Humanity’s ever-worsening estrangement from the natural world is perhaps the most pervasive theme in Döblin’s epic fictions. In numerous passages he brings Earth and the cosmos into focus: here the mighty stage on which humans strut their puny stuff.
War and Pestilence (from Wallenstein Part 1)
Large armies are on the move, creating perfect conditions for disease…
The Desert (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 1)
In his huge unwieldy epic of the future, Döblin sets humanity in its global and cosmic context with frequent passages that transform encyclopedia entries into poetic prose.
Billows of Oxygen Nitrogen (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 5)
This paean to the Sun and the Earth sets in context the Promethean assault on Iceland and Greenland.
Sweet Wilderness (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 8)
The bucolic countryside of southern France attracts those who refuse to go to ‘safety’ in the underground townzones.
The Mountains Boomed (from Manas Part 2)
In Döblin’s remarkable (and totally neglected) verse-epic, the landscape itself is sentient. Here Savitri is making her arduous way up to the Field of the Dead in search of Manas.
The Rudras flew (from Manas Part 3)
Manas is carried back to Earth, re-embodied following the coupling of his Soul with Savitri.The Rudras personify mountain weather.
The Amazon (from Land without Death Part 1)
In the Amazonas trilogy, Nature is as much a participant as the human actors.
Turtles (from Land without Death Part 2)
One of the three bands of conquistadors tracked in part 2 shows signs of ‘going native’ rather than killing and enslaving those they encounter. They take lessons about the alien environment from the native Indians as they trek across the savannah.
On the Paraná (from The Blue Tiger part 4)
In South America, pillage and slaughter are giving way to agriculture and industry; but the native wildlife still presents curiosities.
War and Pestilence (from Wallenstein Part 1)
FAR AFIELD FROM his fortress – nearer to base he was considerate in his ravening – the army of the Bastard von Mansfeld went foraging. The pestilential stink that streamed to him revealed its location. A fever had broken out in the camp near Beidhaus; spread like wildfire by billet-finders foragers rangers freebooters across woods and hills, rippled through peasants and cavalrymen, armoured cuirassiers, musketeers. Midges and mosquitoes swarmed up from ponds. Just beneath the reed-choked mirror-surface of the water hung millions of larvae, ownerless litter discarded by Nature, calmly sucking air through the little breathing-tube. Heads swelled, lifted above the mirror, carapaces shivered, cracked, stretched, tore sideways from the head down; slowly the long juvenile thrust its way out, antennae limbs wings tight against the torso, rested spreading itself on a leaf of duckweed, hung wing-stretching long-legged on a reedy scabbard. They rose humming into the twilight, veined the air with chirping, their thin high song. Jostling humming flies with ringed darting bodies, long proboscis projecting between whisper-thin antennae stiff as a spear from the little head in front of the clunky thorax. Bore itself a thousandfold, tenthousandfold, millionfold through the evening air on little glassy wings. Lighted on a mouth, a forehead, a hand breaking bread, on a throat, between the trim beard of cornet or captain and his Venetian collar.
If someone jumping from his horse in a sweat tore off his jacket to allow cool air against his damp chest, the little flying creature clung unseen to his hot skin, sucked its little drop of blood, injected as it did so a little drop of poison. Now the soldier can go hunting, hang people from door-beams and wells, drive away livestock, lead a high old life – and all the while the fever courses through his body, night after night, turns his blood into a tropical swamp. Let the cornet roar, gulp this year’s sour wine from a jug, sail menacing on his steed at the head of a hundred men through silent chimney-smoking villages, papers tucked around the throat for protection, plump-cheeked and hot on his overfed mount: in his knees is a vibration, the collar must be loosened, no strength in the calves, rainbows shimmer before the eyes; the freezing and teeth-chattering begin, at night the man lies in hay, in a bed, swears hoarsely as if it is nothing, and day by day grows weaker, more spectral from one excursion to the next. And it fell as much upon the highest, the pikemen, as on whores and their enforcers. Not many died of the fever. Those attacked became weak, raved worse than before. Those who died rotted where they fell. Men moved among each other jaundiced, smiled feebly in the heat.
