with the head and beard of a Sikh on the legs of a Bengalee, and a thin
Bengalee at that. The audience which pressed close behind, looked and
smelled Calcutta and Darjeeling, and a homesickness which was pain came
over me, to be once more among the great Himalayas. The flickering torch
showed all my retinue threaded along the outer rim of onlookers; my
following who formed a veritable racial tower of Babel. There was Nupee
the Akawai, and Vingi the Machusi and Semmi the Wapiano--red Indians
from forest and savannah. Near them the broad, black African face of
little Mame, all eyes and mouth in the dim light. Then de Freitas the
Portuguese, and all the others of less certain lineage.
Meanwhile Persaid had brought forth an oily, vile-smelling liquid with
which he coated a square yard of earth, and then with pounded maize and
rice he marked out a mystic figure--two squares and diagonals. As the
ceremony went on I lost much of the significance, and the coolies
themselves seemed very vague. They were all of low caste and preserved
more of the form than knowledge of the intricate rites.
We were at the groom's end of the absurd street, and before long Madhoo
himself appeared and was led a few steps away by his female tormentors.
This time they scrubbed and washed and rinsed him with water, and then
dressed him in a soft white waist-cloth draped coolie-wise. Then a long
tight-sleeved pink dress was pulled with much difficulty over his head.
Madhoo now looked like a woman dressed in a fashion long extinct. Next,
a pink turban was wound wonderfully about his head and he was led to one
side of the rice figure, where he sat down on a low stool.
Sam, my black factotum, sat close to me, translating when my slender
knowledge of Hindustani gave out. Suddenly he stopped abruptly in the
middle of a sentence. I saw that he was staring at the groom, the whites
of his eyes glistening in astonishment.
"Chief," he whispered at last, "see where my socks, my shoes!"
And sure enough, we saw Persaid pulling the purple-striped socks, which
had been Sam's delight, over the unaccustomed ankles of the groom. These
were followed by cheap white tennis shoes, causing another ejaculation
on the part of Sam.
"Hello, shoes!" I heard him murmur to himself.
Sam always personified those parts of his environment which touched his
feelings most deeply, whether clothes, curries, thorns, or gravitation.
When unloading the tent-boat a few nights before, he had left his shoes
on the bank; and during a trip up the hill to Kalacoon they had
vanished. For a moment I was not sure that Sam, like the hero in some
melodrama, would not rise and forbid the marriage. Then I heard him
chuckling and knew that his sense of humor and regard for our evening's
entertainment had nobly overcome what must have been a very real desire
to possess again those gorgeous articles of attire. And, besides, I felt
sure that the morrow would witness a short, pithy interview regarding
these same articles, between Sam and either Madhoo or Persaid.
Clad now in this added glory, the groom waited, like the tethered
heifer, looking furtively at his circle of well-wishers. His little,
shriveled mother came and squatted close behind him, toboggan-fashion,
and flung a fold of her cloth over his back. Then she waved various
things three times over his head: a stone grain-crusher, a brass bowl of
water, and tossed rice and pellets of dough in the four directions. Red
paint was put on her toes and feet and caste marks on her son.
Meanwhile the dancer had begun and his musicians were in full swing; but
of these I shall speak later. The groom was backed into an elaborate
head-dress, a high, open-work affair of long wired beads with dangling
artificial flowers. First it was placed on the mother's head and then on
the turban of the long-suffering young man. An outflaring of torches and
a line of white-robed and turbaned coolies from the other end of the
street of six houses roused the groom and his friends to new activity.
He climbed upon one of the men, straddling his neck, and what appeared
to be a best man, or boy, mounted another human steed. They were then
carried the few feet to the house of the bride, the shiny, black-rubber
soles of the filched tennis shoes sticking absurdly out in front. A
third man carried a bundle,--very small, to which no one seemed to
attach much importance,--which was said to contain clothes for the
bride.
After an undignified dismounting, the groom squatted by a new
rice-and-maize square and removed his shoes and socks, to his own
evident relief and Sam's renewed excitement. Then coppers passed to the
priest and many symbolic gifts were put in the groom's hands; some of
these he ate, and others he laid in the square. Whenever money passed,
it was hidden under sweet-smelling frangipani blossoms, or
temple-flowers, as they are called in India. The bride's mother came out
and performed numerous rites to and around the groom; finally, a small
person in white also achieved one or two unimportant things and
disappeared.
