awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards.
Without a compass, or the landmark of some opening to or from which he
can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness
is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it
impossible to give any general sketch of the forest. Once inside "you
cannot see the wood for the trees." You can only wander on as far as you
dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and
carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines
all straining upward, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far
above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round
your head, and rises thickening to an unknown height. The upward lines
are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what
leaves they bear, being for most part on the tips of the twigs, give a
scattered, mist-like appearance to the under foliage.
For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an
English wood. But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive
you. Around your knees are probably Mamures, with creeping stems and
fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young cocoa-nut-palm. You
try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or
wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round, and then you
find that the air is full of wires,--that you are hung up in a net-work
of fine branches belonging to half a dozen different sorts of young
trees, and intertwined with as many different species of slender
creepers. You thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you
were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a
labyrinth of wire rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at
every five steps.
You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges
to their leaves. It is well for you they are only three and not six
feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick,
triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and
left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually discover that it is
the leaf-stalk of a young Cocorite palm. The leaf is five-and-twenty
feet long, and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out
of the ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the
leaf-stalk through right and left and walk on, to be stopped suddenly
(for you get so confused by the multitude of objects that you never see
anything till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar as thick
as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it entwine
itself with three or four other bars, and roll over with them in great
knots, and festoons, and loops twenty feet high, and then go up with
them into the green cloud over your head, and vanish, as if a giant had
thrown a ship's cable into the tree-tops.
One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the negro and the
Indian, is a Liantasse. You see that at once by the form of its
cable,--six or eight inches across in one direction, and three or four
in another, furbelowed all down the middle into regular knots, and
looking like a chain cable between two flexible bars. At another of
the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if you have a
forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows of his cutlass
he will sever it as high up as he can reach, and again below, some three
feet down; and, while you are wondering at this seemingly wanton
destruction, he lifts the bar on high, throws his head back, and pours
down his thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This hidden
treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or rather the
ascending pure rain-water which has been taken up by the roots, and
is hurrying aloft, to be elaborated into sap, and leaf, and flower,
and fruit, and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally
climbed, and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the water-vine
through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the
bottom; for so rapid is the ascent of the sap, that if he cut the stem
below, the water would have all fled upward before he could cut it off
above.
Meanwhile, the old story of Jack and the Bean-stalk comes into your
mind. In such a forest was the old dame's hut, and up such a bean-stalk
Jack climbed, to fight a giant and a castle high above. Why not? What
may not be up there? You look up into the green cloud, and long for
a moment to be a monkey. There may be monkeys up there over your
head,--burly red Howler, or tiny peevish Sapajou, peering down at you,
but you cannot peer up at them. The monkeys, and the parrots, and the
humming-birds, and the flowers, and all the beauty, are upstairs--up
above the green cloud. You are in "the empty nave of the cathedral," and
the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.
We will hope that, as you look up, you have not been careless enough to
walk on, for if you have you will be tripped up at once; nor to put your
hand out incautiously to rest it against a tree, or what not, for fear
of sharp thorns, ants, and wasp-nests. If you are all safe, your next
steps, probably, as you struggle through the bush between tree-trunks of
every possible size, will bring you face to face with huge upright walls
of seeming boards, whose rounded edges slope upward till, as your eye
follows them, you find them enter an enormous stem, perhaps round, like
one of the Norman pillars of Durham nave, and just as huge; perhaps
fluted, like one of William of Wykeham's columns at Winchester.
There is the stem, but where is the tree? Above the green cloud. You
struggle up to it between two of the board walls, but find it not so
easy to reach. Between you and it are half a dozen tough strings which
you had not noticed at first,--the eye cannot focus itself rapidly
enough in this confusion of distances,--which have to be cut through ere
you can pass. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense;
some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they?
Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or
of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see
is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look
up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on
end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as
English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole
green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and
half climbed up again.
You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has
sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from
climbers, and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very
cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty
yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has
climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller
still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower
branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their
families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist
can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The
leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the
tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut,
refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees
around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may
be one of three or even four different plants....
And where are the famous Orchids? They perch on every bough and stem;
but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the
winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them; at least I know
enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin's
"Fertilization of Orchids," and finds in his own reason that the book is
true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen
with his own eyes more than his master.