Until the stink spread: first in the camp near Beidhaus, then in Weiden, in Kohlberg Market, people appeared with a new kind of ailment. Distraught plague-barbers told of peasants who had a new sickness in their beds. Lice assailed the army. They multiplied on the mercenaries in their pillaged jackets linens palliasses pelts saddle-cloths, dropped them dead in muddy woods and lanes, made welts in the skin, dry or weeping; in many the beastly venom sank deep into their veins. They began to talk feverish nonsense, some raved, lumps as big as peas erupted on the bitten skin, flecks of blood spurted horribly; sleepy and numb they dropped where they had fled, shunned by others, quarantined, starved. Learned pupils of Paracelsus spoke of the mercurial-sulphurous signal of the disease, or the mercurial-saline, of the fever-hunger, disorders of the urine, watery oedemas in the legs, spitting of blood, turgescence of the chest, melancholy.
The Desert (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 1)
Along the Mediterranean lay the remains of little Arab settlements, still occupied by bandits degenerates the untamed, sanctuaries for northern criminals, centres of resistance to globe-spanning society and its suffocating security; freeloaders too, sniffing out like policemen and judges the vulnerabilities of society, the better to exploit them. They flicked their tongues like vipers. From wretched burrows in Great Syrtis, from Tarabulus Lebda Misrata, as ruined as any ancient city of Babylon or Egypt, there emerged countless men and women, who over many decades goaded and tormented the European bull. Overhead white men and women whizzed in little flying machines, across the coastal ranges into the great hot desert.
The desert, mighty being, extended over fifteen degrees of latitude hidden behind mountain chains from Morocco to Tunis, from Mauretania and the trade routes of brown Tuareg to the ancient Berber grazing grounds of Aulad, Soliman. It stretched grey and white, rose from coastal terraces as plains high plateaus dunes beneath a sun that lay on it almost touching. It elided from gravel plain to stony desert. Winds tore at naked glowing hills, abraded crags with flying sand, crags splintered worn down by the heat. Whirlwinds worked like whetstones. Slowly the age-old mountains of the Earth decayed. Black hills and cliffs rose out of sand flying yellow white. Skirting the stony plateaus of Hamada al-Hamra lay the rubble fields, crumbling sintering, of Sarir all gnawed away. Chalk became exposed, on its back black scoured sandstone; everything ground down to sand for dunes. Tibesti, wild mountains, covering two degrees of latitude in the south; dark-coloured massifs piled massively on one another, bald and naked. Blue green white chalk trickled puffed from vertical rockwalls under the sucking fire-breath. Huge slabs sheered slid slowly down from skeletal mountains, hills were levelled, slumped to a stony plain with tottering pillars and columns. Six hundred kilometres of nothing east to west, the stony land Hamada al-Hamra; the ground gave itself to wind and sun alone, fine sand blew over it. The land rippled south for two hundred dead kilometres. Waterless plains away to the southeast: this was Fezzan. In the bare limestone plain amid the black peaks of Tibesti dwelt the Teda. Lived with the furious wind that spun in whorls over the stony pavement of their land, grey-yellow sand-devils that swept across the plain. Thorny tamarisk bushes grew from the desiccated ground, sayal-acacias with broad crowns.
Rarely did turbid water ooze to the surface, to thistles thorn-bushes esparto-grass. Date palms in scattered sparse groves; the slender graceful plant-creature hung its thirsty roots deep in the damp layers of the ground, flourished its bushy crown atop the tall trunk.