While we waited for some culminating event, the groom stood up,
skilfully lit a cigarette through the meshes of the dangling head-dress,
and walked with his friends to the porch of the opposite house, where he
squatted on the earthen floor in the semi-darkness. Then came Persaid
and announced, "Marriage over; man wait until daylight, then carry off
bride to honeymoon house"--the 'dobe hut plastered all over with the
imprints of hundreds of white, outspread fingers and palms.
The marriage over! This was a shock. The critical moment had come and
passed, eluding us, and Budhany, the little bride, had appeared and
vanished so hurriedly that we had not recognized her.
The dancer had throughout been the focus of interest for me. There was
no perfunctory work or slurring over of the niceties of his part, and
his sincerity and absorption inspired and stimulated his four assistants
until they fairly lost themselves in _abandon_ to the rhythm and the
chant. His name was Gokool and he had come up from one of the great
coastal sugar plantations. Nowhere outside of India had I seen such
conscientious devotion to the dancer's work.
Rammo the tent-boat captain played the cretinous violin; he it was who
never tired of bringing us giant _buprestids_ and rails' eggs, and whose
reward was to watch and listen to our typewriter machine through all the
time that he dared prolong his visit to our laboratory. Dusrate played
the tiny clinking cymbals; Mattora, he of the woman's voice, held the
torch always close before the dancer's face; while the drummer--the most
striking of them all--was a stranger, Omeer by name. Omeer, with the
double-ended tom-tom in a neck-sling, followed Gokool about, his eyes
never leaving the latter's face. Little by little he became wholly rapt,
absorbed, and his face so expressive, so working with emotion, that I
could watch nothing else.
Gokool was a real actor, a master of his art, with a voice deep, yet
shifting easily to falsetto quavers, and with the controlled ability of
emphasizing the slightest intonations and delicate semi-tones which made
his singing full of emotional power. He got his little orchestra
together, patting his palms in the _tempo_ he wished, then broke
suddenly into the wailing, dynamic, abrupt phrases which I knew so well.
Had not my servants droned them over my camp-fires from Kashmir to
Myitkyina, and itinerant ballad-singers chanted them from Ceylon to the
Great Snows!
Gokool's dress was wide and his skirt flaring, so that, when he whirled,
it stood straight out, and it was stiff with embroidery and
scintillating with tinsel. From his sleek, black hair came perfume,
that musky, exciting scent which alone would summon India to mind as
with a rub of Aladdin's lamp. His anklets and bracelets clinked as he
moved; and suddenly, and to our Western senses always unexpectedly, he
would begin the swaying, reeling motion, almost that of a cobra in hood.
Then after several more phrases, chanted with all the fire and
temperamental vigor which marks Hindu music, he would start the rigid
little muscular steps which carried him over the ground with no apparent
effort, though all the time he was wholly tense and working up into that
ecstasy which would obsess him more and more. His songs were of love and
riches and war, and all the things of life which can mean so little to
these poor coolies.
Exhausted at last, he stopped; and I found that I too suddenly
relaxed--that I had been sitting with every muscle tense in sympathy.
Gokool came and gave me a salaam, and as he turned away for a
hand-hollowed puff of hemp I spoke a little word of thanks in his own
tongue.
He looked back, not believing that he had heard aright. I repeated it
and asked if he knew "Dar-i-Parhadoor," this being my phonetic spelling
of a certain ballad of ancient India.
"Koom, sahib," he said; and kneeling touched my foot with his head.
Then we talked as best we could, and I found he was from the Hills, and
knew and adored the Parhadoor, and was even more homesick for the Great
Snows than I. But once something had snapped in his head and he could
not work in the sun, and could dance but rarely; so now he earned money
for his daily rice only and could never return.
Then he gathered his musicians once more and sang part of the majestic
Parhadoor, which is full of romance and royal wars, and has much to do
with the wonders of the early Rajputs. And he sang more to me than to
the groom, who neither looked nor listened, but kept busy with his
clothes.
