THE SPELL OF THE JUNGLE
What the desert is to Arizona and the ice to Alaska the jungle is to
tropical America. He who has never traveled through a tropical jungle on a
trusty mule has missed something out of his life. He should go back and
begin over again.
The jungle is much maligned and often misinterpreted. The jungle has a
place in the agricultural life of the tropics, but it has also a place in
the aesthetic and moral life of mankind. Here at last there is room, and
the starved and stunted life may relax its struggle and strain and expand
under the luxuriance and exuberance of a world where all the forces of
life overflow and run riot in a thousand fantastic forms of energy and
growth. Like the uncharted vastness of the polar sea and the unbounded,
shimmering mirage of the wide desert, here at last there is plenty and to
spare. When a man has stinted and economized all his life on a New England
hillside amid stones and stumps, the jungle takes the load off his soul
and sets him free in a universe of new and untested dimensions.
The jungle is misunderstood. There are jungles unworthy of the name, but
these vast Panamanian hothouses are a different matter. They are not the
bottomless morasses of deadly snakes and poisonous vapors. Since men have
learned how to live in the tropics these terrors have largely retreated to
the highly colored accounts of tropical travelers who took one look and
fled--to write a book of timely warning to the uninitiated. These jungles
are not the haunts of hidden horrors and poisoned arrows. Ferocious
tree-dwellers may inhabit the unknown recesses of the upper Amazon, but
they do not live in the jungles of Central America and Panama.
[Illustration: PAPAYA TREES]
It takes just three conditions to make a good jungle, and these three are
all present in this fascinating country. Moisture, temperature, and soil;
mix them in the right proportions and you can produce a jungle at the
North Pole, but nowhere can the mixture be located except in the tropics.
When one remembers the painstaking toil expended on the rocky fields of
northern New York and then turns to a land where the problem is not to
encourage but to prevent growth, one wonders how it happened that our
ancestors blundered into an environment reeking with difficulties when
they might have had all this overflow of abundance for the taking.
There are several brands of jungle, to be sure, and distinct differences
of kind may be located easily. The jungle of the overflowed level river
land is a very different formation from that which climbs over the rolling
hills and up the mountain slopes. But everywhere there is the same
reckless riot of power and life. Fantastic growths are here just because
there is so much growing to do and so much energy back of the roots that
there are not conventional forms of life enough to go around and life
boils over in every conceivable absurdity of form and habit. This is no
place for a niggard. But it is a splendid antidote for smallness of soul
and for that dried-up-ness that settles down like a pall upon the spirits
of men who never in their lives have had enough of anything or breathed an
atmosphere of abundance.
It must be a petrified soul that can resist this wanton abandon of
vegetable life. How a man can spend three days in this full-blown
exhibition of vital energy at work in the vegetable world and ever be
small again is more than can be readily understood.
Here is a world where no one ever need cry for more; there is too much
already. After a few days of it one longs to get out in the open, to see a
barren spot somewhere just to rest the surfeited soul a bit. It's all for
the asking; in fact, there is no chance to ask; it is poured out of the
horn of nature's plenty, and all the color and charm and fantasy and music
and laughter and glory of it are piled in wild profusion a hundred feet
high, and you cannot get away if you will. Nature at least has a chance to
show what she can really do, and it is yours for the looking.
[Illustration: BANANAS AND SUGAR CANE]
What makes up a jungle? Well, that's hard to say. There are mighty trees
of cedar and mahogany and a hundred lesser breeds, lifting their heads
into the tropic sky. There are palms and giant ferns of course. There are
wonderful purple and magenta and crimson-topped trees, whose glaring flat
colors fairly shriek at you like the bedlam of a paint box let loose on
the sky. Sturdy lignum vitae trees stand conscious of their high value and
rare qualities. Ferns in profusion, vast, variegated and immense, line the
banks of streams and hide in the shadows of the great trees. Orchids, of
course, winding streams strewn with the flowers and foliage of the dense
mass overhead, entrancing water streets and winding Venetian tunnels
through forests so thick that the sun never penetrates the shadowed
fastnesses below. There are paraqueets, parrots, singing canaries,
alligators, bananas, bamboos, singing winds, warbling bluebirds,
blackbirds that can render a tune, purples and blues and crimsons and
browns, all poured out and mixed together without stint. It is fascinating
for a few hours, but after a time you get overloaded and are ready to cry
"Enough." It's great, but a little stupefying till one gets used to it.
The jungle of the mountains is essentially different from and more
interesting than that of the level swamps. Both are largely uninhabited,
for men naturally like to have a little outlook both for their lives and
about their habitations.
But the growth is about equally dense, provided the soil and moisture are
right for the production of real jungle. From Puerto Limon to Almirante is
about one hundred and twenty miles overland, and there was a time when
practically every mile of this distance was untouched jungle. The United
Fruit Company has conquered most of it, until there is now but a day's
journey on horseback through the connecting link between the two railroad
terminal points at Estrella and the Talamanca Valley. The one hundred
miles of rails run almost entirely through the endless fields of bananas.
But once this was all primitive wilderness; that is, we think it was, but
some of the superintendents of this clearing and planting work say that
they have discovered numerous evidences that there was a time in ages past
when practically all of this vast area was under some sort of cultivation.
