Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon | Page 5

the dregs of society, and we shall not be far wrong in
assuming that the man with the cryptogram was a fitting comrade for
his fellow "capitaes do mato." Torres--for that was his name--unlike
the majority of his companions, was neither half-breed, Indian, nor
negro. He was a white of Brazilian origin, and had received a better
education than befitted his present condition. One of those unclassed
men who are found so frequently in the distant countries of the New
World, at a time when the Brazilian law still excluded mulattoes and
others of mixed blood from certain employments, it was evident that if
such exclusion had affected him, it had done so on account of his
worthless character, and not because of his birth.
Torres at the present moment was not, however, in Brazil. He had just
passed the frontier, and was wandering in the forests of Peru, from
which issue the waters of the Upper Amazon.
He was a man of about thirty years of age, on whom the fatigues of a
precarious existence seemed, thanks to an exceptional temperament and
an iron constitution, to have had no effect. Of middle height, broad
shoulders, regular features, and decided gait, his face was tanned with
the scorching air of the tropics. He had a thick black beard, and eyes
lost under contracting eyebrows, giving that swift but hard glance so
characteristic of insolent natures. Clothed as backwoodsmen are
generally clothed, not over elaborately, his garments bore witness to

long and roughish wear. On his head, stuck jauntily on one side, was a
leather hat with a large brim. Trousers he had of coarse wool, which
were tucked into the tops of the thick, heavy boots which formed the
most substantial part of his attire, and over all, and hiding all, was a
faded yellowish poncho.
But if Torres was a captain of the woods it was evident that he was not
now employed in that capacity, his means of attack and defense being
obviously insufficient for any one engaged in the pursuit of the blacks.
No firearms--neither gun nor revolver. In his belt only one of those
weapons, more sword than hunting-knife, called a "manchetta," and in
addition he had an "enchada," which is a sort of hoe, specially
employed in the pursuit of the tatous and agoutis which abound in the
forests of the Upper Amazon, where there is generally little to fear from
wild beasts.
On the 4th of May, 1852, it happened, then, that our adventurer was
deeply absorbed in the reading of the document on which his eyes were
fixed, and, accustomed as he was to live in the forests of South
America, he was perfectly indifferent to their splendors. Nothing could
distract his attention; neither the constant cry of the howling monkeys,
which St. Hillaire has graphically compared to the ax of the woodman
as he strikes the branches of the trees, nor the sharp jingle of the rings
of the rattlesnake (not an aggressive reptile, it is true, but one of the
most venomous); neither the bawling voice of the horned toad, the most
hideous of its kind, nor even the solemn and sonorous croak of the
bellowing frog, which, though it cannot equal the bull in size, can
surpass him in noise.
Torres heard nothing of all these sounds, which form, as it were, the
complex voice of the forests of the New World. Reclining at the foot of
a magnificent tree, he did not even admire the lofty boughs of that "pao
ferro," or iron wood, with its somber bark, hard as the metal which it
replaces in the weapon and utensil of the Indian savage. No. Lost in
thought, the captain of the woods turned the curious paper again and
again between his fingers. With the cipher, of which he had the secret,
he assigned to each letter its true value. He read, he verified the sense

of those lines, unintelligible to all but him, and then he smiled--and a
most unpleasant smile it was.
Then he murmured some phrases in an undertone which none in the
solitude of the Peruvian forests could hear, and which no one, had he
been anywhere else, would have heard.
"Yes," said he, at length, "here are a hundred lines very neatly written,
which, for some one that I know, have an importance that is undoubted.
That somebody is rich. It is a question of life or death for him, and
looked at in every way it will cost him something." And, scrutinizing
the paper with greedy eyes, "At a conto [1] only for each word of this
last sentence it will amount to a considerable sum, and it is this
sentence which fixes the price. It sums up the entire document. It gives
their true