of the berry-hunters--these baffle description, yet we cannot pass them
by in silence. The blood and orange splashed on black of the toucans,
the scarlet and yellow of woodpeckers, the soft greens and buffs of
flycatchers, all these paled when a flock of manakins or tanagers or
honey-creepers came to the tree. Every precious stone found its
counterpart in the metallic hues of these exquisite feathered folk.
The glory of all was the opal-crowned manakin, a midget in green coat
and sulphur waistcoat, with a cap of scaly, iridescent, silvery
mother-of-pearl plates, in no way akin to feathers. Until now the life
of this Hop o' my Thumb, like those of all his ancestors, had gone
smoothly on, with never a human to admire, to wonder, and vainly to echo
the question of the great black frog, _Wh--y?_
On the last day of my stay I walked slowly up the trail toward the
_canella do matto_. For the last time I strained upward at the
well-known branches, and with the very movement there came the voice of
the swamp. Its tone was insistent, with a tinge of accusation, a note of
censure. _Wh--y?_ and after a little time, _Wh--y?_
I looked about me despairingly. What had I learned after all? Was there
any clearing up of the mystery of the jungle? Had my week of scrutiny
brought me any closer to the real intimacies of evolution? Or--evading
these questions for the time--was there nothing I could do in the few
precious moments left?
In five minutes I should turn my back on all this wildness, this jungle
seething with profound truths, and great solutions within arm's reach. I
should pass to the ocean where monotony compels introspection, and
finally to the great center of civilization where the veneer covers up
all truths.
Even if my studies had taught only the lesson of the tremendous
insurgence of life, could I not emphasize this, make it a more
compelling factor to be considered in future efforts toward the frog's
question and mine?
My eyes left the foliage overhead and sought the ground. Acting on
impulse, I brought from my camping stores an empty war-bag, and scraped
together an armful of leaves, sticks, moss, earth, mold of all sorts.
Four square feet of jungle debris went into my bag, and I shouldered it.
Then I said adieu to my trail and my tree--a sorrowful leave-taking, as
is always my misfortune. For the bonds which bind me to a place or a
person are not easily broken. And, as usual when the trail passed from
view, the ideal alone remained. The thoughts of mosquitoes, of
drenchings, of hours of breathless disappointed waiting, all sank in the
memory of the daily discoveries, the mental delights of new research.
A week later, when the sky-line was unbroken by land, when a long
ground-swell waved but did not disturb the deep blue of the open sea, I
unlaced my bag of jungle mold. Armed with forceps, lens, and vials I
began my search. For days I had gazed upward; now my scrutiny was
directed downward. With binoculars I had scanned without ceasing the
myriad leaves of a great tree; now with lens or naked eye I sought for
life or motion on single fallen leaves and dead twigs. When I studied
the life of the great tree I was in the land of Brobdingnag; now I was
verily a Gulliver in Lilliput. The cosmos in my war-bag teemed with
mystery as deep and as inviting as any in the jungle itself.
When I began work I knew little of what I should find. My vague thoughts
visualized ants and worms, and especially I anticipated unearthing
myriads of the unpleasant "mucuims" or _betes rouges_, whose hosts had
done all in their power to make life in the jungle unhappy.
Day by day my vials increased. Scores of creatures evaded my search;
many others, of whose kind I had captured a generous number, I allowed
to escape.
My lilliputian census was far from the mere aggregation of ants and
worms which I had anticipated, and a review of the whole showed that
hardly any great group of living creatures was unrepresented.
As hinting of the presence of wild animals, a bunch of rufous hairs had
in some way been tweaked from a passing agouti. Man himself was
represented in the shape of two wads which had dropped from my gun-shots
some time during the week. One had already begun to disintegrate and
sheltered half a dozen diminutive creatures. Five feathers were the
indications of birds, two of which were brilliant green plumes from a
calliste. Of reptiles there was a broken skull of some lizard, long
since dead, and the eggshell of a lizardling which had hatched and gone
forth upon his mission into the jungle. A third reptilian trace may have
been his nemesis--a bit of shed snake-skin. The group of amphibians was
present even in this square of four feet--a very tiny, dried, black, and
wholly unrecognizable little frog. Fishes were absent, though from my
knees as I scraped up the debris, I could almost have seen a little
igarape in which dwelt scores of minnows.
