dangers of fumes which had threatened to destroy the entire colony the
night before, suddenly was made plain as I watched. A critical time
was at hand in the lives of the all-precious larvæ, when they could
not be moved--the period of spinning, of beginning the transformation
from larvæ to pupæ. This evidently was an operation which had to take
place outside the nest and demanded some sort of light covering. On
the flat board were several thousand ants and a dozen or more groups
of full-grown larvæ. Workers of all sizes were searching everywhere
for some covering for the tender immature creatures. They had chewed
up all available loose splinters of wood, and near the rotten,
termite-eaten ends, the sound of dozens of jaws gnawing all at once
was plainly audible. This unaccustomed, unmilitary labor produced a
quantity of fine sawdust, which was sprinkled over the larvæ. I had
made a partition of a bit of a British officer's tent which I had used
in India and China, made of several layers of colored canvas and
cloth. The ants found a loose end of this, teased it out and unraveled
it, so that all the larvæ near by were blanketed with a gay,
parti-colored covering of fuzz.
All this strange work was hurried and carried on under great
excitement. The scores of big soldiers on guard appeared rather ill at
ease, as if they had wandered by mistake into the wrong department.
They sauntered about, bumped into larvæ, turned and fled. A constant
stream of workers from the nest brought hundreds more larvæ; and no
sooner had they been planted and débris of sorts sifted over them,
than they began spinning. A few had already swathed themselves in
cocoons--exceedingly thin coverings of pinkish silk. As this took
place out of the nest,--in the jungle they must be covered with wood
and leaves. The vital necessity for this was not apparent, for none of
this débris was incorporated into the silk of the cocoons, which were
clean and homogeneous. Yet the hundreds of ants gnawed and tore and
labored to gather this little dust, as if their very lives depended
upon it.
With my hand-lens focused just beyond mandible reach of the biggest
soldier, I leaned forward from my insulated chair, hovering like a
great astral eye looking down at this marvelously important business
of little lives. Here were thousands of army ants, not killing, not
carrying booty, nor even suspended quiescent as organic molecules in
the structure of the home, yet in feverish activity equaled only by
battle, making ready for the great change of their foster offspring. I
watched the very first thread of silk drawn between the larva and the
outside world, and in an incredibly short time the cocoon was outlined
in a tissue-thin, transparent aura, within which the tenant could be
seen skilfully weaving its own shroud.
When first brought from the nest, the larvæ lay quite straight and
still; but almost at once they bent far over in the spinning position.
Then some officious worker would come along, and the unfortunate larva
would be snatched up, carried off, and jammed down in some neighboring
empty space, like a bolt of cloth rearranged upon a shelf. Then
another ant would approach, antennæ the larva, disapprove, and again
shift its position. It was a real survival of the lucky, as to who
should avoid being exhausted by kindness and over-solicitude. I
uttered many a chuckle at the half-ensilked unfortunates being toted
about like mummies, and occasionally giving a sturdy, impatient kick
which upset their tormentors and for a moment created a little swirl
of mild excitement.
There was no order of packing. The larvæ were fitted together anyway,
and meagerly covered with dust of wood and shreds of cloth. One big
tissue of wood nearly an inch square was too great a temptation to be
let alone, and during the course of my observation it covered in turn
almost every group of larvæ in sight, ending by being accidentally
shunted over the edge and killing a worker near the kitchen middens.
There was only a single layer of larvæ; in no case were they piled up,
and when the platform became crowded, a new column was formed and
hundreds taken outside. To the casual eye there was no difference
between these legionaries and a column bringing in booty of insects,
eggs, and pupæ; yet here all was solicitude, never a bite too severe,
or a blunder of undue force.
