Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Mark C. Orton, Linda
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[Illustration: WILLIAM BEEBE
Author of Edge of the Jungle, Jungle Days, Gallapagos, World's End,
The Arcturus Adventure, etc.]
BY THE AUTHOR OF "JUNGLE DAYS,"
"THE LOG OF THE SUN," ETC.
EDGE OF THE
JUNGLE
By WILLIAM BEEBE
_Honorary Curator of Birds and Director of the Tropical
Research Station of the New York Zoological Society._
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1921
BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
* * * * *
TO
THE BIRDS AND BUTTERFLIES,
THE ANTS AND TREE-FROGS
WHO HAVE TOLERATED ME IN
THEIR JUNGLE ANTE-CHAMBERS
I OFFER THIS VOLUME OF
FRIENDLY WORDS
* * * * *
NOTE
This second series of essays, following those in _Jungle Peace_, are
republished by the kindness of the Editors of _The Atlantic Monthly_,
_Harper's Magazine_ and _House and Garden_.
With the exception of _A Tropic Garden_ which refers to the Botanical
Gardens of Georgetown, all deal with the jungle immediately about the
Tropical Research Station of the New York Zoological Society, situated
at Kartabo, at the junction of the Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers, in
British Guiana.
For the accurate identification of the more important organisms
mentioned, a brief appendix of scientific names has been prepared.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE LURE OF KARTABO 3
II A JUNGLE CLEARING 34
III THE HOME TOWN OF THE ARMY ANTS 58
IV A JUNGLE BEACH 90
V A BIT OF USELESSNESS 112
VI GUINEVERE THE MYSTERIOUS 123
VII A JUNGLE LABOR UNION 149
VIII THE ATTAS AT HOME 172
IX HAMMOCK NIGHTS 195
X A TROPIC GARDEN 230
XI THE BAY OF BUTTERFLIES 252
XII SEQUELS 274
APPENDIX OF SCIENTIFIC NAMES 295
INDEX 299
* * * * *
EDGE OF THE JUNGLE
"For the true scientific method is this:
To trust no statements without verification,
to test all things as rigorously as possible,
to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies,
to give out one's best modestly and plainly,
serving no other end but knowledge."
H. G. WELLS.
I
THE LURE OF KARTABO
A house may be inherited, as when a wren rears its brood in turn
within its own natal hollow; or one may build a new home such as is
fashioned from year to year by gaunt and shadowy herons; or we may
have it built to order, as do the drones of the wild jungle bees. In
my case, I flitted like a hermit crab from one used shell to another.
This little crustacean, living his oblique life in the shallows,
changes doorways when his home becomes too small or hinders him in
searching for the things which he covets in life. The difference
between our estates was that the hermit crab sought only for food, I
chiefly for strange new facts--which was a distinction as trivial as
that he achieved his desires sideways and on eight legs, while I
traversed my environment usually forward and generally on two.
The word of finance went forth and demanded the felling of the second
growth around Kalacoon, and for the second time the land was given
over to cutlass and fire. But again there was a halting in the affairs
of man, and the rubber saplings were not planted or were smothered;
and again the jungle smiled patiently through a knee-tangle of thorns
and blossoms, and the charred clumps of razor-grass sent forth skeins
of saws and hanks of living barbs.
I stood beneath the familiar cashew trees, which had yielded for me so
bountifully of their crops of blossoms and hummingbirds, of fruit and
of tanagers, and looked out toward the distant jungle, which trembled
through the expanse of palpitating heat-waves; and I knew how a hermit
crab feels when its home pinches, or is out of gear with the world.
And, too, Nupee was dead, and the jungle to the south seemed to call
less strongly. So I wandered through the old house for the last time,
sniffing the agreeable odor of aged hypo still permeating the dark
room, re-covering the empty stains of skins and traces of maps on the
walls, and re-filling in my mind the vacant shelves. The vampires had
returned to their chosen roost, the martins still swept through the
corridors, and as I went down the hill, a moriche oriole sent a silver
shaft of song after me from the sentinel palm, just as he had greeted
me four years ago.
Then I gathered about me all the strange and unnameable possessions of
a tropical laboratory--and moved. A wren reaches its home after
hundreds of miles of fast aerial travel; a hermit crab achieves a new
lease with a flip of his tail. Between these extremes, and in no less
strange a fashion, I moved. A great barge pushed off from the Penal
Settlement, piled high with my zoölogical Lares and Penates, and along
each side squatted a line of paddlers,--white-garbed burglars and
murderers, forgers and fighters,--while seated aloft on one of my
ammunition trunks, with a microscope case and a camera close under his
watchful eye, sat Case, King of the Warders, the biggest, blackest,
and kindest-hearted man in the world.
Three miles up river swept my moving-van; and from the distance I
could hear the half-whisper--which was yet a roar--of Case as he
admonished his children. "Mon," he would say to a shirking, shrinking
coolie second-story man, "mon, do you t'ink dis the time to sleep?
What toughts have you in your bosom, dat you delay de Professor's
household?" And then a chanty would rise, the voice of the leader
quavering with that wild rhythm which had come down to him, a vocal
heritage, through centuries of tom-toms and generations of savages
striving for emotional expression. But the words were laughable or
pathetic. I was adjured to
"Blow de mon down with a bottle of rum,
Oh, de mon--mon--blow de mon down."
