egg-producing machine, fed mechanically by mechanical workers, the
food transformed by physiological mechanics into yolk and then
deposited. The aeroplane has become transformed into an incubator.
One wonders whether, throughout the long hours, weeks and months, in
darkness which renders her eyes a mockery, there ever comes to her
dull ganglion a flash of memory of The Day, of the rushing wind, the
escape from pursuing puff-birds, the jungle stretching away for miles
beneath, her mate, the cool tap of drops from a passing shower, the
volplane to earth, and the obliteration of all save labor. Did she
once look behind her, did she turn aside for a second, just to feel
the cool silk of petals?
As we have seen, an Atta worker is a member of the most implacable
labor-union in the world: he believes in a twenty-four hour day, no pay, no
play, no rest--he is a cog in a machine-driven
Good-for-the-greatest-number. After studying these beings for a week, one
longs to go out and shout for kaisers and tsars, for selfishness and
crime--anything as a relief from such terrible unthinking altruism. All
Atta workers are born free and equal--which is well; and they remain
so--which is what a Buddhist priest once called "gashang"--or so it
sounded, and which he explained as a state where plants and animals and men
were crystal-like in growth and existence. What a welcome sight it would be
to see a Medium mount a bit of twig, antennæ a crowd of Minims about him,
and start off on a foray of his own!
We may jeer or condemn the Attas for their hard-shell existence, but
there comes to mind again and again, the wonder of it all. Are the
hosts of little beings really responsible; have they not evolved into
a pocket, a mental cul-de-sac, a swamping of individuality, pooling
their personalities? And what is it they have gained--what pledge of
success in food, in safety, in propagation? They are not separate
entities, they have none of the freedom of action, of choice, of
individuality of the solitary wasps. They are the somatic cells of the
body politic, while deep within the nest are the guarded sexual
cells--the winged kings and queens, which from time to time, exactly
as in isolated organisms, are thrown off to propagate, and to found
new nests. They, no less than the workers, are parts of something
more subtle than the visible Attas and their material nest. Whether I
go to the ant as sluggard, or myrmocologist, or accidentally, via
Pterodactyl Pups, a day spent with them invariably leaves me with my
whole being concentrated on this mysterious Atta Ego. Call it
Vibration, Aura, Spirit of the nest, clothe ignorance in whatever term
seems appropriate, we cannot deny its existence and power.
As with the Army ants, the flowing lines of leaf-cutters always
brought to mind great arteries, filled with pulsating, tumbling
corpuscles. When an obstruction appeared, as a fallen leaf, across the
great sandy track, a dozen, or twenty or a hundred workers
gathered--like leucocytes--and removed the interfering object. If I
injured a worker who was about to enter the nest, I inoculated the
Atta organism with a pernicious, foreign body. Even the victim himself
was dimly aware of the law of fitness. Again and again he yielded to
the call of the nest, only to turn aside at the last moment. From a
normal link in the endless Atta chain, he had become an
outcast--snapped at by every passing ant, self-banished, wandering off
at nightfall to die somewhere in the wilderness of grass. When well,
an Atta has relations but no friends, when ill, every jaw is against
him.
As I write this seated at my laboratory table, by turning down my lamp
and looking out, I can see the star dust of Orion's nebula, and
without moving from my chair, Rigel, Sirius, Capella and
Betelgeuze--the blue, white, yellow and red evolution of so-called
lifeless cosmic matter. A few slides from the aquarium at my side
reveal an evolutionary sequence to the heavenly host--the simplest of
earthly organisms playing fast and loose with the borderland, not only
of plants and animals, but of the one and of the many-celled. First a
swimming lily, Stentor, a solitary animal bloom, twenty-five to the
inch; Cothurnia, a double lily, and Gonium, with a quartet of cells
clinging tremulously together, progressing unsteadily--materially
toward the rim of my field of vision--in the evolution of earthly life
toward sponges, peripatus, ants and man.
