[Illustration: Indian Hut on the Mazaruni River]
JUNGLE DAYS
BY
WILLIAM BEEBE
AUTHOR OF
“GALÁPAGOS: WORLD’S END,” ETC.
[Illustration]
_Illustrated_
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1925
Copyright, 1923
by
The Atlantic Monthly Co., Inc.
Copyright, 1925
by
The Curtis Publishing Co.
Copyright, 1925
by
William Beebe
[Illustration]
Made in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--A CHAIN OF JUNGLE LIFE 3
II.--MY JUNGLE TABLE 26
III.--A MIDNIGHT BEACH COMBING 49
IV.--FALLING LEAVES 71
V.--THE JUNGLE SLUGGARD 92
VI.--MANGROVE MYSTERY 113
VII.--THE LIFE OF DEATH 137
VIII.--OLD-TIME PEOPLE 166
IX.--THE BIRD OF THE WINE-COLORED EGG 182
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
INDIAN HUT ON THE MAZARUNI RIVER _Frontispiece_
“AND THERE WAS A GRANDMOTHER FROG” 14
“WELL WITHIN THE REALM OF BLACK MAGIC” 32
“SILENT AND SMOOTH AS A MIRROR” 60
“THE JUNGLE _du Printemps Eternel_” 80
“A FITTING INHABITANT OF MARS” 100
“IN THE SUNSHINE AND WARMTH OF THE MANGROVE TANGLE” 122
“THE GIANT ETABALLI FELL LAST NIGHT” 154
“ONE WISTFUL LITTLE CHAP” 176
THE TINAMOU 192
From a painting by Helen Damrosch Tee Van.
JUNGLE DAYS
Jungle Days
I
A CHAIN OF JUNGLE LIFE
_This is the story of Opalina
Who lived in the Tad,
Who became the Frog,
Who was eaten by Fish,
Who nourished the Snake,
Who was caught by the Owl,
But fed the Vulture,
Who was shot by Me,
Who wrote this Tale,
Which the Editor took,
And published it Here,
To be read by You,
The last in The Chain,
Of Life in the tropical Jungle._
I offer a living chain of ten links--the first a tiny delicate being,
one hundred to the inch, deep in the jungle, with the strangest home
in the world--my last, you the present reader of these lines. Between,
there befell certain things, of which I attempt falteringly to write.
To know and think them is very worth while, to have discovered them
is sheer joy, but to write of them is impertinence, so exciting
and unreal are they in reality, and so tame and humdrum are any
combinations of our twenty-six letters.
Somewhere today a worm has given up existence, a mouse has been slain,
a spider snatched from the web, a jungle bird torn sleeping from its
perch; else we should have no song of robin, nor flash of reynard’s
red, no humming flight of wasp, nor grace of crouching ocelot. In
tropical jungles, in Northern home orchards, anywhere you will,
unnumbered activities of bird and beast and insect require daily toll
of life.
Now and then we actually witness one of these tragedies or
successes--whichever point of view we take--appearing to us as an
exciting but isolated event. When once we grasp the idea of chains of
life, each of these occurrences assumes a new meaning. Like everything
else in the world it is not isolated, but closely linked with other
similar happenings. I have sometimes traced even closed chains, one of
the shortest of which consisted of predacious flycatchers which fed
upon young lizards of a species which, when it grew up, climbed trees
and devoured the nestling flycatchers!
One of the most wonderful zoological “Houses that Jack built,” was this
of Opalina’s, a long, swinging, exciting chain, including in its links
a Protozoan, two stages of Amphibians, a Fish, a Reptile, two Birds and
(unless some intervening act of legislature bars the fact as immoral
and illegal) three Mammals,--myself, the Editor, and You.
As I do not want to make it into a mere imaginary animal story, however
probable, I will begin, like Dickens, in the middle. I can cope,
however lamely, with the entrance and participation of the earlier
links, but am wholly out of my depth from the time when I mail my tale.