As I delved deeper and examined the mold more carefully for the
diminutive inhabitants, I found that this thin film from the floor of
the jungle appeared to have several layers, each with its particular
fauna. The upper layer was composed of recently fallen leaves, nuts,
seeds, and twigs, dry and quite fresh. Here were colonies of small ants
and huge, solitary ones; here lived in hiding small moths and beetles
and bugs, awaiting dusk to fly forth through the jungle. The middle
layer was by far the most important, and in it lived four fifths of all
the small folk. The lowest layer was one of matted roots and clayey soil
and its animal life was meager.
Between the upper and the middle strata were sprouting nuts and seeds,
with their blanched roots threaded downward into the rich dark mold, and
the greening cotyledons curling upward toward light and warmth. Thus had
the great bird-filled canella begun its life. In my war-bag were a
score of potential forest giants doomed to death in the salt ocean. But
for my efforts toward the _Wh--y_, their fate might have been very
different.
Some of the half-decayed leaves were very beautiful. Vistas of pale,
bleached fungus lace trailed over the rich mahogany-colored tissues,
studded here and there with bits of glistening, transparent quartz. Here
I had many hints of a world of life beyond the power of the unaided eye.
And here too the grosser fauna scrambled, hopped, or wriggled.
Everywhere were tiny chrysalides and cocoons, many empty. Now and then a
plaque of eggs, almost microscopic, showed veriest pin-pricks where
still more minute parasites had made their escape. When one contracted
the field of vision to this world where leaves were fields and fungi
loomed as forests, competition, the tragedies, the mystery lessened not
at all. Minute seeds mimicked small beetles in shape and in exquisite
tracery of patterns. Bits of bark simulated insects, a patch of fungus
seemed a worm, while the mites themselves were invisible until they
moved. Here and there I discovered a lifeless boulder of emerald or
turquoise--the metallic cuirass of some long-dead beetle.
Some of the scenes which appeared as I picked over the mold, suddenly
unfolding after an upheaval of debris, were like Aladdin's cave. Close
to the eye appeared great logs and branches protruding in confusion from
a heaped up bank of diamonds. Brown, yellow, orange, and white colors
played over the scene; and now over a steep hill came a horrid, ungainly
creature, with enormous proboscis, eight legs, and a shining,
liver-colored body, spotted with a sickly hue of yellow. It was studded
with short, stiff, horny hairs--a mite by name, but under the lens a
terrible monster. I put some of these on my arm, to see if they were the
notorious "mucuims" which tortured us daily. Under the lens I saw the
hideous creature stop in its awkward progress, and as it prepared to
sink its proboscis I involuntarily flinched, so fearful a thing seemed
about to happen.
The lesser organisms defy description. They are nameless except in the
lists of specialists, and indeed most are of new, quite unnamed forms.
The only social insects were small twigfuls of ant and termite colonies,
with from five to fifteen members. All others were isolated, scattered.
Life here, so far beneath the sunlight, is an individual thing. Flocks
and herds are unknown; the mob has no place here. Each tiny organism
must live its life and meet its fate single-handed.
Little pseudo-scorpions were very abundant, and I could have vialed
hundreds. They rushed out excitedly and, unlike all the other little
beings, did not seek to hide. Instead, when they were disturbed, they
sought open spaces, walking slowly and brandishing and feeling ahead
with their great pincer-tipped arms, as long as their entire body. When
irritated or frightened, they scurried backwards, holding up their chelae
in readiness.
Mites were the most abundant creatures, equaling the ants in number,
always crawling slowly along, tumbling over every obstacle in their path
and feeling their way awkwardly. Their kinds were numerous, all
villainous in appearance. Ticks were less common but equally repellent.
Small spiders and beetles were occasionally found, and hundred-legged
wrigglers fled to shelter at every turn of a leaf. The smallest snails
in the world crawled slowly about, some flat-shelled, others turreted.
