SILENCES
"Who has not hearkened to Her infinite din?"--THOREAU.
Free alike from the clatter of pastimes and the creaks and groans of
labour, this region discovers acute sensibility to sound. Silence in its
rarest phases soothes the Isle, reproaching disturbances, though never so
temperate. All the endemic sounds are primitive and therefore seldom
harsh. Even the mysterious fall of a tree in the jungle--not an unusual
occurrence on still days during the wet season--is unaccompanied by thud
and shock. Encompassing vines and creepers, colossal in strength and
overwhelming in weight, which have strained the tree to breaking point,
ease their burden down, muffling its descent, though now and again the
primal rupture of trunk or branch rings out a sharp protest, and
following the fall is silence--that varying, elusive sensation not to he
expressed by the absence of actual noise.
There are silences which tinkle or buzz in the ears, causing them to ache
with stress and strain; silences dull and sad as a wad of wool; silences
as searching as the odour of musk--as soothing as the perfume of violets.
The crisp silence of the seashore when absolute calm prevails is as
different from the strained, sodden, padded silence of the jungle as the
savour of olives from the raw insipidity of white of egg, for the
cumbersome mantle of leafage is the surest stifler of noise, the truest
cherisher of silence.
The most imperious hour of this realm of silence is three o'clock in the
afternoon, when the sun has absorbed the energies of the most volatile of
birds and insects. An hour later all may begin to assert themselves after
a reviving, siesta; yet during the intensest hour of silence any abrupt
noise--a call, or whistle, or bark of a dog--finds an immediate response.
No sound has been heard for an hour. All the birds have been stricken
dumb or have been banished, yet as an echo to any violation of the
silence comes the sweet, mellow, inquisitive note of the "moor-goody" (to
use the black's name, for the shrike thrush). The bird seems fond of
sound and will answer in trills and chuckles attempts to imitate its
call.
The condition of perfect silence is not for this noisy sphere. The artist
in so-called silences merely registers certain more or less delicate
sound-waves flowing in easy contours, which others have not the leisure
to distinguish. Often have I found myself as I strolled gloating over the
exquisite absence of sound--enjoying in full mental relish the quaint and
refined sensation. Yet when I have stopped and listened determinedly,
viciously analysing my sensations, have I become aware of a hubbub of
frail and interblended sounds. That which I had thought to be distilled
silence, was microphonic Babel--an intimate commingling of analogous
noises varying in quality and intensity. By wilful resistance to what
Falstaff called "the disease of not listening," I have been privileged to
become aware of the singing of a quiet tune, some of the phrases of which
were directly derivative from inarticulate vegetation--the thud of glossy
blue quandongs on the soft floor of the jungle, the clicking of a
discarded leaf as it fell from topmost twigs down through the strata of
foliage, the bursting of a seed-pod, the patter of rejects from the
million pink-fruited fig, overhanging the beach, the whisper of leaves,
the faint squeal where interlocked branches fret each other unceasingly,
the sigh of phantom zephyrs too elusive to be felt.
Echoes from vistas of silence far in the jungle lost their individuality
in a sob. Grasshoppers clinked in the forest, the hum of bees and
beetles, the fluty plaint of a painted pigeon far in the gloom, the
furtive scamper of scrub fowl among leaves made tender by decay, the
splash of startled fish in the shadows, commingled and blended to the
accompaniment of that subdued aerial buzz by which Nature manifests the
more secret of her functions and art--that ineffable minstrelsy to which
her silent battalions keep step. Preoccupation, the whirl of my own
temperate thoughts, scared silence, while as soon as the mental machine
was stilled, the very trees became vocal. Thus have I caught fleet
silences as they passed in chase of fugitive sounds.
Since the morning stars sang together, absolute silence has not visited
the uneasy earth. In this Silent Isle the ears--
"Set to small measure, deaf to all the beats
Of the large music rolling o'er the world"--
become almost supernaturally alert, catching the faintest sound.
Kinglake, who heard in the Syrian desert while dozing on his camel and
for ten minutes after awakening "the innocent bells of Marlen,"
attributed the phenomenon to the heat of the sun, the perfect dryness,
the deep stillness, "having rendered the ears liable to tingle under the
passing touch of some mere memory that may have swept across my brain in
a moment of sleep." Homesick sailors, too, lost in the profound stillness
of mid-ocean, have listened with fearful wonder to the phantom chiming of
their village bells.
