peered into this pocket. The gecko was where geckos go in the space of
three weeks, and the fly also had vanished, either within or without
the gecko. But the crane-flies were still there: to my roughly
appraising eyes the same flies, doing the same dance in exactly the
same place. Three weeks later, and again I returned, this time
intentionally, to see whether the dance still continued; and it was in
full swing. That same night at midnight I climbed down, flashed a
light upon them, and there they whirled and vibrated, silently,
incredibly rapid, unceasingly.
After a thousand hours all the surroundings had changed. New leaves
had sprouted, flowers faded and turned to fruit, the moon had twice
attained her full brightness, our earth and sun and the whole solar
system had swept headlong a full two-score million miles on the
endless swing toward Vega. Only the roots and the crane-flies
remained. A thousand hours had apparently made no difference to them.
The roots might have been the granite near by, fashioned by primeval
earth-flame, and the flies but vibrating atoms within the granite,
made visible by some alchemy of elements in this weird Rim of the
World.
And so a new memory is mine; and when one of these insects comes to my
lamp in whatever part of the world, fluttering weakly, legs breaking
off at the slightest touch, I shall cease to worry about the
scientific problems that loom too great for my brain, or about the
imperfection of whatever I am doing, and shall welcome the crane-fly
and strive to free him from this fatal passion for flame, directing
him again into the night; for he may be looking for a dark pocket in a
root, a pocket on the Edge of the World, where crane-flies may vibrate
with their fellows in an eternal dance. And so, in some ordained way,
he will fulfil his destiny and I acquire merit.
* * * * *
To write of sunrises and moonlight is to commit literary harikiri; but
as that terminates life, so may I end this. And I choose the morning
and the midnight of the sixth of August, for reasons both greater and
less than cosmic. Early that morning, looking out from the beach over
the Mazacuni, as we called the union of the two great rivers, there
was wind, yet no wind, as the sun prepared to lift above the horizon.
The great soft-walled jungle was clear and distinct. Every reed at the
landing had its unbroken counterpart in the still surface. But at the
apex of the waters, the smoke of all the battles in the world had
gathered, and upon this the sun slowly concentrated his powers, until
he tore apart the cloak of mist, turning the dark surface, first to
oxidized, and then to shining quicksilver. Instantaneously the same
shaft of light touched the tips of the highest trees, and as if in
response to a poised bâton, there broke forth that wonder of the
world--the Zoroastrian chorus of tens of thousands of jungle
creatures.
Over the quicksilver surface little individual breezes wandered here
and there. I could clearly see the beginning and the end of them, and
one that drifted ashore and passed me felt like the lightest touch of
a breath. One saw only the ripple on the water; one thought of
invisible wings and trailing unseen robes.
With the increasing warmth the water-mist rose slowly, like a last
quiet breath of night; and as it ascended,--the edges changing from
silvery gray to grayish white,--it gathered close its shredded
margins, grew smaller as it rose higher, and finally became a cloud. I
watched it and wondered about its fate. Before the day was past, it
might darken in its might, hurl forth thunders and jagged light, and
lose its very substance in down-poured liquid. Or, after drifting idly
high in air, the still-born cloud might garb itself in rich purple and
gold for the pageant of the west, and again descend to brood over the
coming marvel of another sunrise.
The tallest of bamboos lean over our low, lazy spread of bungalow; and
late this very night, in the full moonlight, I leave my cot and walk
down to the beach over a shadow carpet of Japanese filigree. The air
over the white sand is as quiet and feelingless to my skin as
complete, comfortable clothing. On one side is the dark river; on the
other, the darker jungle full of gentle rustlings, low, velvety
breaths of sound; and I slip into the water and swim out, out, out.
Then I turn over and float along with the almost tangible moonlight
flooding down on face and water. Suddenly the whole air is broken by
the chorus of big red baboons, which rolls and tumbles toward me in
masses of sound along the surface and goes trembling, echoing on over
shore and jungle, till hurled back by the answering chorus of another
clan. It stirs one to the marrow, for there is far more in it than the
mere roaring of monkeys; and I turn uneasily, and slowly surge back
toward the sand, overhand now, making companionable splashes.