Tiny earthworms, bright red and very active, crept slowly through fungus
jungles until disturbed, when they became an amazingly active tangle of
twisting curves, dancing all about. Simple insects, which we shall have
to call collembolas, were difficult to capture. They leaped with agility
many times their own length, and when quiescent looked like bits of
fungus. As for the rest, only Adam and a few specialists hidden in
museums could call them by name. They were a numerous company, some
ornamented with weird horns and fringes and patterns, others long of
legs or legless, swift of foot or curling up into minute balls of
animate matter.
One thing was evident early in my exploration: I was in a world of
little people. No large insects were in any of the debris. The largest
would be very small in comparison with a May beetle. And another thing
was the durability of chitin. The remains of beetles, considering the
rareness of living ones, were remarkable. The hard wing-cases, the
thorax armor, the segments of wasps, eyeless head masks, still remained
perfect in shape and vivid in color. Even in the deepest layers where
all else had disintegrated and returned to the elements, these shards
of death were as new.
And the smell of the mold, keen and strong as it came to my nostrils an
inch away--it was pungent, rich, woody. It hinted of the age-old
dissolution, century after century, which had been going on. Leaves had
fallen, not in a sudden autumnal downpour, but in a never-ending drift,
day after day, month after month. With a daily rain for moisture, with a
temperature of three figures, for the quicker increase of bacteria, and
an excess of humidity to foster quick decay, the jungle floor was indeed
a laboratory of vital work--where only analytic chemistry was allowed
full sway, and the mystery of synthetic life was ever handicapped, and
ever a mystery.
Before the vessel docked I had completed my task and had secured over
five hundred creatures of this lesser cosmos. At least twice as many
remained, but when I made my calculations I estimated that the mold had
sheltered only a thousand organisms plainly visible to the eye.
And when I had corked my last vial and the steward had removed the last
pile of shredded debris, I leaned back and thought of the thousand
creatures in my scant four square feet of mold. Then there came to mind
a square mile of jungle floor with its thin layer of fallen leaves
sheltering more than six billion creatures. Then I recalled the three
thousand straight miles of jungle which had lain west of me, and the
hundreds of miles of wonderful unbroken forest north and south, and my
mind became a blank. And then from the mist of unnamable numerals, from
this uncharted arithmetical census, there came to memory a voice, deep
and guttural,--and this time the slow enunciation was jeering, hopeless
of answer, _Wh--y?_ And soon afterwards, _Wh--y?_ And I packed up my
last box of vials and went on deck to watch the sunset.
XI
JUNGLE NIGHT
Within gun-reach in front of me trudged my little Akawai Indian hunter.
He turned his head suddenly, his ears catching some sound which mine had
missed, and I saw that his profile was rather like that of Dante.
Instantly the thought spread and the simile deepened. Were we two not
all alone? and this unearthly hour and light--Then I chuckled softly,
but the silence that the chuckle shattered shrank away and made it a
loud, coarse sound, so that I involuntarily drew in my breath. But it
was really amusing, the thought of Dante setting out on a hunt for
kinkajous and giant armadillos. Jeremiah looked at me wonderingly, and
we went on in silence. And for the next mile Dante vanished from my
thoughts and I mused upon the sturdy little red man. Jeremiah was his
civilized name; he would never tell me his real one. It seemed so
unsuited to him that I thought up one still less appropriate and called
him Nupee--which is the three-toed sloth; and in his quiet way he saw
the humor of it, for a more agile human being never lived.
Nupee's face was unclouded, but his position as hunter to our expedition
had brought decisions and responsibilities which he had not known
before. The simple life,--the unruffled existence in the little open
_benab_, with hammock, cassava field, and an occasional hunt,--this was
of the past. A wife had come, slipping quietly into his life,
Indian-fashion; and now, before the baby arrived, decisions had to be
made. Nupee longed for some store shoes and a suit of black clothes. He
had owned a big _benab_ which he himself had built; but a godmother,
like the cowbird in a warbler's nest, had gradually but firmly ousted
him and had filled it with diseased relatives, so that it was unpleasant
to visit. He now, to my knowledge, owned a single shirt and a pair of
short trousers.
