Old Century's River

by OLIVER LA FARGE

ALMOST as soon as he found those two miraculous bottles of whiskey he knew that they meant the end, and were to he t he means of it. He did not stale this explicitly to himself, but felt it below the level of worded thoughts or of admission, as a wild animal knows that its end is coming, as an old jungle hand, by the time he had reached his age, should have learned to know.

He saw the little suitcase that contained them by pure accident, because one ol his awkward, improvised crutches slipped as he was turning away, after he had cut his fourth heart of palm. Four hearts of palm weren’t much of a supply, but that was all he had strength for now. It was better to go short, and be sure of making it back to his shelter and his mosquito net before dark, lie lurned slowly, one crutch slipped, he caught himself, and it was t hen I ha t he saw the edge of the valise, under a low-growing ramón palm. His faded blue eyes studied it for several seconds while he remembered that Tolling had looked for it, and had said that, among other things, he had two bottles of good whiskey in it.

He lowered himself to the ground slowly, with elaborate care not to jar his bad leg. The slightest jolt, twist, or even just wrong position meant a white swirl of pain which was not quick in going away. Presently he was on the ground, his legs out in front of him, and had pulled the little suitcase into the open.

He felt the case gently with the palm of his hand, studying it. It was about eighteen inches long and a foot wide. It had been badly scratched, probably bounced off a couple of trees when it was thrown from the plane, and one end was slightly charred. Three weeks lying on the damp ground had done it no good. Still, you could recognize its quality, the quality of the leather, very unlike the soft surface of native Mexican tanning. The brass locks were neat and solid. The initials under the handle were clear, “J.H.T."Tolling’s case all right, and because he had not yet given up his fight, he could think that it was too bad that by now Tolling and McDaniels, two young and healthy men, might well be dead, and to consider with a bit of triumph and a bit of laughter that he, old, injured, his system charged with God only knew how many tropical infections, was still alive and still fighting.

An Indian would have given up by now. An Indian’s reason would have told him that it was all over days ago, and very reasonably he would have given up and avoided a lot of discomfort by deliberately dying, the way Indians know how to do. A white man goes beyond reason, not with hope so much as with determination, and so a lot of times he wins out when he ought not to. Thus the first thing he got out of finding the valise was a lift, not at that moment applying to his situation the meaning of the thing he had just admitted to himself, his belief dial Tolling and McDaniels had failed to make it. He thought of their probable demise only as a contrast to his own survival, with the triumph that the aged, the sick, the disreputable feel over the downfall of the young, the strong, the correct.

Copyright 1950 by The Atlantic Monthly Campany’ Boston 16' Mass. All rights reserved.

He remembered the ridiculousness of being hired by those two young fellows to guide them in the air. He remembered their tale of gold cached in an ancient mound, and I lie map and I he old letter they had to prove it. He knew better, but they offered him nice work, good pay, and a cut in everything they found, to fly around and identify places from the air, later to run their camp and supply train. In honesty he’d warned them that they were starting too late, with the rains coming on; but they wanted to make a scout now, and come back the next season. That was all right with him. Anyway, he’d long wanted to know what it was like to fly.

He sure as hell found out. Sick and frightened, right from the start. And then good and lost — everything looked so different from the air. All he could do was feel awful and hang onto himself, and hang onto the gleam of the river, when he could find it.

After the crash, Tolling had delayed awhile, looking for the valise, before he and McDaniels started out. He had hoped to find it, not only for the liquor, but because it contained personal papers and a large-scale map of Chiapas. Tolling set a lot of store by maps. The trouble was, he had looked too close to the wreckage of the plane. From where lie sat’ the old man could not see the clearing in which they had come down, but he could see, like shafts between the great trees, the glow of light which marked it. The clearing was of no interest to him. There was nothing edible growing there. Except where the plane had cut a swathe and made a scorched area, it was all oleander, high as a man.