Or the jungle reëchoed the edifying reiteration of
"Sardines--and bread--OH!
Sardines--and bread,
Sardines--and bread--AND!
Sardines--and bread."
The thrill that a whole-lunged chanty gives is difficult to describe.
It arouses some deep emotional response, as surely as a military band,
or the reverberating cadence of an organ, or a suddenly remembered
theme of opera.
As my aquatic van drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the
motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to
the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these
pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's
convicts--and I doubted it.
Across my doorstep a line of leaf-cutting ants was passing, each
bearing aloft a huge bit of green leaf, or a long yellow petal, or a
halberd of a stamen. A shadow fell over the line, and I looked up to
see an anthropomorphic enlargement of the ants,--the convicts winding
up the steep bank, each with cot, lamp, table, pitcher, trunk, or
aquarium balanced on his head,--all my possessions suspended between
earth and sky by the neck-muscles of worthy sinners. The first thing
to be brought in was a great war-bag packed to bursting, and Number
214, with eight more years to serve, let it slide down his shoulder
with a grunt--the self-same sound that I have heard from a Tibetan
woman carrier, and a Mexican peon, and a Japanese porter, all of whom
had in past years toted this very bag.
I led the way up the steps, and there in the doorway was a tenant, one
who had already taken possession, and who now faced me and the
trailing line of convicts with that dignity, poise, and perfect
self-possession which only a toad, a giant grandmother of a toad, can
exhibit. I, and all the law-breakers who followed, recognized the
nine tenths involved in this instance and carefully stepped around.
When the heavy things began to arrive, I approached diffidently, and
half suggested, half directed her deliberate hops toward a safer
corner. My feelings toward her were mingled, but altogether
kindly,--as guest in her home, I could not but treat her with
respect,--while my scientific soul revelled in the addition of _Bufo
guttatus_ to the fauna of this part of British Guiana. Whether
flashing gold of oriole, or the blinking solemnity of a great toad, it
mattered little--Kartabo had welcomed me with as propitious an omen as
had Kalacoon.
* * * * *
Houses have distinct personalities, either bequeathed to them by their
builders or tenants, absorbed from their materials, or emanating from
the general environment. Neither the mind which had planned our
Kartabo bungalow, nor the hands which fashioned it; neither the
mahogany walls hewn from the adjoining jungle, nor the white-pine
beams which had known many decades of snowy winters--none of these
were obtrusive. The first had passed into oblivion, the second had
been seasoned by sun and rain, papered by lichens, and gnawed and
bored by tiny wood-folk into a neutral inconspicuousness as complete
as an Indian's deserted _benab_. The wide verandah was open on all
sides, and from the bamboos of the front compound one looked straight
through the central hall-way to bamboos at the back. It seemed like a
happy accident of the natural surroundings, a jungle-bound cave, or
the low rambling chambers of a mighty hollow tree.
No thought of who had been here last came to us that first evening. We
unlimbered the creaky-legged cots, stiff and complaining after their
three years' rest, and the air was filled with the clean odor of
micaceous showers of naphthalene from long-packed pillows and sheets.
From the rear came the clatter of plates, the scent of ripe papaws and
bananas, mingled with the smell of the first fire in a new stove. Then
I went out and sat on my own twelve-foot bank, looking down on the
sandy beach and out and over to the most beautiful view in the
Guianas. Down from the right swept slowly the Mazaruni, and from the
left the Cuyuni, mingling with one wide expanse like a great rounded
lake, bounded by solid jungle, with only Kalacoon and the Penal
Settlement as tiny breaks in the wall of green.
The tide was falling, and as I sat watching the light grow dim, the
water receded slowly, and strange little things floated past
downstream. And I thought of the no less real human tide which long
years ago had flowed to my very feet and then ebbed, leaving, as drift
is left upon the sand, the convicts, a few scattered Indians, and
myself. In the peace and quiet of this evening, time seemed a thing of
no especial account. The great jungle trees might always have been
lifeless emerald water-barriers, rather than things of a few
centuries' growth; the ripple-less water bore with equal disregard the
last mora seed which floated past, as it had held aloft the keel of an
unknown Spanish ship three centuries before. These men came up-river
and landed on a little island a few hundred yards from Kartabo. Here
they built a low stone wall, lost a few buttons, coins, and bullets,
and vanished. Then came the Dutch in sturdy ships, cleared the islet
of everything except the Spanish wall, and built them a jolly little
fort intended to command all the rivers, naming it Kyk-over-al.
To-day the name and a strong archway of flat Holland bricks survive.
In this wilderness, so wild and so quiet to-day, it was amazing to
think of Dutch soldiers doing sentry duty and practising with their
little bell-mouthed cannon on the islet, and of scores of negro and
Indian slaves working in cassava fields all about where I sat. And
this not fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, but about the
year 1613, before John Smith had named New England, while the Hudson
was still known as the Maurice, before the Mayflower landed with all
our ancestors on board. For many years the story of this settlement
and of the handful of neighboring sugar-plantations is one of
privateer raids, capture, torture, slave-revolts, disease, bad
government, and small profits, until we marvel at the perseverance of
these sturdy Hollanders. From the records still extant, we glean here
and there amusing details of the life which was so soon to falter and
perish before the onpressing jungle. Exactly two hundred and fifty
years ago one Hendrik Rol was appointed commander of Kyk-over-al. He
was governor, captain, store-keeper and Indian trader, and his salary
was thirty guilders, or about twelve dollars, a month--about what I
paid my cook-boy.
