Bardamu crosses the jungle and reaches Santa Petta

Bardamu crosses the jungle and reaches San Tapeta during a feverish flight from the colonial trading post, but arrival brings no simple escape. Carried through the forest by local laborers, he finds temporary help from a Spanish sergeant and reaches a town whose distant beauty gives way, close at hand, to the same overworked people and bodily suffering he has encountered elsewhere. The episode makes the journey’s central reversal plain: the landscape changes, but illness, labor, and colonial hardship travel with him.

The jungle crossing

Bardamu sets out in the direction taken by Robinson while he is already gravely ill. The forest reaches him first as sound: calls and roars seem to come from innumerable animals, yet at their apparent source he finds only a few conspicuous creatures, including blue guinea fowl. The mismatch between an overwhelming jungle chorus and the sparse animals he actually sees establishes the uncertainty of his passage. A small wild pig nearly underfoot is one of the rare exceptions.

The movement through the forest is laborious and largely beyond Bardamu’s control. Local men carry him in a litter made from sacks sewn end to end as they wade through yellow mud and cross streams. He imagines that they might abandon him or harm him, but does not yet understand why they do not. His suspicions arise from his fever and from the colonial assumptions surrounding him; the men’s practical assistance is an observable fact, even while he remains unable to read their intentions.

Illness further unsettles the distinction between observation and hallucination. Bardamu suffers bouts of diarrhea and fever, sees the world turning green, and after nightfall hears animals around the camp. A wounded animal’s cry reaches him through the darkness. By the fourth day, he can no longer reliably separate events from fever images, which arrive mixed with fragments of people and broken resolutions. In retrospect, he singles out one encounter as real, though the broader journey remains partly lost to him.

The Spanish sergeant’s help

Near the meeting of two rivers, on a rocky rise beside a loud cataract, the travelers encounter a bearded Spanish sergeant. He lives alone in a shack in Rio del Rio, a colony described as an old possession of the Crown of Castile. Like Alcide, he is an isolated colonial soldier, but his circumstances have their own stark particulars: for nearly two months, migrating red ants have been passing through his dwelling, leaving little room to move and biting anyone in their way.

Bardamu shares his cassoulet with the sergeant, whose diet has consisted of tomatoes for three years. The soldier says that he has consumed more than three thousand cans, eventually taking to sucking the contents through holes punched in their lids. The ants’ interest in the newly arrived food makes the gift precarious, but the exchange creates a small bond between two stranded men. Bardamu likes his host enough to give him all the cassoulet; in return, the sergeant prepares a passport for him on rough paper bearing the arms of Castile, carefully adding an elaborate signature.

The sergeant also tells Bardamu that San Tapeta is the capital of Rio del Rio and a port known for its transoceanic galleys. Bardamu asks him for a remedy for the fever and delirium, but the soldier rejects native medicine. The encounter offers practical help—a passport and directions—without providing a cure. Bardamu remembers little of the journey onward, only that the road was easy to follow and that he was handed over to a priest upon arrival.

Arrival in San Tapeta

San Tapeta stands on a rocky slope facing the sea. From the roadstead it appears magnificent and strikingly green; on arrival, however, Bardamu sees no marvel beyond people working and sweating as they did in Fort-Gono. The contrast between the impressive view from a distance and the laboring bodies on the ground punctures the promise of the town as a refuge. A change of place has not changed the conditions of colonial life.

At a lucid moment, Bardamu dismisses the men who have carried him across the jungle. They say that they fear the return journey and weep at the thought of undertaking it. He is too exhausted to feel pity. The moment registers both their danger and the limits of his own attention: the carriers have borne him through the forest, but at the end of the route he can scarcely respond to their distress.

The priest takes Bardamu to the presbytery, where a bed is set aside for him and curious townspeople gather around him day and night. Conversation exhausts him; the priest gives him herbal drinks, while a long gilt crucifix hangs over the priest’s belly and coins clink inside his cassock as he approaches. Bardamu feels close to death and tries to take a final look through the window. His account of the gardens is expressly uncertain, but retains the sun, enormous vegetation, and toads as large as spaniels. The scene combines the presbytery’s religious trappings with the tropical environment and the crowd’s appetite for distraction, while leaving Bardamu too weak to make sense of it all.

Narrative significance

The episode is shaped by a retrospective voice that repeatedly qualifies its own memory. Bardamu says he does not remember the trip to San Tapeta, identifies the Spanish sergeant as real only by present-day recollection, and doubts the accuracy of what he can still picture from the priest’s window. These admissions make the journey not a clear sequence of discoveries but an account reconstructed from fever, exhaustion, and partial survival.

Across the crossing and arrival, people are seen in relation to labor and physical endurance. Bardamu’s carriers bear him through difficult terrain; the sergeant survives in isolation among migrating ants; and the residents of San Tapeta appear to him as overworked people rather than the promise suggested by the town’s distant beauty. The assistance Bardamu receives is genuine but limited: a shared meal earns him a passport, the route delivers him to shelter, and the priest tends to him, yet none of these gestures lifts him out of illness or colonial hardship. Arrival marks a pause in the journey, not its resolution.