They were dead and he was on his own, all right. He was sorry about them. It had been fine, the way they dragged him away from the burning wreckage, the way they splinted him and lived up his shelter under his directions, and the generosity with which thex divided the salvaged supplies with him. They had wanted to try carrying him out, but he knew that that would never have worked. Even then, when they stood before him, ready to go, he’d figured that forty miles of this kind of bush, with the swamp to cross, was going to he tough going for a couple of complete greenhorns. The bearing of their failure upon his own situation began to impress him. To free his mind of it, he concentrated on the suitcase. He was a trifle lightheaded, not with the familiar fever of malaria, but with a giddiness and feeling of infection which came from the poisons being manufactured in his leg.

He tried the catches. The two locks snapped open. Good. He lifted the lid. The top layer of socks and some brightly striped drawers kept the rest of the contents snug. Under them were various papers in several bundles, the folded map, and the two bottles. He did not touch them, but sat studying the labels and seals. The best, bottled in bond, aged, one hundred proof, the kind of liquor the very existence of which a man completely forgot in the little towns of the back country, drinking barbed wire, aguardiente, most of the time, and Habanero when he was flush.

The pale golden-brown contents of the two bottles promised him pleasure and relief from pain. The continuous throbbing of his leg this last week had at first broken his sleep, and the last few nights had allowed him to doze only in snatches. With one of these under his belt . . .

Seldom in his life had he tasted liquor of this class, mostly that time he found gold and sold out, and went clear to Mexico City. It had been his plan then to go to the States, with all the cash he had, but Mexico City had everything, even blondes. He suspected that that blonde of his was synthetic, but if so she had done a job of it . She was blonde all over, He frowned over her name. Rita— Rita something, claimed to be half Polish. She was e;xpensive as hell, but worth every peso of it. The memory of those six weeks had stayed good for years. She’d gone in for all sorts of mixed drinks, but he had mistrusted them; that was when he got onto the fine Bourbon. It goes down like tea, and it’s as strong as anything that ever hit your stomach.

He closed the valise. Drawing bis machete, he eut a length of narrow, flexible liana. The act took two Hips of the wrist. He handled his machete with old skill, but he paused between the strokes and afterwards set the blade down as though it were heavily weighted. There was no more strength in him. With the liana he slung the valise from his shoulder. ’Then he sheathed the machete and went through the long, careful, effortful process of getting to bis feel and onto the crutches ’Foiling and McDaniels had made for him.

2

IT WAS about a hundred feet from where he stood to his shelter. He had come so far only because he had cleaned out everything edible nearer, at least exerxlhing that grew in places open enough for him to penetrate. Cutting a path into the really thick places was quite beyond him in his condition. As he inched his way back, he made a remarkable picture. He wore a fairly new, straw sombrero, set aslant on his longish, white hair. His three weeks’ beard was scraggly, curly, and nearly as white as the finer hair of his head. His face was deeply tanned, of a sickly color under the tan, lined and sunken.

He wore a strong khaki shirt and slacks, purchased with the advance money the young men had given him, but these now looked as if he had had them for years. They were filthy. The shirt had several rips in it. The left trouser leg, over his bad leg, had been cut away at the knee. On his left foot, the newly purchased, high laced boot had likewise been cut away above the ankle, leaving a sort of shoe. In between was the splint, fashioned out of pieces of the wrecked plane and wrapped with materials which had become gray-black, fuzzy, rotting rags. In his left breast pocket, four slender, white hearts of palm stuck up like candy sticks. His machete and knife hung at his waist, the little valise, woefully heavy, slid around against his back and his side.

He concentrated on his panting progress, leaving for later the endless, rambling self-communions of a man who has been long alone.

The forest in front of him lightened, there were the same brillianl shafts and streaks ahead of him as had marked the neighborhood of the clearing. He came out on the edge of the river beside his shelter. He rested, looking at the river. It was familiar; a great part of his life had been spent along it. Its presence supported him.

Within easy distance of him were a number of traps, the simple arrangements of stieks I he Indians make for catching the smallest animals. He scanned them carefully, without expectation; he’d been living and moving around here too long for the little creatures to be coming by.