The shoes were achieved. I detected in him qualities which I knew that I
should find in some one, as I do on every expedition, and I made him
perform some unnecessary labor and gave him the shoes. But the clothes
would cost five dollars, a month's wages, and he had promised to get
married--white-fashion--in another month, and that would consume several
times five dollars. I did not offer to help him decide. His Akawai
marriage ceremony seemed not without honor, and as for its sincerity--I
had seen the two together. But my lips were sealed. I could not tell him
that a recementing of the ritual of his own tribe did not seem quite the
equal of a five-dollar suit of clothes. That was a matter for individual
decision.
But tonight I think that we both had put all our worries and sorrows far
away, and I memory as well; and I felt sympathy in the quiet, pliant
gait which carried him so swiftly over the sandy trail. I knew Nupee now
for what he was--the one for whom I am always on the lookout, the
exceptional one, the super-servant, worthy of friendship as an equal. I
had seen his uncle and his cousins. They were Indians, nothing more.
Nupee had slipped into the place left vacant for a time by Aladdin, and
by Satan and Shimosaka, by Drojak and Trujillo--all exceptional, all
faithful, all servants first and then friends. I say "for a time," for
all hoped, and I think still hope with me, that we shall meet and
travel and camp together again, whether in the Cinghalese thornbush, or
Himalayan daks, in Dyak canoes or among the camphor groves of
Sakarajama.
Nupee and I had not been thrown together closely. This had proved a
static expedition, settled in one place, with no dangers to speak of, no
real roughing it, and we met only after each hunting trip. But the magic
of a full moon had lured me from my laboratory table, and here we were,
we two, plodding junglewards, becoming better acquainted in silence than
I have often achieved with much talk.
It was nearly midnight. We traversed a broad trail of white sand,
between lines of saplings of pale-barked rubber trees, flooded,
saturated, with milky-gray light. Not a star appeared in the cloudless
sky, which, in contrast to the great silver moon-plaque, was blue-black.
These open sandy stretches, so recently etched into what had been
primitive jungle, were too glowing with light for most of the nocturnal
creatures who, in darkness, flew and ran and hunted about in them. And
the lovers of twilight were already come and gone. The stage was vacant
save for one actor--the nighthawk of the silvery collar, whose eerie
_wheeeo!_ or more leisurely and articulate _who-are-you?_ was queried
from stump and log. There was in it the same liquid tang, the virile
ringing of skates on ice, which enriches the cry of the whip-poor-will
in our country lanes.
Where the open trail skirted a hillside we came suddenly upon a great
gathering of these goatsuckers, engaged in some strange midnight revel.
Usually they roost and hunt and call in solitude, but here at least
forty were collected on the white sand within an area of a few yards. We
stopped and watched. They were dancing--or, rather, popping, as corn
pops in a hopper. One after another, or a half dozen at a time, they
bounced up a foot or two from the ground and flopped back, at the
instant of leaving and returning uttering a sudden, explosive _wop!_
This they kept up unceasingly for the five minutes we gave to them, and
our passage interrupted them for only a moment. Later we passed single
birds which popped and wopped in solitary state; whether practicing, or
snobbishly refusing to perform in public, only they could tell. It was a
scene not soon forgotten.
Suddenly before us rose the jungle, raw-edged, with border zone of
bleached, ashamed trunks and lofty branches white as chalk, of dead and
dying trees. For no jungle tree, however hardy, can withstand the
blasting of violent sun after the veiling of emerald foliage is torn
away. As the diver plunges beneath the waves, so, after one glance
backward over the silvered landscape, I passed at a single stride into
what seemed by contrast inky blackness, relieved by the trail ahead,
which showed as does a ray of light through closed eyelids. As the
chirruping rails climbed among the roots of the tall cat-tails out
yonder, so we now crept far beneath the level of the moonlit foliage.
The silvery landscape had been shifted one hundred, two hundred feet
above the earth. We had become lords of creation in name alone,
threading our way humbly among the fungi and toadstools, able only to
look aloft and wonder what it was like. And for a long time no voice
answered to tell us whether any creature lived and moved in the
tree-tops.