And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a
mile to see. In the hot-house they seem almost artificial from their
strangeness; but to see them "natural," on natural boughs, gives a sense
of their reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up
at them perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what
exquisite and fantastic form may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of
those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, is a strange pleasure,--a spur to
the fancy which is surely wholesome, if we will but believe that all
these things were invented by a Fancy, which desires to call out in us,
by contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess, and to make us
poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if
rightly looked at, all is poetry.
Another fact will soon force itself on your attention, unless you wish
to tumble down and get wet up to your knees. The soil is furrowed
everywhere by holes, by graves some two or three feet wide and deep, and
of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about for thirty or forty
feet, and running confusedly into each other. They are not the work of
man, nor of an animal, for no earth seems to have been thrown out of
them. In the bottom of the dry graves you sometimes see a decaying root;
but most of them just now are full of water, and of tiny fish also,
which burrow in the mud, and sleep during the dry season, to come out
and swim during the wet. These graves are, some of them, plainly quite
new. Some, again, are very old, for trees of all sizes are growing in
them and over them.
What makes them? A question not easily answered. But the shrewdest
foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead. Either
the tree has fallen, and torn its roots out of the ground, or the roots
and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above them has
fallen in.
But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quiet
fresh graves thus empty; and--now one thinks of it--how few fallen
trees, or even dead sticks, there are about. An English wood, if left to
itself, would be cumbered with fallen timber; and one has heard of
forests in North America through which it is all but impossible to make
way, so high are piled up, among the still growing trees, dead logs in
every stage of decay. Such a sight may be seen in Europe among the high
silver-fir forests of the Pyrenees. How is it not so here? How, indeed?
And how comes it--if you will look again--that there are few or no
fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there
would be a foot--perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed by every
autumn leaf-fall. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting
in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and
scarlet rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty
feet of leaf- and timber-mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient,
every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam as it might in a
well-hoed garden-bed. Is it not strange?
Most strange, till you remember where you are,--in one of Nature's
hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain
and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with
vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle
into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old
Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat,
where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up,
lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable
sun force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates
again as swiftly as it destroys. Here, when the forest giant falls, as
some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the
cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry
through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a
heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then
"Nothing in him that doth fade,
But doth suffer an _air_-change
Into something rich and strange."
Under the genial rain and genial heat, the timber-tree itself, all its
tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, snapped
off not only by the blow, but by the very wind of the falling tree, all
melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months--say almost a few
days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight out of which
they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green
leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not
a wrack behind. Explained thus,--and this I believe to be the true
explanation,--the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it
is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.
[And thus the writer rambles on, telling fresh marvels of the
tropic woods, from which a knowledge is attained that "defies
all analysis."]
[It is that of] the causes and effects of their beauty; that "aesthetic"
of plants, of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book
of his, "The Plant," which all should read who wish to know somewhat of
"The Open Secret." But when they read it let them read with open hearts.
For that same "Open Secret" is, I suspect, one of those which God may
hide from the wise and prudent, and yet reveal to babes.
At least, so it seemed to me, the first day that I went, awe-struck,
into the High Woods; and so it seemed to me, the last day that I came,
even more awe-struck, out of them.
ANIMALS OF BRITISH GUIANA.
C. BARRINGTON BROWN.
[British Guiana, the land which seems so strongly inclined to
extend its borders at the expense of Venezuela, is as yet very
far from being the active and well-developed settlement which
might be imagined from the aggressiveness of its rulers. Mr.
Brown's story of it indicates a land of which nature is still
largely the lord, and which is so little known that he, as late
as twenty years ago, was able to discover a river and a
cataract not previously heard of. The selection we append,
descriptive of the wild animals of the country, is significant
of an undeveloped land. Mr. Brown, in his "Canoe and Camp Life
in British Guiana," describes a number of unsuccessful efforts
to shoot jaguars, and continues:]
One of the men happened to go a few yards behind one of our
camping-places, when he heard a movement behind him; turning round he
saw a jaguar leisurely surveying him. He fled to the camp with his
story, and I went in search of the animal accompanied by one man armed
with a cutlass. We did not go far before we saw its tracks in the sandy
bed of a dry water-course, and concluded that it had gone off. We gave
up all hopes of seeing it, and, turning round, were on the point of
making our way back to camp, when my companion suddenly exclaimed,
"Look! look! the tiger!" Glancing at the spot indicated I saw it
crouching in a thicket with its head bent down, its body swaying from
side to side, glaring at us with eyes of a greenish metallic hue. The
brute had evidently been following us whilst we were searching for it,
and was working itself into a rage. I took as good aim at its head as
I could, and fired; but instead of seeing it lying dead, I heard it
bounding and crashing through the forest at a fearful pace.