And then again I stop, treading water softly, with face alone between
river and sky; for the monkeys have ceased, and very faint and low,
but blended in wonderful minor harmony, comes another chorus--from
three miles down the river: the convicts singing hymns in their cells
at midnight. And I ground gently and sit in the silvered shadows with
little bewildered shrimps flicking against me, and unlanguaged
thoughts come and go--impossible similes, too poignant phrases to be
stopped and fettered with words, and I am neither scientist nor man
nor naked organism, but just mind. With the coming of silence I look
around and again consciously take in the scene. I am very glad to be
alive, and to know that the possible dangers of jungle and water have
not kept me armed and indoors. I feel, somehow, as if my very daring
and gentle slipping-off of all signs of dominance and protection on
entering into this realm had made friends of all the rare but possible
serpents and scorpions, sting-rays and perai, vampires and electric
eels. For a while I know the happiness of Mowgli.
And I think of people who would live more joyful lives in dense
communities, who would be more tolerant, and more certain of
straightforward friendship, if they could have as a background a
fundamental hour of living such as this, a leaven for the rest of
what, in comparison, seems mere existence.
At last I go back between the bamboos and their shadows, from unreal
reality into a definiteness of cot and pajamas and electric torch. But
wild nature still keeps touch with me; for as I write these lines,
curled up on the edge of the cot, two vampires hawk back and forth so
close that the wind from their wings dries my ink. And the soundness
of my sleep is such that time does not exist between their last
crepuscular squeak and the first wiry twittering of a blue tanager, in
full sunshine, from a palm overhanging my beach.
V
A BIT OF USELESSNESS
A most admirable servant of mine once risked his life to reach a
magnificent Bornean orchid, and tried to poison me an hour later when
he thought I was going to take the plant away from him. This does not
mean necessarily that we should look with suspicion upon all gardeners
and lovers of flowers. It emphasizes, rather, the fact of the
universal and deep-rooted appreciation of the glories of the vegetable
kingdom. Long before the fatal harvest time, I am certain that Eve
must have plucked a spray of apple blossoms with perfect impunity.
A vast amount of bad poetry and a much less quantity of excellent
verse has been written about flowers, much of which follows to the
letter Mark Twain's injunction about Truth. It must be admitted that
the relations existing between the honeysuckle and the bee are basely
practical and wholly selfish. A butterfly's admiration of a flower is
no whit less than the blossom's conscious appreciation of its own
beauties. There are ants which spend most of their life making
gardens, knowing the uses of fertilizers, mulching, planting seeds,
exercising patience, recognizing the time of ripeness, and gathering
the edible fruit. But this is underground, and the ants are blind.
There is a bird, however--the bower bird of Australia--which appears
to take real delight in bright things, especially pebbles and flowers
for their own sake. Its little lean-to, or bower of sticks, which has
been built in our own Zoological Park in New York City, is fronted by
a cleared space, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its
colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which
are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably,
something to do with courtship, which should inspire a sonnet.
From the first pre-Egyptian who crudely scratched a lotus on his dish
of clay, down to the jolly Feckenham men, the human race has given to
flowers something more than idle curiosity, something less than mere
earnest of fruit or berry.
At twelve thousand feet I have seen one of my Tibetans with nothing
but a few shreds of straw between his bare feet and the snow, probe
around the south edge of melting drifts until he found brilliant
little primroses to stick behind his ears. I have been ushered into
the little-used, musty best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and
seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flowers--so recently placed
for my edification, that drops of water still glistened like dewdrops
on the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in the seat of honor of a
Dyak communal house, looked up at the circle of all too recent heads,
and seen a gay flower in each hollow eye socket, placed there for my
approval. With a cluster of colored petals swaying in the breeze, one
may at times bridge centuries or span the earth.
