and two trustworthy stakes, will survive the heaviest downpour as well
as the most arid and uncompromising desert. But since it is man-made,
with finite limitations, nature is not without means to defeat its
purpose. The hammock cannot cope with the cold--real cold, that is,
not the sudden chill of tropical night which a blanket resists, but
the cold of the north or of high altitudes. This is the realm of the
sleeping-bag, the joy of which is another story. More than once I have
had to use a hammock at high levels, since there was nothing else at
hand; and the numbness of the Arctic was mine. Every mesh seemed to
invite a separate draught. The winds of heaven--all four--played
unceasingly upon me, and I became in due time a swaying mummy of ice.
It was my delusion that I was a dead Indian cached aloft upon my
arboreal bier--which is not a normal state of mind for the sleeping
explorer.
Anything rather than this helpless surrender to the elements. Better
the lowlands and that fantastic shroud, the mosquitaro. For even to
wind one's self into this is an experience of note. It is ingenious,
and called the mosquito shirt because of its general shape, which is
as much like a shirt as anything else. A large round center covers the
hammock, and two sleeves extend up the supporting strands and inclose
the ends, being tied to the ring-ropes. If at sundown swarms of
mosquitoes become unbearable, one retires into his netting funnel, and
there disrobes. Clothes are rolled into a bundle and tied to the
hammock, that one may close one's eyes reasonably confident that the
supply will not be diminished by some small marauder. It is then that
a miracle is enacted. For one is at last enabled, under these
propitious circumstances, to achieve the impossible, to control and
manipulate the void and the invisible, to obey that unforgotten advice
of one's youth, "Oh, g'wan--crawl into a hole and pull the hole in
after you!" At an early age, this unnatural advice held my mind, so
that I devised innumerable means of verifying it; I was filled with a
despair and longing whenever I met it anew. But it was an ambition
appeased only in maturity. And this is the miracle of the tropics:
climb up into the hamaca, and, at this altitude, draw in the hole of
the mosquitaro funnel, making it fast with a single knot. It is done.
One is at rest, and lying back, listens to the humming of all the
mosquitoes in the world, to be lulled to sleep by the sad, minor
singing of their myriad wings. But though I have slung my hammock in
many lands, on all the continents, I have few memories of netting
nights. Usually, both in tropics and in tempered climes, one may
boldly lie with face uncovered to the night.
And this brings us to the greatest joy of hammock life, admission to
the secrets of the wilderness, initiation to new intimacies and
subtleties of this kingdom, at once welcomed and delicately ignored
as any honored guest should be. For this one must make unwonted
demands upon one's nocturnal senses. From habit, perhaps, it is
natural to lie with the eyes wide open, but with all the faculties
concentrated on the two senses which bring impressions from the world
of darkness--hearing and smell. In a jungle hut a loud cry from out of
the black treetops now and then reaches the ear; in a tent the faint
noises of the night outside are borne on the wind, and at times the
silhouette of a passing animal moves slowly across the heavy cloth;
but in a hamaca one is not thus set apart to be baffled by hidden
mysteries--one is given the very point of view of the creatures who
live and die in the open.
Through the meshes which press gently against one's face comes every
sound which our human ears can distinguish and set apart from the
silence--a silence which in itself is only a mirage of apparent
soundlessness, a testimonial to the imperfection of our senses. The
moaning and whining of some distant beast of prey is brought on the
breeze to mingle with the silken swishing of the palm fronds overhead
and the insistent chirping of many insects--a chirping so fine and
shrill that it verges upon the very limits of our hearing. And these,
combined, unified, are no more than the ground surge beneath the
countless waves of sound. For the voice of the jungle is the voice of
love, of hatred, of hope, of despair--and in the night-time, when the
dominance of sense-activity shifts from eye to ear, from retina to
nostril, it cries aloud its confidences to all the world. But the
human mind is not equal to a true understanding of these; for in a
tropical jungle the birds and the frogs, the beasts and the insects
are sending out their messages so swiftly one upon the other, that the
senses fail of their mission and only chaos and a great confusion are
carried to the brain. The whirring of invisible wings and the movement
of the wind in the low branches become one and the same: it is an
epic, told in some strange tongue, an epic filled to overflowing with
tragedy, with poetry and mystery. The cloth of this drama is woven
from many-colored threads, for Nature is lavish with her pigment,
reckless with life and death. She is generous because there is no need
for her to be miserly. And in the darkness, I have heard the working
of her will, translating as best I could.
