The land through which we were riding shall have a little railway there some day, if the men who are building it keep their hearts of brass, and refuse in working hours to remember London and New York. When it is there, that short line, it will begin and end in places having names which will convey little meaning to people outside Brazil; but to know what endurance of valour, but chiefly what raillery and light-hearted disregard of the gods who put baleful forests guarded by dragons--the dragons of mythology were lambs to what mosquitoes are--in the path of weak men pursuing their purpose, to know what has gone to the building of that track, though it nowhere plainly shows, for the graveyards are casual and obscure, brings you to a stand, surprised into awe of your fellows, as though through a coarse disguise you caught a gleam of divinity. Something shows, a light shows, which is beyond human. Would men be so prodigal of life and time if they were not aware of their great wealth? I don't know. My travels never brought me to that ultimate assurance. But I did see that my fellow-men are indifferent, spendthrift with their known and scanty store as though they were immortals, the remittance men of Great Jove. I have no doubt now the line will be finished some day; but there were times, riding along the roughly cleared trail where it is to be, and we came upon places where men, in a spasm of pointless and soon expiring energy had scratched and mauled the pristine earth, when I did not think so. Always the same dumb mystery was about us at noon as at nightfall. I felt we were lost at the back of the world, that we had crossed the boundary beyond which the voice of traffic never goes, and were idly wandering on the confines of oblivion. Sometimes I had that consciousness of futility which comes to us when, in sleep, we are earnest in the absurd activities of a dream, one point of the reason remaining awake to wonder at the antics of the busy but blind mind. Why was I there at all? Was I there? Those forlorn spots in the forest where our fellows had been before us, which we two riders overlooked alone, seemed to show that those men, while in the midst of their feverish labour, had recovered their minds, and had seen the wilderness was too vast, was unconquerable; and they had fled. There before us was what they had done. A deep trench would be in the track, the sand thrown up on either side. Some dead trees would be prone in our path, and we had to ride round them. There would be a few empty huts of leaves, with old ashes at the entrances, and a midden with its usual gorgeous butterflies. There would not be a sign of life, except the butterflies over the refuse, and not a sound or a movement but a clink from our own harness, and the heads of our mules impatient with the flies. Over the evidence of man's far-fetched enterprise and industry, his short and ferocious attack on the wild, brooded the forest. That bent over us, and it might have been solicitous and compassionate, or it might have been merely curious about the behaviour of the surprising creatures who had come there for the first time, and had been so active for a while. Sitting in the pour of the sun, looking upon the scanty work of my fellows, and then upon the near watchful ranks of that continent of trees pressing close to regard the grave-like trench into which man's hope might have been thrown, I had a dread of the easy and enduring dominion of those powers which were before man.