The desert-dwelling Teda had slim dainty bodies, their skin dark yellow, flat drooping nose, thick lips, false furtive gaze not steady like the gaze of forest pygmies. In their dark tunics, dark veil over mouth and nose, little leather charm-pouches on turban throat arms, they trekked with their camels from waterhole to waterhole. Their diet camel-milk and dates, which wore their teeth to brown stumps. The soles of their feet so horny they could run over gravel and hot schist. Bleached camel-bones they found they pulverised, mixed the powder with blood from one of their beasts to make a paste; filled their bellies with it. Leather rings on their knives they macerated with stones, boiled them sliced them, filled their bellies. At night the sand-wind fell silent. When glittering lights came on in the clear deep dark sky, great moon-globe swinging high in the silvery ether, they rose mutely out of the rock-shadows murmuring a fatifa, wandered mutely on, unveiled. Tuareg in the expanses of the western desert lived like them, thin suspicious people with short two-pronged javelins and spears.
Above the waves and mountain ranges of the desert, restless white aviators appeared. They abducted frightened youngsters from nomad campsites, deposited them hours later near the panicked tribe. The Teda let them spend the night with them. But when the moon flooded the landscape with its white light, bronze-skinned men crept in shadows to the tents of the strangers, silently lifted the flaps, hurled spears. These flew barely a hand’s breadth into the darkness. To the dismay of the cowering Teda the iron points seemed to hit a wall; the long quivering shafts fell back. When nothing stirred within where the men were sleeping, stealthy crouching nomads crept from all around to the strangers’ tents, in their hands the revolvers they had been given in exchange for a red tarboush, indigo Sudanese tunic and leggings, indigo veil for mouth and nose. The closer they came to the strangers, the heavier the guns felt in their fingers. They had to urge the revolvers on, they seemed afraid to approach their former owners. But when the cocked hammer snapped and powder cracked, the exploding gases made it only a little way down the barrel, the bullet was forced back, the barrel burst with a roar and shattered the attacker’s hands. The strangers rose calmly from their cots. They adjusted more tightly around their chests the little leather pouches containing the metal-repellent charge, bandaged the wounded, spoke to the attackers now grovelling in the sand at their feet, and to those lying motionless in ambush in the black shadows of tamarisks.
Billows of Oxygen Nitrogen (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 5)
BILLOWS OF oxygen-nitrogen forty miles high, miles of hydrogen sent swirling by the Earth’s globe through the dark energy-soaked diaphanous ether. The uppermost fringe of the gassy fabric slipped away, vanished like smoke from a burning torch. No ear heard the slinking sliding, the silky billowing of that distant fringe. The roll and tumble of the globe that carried it along perturbed the air. It swathed the Earth, snuggled up to the headlong body, spun in pursuit like a top let go.
Fiery hoyden, incinerating Hell of everything that creeps flies hops: the implausibly distant sun on the far side of the icy ether. White seething sea of flame. It gleamed through cloud-banks, gave warmth. The fire-spewing white chaos of flames hung there in the distance like a burning town. Burning that never burns out. Earth circled the chaos. The boiling sun flung out gassy masses star-wide radiant vapours, hauled them back in. Stood there, clanking ghostly apparition in the darkness that shrank from it, gathered for attack. In its body metals burned, metallic clouds collapsed back onto it. Zinc Iron Nickel Cobalt, creeping into the rocks of the congealed Earth, Barium Sodium. They fell back as slag. Flares stood proud, were funnelled from the sea of flame out into the vibrating ether: a cyclone of burning hydrogen soaring seventy thousand miles. No splash when the gouts hurtled back onto the sun-body, were smelted anew, blazed. The standing flames that welcomed them bent like a cornfield in rain, stood straight again. No thunder from those primal forces. No avalanche or hurricane makes a noise like that of the living alluring sun. The raging sea of flame, everywhere simmering seething, exploding throwing up sheaves – if it came nearer, planets would turn to ashes and smoke – its song swallowed every sound far and near. Chirruping chirping of cicadas magnified a millionfold. Chattering metals. In between, the never-fading clash and drumroll that imposed itself on every earthly burning thing and lurked behind every roaring noise. Strontium bright purple-red, Magnesium crushed beneath the heavy mountains of the Earth, fiery breath upon fiery breath. Primordial beings – Helium Manganese Calcium – bloom and smoulder freely, dazzling when they light up in a light beyond what any eye can see, draining every colour. Radiant streaming this hundred-voiced chattering sea of flame, flare-hurling primordial world in the ether.
