these tiny ornate globes, there was aroused a realization of
complexity, of helpless, ignorant achievement; the butterfly blindly
pausing in her flower-to-flower fluttering--a pause as momentous to
her race as that of the slow daily and monthly progress of the weed's
struggle to fruition.
I took a final glance at the eggs before returning to my own larger
world, and I detected a new complication, one which left me with
feelings too involved for calm scientific contemplation. As if a
Martian should suddenly become visible to an astronomer, I found that
one of the egg planets was inhabited. Perched upon the summit--quite
near the north pole--was an insect, a wasp, much smaller than the egg
itself. And as I looked, I saw it at the climax of its diminutive
life; for it reared up, resting on the tips of two legs and the
iridescent wings, and sunk its ovipositor deep into the crystalline
surface. As I watched, an egg was deposited, about the latitude of New
York, and with a tremor the tiny wasp withdrew its instrument and
rested.
On the same leaf were casually blown specks of dust, larger than the
quartette of eggs. To the plant the cluster weighed nothing, meant
nothing more than the dust. Yet a moment before they contained the
latent power of great harm to the future growth of the weed--four
lusty caterpillars would work from leaf to leaf with a rapidity and
destructiveness which might, even at the last, have sapped the
maturing seeds. Now, on a smaller scale, but still within the realm of
insect life, all was changed--the plant was safe once more and no
caterpillars would emerge. For the wasp went from sphere to sphere and
inoculated every one with the promise of its kind. The plant bent
slightly in a breath of wind, and knew nothing; the butterfly was far
away to my left, deep-drinking in a cluster of yellow cassia; the wasp
had already forgotten its achievement, and I alone--an outsider, an
interloper--observed, correlated, realized, appreciated, and--at the
last--remained as completely ignorant as the actors themselves of the
real driving force, of the certain beginning, of the inevitable end.
Only a momentary cross-section was vouchsafed, and a wonder and a
desire to know fanned a little hotter.
I had far from finished with my weed: for besides the cuts and tears
and disfigurements of the leaves, I saw a score or more of curious
berry-like or acorn-like growths, springing from both leaf and stem. I
knew, of course, that they were insect-galls, but never before had
they meant quite so much, or fitted in so well as a significant
phenomenon in the nexus of entangling relationships between the weed
and its environment. This visitor, also a minute wasp of sorts,
neither bit nor cut the leaves, but quietly slipped a tiny egg here
and there into the leaf-tissue.
And this was only the beginning of complexity. For with the quickening
of the larva came a reaction on the part of the plant, which, in
defense, set up a greatly accelerated growth about the young insect.
This might have taken the form of some distorted or deformed plant
organ--a cluster of leaves, a fruit or berry or tuft of hairs, wholly
unlike the characters of the plant itself. My weed was studded with
what might well have been normal seed-fruits, were they not proved
nightmares of berries, awful pseudo-fruits sprouting from horridly
impossible places. And this excess of energy, expressed in tumorous
outgrowths, was all vitally useful to the grub--just as the skilful
jiu-jitsu wrestler accomplishes his purpose with the aid of his
opponent's strength. The insect and plant were, however, far more
intricately related than any two human competitors: for the grub in
turn required the continued health and strength of the plant for its
existence; and when I plucked a leaf, I knew I had doomed all the
hidden insects living within its substance.
The galls at my hand simulated little acorns, dull greenish in color,
matching the leaf-surface on which they rested, and rising in a sharp
point. I cut one through and, when wearied and fretted with the
responsibilities of independent existence, I know I shall often recall
and envy my grub in his palatial parasitic home. Outside came a rather
hard, brown protective sheath; then the main body of the gall, of firm
and dense tissue; and finally, at the heart, like the Queen's chamber
in Cheops, the irregular little dwelling-place of the grub. This was
not empty and barren; but the blackness and silence of this vegetable
chamber, this architecture fashioned by the strangest of builders for
the most remarkable of tenants, was filled with a nap of long,
crystalline hairs or threads like the spun-glass candy in our
Christmas sweetshops--white at the base and shading from pale salmon
to the deepest of pinks. This exquisite tapestry, whose beauties were
normally forever hidden as well from the blind grub as from the
outside world, was the ambrosia all unwittingly provided by the
antagonism of the plant; the nutrition of resentment, the food of
defiance; and day by day the grub gradually ate his way from one end
to the other of his suite, laying a normal, healthful physical
foundation for his future aerial activities.
