The traveler sits in the humid stew of another day, taking notice now of all sorts of little things. He is like a slack-jawed prisoner whose cell has becomes his universe. Details carve themselves like graffiti onto the walls of his prison cell, his mind, his memory, his dreams. The smell of wet earth fills his head like a dose of alien laughing-gas until he finds himself slowly going mad in this place without definiton, lost in the labyrinth of hammocks crowding the slippery wide riverboat deck like rows of alien pods growing on a sleeping monsters back in a troubled fever-dream.
The tiniest, most minute details are blending together now in a timeless montage of spectacular sunsets and sunrises, storms and the constant comings and goings of a surreal cast of characters occupying the hammocks around him. A group of Argentine boys are chattering in his ear like drunken parakeets, then they are gone, replaced by whole families of Amazonian Indians bundled together under grey blankets in their hammocks, cowering before the elements.
A brown skinned boy with a sunken tubercular chest eyes as black as the night sky is standing by the rail. A small monkey with a long tiger-striped tail is sitting on his shoulder picking lice from the boy’s hair, eyeing the curious traveler defensively. The boy turns to look off into the water and the monkey pivots like a camera to continue it’s staring match with the strange traveler under the imposing glare of a fantastic rising moon. A bare chested thirteen year old Indian girl breast-feeds a baby not much larger than the monkey. What do these people think about, what is this place, this life? Who are these strange traveling souls with faces like monkeys and minds the traveler does not know?
This is my personal fav. scene in the book.