Journey to the River Sea

‘So she did survive the fire,’ said Mrs Carter. They had left Manaus when Maia was still missing.

‘Well, it serves her right if she gets put in a cooking pot – she always liked the Indians better than anyone else.’

‘Now, Beatrice!’ said Mrs Carter. ‘You mustn’t say such things.’

‘Well, we won’t say them,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘But nothing can stop us thinking them.’

And all that day, as they gave the dog his worm powders and ironed Lady Parsons’ handkerchiefs and sewed the pom-poms back on her bedroom slippers, their small, tight mouths would suddenly curve into a smile.

‘It may be awful here, but at least we won’t get eaten,’ said Beatrice.

And Gwendolyn agreed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Maia had never had any sisters or cousins, but she had them now. Her day in the Xanti village began with the three girls who were closest to her in age, pulling her out of sleep and down to the river for a swim.

The swim did not have much to do with striking out over the water, nor with serious washing. It was about splashing and ducking each other and pretending to have been attacked by electric eels – and afterwards it was about chasing each other through the trees and combing each other’s hair and persuading Maia that she needed a bead anklet.

Then it was the turn of the babies, who were brought down to the edge of the stream and doused with water from hollowed-out calabash shells while they screamed at the top of their lungs. Maia had a pair of babies that were her special charge; tiny, big-eyed creatures who turned into thrashing demons when she tried to make them clean.

When she got back with the babies, Miss Minton was usually at work on her English–Xanti dictionary, but today she was surrounded by a group of women begging her to do her imitation of a person with a stomach-ache.

‘STOMAK-AKE’, they chanted, because that was their favourite. When she needed a word for her dictionary and couldn’t make the Xanti understand, Miss Minton took to acting. They had enjoyed her horribly snapping teeth when she wanted the word for ‘alligator’, and they were impressed when she pricked herself with a needle to get the word for ‘blood’. But the one they liked best was definitely the one where she rubbed her stomach and doubled up with pain and groaned.

Yet when Miss Minton, soon after she arrived, was struck by one of her blinding migraine headaches, there had been no need for her to act. The women found her leaning against a tree with her eyes shut and came back with a disgusting, dark-green brew of bitter leaves which she forced herself to drink – and in a few hours she was herself again.

The Xanti village was not the dark huddle of huts in the gloom of the forest that Maia had expected. It was in a clearing open to the sky. At night they could see the Southern Cross, and stars so bright they seemed unreal, and by day the sun shone down on the compound where the children played and animals wandered.

Nearly all the children had pets: a little boy with a crippled foot had a huge bird-eating spider with a liana tied round its middle, which he led along like a dog. One of the chief’s nephews owned a golden tamarind; a monkey so small that it could be covered by a human hand. Tame macaws and parrots and hoopoes flew onto people’s shoulders and off again, driving Finn’s dog to despair.

By the time the sun was high and everyone was wandering about eating breakfast, Professor Glastonberry appeared. The Xanti had woven palm leaf shelters for their guests, but he preferred to sleep on the Carters’ boat with the Arabella moored beside him, so as to watch the boats and his collection, which was growing fast.

After breakfast the women usually went to their work; weaving hammocks or pounding manioc roots into flour or making baskets – but Maia did not have to join them; she was allowed to go to the musicians. There was a man who played a tiny, three-holed flute made out of the bones of a deer; and another man who had a hollowed-out palm trunk which made a noise like a tuba ...

Maia was learning to play the little flute, and the men sang for her – all the Xanti did, she begged so hard. They sang their work songs and their feasting songs because they understood that Maia needed to know about songs like Miss Minton needed to know about words, and Finn needed to know about the plants they used for healing.

And it was now that Maia saw what Haltmann meant when he said that she would find the purely Indian music very different, and not at all easy to write down. The songs were wild and strange, and often seemed to have no tune at all – and yet the more she heard them, the more she liked them.

But they wanted a fair exchange. ‘SING, Maia’ was heard as often as ‘STOMAK-AKE’. Maia had begun by singing funny songs for the children because she knew how much the Xanti liked to laugh. But it was the old folk songs that they liked best: sad songs in the minor key in which lovers were separated, ships sank, and people wept by open graves.