The natural history of galls is full of romance and strange
unrealities, but to-day it meant to me only a renewed instance of an
opportunity seized and made the most of; the success of the indirect,
the unreasonable--the long chance which so few of us humans are
willing to take, although the reward is a perpetual enthusiasm for the
happening of the moment, and the honest gambler's joy for the future.
How much more desirable to acquire merit as a footless grub in the
heart of a home, erected and precariously nourished by a worthy
opponent, with a future of unnumbered possibilities, than to be a
queen-mother in nest or hive--cared-for, fed, and cleansed by a host
of slaves, but with less prospect of change or of adventure than an
average toadstool.
* * * * *
Thus I sat for a long time, lulled by similitudes of northern plants
and bees and birds, and then gently shifted southward a few hundred
miles, the transition being smooth and unabrupt. With equal gentleness
the dead calm stirred slightly and exhaled the merest ghost of a
breeze; it seemed as if the air was hardly in motion, but only
restless: the wings of the bees and the flycatcher might well have
caused it. But, judged by the sequence of events, it was the almost
imperceptible signal given by some great Jungle Spirit, who had tired
of playing with my dreams and pleasant fancies of northern life, and
now called upon her legions to disillusion me. And the response was
immediate. Three great shells burst at my very feet,--one of sound,
one of color, and the third of both plus numbers,--and from that time
on, tropical life was dominant whichever way I looked. That is the way
with the wilderness, and especially the tropical wilderness--to
surprise one in the very field with which one is most familiar. While
in my own estimation my chief profession is ignorance, yet I sign my
passport applications and my jury evasions as Ornithologist. And now
this playful Spirit of the Jungle permitted me to meditate cheerfully
on my ability to compare the faunas of New York and Guiana, and then
proceeded to startle me with three salvos of birds, first physically
and then emotionally.
From the monotone of under-world sounds a strange little rasping
detached itself, a reiterated, subdued scraping or picking. It carried
my mind instantly to the throbbing theme of the Niebelungs,
onomatopoetic of the little hammers forever busy in their underground
work. I circled a small bush at my side, and found that the sound came
from one of the branches near the top; so with my glasses I began a
systematic search. It was at this propitious moment, when I was
relaxed in every muscle, steeped in the quiet of this hillside, and
keen on discovering the beetle, that the first shell arrived. If I had
been less absorbed I might have heard some distant chattering or
calling, but this time it was as if a Spad had shut off its power,
volplaned, kept ahead of its own sound waves, and bombed me. All that
actually happened was that a band of little parrakeets flew down and
alighted nearby. When I discovered this, it seemed a disconcerting
anti-climax, just as one can make the bravest man who has been under
rifle-fire flinch by spinning a match swiftly past his ear.
I have heard this sound of parrakeet's wings, when the birds were
alighting nearby, half a dozen times; but after half a hundred I shall
duck just as spontaneously, and for a few seconds stand just as
immobile with astonishment. From a volcano I expect deep and sinister
sounds; when I watch great breakers I would marvel only if the
accompanying roar were absent; but on a calm sunny August day I do not
expect a noise which, for suddenness and startling character, can be
compared only with a tremendous flash of lightning. Imagine a
wonderful tapestry of strong ancient stuff, which had only been woven,
never torn, and think of this suddenly ripped from top to bottom by
some sinister, irresistible force.
