The Conqueror of Death, page 12
Suddenly, João’s face took on an expression of sinister malice. Choosing a moment when Pedro, slightly reassured, was leaning over to see better, the sergeant—by way of a joke—slid his twig between the stems of the plants on which the frightful beasts were sleeping, and, with a slight movement, gave the flexible liana a vibrant impulsion that shook the receptacle of sudden death.
As rapid as thought, João then made his escape through the window. A hundred shrill hisses resounded in Pedro’s ears; he also tried to run away but collapsed as soon as he reached the courtyard. His brother, who was standing guard at the deputy governor’s door, dropped his rifle in order to go to his aid, but it was too late. Five or six reptiles had bitten him. He went black, and scarcely had the strength to say what had happened.
Alfonso Baçao, the dead man’s brother, leaned over the cadaver, kissed the forehead, went to pick up his rifle, and loaded it; a shot rang out and Sergeant João fell dead.
A few moments later, the deputy governor, on returning to the fort, discovered what had happened, had Alfonso arrested, and announced that a court martial would pass sentence on the murderer the next day. The latter was, indeed, brought before the Dom Luiz Vagaërt twenty-four hours later, and, as the deputy governor was even more bored that day than usual, he pronounced the death sentence in a perfectly calm voice.
The execution was to take place the following day, Thursday 16 September 1857.
Since the fort and the village of Salem had existed, no sentence of capital punishment had been pronounced, either on one of the inhabitants or one of the soldiers of the garrison. It was, in consequence, an event, and the deputy governor, who had doubtless judged Alfonso Baçao in accordance with his soul and his conscience, was not far from thinking that it might distract him slightly.
A crowd gathered on the ramparts at nine o’clock in the morning on that Thursday. The word “crowd” is perhaps ambitious, but everything is relative, and since the entire population of Salem was there, it would be ridiculous to remember that here at home, a hundred people do not constitute an assembly.
The entire garrison was under arms. The deputy governor, on horseback, was to preside over the execution, and while a picket of a dozen soldiers went to fetch the condemned man, Dom Luiz Vagaërt set himself at the head of his troop, who arranged themselves militarily in a square around the lace of execution.
Nine o’clock chimed on the deputy governor’s watch. A frisson ran through the assembly. The condemned man had not yet appeared, however. Dom Luiz Vagaërt was very pale, and did not seem overly desirous of knowing the reason of a delay so little in harmony with military habits.
Finally, the sergeant in command of the execution detail arrived, out of breath, and, making expansive gestures before being able to speak, gave the deputy governor to understand that the prisoner had escaped.
At this news, Dom Luiz recovered his true colors, uttered a sigh of relief and murmured, in a low voice: “That Alfonso is not only a brave man but an intelligent fellow. His escape is the most unexpected and most agreeable thing that could have happened; we can spend at least a week searching for him. That will be seven days killed, and I hope that will be all, because we won’t find him. All the more reason, though, to chase him.”
“Comrades!” cried the deputy governor, from the back of his horse, “the guilty man has run away from the rigor of the law. Our duty is to do everything to ensure that Alfonso Baçao, condemned to be executed by firing squad by an authorized tribunal, is recaptured and shot as soon as possible. In consequence, we’re going to set out on campaign right away, and a reward of twenty douros will be given to any soldier or sub-officer who brings him back, dead or alive. Forward march!”
And, continuing his monologue, Luiz said to himself: “He must have a good start. I could have promised a hundred thousand douros.”
On the night that should have preceded his execution, Alfonso Baçao had received a visit from Salem’s priest, to whom he had confessed his sins. Then, when he had been asked whether he had any last request before going to his death, he had asked for a bottle of eau-de-vie, which had been brought to him, with the permission of the civil and military authorities—which is to say, Dom Luiz.