A long way from the sun’s surging crashing streaming burning: little grey Earth. Running like a weasel across a field. Laced about with vapours, damp mists, its fires encased in a crust of slag, damped down by oceans rivers ice. No clouds of burning metal driven by their own ferocity rain down on it. As a glazier uses force to press glass and wood against putty and it sticks tight, as a fist squeezes snow between curled fingers and palm and presses it to a hard ball and the snow no longer drifts, just so the Earth, its embers fading radiating helplessly away, is caught by ethereal ice, and yields creaking. Its interior seethes and burns; the body is impounded beneath ashes.
This is Earth. Above and below, a primordial world of light and fire. An undulating mantle of rock clothes its torso. The rock goes down for miles and rises miles high. Continents and islands carry mountains plains steppes deserts. Water breaks out from its sources in the mountains, oceans flood the basins. Mountains gneiss slate float heavily on molten flowing burning masses that break out now and then through stony crust to soften them with stabbing flames and shake them back and forth.
Asia spreads its body wide across the northern half of the Earth, over a hundred and forty six degrees of longitude and eighty seven degrees of latitude. With Gondwana, Angaraland, the China plates it rose from the mirror of the great oceans, allowed its seas to dry up. Its spine is the Altai, the Himalayan massif from the Hsing’an to the Pamirs, from Karakorum to Bhutan and the bend of the Dihang Gorge. The Caspian-Ural depression, abandoned by the sea, sucks in the Volga and Ural rivers, feasts on their silt. Glaciers cover the Kunlun. Its borders are snow mountains, sandy deserts in the east, Tibet of the yak, the green hills and loess plains of China, Manchurian meadows. Mountains fall steeply south to the flat swampy expanses of Hindustan, the hot land of Bengal. Blooming shores of India, paddy-fields, plantations of sugarcane, sago, coconut palms. Swamp forests of the Sundarbans, Terai where bright royal tigers prowl, long-eared elephants, four-handed gibbons. River after river northward to the sea of ice through Siberian grasslands, marshy tundra freezing steppe. The long-haired Kashgar panther prowls as far as the Lena.
Attached to this eastern stronghold, many-limbed little Europe. The young soaring Alps, ancient horst mountains in Thrace Corsica Spain, rock layers thrust up by pressure, decked in rubble. Sunken land in the south where the Mediterranean has burst into the yawning basin.
Africa besieged by rainstorms and the sun’s heat. Land extending over eleven million square miles, a table laid flat. Rice sorghum coffee maize fiery spices shoot from the earth. Bare ancient massifs of granite and mica-schist stand tall, a blanket of sandstone stretches away. Under the sun’s burning, rocks crumble to rubble, are transformed into soil and clay, coloured red by iron. Lakes Tanganyika and Nyasa fill the highland rifts, their ramparts volcano-fringed. Ten big lakes feed the Congo Niger Zambesi. The savannah sends up enormous grasses. Gallery forests along riverbanks. Lemurs and apes, the elegant zebra, okapi in the forests. Tree-like stems of the banana with leaves six yards long; the mighty leaves are enclosed in sheaths; dense clumps of the great berry-fruit hang down.
From Cape Murchison to Cape Horn, the western stronghold: America. A severely folded mountain belt runs through the continent from the southern extremity to the Mackenzie River, a lowlying basin from the sea of ice to the sultry Gulf of Mexico. To the north, deep beds of five Great Lakes. The mighty Mississippi surges south through plains, to it from the Appalachians comes the Ohio, and the Missouri from the Cordillera. Having rolled Earth’s stiff skin in the west, the double chain of mountains follows the western ocean like a wall. Primal forests surround the Amazon, called Tungurahua in its upper course, then Marañon; the Earth gives birth to it in Lake Lauricocha; it carries with it two hundred rivers, black and white from soils of chalk and iron, until it spills into the ocean.