In the instant that the sound began, it ceased; there was no echo, no
bell-like sustained overtones; both ends were buried in silence. As it
came to-day it was a high tearing crash which shattered silence as a
Very light destroys darkness; and at its cessation I looked up and
saw twenty little green figures gazing intently down at me, from so
small a sapling that their addition almost doubled the foliage. That
their small wings could wring such a sound from the fabric of the air
was unbelievable. At my first movement, the flock leaped forth, and if
their wings made even a rustle, it was wholly drowned in the chorus of
chattering cries which poured forth unceasingly as the little band
swept up and around the sky circle. As an alighting morpho butterfly
dazzles the eyes with a final flash of his blazing azure before
vanishing behind the leaves and fungi of his lower surface, so
parrakeets change from screaming motes in the heavens to silence, and
then to a hurtling, roaring boomerang, whose amazing unexpectedness
would distract the most dangerous eyes from the little motionless
leaf-figures in a neighboring treetop.
When I sat down again, the whole feeling of the hillside was changed.
I was aware that my weed was a northern weed only in appearance, and I
should not have been surprised to see my bees change to flies or my
lizards to snakes--tropical beings have a way of doing such things.
The next phenomenon was color,--unreal, living pigment,--which seemed
to appeal to more than one sense, and which satisfied, as a cooling
drink or a rare, delicious fragrance satisfies. A medium-sized, stocky
bird flew with steady wing-beats over the jungle, in black silhouette
against the sky, and swung up to an outstanding giant tree which
partly overhung the edge of my clearing. The instant it passed the
zone of green, it flashed out brilliant turquoise, and in the same
instant I recognized it and reached for my gun. Before I retrieved the
bird, a second, dull and dark-feathered, flew from the tree. I had
watched it for some time, but now, as it passed over, I saw no yellow
and knew it too was of real scientific interest to me; and with the
second barrel I secured it. Picking up my first bird, I found that it
was not turquoise, but beryl; and a few minutes later I was certain
that it was aquamarine; on my way home another glance showed the color
of forget-me-nots on its plumage, and as I looked at it on my table,
it was Nile green. Yet the feathers were painted in flat color,
without especial sheen or iridescence, and when I finally analyzed it,
I found it to be a delicate calamine blue. It actually had the
appearance of a too strong color, as when a glistening surface
reflects the sun. From beak to tail it threw off this glowing hue,
except for its chin and throat, which were a limpid amaranth purple;
and the effect on the excited rods and cones in one's eyes was like
the power of great music or some majestic passage in the Bible. You,
who think my similes are overdone, search out in the nearest museum
the dustiest of purple-throated cotingas,--_Cotinga cayana,_--and
then, instead, berate me for inadequacy.
Sheer color alone is powerful enough, but when heightened by contrast,
it becomes still more effective, and I seemed to have secured, with
two barrels, a cotinga and its shadow. The latter was also a
full-grown male cotinga, known to a few people in this world as the
dark-breasted mourner (_Lipaugus simplex_). In general shape and form
it was not unlike its cousin, but in color it was its shadow, its
silhouette. Not a feather upon head or body, wings or tail showed a
hint of warmth, only a dull uniform gray; an ash of a bird, living in
the same warm sunlight, wet by the same rain, feeding on much the same
food, and claiming relationship with a blazing-feathered turquoise.
There is some very exact and very absorbing reason for all this, and
for it I search with fervor, but with little success. But we may be
certain that the causes of this and of the host of other unreasonable
realities which fill the path of the evolutionist with never-quenched
enthusiasm, will extend far beyond the colors of two tropical birds.
They will have something to do with flowers and with bright
butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a
whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the
full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes
in comparison to what they might be.
Finally, there was thrown aside all finesse, all delicacy of
presentation, and the last lingering feeling of temperate life and
nature was erased. From now on there was no confusion of zones, no
concessions, no mental palimpsest of resolving images. The spatial,
the temporal,--the hillside, the passing seconds,--the vibrations and
material atoms stimulating my five senses, all were tropical,
quickened with the unbelievable vitality of equatorial life. A
rustling came to my ears, although the breeze was still little more
than a sensation of coolness. Then a deep whirr sounded overhead, and
another, and another, and with a rush a dozen great toucans were all
about me. Monstrous beaks, parodies in pastels of unheard-of blues
and greens, breasts which glowed like mirrored suns,--orange overlaid
upon blinding yellow,--and at every flick of the tail a trenchant
flash of intense scarlet. All these colors set in frames of jet-black
plumage, and suddenly hurled through blue sky and green foliage, made
the hillside a brilliant moving kaleidoscope.