The high tide of development at Kartabo came two hundred and three
years ago, when, as we read in the old records, a Colony House was
erected here. It went by the name of Huis Naby (the house nearby),
from its situation near the fort. Kyk-over-al was now left to the
garrison, while the commander and the civil servants lived in the new
building. One of its rooms was used as a council chamber and church,
while the lower floor was occupied by the company's store. The land in
the neighborhood was laid out in building lots, with a view to
establishing a town; it even went by the name of Stad Cartabo and had
a tavern and two or three small houses, but never contained enough
dwellings to entitle it to the name of town, or even village.
The ebb-tide soon began, and in 1739 Kartabo was deserted, and thirty
years before the United States became a nation, the old fort on
Kyk-over-al was demolished. The rivers and rolling jungle were
attractive, but the soil was poor, while the noisome mud-swamps of the
coast proved to be fertile and profitable.
Some fatality seemed to attach to all future attempts in this region.
Gold was discovered, and diamonds, and to-day the wilderness here and
there is powdering with rust and wreathing with creeping tendrils
great piles of machinery. Pounds of gold have been taken out and
hundreds of diamonds, but thus far the negro pork-knocker, with his
pack and washing-pan, is the only really successful miner.
The jungle sends forth healthy trees two hundred feet in height,
thriving for centuries, but it reaches out and blights the attempts of
man, whether sisal, rubber, cocoa, or coffee. So far the ebb-tide has
left but two successful crops to those of us whose kismet has led us
hither--crime and science. The concentration of negroes, coolies,
Chinese and Portuguese on the coast furnishes an unfailing supply of
convicts to the settlement, while the great world of life all about
affords to the naturalist a bounty rich beyond all conception.
So here was I, a grateful legatee of past failures, shaded by
magnificent clumps of bamboo, brought from Java and planted two or
three hundred years ago by the Dutch, and sheltered by a bungalow
which had played its part in the development and relinquishment of a
great gold mine.
* * * * *
For a time we arranged and adjusted and shifted our
equipment,--tables, books, vials, guns, nets, cameras and
microscopes,--as a dog turns round and round before it composes itself
to rest. And then one day I drew a long breath and looked about, and
realized that I was at home. The newness began to pass from my little
shelves and niches and blotters; in the darkness I could put my hand
on flash or watch or gun; and in the morning I settled snugly into my
woolen shirt, khakis, and sneakers, as if they were merely accessory
skin.
In the beginning we were three white men and four servants--the latter
all young, all individual, all picked up by instinct, except Sam, who
was as inevitable as the tides. Our cook was too good-looking and too
athletic to last. He had the reputation of being the fastest sprinter
in Guiana, with a record, so we were solemnly told, of 9-1/5 seconds
for the hundred--a veritable Mercury, as the last world's record of
which I knew was 9-3/5. His stay with us was like the orbit of some
comets, which make a single lap around the sun never to return, and
his successor Edward, with unbelievably large and graceful hands and
feet, was a better cook, with the softest voice and gentlest manner in
the world.
But Bertie was our joy and delight. He too may be compared to a
star--one which, originally bright, becomes temporarily dim, and
finally attains to greater magnitude than before. Ultimately he became
a fixed ornament of our culinary and taxidermic cosmic system, and
whatever he did was accomplished with the most remarkable contortions
of limbs and body. To watch him rake was to learn new anatomical
possibilities; when he paddled, a surgeon would be moved to
astonishment; when he caught butterflies, a teacher of physical
culture would not have believed his eyes.
At night, when our servants had sealed themselves hermetically in
their room in the neighboring thatched quarters, and the last squeak
from our cots had passed out on its journey to the far distant goal of
all nocturnal sounds, we began to realize that our new home held many
more occupants than our three selves. Stealthy rustlings, indistinct
scrapings, and low murmurs kept us interested for as long as ten
minutes; and in the morning we would remember and wonder who our
fellow tenants could be. Some nights the bungalow seemed as full of
life as the tiny French homes labeled, "_Hommes 40: Chevaux 8_," when
the hastily estimated billeting possibilities were actually achieved,
and one wondered whether it were not better to be the _cheval
premier_, than the _homme quarantième_.
For years the bungalow had stood in sun and rain unoccupied, with a
watchman and his wife, named Hope, who lived close by. The aptness of
his name was that of the little Barbadian mule-tram which creeps
through the coral-white streets, striving forever to divorce motion
from progress and bearing the name Alert. Hope had done his duty and
watched the bungalow. It was undoubtedly still there and nothing had
been taken from it; but he had received no orders as to accretions,
and so, to our infinite joy and entertainment, we found that in many
ways it was not only near jungle, it _was_ jungle. I have compared it
with a natural cave. It was also like a fallen jungle-log, and we some
of the small folk who shared its dark recesses with hosts of others.
Through the air, on wings of skin or feathers or tissue membrane;
crawling or leaping by night; burrowing underground; gnawing up
through the great supporting posts; swarming up the bamboos and along
the pliant curving stems to drop quietly on the shingled roof;--thus
had the jungle-life come past Hope's unseeing eyes and found the
bungalow worthy residence.