In the darkness, I have at times heard the tramping of many feet; in
a land traversed only by Indian trails I have listened to an
overloaded freight train toiling up a steep grade; I have heard the
noise of distant battle and the cries of the victor and the
vanquished. Hard by, among the trees, I have heard a woman seized,
have heard her crying, pleading for mercy, have heard her choking and
sobbing till the end came in a terrible, gasping sigh; and then, in
the sudden silence, there was a movement and thrashing about in the
topmost branches, and the flutter and whirr of great wings moving
swiftly away from me into the heart of the jungle--the only clue to
the author of this vocal tragedy. Once, a Pan of the woods tuned up
his pipes--striking a false note now and then, as if it were his whim
to appear no more than the veriest amateur; then suddenly, with the
full liquid sweetness of his reeds, bursting into a strain so
wonderful, so silvery clear, that I lay with mouth open to still the
beating of blood in my ears, hardly breathing, that I might catch
every vibration of his song. When the last note died away, there was
utter stillness about me for an instant--nothing stirred, nothing
moved; the wind seemed to have forsaken the leaves. From a great
distance, as if he were going deeper into the woods, I heard him once
more tuning up his pipes; but he did not play again.
Beside me, I heard the low voice of one of my natives murmuring,
"_Muerte ha pasado_." My mind took up this phrase, repeating it,
giving it the rhythm of Pan's song--a rhythm delicate, sustained, full
of color and meaning in itself. I was ashamed that one of my kind
could translate such sweet and poignant music into a superstition,
could believe that it was the song of death,--the death that
passes,--and not the voice of life. But it may have been that he was
wiser in such matters than I; superstitions are many times no more
than truth in masquerade. For I could call it by no name--whether bird
or beast, creature of fur or feather or scale. And not for one, but
for a thousand creatures within my hearing, any obscure nocturnal
sound may have heralded the end of life. Song and death may go hand in
hand, and such a song may be a beautiful one, unsung, unuttered until
this moment when Nature demands the final payment for what she has
given so lavishly. In the open, the dominant note is the call to a
mate, and with it, that there may be color and form and contrast,
there is that note of pure vocal exuberance which is beauty for beauty
and for nothing else; but in this harmony there is sometimes the cry
of a creature who has come upon death unawares, a creature who has
perhaps been dumb all the days of his life, only to cry aloud this
once for pity, for mercy, or for faith, in this hour of his extremity.
Of all, the most terrible is the death-scream of a horse,--a cry of
frightful timbre,--treasured, according to some secret law, until this
dire instant when for him death indeed passes.
It was years ago that I heard the pipes of Pan; but one does not
forget these mysteries of the jungle night: the sounds and scents and
the dim, glimpsed ghosts which flit through the darkness and the
deepest shadow mark a place for themselves in one's memory, which is
not erased. I have lain in my hammock looking at a tapestry of green
draped over a half-fallen tree, and then for a few minutes have turned
to watch the bats flicker across a bit of sky visible through the dark
branches. When I looked back again at the tapestry, although the dusk
had only a moment before settled into the deeper blue of twilight, a
score of great lustrous stars were shining there, making new patterns
in the green drapery; for in this short time, the spectral blooms of
the night had awakened and flooded my resting-place with their
fragrance.
