I
Within gun-reach in front of me trudged my little Akawai Indian
hunter. He turned his head suddenly, his ears catching some sound
which mine had missed, and I saw that his profile was rather
like that of Dante. Instantly the thought spread and the simile
deepened. Were we two not all alone? and this unearthly hour and
light--Then I chuckled softly, but the silence that the chuckle
shattered shrank away and made it a loud, coarse sound, so that I
involuntarily drew in my breath. But it was really amusing, the
thought of Dante setting out on a hunt for kinkajous and giant
armadillos. Jeremiah looked at me wonderingly, and we went on in
silence. And for the next mile Dante vanished from my thoughts and
I mused upon the sturdy little red man. Jeremiah was his civilized
name; he would never tell me his real one. It seemed so unsuited
to him that I thought up one still less appropriate and called him
Nupee--which is the three-toed sloth; and in his quiet way he saw
the humor of it, for a more agile human being never lived.
Nupee’s face was unclouded, but his position as hunter to our
expedition had brought decisions and responsibilities which he had
not known before. The simple life,--the unruffled existence in the
little open _benab_, with hammock, cassava field, and an occasional
hunt,--this was of the past. A wife had come, slipping quietly
into his life, Indian-fashion; and now, before the baby arrived,
decisions had to be made. Nupee longed for some store shoes and a
suit of black clothes. He had owned a big _benab_ which he himself
had built; but a godmother, like the cowbird in a warbler’s nest,
had gradually but firmly ousted him and had filled it with diseased
relatives, so that it was unpleasant to visit. He now, to my
knowledge, owned a single shirt and a pair of short trousers.
The shoes were achieved. I detected in him qualities which I knew
that I should find in some one, as I do on every expedition, and I
made him perform some unnecessary labor and gave him the shoes. But
the clothes would cost five dollars, a month’s wages, and he had
promised to get married--white-fashion--in another month, and that
would consume several times five dollars. I did not offer to help
him decide. His Akawai marriage ceremony seemed not without honor,
and as for its sincerity--I had seen the two together. But my lips
were sealed. I could not tell him that a recementing of the ritual
of his own tribe did not seem quite the equal of a five-dollar suit
of clothes. That was a matter for individual decision.
But to-night I think that we both had put all our worries and
sorrows far away, and I memory as well; and I felt sympathy in the
quiet, pliant gait which carried him so swiftly over the sandy
trail. I knew Nupee now for what he was--the one for whom I am
always on the lookout, the exceptional one, the super-servant,
worthy of friendship as an equal. I had seen his uncle and his
cousins. They were Indians, nothing more. Nupee had slipped into
the place left vacant for a time by Aladdin, and by Satán and
Shimosaka, by Drojak and Trujillo--all exceptional, all faithful,
all servants first and then friends. I say ‘for a time’--for they
all hoped, and I think still hope with me, that we shall meet
and travel and camp together again, whether in the Cinghalese
thorn-bush, or Himalayan dâks, in Dyak canoes or among the camphor
groves of Sakarajama.
Nupee and I had not been thrown together closely. This had proved a
static expedition, settled in one place, with no dangers to speak
of, no real roughing it, and we met only after each hunting trip.
But the magic of a full moon had lured me from my laboratory table,
and here we were, we two, plodding junglewards, becoming better
acquainted in silence than I have often achieved with much talk.
It was nearly midnight. We traversed a broad trail of white sand,
between lines of saplings of pale-barked rubber trees, flooded,
saturated, with milky-gray light. Not a star appeared in the
cloudless sky, which, in contrast to the great silver moon-plaque,
was blue-black. These open sandy stretches, so recently etched into
what had been primitive jungle, were too glowing with light for
most of the nocturnal creatures who, in darkness, flew and ran and
hunted about in them. And the lovers of twilight were already come
and gone. The stage was vacant save for one actor--the nighthawk
of the silvery collar, whose eerie _wheeeo!_ or more leisurely and
articulate _who-are-you?_ was queried from stump and log. There was
in it the same liquid tang, the virile ringing of skates on ice,
which enriches the cry of the whip-poor-will in our country lanes.
Where the open trail skirted a hillside we came suddenly upon a
great gathering of these goatsuckers, engaged in some strange
midnight revel. Usually they roost and hunt and call in solitude,
but here at least forty were collected on the white sand within an
area of a few yards. We stopped and watched. They were dancing--or,
rather, popping, as corn pops in a hopper. One after another, or a
half dozen at a time, they bounced up a foot or two from the ground
and flopped back, at the instant of leaving and returning uttering
a sudden, explosive _wop!_ This they kept up unceasingly for the
five minutes we gave to them, and our passage interrupted them for
only a moment. Later we passed single birds which popped and wopped
in solitary state; whether practicing, or snobbishly refusing to
perform in public, only they could tell. It was a scene not soon
forgotten.