Primordial beings have entrenched themselves in the seas: Hydrogen, Oxygen. They stream across the globe, Arctic Atlantic Pacific waters. Water, steady flowing entity, heavy changeable being that sprays and steams, forms clouds, drifts as snow, tremulous being along low shores, menacing black ragged phenomena of hurricane and storm flood. It sucks itself full of salts, Sodium chloride Magnesium Calcium, makes itself heavy, milk-white in the Gulf of Guinea, cinnamon coloured the Gulf of California, yellow-brown the Indian Ocean. Warm and cold currents surge through the oceans, coloured bands; silvery mists lie over them where they meet.
Primordial beings waft around the globe, burn and flow in its body, overburden it with solid and motile masses: they are Friction Gravity Heat Light, are Sulphur Chromium Manganese Silicon Phosphorous. They are soil and sand. Are silent crystals, flowers, lichens doggedly germinating all across the land, flowering plants, fish that swim, birds that sing and call to one another, creeping predators, pounding fighting people, snailshells on seashores, bacteria vines dead trees, rotting roots, worms, beetles laying eggs.
Sweet Wilderness (from Mountains Oceans Giants Part 8)
IN THE southeast of the country stood an age-old range of eroded mountains. It formed a gentle arc, worn to its base by water and rain. In the west its surface dropped to broad flat basin landscapes. Volcanoes had broken through an ancient granitic mass: here was the upthrust Cevennes, high land of the Auvergne, Feurs, Lyons. Mountain spates broke through undulating plateaux, narrow rocky valleys, cones of basalt and trachyte, layers of slag and ash. A crater might drop a hundred meters. The Rhone flowed down from the glaciers of Gotthard; rushing streams fed into her. She raced through narrow passes, poured her muddy water into sickle-shaped Lake Geneva, emerged from that basin deep blue. And when she broke through the Jura, gentle Saône came from the north to meet her. She mingled their waters, rolled on south. Wider and wider the river flowed across lavender- and myrtle-scented plains. Nearby regions sent more waters to her. The Alpine crags that had given birth to her closed in once more. Then the valley opened out. Swampy banks. Pebbles in a shallow bed. Fields of gravel down to the sea strand, desolate delta country. The lazy waters drifted on, to perish in the sea.
Garonne, mighty stream, eddying west through bottomland and gentle hills and vineyards. In the south, shimmering, the line of the Pyrenees white blue pink. Along the Atlantic coast the wind had built a barrier, the Landes; took sand north from Spain’s sea-nibbled coast to pile it here in dunes. Few townzones occupied these two broad southern river basins. On the coasts, radiant menacing Marseilles, Bordeaux. Toulouse on the Garonne blared its domination of the region. Like the northern zones, these cities went underground with most of their inhabitants. Onto the fertile surface land north of the Pyrenees – rubble deposited by ice-age glaciers – Settlers crept. They peopled the landscape of Provence with its palms and orange trees, settled along the banks of the great rivers.
Even before the struggle for Greenland ended, small bands of Settlers had left the British Isles, where extermination threatened. To the north and round about them, cities were sinking into the depths as migrants snaked their way down the sycamore-filled valley of the lower Garonne and its rich meadowlands. White Baker came with her band to this country once ruled by Melise, cruel queen of Bordeaux. They flowed into the basin bordered by the Pyrenees, the massif to the east, the ocean. Moved through the Charente’s warm wetlands, beneath sweet chestnuts coming into leaf, dark elms, leafy crowns of nut trees, over meadows and vine-covered ridges. In forests, sunny clearings, endless farmland gone to wilderness they faded into the older communities of half-Spanish and African Settlers.