His shelter was a simple affair of palm branches and a tarpaulin, a lean-to facing the river. One end was over the roots of a massive mahogany, the other was partly closed by a smaller tree. In a rise of ground between two roots was his bed, a pile of palm branches and a blanket with the mosquito net suspended above. Behind that, on the raised shelf of another root, were his rifle and his supplies. In front of the shelter was a meager pile of firewood beside the black circle of his fire. The edge of the circle was cut by a frying pan with a spoon in it and a blackened tin can, its top bent backwards to form a sort of handle.

His supplies were cached in the empty tin cans beside the rifle. In one was a small bag of salt and another bag containing a handful of rice. A second was half full of carefully saved cigarette stubs, and on top of them an empty quinine bottle containing two whole cigarettes. In others were some money, some pieces of newspaper, a dozen matches wrapped elaborately in part of an oilskin tobacco pouch, and a bottle of insect repellent, nearly empty. Between the bed and the fireplace stood a badly dented. Army issue canteen, its upper part fire-blackened, lacking its canvas cover and its cup. Most of the cans showed the effects of fire. The rifle had a charred place on the stock. Along the barrel were a number of spots of rubbed-down rust.

After a moment’s hesitation, he took out one of the whole cigarettes and laid it carefully on a root. He hefted the canteen, and was relieved to find it full. It had become difficult to remember whether he had stuck to his routine of working his way to the water and filling it before he went looking for food. He tended to his fire, uncovering the coals, laying on twigs and bark, fanning gently with his hat, until he had a dependable little flame.

Daylight would last at least an hour more, but already the river was beginning to fill with shadow, while the sunlight became sharper, more emphatic, on the far bank. The occasional bole of a great tree, exposed directly to the light, turned gold. The water was a living, dull metal, moving in an oily, quiet, powerful, yet sluggish way, with blue here and there in its swirls. The Chacaliá — the river had a dozen names, Spanish, Nahua, Mayan; from among them this one, the one the Indians of the headwaters gave it, was the one which to him best meant the whole. The name Concha used for it. The hut he had lived in with Concha hadn’t boon far from here, when he’d been a young sprout. A doll, a kind of toy, a live toy who could love you and keep house and laugh and make you laugh, He wanted not to think of her, but could not stop the sequence, first of Concha in those good months and then of how she screamed and wept when LI Xopo, that bandit bastard, and the troops of his private revolution came through and took her along with them. You were a young Gringo and you worked for the oil company. You were a Gringo and strong and wonderful, and you were supposed to be able to cope with anything, and you stood there looking into the rifle barrels while they tied your girl on a saddle.

That was what started off the first big drunk. He quit his job clearing trail and got really in Dutch with the company. That was the start of a lot, he guessed. He certainly had stayed drunk a long time.

3

HE OPENED the valise and got out the bottles. They were fair prey, and maybe, if he got oul of here, he could use the clothing, but the papers belonged to Trolling. Some of them were handwritten letters. They ought to be sent home. Holding one of the bottles, thinking of that, he really thought out and faced the first fact. In the end of the dry season as it was now, with the bush at its driest and openest, you could figure on a couple of healthy men taking ten days to go forty miles, if they didn’t hit a made trail further down the river and if they were green at bush travel. You could figure even on two weeks. But you could not figure on three. He knew where he was, as he had told them, about five miles below El Salto. the first fall, and forty miles above Ocantán. At Ocantán there were a Swiss and a number of Mexicans, and at least two double canoes with outboard motors. They would have been here by now; the river was low and mild. Being completely green, the voung men had not gotten out. there was only one answer to that one, they were dead by now. Easy enough to happen, too. So here he was.

He opened the bottle slowly and smelled of it. Then he lit the cigarette. Boy, this was life. A remark he had heard somewhere came to mind: “James, serve the champagne in tin cups, the gentlemen wish to rough it.” He look a pull at the bottle. It was really prime stuff. He had smoked little the last few days, because the smoke tasted foul, but now his cigarette was good. He meditated taking a swig of water, but decided in favor of letting the liquor glow in his mouth and throat and stomach. He set the bottle down with care and smoked, looking out.