The bats were with us from first to last. We exterminated one colony
which spent its inverted days clustered over the center of our supply
chamber, but others came immediately and disputed the ownership of the
dark room. Little chaps with great ears and nose-tissue of sensitive
skin, spent the night beneath my shelves and chairs, and even my cot.
They hunted at dusk and again at dawn, slept in my room and vanished
in the day. Even for bats they were ferocious, and whenever I caught
one in a butterfly-net, he went into paroxysms of rage, squealing in
angry passion, striving to bite my hand and, failing that, chewing
vainly on his own long fingers and arms. Their teeth were wonderfully
intricate and seemed adapted for some very special diet, although
beetles seemed to satisfy those which I caught. For once, the
systematist had labeled them opportunely, and we never called them
anything but _Furipterus horrens_.
In the evening, great bats as large as small herons swept down the
long front gallery where we worked, gleaning as they went; but the
vampires were long in coming, and for months we neither saw nor heard
of one. Then they attacked our servants, and we took heart, and night
after night exposed our toes, as conventionally accepted vampire-bait.
When at last they found that the color of our skins was no criterion
of dilution of blood, they came in crowds. For three nights they swept
about us with hardly a whisper of wings, and accepted either toe or
elbow or finger, or all three, and the cots and floor in the morning
looked like an emergency hospital behind an active front. In spite of
every attempt at keeping awake, we dropped off to sleep before the
bats had begun, and did not waken until they left. We ascertained,
however, that there was no truth in the belief that they hovered or
kept fanning with their wings. Instead, they settled on the person
with an appreciable flop and then crawled to the desired spot.
One night I made a special effort and, with bared arm, prepared for a
long vigil. In a few minutes bats began to fan my face, the wings
almost brushing, but never quite touching my skin. I could distinguish
the difference between the smaller and the larger, the latter having a
deeper swish, deeper and longer drawn-out. Their voices were so high
and shrill that the singing of the jungle crickets seemed almost
contralto in comparison. Finally, I began to feel myself the focus of
one or more of these winged weasels. The swishes became more frequent,
the returnings almost doubling on their track. Now and then a small
body touched the sheet for an instant, and then, with a soft little
tap, a vampire alighted on my chest. I was half sitting up, yet I
could not see him, for I had found that the least hint of light ended
any possibility of a visit. I breathed as quietly as I could, and made
sure that both hands were clear. For a long time there was no
movement, and the renewed swishes made me suspect that the bat had
again taken flight. Not until I felt a tickling on my wrist did I know
that my visitor had shifted and, unerringly, was making for the arm
which I had exposed. Slowly it crept forward, but I hardly felt the
pushing of the feet and pulling of the thumbs as it crawled along. If
I had been asleep, I should not have awakened. It continued up my
forearm and came to rest at my elbow. Here another long period of
rest, and then several short, quick shifts of body. With my whole
attention concentrated on my elbow, I began to imagine various
sensations as my mind pictured the long, lancet tooth sinking deep
into the skin, and the blood pumping up. I even began to feel the hot
rush of my vital fluid over my arm, and then found that I had dozed
for a moment and that all my sensations were imaginary. But soon a
gentle tickling became apparent, and, in spite of putting this out of
my mind and with increasing doubts as to the bat being still there,
the tickling continued. It changed to a tingling, rather pleasant than
otherwise, like the first stage of having one's hand asleep.
It really seemed as if this were the critical time. Somehow or other
the vampire was at work with no pain or even inconvenience to me, and
now was the moment to seize him, call for a lantern, and solve his
supersurgical skill, the exact method of this vespertilial
anæsthetist. Slowly, very slowly, I lifted the other hand, always
thinking of my elbow, so that I might keep all the muscles relaxed.
Very slowly it approached, and with as swift a motion as I could
achieve, I grasped at the vampire. I felt a touch of fur and I gripped
a struggling, skinny wing; there came a single nip of teeth, and the
wing-tip slipped through my fingers. I could detect no trace of blood
by feeling, so turned over and went to sleep. In the morning I found a
tiny scratch, with the skin barely broken; and, heartily disappointed,
I realized that my tickling and tingling had been the preliminary
symptoms of the operation.
Marvelous moths which slipped into the bungalow like shadows; pet
tarantulas; golden-eyed gongasocka geckos; automatic, house-cleaning
ants; opossums large and small; tiny lizards who had tongues in place
of eyelids; wasps who had doorsteps and watched the passing from their
windows;--all these were intimates of my laboratory table, whose
riches must be spread elsewhere; but the sounds of the bungalow were
common to the whole structure.
One of the first things I noticed, as I lay on my cot, was the new
voice of the wind at night. Now and then I caught a familiar
sound,--faint, but not to be forgotten,--the clattering of palm
fronds. But this came from Boom-boom Point, fifty yards away (an out
jutting of rocks where we had secured our first giant catfish of that
name). The steady rhythm of sound which rose and fell with the breeze
and sifted into my window with the moonbeams, was the gentlest
_shussssss_ing, a fine whispering, a veritable fern of a sound, high
and crisp and wholly apart from the moaning around the eaves which
arose at stronger gusts. It brought to mind the steep mountain-sides
of Pahang, and windy nights which presaged great storms in high passes
of Yunnan.