[Illustration: CACAO PODS]
There would be a railroad now across the gap of twenty miles but for the
fact that this gap includes a mountain range with rushing rivers and
steeps, gorges and almost impenetrable forests. Occasional travelers cross
this range by the aid of sturdy mules, but there is yet nothing that could
by any strain of language be called a trail. There is simply a "blaze"
through the forest and occasional marks where some floundering traveler
has preceded the venturesome explorer through the depths of some yawning
mudhole.
I crossed this range on a day when the sun was shining overhead, but only
two or three times did its rays fall upon the "trail." The overhead growth
was so thick that there was nothing but dense shadow below. A hundred and
fifty feet these immense trees rose into the air, carrying upward with
them festoons of hanging vines, swinging rattan, and clinging orchids.
Curious enough are some of these trees, with their winding external
buttresses and thin flanges thrown out to brace against the winds. Banyan
trees reach out their long arms and drop their fingers down into the soil
and take root and continue until the tree literally "stalks" its way
across the mountain side. There are rubber trees and cedar trees and
mahogany trees and prickly poisoned trees that are the terror of the
natives, and trees bearing all manner of jungle fruits and flowers and
swarming with chattering birds and creeping things. Rattan "ropes" an inch
in diameter and two hundred feet long trip the unwary traveler, and it is
useless to try to break them. They are like steel cables. Wild birds are
plentiful, occasional baboons bark and bray, and the mountain streams
splash and plunge their way through the ferns and flowers. The Estrella
River forms the highway for several miles, and its rocky torrent must be
forded a score of times.
He who has never tried to travel this "road" has a new experience in
store. There are hillsides that are all but perpendicular, which would not
be so bad, but they are a mixture of clay and soapstone and moisture, and
it is practically impossible to stand erect without holding on to nearby
saplings. How a laden mule can navigate such a causeway of destruction is
a mystery to be explained only by people who understand mules. And I rode
a mule whose mastery of the art of trail-navigation left nothing to be
learned. In the ignorance of my novitiate I alighted before the first
precipitous descent to which we came. The mule, with the conservatism born
of experience, took his time to make the descent, and I essayed to go
before and show him how to do it. He watched me with intense interest,
while I gingerly approached the edge of the slippery declivity and started
down. As a descent it was a complete success. At the second step I slipped
on the wet clay and went rolling and coasting to the bottom, whither I
arrived in record time, plastered from head to foot with the raw material
of which pottery is made. I struggled to my feet and looked up at the
mule. He still regarded me intently, and I think that he winked, at least
his ear did. Then he deliberately put his front feet over the edge,
gathered in his hind feet, and with all fours together, sat down and
gracefully slid to the bottom of the hill. He arrived right side up at the
bottom, munching a mouthful of grass, which he seized in passing on the
way down, and turned to look at me with an expression that needed no
interpreter. And I took the hint and stayed on his back most of the day.
After a solid day of this dense growth where we could not see more than a
stone's throw at any time it was with a distinct sense of relief that we
caught sight of daylight at last through an opening ahead and came upon
the fringes of the Talamanca plantation.
[Illustration: PROPOSED LOCATION FOR REST CURE]
The Talamanca Valley is something quite worth while in itself. Years ago
it was inhabited by Spanish refugees who fled back from the bloody attacks
of the ravenous Caribbean pirates of the sixteenth century. Their little
plantations were not large and the land was not cleared very thoroughly,
but they shifted their planting places until much of the present area was
covered sooner or later with platanas. The view of this valley from the
hillside is surpassingly beautiful. Thirty miles long, ten miles wide, and
surrounded by mountains and forests, the whole floor of the valley is one
vast, waving, level field of bananas, and there are few things better to
look upon than a valley level full of banana tops. From twenty to forty
feet high they stand, and their long, shady corridors are like the aisles
of some great series of cathedral chapels, waiting for worshipers within.
Through the middle of the valley runs the stream of the upper Sexola River
with its three tributaries and their bluffs. The Changuanola Railway,
which is the name under which the United Fruit Company moved its bananas
and its men in this great plantation, runs the length of the valley, and
the line of rails is punctuated by the white cabins of the black employees
and the houses and offices of the plantation superintendents and foremen.
Dominating the whole valley stands old Pico Blanco, or White Top. There is
no snow at the summit, but there is nearly always a white cloud cap there,
hence the name. This noble mountain is the interest and admiration of all
dwellers in the valley. Its top lists eleven thousand feet above the sea.
It is not as high as Pike's Peak nor Shasta, but it towers well up toward
the level of Fujiyama, and beside it Mount Washington looks like a pigmy
and the Adirondacks are mere foothills. Back in the canyons and forests of
the mountain range live the curious Talamanca Indians, whose tribal
customs indicate a close affinity between their ancestors and those of the
famous Indians of Quirigua.
The difference between the jungle and the dividend-paying plantation is
one of organization, capital, administration, and toil. Add these to the
jungle and you have the plantation. Take them away from the plantation and
in a very short time the jungle is again supreme. Crowding around the
corners, peeping over the edges, and creeping ever onward, the jungle
pushes its jealous way behind the footprints of the men who essay to
conquer its wild ways. But once defeated, the jungle becomes a slave
bearing costly burdens for its master--man.