“Impressions completely new to me” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 188

headwaters in contest until the last possible moment so that the arbitration would have
to fall back on earlier agreements, the imaginative Peruvian cartography and the Idelf-
onso Treaty. This was a potentially successful plan, one that Peru had employed to its
advantage with Bolivia and Ecuador. The power of this earlier legal precedent could
work in Peruvian favor. The Peruvian resistance to completing the project reverberated
throughout the travels of the Joint Commission.
. . .
Da Cunha begged Veríssimo for leave to go visit his family. A day later, the marching
orders would arrive.
The night before he left for the Purús he wrote to Rangel, in contemplation of what
for him might be a very short future.
“Alone . . . completely alone in the narrow study of your bucolic hideaway. Or better yet, alone
but with some ancient shades: Father João de St José; 17 the valiant Ricardo Franco, 18 the meticulous
Francisco Lacerda e Almeida 19 —and I don't know how many others: imagine if you can our silent
and formidable orgy—alive with past triumphs and stupendous endeavors—forever ended. That old
monk, of Voltairian wit with his impeccable phrasing, tells of the old exploits of an old Amazon; the
implacable colonel—the greatest explorer of all the Livingstones and all the Stanleys—speaks of his
four or five odysseys into the backlands, including his last travels from the “visible equator” to the
meridians of Mantiquiera!
They while away the hours in this wordless chatter. . . . Firmo is out; at this moment he is prosaic-
ally under the adorable and passionate gaze of his fiancée. Manoel is inside, with his elbows on the
table, brow furrowed, doing his ABCs in a crumpled workbook . . . it's a great, mysterious silence,
laced sporadically with the scattered murmurs of the foliage—and then becomes more solemn, an
overwhelming stillness. Of course, if from time to time the fretful hacking from your rooster with the
chronicbronchitis, “thenutcase” according toFirmo'sdiagnosis, werenottocall metoanirritatingly
earthly reality, I would see your bookcase mysteriously opening, and bursting out from it the tortured
poetRollinetwith“L'éternelledameenblanc,quivoitsansyeuxetritsanslevres” *1 onhisarm.Such
is the august serenity that, in this dead hour, completely dominates your charming villa.
Our departure is near. The orders came yesterday. My fleet? Two launches (one still problematic),
a batalão , and six canoes, bob triumphantly at the end of the igarapé *2 “Raimundo,” and yesterday
were baptized byatempest. Ineverimagined that this sluggish rivercouldsotreacherously hidesuch
violent waves. A sharp gale from the southwest produced the tumultuous swells of a sea—and it is a
sea!Aseabetweenembankments. . .Happilymyboatsbravelysurvived.. . .Ihavethebelief,largely
metaphysical, that our life is always guaranteed by an ideal, a great aspiration that is realizing itself.
And I still have so much to write.