I crossed the Cuyuni in a canoe. There arose deep, liquid, vibrating
sounds, such as those I now heard, deep and penetrating, as if from
some submarine gong--a gong which could not be thought of as wet, for
it had never been dry. As I stopped paddling the sound became absolute
vibration, the canoe itself seemed to tremble, the paddle tingled in
my hands. It was wholly detached; it came from whatever direction the
ear sought it. Then, without dying out, it was reinforced by another
sound, rhythmical, abrupt, twanging, filling the water and air with a
slow measure on four notes. The water swirled beside the canoe, and a
face appeared--a monstrous, complacent face, such as Böcklin would
love--a face inhuman in possessing the quality of supreme contentment.
Framed in the brown waters, the head of the great, grinning catfish
rose, and slowly sank, leaving outlines discernible in ripples and
bubbles with almost Cheshire persistency. One of my Indians, passing
in his dugout, smiled at my peering down after the fish, and murmured,
"Boom-boom."
Then came a day when one of these huge, amiable, living smiles
blundered into our net, a smile a foot wide and six feet long, and
even as he lay quietly awaiting what fate brought to great catfish, he
sang, both theme and accompaniment. His whole being throbbed with the
continuous deep drumming as the thin, silky walls of his swim-bladder
vibrated in the depths of his body. The oxygen in the air was slowly
killing him, and yet his swan song was possible because of an inner
atmosphere so rich in this gas that it would be unbreathable by a
creature of the land. Nerve and muscle, special expanse of circling
bones, swim-bladder and its tenuous gas--all these combined to produce
the aquatic harmony. But as if to load this contented being with
largesse of apparently useless abilities, the two widespreading fin
spines--the fins which correspond to our arms--were swiveled in
rough-ridged cups at what might have been shoulders, and when moved
back and forth the stridulation troubled all the water, and the air,
too, with the muffled, twanging, _rip_, _rip_, _rip_, _rip_. The two
spines were tuned separately, the right being a full tone lower, and
the backward drawing of the bow gave a higher note than its forward
reach. So, alternately, at a full second tempo, the four tones rose
and fell, carrying out some strange Silurian theme: a muffled cadence
of undertones, which, thrilled with the mystery of their author and
cause, yet merged smoothly with the cosmic orchestra of wind and
ripples and distant rain.
So the great, smooth, arching lift of granite rocks at our bungalow's
shore, where the giant catfish sang, was ever afterward Boom-boom
Point. And now I sat close by on the sand and strove to think anew of
my butterflies, for they were the reason of my being there that
brilliant October afternoon. But still my pen refused, hovering about
the thing of ultimate interest as one leaves the most desired book to
the last. For again the ear claimed dominance, and I listened to a new
little refrain over my shoulder. I pictured a tiny sawhorse, and a
midget who labored with might and main to cut through a never-ending
stint of twigs. I chose to keep my image to the last, and did not
move or look around, until there came the slightest of tugs at my
knee, and into view clambered one of those beings who are so beautiful
and bizarre that one almost thinks they should not be. My second
singer was a beetle--an awkward, enormous, serious, brilliant beetle,
with six-inch antennæ and great wing covers, which combined the hues
of the royal robes of Queen Thi, tempered by thousands of years of
silent darkness in the underground tombs at Sakhara, with the grace of
curve and angle of equally ancient characters on the hill tombs of
Fokien. On a background of olive ochre there blazed great splashes and
characters of the red of jasper framed in black. Toward the front
Nature had tried heavy black stippling, but it clouded the pattern and
she had given it up in order that I might think of Egypt and Cathay.
But the thing which took the beetle quite out of a world of reasonable
things was his forelegs. They were outrageous, and he seemed to think
so, too, for they got in his way, and caught in wrong things and
pulled him to one side. They were three times the length of his other
limbs, spreading sideways a full thirteen inches, long, slender,
beautifully sculptured, and forever reaching out in front for
whatever long-armed beetles most desire. And his song, as he climbed
over me, was squeaky and sawlike, and as he walked he doddered, head
trembling as an old man's shakes in final acquiescence in the futility
of life.