But these wonder times lived only through memory and were misted with
intervening years, while it came upon me during early nights, again
and again, that this was Now, and that into the hour-glass neck of Now
was headed a maelstrom of untold riches of the Future--minutes and
hours and sapphire days ahead---a Now which was wholly unconcerned
with leagues and liquor, with strikes and salaries. So I turned over
with the peace which passes all telling--the forecast of delving into
the private affairs of birds and monkeys, of great butterflies and
strange frogs and flowers. The seeping wind had led my mind on and on
from memory and distant sorrows to thoughts of the joy of labor and
life.
At half-past five a kiskadee shouted at the top of his lungs from the
bamboos, but he probably had a nightmare, for he went to sleep and did
not wake again for half-an-hour. The final swish of a bat's wing came
to my ear, and the light of a fog-dimmed day slowly tempered the
darkness among the dusty beams and rafters. From high overhead a
sprawling tarantula tossed aside the shriveled remains of his night's
banquet, the emerald cuirass and empty mahogany helmet of a
long-horned beetle, which eddied downward and landed upon my sheet.
Immediately around the bungalow the bamboos held absolute sway, and
while forming a very tangible link between the roof and the outliers
of the jungle, yet no plant could obtain foothold beneath their shade.
They withheld light, and the mat of myriads of slender leaves killed
off every sprouting thing. This was of the utmost value to us,
providing shade, clear passage to every breeze, and an absolute dearth
of flies and mosquitoes. We found that the clumps needed clearing of
old stems, and for two days we indulged in the strangest of weedings.
The dead stems were as hard as stone outside, but the ax bit through
easily, and they were so light that we could easily carry enormous
ones, which made us feel like giants, though, when I thought of them
in their true botanical relationship, I dwarfed in imagination as
quickly as Alice, to a pigmy tottering under a blade of grass. It was
like a Brobdingnagian game of jack-straws, as the cutting or prying
loose of a single stem often brought several others crashing to earth
in unexpected places, keeping us running and dodging to avoid their
terrific impact. The fall of these great masts awakened a roaring
swish ending in a hollow rattling, wholly unlike the crash and dull
boom of a solid trunk. When we finished with each clump, it stood as a
perfect giant bouquet, looking, at a distance, like a tuft of green
feathery plumes, with the bungalow snuggled beneath as a toadstool is
overshadowed by ferns.
Scores of the homes of small folk were uncovered by our weeding
out--wasps, termites, ants, bees, wood-roaches, centipedes; and
occasionally a small snake or great solemn toad came out from the
débris at the roots, the latter blinking and swelling indignantly at
this sudden interruption of his siesta. In a strong wind the stems
bent and swayed, thrashing off every imperfect leaf and sweeping low
across the roof, with strange scrapings and bamboo mutterings. But
they hardly ever broke and fell. In the evening, however, and in the
night, after a terrific storm, a sharp, unexpected _rat-tat-tat-tat_,
exactly like a machine-gun, would smash in on the silence, and two or
three of the great grasses, which perhaps sheltered Dutchmen
generations ago, would snap and fall. But the Indians and Bovianders
who lived nearby, knew this was no wind, nor yet weakness of stem, but
Sinclair, who was abroad and who was cutting down the bamboos for his
own secret reasons. He was evil, and it was well to be indoors with
all windows closed; but further details were lacking, and we were
driven to clothe this imperfect ghost with history and habits of our
own devising.
The birds and other inhabitants of the bamboos, were those of the more
open jungle,--flocks drifting through the clumps, monkeys occasionally
swinging from one to another of the elastic tips, while toucans came
and went. At evening, flocks of parrakeets and great black orioles
came to roost, courting the safety which they had come to associate
with the clearings of human pioneers in the jungle. A box on a bamboo
stalk drew forth joyous hymns of praise from a pair of little
God-birds, as the natives call the house-wrens, who straightway
collected all the grass and feathers in the world, stuffed them into
the tiny chamber, and after a time performed the ever-marvelous feat
of producing three replicas of themselves from this trash-filled box.
The father-parent was one concentrated mite of song, with just enough
feathers for wings to enable him to pursue caterpillars and
grasshoppers as raw material for the production of more song. He sang
at the prospect of a home; then he sang to attract and win a mate;
more song at the joy of finding wonderful grass and feathers; again
melody to beguile his mate, patiently giving the hours and days of her
body-warmth in instinct-compelled belief in the future. He sang while
he took his turn at sitting; then he nearly choked to death trying to
sing while stuffing a bug down a nestling's throat; finally, he sang
at the end of a perfect nesting season; again, in hopes of persuading
his mate to repeat it all, and this failing, sang in chorus in the
wren quintette--I hoped, in gratitude to us. At least from April to
September he sang every day, and if my interpretation be
anthropomorphic, why, so much the better for anthropomorphism. At any
rate, before we left, all five wrens sat on a little shrub and
imitated the morning stars, and our hearts went out to the little
virile featherlings, who had lost none of their enthusiasm for life in
this tropical jungle. Their one demand in this great wilderness was
man's presence, being never found in the jungle except in an inhabited
clearing, or, as I have found them, clinging hopefully to the
vanishing ruins of a dead Indian's _benab_, waiting and singing in
perfect faith, until the jungle had crept over it all and they were
compelled to give up and set out in search of another home, within
sound of human voices.