The Akawai Indian who took it upon its first lap toward the Editor
should by rights have a place in the chain, especially when I think
how much better he might tell of the interrelationships of the various
links than can I. Still, I know the shape of the owl’s wings when it
dropped upon the snake, but I do not know why the Editor accepted this;
I can imitate the death scream of the frog when the fish seized it, but
I have no idea why You purchased this volume nor whether you perceive
in my tale the huge bed of ignorance in which I have planted this
scanty crop of facts. Nor do I know the future of this book, whether
it will go to the garret, to be ferreted out in future years by other
links, as I used to do, or whether it will find its way to mid-Asia or
the Malay States, or, as I once saw a magazine, half buried, like the
pyramids, in Saharan sands, where it had slipped from the camel load of
some unknown traveller.
I left my Kartabo laboratory one morning with my gun, headed for the
old Dutch stelling. Happening to glance up I saw a mote, lit with the
oblique rays of the morning sun. The mote drifted about in circles,
which became spirals; the mote became a dot, then a spot, then an
oblong, and down the heavens from unknown heights, with the whole of
British Guiana spread out beneath him from which to choose, swept a
vulture into my very path. We had a quintet, a small flock of our own
vultures who came sifting down the sky, day after day, to the feasts of
monkey bodies and wild peccaries which we spread for them. I knew all
these by sight, from one peculiarity or another, for I was accustomed
to watch them hour after hour, striving to learn something of that
wonderful soaring, of which all my many hours of flying had taught me
nothing.
This bird was a stranger, perhaps from the coast or the inland
savannas, for to these birds great spaces are only matters of brief
moments. I wanted a yellow-headed vulture, both for the painting of its
marvellous head colors, and for the strange, intensely interesting,
one-sided, down-at-the-heel syrinx, which, with the voice, had
dissolved long ages ago, leaving only a whistling breath, and an
irregular complex of bones straggling over the windpipe. Some day I
shall dilate upon vultures as pets--being surpassed in cleanliness,
affectionateness and tameness only by baby bears, sloths and certain
monkeys.
But today I wanted the newcomer as a specimen. I was surprised to see
that he did not head for the regular vulture table, but slid along a
slant of the east wind, banked around its side, spreading and curling
upward his wing-finger-tips and finally resting against its front edge.
Down this he sank slowly, balancing with the grace of perfect mastery,
and again swung round and settled suddenly down shore, beyond a web of
mangrove roots. This took me by surprise, and I changed my route and
pushed through the undergrowth of young palms. Before I came within
sight, the bird heard me, rose with a whipping of great pinions and
swept around three-fourths of a circle before I could catch enough of
a glimpse to drop him. The impetus carried him on and completed the
circle, and when I came out on the Cuyuni shore I saw him spread out on
what must have been the exact spot from which he had risen.
I walked along a greenheart log with little crabs scuttling off on each
side, and as I looked ahead at the vulture I saw to my great surprise
that it had more colors than any yellow-headed vulture should have,
and its plumage was somehow very different. This excited me so that I
promptly slipped off the log and joined the crabs in the mud. Paying
more attention to my steps I did not again look up until I had reached
the tuft of low reeds on which the bird lay. Now at last I understood
why my bird had metamorphosed in death, and also why it had chosen
to descend to this spot. Instead of one bird, there were two and a
reptile. Another tragedy had taken place a few hours earlier, before
dawn, a double death, and the sight of these three creatures brought to
mind at once the chain for which I am always on the lookout. I picked
up my chain by the middle and began searching both ways for the missing
links.
The vulture lay with magnificent wings outspread, partly covering a
big, spectacled owl, whose dishevelled plumage was in turn wrapped
about by several coils of a moderate-sized anaconda. Here was an
excellent beginning for my chain, and at once I visualized myself and
the snake, although alternate links, yet coupled in contradistinction
to my editor and the vulture, the first two having entered the chain
by means of death, whereas the vulture had simply joined in the
pacifistic manner of its kind, and as my editor has dealt gently with
me heretofore, I allowed myself to believe that his entrance might also
be through no more rough handling than a blue slip.