The sights I saw in this second day's accessible nest-swarm would
warrant a season's meditation and study, but one thing impressed me
above all others. Sometimes, when I carefully pried open one section
and looked deep within, I could see large chambers with the larvæ in
piles, besides being held in the mandibles of the components of the
walls and ceilings. Now and then a curious little ghost-like form
would flit across the chamber, coming to rest, gnome-like, on larva or
ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the
very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no
attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless,
intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them,
going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the
thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth
dimensional state, a realm comparable to that which we people with
ghosts and spirits. It was a most uncanny, altogether absorbing,
intensely interesting relationship; and sometimes, when I ponder on
some general aspect of the great jungle,--a forest of greenheart, a
mighty rushing river, a crashing, blasting thunderstorm,--my mind
suddenly reverts by way of contrast to the tiny ghosts of springtails
flitting silently among the terrible living chambers of the army ants.
On the following morning I expected to achieve still greater intimacy
in the lives of the mummy soldier embryos; but at dawn every trace of
nesting swarm, larvæ, pupæ and soldiers was gone. A few dead workers
were being already carried off by small ants which never would have
dared approach them in life. A big blue morpho butterfly flapped
slowly past out of the jungle, and in its wake came the distant
notes--high and sharp--of the white-fronted antbirds; and I knew that
the legionaries were again abroad, radiating on their silent, dynamic
paths of life from some new temporary nest deep in the jungle.
IV
A JUNGLE BEACH
A jungle moon first showed me my beach. For a week I had looked at it
in blazing sunlight, walked across it, even sat on it in the intervals
of getting wonted to the new laboratory; yet I had not perceived it.
Colonel Roosevelt once said to me that he would rather perceive things
from the point of view of a field-mouse, than be a human being and
merely see them. And in my case it was when I could no longer see the
beach that I began to discern its significance.
This British Guiana beach, just in front of my Kartabo bungalow, was
remarkably diversified, and in a few steps, or strokes of a paddle, I
could pass from clean sand to mangroves and muckamucka swamp, thence
to out-jutting rocks, and on to the Edge of the World, all within a
distance of a hundred yards. For a time my beach walks resulted in
inarticulate reaction. After months in the blindfolded canyons of New
York's streets, a hemicircle of horizon, a hemisphere of sky, and a
vast expanse of open water lent itself neither to calm appraisal nor
to impromptu cuff-notes.
It was recalled to my mind that the miracle of sunrise occurred every
morning, and was not a rather belated alternation of illumination,
following the quenching of Broadway's lights. And the moon I found was
as dependable as when I timed my Himalayan expeditions by her
shadowings. To these phenomena I soon became re-accustomed, and could
watch a bird or outwit an insect in the face of a foreglow and silent
burst of flame that shamed all the barrages ever laid down. But cosmic
happenings kept drawing my attention and paralyzing my activities for
long afterward. With a double rainbow and four storms in action at
once; or a wall of rain like sawn steel slowly drawing up one river
while the Mazaruni remains in full sunlight; with Pegasus galloping
toward the zenith at midnight and the Pleiades just clearing the Penal
Settlement, I could not always keep on dissecting, or recording, or
verifying the erroneousness of one of my recently formed theories.
There was Thuban, gazing steadily upon my little mahogany bungalow,
as, six millenniums ago, he had shone unfalteringly down the little
stone tube that led his rays into the Queen's Chamber, in the very
heart of great Cheops. Just clearing a low palm was the present North
Star, while, high above, Vega shone, patiently waiting to take her
place half a million years hence. When beginning her nightly climb,
Vega drew a thin, trembling thread of argent over the still water,
just as in other years she had laid for me a slender silver strand of
wire across frozen snow, and on one memorable night traced the ghost
of a reflection over damp sand near the Nile--pale as the wraiths of
the early Pharaohs.
Low on the eastern horizon, straight outward from my beach, was the
beginning and end of the great zodiac band--the golden Hamal of Aries
and the paired stars of Pisces; and behind, over the black jungle,
glowed the Southern Cross. But night after night, as I watched on the
beach, the sight which moved me most was the dull speck of emerald
mist, a merest smudge on the slate of the heavens,--the spiral nebula
in Andromeda,--a universe in the making, of a size unthinkable to
human minds.
The power of my jungle beach to attract and hold attention was not
only direct and sensory,--through sight and sound and scent,--but
often indirect, seemingly by occult means. Time after time, on an
impulse, I followed some casual line of thought and action, and found
myself at last on or near the beach, on a lead that eventually would
take me to the verge or into the water.