Freed from the zones they flourished in the Charente valley, along the broad bed of the Garonne. Migrating Snakes brought from Britain their arcane doctrine of immersion in erotic embraces, raptures. Around Perigueux and Bergerac, down to the mouth of the Gironde where they built ramparts reminiscent of Rome, these men and women swung between placidity and enthusiasm. Not here Britain’s gloom, its mists, cold winds, frosts. The powers of the zones evaporated. Here only the Mistral was to be feared, and devastating thunderstorms in spring and summer, springtime floods running up from the mouth of mighty Gironde to cover the fields. Sleeping wilderness, gardens, golden broom, crumbling roadways. Now and then they flinched as lightning flashed. Planes and wagons of the townzones deep below scraped up piles of sand and stones, broke blocks from soft crags, carried them down to the Meki-factories. On the seashore you could see great air-freighters that daily brought salts acids loads of rock from the north. The migrants settled unobstructed on the fertile land. They settled in farmsteads beside verdant grassy vine-covered fields, age-old swamps and bottomlands, on bumps in the landscape thick with growth, under the tall trunks of cherry laurels, beside wild twiggy acacias that dangled their leafy thatch over little streams.
And as people went over the soft fragrant ground, breathing in the scent of vines and herbs, there came a profound urge to come together after such a long time of alienation. On the heels of White Baker’s band of Snakes came group after group of fugitive Settlers, from Britain Flanders Franconia Jutland, who like them were captivated. Such a boundless Now, refreshing self-renewal. Every breath a stimulus to self-realisation, everything upended.
The Mountains Boomed (from Manas Part 2)
Mountains had closed in about her.
The flowery meadows were far behind already,
The southern slopes, bedlam of beasts and trees,
Euphorbia acacia stands of bamboo,
Behind and below her the rivers in their deep valleys,
Thundering Alaknanda, Kosi, Yamuna,
Ravines meadows rockwalls.
The mountains gathered round her. The mountains boomed:
‘Here we have stood since Time began,
We enclose the Field of the Dead.
Rivers stream out from us, little clouds fly over us,
Stones splinter and slide down from us,
Nanda Kot, Trisul, Yamunotri, Badrinath.
We buttress Kailash, Nanda Devi,
Our ravines are filled with ice, our summits are ice-bound.
Shiva’s breath is on us,
Shiva enthroned in the sea of mist.
Here is night, and storms and snow,
Leopards, ibex, blackhaired dogs.
Take care, stars, to shine the whole night through,
Take care, take care, vagrant mists,
When we tremble, when Shiva’s tread is on us,
Boisterous giant dancer, his heels upon us.
Take care, take care!’
The Rudras flew (from Manas Part 3)
AND there was no more rain.
Storms shredded the blue-black ragged clouds hither and down,
Hurled them with thunderclaps over glaciers snowfields ravines.
Through the thunderclaps the Rudras flew,
Eleven of them, Shiva’s curly-head companions, moonhorns at their brow,
Bearing the man on their backs.
Over sombre Nanda Devi they flew.
Its double summit flashed blue in the storm’s flickering.
The mountains, unsettled by Shiva’s dance,
Now started their booming.
Gori brook surged white from Milam glacier,
Tumbled southward.
Rushing Pindar cascaded down from Nanda Kot.
To the west, Ganges had set out on its course,
Foaming through the mountains.
Such crepitating across the night.
Moon and stars hid from the boisterous Rudras.
Forests on the southern slopes awoke,
Euphorbia acacia stands of bamboo,
Howled along like dogs in the night,
One dog here, another there responding with a long-drawn howl.
Eleven Rudras, on their backs the sleeping man,
Headlong through the dripping night, southward,
Swooping to flick snowcaps from the rocky ridges,
Shake them from their arms down into valleys.
They spat sprayed hail as they hurtled on.
By morning they were roaring over mountain jungle,
The flame-headed ones.
Their eyes flashed green.
Here was the boundary of the Field of the Dead.
They snuggled wearily into snow that steamed.
They laid the man down.
Fell asleep beside him, until the sun flashed.
Then they let winds whirl them aloft
Light as air, stretched flat, they rode high, flickering
Whenever a ridge, as they passed over,
Brushed a back or a drooping arm
And grazed them.
