“That Sambo chap,” said Holroyd, “says these are a different sort of ant.”

The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to a cigarette.

Afterwards he reopened the subject.  “My dear ’Olroyd, what am I to do about dese infernal ants?”

The captain reflected.  “It is ridiculous,” he said.  But in the afternoon he put on his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came back to the ship and subsequently he did.  And Holroyd sat on deck in the evening coolness and smoked profoundly and marvelled at Brazil.  They were six days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east and west of him there was a horizon like the sea, and to the south nothing but a sand-bank island with some tufts of scrub.  The water was always running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul.  The town of Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, its discoloured ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this wilderness of Nature, a sixpence dropped on Sahara.  He was a young man, this was his first sight of the tropics, he came straight from England, where Nature is hedged, ditched, and drained, into the perfection of submission, and he had suddenly discovered the insignificance of man.  For six days they had been steaming up from the sea by unfrequented channels; and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly.  One saw one day a canoe, another day a distant station, the next no men at all.  He began to perceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious hold upon this land.

He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his devious way to the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who ruled over one big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition.  Holroyd was learning Spanish industriously, but he was still in the present tense and substantive stage of speech, and the only other person who had any words of English was a negro stoker, who had them all wrong.  The second in command was a Portuguese, da Cunha, who spoke French, but it was a different sort of French from the French Holroyd had learnt in Southport, and their intercourse was confined to politenesses and simple propositions about the weather.  And the weather, like everything else in this amazing new world, the weather had no human aspect, and was hot by night and hot by day, and the air steam, even the wind was hot steam, smelling of vegetation in decay:  and the alligators and the strange birds, the flies of many sorts and sizes, the beetles, the ants, the snakes and monkeys seemed to wonder what man was doing in an atmosphere that had no gladness in its sunshine and no coolness in its night.  To wear clothing was intolerable, but to cast it aside was to scorch by day, and expose an ampler area to the mosquitoes