Once I did what for me was a most unusual thing. I woke in the middle
of the night without apparent reason. The moonlight was pouring in a
white flood through the bamboos, and the jungle was breathless and
silent. Through my window I could see Jennie, our pet monkey, lying
aloft, asleep on her little verandah, head cushioned on both hands,
tail curled around her dangling chain, as a spider guards her
web-strands for hint of disturbing vibrations. I knew that the
slightest touch on that chain would awaken her, and indeed it seemed
as if the very thought of it had been enough; for she opened her eyes,
sent me the highest of insect-like notes and turned over, pushing her
head within the shadow of her little house. I wondered if animals,
too, were, like the Malays and so many savage tribes, afraid of the
moonlight--the "luna-cy" danger in those strange color-strained rays,
whose power must be greater than we realize. Beyond the monkey roosted
Robert, the great macaw, wide-awake, watching me with all that
broadside of intensive gaze of which only a parrot is capable.
The three of us seemed to be the only living things in the world, and
for a long time we--monkey, macaw, and man--listened. Then all but the
man became uneasy. The monkey raised herself and listened, uncurled
her tail, shifted, and listened. The macaw drew himself up, feathers
close, forgot me, and listened. They, unlike me, were not merely
listening--they were hearing something. Then there came, very slowly
and deliberately, as if reluctant to break through the silent
moonlight, a sound, low and constant, impossible to identify, but
clearly audible even to my ears. For just an instant longer it held,
sustained and quivering, then swiftly rose into a crashing roar--the
sound of a great tree falling. I sat up and heard the whole long
descent; but at the end, after the moment of silence, there was no
deep boom--the sound of the mighty bole striking and rebounding from
the earth itself. I wondered about this for a while; then the monkey
and I went to sleep, leaving the macaw alone conscious in the
moonlight, watching through the night with his great round, yellow
orbs, and thinking the thoughts that macaws always think in the
moonlight.
The next day the macaw and the monkey had forgotten all about the
midnight sound, but I searched and found why there was no final boom.
And my search ended at my beach. A bit of overhanging bank had given
way and a tall tree had fallen headlong into the water, its roots
sprawling helplessly in mid-air. Like rats deserting a sinking ship, a
whole Noah's ark of tree-living creatures was hastening along a single
cable shorewards: tree-crickets; ants laden with eggs and larvæ;
mantids gesticulating as they walked, like old men who mumble to
themselves; wood-roaches, some green and leaf-like, others, facsimiles
of trilobites--but fleet of foot and with one goal.
What was a catastrophe for a tree and a shift of home for the tenants
was good fortune for me, and I walked easily out along the trunk and
branches and examined the strange parasitic growths and the homes
which were being so rapidly deserted. The tide came up and covered the
lower half of the prostrate tree, drowning what creatures had not
made their escape and quickening the air-plants with a false rain,
which in course of time would rot their very hearts.
But the first few days were only the overture of changes in this shift
of conditions. Tropic vegetation is so tenacious of life that it
struggles and adapts itself with all the cunning of a Japanese
wrestler. We cut saplings and thrust them into mud or the crevices of
rocks at low tide far from shore, to mark our channel, and before long
we have buoys of foliage banners waving from the bare poles above
water. We erect a tall bamboo flagpole on the bank, and before long
our flag is almost hidden by the sprouting leaves, and the pulley so
blocked that we have occasionally to lower and lop it.
So the fallen tree, still gripping the nutritious bank with a moiety
of roots, turned slowly in its fibrous stiffness and directed its life
and sap and hopes upward. During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk
and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided,
controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach
of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks
after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape
shorewards, the taut liana strand was again crowded with a mass of
passing life--a maze of vines and creepers, whose tendrils and suckers
reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting for gangway to shore,
through days and weeks, as the animal life which preceded them had
made the most of seconds and minutes.