Some flew straight over, with several quick flaps, then a smooth
glide, flaps and glide. A few banked sharply at sight of me, and
wheeled to right or left. Others alighted and craned their necks in
suspicion; but all sooner or later disappeared eastward in the
direction of a mighty jungle tree just bursting into a myriad of
berries. They were sulphur-breasted toucans, and they were silent,
heralded only by the sound of their wings and the crash of their
pigments. I can think of no other assemblage of jungle creatures more
fitted to impress one with the prodigality of tropical nature. Four
years before, we set ourselves to work to discover the first eggs and
young of toucans, and after weeks of heartbreaking labor and
disappointments we succeeded. Out of the five species of toucans
living in this part of Guiana we found the nests of four, and the one
which eluded us was the big sulphur-breasted fellow. I remembered so
vividly the painstaking care with which, week after week, we and our
Indians tramped the jungle for miles,--through swamps and over rolling
hills,--at last having to admit failure; and now I sat and watched
thirty, forty, fifty of the splendid birds whirr past. As the last of
the fifty-four flew on to their feast of berries, I recalled with
difficulty my faded visions of northern birds.
And so ended, as in the great finale of a pyrotechnic display, my two
hours on a hillside clearing. I can neither enliven it with a
startling escape, nor add a thrill of danger, without using as many
"ifs" as would be needed to make a Jersey meadow untenable. For
example, _if_ I had fallen over backwards and been powerless to rise
or move, I should have been killed within half an hour, for a stray
column of army ants was passing within a yard of me, and death would
await any helpless being falling across their path. But by searching
out a copperhead and imitating Cleopatra, or with patience and
persistence devouring every toadstool, the same result could be
achieved in our home-town orchard. When on the march, the army ants
are as innocuous at two inches as at two miles. Had I sat where I was
for days and for nights, my chief danger would have been demise from
sheer chagrin at my inability to grasp the deeper significance of life
and its earthly activities.
III
THE HOME TOWN OF THE ARMY ANTS
From uniform to civilian clothes is a change transcending mere
alteration of stuffs and buttons. It is scarcely less sweeping than
the shift from civilian clothes to bathing-suit, which so often
compels us to concentrate on remembered mental attributes, to avoid
demanding a renewed introduction to estranged personality. In the home
life of the average soldier, the relaxation from sustained tension and
conscious routine results in a gentleness and quietness of mood for
which warrior nations are especially remembered.
Army ants have no insignia to lay aside, and their swords are too
firmly hafted in their own beings to be hung up as post-bellum mural
decorations, or--as is done only in poster-land--metamorphosed into
pruning-hooks and plowshares.
I sat at my laboratory table at Kartabo, and looked down river to the
pink roof of Kalacoon, and my mind went back to the shambles of Pit
Number Five.[1] I was wondering whether I should ever see the army
ants in any guise other than that of scouting, battling searchers for
living prey, when a voice of the jungle seemed to hear my unexpressed
wish. The sharp, high notes of white-fronted antbirds--those
white-crested watchers of the ants--came to my ears, and I left my
table and followed up the sound. Physically, I merely walked around
the bungalow and approached the edge of the jungle at a point where we
had erected a small outhouse a day or two before. But this two hundred
feet might just as well have been a single step through quicksilver,
hand in hand with Alice, for it took me from a world of hyoids and
syrinxes, of vials and lenses and clean-smelling xylol, to the home of
the army ants.
[Footnote 1: See _Jungle Peace_, p. 211.]
