The first officer, the only man in the ship who could converse freely
with me in English, waved his hand as he went overside. He was going
ashore to some friends. The shore of the island was just out of hailing
distance. The setting sun was below the height of the land. The huts
among the columns of the palms along the beach were becoming formless.
Even by day our steamer, among those islands of Indonesia, gave me the
idea that she was a vagrant from another and a coarser world. Land was
nearly always in sight, but whether distant or close to our beam it
might have been a vagary, the vaporous show of a kingdom with which
we could have no contact. It would have no name. It had not been seen
before. We were the first to see it, and the last. To-morrow some other
shape would be there, or nothing. The only reality was our steamer and
its Dutchman, chance blunderers into a region which was not for us.
Even when the sun was over the ship, and the blaze on the deck was like
exposure to a furnace, the coast in sight was but the filmy stuff of
an hallucination.
But now the sun was going, and in those seas that spectacle was always
strangely disturbing. It was a celestial display which should have been
accompanied by the rolling of thunder and the shaking of the earth.
One watched for the sudden peopling of those far off and luminous
battlements of the sky. But there was no sound. There was no movement.
It was an empty display; we might have been surprised by the beginning
of a rehearsal which was postponed. One could not help feeling the
immanence of a revelation to men who now, open-mouthed, had paused in
their foolish activities, and were waiting; and so it was astonishing,
after that warning prelude, that only darkness should fall. We were
reprieved. Perhaps Heaven did not know what to do with us.
The pale huts receded into nothing. The black filigree of palm fronds
above them dissolved in night. The smooth water of the anchorage
vanished without a whisper. The day was done. In the alleyway on which
my cabin opened a few electric sconces made solid a short walk, which
was suspended with vague ends in the dark. The weight of a heated
silence, in which there was no more to be discerned than that short
promenade, fell over the ship. It was astonishing that she could be so
quiet.
In my cabin even an electric fan would have been a companion, but
it would not work; it was dumb. The cabin was only a recess in
solitude. Every book there had been read, and the advertisements in
the newspapers, which were two months old, and had been used for
packing. When I left London I took with me some clear and scientific
advice about the collecting of insects. “Not butterflies and moths.”
My instructions were specific. “Only diptera, hymenoptera, and bugs
like these.” The bugs called “these” were exhibited and demonstrated in
their British counterparts.
It appeared that I might be of aid to a new study, which now is
earnestly seeking an answer to the growing challenge of the insect
world to man’s dominion of this earth. This quest was urged on me with
cool insistence, careless of any suspicion I might have had that there
may be, to an overseeing and directing mind unknown, worse pests than
bugs on earth. I accepted the job, the tins, the pins, the forceps,
the bottles, chemicals, nets and all, and submitted to a series of
elementary lessons. I began with the feeling of a Jain in the matter;
but at last was persuaded that I should be performing a social service,
for I was reminded that a tse-tse fly could make as good an exhibit of
me as ever man made of a gorilla.
With some little entomological routine to be got through daily I began
to understand why it was the Victorian naturalists showed a fortitude
in adversity which, had they resolved, not on beetles but on something
nobler, might have got them to Truth itself. On tropical days so
searching that nothing but a sudden threat would have moved a man from
where he happened to be resting, I picked up my net with alacrity,
filled a little bag with bottles, and toiled to some place which, so
the sun and wind told me, would make the shade of old Wallace eagerly
readjust his ghostly spectacles as he watched me; and I saw clearly
enough then that at an earlier age and with a stouter nerve I should
have found fun in collecting record horns and tusks. It was usually
in a secluded corner where I was alone; though once, near a Malay
village in Celebes, in a clearing which had already become a tangled
shrubbery again, I noticed at last a native, his krise in his sarong,
sternly watching me. He stood like a threatening image, and whenever
I glanced casually in his direction, which I did as often as dignity
allowed, he still had that severe look. Presently I found that this
area was a Mohammedan graveyard, for I tripped over one of the hidden
stones while stealthily following the eccentric course of a fly which
looked attractively malignant. The Malay stood over me as I pulled out
some thorns with forced deliberation. He did not speak. He picked up a
spare net, and spent the rest of the morning adding industriously to my
collection.
The close scrutiny of one patch of forest, into which direct sunlight
fell, with the eye watchful for the slightest movement, gave one a
notion of the density with which that apparently empty jungle was
peopled. A biologist once said that most of the world’s protoplasm is
locked up in the bodies of insects. You would think so when, having
missed a miniature bogie with the net, you scrutinised the place where
it had so miraculously disappeared. (Sometimes it was in a fold of the
net all the time, discovered when it nailed a careless hand.)
Nothing appears to be there but fronds and branches, yet as soon as the
image of the object you missed begins to fade from your recollection,
you see, sitting under a leaf, a robber fly eating a victim as large as
itself. Near it is a big grasshopper so closely resembling the leaves
and stem with which it is aligned that your sight is apt to take it in
as a slow transmutation of the foliage. Touch him, and he shoots off
like a projectile. His noisy flight betrays a number of things. They
move, and then there they are. A shield bug, whose homeland cousins
are hated by fruit-growers, moves uneasily in its place. You had
supposed it was a coloured leaf-scar. Spiders and mantids run and drop.
You mark the fall of one creature, and then are aware that a column
of ants is marching through the dead leaves at your feet. Every inch
appears to be occupied, where a casual glance would have seen nothing
in the whole front of the woods.
The mere collecting of these creatures is but a pastime, though it is
easy enough to find species that are unknown to entomologists; yet of
very few of those innumerable forms is the life-history known, though
some of the little items of the forest prove disastrous, with acquired
habits, in the plantations. Man quite easily displaces the tigers and
their lairs, but it is more than likely that the little things, of
which he has been contemptuous, may put up a more remarkable fight for
a place in the sun than he will enjoy.
When the ship was quiet at night, that was the time when the bottles
were emptied, and the creatures were put into paper envelopes, with a
place and date. The electric sconces outside at night made good hunting
ground. Moths like translucent jewels reposed on them; but the luminous
plaques were chiefly valuable as attractions for mosquitoes and some
flies which would have been unbelievable even by day.
One night, unable for a time to do more work because my hands were wet
with sweat caused by my concentration on small and delicate objects, I
looked up at some books facing me on the table. A creature with eyes
like tiny orange glow lamps was sitting there watching me, its wings
tremulous with energy.
It was a moth, demi-octavo in size, and I became at once a little
nervous in its presence. I assured it earnestly that moths were
quite outside my instructions. Nevertheless, when I rose gently to
inspect it, so desirable a beauty I had never seen before. It was jet
black, body and wings, though its wings were marked sparsely with
hieroglyphics in gold. Was it real? I got the net, and secured it
neatly as it rose; brought a killing bottle--might I not have one such
creature when Bates and Wallace slew their thousands?--and watched the
captive where it quivered, though not in alarm, in a loose fold of the
muslin. It was quiet, making a haze of its wings, at times checking
them so that I could attempt a translation of its golden message. It
had a face ... rather a large black face, in which those glowing eyes
were very conspicuous.
I took out the cork of the bottle, looked again at the quivering and
fearsome beauty, and put back the cork and shoved the bottle away.
It was impossible. It would have been worse than murder. They who
destroy beauty are damned. I felt I did not want to be damned. That
wonderful form, and the stillness, and the silence, overcame me. This
creature was not mine. I freed the prisoner. It shot round the cabin,
settled again on a book, and watched me, with its wings vibrating,
until I had finished. A dim suspicion that it was more than a moth was
inconsequential, but natural.