The half-circle of exposed raw bank became in its turn the center of a
myriad activities. Great green kingfishers began at once to burrow;
tiny emerald ones chose softer places up among the wreckage of
wrenched roots; wasps came and chopped out bits for the walls and
partitions of their cells; spiders hung their cobwebs between ratlines
of rootlets; and hummingbirds promptly followed and plucked them from
their silken nets, and then took the nets to bind their own tiny
air-castles. Finally, other interests intervened, and like Jennie and
Robert, I gradually forgot the tree that fell without an echo.
In the jungle no action or organism is separate, or quite apart, and
this thing which came to the three of us suddenly at midnight led by
devious means to another magic phase of the shore.
A little to the south along my beach is the Edge of the World. At
least, it looks very much as I have always imagined that place must
look, and I have never been beyond it; so that, after listening to
many arguments in courts of law, and hearing the reasoning of
bolsheviki, teetotalers, and pacifists, I feel that I am quite
reasonable as human beings go. And best of all, it hurts no one, and
annoys only a few of my scientific friends, who feel that one cannot
indulge in such ideas at the wonderful hour of twilight, and yet at
eight o'clock the following morning describe with impeccable accuracy
the bronchial semi-rings, and the intricate mosaic of cartilage which
characterizes and supports the _membranis tympaniformis_ of _Attila
thamnophiloides_; a dogma which halves life and its interests.
The Edge of the World has always meant a place where usual things are
different; and my southern stretch of beach was that, because of
roots. Whenever in digging I have come across a root and seen its
living flesh, perhaps pink or rose or pale green, so far underground,
I have desired to know roots better; and now I found my opportunity. I
walked along the proper trail, through right and usual trees, with
reasonable foliage and normal trunks, and suddenly I stepped down over
the Edge. Overhead and all around there was still the foliage. It shut
out the sun except for greenish, moderated spots and beams. The
branches dipped low in front over the water, shutting out the sky
except along the tops of the cross-river jungle. Thus a great
green-roofed chamber was formed; and here, between jungle and the
water-level of the world, was the Kingdom of the Roots.
Great trees had in their youth fallen far forward, undermined by the
water, then slowly taken a new reach upward and stretched forth great
feet and hands of roots, palms pressing against the mud, curved backs
and thews of shoulders braced against one another and the drag of the
tides. Little by little the old prostrate trunks were entirely
obliterated by this fantastic network. There were no fine fibers or
rootlets here; only great beams and buttresses, bridges and up-ended
spirals, grown together or spreading wide apart. Root merged with
trunk, and great boles became roots and then boles again in this
unreasonable land. For here, in place of damp, black mold and soil,
water alternated with dark-shadowed air; and so I was able for a time
to live the life of a root, resting quietly among them, watching and
feeling them, and moving very slowly, with no thought of time, as
roots must.
I liked to wait until the last ripple had lapped against the sand
beneath, and then slip quietly in from the margin of the jungle and
perch--like a great tree-frog--on some convenient shelf. Seumas and
Brigid would have enjoyed it, in spite of the fact that the
Leprechauns seemed to have just gone. I found myself usually in a
little room, walled with high-arched, thin sheets of living roots,
some of which would form solid planks three feet wide and twelve long,
and only an inch or two in thickness. These were always on edge, and
might be smooth and sheer, or suddenly sprout five stubby, mittened
fingers, or pairs of curved and galloping legs--and this thought gave
substance to the simile which had occurred again and again: these
trees reminded me of centaurs with proud, upright man torsos, and
great curved backs. In one, a root dropped down and rested on the
back, as a centaur who turns might rest his hand on his withers.
When I chanced upon an easy perch, and a stray idea came to mind, I
squatted or sat or sprawled, and wrote, and strange things often
happened to me. Once, while writing rapidly on a small sheet of paper,
I found my lines growing closer and closer together until my fingers
cramped, and the consciousness of the change overlaid the thoughts
that were driving hand and pen. I then realized that, without
thinking, I had been following a succession of faint lines,
cross-ruled on my white paper, and looking up, I saw that a
leaf-filtered opening had reflected strands of a spider-web just above
my head, and I had been adapting my lines to the narrow spaces, my
chirography controlled by cobweb shadows.