And these were but the first of the flowers; for when the brief tropic
twilight is quenched, a new world is born. The leaves and blossoms of
the day are at rest, and the birds and insects sleep. New blooms open,
strange scents pour forth. Even our dull senses respond to these; for
just as the eye is dimmed, so are the other senses quickened in the
sudden night of the jungle. Nearby, so close that one can reach out
and touch them, the pale Cereus moons expand, exhaling their
sweetness, subtle breaths of fragrance calling for the very life of
their race to the whirring hawkmoths. The tiny miller who, through the
hours of glare has crouched beneath a leaf, flutters upward, and the
trail of her perfume summons her mate perhaps half a mile down wind.
The civet cat, stimulated by love or war, fills the glade with an odor
so pungent that it seems as if the other senses must mark it.
Although there may seem not a breath of air in motion, yet the tide of
scent is never still. One's moistened finger may reveal no cool side,
since there is not the vestige of a breeze; but faint odors arrive,
become stronger, and die away, or are wholly dissipated by an onrush
of others, so musky or so sweet that one can almost taste them. These
have their secret purposes, since Nature is not wasteful. If she
creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her
whim to walk in obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable.
However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; at best, one
achieves, not knowledge, but a few isolated facts.
Sport in a hammock might, by the casual thinker, be considered as
limited to dreams of the hunt and chase. Yet I have found at my
disposal a score of amusements. When the dusk has just settled down,
and the little bats fill every glade in the forest, a box of beetles
or grasshoppers--or even bits of chopped meat--offers the possibility
of a new and neglected sport, in effect the inversion of baiting a
school of fish. Toss a grasshopper into the air and he has only time
to spread his wings for a parachute to earth, when a bat swoops past
so quickly that the eyes refuse to see any single effort--but the
grasshopper has vanished. As for the piece of meat, it is drawn like
a magnet to the fierce little face. Once I tried the experiment of a
bit of blunted bent wire on a long piece of thread, and at the very
first cast I entangled a flutter-mouse and pulled him in. I was aghast
when I saw what I had captured. A body hardly as large as that of a
mouse was topped with the head of a fiend incarnate. Between his red
puffed lips his teeth showed needle-sharp and ivory-white; his eyes
were as evil as a caricature from _Simplicissimus_, and set deep in
his head, while his ears and nose were monstrous with fold upon fold
of skinny flaps. It was not a living face, but a mask of frightful
mobility.
I set him free, deeming anything so ugly well worthy of life, if such
could find sustenance among his fellows and win a mate for himself
somewhere in this world. But he, for all his hideousness and unseemly
mien, is not the vampire; the blood-sucking bat has won a mantle of
deceit from the hands of Nature--a garb that gives him a modest and
not unpleasing appearance, and makes it a difficult matter to
distinguish him from his guileless confrères of our summer evenings.
But in the tropics,--the native land of the hammock,--not only the
mysteries of the night, but the affairs of the day may be legitimately
investigated from this aerial point of view. It is a fetish of belief
in hot countries that every unacclimatized white man must, sooner or
later, succumb to that sacred custom, the siesta. In the cool of the
day he may work vigorously, but this hour of rest is indispensable. To
a healthful person, living a reasonable life, the siesta is sheer
luxury. However, in camp, when the sun nears the zenith and the hush
which settles over the jungle proclaims that most of the wild
creatures are resting, one may swing one's hammock in the very heart
of this primitive forest and straightway be admitted into a new
province, where rare and unsuspected experiences are open to the
wayfarer. This is not the province of sleep or dreams, where all
things are possible and preëminently reasonable; for one does not go
through sundry hardships and all manner of self-denial, only to be
blindfolded on the very threshold of his ambition. No naturalist of a
temperament which begrudges every unused hour will, for a moment,
think of sleep under such conditions. It is not true that the rest and
quiet are necessary to cool the Northern blood for active work in the
afternoon, but the eye and the brain can combine relaxation with
keenest attention.
In the northlands the difference in the temperature of the early dawn
and high noon is so slight that the effect on birds and other
creatures, as well as plants of all kinds, is not profound. But in the
tropics a change takes place which is as pronounced as that brought
about by day and night. Above all, the volume of sound becomes no more
than a pianissimo melody; for the chorus of birds and insects dies
away little by little with the increase of heat. There is something
geometrical about this, something precise and fine in this working of
a natural law--a law from which no living being is immune, for at
length one unconsciously lies motionless, overcome by the warmth and
this illusion of silence.
