If Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, still keeping
himself alive by means of his marvellous knowledge of the secrets of
Nature, were to appear before me now on this mountain to inform me
that the sacred community he resided with in Central Africa was no
mere dream, and should offer to conduct me to it, I should decline to
go with him. I should prefer to remain in the Banda Oriental, even
though by so doing I should grow at last to be as bad as any person
in it, and ready to "wade through slaughter" to the Presidential Chair.
For even in my own country of England, which is not so perfect as old
Peru or the Pophar's country in Central Africa, I have been long divided
from Nature, and now in this Oriental country, whose political misdeeds
are a scandal alike to pure England and impure Brazil, I have been
reunited to her. For this reason I love her with all her faults. Here,
like Santa Coloma, I will kneel down and kiss this stone, as an infant
might kiss the breast that feeds it; here, fearless of dirt, like John
Carrickfergus, I will thrust my hands into the loose brown soil to
clasp the hands, as it were, of dear mother Nature after our long
separation.
Farewell, beautiful land of sunshine and storm, of virtue and of crime;
may the invaders of the future fare on your soil like those of the
past and leave you in the end to your own devices; may the chivalrous
instinct of Santa Coloma, the passion of Dolores, the loving-kindness
of Candelaria still live in your children to brighten their lives with
romance and beauty; may the blight of our superior civilisation never
fall on your wild flowers, or the yoke of our progress be laid on your
herdsman--careless, graceful, music-loving as the birds--to make him
like the sullen, abject peasant of the Old World!
CHAPTER XXIX
The meeting of my fellow-travellers took place next day on board the
ship, where we three were the only cabin passengers.
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