The first unreality of the roots was their rigidity. I stepped from
one slender tendon of wood to the next, expecting a bending which
never occurred. They might have been turned to stone, and even little
twigs resting on the bark often proved to have grown fast. And this
was the more unexpected because of the grace of curve and line, fold
upon fold, with no sharp angles, but as full of charm of contour as
their grays and olives were harmonious in color. Photographs showed a
little of this; sketches revealed more; but the great splendid things
themselves, devoid of similes and human imagination, were
soul-satisfying in their simplicity.
I seldom sat in one spot more than a few minutes, but climbed and
shifted, tried new seats, couches, perches, grips, sprawling out along
the tops of two parallel monsters, or slipping under their bellies,
always finding some easy way to swing up again. Two openings just
permitted me to squeeze through, and I wondered whether, in another
year, or ten, or fifty, the holes would have grown smaller. I became
imbued with the quiet joy of these roots, so that I hated to touch the
ground. Once I stepped down on the beach after something I had
dropped, and the soft yielding of the sand was so unpleasant that I
did not afterwards leave this strange mid-zone until I had to return.
Unlike Antæus, I seemed to gain strength and poise by disassociation
with the earth.
Here and there were pockets in the folds of the sweeping draperies,
and each pocket was worth picking. When one tried to paint the roots,
these pockets seemed made expressly to take the place of palette cups,
except that now and then a crab resented the infusion of Hooker's
green with his Vandyke brown puddle, and seized the end of the brush.
The crabs were worthy tenants of such strange architecture, with
comical eyes twiddling on the end of their stalks, and their
white-mittened fists feinting and threatening as I looked into their
little dark rain or tide-pools.
I found three pockets on one wall, which seemed as if they must have
been "salted" for my benefit; and in them, as elsewhere on my beach,
the two extremes of life met. The topmost one, curiously enough,
contained a small crab, together with a large water-beetle at the
farther end. Both seemed rather self-conscious, and there was no hint
of fraternizing. The beetle seemed to be merely existing until
darkness, when he could fly to more water and better company; and the
crab appeared to be waiting for the beetle to go.
The next pocket was a long, narrow, horizontal fold, and I hoped to
find real excitement among its aquatic folk; but to my surprise it had
no bottom, but was a deep chute or socket, opening far below to the
sand. However, this was not my discovery, and I saw dimly a weird
little head looking up at me--a gecko lizard, which called this
crevice home and the crabs neighbors. I hailed him as the only other
backboned friend who shared the root-world with me, and then listened
to a high, sweet tone, which came forth in swinging rhythm. It took
some time for my eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness, and
then I saw what the gecko saw--a big yellow-bodied fly humming in this
cavern, and swinging in a small orbit as she sang. Now and then she
dashed out past me and hovered in mid-air, when her note sank to a
low, dull hum. Back again, and the sound rose and fell, and gained ten
times in volume from the echo or reverberations. Each time she passed,
the little lizard licked his chops and swallowed--a sort of vicarious
expression of faith or desire; or was he in a Christian Science frame
of mind, saying, "My, how good that fly tasted!" each time the
dipteron passed? The fly was just as inexplicable, braving danger and
darkness time after time, to leave the sunshine and vibrate in the
dusk to the enormously magnified song of its wings.
With eyes that had forgotten the outside light, I leaned close to the
opening and rested my forehead against the lichens of the wall of
wood. The fly was frightened away, the gecko slipped lower, seemingly
without effort, and in a hollowed side of the cavernous root I saw a
mist, a quivering, so tenuous and indistinct that at first it might
have been the dancing of motes. I saw that they were living
creatures--the most delicate of tiny crane-flies--at rest looking like
long-legged mosquitoes. Deep within this root, farther from the light
than even the singing fly had ventured, these tiny beings whirled
madly in mid-air--subterranean dervishes, using up energy for their
own inexplicable ends, of which one very interested naturalist could
make nothing.