Bare as our leaf-carpeted bamboo-glade appeared, yet a select little
company found life worth living there. The dry sand beneath the house
was covered with the pits of ant-lions, and as we watched them month
after month, they seemed to have more in common with the grains of
quartz which composed their cosmos than with the organic world. By day
or night no ant or other edible thing seemed ever to approach or be
entrapped; and month after month there was no sign of change to imago.
Yet each pit held a fat, enthusiastic inmate, ready at a touch to turn
steam-shovel, battering-ram, bayonet, and gourmand. Among the first
thousand-and-one mysteries of Kartabo I give a place to the source of
nourishment of the sub-bungalow ant-lions.
Walking one day back of the house, I observed a number of small holes,
with a little shining head just visible in each, which vanished at my
approach. Looking closer, I was surprised to find a colony of tropical
doodle-bugs. Straightway I chose a grass-stem and squatting, began
fishing as I had fished many years ago in the southern states. Soon a
nibble and then an angry pull, and I jerked out the irate little chap.
He had the same naked bumpy body and the fierce head, and when two or
three were put together, they fought blindly and with the ferocity of
bulldogs.
* * * * *
To write of pets is as bad taste as to write in diary form, and,
besides, I had made up my mind to have no pets on this expedition.
They were a great deal of trouble and a source of distraction from
work while they were alive; and one's heart was wrung and one's
concentration disturbed at their death. But Kib came one day, brought
by a tiny copper-bronze Indian. He looked at me, touched me
tentatively with a mobile little paw, and my firm resolution melted
away. A young coati-mundi cannot sit man-fashion like a bear-cub, nor
is he as fuzzy as a kitten or as helpless as a puppy, but he has ways
of winning to the human heart, past all obstacles.
The small Indian thought that three shillings would be a fair
exchange; but I knew the par value of such stock, and Kib changed
hands for three bits. A week later a thousand shillings would have
seemed cheap to his new master. A coati-mundi is a tropical, arboreal
raccoon of sorts, with a long, ever-wriggling snout, sharp teeth, eyes
that twinkle with humor, and clawed paws which are more skilful than
many a fingered hand. By the scientists of the world he is addressed
as _Nasua nasua nasua_--which lays itself open to the twin ambiguity
of stuttering Latin, or the echoes of a Princetonian football yell.
The natural histories call him coati-mundi, while the Indian has by
far the best of it, with the ringing, climactic syllables, _Kibihée!_
And so, in the case of a being who has received much more than his
share of vitality, it was altogether fitting to shorten this to
Kib--Dunsany's giver of life upon the earth.
My heart's desire is to run on and tell many paragraphs of Kib; but
that, as I have said, would be bad taste, which is one form of
immorality. For in such things sentiment runs too closely parallel to
sentimentality,--moderation becomes maudlinism,--and one enters the
caste of those who tell anecdotes of children, and the latest symptoms
of their physical ills. And the deeper one feels the joys of
friendship with individual small folk of the jungle, the more
difficult it is to convey them to others. And so it is not of the
tropical mammal coati-mundi, nor even of the humorous Kib that I
think, but of the soul of him galloping up and down his slanting log,
of his little inner ego, which changed from a wild thing to one who
would hurl himself from any height or distance into a lap, confident
that we would save his neck, welcome him, and waste good time playing
the game which he invented, of seeing whether we could touch his
little cold snout before he hid it beneath his curved arms.
So, in spite of my resolves, our bamboo groves became the homes of
numerous little souls of wild folk, whose individuality shone out and
dominated the less important incidental casement, whether it happened
to be feathers, or fur, or scales. It is interesting to observe how
the Adam in one comes to the surface in the matter of names for pets.
I know exactly the uncomfortable feeling which must have perturbed the
heart of that pioneer of nomenclaturists, to be plumped down in the
midst of "the greatest aggregation of animals ever assembled" before
the time of Noah, and to be able to speak of them only as _this_ or
_that_, _he_ or _she_. So we felt when inundated by a host of pets. It
is easy to speak of the species by the lawful Latin or Greek name; we
mention the specimen on our laboratory table by its common
natural-history appellation. But the individual who touches our pity,
or concern, or affection, demands a special title--usually absurdly
inapt.
Soon, in the bamboo glade about our bungalow, ten little jungle
friends came to live; and to us they will always be Kib and Gawain,
George and Gregory, Robert and Grandmother, Raoul and Pansy, Jennie
and Jellicoe.
Gawain was not a double personality--he was an intermittent
reincarnation, vibrating between the inorganic and the essence of
vitality. In a reasonable scheme of earthly things he filled the
niche of a giant green tree-frog, and one of us seemed to remember
that the Knight Gawain was enamored of green, and so we dubbed him.
For the hours of daylight Gawain preferred the role of a hunched-up
pebble of malachite; or if he could find a leaf, he drew eighteen
purple vacuum toes beneath him, veiled his eyes with opalescent lids,
and slipped from the mineral to the vegetable kingdom, flattened by
masterly shading which filled the hollows and leveled the bumps; and
the leaf became more of a leaf than it had been before Gawain was
merged with it.