The old Chacaljá a few miles above here he had lived with Concha, when he was a young sprout full of beans and had a regular job. If you could go there now, you probably could not lind the spot, any more than you would be able to lind any trace of this camp a few years from now. How long ago was that? He had to do a little counting to figure that this was nineteen fifty, not forty-nine. Usually a little thing like that made no difference. He came out in nineteen hundred, the leap year when it didn’t leap, the turn of the century, He liked to say that, after the lapse of time had made it impressive, “I came out here at the turn of the century, when I was a young sprout.” so that back when he was hardly fifty the Americans had taken to calling him Old Century. Those two boys, Tolling and McDaniels, had called him “Mr. Century” when they first met him. The cigarette was half gone. He took another good pull at the bottle.

Pretty nearly half a century, and not much to show for it. No sign of that fortune he’d been going to make. He’d had one real friend, Whittaker, and old Whit was long gone. Up this same river, too. He wished old Whit were here now to sit with him and pull at the bottle and watch the day go over the Chacaljá and night come down. It would he a pretty night, with a moon, if it didn’t cloud up. There’ll been a lot of clouds around lately. Be a hell of a note if the rains started tonight and ruined this binge. Old Whit had said one time, when they were both good and drunk, that it was a pity he, Century, hadn’t stayed in school and gotlen an education. He’d have been a poet ora philosopher, Whit had said. Funny thing, he’d felt something that way about Whit.

Apart from Whit, he couldn’t say he’d had any real friends. Knew a hell of a lot of men of different kinds, yes, liked some of them, been able to work and live with a lot of them, but not friends, not really. First he guessed he was too brash, and then maybe too much of a rum-bum. Besides, the more you live in the bush and along the river, the more you want to be let live inside yourself.

There had been a variety of women, some of whom he remembered sharply , some of whom were mere whorehouse blurs, vague punctuations to drinking, but none of them had lasted. He’d have liked to have had Eufemia last, but Fufemia was a Tehuana, and she ended up by going home with a Tehuano man, the way they alway s do. He guessed his kid was a good Tehuano, speaking Zapotec as his mother tongue. The chief thing he could say for all these years was that he’d never worked hard, not steadily that is, and he’d had a lot of fun.

Or maybe the chief thing was that here he was, sick, old, and crippled, and still alive after three weeks. Most while men would be dead by now. The grub left him wouldn’t have lasted ten davs. If his leg cleared up he could tough it out indefinitely, even after the rains came if he had to. And the two young men were dead. Apart from his leg there was nothing the matter with him. Of course, he guessed he’d been orating to himself a lot, but anyone does that who lives much alone in the bush. He had a drink to his own mastery of the wild country.

As that drink look hold his mood changed. He thought of the great joke of being hired by those two young fellows and how, to clinch the job, he had artfully let them draw out of him every fool story he had ever heard of gold being found. Anyone knew it was all bunk. He’d seen it proven a dozen times. What a joke on them —and now on him, too.

4

A CURASSOW , big and black looking, lit on a branch not twenty feet from him. He stiffened and reached for his rifle, almost tasting the meal. The bird flew off again. He swore. He had moved too soon, before it got settled. He looked at the little package of rice and his slivers of heart of palm, studying the rice for a long time. He looked at the bottles, then out over the river. The higher bank opposite was completely in shadow, and the shadow was mounting rapidly up the trees. With a manner of finality he built up the fire, poured water in the tin can. and set it to boil. He watched it in a sort of blankness until the water bubbled properly, then with the same manner of finality he poured in the last of his rice and added salt. He cut the hearts of palm carefully into small pieces and added them. The extravagance which wiped out his entire larder was committed under compulsion. As soon as the food was in, he drank again, this time following the drink with a brief chaser of tepid water. He did not want to empty the canteen and be forced to the difficult, process of going down the bank to the water. Do that in the morning, on a morning drink.