But in this great-armed beetle it was a nodding of necessity, a
doddering of desire, the drawing of the bow across the strings in a
hymn of hope which had begun in past time with the first stridulation
of ancient insects. To-day the fiddling vibrations, the Song of the
Beetle, reached out in all directions. To the majority of jungle ears
it was only another note in the day's chorus: I saw it attract a
flycatcher's attention, hold it a moment, and then lose it. To me it
came as a vitally interesting tone of deep significance, for whatever
emotions it might arouse in casual ears, its goal was another
Great-armed Beetle, who might or might not come within its radius.
With unquestioning search the fiddler clambered on and on, over me and
over flowers and rocks, skirting the ripples and vanishing into a
maelstrom of waving grass. Long after the last awkward lurch, there
came back zizzing squeaks of perfect faith, and I hoped, as I passed
beyond the periphery of sound, that instinct and desire might direct
their rolling ball of vibrations toward the one whose ear, whether in
antenna, or thorax or femoral tympanum had, through untold numbers of
past lives, been attuned to its rhythm.
Two thousand miles north of where I sat, or ten million, five hundred
and sixty thousand feet (for, like Bunker Bean's book-keeper, I
sometimes like to think of things that way), I would look out of the
window one morning in days to come, and thrill at the sight of falling
flakes. The emotion would very probably be sentiment--the memory of
wonderful northland snowstorms, of huge fires, of evenings with
Roosevelt, when discussions always led to unknowable fields, when book
after book yielded its phrase or sentence of pure gold thought. On one
of the last of such evenings I found a forgotten joy-of-battle-speech
of Huxley's, which stimulated two full days and four books
re-read--while flakes swirled and invisible winds came swiftly around
the eaves over the great trophies--_poussant des soupirs_,--we longing
with our whole souls for an hour of talk with that splendid old
fighting scientist.
These are thoughts which come at first-snow, thoughts humanly narrow
and personal compared to the later delights of snow itself--crystals
and tracks, the strangeness of freezing and the mystery of melting.
And they recurred now because for days past I had idly watched
scattered flurries of lemon-yellow and of orange butterflies drift
past Kartabo. Down the two great Guiana rivers they came, steadily
progressing, yet never hurrying; with zigzag flickering flight they
barely cleared the trees and shrubs, and then skimmed the surface,
vanishing when ripples caught the light, redoubled by reflection when
the water lay quiet and polished. For month after month they passed,
sometimes absent for days or weeks, but soon to be counted at earliest
sunup, always arousing renewed curiosity, always bringing to mind the
first flurry of winter.
We watch the autumn passing of birds with regret, but when the
bluebirds warble their way southward we are cheered with the hope and
the knowledge that some, at least, will return. Here, vast stretches
of country, perhaps all Guiana, and how much of Brazil and Venezuela
no one knows, poured forth a steady stream of yellow and orange
butterflies. They were very beautiful and they danced and flickered
in the sunlight, but this was no temporary shifting to a pleasanter
clime or a land of more abundant flowers, but a migration in the grim
old sense which Cicero loved, _non dubitat_ ... _migrare de vita_. No
butterfly ever turned back, or circled again to the glade, with its
yellow cassia blooms where he had spent his caterpillarhood. Nor did
he fly toward the north star or the sunset, but between the two.
Twelve years before, as I passed up the Essequibo and the Cuyuni, I
noticed hundreds of yellow butterflies each true to his little compass
variation of NNW.
There are times and places in Guiana where emigrating butterflies turn
to the north or the south; sometimes for days at a time, but sooner or
later the eddies straighten out, their little flotillas cease tacking,
and all swing again NNW.
To-day the last of the migration stragglers of the year--perhaps the
fiftieth great-grandsons of those others--held true to the Catopsilian
lodestone.
My masculine pronouns are intentional, for of all the thousands and
tens of thousands of migrants, all, as far as I know, were males.
Catch a dozen yellows in a jungle glade and the sexes may be equal.
But the irresistible maelstrom impels only the males. Whence they come
or why they go is as utterly unknown to us as why the females are
immune.