Night, or hunger, or the merciless tearing of sleep from his soul
wrought magic and transformed him into a glowing, jeweled specter. He
sprouted toes and long legs; he rose and inflated his sleek emerald
frog-form; his sides blazed forth a mother-of-pearl waist-coat--a
myriad mosaics of pink and blue and salmon and mauve; and from nowhere
if not from the very depths of his throat, there slowly rose twin
globes,--great eyes,--which stood above the flatness of his head, as
mosques above an oriental city. Gone were the neutralizing lids, and
in their place, strange upright pupils surrounded with vermilion lines
and curves and dots, like characters of ancient illuminated Persian
script. And with these appalling eyes Gawain looked at us, with these
unreal, crimson-flecked globes staring absurdly from an expressionless
emerald mask, he contemplated roaches and small grasshoppers, and
correctly estimated their distance and activity. We never thought of
demanding friendship, or a hint of his voice, or common froggish
activities from Gawain. We were content to visit him now and then, to
arouse him, and then leave him to disincarnate his vertebral outward
phase into chlorophyll or lifeless stone. To muse upon his courtship
or emotions was impossible. His life had a feeling of sphinx-like
duration--Gawain as a tadpole was unthinkable. He seemed ageless,
unreal, wonderfully beautiful, and wholly inexplicable.
II
A JUNGLE CLEARING
Within six degrees of the Equator, shut in by jungle, on a cloudless
day in mid-August, I found a comfortable seat on a slope of sandy soil
sown with grass and weeds in the clearing back of Kartabo laboratory.
I was shaded only by a few leaves of a low walnut-like sapling, yet
there was not the slightest hint of oppressive heat. It might have
been a warm August day in New England or Canada, except for the
softness of the air.
In my little cleared glade there was no plant which would be wholly
out of place on a New England country hillside. With debotanized
vision I saw foliage of sumach, elm, hickory, peach, and alder, and
the weeds all about were as familiar as those of any New Jersey
meadow. The most abundant flowers were Mazaruni daisies, cheerful
little pale primroses, and close to me, fairly overhanging the paper
as I wrote, was the spindling button-weed, a wanderer from the
States, with its clusters of tiny white blossoms bouqueted in the
bracts of its leaves.
A few yards down the hillside was a clump of real friends--the rich
green leaves of vervain, that humble little weed, sacred in turn to
the Druids, the Romans, and the early Christians, and now brought
inadvertently in some long-past time, in an overseas shipment, and
holding its own in this breathing-space of the jungle. I was so
interested by this discovery of a superficial northern flora, that I
began to watch for other forms of temperate-appearing life, and for a
long time my ear found nothing out of harmony with the plants. The low
steady hum of abundant insects was so constant that it required
conscious effort to disentangle it from silence. Every few seconds
there arose the cadence of a passing bee or fly, the one low and deep,
the other shrill and penetrating. And now, just as I had become wholly
absorbed in this fascinating game,--the kind of game which may at any
moment take a worth-while scientific turn,--it all dimmed and the
entire picture shifted and changed. I doubt if any one who has been at
a modern battle-front can long sit with closed eyes in a midsummer
meadow and not have his blood leap as scene after scene is brought
back to him. Three bees and a fly winging their way past, with the
rise and fall of their varied hums, were sufficient to renew vividly
for me the blackness of night over the sticky mud of Souville, and to
cloud for a moment the scent of clover and dying grass, with that
terrible sickly sweet odor of human flesh in an old shell-hole. In
such unexpected ways do we link peace and war--suspending the greatest
weights of memory, imagination, and visualization on the slenderest
cobwebs of sound, odor, and color.
But again my bees became but bees--great, jolly, busy yellow-and-black
fellows, who blundered about and squeezed into blossoms many sizes too
small for them. Cicadas tuned up, clearing their drum-heads,
tightening their keys, and at last rousing into the full swing of
their ecstatic theme. And my relaxed, uncritical mind at present
recorded no difference between the sound and that which was vibrated
from northern maples. The tamest bird about me was a big
yellow-breasted white-throated flycatcher, and I had seen this
Melancholy Tyrant, as his technical name describes him, in such
distant lands that he fitted into the picture without effort.
White butterflies flitted past, then a yellow one, and finally a real
Monarch. In my boy-land, smudgy specimens of this were pinned,
earnestly but asymetrically, in cigar-boxes, under the title of
_Danais archippus_. At present no reputable entomologist would think
of calling it other than _Anosia plexippus_, nor should I; but the
particular thrill which it gave to-day was that this self-same species
should wander along at this moment to mosaic into my boreal muse.
After a little time, with only the hum of the bees and the staccato
cicadas, a double deceit was perpetrated, one which my sentiment of
the moment seized upon and rejoiced in, but at which my mind had to
conceal a smile and turn its consciousness quickly elsewhere, to
prevent an obtrusive reality from dimming this last addition to the
picture. The gentle, unmistakable, velvet warble of a bluebird came
over the hillside, again and again; and so completely absorbed and
lulled was I by the gradual obsession of being in the midst of a
northern scene, that the sound caused not the slightest excitement,
even internally and mentally. But the sympathetic spirit who was
directing this geographic burlesque overplayed, and followed the soft
curve of audible wistfulness with an actual bluebird which looped
across the open space in front. The spell was broken for a moment, and
my subconscious autocrat thrust into realization the instantaneous
report--apparent bluebird call is the note of a small flycatcher and
the momentary vision was not even a mountain bluebird but a
red-breasted blue chatterer! So I shut my eyes very quickly and
listened to the soft calls, which alone would have deceived the
closest analyzer of bird songs. And so for a little while longer I
still held my picture intact, a magic scape, a hundred yards square
and an hour long, set in the heart of the Guiana jungle.
