MAGIC JOURNEY

Evening Star, Issue 21890, 29 November 1934, Page 9

MAGIC JOURNEY

FLYING DOWN TO RIO WHERE WITCHCRAFT LINGERS OVER TROPIC SEAS There are still a few halfway hoyses where East meets West, where science and magic operate side by The great seaplanes flying between Florida and Argentina land at some of these strange places, writes Rosita Forbes, in the ‘ Daily Mail.’ Miami, from which they start, is the playground of speculators, speed fiends, platinum blondes. There is no getting away from them, and they all look extremely expensive. Soon after dawn the quadruple-en-gined seaplane starts on its way south eight days to Beunos Aires, the other end of the world. At Cuba there may be a whisper of revolution. Convents are in danger. Two sisters who have never left the island, or the ground, come on board. It is very hot. Their stiff skirts fill the cabin. “ Their petticoats must be made of planks!” complains a motor salesman, as ho sits crushed into the smallest space between the spreading sisters, who never look out of the window and whose lips move ceaselessly, silently, till, .with a majestic swirl, the seaplane descends at Haiti. 1 The passengers crowd into a bar famous for a pineapple drink laced with rum. America is still with ns on the radio. Elder Michaux, who rose from negro fish peddler to preacher, is being interviewed in far-away Washington. “No member of my church smokes, drinks, or dances,” expounds the elder. “ We fast one day a month, and our savings go to the unemployed.”

BLACK MAGIC. But, tired of the virtues of the north, the passengers wander out among the peasants, who wear blue overalls and hats made of fan-palm, leaves. The men work with cutlasses; the girls carry on their heads gourds filled with syrup. Black men, striding silently, their out-thrust lips, their palms, and the soles of their feet paler than the rest of their skin, their eyes bloodshot, make for the hills. “ There is a ceremony ” someone says. The sound of flutes muted with paper dies at the outskirts of the town. The whole black world is moving towards this sound, with which the witch doctors communicate at full- moon. Impeded by our hoots, wo Anglo-Saxons follow, ‘in a declivity, surrounded by rocks, are ranged a crowd of figures the colour of burned coffee. In the centre of the circle is a huge ash-grey negro with glazed eyes who shuffles from one foot to another as if he were an automaton. The witch doctor advances with an axe in his hand. His face is smeared with lime. Tufts of feathers stick to his loins and sides. By a rhythmic incantation he strives to summon the powers obedient to Black Magic. When lie begins to whirl the chopper about his head the watching negroes shudder to their knees. In front of them, quivering like a jelly, crouches the huge black with the ash-grey face... Then it happens—or perhaps it doesn’t happen, and two Canadian engineers, three hard-boiled American salesmen, one English traveller ? and a local professor simply imagine it! Headers can take their choice. THE AXE FALLS. In any case, the axe swings. The huge nigger ceases to shake. The next instant the witch doctor is—apparently —holding up a head, while two acolytes bend solicitously over the trunk. Meanwhile, the witch doctor spins in quickening circles with his trophy held high. Then he swoops upon the body of his victim and refits the head to the bleeding neck. A shiver passes through the audience. The victim rises t cautiously feeling his neck, on which the recent operation has left no mark, and recommences his shuffle. Immediately the audience, still kneeling, begin to jerk themselves into the first stages of an ecstasy which, a few hours later, will leave them limp as corpses. “ Let’s get out!” says one of the engineers. “ I guess there’s something wrong with our eyes.” Antigua, Port of Spaip, Paramaribo! The,seaplane descends on the Surinam River hosido a little Dutch town built on stilts to avoid the white ants, with bells ringing from the twin spires of the Lutheran Church, and a white rain or a black rain, according to its violence, falling on the statue of Queen Wilhelmina.

By missing a connection at Paramaribo you can go up river between smooth jungle walls, palisaded ‘with trees that break into flowers eighty feet above the swamps, in which they struggle for footholds, and closeplaited with creepers wherein lurk the murderous mnka snakes.

TO THE AMAZON. “ Will you catch one for me? ” “ Oh, iio, please! ” retorts the black in charge, of the punt. 1 ‘ Mo go too much dead.” But he will show you a fire dance if you convince him of your good faith. A monotonous coastline edged by coffee-coloured swamp reaches out to Cayenne, where the whole country is a prison. The seaplane makes a circle over the three islands of the French penal settlement. Devil’s Island is the furthest out of the three, and, in spite of its reputation, is charming to look at. Next day the pilot makes a detour to show his passengers the lighthouse of L’Jle Perdue, tended by convicts who volunteer for the task and who, surrounded by a stormless sea, mysteriously decrease in number. Sheets of rain as the seaplane approaches the Amazon. Tho sea is churned into tea-coloured foam. Space is curtained in dark, stinging water. There is gloomy talk of a night afloat, but directions come by wireless: “ Visibility at 2,000 feet.” The pilot zooms upwards, and in a few moments tho Amazon is seen as a flat, broad waste beyond the storm.

Para lives in the past, when she was unbelievably enriched by her forests of wild rubber, when speculators paid ton and twenty dollars for the privilege of sleeping in a crowded corridor, and gamblers lit their cigarettes in the casino with notes of the same value. She dreams of the future, when she hopes—in spite of the cheaper cost of production in Malay and the East Inci;cs —to be rich again. But at present she is dead. ON TO RIO. It is from the impression of a cemetery that the passengers are awakened at 3 a.in. for the long flight to San tjiiiz, where the radio speaks BrazilinuPortugucsc, interspersed with the husky Spanish of the republics further south. Cnmocimi, Fortalezzn, forests as uninhabited as any conceivable desert, and long stretches of sea where, dropping down to fifty or sixty feet above the

water, the pilot scares thousands of birds off the mud flats —blue herons and white cranes, the grey of innumerable gulls, flamingoes torn from the sunrise, spoonbills, egrets, and bloodred ibis! Then Natal, goal of transatlantic flyers, where the talk, in softthroated Portuguese, is of coffee and copra and cotton. Rio next day. The city, forest-girt and flower-filled, is a breathless pause between the upward thrust of her mighty granite cones and the still indige of her seas. The beaches gleam liko many-coloured silks upon a counter or daggers gently curved in cases of blue damask. After four thousand miles of Brazil, linked by her forests with the virgin growth of the Amazon, there is Uruguay, the Russia of South America, modern and experimental. And, at long last, Buenos Aires, an imperial city built on a scale to suit the, Argentine of 2034, when that vast republic, where land is measured by the square league, will welcome immigration on the same scale ns she now breeds cattle. Buenos Aires—and to a final whisper from the guardian radio, which has directed the seaplane from Miami : “ Wind Direction Visibility,” the great machine circles down to the River Plate.