If only his leg started mending he’d be all right. If he could get around even as well as he had at first, he wouldn’t worry for grub or for being able to tough it out. He’d last until he could walk like a man and then, rains or no rains, he’d get out to Ocanlan. They would have made sure he was dead. He chuckled. It had happened before. Old Century dead and buried a lot of times, and he turns up again. Just a bad old man, but powerful hard to kill. In one of the tin cans, underneath bits of newspaper, he still had a hundred pesos, part of the advance the boys had given him. He meditated on the simple facilities for pleasure in Ocantán, the known limits of hospitality and the extension of those limits to be made by the judicious buying of drinks all round, and he planned himself a pleasant stretch of time once he got out. The Swiss, Anthaler, set a good table.

The rice was done. The stew lacked meat, but latterly he had been eating little, both to stretch his small reserve and because he lacked appetite. Now his stomach had come magnificently to life under the influence of the whiskey. The stew was delicious. Cooked, it just about filled the can. He cleaned it all out, at first greedily, then with more leisure and appreciation of enjoyment. When there was nothing left but a few inaccessible grains, with a sense of lavishness and pleasure he threw the can high. It sailed through the air, turning over on itself, and dropped beyond the bank. He listened for a splash, and was disappointed when he could not hear one. The dinner called for another good slug of Bourbon and the other whole cigarette, He stretched and sighed luxuriously.

Briefly the strong light remained on the treetops across the river, while the wall of the main mass was mysteriously blue; then the light went, and almost without transition the far wall became a black strip rising to the sky while the river itself, which had been dark, acquired reflections of light. Beyond those trees, to his left, he could see indications of the moon rise. Tomorrow would be the full moon, He greeted the night with another drink.

The bottle in his hand brought his mind back to the boys and the plane ride with them, He had been pretty well lost until, just before the engine stripped working, he had recognized El Salto and the S-bend of the river by the big swamp. The swamp it was most likely that had got the boys. Then everything had come unstuck at once, and he hadn’t done anything but pray until they pulled him out from under the wing and brought him round. It had been a satisfaction, once he was himself, to tell them instantly just where they were. He remembered now their look of respect, just as he remembered trying to tell them how to get by in the bush, and feeling even then that you couldn’t tell it to someone, it had to be learned. You had to live it.

He could not exactly say that his leg had stopped hurting, but he didn’t mind it much. He wished he had some coffee to go with his dinner and lead back into the drinks in a proper manner. He wished Whittaker were here. There was mist in the enclosure of air over the river now, and the moon, coming up beyond the ocean of trees, began to reach the upper wisps of it and make them glow. As a result of light at the higher level, the river itself was lost in darkness. It would be nice to have Concha here now, Concha or—he remembered a phrase — or the equivalent thereof. It was MacNamara at Frontera who used to say that. Concha or the equivalent thereof. He could imagine it, but Whit would be better. It would be the end of both bottles, sure enough, if he could turn up again.

Old Century, fifty years in the bush, and what had he to show for it ? Lying here like a goddamned sultan, looking at the moon rise over the Chacaljá, with a full belly and a rotting leg, and more of the finest whiskey in the world than he could possibly got down in one night. That was a hell of a note, He held the bottle up to the moonlight to see how far he had lowered it, and as it was not even halfway yet, he drank again.

“Or the equivalent thereof.” This stuff had no equivalent. MacNamara, he’d gone back to the States. A lot of them had gone hack, some of them had stayed here, dead. Why did they all go back to the States? He could have gone back, two or three times, with a good bit of money in his pants, but each time, like that best of them all, his visit to Mexico City, he got to somewhere where the facilities were good and there he stayed until he was broke. It never made him feel bad, winding up broke. Who the hell wants to go back to the Stales? Drinking the best whiskey in the world on the moonlit banks of t he Chacaljá, when by good rights he ought to be dead a week ago.