And when at last I had to desert Canada, and relinquish New Jersey, I
slipped only a few hundred miles southward. For another twenty minutes
I clung to Virginia, for the enforced shift was due to a great Papilio
butterfly which stopped nearby and which I captured with a lucky sweep
of my net. My first thought was of the Orange-tree Swallow-tail, _née_
_Papilio cresphontes_. Then the first lizards appeared, and by no
stretch of my willing imagination could I pretend that they were
newts, or fit the little emerald scales into a New England pasture.
And so I chose for a time to live again among the Virginian
butterflies and mockingbirds, the wild roses and the jasmine, and the
other splendors of memory which a single butterfly had unloosed.
As I looked about me, I saw the flowers and detected their fragrance;
I heard the hum of bees and the contented chirp of well-fed birds; I
marveled at great butterflies flapping so slowly that it seemed as if
they must have cheated gravitation in some subtle way to win such
lightness and disregard of earth-pull. I heard no ugly murmur of long
hours and low wages; the closest scrutiny revealed no strikes or
internal clamorings about wrongs; and I unconsciously relaxed and
breathed more deeply at the thought of this nature world, moving so
smoothly, with directness and simplicity as apparently achieved
ideals.
* * * * *
Then I ceased this superficial glance and looked deeper, and without
moralizing or dragging in far-fetched similes or warnings, tried to
comprehend one fundamental reality in wild nature--the universal
acceptance of opportunity. From this angle it is quite unimportant
whether one believes in vitalism (which is vitiating to our "will to
prove"), or in mechanism (whose name itself is a symbol of ignorance,
or deficient vocabulary, or both). Evolution has left no chink or
crevice unfilled, unoccupied, no probability untried, no possibility
unachieved.
The nearest weed suggested this trend of thought and provided all I
could desire of examples; but the thrill of discovery and the artistic
delight threatened to disturb for the time my solemn application of
these ponderous truisms. The weed alongside had had a prosperous life,
and its leaves were fortunate in the unadulterated sun and rain to
which they had access. At the summit all was focusing for the
consummation of existence: the little blossoms would soon open and
have their one chance. To all the winds of heaven they would fling out
wave upon wave of delicate odor, besides enlisting a subtle form of
vibration and refusing to absorb the pink light--thereby enhancing the
prospects of insect visitors, on whose coming the very existence of
this race of weeds depended.
Every leaf showed signs of attack: scallops cut out, holes bored,
stains of fungi, wreaths of moss, and the insidious mazes of
leaf-miners. But, like an old-fashioned ship of the line which wins to
port with the remnants of shot-ridden sails, the plant had paid toll
bravely, although unable to defend itself or protect its tissues; and
if I did not now destroy it, which I should assuredly not do, this
weed would justify its place as a worthy link in the chain of
numberless generations, past and to come.
More complex, clever, subtle methods of attack transcended those of
the mere devourer of leaf-tissue, as radically as an inventor of most
intricate instruments differs from the plodding tiller of the soil. In
the center of one leaf, less disfigured than some of its fellows, I
perceived four tiny ivory spheres, a dozen of which might rest
comfortably within the length of an inch. To my eye they looked quite
smooth, although a steady oblique gaze revealed hints of concentric
lines. Before the times of Leeuwenhoek I should perhaps have been
unable to see more than this, although, as a matter of fact, in those
happy-go-lucky days my ancestors would doubtless have trounced me
soundly for wasting my time on such useless and ungodly things as
butterfly eggs. I thought of the coming night when I should sit and
strain with all my might, striving, without the use of my powerful
stereos, to separate from translucent mist of gases the denser nucleus
of the mighty cosmos in Andromeda. And I alternately bemoaned my
human limitation of vision, and rejoiced that I could focus clearly,
both upon my butterfly eggs a foot away, and upon the spiral nebula
swinging through the ether perhaps four hundred and fifty light-years
from the earth.
I unswung my pocket-lens,--the infant of the microscope,--and my whole
being followed my eyes; the trees and sky were eclipsed, and I hovered
in mid-air over four glistening Mars-like planets--seamed with
radiating canals, half in shadow from the slanting sunlight, and
silhouetted against pure emerald. The sculpturing was exquisite. Near
the north poles which pointed obliquely in my direction, the lines
broke up into beads, and the edges of these were frilled and
scalloped; and here again my vision failed and demanded still stronger
binoculars. Here was indeed complexity: a butterfly, one of those
black beauties, splashed with jasper and beryl, hovering nearby, with
taste only for liquid nectar, yet choosing a little weed devoid of
flower or fruit on which to deposit her quota of eggs. She neither
turned to look at their beauties nor trusted another batch to this
plant. Somehow, someway, her caterpillar wormhood had carried, through
the mummified chrysalid and the reincarnation of her present form,
knowledge of an earlier, infinitely coarser diet.