I was interrupted in my microcosmus just as it occurred to me that
Chesterton would heartily approve of my approximation of Sirius and
Stentor, of Capella and Cothurnia--the universe balanced. My attention
was drawn from the atom Gonium--whose brave little spirit was striving
to keep his foursome one--a primordial struggle toward unity of self
and division of labor; my consciousness climbed the microscope tube
and came to rest upon a slim glass of amber liquid on my laboratory
table: a servant had brought a cocktail, for it was New Year's Eve.
(Now the thought came that there were a number of worthy people who
would also approve of this approximation!) I looked at the small
spirituous luxury, and I thought of my friends in New York, and then
of the Attas in front of the laboratory. With my electric flash I went
out into the starlight, and found the usual hosts struggling nestward
with their chlorophyll burdens, and rushing frantically out into the
black jungle for more and yet more leaves. My mind swept back over
evolution from star-dust to Kartabo compound, from Gonium to man, and
to these leaf-cutting ants. And I wondered whether the Attas were any
the better for being denied the stimulus of temptation, or whether I
was any the worse for the opportunity of refusing a second glass. I
went back into the house, and voiced a toast to tolerance, to
temperance, and--to pterodactyls--and drank my cocktail.
IX
HAMMOCK NIGHTS
There is a great gulf between pancakes and truffles: an eternal,
fixed, abysmal cañon. It is like the chasm between beds and hammocks.
It is not to be denied and not to be traversed; for if pancakes with
syrup are a necessary of life, then truffles with anything must be, by
the very nature of things, a supreme and undisputed luxury, a regal
food for royalty and the chosen of the earth. There cannot be a shadow
of a doubt that these two are divided; and it is not alone a mere
arbitrary division of poverty and riches as it would appear on the
surface. It is an alienation brought about by profound and fundamental
differences; for the gulf between them is that gulf which separates
the prosaic, the ordinary, the commonplace, from all that is colored
and enlivened by romance.
The romance of truffles endows the very word itself with a halo, an
aristocratic halo full of mystery and suggestion. One remembers the
hunters who must track their quarry through marshy and treacherous
lands, and one cannot forget their confiding catspaw, that desolated
pig, created only to be betrayed and robbed of the fungi of his
labors. He is one of the pathetic characters of history, born to
secret sorrow, victimized by those superior tastes which do not become
his lowly station. Born to labor and to suffer, but not to eat. To
this day he commands my sympathy; his ghost--lean, bourgeois,
reproachful--looks out at me from every market-place in the world
where the truffle proclaims his faithful service.
But the pancake is a pancake, nothing more. It is without inherent or
artificial glamour; and this unfortunately, when you come right down
to it, is true of food in general. For food, after all, is one of the
lesser considerations; the connoisseur, the gourmet, even the
gourmand, spends no more than four hours out of the day at his table.
From the cycle, he may select four in which to eat; but whether he
will or not, he must set aside seven of the twenty-four in which to
sleep.
Sleeping, then, as opposed to eating, is of almost double importance,
since it consumes nearly twice as much time--and time, in itself, is
the most valuable thing in the world. Considered from this angle, it
seems incredible that we have no connoisseurs of sleep. For we have
none. Therefore it is with some temerity that I declare sleep to be
one of the romances of existence, and not by any chance the simple
necessary it is reputed to be.
However, this romance, in company with whatever is worthy, is not to
be discovered without the proper labor. Life is not all truffles.
Neither do they grow in modest back-yards to be picked of mornings by
the maid-of-all-work. A mere bed, notwithstanding its magic camouflage
of coverings, of canopy, of disguised pillows, of shining brass or
fluted carven posts, is, pancake like, never surrounded by this aura
of romance. No, it is hammock sleep which is the sweetest of all
slumber. Not in the hideous, dyed affairs of our summer porches, with
their miserable curved sticks to keep the strands apart, and their
maddening creaks which grow in length and discord the higher one
swings--but in a hammock woven by Carib Indians. An Indian hammock
selected at random will not suffice; it must be a Carib and none
other. For they, themselves, are part and parcel of the romance,
since they are not alone a quaint and poetic people, but the direct
descendants of those remote Americans who were the first to see the
caravels of Columbus. Indeed, he paid the initial tribute to their
skill, for in the diary of his first voyage he writes,--
"A great many Indians in canoes came to the ship to-day for the
purpose of bartering their cotton, and _hamacas_ or nets in which they
sleep."