Once, from the deck of a steamer, far off the Guiana coast, I saw
hosts of these same great saffron-wings flying well above the water,
headed for the open sea. Behind them were sheltering fronds, nectar,
soft winds, mates; before were corroding salt, rising waves, lowering
clouds, a storm imminent. Their course was NNW, they sailed under
sealed orders, their port was Death.
Looking out over the great expanse of the Mazaruni, the fluttering
insects were usually rather evenly distributed, each with a few yards
of clear space about it, but very rarely--I have seen it only twice--a
new force became operative. Not only were the little volant beings
siphoned up in untold numbers from their normal life of sleeping,
feeding, dancing about their mates, but they were blindly poured into
an invisible artery, down which they flowed in close association,
_véritables corpuscules de papillons_, almost touching, forming a
bending ribbon, winding its way seaward, with here and there a
temporary fraying out of eddying wings. It seemed like a wayward
cloud still stained with last night's sunset yellow, which had set out
on its own path over rivers and jungles to join the sea mists beyond
the uttermost trees.
Such a swarm seemed imbued with an ecstasy of travel which surpassed
discomfort. Deep cloud shadows might settle down, but only dimmed the
painted wings; under raindrops the ribbon sagged, the insects flying
closer to the water. On the other hand, the scattered hosts of the
more ordinary migrations, while they turned neither to the north nor
to the west, yet fled at the advent of clouds and rain, seeking
shelter under the nearest foliage. So much loitering was permitted,
but with the coming of the sun again they must desert the pleasant
feel of velvet leaves, the rain-washed odors of streaming blossoms,
and set their antennæ unquestioningly upon the strange last turn of
their wheel of life.
What crime of ancestors are they expiating? In some forgotten
caterpillardom was an act committed, so terrible that it can never be
known, except through the working out of the karma upon millions of
butterflies? Or does there linger in the innumerable little ganglion
minds a memory of long-lost Atlantis, so compelling to masculine
Catopsilias that the supreme effort of their lives is an attempt to
envisage it? "Absurd fancies, all," says our conscious entomological
sense, and we agree and sweep them aside. And then quite as readily,
more reasonable scientific theories fall asunder, and we are left at
last alone with the butterflies, a vast ignorance, and a great
unfulfilled desire to know what it all means.
On this October day the migration of the year had ceased. To my coarse
senses the sunlight was of equal intensity, the breeze unchanged, the
whole aspect the same--and yet something as intangible as thought, as
impelling as gravitation, had ceased to operate. The tension once
slackened, the butterflies took up their more usual lives. But what
could I know of the meaning of "normal" in the life of a butterfly--I
who boasted a miserable single pair of eyes and no greater number of
legs, whose shoulders supported only shoulder blades, and whose youth
was barren of caterpillarian memories!
As I have said, migration was at an end, yet here I had stumbled upon
a Bay of Butterflies. No matter whether one's interest in life lay
chiefly with ornithology, teetotalism, arrowheads, politics, botany,
or finance, in this bay one's thoughts would be sure to be
concentrated on butterflies. And no less interesting than the
butterflies were their immediate surroundings. The day before, I had
sat close by on a low boulder at the head of the tiny bay, with not a
butterfly in sight. It occurred to me that my ancestor, Eryops, would
have been perfectly at home, for in front of me were clumps of
strange, carboniferous rushes, lacking leaves and grace, and sedges
such as might be fashioned in an attempt to make plants out of green
straw. Here and there an ancient jointed stem was in blossom, a
pinnacle of white filaments, and hour after hour there came little
brown trigonid visitors, sting-less bees, whose nests were veritable
museums of flower extracts--tubs of honey, hampers of pollen, barrels
of ambrosia, hoarded in castles of wax. Scirpus-sedge or orchid, all
was the same to them.
All odor evaded me until I had recourse to my usual olfactory crutch,
placing the flower in a vial in the sunlight. Delicate indeed was the
fragrance which did not yield itself to a few minutes of this
distillation. As I removed the cork there gently arose the scent of
thyme, and of rose petals long pressed between the leaves of old, old
books--a scent memorable of days ancient to us, which in past lives of
sedges would count but a moment. In an instant it passed, drowned in
the following smell of bruised stem. But I had surprised the odor of
this age-old growth, as evanescent as the faint sound of the breeze
sifting through the cluster of leafless stalks. I felt certain that
Eryops, although living among horserushes and ancient sedges, never
smelled or listened to them, and a glow of satisfaction came over me
at the thought that perhaps I represented an advance on this funny old
forebear of mine; but then I thought of the little bees, drawn from
afar by the scent, and I returned to my usual sense of human futility,
which is always dominant in the presence of insect activities.
