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This Book List Sectory 06
Page 10
The trail--about half a metre wide--wound its way up to a great height above the foaming river. There were beautiful ferns of immense height, some of which had finely ribbed, gigantic leaves. Graceful yellow flowers, or sometimes beautiful red ones, were to be seen on tall trees with white, clean stems. We passed a coffee plantation, owned by English people, near a charming settlement of whitewashed houses on the opposite side of the river. When we came to cross the Rio Las Palmas--heavily swollen--we were once more nearly swept away in riding across with water up to our chests. The baggage naturally suffered a good deal in those constant immersions. This was, unfortunately, the wrong season for crossing the Andes; but I could not help that, as I was anxious to get through, and could not wait for the fine weather to come.
I struggled up on my feet and proceeded to carry the big vessels to the river bank, where I intended to construct the raft. The effort to take each heavy bottle those few metres seemed almost beyond me in my exhausted state. At last I proceeded to strip the floor of the hut, which had been made with split _assahy_ palms (_Euterpe oleracea_ L.), in order that I might make a frame to which I could fasten the bottles. With a great deal of persuasion I got Filippe and Benedicto to help me. The long pieces of _assahy_ were too heavy for our purpose, and we had the additional trouble of splitting each piece into four. It was most trying work in our worn-out condition. Then we had to go into the forest and collect some small liane, so that we could tie the pieces together, as we had no nails and no rope.
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the "Odyssey," and of Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist--their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life which every age and country has recognised as higher and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other lives into which they infused their own.
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