It seemed to him that there was some connection between the lowering of the level in the bottle and the lowering line of the shadow around him. He was not able to keep pace, however, and he did not really try, because to have emptied the bottle by the time the moonlight reached him would have been to force his pace unpleasantly and bring pleasure to an end too soon. It was just one of those fool ideas that used to amuse Whit. “Don’t kill the bottle, just squeeze it slowly to death.”That had been Whit.

5

HE SAW the moon, just short of full. He took its light on his face. The light was a ragged silver line along the edge of the cut-bank in front of him, and shortly, or he thought it was shortly, it reached the river. The fact that each change he was watching was totally familiar did not in the least decrease his delight in it. As drunk as he was beginning to be, his appreciation was intensified and he felt, as he had when he was young, and on other drunken occasions, that there was much more in this than the eye beheld. Although familiar it was unique, it was a manifestation of something great which hovered just beyond the line of comprehension.

The thin mists lay between him and the moon. forming streaks of luminosity. The jungle on the other side was a jagged silhouette of deepest blueblack with silver edges and curious sprays and spurts of silver, or of white, ice-cold fire along the top. The river swirled black designs in the brightness of its reflections, the moonpath broad and flecked, breaking up at the edges, merging into an area of blackness on each side. The ice-cold fire lay on his hand; it lay, barred and mottled with shadow, around him and between him and the edge of the bank. The thing was enough in itself—he needed no one, lacked for no company.

He drank slowly but at some length. The liquor now really did go down like tea. This is what Old Century’s got, he told himself. He’s got the Chacaljá River, He’s got this. I got this and I got the bush, and the satisfaction of knowing that even this old and bad off I can stay alive here and have the love of it. This is what I’ve got and it ain’t hay. He put his bottle to his lips, tilting his head well back, and felt insulted and fooled when it ran dry at the second swallow.

He looked at the empty bottle and then at the untouched one. He did not seem anywhere near drunk enough for the amount that had gone down, He hefted the empty bottle, set it down, picked up the full one, and as he did so, feeling the second bottle’s weight, the inner realizations which had been working to the surface ever since he saw these two miraculous containers, which he had been holding back and denying since they began gathering days before, came to the top.

There was the simple, central fact of his leg. It didn’t only hurt him like fury, it was not only swelling, it smelled. Unable to wash or change his clothes, he had gathered about him a general, ripe, definite smell, but after enough time has gone by, a man ceases to notice his own odor. This was different. He knew perfectly well what it was and what it meant. With food and shelter, still he and his leg had only a few more days to go, days of increasing pain and wretchedness. And he was at the end of gathering food. Right now he had strength and a sense of well-being out of that God-sent bottle, but he could not survive on that. He was through.

It was, of course, quite unnecessary for him to restate all the factors of his situation to himself. He knew the bush, the river, himself, and how men die much too well. He simply admitted their sum and told himself, This is what I’ve had. So now what ?

The surface of the river was now entirely covered with a low-lying mist which lay in slight, irregular waves, shining white, with decorations of soft, bluish shadow. From the main body, higher elements detached themselves here and there. This soft brightness gave a new background for the silhouettes of the growths immediately in front of him, a new value to the dark, silver-topped block of the far side. This phenomenon, too, he knew well. He had been looking forward to it. He nodded his head sagely. He would go to the river, he would join the good old Chacaljá.

Slowly, with great seriousness, he peeled the wrapping off the second bottle and loosened the cork. He put the bottle down. A man should leave some kind of word. He had an idea. If he left a message in the first bottle, the chances were fair that even if it was Indians who found it, they would bring it to Ocantan. He opened Tolling’s valise once more, and searched in it uncertainly by the moonlight. He found what seemed to be a blank piece he could tear off a sheet, and a pencil. For a long time he pondered and frowned. Finally he wrote, “ Sirvase pagar al portador 1 peso. Died drunk and happy. Old Century William Tecumsch Carpenter.” He had trouble making the letters. He folded the sheet, and on the outside, on both sides, printed in unsteady letters, “Liɭevase d don Alberto Anthaler— 1 Peso.” After a little thought, he added a cross to impress the Indians.

