Brantori Garde Sectory 09

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of the Heavens have now become common and familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but impossible to throw back our imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and their own power, unshackled to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendent as they would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.

Some 13 kil. farther, the river being smooth but swift, we came to a basin 700 m. broad, where the river described a turn toward the north-east. We came upon a large clearing on the hill-side on the left bank. There we saw the remains of two or three huts which had been destroyed by fire. We perceived one or two people, and we landed. We found that it was the shed of an enterprising Peruvian trader who had established himself there in order to collect rubber. Only a few days before we arrived a great fire had taken place, which had destroyed nearly all he possessed; but--fortunately for us--they had saved a few things, and I was able to purchase a quantity of rice, biscuits, dried meat, beans, _farinha_, condensed milk, _banho_ (liquid lard in tins), and a number of other things, such as clothes, shirts, rope, nails, axes, etc., which we needed badly.

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