Eva Ibbotson

The brightly patterned fish, salted and grilled on a driftwood fire, smelled delicious but Rom shook his head. He sat leaning against the twisted trunk of a mango, letting the fine sand of the praia on which they had made camp run through his fingers. Nearby the Daisy May floated quietly at anchor. A cormorant turned a yellow-ringed and disbelieving eye on the intruders and flapped off across the river. In the still water, the colors of the sunset changed from flame to primrose and a last glimmer of unearthly green.

Rom, usually aware of every stirring leaf, noticed nothing; he was lost in the horror of what he had just seen.

He had meant simply to spend a few days on the river, wanting to shake off the memory of that ill-fated lunch with Harriet. Taking only the silent and devoted Furo—loading the boat with the usual gifts of fishhooks and beads and medical supplies—he had traveled up the Negro, bound for an island where tree orchids grew in incredible profusion and the snowy egrets made their nests.

Then something—he had no idea what it was—made him turn up the Ombidos river. There had long been rumors of gross ill-treatment of the Indians by the men who ran the Ombidos Rubber Company, and the report de Silva had sent down had made disquieting reading, but Rom had seen too many do-gooders and journalists make capital out of the rubber barons’ wicked treatment of the natives to be seriously disturbed. Moreover the company was entirely Brazilian-owned. Rom might fight exploitation ruthlessly where it was inflicted by Europeans, but he did not meddle in the affairs of his hosts.

Yet at the end of the second day, the Daisy May was chugging at a steady seven knots up the Ombidos. Perhaps it was hindsight, but it seemed to Rom a frightful place; the “green hell” so beloved of the fiction writers come hideously to life. Oppressive, dark, ominously silent: only the mosquitos, incessant and insatiable even in the hissing rain, seemed to be alive on that Stygian stretch of water.

That night they had tied up in a creek, concealed by overhanging trees. The next morning Rom put on a battered sombrero, slung a rifle over his shoulder and, with his pockets full of trinkets, disappeared along a jungle track in the direction of the village. With his two-day stubble, his shirt stained by grease from the Daisy May’s engine, he passed easily enough for a poor-white trader come to cheat the natives out of basket-work or cured skins for a handful of beads.

He was away for twenty-four hours. Since then he had spoken only to give Furo orders which would take them away fast, and faster, from that accursed place. Even now, fifty miles down-river in as halcyon a spot as anyone could hope for, he sat like a man in a trance and in that steaming jungle, looked cold.

“It was very bad, then?” inquired Furo at last.

Rom stirred and turned.

“Yes.”

He took the bottle of brandy that Furo had pushed toward him and tilted it to his mouth, but nothing could blot out what he had seen at Ombidos. He had believed that he knew of all the cruelties which men had inflicted on the Indians in their insane greed for rubber… Workers flayed into insensibility with tapir-hide whips for bringing in less cahuchu than their master craved; hirelings with Winchesters dragging into slavery every able-bodied man in a village… He himself had been offered—by a drunken overseer on the Madeira—one of the man’s native concubines, a girl just nine years old…

But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.

“Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?” asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.

“Yes, it is true. To Antonio Alvarez, the Minister for Amazonia.”

“And he is coming to Manaus. So he will go to Ombidos and see for himself? He will make it right?”

Rom shook his head. “He will come, Furo. He will dine at the Sports Club and go to Madame Anita’s brothel with the Mayor and attend some meetings at the Town Hall in his tight suit and pointed shoes. But he will not go to Ombidos.”

Antonio Alvarez, a man approaching sixty… A gourmet who traveled with a French chef; a dandy who kept a retinue of hairdressers, valets and masseurs in his mansion in Rio… Nothing on God’s earth, thought Rom, would get Alvarez to that hell-hole. It was said that once he had been different—an idealist and a patriot—but that had been decades ago. Some personal tragedy was supposed to have turned him into the man he now was, the man Rom knew: wily, powerful, idle…