It is supposed that this name owes its being to the hamack tree, from
the bark of which they were woven. However that may be, the modern
hammock of these tropical Red Men is so light and so delicate in
texture that during the day one may wear it as a sash, while at night
it forms an incomparable couch.
But one does not drop off to sleep in this before a just and proper
preparation. This presents complexities. First, the hammock must be
slung with just the right amount of tautness; then, the novice must
master the knack of winding himself in his blanket that he may slide
gently into his aerial bed and rest at right angles to the tied ends,
thus permitting the free side-meshes to curl up naturally over his
feet and head. This cannot be taught. It is an art; and any art is
one-tenth technique, and nine-tenths natural talent. However, it is
possible to acquire a certain virtuosity, which, after all is said, is
but pure mechanical skill as opposed to sheer genius. One might,
perhaps, get a hint by watching the living chrysalid of a potential
moon-moth wriggle back into its cocoon--but little is to be learned
from human teaching. However, if, night after night, one observes his
Indians, a certain instinctive knowledge will arise to aid and abet
him in his task. Then, after his patient apprenticeship, he may reap
as he has sowed. If it is to be disaster, it is as immediate as it is
ignominious; but if success is to be his portion, then he is destined
to rest, wholly relaxed, upon a couch encushioned and resilient beyond
belief. He finds himself exalted and supreme above all mundane
disturbances, with the treetops and the stars for his canopy, and the
earth a shadowy floor far beneath. This gentle aerial support is
distributed throughout hundreds of fine meshes, and the sole contact
with the earth is through twin living boles, pulsing with swift
running sap, whose lichened bark and moonlit foliage excel any
tapestry of man's devising.
Perhaps it is atavistic--this desire to rest and swing in a hamaca.
For these are not unlike the treetop couches of our arboreal
ancestors, such a one as I have seen an orang-utan weave in a few
minutes in the swaying crotch of a tree. At any rate, the hammock is
not dependent upon four walls, upon rooms and houses, and it partakes
altogether of the wilderness. Its movement is æolian--yielding to
every breath of air. It has even its own weird harmony--for I have
often heard a low, whistling hum as the air rushed through the cordage
mesh. In a sudden tropical gale every taut strand of my hamaca has
seemed a separate, melodious, orchestral note, while I was buffeted to
and fro, marking time to some rhythmic and reckless tune of the wind
playing fortissimo on the woven strings about me. The climax of this
musical outburst was not without a mild element of danger--sufficient
to create that enviable state of mind wherein the sense of security
and the knowledge that a minor catastrophe may perhaps be brought
about are weighed one against the other.
Special, unexpected, and interesting minor dangers are also the
province of the hamaca. Once, in the tropics, a great fruit fell on
the elastic strands and bounced upon my body. There was an ominous
swish of the air in the sweeping arc which this missile described,
also a goodly shower of leaves; and since the fusillade took place at
midnight, it was, all in all, a somewhat alarming visitation. However,
there were no honorable scars to mark its advent; and what is more
important, from all my hundreds of hammock nights, I have no other
memory of any actual or threatened danger which was not due to human
carelessness or stupidity. It is true that once, in another continent,
by the light of a campfire, I saw the long, liana-like body of a
harmless tree-snake wind down from one of my fronded bed-posts and,
like a living woof following its shuttle, weave a passing pattern of
emerald through the pale meshes. But this heralded no harm, for the
poisonous reptiles of that region never climb; and so, since I was
worn out by a hard day, I shut my eyes and slept neither better nor
worse because of the transient confidence of a neighborly serpent.
As a matter of fact, the wilderness provides but few real perils, and
in a hammock one is safely removed from these. One lies in a stratum
above all damp and chill of the ground, beyond the reach of crawling
tick and looping leech; and with an enveloping _mosquitaro_, or
mosquito shirt, as the Venezuelans call it, one is fortified even in
the worst haunts of these most disturbing of all pests.