One of my men got a shot at a jaguar on a sand-beach, where it passed
within twenty feet of him, as he crouched on some rocks. The only effect
the shot had on the animal was to make it gallop away a few yards, then
turn for an instant and look at him. The men whom I left in charge on
the New River cut open a hollow log containing young accouries, and took
them out. Their squeals on being seized attracted a puma, which ran
close up to the men, apparently wishing to get the accouries, when one
of them fired at it and it made off.
One evening, whilst returning to camp along the portage path that we
were cutting at Wonobobo Falls, I walked faster than the men, and got
some two hundred yards in advance. As I rose the slope of an uneven
piece of ground, I saw a large puma (_Felis concolor_) advancing along
the other side of the rise towards me, with its nose down on the ground.
The moment I saw it I stopped; and at the same instant it tossed up its
head, and seeing me also came to a stand. With its body half crouched,
its head erect, and its eyes round and black, from its pupils having
expanded in the dusky light, it looked at once a noble and appalling
sight. I glanced back along our wide path to see if any of my men were
coming, as at the moment I felt that it was not well to be alone without
some weapon of defence, and I knew that one of them had a gun; but
nothing could I see. As long as I did not move the puma remained
motionless also, and thus we stood some fifteen yards apart, eying each
other curiously. I had heard that the human voice is potent in scaring
most wild beasts, and feeling that the time had arrived to do something
desperate, I waved my arms in the air and shouted loudly. The effect on
the tiger was electrical; it turned quickly on one side, and in two
bounds was lost in the forest. I waited until my men came up, however,
before passing the place at which it disappeared in case it might only
be lying in ambush there; but we saw nothing more of it.
When returning down the portage and dragging our boats over, we saw a
jaguar sitting on a log near the same spot, watching our movements with
evident curiosity, and although the men were singing as they hauled the
boats along, it did not seem to mind the noise. As soon as it saw that
it was observed, it jumped off the log, and with a low growl made off.
From this I infer that the flight of my puma must have been owing more
to the windmill-like motion of my arms than to my voice.
During our journey across from the New River to the Essequebo, we were
cooking breakfast one morning, when we heard a tremendous rushing and
crashing noise coming towards us through the forest, and then caught a
glimpse of an accourie flying for dear life before a black tiger. Just
after they passed the accourie gave a heart-rending scream as the tiger
seized it, but on my men rushing up to the spot, the tiger left its prey
and fled. When picked up the accourie was quite dead, but on examination
showed no marks whatever of the tiger's teeth. The tiger had evidently
killed it by springing upon it with its legs close together, the weight
of its body giving such a blow that the accourie's life was fairly
knocked out. The men found its dead body just beyond a large log,
slightly raised from the ground, under which it had bolted and lost some
headway, while the cunning tiger took the log in its stride and so came,
as it intended, on the poor accourie's back, with the result we have
seen.
On returning to the head of the New River for provisions, we were
followed for many miles by a tiger, for on going back we saw its huge
tracks in the swampy places on our path.
With good hunting-dogs fine jaguar- and puma-hunting might be obtained
on the banks of this river, where without doubt they are exceedingly
numerous. Many of the Indian hunting-dogs trained for deer or tapir will
hunt tigers. When on the track of either of these animals, should they
come across the scent of a tiger, their eager and confident manner of
pressing on after the game is immediately changed, and with hair on
their backs erect they become cautious and nervous to a degree, jumping
at even the snapping of a twig. Abandoning the hunt they take up the
tiger's track and follow it. But should the huntsman call them from it,
or not cheer them on with his voice from time to time, they exhibit
great fear, and keeping close to his heels cannot be induced to hunt any
more in that district for the day. On the contrary, if allowed to follow
the tiger, they track it up with caution, being fully aware of the
cunning dodge practised by that animal, which is, when the dog is close
at hand, to spring to one side and lie in ambush till it passes, when
with one spring the dog is seized.