Half of that eau-de-vie had served to fill a gourd that the prisoner had in his cell, and the rest was generously offered to the sentinel charged with guarding him. The soldier had put up token resistance but Alfonso insisted so graciously that the other had not dared to offer a final insult to a comrade who was about to die by refusing. The sentinel had, therefore, accepted, out of a sense of propriety, drunk out of politeness and fallen asleep thanks to drunkenness. Baçao had then dragged the drunken man into his cell, and put himself on guard in his stead. It was then two o’clock in the morning.
Alfonso had not had time to get his bearings before a patrol was heard in the darkness. The sentinel was about to be relieved. The condemned man slapped his forehead in despair. When the password was exchanged he was sure to be recognized; he needed a miracle to save him. To take flight was impossible. Baçao waited.
The corporal in command of the patrol was some sort of half-breed who had come, no one knew why, from the Republic of Argentina, to which he had no desire to return. Fortunately, the man did not speak very good Portuguese, and Alfonso, realizing that, judged that it would not be difficult to deceive him. It was, however, the return to the guard-room that constituted the greatest danger. Until then, there was nothing to fear—the troopers and the half-breed were practically sleep-walking—but if, as always happens, there was a single insomniac among the soldiers at the post, all was lost.
Alfonso made a supreme resolution. The patrol was marching along the ramparts in a disorderly fashion. Fortunately, Fort Salem had never been besieged, and yet there was, in the eastern wall of the fortifications a kind of breach commenced by the sun and continued by that invincible enemy, time.
The ramparts, made of earth supported by bricks, had suffered a small landslip at that point, and although it was difficult to climb up into the citadel by that route, so steep was the slope, a desperate many might try to let himself roll down to the bottom, at the risk of breaking his neck.
In any other part of the fort Alfonso would have needed a stout rope to descend the rampart, but this was not the moment to go and look for one. As for the gates, they were well-guarded, for Dom Luiz Vagaërt had too little to do at Salem not to have introduced a very severe discipline in what he referred to as his army.
So, at the moment when the patrol arrived at the location of the breach, Alfonso, who was bringing up the rear, moved to the edge of the abyss and let himself roll down the rampart. The half-breed and his subordinates, hearing the noise, thought it had been made by some ferocious beast and went back to the guard-room at the double. A man was missing. Someone claimed to have seen a jaguar carry him away through the breach; a second contended that it was a caiman; a third declared that he had heard the cry of a famished boa, which resembles the sound of a saw cutting through rotten wood. That was quite sufficient to persuade the soldiers to barricade the guard-room, with the result that the sentinel was not relieved again before daybreak.
We know what happened after that. The escape was discovered at nine o’clock. The soldier found in the prison, sleeping off his eau-de-vie, was sentenced to a month in the cell. The half-breed guessed the cause of the noise he had heard at the breach, but refrained from mentioning it, and it was decided that after the siesta—which is to say, at the moment when human heads can tolerate the equatorial sun—between forty and fifty men set forth with weapons and kit to explore the forest, in which they were to camp throughout the duration of the expedition.
The fugitive, let us hasten to say, was already far away. His voluntary fall had been accomplished in excellent conditions: brambles, long grass and a few flexible lianas had deadened his impacts; even though he had felt empty space beneath him after rolling for a few seconds and had fallen from a height of seven or eight meters, he had only sustained a few bruises.
When the dizziness that followed the vertiginous descend had passed, Alfonso got to his feet and marched northwards. That was not the direction he intended to take, but the village was east of the fort, and he did not want to be seen by anyone who might give the slightest indication of the direction in which he had gone.
What the reader had just learned is necessary to the understanding of the story, but Alonso’s frightful story only really starts at this point. In three days, the man had seen his brother die, slain by the most terrible venom in the world, had been condemned to death himself without have had time to mourn, had been subjected to all the anguish of the night that was supposed to precede his execution, and by virtue of his self-composure in the midst of a thousand alarms he had escaped that ignominious death. He was saved. It seemed, therefore, that bad luck had relaxed its grip on him.
Well, all that was nothing by comparison with the alarms, anguish and torments that the man had prepared for himself by escaping.