The swaying of the hammock sets in motion a cool breeze, and lying at
full length, one is admitted at high noon to a new domain which has no
other portal but this. At this hour, the jungle shows few evidences of
life, not a chirp of bird or song of insect, and no rustling of leaves
in the heat which has descended so surely and so inevitably. But from
hidden places and cool shadows come broken sounds and whisperings,
which cover the gamut from insects to mammals and unite to make a
drowsy and contented murmuring--a musical undertone of amity and
goodwill. For pursuit and killing are at the lowest ebb, the stifling
heat being the flag of truce in the world-wide struggle for life and
food and mate--a struggle which halts for naught else, day or night.
Lying quietly, the confidence of every unconventional and adventurous
wanderer will include your couch, since courage is a natural virtue when
the spirit of friendliness is abroad in the land. I felt that I had
acquired merit that eventful day when a pair of hummingbirds--thimblefuls
of fluff with flaming breastplates and caps of gold--looked upon me with
such favor that they made the strands of my hamaca their boudoir. I was not
conscious of their designs upon me until I saw them whirring toward me, two
bright, swiftly moving atoms, glowing like tiny meteors, humming like a
very battalion of bees. They betook themselves to two chosen cords and,
close together, settled themselves with no further demands upon existence.
A hundred of them could have rested upon the pair of strands; even the
dragon-flies which dashed past had a wider spread of wing; but for these
two there were a myriad glistening featherlets to be oiled and arranged,
two pairs of slender wings to be whipped clean of every speck of dust, two
delicate, sharp bills to be wiped again and again and cleared of
microscopic drops of nectar. Then--like the great eagles roosting high
overhead in the clefts of the mountainside--these mites of birds must needs
tuck their heads beneath their wings for sleep; thus we three rested in the
violent heat.
On other days, in Borneo, weaver birds have brought dried grasses and
woven them into the fabric of my hammock, making me indeed feel that
my couch was a part of the wilderness. At times, some of the larger
birds have crept close to my glade, to sleep in the shadows of the low
jungle-growth. But these were, one and all, timid folk, politely
incurious, with evident respect for the rights of the individual. But
once, some others of a ruder and more barbaric temperament advanced
upon me unawares, and found me unprepared for their coming. I was
dozing quietly, glad to escape for an instant the insistent screaming
of a cicada which seemed to have gone mad in the heat, when a low
rustling caught my ear--a sound of moving leaves without wind; the
voice of a breeze in the midst of breathless heat. There was in it
something sinister and foreboding. I leaned over the edge of my
hammock, and saw coming toward me, in a broad, irregular front, a
great army of ants, battalion after battalion of them flowing like a
sea of living motes over twigs and leaves and stems. I knew the danger
and I half sat up, prepared to roll out and walk to one side. Then I
gaged my supporting strands; tested them until they vibrated and
hummed, and lay back, watching, to see what would come about. I knew
that no creature in the world could stay in the path of this horde and
live. To kill an insect or a great bird would require only a few
minutes, and the death of a jaguar or a tapir would mean only a few
more. Against this attack, claws, teeth, poison-fangs would be idle
weapons.
In the van fled a cloud of terrified insects--those gifted with flight
to wing their way far off, while the humbler ones went running
headlong, their legs, four, six, or a hundred, making the swiftest
pace vouchsafed them. There were foolish folk who climbed up low
ferns, achieving the swaying, topmost fronds only to be trailed by the
savage ants and brought down to instant death.
Even the winged ones were not immune, for if they hesitated a second,
an ant would seize upon them, and, although carried into the air,
would not loosen his grip, but cling to them, obstruct their flight,
and perhaps bring them to earth in the heart of the jungle, where, cut
off from their kind, the single combat would be waged to the death.