Out of all the pressing throng a little coolie boy came and squatted
close, and his eyes grew large as he listened to the tale, and from time
to time he smiled at me. He had once brought me a coral snake, but I
could not call him by name. Now I knew him for the one unlike the
rest,--worthy perhaps of a place in my memory roll of supercoolies,--who
worked at weeding day after day, like the rest of the men, but who
thought other thoughts than those of Mahabol and Guiadeen. I wished I
had known of him sooner.
So Gokool sang to us two, the coolie boy and me, a song of ancient
India, and danced it by moonlight here in this American jungle, and I
dotted his dancing circle with pence, and a few bits, and even a
shilling or two. And Gokool thanked me with dignity. And his face will
long remain vivid, tense with feeling, forgetful of all but the
loud-cadenced phrases, the quavering chant which broke in and out of
falsetto so subtlely that no Western voice may imitate it. And I like to
think that he enjoyed dancing for a sahib who loved Lucknow and the old
ballads. And so we parted.
* * * * *
After I cached the vampire lantern behind its intrenched bulwark of
books and magazines, I leaned far out of a window and thought over the
night's happenings. It was long after midnight, and the steady throb of
the tom-tom still kept rhythm with the beat of my temples, and I gave
myself up to the lure of the hypnotic monotone.
One thought kept recurring--of the little girl far back in the dark
depths of the wattled hut. She was so little, so childish, and her part
that evening had been so slight and perfunctory, not as much as that of
any of the other women and girls who had slovenly performed the
half-understood rites. She had brought us milk regularly, and smiled
when we wished salaam to her.
She knew less of India than I did. Guiana, this alien land, as humid and
luxuriant as the Great Plains were dry and parched--this was her native
country. And this evening was her supreme moment; yet her part in it had
not seemed fair. She would have liked so much to have worn that pink
dress which made her future husband a caricature; she would have adored
to place the shining, tinseled head-dress on her black hair--more with a
child's delight than a woman's. And now she would live in a house of her
own, and not a play-house, and obey this kind-faced young man--young,
but not in comparison with her, whose father he could have been. And she
would have anklets and bracelets and a gorgeous nose-button if he could
save enough shillings,--I almost said rupees,--and ultimately she would
go and cut grass with the other women, and each day take her little baby
astride her hip down to the water and wash it, as she, so very short a
time ago, had been washed.
And so, close to the wonder windows, we had seen a marriage of strange
peoples, who were yet of our own old Aryan stock; whose ceremonies were
already ancient when the Christians first kept faith, now transported to
a new land where life was infinitely easier for them than in their own
overcrowded villages; immigrants to the tropical hinterland where they
rubbed elbows with idle Africans and stolid Red Indians. And I was glad
of all their strange symbolic doings, for these showed imagination and a
love of the long past in time and the distant in space.
I wished a good wish for Budhany, our little milkmaid, and forgot all in
the sound, dreamless sleep which comes each night at Kalacoon.
VIII
THE CONVICT TRAIL
I am thinking of a very wonderful thing and words come laggardly. For it
is a thing which more easily rests quietly in the deep pool of memory
than stirred up and crystalized into words and phrases. It is of the
making of a new trail, of the need and the planning and the achievement,
of the immediate effects and the possible consequences. For the effects
became manifest at once, myriad, unexpected, some sinister, others
altogether thrilling and wholly delightful to the soul of a naturalist.
And now, many months after, they are still spreading, like a forest fire
which has passed beyond control. Only in this case the land was no worse
and untold numbers of creatures were better off because of our new
trail.
Of the still more distant consequences I cannot write, for the book of
the future is tightly sealed. But we may recall that a trail once was
cut through coarse, high grass and belts of cedar, which in time became
the Appian Way. And a herd of aurochs breasting in single file dense
shrubby oaks and heather toward a salt lick may well have foreshadowed
Regent Street; the Place d'Etoile was perhaps first adumbrated by wild
boars concentrating on a root-filled marsh. And why should not the
Indian trail which became a Dutch road and our Fifth Avenue, have had
its first hint in a moose track down the heart of a wooded island,
leading to some hidden spring!