The head of the vulture was already losing some of its brilliant chrome
and saffron, so I took it up, noted the conditions of the surrounding
sandy mud, and gathered together my spoils. I would have passed within
a few feet of the owl and the snake and never discovered them, so close
were they in color to the dark reddish beach, yet the vulture with
its small eyes and minute nerves had detected this tragedy when still
perhaps a mile high in the air, or half a mile up river. There could
have been no odor, nor has the bird any adequate nostrils to detect it,
had there been one. It was sheer keenness of vision. I looked at the
bird’s claws and their weakness showed the necessity of the eternal
search for carrion or recently killed creatures. Here in a half minute,
it had devoured an eye of the owl and both of those of the serpent. It
is a curious thing, this predilection for eyes; give a monkey a fish,
and the eyes are the first titbits taken.
Through the vulture I come to the owl link, a splendid bird clad in
the colors of its time of hunting; a great, soft, dark, shadow of a
bird, with tiny body and long fluffy plumage of twilight buff and ebony
night, lit by twin, orange moons of eyes. The name “spectacled owl”
is really more applicable to the downy nestling which is like a white
powder puff with two dark feathery spectacles around the eyes. Its
name is one of those which I am fond of repeating rapidly--_Pulsatrix
perspicillata perspicillata_. Etymologies do not grow in the jungle and
my memory is noted only for its consistent vagueness, but if the owl’s
title does not mean _The Eye-browed One Who Strikes_, it ought to,
especially as the subspecific trinomial grants it two eye-brows.
I would give much to know just what the beginning of the combat was
like. The middle I could reconstruct without question, and the end was
only too apparent. By a most singular coincidence, a few years before,
and less than three miles away, I had found the desiccated remains
of another spectacled owl mingled with the bones of a snake, only
in that instance, the fangs indicated a small fer-de-lance, the owl
having succumbed to its venom. This time the owl had rashly attacked
a serpent far too heavy for it to lift, or even, as it turned out,
successfully to battle with. The mud had been churned up for a foot
in all directions, and the bird’s plumage showed that it must have
rolled over and over. The anaconda, having just fed, had come out of
the water and was probably stretched out on the sand and mud, as I have
seen them, both by full sun and in the moonlight. These owls are birds
rather of the creeks and river banks than of the deep jungle, and in
their food I have found shrimps, crabs, fish and young birds. Once a
few snake vertebræ showed that these reptiles are occasionally killed
and devoured.
Whatever possessed the bird to strike its talons deep into the neck
and back of this anaconda, none but the owl could say, but from then
on the story was written by the combatants and their environment. The
snake, like a flash, threw two coils around bird, wings and all, and
clamped these tight with a cross vise of muscle. The tighter the coils
compressed the deeper the talons of the bird were driven in, but the
damage was done with the first strike, and if owl and snake had parted
at this moment, neither could have survived. It was a swift, terrible
and short fight. The snake could not use its teeth and the bird had
no time to bring its beak into play, and there in the night, with the
lapping waves of the falling tide only two or three feet away, the two
creatures of prey met and fought and died, in darkness and silence,
locked fast together.
A few nights before I had heard, on the opposite side of the bungalow,
the deep, sonorous cry of the spectacled owl; within the week I had
passed the line-and-crescents track of anacondas, one about the size
of this snake and another much larger. And now fate had linked their
lives, or rather deaths, with my life, using as her divining rod, the
focussing of a sky-soaring vulture.
The owl had not fed that evening, although the bird was so well
nourished that it could never have been driven to its foolhardy feat by
stress of hunger. Hopeful of lengthening the chain, I rejoiced to see
a suspicious swelling about the middle of the snake, which dissection
resolved into a good-sized fish--itself carnivorous, locally called a
basha. This was the first time I had known one of these fish to fall
a victim to a land creature, except in the case of a big kingfisher
who had caught two small ones. Like the owl and anaconda, bashas are
nocturnal in their activities, and, according to their size, feed on
small shrimps, big shrimps, and so on up to six or eight inch catfish.