And now as I sit writing these words in my jungle laboratory, a small
dusky hand steals around an aquarium and deposits a beautiful spray of
orchids on my table. The little face appears, and I can distinguish
the high cheek bones of Indian blood, the flattened nose and slight
kink of negro, and the faint trace of white--probably of some long
forgotten Dutch sailor, who came and went to Guiana, while New York
City was still a browsing ground for moose.
So neither race nor age nor mélange of blood can eradicate the love
of flowers. It would be a wonderful thing to know about the first
garden that ever was, and I wish that "Best Beloved" had demanded
this. I am sure it was long before the day of dog, or cow, or horse,
or even she who walked alone. The only way we can imagine it, is to go
to some wild part of the earth, where are fortunate people who have
never heard of seed catalogs or lawn mowers.
Here in British Guiana I can run the whole gamut of gardens, within a
few miles of where I am writing. A mile above my laboratory up-river,
is the thatched _benab_ of an Akawai Indian--whose house is a roof,
whose rooms are hammocks, whose estate is the jungle. Degas can speak
English, and knows the use of my 28-gauge double barrel well enough to
bring us a constant supply of delicious bushmeat--peccary, deer,
monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But Grandmother has no language but
her native Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and we hold long
conversations, neither of us bothering with the letter, but only the
spirit of communication. She is a tiny person, bowed and wrinkled as
only an old Indian squaw can be, always jolly and chuckling to
herself, although Degas tells me that the world is gradually
darkening for her. And she vainly begs me to clear the film which is
slowly closing over her eyes. She labors in a true landscape
garden--the small circle wrested with cutlass and fire from the great
jungle, and kept free only by constant cutting of the vines and lianas
which creep out almost in a night, like sinister octopus tentacles, to
strangle the strange upstarts and rejungle the bit of sunlit glade.
Although to the eye a mass of tangled vegetation, an Indian's garden
may be resolved into several phases--all utterly practical, with color
and flowers as mere by-products. First come the provisions, for if
Degas were not hunting for me, and eating my rations, he would be out
with bow and blowpipe, or fish-hooks, while the women worked all day
in the cassava field. It is his part to clear and burn the forest, it
is hers to grub up the rich mold, to plant and to weed. Plots and beds
are unknown, for in every direction are fallen trees, too large to
burn or be chopped up, and great sprawling roots. Between these,
sprouts of cassava and banana are stuck, and the yams and melons which
form the food of these primitive people. Cassava is as vital to these
Indians as the air they breathe. It is their wheat and corn and rice,
their soup and salad and dessert, their ice and their wine, for
besides being their staple food, it provides _casareep_ which
preserves their meat, and _piwarie_ which, like excellent wine,
brightens life for them occasionally, or dims it if overindulged
in--which is equally true of food, or companionship, or the oxygen in
the air we breathe.
Besides this cultivation, Grandmother has a small group of plants
which are only indirectly concerned with food. One is _kunami_, whose
leaves are pounded into pulp, and used for poisoning the water of
jungle streams, with the surprising result that the fish all leap out
on the bank and can be gathered as one picks up nuts. When I first
visited Grandmother's garden, she had a few pitiful little cotton
plants from whose stunted bolls she extracted every fiber and made a
most excellent thread. In fact, when she made some bead aprons for me,
she rejected my spool of cotton and chose her own, twisted between
thumb and finger. I sent for seed of the big Sea Island cotton, and
her face almost unwrinkled with delight when she saw the packets with
seed larger than she had ever known.
Far off in one corner I make certain I have found beauty for beauty's
sake, a group of exquisite caladiums and amaryllis, beautiful flowers
and rich green leaves with spots and slashes of white and crimson. But
this is the hunter's garden, and Grandmother has no part in it,
perhaps is not even allowed to approach it. It is the _beena_
garden--the charms for good luck in hunting. The similarity of the
leaves to the head or other parts of deer or peccary or red-gilled
fish, decides the most favorable choice, and the acrid, smarting juice
of the tuber rubbed into the skin, or the hooks and arrows anointed,
is considered sufficient to produce the desired result. Long ago I
discovered that this demand for immediate physical sensation was a
necessary corollary of doctoring, so I always give two medicines--one
for its curative properties, and the other, bitter, sour, acid or
anything disagreeable, for arousing and sustaining faith in my
ability.