Ordinary dogs would fall a prey to this trap, but not the self-taught
tiger dogs. Their fine powers of scent warn them of their near approach
to the quarry, when they advance with great caution, never failing to
detect the tiger in time, and when once their eye is upon their enemy it
has no chance to escape. In its pride of strength, the jaguar scorns the
dogs, and with a rush like a ball from a cannon springs madly at one of
them, feeling sure that it cannot escape. It has reckoned, however,
without its host, for the dog eludes the spring with ease, and with
great quickness flies on the tiger's flank, giving it a severe nip. As
the tiger turns with a growl of pain and disappointment, the dog is off
to a little distance, yelping lustily and never remaining still an
instant, but darting first on one side and then on the other. After one
or two ineffectual charges the tiger gives it up, and on the approach of
the hunter, springs into the nearest suitable tree, which it seldom
leaves alive.
[The Indians describe several kinds of tigers and tiger-cats,
each of which hunts one kind of animal in particular, whose
call it can imitate. The deer-tiger is the puma. The wailah, or
tapir-tiger, is pure black and of great size.]
The Corentyne and its branches were literally teeming with fish of
various kinds, the greater number being haimara and perai. The latter
were so abundant and ferocious that at times it was dangerous, when
bathing, to go into the water at a greater depth than up to one's knees.
Even then small bodies of these hungry creatures would swim in and make
a dash close up to our legs, and then retreat to a short distance. They
actually bit the steering paddles as they were drawn through the water
astern of the boats. A tapir which I shot swimming across the river had
its nose eaten off by them whilst we were towing it to the shore.
Of an evening the men used to catch some of them for sport, and in
taking the hook from their mouths produce a wound from which the blood
ran freely. On throwing them back into the water in this injured
condition they were immediately set upon and devoured by their
companions. Even as one was being hauled in on the line, its comrades,
seeing that it was in difficulties, attacked it at once. One day, when
the boat was hauled in to some rocks, a few of the men were engaged
shooting fish near by, and in so doing wounded a large haimara. Having
escaped from its human tormentors, it made for the open river, but was
instantly attacked by perai attracted by the blood escaping from its
wound, and was driven back to the shelter of the rocks close to the
boat, from which I had a good view of the chase. The large fish
followed by its savage enemies reminded me of a parallel case on
land,--a stricken deer pursued by wolves.
The perai, fortunately, lie only off sand-beaches and in quiet pools,
not frequenting the cataracts, where their presence would be anything
but acceptable to the men when working in the water. I was fortunate
enough to find the spawning-place of some perai on the matted clusters
of fibrous roots of some lianes, which hung from the branches of a tree
into the water, among which much earthy sediment had collected and many
small aquatic plants had grown. The sediment gave weight to the roots,
which kept the clusters under water, and the force of the current made
them buoyant, giving the lianes a slope when the river was high, which
kept them not far from its surface. My attention was attracted to them
by two perai lying close to them, with their heads up-stream, as the men
said, engaged in watching their eggs. Procuring one of the roots I
examined it, and found among it numbers of single eggs and clusters of
small jelly-like young, which had been already hatched. The eggs were
white and about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, with a hard exterior.
The young were very little larger, and had a glutinous surface, which
caused them to adhere together on being taken from the water. They had
not acquired any powers of locomotion, but could just wriggle their
tails like tadpoles. Under a lens they resembled the egg devoid of
its covering, with a gelatinous ridge around three-quarters of its
circumference, one of which expanded into a knob (probably the head),
while the other termination was flattened and tail-like. I could not
detect any eyes or mouth in them, but their bodies were speckled with
gray markings of coloring matter....
In hauling the boats up the shallow rapids near the mouth of the Cutari
the men, whilst wading, were frequently struck by conger eels. Every now
and then a man would call out "Congler, congler," and jumping into the
boat rub his shins, which had been benumbed by a touch from one of these
fish. After half a minute or so the numbness wore off and he took to the
water again. The boat being in a critical condition at the time, it was
impossible for the men to leave the water. They had therefore to brave
out the shocks from these batteries, which must have been very slight,
given probably by small eels, or they could not have stood them.