in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their proteges
for the authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government
which caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its `taxables',
chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind.
Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes
in what they thought they saw was right. On foot and unattended
Fathers Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand captives to Brazil,
confessing those who fell upon the road before they died,
and instant in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners' release.
Father Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those
who could hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead
with hunger and his constant toil. Especially he strove to effect
the release of a captive chief called Guiravera, who had been
one of his bitterest enemies, and strove so hard that a Paulista captain,
either touched by his zeal or wearied with his pleading,
released the chief, his wife and family, and six of the Indians of his tribe.
The chief returned to become the Jesuits' best friend,
and the two priests on foot followed the captives' train.
What they endured on foot without provisions, tortured by insects,
and in danger from wild beasts, as well as constant perils from the Paulistas,
who now and then pricked them with lances or fired pistols over their heads
to frighten them away, none but those who have journeyed
in the forests of that forgotten corner of the world can estimate.
I see them in their torn and sun-browned cassocks struggling through
the `esteros'*1* in water to the knees, falling and rising oft,
after the fashion of the supposititious Christian on life's way;
pushing along through forest paths across which darted humming-birds,
now coming on a dying man and kneeling by his side, now gathering
the berries of the guavirami*2* to eat upon the road, and then again
catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside the trail, and all the time