Suddenly before us rose the jungle, raw-edged, with border zone of
bleached, ashamed trunks and lofty branches white as chalk, of dead
and dying trees. For no jungle tree, however hardy, can withstand
the blasting of violent sun after the veiling of emerald foliage is
torn away. As the diver plunges beneath the waves, so, after one
glance backward over the silvered landscape, I passed at a single
stride into what seemed by contrast inky blackness, relieved by the
trail ahead, which showed as does a ray of light through closed
eyelids. As the chirruping rails climbed among the roots of the
tall cat-tails out yonder, so we now crept far beneath the level
of the moonlit foliage. The silvery landscape had been shifted one
hundred, two hundred feet above the earth. We had become lords of
creation in name alone, threading our way humbly among the fungi
and toad-stools, able only to look aloft and wonder what it was
like. And for a long time no voice answered to tell us whether any
creature lived and moved in the tree-tops.
The tropical jungle by day is the most wonderful place in the
world. At night I am sure it is the most weirdly beautiful of
all places outside the world. For it is primarily unearthly,
unreal; and at last I came to know why. In the light of the full
moon it was rejuvenated. The simile of theatrical scenery was
always present to the mind, the illusion lying especially in the
completeness of transformation from the jungle by daylight. The
theatrical effect was heightened by the sense of being in some
vast building. This was due to the complete absence of any breath
of air. Not a leaf moved; even the pendulous air-roots reaching
down their seventy-foot plummets for the touch of soil did not
sway a hair’s breadth. The throb of the pulse set the rhythm
for one’s steps. The silence, for a time, was as perfect as the
breathlessness. It was a wonderfully ventilated amphitheatre; the
air was as free from any feeling of tropical heat, as it lacked all
crispness of the north. It was exactly the temperature of one’s
skin. Heat and cold were for the moment as unthinkable as wind.
One’s body seemed wholly negligible. In soft padding moccasins and
easy swinging gait, close behind my Indian hunter, and in such
khaki browns that my body was almost invisible to my own downward
glance, I was conscious only of the play of my senses: of two at
first, sight and smell; later, of hearing. The others did not
exist. We two were unattached, impersonal, moving without effort or
exertion. It was magic, and I was glad that I had only my Akawai
for companion, for it was magic that a word would have shattered.
Yet there was this wonderfully satisfying thing about it, that most
magic lacks: it exists at present, to-day, perhaps, at least once
a month, and I know that I shall experience it again. When I go to
the window and look out upon the city night, I find all extraneous
light emaciated and shattered by the blare of gas and electricity,
but from one upreaching tower I can see reflected a sheen which
is not generated in any power-house of earth. Then I know that
within the twenty-four hours the _terai_ jungles of Garhwal, the
tree-ferns of Pahang, and the mighty _moras_ which now surround us,
were standing in silvery silence and in the peace which only the
wilderness knows.
I soon took the lead and slackened the pace to a slow walk. Every
few minutes we stood motionless, listening with mouth as well as
ears. For no one who has not listened in such silence can realize
how important the mouth is. Like the gill of old which gave it
origin, our ear has still an entrance inward as well as outward,
and the sweep of breath and throb of the blood are louder than we
ever suspect. When at an opera or concert I see some one sitting
rapt, listening with open mouth, I do not think of it as ill-bred.
I know it for unconscious and sincere absorption based on an
excellent physical reason.
It was early spring in the tropics; insect life was still in the
gourmand stage, or that of pupal sleep. The final period of pipe
and fiddle had not yet arrived, so that there was no hum from
the underworld. The flow of sap and the spread of petals were no
less silent than the myriad creatures which, I knew, slumbered or
hunted on every side. It was as if I had slipped back one dimension
in space and walked in a shadow world. But these shadows were not
all colorless. Although the light was strained almost barren by
the moon mountains, yet the glow from the distant lava and craters
still kept something of color, and the green of the leaves, great
and small, showed as a rich dark olive. The afternoon’s rain had
left each one filmed with clear water, and this struck back the
light as polished silver. There was no tempered illumination. The
trail ahead was either black, or a solid sheet of light. Here and
there in the jungle on each side, where a tree had fallen, or a
flue of clear space led moonwards, the effect was of cold electric
light seen through trees in city parks. When such a shaft struck
down upon us, it surpassed simile. I have seen old paintings
in Belgian cathedrals of celestial light which now seems less
imaginary.
At last the silence was broken, and like the first breath of the
trade-wind which clouds the Mazaruni surface, the mirror of silence
was never quite clear again--or so it seemed. My northern mind,
stored with sounds of memory, never instinctively accepted a new
voice of the jungle for what it was. Each had to go through a
reference clearing-house of sorts. It was like the psychological
reaction to words or phrases. Any strange wail or scream striking
suddenly upon my ear instantly crystallized some vision of the
past--some circumstance or adventure fraught with similar sound.
Then, appreciably as a second thought, came the keen concentration
of every sense to identify this new sound, to hear it again, to
fix it in mind with its character and its meaning. Perhaps at some
distant place and time, in utterly incongruous surroundings, it may
in turn flash into consciousness--a memory-simile stimulated by
some sound of the future.