We left our boats stranded on the Mazaruni River bank and climbed the
steep ascent to our new home in the heart of British Guiana. Our outfit
was unpacked, and the laboratory and kitchen and bedrooms in the big
Kalacoon house were at last more than names.
And now we surveyed our little kingdom. One path led down to our boats,
another meandered eastwards through the hills. But like the feathered
end of the magnetic arrow, we drifted as with one will to the south.
Here at the edge of our cleared compound we were confronted by a tangle.
It was not very high--twenty feet or so--but dense and unbroken. Like
newly trapped creatures we paced back and forth along it looking for an
opening. It was without a break. We examined it more closely and saw a
multitude of slender, graceful cane stems hung with festoons and
grass-like drapery. One of us seized a wisp of this climbing grass and
pulled downward. When he dropped it his hand dripped blood. He might as
well have run a scroll saw over his fingers. The jungle had shown its
teeth.
We laughed and retreated to the upper floor for consultation. The sight
we saw there decided us. In the distance "not too far," to use the
hopelessly indefinite Guiana vernacular, high over the tumbled lower
growths towered the real jungle--the high bush. This was the edge of
that mighty tropical ocean of foliage, that sea of life with its surface
one hundred, two hundred feet above the earth, stretching unbroken to
the Andes: leagues of unknown wonderland. And here we were, after
thousands of miles of voyaging to study the life of this great jungle,
to find our last few yards blocked by a mass of vegetation. There was no
dissenting voice. We must cut a trail, and at once, straight to the
jungle.
Before we begin our trail, it will be wise to try to understand this
twenty-foot tangle, stretching almost a mile back from Kalacoon. Three
years before it was pure jungle. Then man came with ax and saw and fire
and one by one the great giants were felled--mora, greenheart,
crabwood--each crashing its way to earth after centuries of upward
growth. The underbrush in the dark, high jungle is comparatively scanty.
Light-starved and fungus-plagued, the shrubs and saplings are stunted
and weak. So when only the great stumps were left standing, the
erstwhile jungle showed as a mere shambles of raw wood and shriveled
foliage. After a time fire was applied, and quickly, as in the case of
resinous trees, or with long, slow smolderings of half-rotted, hollow
giants, the huge boles were consumed.
For a period, utter desolation reigned. Charcoal and gray ash covered
everything. No life stirred. Birds had flown, reptiles and insects made
their escape or succumbed. Only the saffron-faced vultures swung past,
on the watch for some half-charred creature. Almost at once, however,
the marvelous vitality of the tropical vegetation asserted itself.
Phoenix-like, from the very heart of the ashes, appeared leaves of
strange shape and color. Stumps whose tissues seemed wholly turned to
charcoal sent forth adventitious shoots, and splintered boughs blossomed
from their wounds. Now was the lowest ebb of the jungle's life, when man
for the success of his commercial aims, should take instant advantage.
But plans miscarried and the ruin wrought was left to nature.
The destruction of the jungle had been complete and the searing flames
had destroyed all forest seeds. In their place, by some magic, there
sprang up at once a maze of weeds, vines and woody shrubs, reeds, ferns
and grasses, all foreign to the dark jungle and whose nearest congeners
were miles away. Yet here were their seeds and spores, baffling all
attempts at tracing their migration or the time they had laid dormant.
When we had begun to penetrate this newborn tangle we found it possible,
by comparing various spots, to follow its growth in past time. The first
things to appear in the burned jungle area were grasses or grass-like
plants and prostrate vines. These latter climbed over the fallen
tree-trunks and covered the charred stumps with a glory of
blossoms--white convolvulus gleaming everywhere, then pale yellow
allamandas, and later, orchid-like, violet, butterfly peas which at
first flowered among the ashes on the ground, but climbed as soon as
they found support. Little by little, a five-finger vine flung whole
chains of bloom over stumps, logs and bushes, a beautiful, blood-red
passion flower, whose buds looked like strings of tiny Chinese lanterns.
Soon another type of plant appeared, with hollow and jointed stems,
pushing out fans of fingered leaves, swiftly, wasting no time in
branching, but content with a single spike piercing up through strata of
grass and reeds, through shrubs and bushes until it won to the open sky.
This was the cecropia or trumpet tree, falsely appearing firm and solid
stemmed, but quite dominant in the neglected tangle.