Once my ring rope slipped and the hammock settled, but not enough to
wake me up and force me to set it to rights. I was aware that
something had gone wrong, but, half asleep, I preferred to leave the
matter in the lap of the gods. Later, as a result, I was awakened
several times by the patting of tiny paws against my body, as small
jungle-folk, standing on their hind-legs, essayed to solve the mystery
of the swaying, silent, bulging affair directly overhead. I was unlike
any tree or branch or liana which had come their way before; I do not
doubt that they thought me some new kind of ant-nest, since these
structures are alike only as their purpose in life is identical--for
they express every possible variation in shape, size, color, design,
and position. As for their curiosity, I could make no complaint, for,
at best, my visitors could not be so inquisitive as I, inasmuch as I
had crossed one ocean and two continents with no greater object than
to pry into their personal and civic affairs as well as those of
their neighbors. To say nothing of their environment and other
matters.
That my rope slipped was the direct result of my own inefficiency. The
hammock protects one from the dangers of the outside world, but like
any man-made structure, it shows evidences of those imperfections
which are part and parcel of human nature, and serve, no doubt, to
make it interesting. But one may at least strive for perfection by
being careful. Therefore tie the ropes of your hammock yourself, or
examine and test the job done for you. The master of hammocks makes a
knot the name of which I do not know--I cannot so much as describe it.
But I would like to twist it again--two quick turns, a push and a
pull; then, the greater the strain put upon it, the greater its
resistance.
This trustworthiness commands respect and admiration, but it is in the
morning that one feels the glow of real gratitude; for, in striking
camp at dawn, one has but to give a single jerk and the rope is
straightened out, without so much as a second's delay. It is the
tying, however, which must be well done--this I learned from bitter
experience.
It was one morning, years ago, but the memory of it is with me still,
vivid and painful. One of the party had left her hammock, which was
tied securely since she was skilful in such matters, to sit down and
rest in another, belonging to a servant. This was slung at one end of
a high, tropical porch, which was without the railing that surrounds
the more pretentious verandahs of civilization, so that the hammock
swung free, first over the rough flooring, then a little out over the
yard itself. A rope slipped, the faulty knot gave way, and she fell
backward--a seven-foot fall with no support of any kind by which she
might save herself. A broken wrist was the price she had to pay for
another's carelessness--a broken wrist which, in civilization, is
perhaps, one of the lesser tragedies; but this was in the very heart
of the Guiana wilderness. Many hours from ether and surgical skill,
such an accident assumes alarming proportions. Therefore, I repeat my
warning: tie your knots or examine them.
It is true, that, when all is said and done, a dweller in hammocks may
bring upon himself any number of diverse dangers of a character never
described in books or imagined in fiction. A fellow naturalist of
mine never lost an opportunity to set innumerable traps for the lesser
jungle-folk, such as mice and opossums, all of which he religiously
measured and skinned, so that each, in its death, should add its mite
to human knowledge. As a fisherman runs out set lines, so would he
place his traps in a circle under his hammock, using a cord to tie
each and every one to the meshes. This done, it was his custom to lie
at ease and wait for the click below which would usher in a new
specimen,--perhaps a new species,--to be lifted up, removed, and
safely cached until morning. This strategic method served a double
purpose: it conserved natural energy, and it protected the catch. For
if the traps were set in the jungle and trustfully confided to its
care until the break of day, the ants would leave a beautifully
cleaned skeleton, intact, all unnecessarily entrapped.
Now it happened that once, when he had set his nocturnal traps, he
straightway went to sleep in the midst of all the small jungle people who
were calling for mates and new life, so that he did not hear the click
which was to warn him that another little beast of fur had come unawares
upon his death. But he heard, suddenly, a disturbance in the low ferns
beneath his hammock. He reached over and caught hold of one of the cords,
finding the attendant trap heavy with prey. He was on the point of feeling
his way to the trap itself, when instead, by some subconscious prompting,
he reached over and snapped on his flashlight. And there before him,
hanging in mid-air, striking viciously at his fingers which were just
beyond its reach, was a young fer-de-lance--one of the deadliest of
tropical serpents. His nerves gave way, and with a crash the trap fell to
the ground where he could hear it stirring and thrashing about among the
dead leaves. This ominous rustling did not encourage sleep; he lay there
for a long time listening,--and every minute is longer in the
darkness,--while his hammock quivered and trembled with the reaction.