Apart from the tricks which memory plays upon the solitary individual,
inviting him by scents and sounds to scenes of the past, I find that the
moist unadulterated atmosphere is a most compliant medium for the
transmission of certain sorts of sound waves. The actual surface of the
sea--differing from its resonant bulk--seems to sap up, rather than
convey sounds, though on given planes above its level sounds travel
unimpeded for remarkable distances. The resonance of the atmosphere
appears at times to be dependent on the tone and quality rather than on
the abruptness and loudness of the sound. I have listened with strange
delight to the rustle of the sea on the mainland beach--two and a half
miles distant--when the air has been so idle that the sensitive
casuarinas--ever haunted by some secret woe upon which to moan and
sob--have been mute and unable to find excuse for the faintest sigh. The
branches which thinly shaded me hung limp and still and yet the soft,
white-footed sea marking time on the harder sands of the mainland set
distance at naught in one continuous murmur.
However listless the air, the coral-reef, though its crowded life is
inarticulate and mute is ever brisk with minor but strenuous noises.
Splashes and gurgles, sighs and gasps, coughs and sneezes, sharp clicks
and snaps and snarls--telling of alarms, tragic escapes, and violent
death-dealings--blend with the continuous murmur of the sea, and are
occasionally punctuated by sudden slaps and thuds as a blundering,
hammer-head shark pursues a high-leaping eagle-ray, or the red-backed sea
eagle dashes down upon a preoccupied bream, the impact of its firm breast
embossing a white rosette on the blue water.
In the absence of vibratory media the noises of the reef are isolated.
furtive, echoless--staccato accidentals and dull dissonances out of tune
with the soothing theme of the sea. Hence, when, as I wandered absorbed
in an inspection of minor details, and a mellow whistle, constant but
varying in volume, broke in upon my musings, it was vain to repress the
thrill of excitement. A sound so foreign and incongruous also had a
certain element of mystery. In a flash unsensational ponderings were
displaced by a picture of a steamer in distress far away. Had I not on a
similar occasion of a secret-disclosing tide heard through seven miles of
insulted and sullen air the flop of an inch or so of dynamite exploded by
a heartless barbarian for the illicit destruction of vivacious fish? Had
I not listened with amazement to the buzz of a steamer's propeller and
the throb of her engines six miles away when unaccustomed "nigger-heads"
of coral showed yellow in the sun? The calm, shallow sea conveyed the
sounds with marvellous fidelity and surety. Yet this unaccountable call
came from a quarter whence steamers may not venture, and was I not the
only whistler within a range of many miles? No steamer ever gloated or
warned or appealed in so fluty a note--plaintive, slightly tremulous,
nervously imploring.
Alert, I tracked the strange sound along an eccentric course to its
haunt, finding nothing more than the empty shell of a huge sea urchin,
which in accord with a whim of the sea had floated and was now held aloft
slantwise to the lips of the wind, firm in the branching tines of
stag's-horn coral. A rustic pipe--giving forth a sonorous moan, now
cooing and crooning, now bold and confident, and again irresolute and
unschooled. Not too sure of instrumentalism, oft the note was hesitating,
soliciting a compliant ear as became a modest wooer of the muses,
polishing his unceremonious serenade to some, shy mermaid, or hooting at
shyer silence.
A new art, a rare accomplishment! So the musician was diffident,
half-ashamed, half-shocked at his audacity, wholly self-conscious;
earnest to please yet doubtful of the reception awaiting his untutored,
artless play. Gathering courage, the breeze moistened his lips and a
triumphant spasm of sound boomed out, and again the tremulous undertone
prevailed. It was more than a serenade--a primitive sensation from
primitive matter--a vital function, for as long, as the wind blew and
until the lapping sea gurgled in its throat and its note ceased with the
bursting of a bubble, there, held fixedly by living coral, the dead shell
could not choose but whistle. So I left it to its wayward pipings, happy
to have been the sole auditor to a purely natural, albeit mechanical,
monotone. Upon such an instrument did the heavenly maid beguile the time
when she was yet uncouthly young--at the hoydenish age when men also
cajoled her with clicking sticks and the beating of hollow logs, and
music was but a variety of noise.