The antbirds were chirping and hopping about on the very edge of the
jungle, but I did not have to go that far. As I passed the doorless
entrance of the outhouse I looked up, and there was an immense mass of
some strange material suspended in the upper corner. It looked like
stringy, chocolate-colored tow, studded with hundreds of tiny ivory
buttons. I came closer and looked carefully at this mushroom growth
which had appeared in a single night, and it was then that my eyes
began to perceive and my mind to record, things that my reason
besought me to reject. Such phenomena were all right in a dream, or
one might imagine them and tell them to children on one's knee, with
wind in the eaves--wild tales to be laughed at and forgotten. But this
was daylight and I was a scientist; my eyes were in excellent order,
and my mind rested after a dreamless sleep; so I had to record what I
saw in that little outhouse.
This chocolate-colored mass with its myriad ivory dots was the home,
the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the
bed and board of the army ants. It was the focus of all the lines and
files which ravaged the jungle for food, of the battalions which
attacked every living creature in their path, of the unnumbered rank
and file which made them known to every Indian, to every inhabitant of
these vast jungles.
Louis Quatorze once said, "_L'Etat, c'est moi!_" but this figure of
speech becomes an empty, meaningless phrase beside what an army ant
could boast,--"_La maison, c'est moi!_" Every rafter, beam, stringer,
window-frame and door-frame, hall-way, room, ceiling, wall and floor,
foundation, superstructure and roof, all were ants--living ants,
distorted by stress, crowded into the dense walls, spread out to
widest stretch across tie-spaces. I had thought it marvelous when I
saw them arrange themselves as bridges, walks, handrails, buttresses,
and sign-boards along the columns; but this new absorption of
environment, this usurpation of wood and stone, this insinuation of
themselves into the province of the inorganic world, was almost too
astounding to credit.
All along the upper rim the sustaining structure was more distinctly
visible than elsewhere. Here was a maze of taut brown threads
stretching in places across a span of six inches, with here and there
a tiny knot. These were actually tie-strings of living ants, their
legs stretched almost to the breaking-point, their bodies the
inconspicuous knots or nodes. Even at rest and at home, the army ants
are always prepared, for every quiescent individual in the swarm was
standing as erect as possible, with jaws widespread and ready, whether
the great curved mahogany scimitars of the soldiers, or the little
black daggers of the smaller workers. And with no eyelids to close,
and eyes which were themselves a mockery, the nerve shriveling and
never reaching the brain, what could sleep mean to them? Wrapped ever
in an impenetrable cloak of darkness and silence, life was yet one
great activity, directed, ordered, commanded by scent and odor alone.
Hour after hour, as I sat close to the nest, I was aware of this odor,
sometimes subtle, again wafted in strong successive waves. It was
musty, like something sweet which had begun to mold; not unpleasant,
but very difficult to describe; and in vain I strove to realize the
importance of this faint essence--taking the place of sound, of
language, of color, of motion, of form.
I recovered quickly from my first rapt realization, for a dozen ants
had lost no time in ascending my shoes, and, as if at a preconcerted
signal, all simultaneously sank their jaws into my person. Thus
strongly recalled to the realities of life, I realized the opportunity
that was offered and planned for my observation. No living thing could
long remain motionless within the sphere of influence of these
six-legged Boches, and yet I intended to spend days in close
proximity. There was no place to hang a hammock, no overhanging tree
from which I might suspend myself spider-wise. So I sent Sam for an
ordinary chair, four tin cans, and a bottle of disinfectant. I filled
the tins with the tarry fluid, and in four carefully timed rushes I
placed the tins in a chair-leg square. The fifth time I put the chair
in place beneath the nest, but I had misjudged my distances and had to
retreat with only two tins in place. Another effort, with Spartan-like
disregard of the fiery bites, and my haven was ready. I hung a bag of
vials, notebook, and lens on the chairback, and, with a final rush,
climbed on the seat and curled up as comfortably as possible.
All around the tins, swarming to the very edge of the liquid, were the
angry hosts. Close to my face were the lines ascending and descending,
while just above me were hundreds of thousands, a bushel-basket of
army ants, with only the strength of their threadlike legs as
suspension cables. It took some time to get used to my environment,
and from first to last I was never wholly relaxed, or quite
unconscious of what would happen if a chair-leg broke, or a bamboo
fell across the outhouse.