From where I watched, I saw massacres innumerable; terrible battles in
which some creature--a giant beside an ant--fought for his life,
crushing to death scores of the enemy before giving up.
They were a merciless army and their number was countless, with host
upon host following close on each other's heels. A horde of warriors
found a bird in my game-bag, and left of it hardly a feather. I
wondered whether they would discover me, and they did, though I think
it was more by accident than by intention. Nevertheless a half-dozen
ants appeared on the foot-strands, nervously twiddling their antennæ
in my direction. Their appraisal was brief; with no more than a
second's delay they started toward me. I waited until they were well
on their way, then vigorously twanged the cords under them harpwise,
sending all the scouts into mid-air and headlong down among their
fellows. So far as I know, this was a revolutionary maneuver in
military tactics, comparable only to the explosion of a set mine. But
even so, when the last of this brigade had gone on their menacing,
pitiless way, and the danger had passed to a new province, I could not
help thinking of the certain, inexorable fate of a man who, unable to
move from his hammock or to make any defense, should be thus exposed
to their attack. There could be no help for him if but one of this
great host should scent him out and carry the word back to the rank
and file.
It was after this army had been lost in the black shadows of the
forest floor, that I remembered those others who had come with
them--those attendant birds of prey who profit by the evil work of
this legion. For, hovering over them, sometimes a little in advance,
there had been a flying squadron of antbirds and others which had come
to feed, not on the ants, but on the insects which had been
frightened into flight. At one time, three of these dropped down to
perch on my hammock, nervous, watchful, and alert, waiting but a
moment before darting after some ill-fated moth or grasshopper which,
in its great panic, had escaped one danger only to fall an easy victim
to another. For a little while, the twittering and chirping of these
camp-followers, these feathered profiteers, was brought back to me on
the wind; and when it had died away, I took up my work again in a
glade in which no voice of insect reached my ears. The hunting ants
had done their work thoroughly.
And so it comes about that by day or by night the hammock carries with
it its own reward to those who have learned but one thing--that there
is a chasm between pancakes and truffles. It is an open door to a new
land which does not fail of its promise, a land in which the prosaic,
the ordinary, the everyday have no place, since they have been
shouldered out, dethroned, by a new and competent perspective. The god
of hammocks is unfailingly kind, just, and generous to those who have
found pancakes wanting and have discovered by inspiration, or
what-not, that truffles do not grow in back-yards to be served at
early breakfast by the maid-of-all-work. Which proves, I believe, that
a mere bed may be a block in the path of philosophy, a commonplace,
and that truffles and hammocks--hammocks unquestionably--are twin
doors to the land of romance.
The swayer in hammocks may find amusement and may enrich science by
his record of observations; his memory will be more vivid, his caste
the worthier, for the intimacy with wild things achieved when swinging
between earth and sky, unfettered by mattress or roof.
X
A TROPIC GARDEN
Take an automobile and into it pile a superman, a great evolutionist,
an artist, an ornithologist, a poet, a botanist, a photographer, a
musician, an author, adorable youngsters of fifteen, and a tired
business man, and within half an hour I shall have drawn from them
superlatives of appreciation, each after his own method of emotional
expression--whether a flood of exclamations, or silence. This is no
light boast, for at one time or another, I have done all this, but in
only one place--the Botanical Gardens of Georgetown, British Guiana.
As I hold it sacrilege to think of dying without again seeing the Taj
Mahal, or the Hills from Darjeeling, so something of ethics seems
involved in my soul's necessity of again watching the homing of the
herons in these tropic gardens at evening.
In the busy, unlovely streets of the waterfront of Georgetown, one is
often jostled; in the markets, it is often difficult at times to make
one's way; but in the gardens a solitary laborer grubs among the
roots, a coolie woman swings by with a bundle of grass on her head,
or, in the late afternoon, an occasional motor whirrs past. Mankind
seems almost an interloper, rather than architect and owner of these
wonder-gardens. His presence is due far more often to business, his
transit marked by speed, than the slow walking or loitering which real
appreciation demands.