult; and in those who, like the natives of Australia, have not even a cult, the belief in, and fear of, ghosts is as strong as anywhere else. But the correspondence between the old Israelitic and other archaic forms of theology extends to details.
It is possible, however, that some species may produce a horrible stench, from a substance secreted in certain glands near the tail a fact which has probably given rise to the fable. Among the semi-civilised, idolatrous inhabitants of the continent, several snakes were objects of worship.
When he landed at the port named by him Vera Cruz, the appearance of his men, and more especially of his horses, astonished and alarmed the natives of Mexico, then a large and semi-civilised state under the rule of Montezuma, the last representative of the Aztecs, who in the twelfth century had succeeded the Toltecs, a people that had settled on the Mexican tableland as early probably as the seventh century, introducing the use of metals and roads and many of the elements of civilisation.
A young fellow said to me the other day, 'Ah! Mr. A pompous ex-Governor said swaggeringly to me at the last dinner party at which I assisted, 'Well, Mr. Consul, I suppose you Europeans think us semi-civilised here in America? 'Almost! said I. Now ask Tom if that was not pretty considerable smart. But assure him at the same time, it is nothing at all to what I could do in the way of impertinence!
Penna was inexorable; he ordered the crew to weigh anchor, and the disappointed savages remained hooting after us with all their might from the top of the bank as we glided away. The Muras have a bad reputation all over this part of the Amazons, the semi-civilised Indians being quite as severe upon them as the white settlers. Everyone spoke of them as lazy, thievish, untrustworthy, and cruel.
It may be conceived then with what anxiety and yearning we looked forward to the periodical break in the weary six months of total silence that had enveloped us. Men in civilised, or even semi-civilised communities, cannot understand this. Convicts on penal servitude for long periods may have some faint notion of it, but even these have periods of literary intercourse more frequently than we had.
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