THE HEART OF THE RUBBER COUNTRY

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 300, 13 May 1911, Page 9

THE HEART OF THE RUBBER COUNTRY

It is a far cry J'roni I'ara, the very metropolis of the Brazilian rubber industrv, to the little village of Santo Antonio, a nook on the .Madeira river, Where the rubber from a vast network of lesser streams is collected for transhipment to the -teamers that convey it to the mouth of the Amazon. The voyage to Santo Antonio and the impression of the village at the journey's end are pictured by a correspondent who has recently returned from that district. After a three weeks' journey from Para we saw far from our river steamer a white gleam, which barred the Rio Madeiro far ahead, and had little trouble in persuading each other that faint _reverheratious eou'd be beard. Thi.s was the tirst of the cataracts and the end of the Madeira navigation; we had arrived at last. We were liiOD miles from the estuary of the Amazon, and had penetrated to the centre of South America. . Approaching the village of Santo Antonio, which' sits by the white water where the very age must, ciijl, tin; change from the previous Hat world is extraordinary. From the higher Bolivian plateau, the threshold of the Andes, the .Madeira River descends a granite .stairway "250 miles long; and Santo Antonio is on the bottom step. The river avenue through the continental forest has its simple, monotonous lines interrupted with noble rocks which turn the river aside, broadening the day and tilling it with new forms and new colors. The rocks ahead of u,s appear, and the water can be seen like, pulsing light amongst them; the trees on the shore seem to become faintly tremulous with constant and profound underground thundering. The boulders athwart the stream were piled high, having the structure of sombre masonry in ruins which weathered plutbnie rock so often assumes. Beyond that barrier the river was palpably above our level. It was seen through breaks in the roughly crenellated natural masonry, poised over our way, as a higher plane as bright as quicksilver. One mass of dark rocks had a rigid coronet of palms, black and individual, with the same gleam of mercury behind.

The crowd of dwellings of the village is on slightly rising ground, and the forest is beside and above them. The trees keep Santo Antonio down by the river. Like every Brazilian town and village it seems under that brooding and silent jungle as precarious a human foothold allowed on sufferance as a boat in midocean or as an eyrie on a mountain, a few lights and a few voices in the dark and interminable wastes. A village on one of these rivers is seen like another ship at sea. The •'return to nature" has no meaning to a sailor or to a Brazilian rubber-hunter. Nature is the enemy always in wait. So one lands at Santo Antonio, where there is a garrison of human beings, with a feeling of newlyacquired security and elation. The village shining through the foliage, the rounded amplitude of the tro-' pical rain clouds above, the leaping water and the rocks, the island with its plume of palms in mid-stream, the unexplored jungle everywhere closing in, the fierce sun, the half-naked Indians by the boats on the foreshore—all the right tropical picture one expects as the reward of a long journey. It has, however, the usual disabilities of a picture near the equator. It is better to regard it from a distance. The village has one street, running parallel with the river.

Through the centre of the street, veiled by coarse grass, are the lines of the railway attempted here 30 years ago by American engineers—an enterprise which had such a tragic ending; the same enterprise has lately been undertaken again, and the Madeira-Mamore railway will be soon an accomplished fact The old metals are' now \ised by the rubber men when making the final portage of the Madeira rapids. The houses are of clay and plaster, rough wun peeling whitewash, and like all Brazilian houses are built open, without doors, to give coolness. There are several cafes, with interiors of rough mud walls, containing a few iron tables and chairs, and some girls with flowers stuck in their black hair, where a visitor may drink from bottles which do at least bear European labels, though their cost is past all European understanding. There is also the big store, so big as to be out of all proportion to the town: but it is the head depot of a famous rubber house, with a warehouse supplying the wants of rubber hunters throushout the vallevs of the Rivers Upper Madeira, Mamore. Beni.and Madre de Dios, a system which penetrates the tar Andes. Rubber is evervthing ( to Santo' Antonio, for the town stands in the midst of the most produc-1 tive rubber region in the world. I