Were giddy, called to one another, sang out over distances.
The Amazon (from Land without Death Part 1)
The sun burns hot on the mountains to the west. Their mass is riven by gorges. Rivers gouge their way through the gorges.
Such colossal mountains. Their peaks are skittles, spearpoints. They are ice-clad, some open up and from their craters fire spills from the Earth’s insides.
Waters tumble from the peaks down the mountain flanks. The waters know their way. They fall from the sky to the icy peaks down into gorges. They fill the gorges and gnaw them away. They invade side valleys. From springs and streams, rivers grow.
Lauricocha, Quiquiacocha are the names of source lakes. The Marañon plunges from its lake headlong into an abyss. Its water strikes like a chisel. The valley walls are bare, heights glow like a furnace. It follows the valley from south to north. Towards the east high passes lead out of this land, beyond the river’s reach. Furious winds howl from the east over the passes. They snatch birds that fly up from below, snipe, ibis, heron, the wind whirls them up, dashes them to the ground, drives them with hail and snow against cliffs down into the lakes. The river must break through the mountains. It finds the gate. Pongo de Mansariche is the gate, here it will go through, leave the mountains behind. It shoots narrowed through the gate and ahead lies open land. The land sinks from the craggy west where ice-crowns glow and volcanoes flaunt their plumes, eastward to the one immense plain. The river’s own plain.
And like a monster with flowing mane the Amazon leaps from the mountains down into its plain. From left and right, as if they had awaited its coming, waters are drawn to merge with its stream. Its coming affects vast tracts. The tributaries turn, follow entranced and sink themselves into its water, where they disappear.
The Amazon has broken through the mountains and carries them along. What once hemmed it in, what it seized and ground to fragments, now it hoards before it and below as spoil, mud and silt, spreads it over the plain as it surges on. Once the plain was a broad gulf, the sea filled it, the river drives back the sea and with the waters brought by a hundred streams from left and right becomes a flowing freshwater sea.
Those rivers are white and black. Amazon itself is white.
A hundred meters deep it flows; twice that at start and end.
When at last it leaves the plain behind it is strong enough to drive ships back, miles out to sea. It carries away tree trunks. It colours the sea white.
The hot sun hangs over this land. Primeval forest spreads across the plain, animals teem. Palms, bamboo, rubber trees, ferns, vines, eucalyptus shoot up. Swamps, forest canopies along the river, floating mangroves.
Bright hummingbirds flash across the water. Crocodiles drift lazily with the current. The sloth complains from the trees. The anaconda goes hunting for monkeys.
And in the pulsing waters a thousand kinds of fish are born and die.
Turtles (from Land without Death Part 2)
The brown people show the Whites their enemies – but they do not call them enemies, they speak carefully, respectfully: termites that live in field and forest in little mounds that look like clumps of soil, they keep guests in their cells, beetles and spiders. They are so numerous, explain the brown people in wonder, that no human tribe can compare with termites. They themselves have taken to the river to avoid them, their houses stand on piles in the water and so are safe.
But termites are strong beings, even though small and blind. The natives point to old huts they have preserved, they knock on a plank, a finger goes right through, it is like sponge, the tiny termites have devoured everything.
Now they are surrounded by jaguars. The big cats slink around the band. No one knows what they want. They come in packs, never attack anyone. But the band of Whites attracts and unsettles them for some reason. As always the darkskins say nothing.
But one night the Whites are awakened by their sentries. They seize weapons, wonder why no alarm is sounding, but the darkskins make signs to keep quiet and follow, weapon or no weapon.