I leaned back, crowding into a crevice of rock, and strove to realize
more deeply the kinship of these fine earth neighbors. Bone of my bone
indeed they were, but their quiet dignity, their calmness in storm and
sun, their poise, their disregard of all small, petty things, whether
of mechanics, whether chemical or emotional--these were attributes to
which I could only aspire, being the prerogatives of superiors.
These rocks, in particular, seemed of the very essence of earth. Three
elements fought over them. The sand and soil from which they lifted
their splendid heads sifted down, or was washed up, in vain effort to
cover them. More subtly dead tree trunks fell upon them, returned to
earth, and strove to encloak them. For six hours at a time the water
claimed them, enveloping them slowly in a mantle of quicksilver, or
surging over with rough waves. Algal spores took hold, desmids and
diatoms swam in and settled down, little fish wandered in and out of
the crevices, while large ones nosed at the entrances.
Then Mother Earth turned slowly onward; the moon, reaching down,
beckoned with invisible fingers, and the air again entered this no
man's land. Breezes whispered where a few moments before ripples had
lapped; with the sun as ally, the last remaining pool vanished and
there began the hours of aerial dominion. The most envied character of
our lesser brethren is their faith. No matter how many hundreds of
thousands of tides had ebbed and flowed, yet to-day every pinch of
life which was blown or walked or fell or flew to the rocks during
their brief respite from the waves, accepted the good dry surface
without question.
Seeds and berries fell, and rolled into hollows rich in mulcted earth;
parachutes, buoyed on thistle silk, sailed from distant jungle plants;
every swirl of breeze brought spores of lichens and moss, and even the
retreating water unwittingly aided, having transported hither and
dropped a cargo of living things, from tiniest plant to seeds of
mightiest mora. Though in the few allotted hours these might not
sprout, but only quicken in their heart, yet blue-winged wasps made
their faith more manifest, and worked with feverish haste to gather
pellets of clay and fashion cells. I once saw even the beginning of
storage--a green spider, which an hour later was swallowed by a
passing fish instead of nourishing an infant wasp.
Spiders raised their meshes where shrimps had skipped, and flies
hummed and were caught by singing jungle vireos, where armored catfish
had passed an hour or two before.
So the elements struggled and the creatures of each strove to fulfil
their destiny, and for a little time the rocks and I wondered at it
together.
In this little arena, floored with sand, dotted with rushes and
balconied with boulders, many hundreds of butterflies were gathered.
There were five species, all of the genius _Catopsilia_, but only
three were easily distinguishable in life, the smaller, lemon yellow
_statira_, and the larger, orange _argente_ and _philea_. There was
also _eubele_, the migrant, keeping rather to itself.
I took some pictures, then crept closer; more pictures and a nearer
approach. Then suddenly all rose, and I felt as if I had shattered a
wonderful painting. But the sand was a lodestone and drew them down. I
slipped within a yard, squatted, and mentally became one of them.
Silently, by dozens and scores, they flew around me, and soon they
eclipsed the sand. They were so closely packed that their outstretched
legs touched. There were two large patches, and a smaller area
outlined by no boundary that I could detect. Yet when these were
occupied the last comers alighted on top of the wings of their
comrades, who resented neither the disturbance nor the weight. Two
layers of butterflies crammed into small areas of sand in the midst
of more sand, bounded by walls of empty air--this was a strange thing.
A little later, when I enthusiastically reported it to a professional
lepidopterist he brushed it aside. "A common occurrence the world
over, Rhopalocera gathered in damp places to drink." I, too, had
observed apparently similar phenomena along icy streams in Sikkim, and
around muddy buffalo-wallows in steaming Malay jungles. And I can
recall many years ago, leaning far out of a New England buggy to watch
clouds of little sulphurs flutter up from puddles beneath the creaking
wheels.