The danger of being recaptured was, however, only apparent. He had gone into the forest after skirting the village of Salem. The paths used by the negroes and Indians were familiar to him up to a certain distance. He thought it best to head east, his intention being to go as far as possible toward the sea, then to cross the Amazon and reach Para.
Alfonso certainly knew what an equatorial virgin forest is like, since he had been garrisoned at Salem for a year, and, if he ventured thus into the bushy desert, it was not because he had any choice of paths. He marched vigorously until daybreak, following a path he knew well. He was, however, obliged to stop frequently and hide in a bush or climb a tree in order to let a hunting jaguar pass by or to avoid some other wild beast.
At seven o’clock the sun suddenly appeared on the horizon. Alfonso darted a glance around him. The part of the forest he had reached was unknown to him, and he had covered a formidable distance. Fear had given him the agility and instinct of an animal.
In sum, he was safe and on the right route, for the sun’s rays, which were slanting through the dense foliage, indicated to him by their direction that he was still heading eastwards. He was exhausted, though. For three days the poor devil had been unvisited by slumber, and he needed sleep in order to recover the strength to continue on his way.
Two giant cedars rose up into the air to an incredible height, almost side by side. Fifteen or twenty meters from the ground, a tangle of enormous lianas formed a kind of bridge—or, if you prefer, a kind of enormous hammock—extended between them.
The interlacement of branches permitted him to climb fairly easily up to the lianas, and he found a peculiarly embalmed bed there, covered with flowers and green leaves, on which he lay down sensually, invisible to anyone except the birds and the squirrels. At the moment when Dom Luiz Vagaërt learned of his escape, he was sleeping the most profound and reparative of slumbers.
Meanwhile, he had already advanced well beyond the parts of the forest that the soldiers of Salem were accustomed to visiting. Alfonso was about to enter the heart of the virgin forest, and that merits description for several reasons. The first is that it will difficult to form any idea of the sufferings of the man if one does not know what obstacles he had to overcome; the second is that those immense woods, which extend from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean, over an extent of twelve hundred leagues, has only been described by fantasists, whose endeavors are deeply dappled with poetry but of highly dubious exactitude.
The veritable virgin forest, seen from the Amazon, appears to the traveler to be a green wall. To penetrate into it seems as easy as plunging into the granite of a sheer mountain. Whatever people say, an ax is utterly impotent to clear a path through that verdure. There is only one means of opening a way and that is fire—a means that is dangerous, when it is not impracticable
If, guided by an Indian, you penetrate into the forest by means of one of its paths, the spectacle that meets your eyes is initially sublime: gigantic trees, formidable lianas, unknown flowers, odorous bushes, grasses that grow to eight feet in height, and brambles, thorn-bushes and enormous cacti.
In the midst of all that, you sense that a population of bizarre beings exists, for every plant whose stem moves, every liana subjected to flexion, every leaf that stirs and every rustle that is heard—every movement, in sum—is produced by a living creature, charming or hideous, inoffensive or deadly: a snake, a crocodilian, a enormous batrachian, a bird, a quadrumane and all the intermediate species, whose appearance alone often causes suffering.
But that truly grandiose and seductive spectacle you only find at the edges of virgin forests, having marched for an hour at the most along frequented paths. And of hazard or necessity takes you further, that changes. The branches then become so dense that to get through them one lacerates one’s hands and face on thorns that grow indefinitely. To be sure, you are still walking on a path, but it is necessary to be a jaguar or an Indian to know how to crawl along it.
The trunks of the trees sometimes accumulate across the route to considerable heights, and in between the trunks, vigorous bushes grow. Gradually, the thickness of the wood takes on terrible proportions. “The impenetrable horror” of the classics becomes an absolute verity. It is no longer merely a tangle of lianas, climbing and thorny bushes; it is like a fabric of incredible density, of which sufficiently large trees sometimes constitute the loom.