The tropical jungle by day is the most wonderful place in the world. At
night I am sure it is the most weirdly beautiful of all places outside
the world. For it is primarily unearthly, unreal; and at last I came to
know why. In the light of the full moon it was rejuvenated. The simile
of theatrical scenery was always present to the mind, the illusion lying
especially in the completeness of transformation from the jungle by
daylight. The theatrical effect was heightened by the sense of being in
some vast building. This was because of the complete absence of any
breath of air. Not a leaf moved; even the pendulous air-roots reaching
down their seventy-foot plummets for the touch of soil did not sway a
hair's breadth. The throb of the pulse set the rhythm for one's steps.
The silence, for a time, was as perfect as the breathlessness. It was a
wonderfully ventilated amphitheater; the air was as free from any
feeling of tropical heat, as it lacked all crispness of the north. It
was exactly the temperature of one's skin. Heat and cold were for the
moment as unthinkable as wind.
One's body seemed wholly negligible. In soft padding moccasins and easy
swinging gait close behind my naked Indian hunter, and in such khaki
browns that my body was almost invisible to my own downward glance, I
was conscious only of the play of my senses--of two at first, sight and
smell; later, of hearing. The others did not exist. We two were
unattached, impersonal, moving without effort or exertion. It was magic,
and I was glad that I had only my Akawai for companion, for it was magic
that a word would have shattered. Yet there was this wonderfully
satisfying thing about it, that most magic lacks: it exists at present,
today perhaps, at least once a month, and I know that I shall experience
it again. When I go to the window and look out upon the city night, I
find all extraneous light emaciated and shattered by the blare of gas
and electricity, but from one upreaching tower I can see reflected a
sheen which is not generated in any power-house of earth. Then I know
that within the twenty-four hours the _terai_ jungles of Garhwal, the
tree-ferns of Pahang, and the mighty _moras_ which now surround us, will
stand in silvery silence and in the peace which only the wilderness
knows.
I soon took the lead and slackened the pace to a slow walk. Every few
minutes we stood motionless, listening with mouth as well as ears. For
no one who has not listened in such silence can realize how important
the mouth is. Like the gill of old which gave it origin, our ear has
still an entrance inward as well as outward, and the sweep of breath and
throb of the blood are louder than we ever suspect. When at an opera or
concert I see some one sitting rapt, listening with open mouth, I do not
think of it as ill-bred. I know it for unconscious and sincere
absorption based on an excellent physical reason.
It was early spring in the tropics; insect life was still in the
gourmand stage, or that of pupal sleep. The final period of pipe and
fiddle had not yet arrived, so that there was no hum from the
underworld. The flow of sap and the spread of petals were no less silent
than the myriad creatures which, I knew, slumbered or hunted on every
side. It was as if I had slipped back one dimension in space and walked
in a shadow world. But these shadows were not all colorless. Although
the light was strained almost barren by the moon mountains, yet the glow
from the distant lava and craters still kept something of color, and the
green of the leaves, great and small, showed as a rich dark olive. The
afternoon's rain had left each one filmed with clear water, and this
struck back the light as polished silver. There was no tempered
illumination. The trail ahead was either black, or a solid sheet of
light. Here and there in the jungle on each side, where a tree had
fallen, or a flue of clear space led moonwards, the effect was of cold
electric light seen through trees in city parks. When such a shaft
struck down upon us, it surpassed simile. I have seen old paintings in
Belgian cathedrals of celestial light which now seems less imaginary.
At last the silence was broken, and like the first breath of the
tradewind which clouds the Mazaruni surface, the mirror of silence was
never quite clear again--or so it seemed. My northern mind, stored with
sounds of memory, never instinctively accepted a new voice of the jungle
for what it was. Each had to go through a reference clearing-house of
sorts. It was like the psychological reaction to words or phrases. Any
strange wail or scream striking suddenly upon my ear instantly
crystallized some vision of the past--some circumstance or adventure
fraught with similar sound. Then, appreciably as a second thought, came
the keen concentration of every sense to identify this new sound, to
hear it again, to fix it in mind with its character and its meaning.
Perhaps at some distant place and time, in utterly incongruous
surroundings, it may in turn flash into consciousness--a memory-simile
stimulated by some sound of the future.