The very fact that butterflies chose to drink in company is of intense
interest, and to be envied as well by us humans who are temporarily
denied that privilege. But in the Bay of Butterflies they were not
drinking, nor during the several days when I watched them. One of the
chosen patches of sand was close to the tide when I first saw them,
and damp enough to appease the thirst of any butterfly. The other two
were upon sand, parched by hours of direct tropical sun, and here the
two layers were massed.
The insects alighted, facing in any direction, but veered at once,
heading upbreeze. Along the riverside of markets of tropical cities I
have seen fleets of fishing boats crowded close together, their gay
sails drying, while great ebony Neptunes brought ashore baskets of
angel fish. This came to mind as I watched my flotillas of
butterflies.
I leaned forward until my face was hardly a foot from the outliers,
and these I learned to know as individuals. One sulphur had lost a bit
of hind wing, and three times he flew away and returned to the same
spot. Like most cripples, he was unamiable, and resented a close
approach, pushing at the trespasser with a foreleg in a most
unbutterfly-like way. Although I watched closely, I did not see a
single tongue uncoiled for drinking. Only when a dense group became
uneasy and pushed one another about were the tongue springs slightly
loosened. Even the nervous antennæ were quiet after the insects had
settled. They seemed to have achieved a Rhopaloceran Nirvana, content
to rest motionless until caught up in the temporary whirlwinds of
restlessness which now and then possessed them.
They came from all directions, swirling over the rocks, twisting
through nearby brambles, and settling without a moment's hesitation.
It was as though they had all been here many times before, a
rendezvous which brooked not an instant's delay. From time to time
some mass spirit troubled them, and, as one butterfly, the whole
company took to wing. Close as they were when resting, they fairly
buffeted one another in mid-air. Their wings, striking one another and
my camera and face, made a strange little rustling, crisp and
crackling whispers of sounds. As if a pile of Northern autumn leaves,
fallen to earth, suddenly remembered days of greenness and humming
bees, and strove to raise themselves again to the bare branches
overhead.
Down came the butterflies again, brushing against my clothes and eyes
and hands. All that I captured later were males, and most were fresh
and newly emerged, with a scattering of dimmed wings, frayed at edges,
who flew more slowly, with less vigor. Finally the lower patch was
washed out by the rising tide, but not until the water actually
reached them did the insects leave. I could trace with accuracy the
exact reach of the last ripple to roll over the flat sand by the
contour of the remaining outermost rank of insects.
On and on came the water, and soon I was forced to move, and the
hundreds of butterflies in front of me. When the last one had left I
went away, returning two hours later. It was then that I witnessed the
most significant happening in the Bay of Butterflies--one which shook
to the bottom the theory of my lepidopterist friend, together with my
thoughtless use of the word normal. Over two feet of restless brown
water covered the sand patches and rocked the scouring rushes. A few
feet farther up the little bay the remaining sand was still exposed.
Here were damp sand, sand dotted with rushes, and sand dry and white
in the sun. About a hundred butterflies were in sight, some
continually leaving, and others arriving. Individuals still dashed
into sight and swooped downward. But not one attempted to alight on
the exposed sand. There was fine, dry sand, warm to a butterfly's
feet, or wet sand soaked with draughts of good Mazaruni water. But
they passed this unheeding, and circled and fluttered in two swarms,
as low as they dared, close to the surface of the water, exactly over
the two patches of sand which had so drawn and held them or their
brethren two hours before. Whatever the ultimate satisfaction may
have been, the attraction was something transcending humidity,
aridity, or immediate possibility of attainment. It was a definite
cosmic point, a geographical focus, which, to my eyes and
understanding, was unreasonable, unsuitable, and inexplicable.
As I watched the restless water and the butterflies striving to find a
way down through it to the only desired patches of sand in the world,
there arose a fine, thin humming, seeping up through the very waves,
and I knew the singing catfish were following the tide shoreward. And
as I considered my vast ignorance of what it all meant, of how little
I could ever convey of the significance of the happenings in the Bay
of Butterflies, I felt that it would have been far better for all of
my green ink to have trickled down through the grains of sand.
XII
SEQUELS