The broad rushing Apure lies below in the gentle light of the moon. Nothing breaks its rippling surface. Reflecting stars and moonlight, the river runs swift, the Apure, heading for the Orinoco. A cool breeze blows from the forested banks. No birds call. But as they step cautiously down from the forest to the river they hear a strange persistent noise, a rubbing, scraping, scrabbling. Sometimes a clacking and creaking. Sometimes a dull heavy crash, followed by the same general scrabbling. They realise it is not in the water but on the bank. A broad smooth high beach of white sand and mud extends along the southern bank to the east. In the moonlight a low dark mass is moving and shoving, it is many yards long, sometimes it seems to rest, but keeps coming at a steady slow pace. It is a huge dark blanket being drawn across the beach. They whisper to one another and marvel: these are turtles. They come to a halt. It’s a whole army. Hiding by day, at night they go wandering, and now you can pick out individuals on the edge, brown-black chequerboard shells, a little sharp point like a sign, the triangular head stretched upward, hemmed in. They proceed, shell hard against shell, a huge movement of giant dark moonlit shells marching in their myriads. They halt in a clump, some are forced over the backs of others, the ones on top keep moving, the double-decker keeps on until a gap opens and those on top clunk down again. And behind them slink big wild cats, jaguars that encircle the moving mass, lunge at the scrabbling edges and try to pick something off. The turtles toil in the moonlight, the whole mass stops, loses itself in sand and mud, they bury themselves, this is their breeding season.
On the Paraná (from The Blue Tiger part 4)
They were a hundred and fifty thousand people. No gold or silver mines in their region. Sugarcane, indigo grew here, and cotton bushes in clumps. The bushes started out green and nondescript, at blossom time the pale buds were covered by a green calyx, then came the ripening, the buds opened, turned golden yellow on a dark ground, and seed capsules, the fruit, swelled out of the dark ground and their bursting loosed tufts of thick white filament, a tangle of hairs, and the plants released the seeds to sail freely through the air and find themselves a place. The date palm grew here, groves of coconut palm, the fig, oil palm, in the fields manioc grew, fine cassava flour was won from its clumpy roots, potatoes, sweet potatoes.
And whole groves were filled with the remarkable prized evergreen of yerba-maté. There are countries that have only the barest necessities, and their inhabitants must grow strong and cunning to coax the soil to feed them and their descendants. There are other countries that provide everything people need, but all of it coarse and scanty. Then there are rich countries. And then others that even cosset their people. They do this in many ways: with the wine grape, with opium, coca leaves. On the Paraná and Paraguay, the maté tree took this role. It grew dense in the eastern mountains, in Tupi country and the foothills, around the headwaters of the Ijuhy. Groves tracked the upper course of the Uruguay. And along the right bank of the Paraná, in the hills of the Mirangua river as far as Igatimi and farther westward where you come to the reductions of Conception and Belem, the precious groves extended all along the Paraguay river. The tree grew tall as the apple tree of northern lands. They called it caa, its ribbed leaves caa-nazu, the unribbed caa-mine. People went in groups into the woods to gather maté, dug trenches and put in sackfuls of leaves. They took cowhides from their carts and covered the trenches. The leaves were left in the ground to dry, then loaded onto carts and brought to people. From the leaves they made a tea with hot water. The tree’s sap infused into the tea, the spirit of the maté was not lost. They sat, those white and dark people who wished to partake of the thin yellow brew, day after day, stuck a hollow reed between their lips and invited the spirit of the maté, who lived in the mountains of the Jerbales, to speak to them. He never spoke loudly. If they put many leaves in the water, the spirit would intoxicate them, if they used only a few, he made them cheerful, comforted them, even induced sleep.
On the broad plains of La Plata, horses and oxen brought by the first conquerors multiplied and became wild, as did the hounds that ran away from them. Horses and cattle roamed the plains in herds. There were many kinds of bee. The one that gave the whitest wax they called opemus.
A kind of large falcon was called macagua. The snakes of this country, large and small, would annoy the falcon, it would square up to them for a big fight. Natives who lived in the forest explained: it deceives the snake by hiding its head under its wing and pretending to sleep. When the snake approaches, it lunges with its beak. The snake counters with a bite. Then, the natives say, the falcon flies down from the tree and eats a herb that protects against snakebite, it knows this. It flies up again, continues the fight, and every time it is bitten it goes back to the herb. But it keeps on at the snake until it has killed and eaten it.