We started early one morning with small axes and sharp machetes, and
single file, began to cut and hew and tear a narrow trail southward. For
some distance we found almost a pure culture of the cecropia trees,
through which we made rapid progress which aroused entirely false hopes.
It was a joy to crash obliquely through the crisp hollow stems at one
blow from our great knives. The second man cut again at the base and the
rest took the severed stems and threw or pushed them to one side,
cutting away any smaller growths. We soon learned to be careful in
handling the stems for they were sanctuary for scores of a small
stinging ant, whose race had practiced preparedness for many generations
and who rushed out when the stem was split by cutlass or ax.
As we went on we learned that differences in soil which were not
apparent when the great jungle covered everything, had now become of
much importance. On high sandy spots the cecropias did not get that
flying start which they needed for their vertical straightaway dash.
Here a community of hollow reeds or bamboo grass appeared from no one
knows where. They had grown and multiplied until their stems fairly
touched one another, forming a dense, impenetrable thicket of green,
silicious tubes eight to twelve feet in length. These were smooth and
hard as glass and tapered beautifully, making wonderfully light and
strong arrows with which our Akawai Indians shot fish. Slow indeed was
our progress through this. The silica dulled and chipped our blades and
the sharp points of the cut stems lamed us at a touch.
But whatever the character of the vegetation, whether a tangle of
various thorny nightshades, a grove of cecropias, or a serried phalanx
of reeds, the terrible razor-grass overran all. Gracefully it hung in
emerald loops from branch to branch, festooning living foliage and dead
stump alike, with masses of slender fronds. It appeared soft and
loose-hung as if one could brush it away with a sweep of the hand. But
it was the most punishing of all living things, insidiously cutting to
the bone as we grasped it, and binding all this new growth together with
bands more efficient than steel.
An age-old jungle is kind to the intruder, its floor is smooth and open,
one's footsteps fall upon soft moss, the air is cooled and shadowed by
the foliage high overhead. Here, in this mushroom growth of only three
years, our progress became slower and ever more difficult. Our hands
bled and were cut until we could barely keep them gripped about the
cutlass handles; our trail opened up a lane down which poured the
seething heat of the sun's direct rays; thorns penetrated our moccasins
and ants dropped down our necks and bit and stung simultaneously with
opposite ends of their anatomy. Five minutes' chopping and hacking was
all that the leader could stand, who would then give way to another.
Fifty yards of a narrow lane represented our combined efforts the first
day.
Direction was a constant source of trouble. Every three or four feet we
had to consult a compass, so confusing was the tangle. Sudden gullies
blocked us, a barren, half-open, sandy slope cheered us for a few yards.
It was nature's defense and excelled any barbed-wire entanglement I have
ever seen at the battle-front.
Once I came to a steep concealed gully. The razor-grass had been
particularly bad, giving like elastic to blows of the cutlass and then
flying back across my face. I was adrip with perspiration, panting in
the heat when I slid part way down the bank, and chopping away a solid
mass of huge elephant's ears, uncovered a tree-trunk bridging the swamp.
It brought to mind the bridge from Bad to Worse in the terrible Dubious
Land. Strange insects fled from the great leaves, lizards whisked past
me, hummingbirds whirred close to my face--the very sound seeming to
increase the heat. I slipped and fell off the log, splashing into the
hot water and warm mud, and sat in it for a while, too fagged to move.
Then the rest of the party came up and we clambered slowly to the top of
the next rise, and there caught sight of the jungle's edge, and it
seemed a trifle nearer and we went on with renewed courage. Shortly
afterwards two of us were resting in a patch of reeds while the third
worked some distance ahead, when there came a sudden low growl and rush.
Instinctively we rose on the instant, just in time to see a jaguar
swerve off on one side and disappear in a swish of swaying reed stems. I
have never known one of these animals to attack a man, and in this case
the jaguar had undoubtedly heard but not scented us, and the attack
ceased the moment we proved to be other than deer or similar prey. The
incident had come and passed too swiftly for thought, but now when we
realized that this was a bit of the real wild life of the jungle, our
enthusiasm never flagged, and we kept steadily at the heart-breaking
work, resting only now and then for our cuts to heal.