The Indian's medicine plants, like his true name, he keeps to himself,
and although I feel certain that Grandmother had somewhere a toothache
bush, or pain leaves--yarbs and simples for various miseries--I could
never discover them. Half a dozen tall tobacco plants brought from
the far interior, eked out the occasional tins of cigarettes in which
Degas indulged, and always the flame-colored little buck-peppers
lightened up the shadows of the _benab_, as hot to the palate as their
color to the eye.
One day just as I was leaving, Grandmother led me to a palm nearby,
and to one of its ancient frond-sheaths was fastened a small brown
branch to which a few blue-green leaves were attached. I had never
seen anything like it. She mumbled and touched it with her shriveled,
bent fingers. I could understand nothing, and sent for Degas, who came
and explained grudgingly, "Me no know what for--_toko-nook_ just
name--have got smell when yellow." And so at last I found the bit of
uselessness, which, carried onward and developed in ages to come, as
it had been elsewhere in ages past, was to evolve into botany, and
back-yard gardens, and greenhouses, and wars of roses, and beautiful
paintings, and music with a soul of its own, and verse more than
human. To Degas the _toko-nook_ was "just name," "and it was nothing
more." But he was forgiven, for he had all unwittingly sowed the seeds
of religion, through faith in his glowing caladiums. But Grandmother,
though all the sunlight seemed dusk, and the dawn but as night, yet
clung to her little plant, whose glory was that it was of no use
whatsoever, but in months to come would be yellow, and would smell.
Farther down river, in the small hamlets of the bovianders--the people
of mixed blood--the practical was still necessity, but almost every
thatched and wattled hut had its swinging orchid branch, and perhaps a
hideous painted tub with picketed rim, in which grew a golden splash
of croton. This ostentatious floweritis might furnish a theme for a
wholly new phase of the subject--for in almost every respect these
people are less worthy human beings--physically, mentally and
morally--than the Indians. But one cannot shift literary overalls for
philosophical paragraphs in mid-article, so let us take the little
river steamer down stream for forty miles to the coast of British
Guiana, and there see what Nature herself does in the way of gardens.
We drive twenty miles or more before we reach Georgetown, and the
sides of the road are lined for most of the distance with huts and
hovels of East Indian coolies and native Guiana negroes. Some are made
of boxes, others of bark, more of thatch or rough-hewn boards and
barrel staves, and some of split bamboo. But they resemble one
another in several respects--all are ramshackle, all lean with the
grace of Pisa, all have shutters and doors, so that at night they may
be hermetically closed, and all are half-hidden in the folds of a
curtain of flowers. The most shiftless, unlovely hovel, poised ready
to return to its original chemical elements, is embowered in a mosaic
of color, which in a northern garden would be worth a king's
ransom--or to be strictly modern, should I not say a labor foreman's
or a comrade's ransom!
The deep trench which extends along the front of these sad dwellings
is sometimes blue with water hyacinths; next the water disappears
beneath a maze of tall stalks, topped with a pink mist of lotus; then
come floating lilies and more hyacinths. Wherever there is sufficient
clear water, the wonderful curve of a cocoanut palm is etched upon it,
reflection meeting palm, to form a dendritic pattern unequaled in
human devising.
Over a hut of rusty oil-cans, bougainvillia stretches its glowing
branches, sometimes cerise, sometimes purple, or allamanders fill the
air with a golden haze from their glowing search-lights, either hiding
the huts altogether, or softening their details into picturesque
ruins. I remember one coolie dwelling which was dirtier and less
habitable than the meanest stable, and all around it were hundreds
upon hundreds of frangipanni blooms--the white and gold temple flowers
of the East--giving forth of scent and color all that a flower is
capable, to alleviate the miserable blot of human construction. Now
and then a flamboyant tree comes into view, and as, at night, the
head-lights of an approaching car eclipse all else, so this tree of
burning scarlet draws eye and mind from adjacent human-made squalor.