The life of the wood’s interior then becomes a swarm. To the right, to the left, in front of you, under your feet, above your head, everything stirs, jumps, sings, whistles or roars. Everything there is alive, and everything kills. Oh, if one could see the scene from the stalls of a theater, what a marvel! Myriads of birds of all hues and all dimensions perch and call to one another: macaws, cardinals, squawking parrots and a thousand others; while an army of monkeys descends on four or five cacao-trees, omitting the one to which a jaguar has come to extend death with a thrust of its paw.
Along the trees, like living lianas, snakes of every side glide silently, and a ray of sunlight penetrates by chance through the foliage, all the way to the ground, which shines strangely. In fact, it is not the ground that shines like that, but water—running water, for beneath that framework of upright, curved and twisted living trunks, one perceives that a river is running, all the more evidently when the enormous maw of a crocodile appears at the surface.
Is there any need to add that Alfonso, once awake, understood the full horror of his situation? He had at least ten leagues to cover in such terrain, and he needed to reckon at least four days for that, for, in order to advance securely in that wall, it would be necessary not to place a foot without having carefully examined the place where it would fall. He would not be able to go past a tree before making sure that there was no enemy behind it—not to mention the Indians, whose taste for human flesh might not have disappeared entirely.
He also needed to eat. What? Fruits? They were not easy to gather, and might he not make a mistake and swallow poison? Fortunately for him, he found a few birds’ nests and ate the eggs therefrom. His hammock of lianas housed a dozen parrots’ nests. It was a true feast, washed down with two or three mouthfuls of eau-de-vie, because he had brought his gourd.
His fatigue had not been appeased, however. Baçao understood, therefore, that in order to bring his escape to a successful conclusion, he needed more strength that he had as yet, and resolved to spend the night on his bed of flowers. He had good lodgings there, eggs in quantity, and he was far enough away from Salem to have nothing to fear. It was, therefore, an idea to which a sage could not have raised any objection.
The end of the day he spent exploring the surroundings, and found, in case he had to make a rapid getaway, a passage through which, with the aid of a little gymnastics, he could cover half a league in half an hour.
The next morning, Alfonso was woken up by a gunshot.
He started, without being conscious of where he was—but reflection comes quickly to a man for whom everything is a danger.
With infinite care, without giving his hammock of lianas the slightest oscillation, he tried to turn round to see where the noise had come from. A savage could not have carried out the maneuver any better than he did. It took him a full minute.
Then, slowly and sagely, taking a thousand precautions, he parted a few lianas and saw the half-breed twenty or twenty five meters below, who, with his discharged weapon in his hand, was looking attentively in all directions and cocking his ear at the slightest murmur, while the smoke of his rifle-shot rose slowly and capriciously into the air.
Alfonso did not budge. The Argentinean then examined the path attentively, and seemed to reflect momentarily. He looked up at the lianas, but saw nothing. By the demon’s pantomime, it was easy to understand what he was doing here. The deputy governor of Salem had been wrong to think that Baçao was out of reach and that he could have promised a hundred thousand douros as a reward. At the announcement of the twenty douros, the half-breed’s eyes had taken on an expression of sanguinary avidity and he had said to himself: I’ll have them tomorrow.
He probably knew about escapes, for he had only asked for four men to accompany him, swearing that he would not come back without the prisoner.
Dom Luiz Vagaërt had been on the point of not grating that request, but it was necessary not to appear to be hindering the action of the law, and in any case, he was still hoping that Baçao was out of range. He had granted the corporal his four men, and left in the opposite direction with the remainder of his troop.
The half-breed had gone to explore the paths that led east into the forest, knowing from experience that an intelligent man was bound to think about fleeing seawards.
After an hour of searching, he had found fresh tracks, trodden grass, small broken branches and, here and there, bushes that had been disturbed. That was enough, and more than enough, for a man with the instincts of an executioner. He took his four soldiers along the path that Alonso had taken. Fortunately, night had fallen, and the man-hunters were obliged to make camp.