Guided by this, I might enter into a new field of naturalizing and say
to those who might, in excitement, be tempted to do otherwise, "Look
at your traps before lifting them." But my audience would be too
limited; I will refrain from so doing.
It is true that this brief experience might be looked upon as one
illustration of the perils of the wilderness, since it is not
customary for the fer-de-lance to frequent the city and the town. But
this would give rise to a footless argument, leading nowhere. For
danger is everywhere--it lurks in every shadow and is hidden in the
bright sunlight, it is the uninvited guest, the invisible pedestrian
who walks beside you in the crowded street ceaselessly, without
tiring. But even a fer-de-lance should rather add to the number of
hammock devotees than diminish them; for the three feet or more of
elevation is as good as so many miles between the two of you. And
three miles from any serpent is sufficient.
It may be that the very word danger is subjected to a different
interpretation in each one of our mental dictionaries. It is elastic,
comprehensive. To some it may include whatever is terrible,
terrifying; to others it may symbolize a worthy antagonist, one who
throws down the gauntlet and asks no questions, but who will make a
good and fair fight wherein advantage is neither taken nor given. I
suppose, to be bitten by vampires would be thought a danger by many
who have not graduated from the mattress of civilization to this
cubiculum of the wilderness. This is due, in part, to an ignorance,
which is to be condoned; and this ignorance, in turn, is due to that
lack of desire for a knowledge of new countries and new experiences,
which lack is to be deplored and openly mourned. Many years ago, in
Mexico, when I first entered the vampire zone, I was apprised of the
fact by the clotted blood on my horse's neck in the early morning. In
actually seeing this evidence, I experienced the diverse emotions of
the discoverer, although as a matter of fact I had discovered nothing
more than the verification of a scientific commonplace. It so happened
that I had read, at one time, many conflicting statements of the
workings of this aerial leech; therefore, finding myself in his native
habitat, I went to all sorts of trouble to become a victim to his
sorceries. The great toe is the favorite and stereotyped point of
attack, we are told; so, in my hammock, my great toes were
conscientiously exposed night after night, but not until a decade
later was my curiosity satisfied.
I presume that this was a matter of ill luck, rather than a personal
matter between the vampire and me. Therefore, as a direct result of
this and like experiences, I have learned to make proper allowances
for the whims of the Fates. I have learned that it is their pleasure
to deluge me with rainstorms at unpropitious moments, also to send me,
with my hammock, to eminently desirable countries, which, however, are
barren of trees and scourged of every respectable shrub. That the
showers may not find me unprepared, I pack with my hamaca an extra
length of rope, to be stretched taut from foot-post to head-post, that
a tarpaulin or canvas may be slung over it. When a treeless country is
presented to me in prospect, I have two stout stakes prepared, and I
do not move forward without them.
It is a wonderful thing to see an experienced hammocker take his
stakes, first one, then the other, and plunge them into the ground
three or four times, measuring at one glance the exact distance and
angle, and securing magically that mysterious "give" so essential to
well-being and comfort. Any one can sink them like fence-posts, so
that they stand deep and rigid, a reproach and an accusation; but it
requires a particular skill to judge by the pull whether or not they
will hold through the night and at the same time yield with gentle and
supple swing to the least movement of the sleeper. A Carib knows,
instantly, worthy and unworthy ground. I have seen an Indian sink his
hamaca posts into sand with one swift, concentrated motion,
mathematical in its precision and surety, so that he might enter at
once into a peaceful night of tranquil and unbroken slumber, while I,
a tenderfoot then, must needs beat my stakes down into the ground with
tremendous energy, only to come to earth with a resounding thwack the
moment I mounted my couch.
The Red Man made his comment, smiling: "Yellow earth, much squeeze."
Which, being translated, informed me that the clayey ground I had
chosen, hard though it seemed, was more like putty in that it would
slip and slip with the prolonged pressure until the post fell inward
and catastrophe crowned my endeavor.