In all the tropics of the world I scarcely remember to have seen more
magnificent color than in these unattended, wilful-grown gardens.
In tropical cities such as Georgetown, there are very beautiful
private gardens, and the public one is second only to that of Java.
But for the most part one is as conscious of the very dreadful borders
of brick, or bottles, or conchs, as of the flowers themselves. Some
one who is a master gardener will some day write of the possibilities
of a tropical garden, which will hold the reader as does desire to
behold the gardens of Carcassonne itself.
VI
GUINEVERE THE MYSTERIOUS
Again the Guiana jungle comes wonderfully to the eye and mysteriously
to the mind; again my khakis and sneakers are skin-comfortable; again
I am squatted on a pleasant mat of leaves in a miniature gorge, miles
back of my Kartabo bungalow. Life elsewhere has already become
unthinkable. I recall a place boiling with worried people, rent with
unpleasing sounds, and beset with unsatisfactory pleasures. In less
than a year I shall long for a sight of these worried people, my ears
will strain to catch the unpleasing sounds, and I shall plunge with
joy into the unsatisfactory pleasures. To-day, however, all these have
passed from mind, and I settle down another notch, head snuggled on
knees, and sway, elephant-fashion, with sheer joy, as a musky,
exciting odor comes drifting, apparently by its own volition, down
through the windless little gorge.
If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the
source to be a passing bug,--a giant bug,--related distantly to our
malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as
orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate
volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression--as an
earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles. There is no
breeze, no slightest shift of air-particles; yet down the gorge comes
this cloud,--a cloud unsensible except to nostrils,--eddying as if
swirling around the edges of leaves, riding on the air as gently as
the low, distant crooning of great, sleepy jungle doves.
With two senses so perfectly occupied, sight becomes superfluous and I
close my eyes. And straightway the scent and the murmur usurp my whole
mind with a vivid memory. I am still squatting, but in a dark,
fragrant room; and the murmur is still of doves; but the room is in
the cool, still heart of the Queen's Golden Monastery in northern
Burma, within storm-sound of Tibet, and the doves are perched among
the glitter and tinkling bells of the pagoda roofs. I am squatting
very quietly, for I am tired, after photographing carved peacocks and
junglefowl in the marvelous fretwork of the outer balconies, There
are idols all about me--or so it would appear to a missionary; for my
part, I can think only of the wonderful face of the old Lama who sits
near me, a face peaceful with the something for which most of us would
desert what we are doing, if by that we could attain it. Near him are
two young priests, sitting as motionless as the Buddha in front of
them.
After a half-hour of the strange thing that we call time, the Lama
speaks, very low and very; softly:
"The surface of the mirror is clouded with a breath."
Out of a long silence one of the neophytes replies, "The mirror can be
wiped clear."
Again the world becomes incense and doves,--in the silence and peace
of that monastery, it may have been a few minutes or a decade,--and
the second Tibetan whispers, "There is no need to wipe the mirror."
When I have left behind the world of inharmonious colors, of polluted
waters, of soot-stained walls and smoke-tinged air, the green of
jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think
of all the green things I have loved--of malachite in matrix and
table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed
signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the
toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese
emperors--jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right
color. I think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost
in a flash at a dance; of the air-cooled, living green of curling
breakers; of a lonely light that gleams to starboard of an unknown
passing vessel, and of the transparent green of northern lights that
flicker and play on winter nights high over the garish glare of
Broadway.
Now, in late afternoon, when I opened my eyes in the little gorge, the
soft green vibrations merged insensibly with the longer waves of the
doves' voices and with the dying odor. Soon the green alone was
dominant; and when I had finished thinking of pleasant, far-off green
things, the wonderful emerald of my great tree-frog of last year came
to mind,--Gawain the mysterious,--and I wondered if I should ever
solve his life.