He rolled the paper in a squill, pushed it into the bottle, and watched it unfold. That was about the best he could do to preserve himself for posterity. It would certainly bother Anthaler and the rest as the news spread along the river to know how he came to end up drunk on such elegant liquor, in his predicament. He corked the bottle. Then he made a cigarette from a piece of newspaper out of the storage can and some of his stubs. He smoked it slowly and gravely, watching the dance of the miststrands, the very slow, dreamy, coiling flow of the main body of the mist on the river.

When the cigarette was gone, he took a short drink from the second bottle. Forcing it into a trousers pocket, he got his crutches, and pulled himself erect much more easily than he had expected. Once he was up he was quite steady, which surprised him and gave him a moment of pride. Then he set to the serious business of getting to the edge of the bank, lowering himself to a silling position, and letting himself down to the water. Anyway, he thought with satisfaction, I don’t have to make it back up again.

At the water’s edge, the mist reached to a short distance over his head. Around him was a soft, fuzzy, cool gray-whiteness, and above him a soft glow melting towards a defined central brightness where he faced the moon. The water took his bad leg wonderfully, cooling and easing it. He let himself in, supporting himself on his crutches. If anything, it was chilly in the river, but the sense of his body’s lightness, the feeling of cleanliness, and the complete easing of his leg were sheer delight.

A down tree projected from the bank near him, one end firmly bedded near the shore, the other bobbing and weaving faintly in a slow eddy. He worked his way to it, moving slowly in the supporting, hindering water.

Under his weight the trunk sank lower, so that it was no trick to sit on it and balance with the water up to his waist. He let his crutches float away. The old Chacaljá‚ he thought, this is what I’ve got, this is what I’ve had. The high boot laced on his healthy leg kept the good water from washing about it as it did the other. He wished he’d taken it off, but it was too late for that now. Balancing on the log, he dug out the bottle, hoping the water hadn’t got into the liquor. That was one place the river did not belong. He took a solid drink, his face raised towards the soft whiteness which covered him. Faintly here and there he could make out the outline of the black shadow of a tree. It seemed to him that he was experiencing the essence of the river.

He was sitting in the middle of a misty sphere, which in the direction of the moon contained a great, luminous circle with that brightness in the center. I sure as hell wish Whit was here, I wish he could see this. The good old Chacaljá. He felt the whole river, the vastness of it, waiting. The river and all that that term embraced in its true sense. The slow waters were waiting for him, the lagartos, the alligators, were waiting for him. Along the banks the countless roots which drew their life from the river waited for him, and so did the big and little fishes, the water grasses, the buzzards, the insects, and all the various and beautiful snakes, the nauiacas, the masacuates, the culebras, and the rest. The only people who did not form part of the river, and who therefore did not have sense enough to be waiting for him to join them, were the men who lived along it. They would be curious, perhaps even worried, about his disappearance; the others would know. The graceful animals who drank at the river and who fished in it, the deer, the lions, the iguanas, the jaguars, the big, slow-moving dantas, would know, the mists, and the days and nights, the bugs darting over the water, the gravels and sands and rocks. He was conscious of them all, and he embraced them.

The sphere with its area of brightness, in which he could see nothing and beyond which he could see everything, contracted and expanded. The moon-spot tended to whirl, or else he was whirling. It seemed to him that he had experienced this manifestation before. He took another good, long pull at the bottle, a longer pull than he really wanted, forcing himself, because he did not think that he would get to take many more. Holding the bottle by the neck with its bottom resting on his thigh, he stared at the moon-spot. It was all waiting for him. He knew it all; if Whit were here right now he thought he could explain to him what that thing was you felt in the beautiful moments, that thing that had always been just out of reach when you watched the moonrise or the dawn, and at such times. His hand fell off the bottle, letting it go into the water with a faint gurgle. Slowly, rather majestically, he followed, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open, slipping gently, almost noiselessly, into the river, in which he drifted limply, without motion of his own.