They are built on swift, torpedo-like lines, and clad in iridescent
silver mail.
From what I have seen of the habits of anacondas, I should say that
this one had left its hole high up among the upper beach roots late in
the night, and softly wound its way down into the rising tide. Here
after drinking, the snake sometimes pursues and catches small fish
and frogs, but the usual method is to coil up beside a half-buried
stick or log and await the tide and the manna it brings. In the van
of the waters comes a host of small fry, followed by their pursuers
or by larger vegetable feeders, and the serpent has but to choose. In
this mangrove lagoon then, there must have been a swirl and a splash,
a passive holding fast by the snake for a while until the right
opportunity offered, and then a swift throw of coils. There must then
be no mistake as to orientation of the fish. It would be a fatal error
to attempt the tail first, with scales on end and serried spines to
pierce the thickest tissues. It is beyond my knowledge how one of these
fish can be swallowed even head first without serious laceration. But
here was optical proof of its possibility, a newly swallowed basha, so
recently caught that he appeared as in life, with even the delicate
turquoise pigment beneath his scales, acting on his silvery armor
as quicksilver under glass. The tooth marks of the snake were still
clearly visible on the scales,--another link, going steadily down the
classes of vertebrates, mammal, bird, reptile and fish, and still my
magic boxes were unexhausted.
Excitedly I cut open the fish. An organism more unlike that of the
snake would be hard to imagine. There I had followed an elongated
stomach, and had left unexplored many feet of alimentary canal. Here,
the fish had his heart literally in his mouth, while his liver and
lights were only a very short distance behind, followed by a great
expanse of tail to wag him at its will, and drive him through the
water with the speed of twin propellers. His eyes are wonderful for
night hunting, large, wide, and bent in the middle so he can see
both above and on each side. But all this wide-angled vision availed
nothing against the lidless, motionless watch of the ambushed anaconda.
Searching the crevices of the rocks and logs for timorous small fry,
the basha had sculled too close, and the jaws which closed upon him
were backed by too much muscle, and too perfect a throttling machine to
allow of the least chance of escape. It was a big basha compared with
the moderate-sized snake but the fierce eyes had judged well, as the
evidence before me proved.
[Illustration: “And there was a Grandmother Frog”]
Still my chain held true, and in the stomach of the basha I found
what I wanted--another link, and more than I could have hoped for--a
representative of the fifth and last class of vertebrate animals
living on the earth, an Amphibian, an enormous frog. This too had been
a swift-forged link, so recent that digestion had only affected the
head of the creature. I drew it out, set it upon its great squat legs,
and there was a grandmother frog almost as in life, a Pok-poke as the
Indians call it, or, as a herpetologist would prefer, _Leptodactylus
caliginosus_,--the Smoky Jungle Frog.
She lived in the jungle just behind, where she and a sister of hers
had their curious nests of foam, which they guarded from danger, while
the tadpoles grew and squirmed within its sudsy mesh as if there were
no water in the world. I had watched one of the two, perhaps this one,
for hours, and I saw her dart angrily after little fish which came too
near. Then, this night, the high full-moon tides had swept over the
barrier back of the mangrove roots and set the tadpoles free, and the
mother frogs were at liberty to go where they pleased.
From my cot in the bungalow to the south, I had heard in the early part
of the night, the death scream of a frog, and it must have been at that
moment that somehow the basha had caught the great amphibian. This frog
is one of the fiercest of its class, and captures mice, reptiles and
small fish without trouble. It is even cannibalistic on very slight
provocation, and two of equal size will sometimes endeavor to swallow
one another in the most appallingly matter-of-fact manner.
They represent the opposite extreme in temperament from the pleasantly
philosophical giant toads. In outward appearance in the dim light of
dusk, the two groups are not unlike, but the moment they are taken in
the hand all doubt ceases. After one dive for freedom the toad resigns
himself to fate, only venting his spleen in much puffing out of his
sides, while the frog either fights until exhausted, or pretends death
until opportunity offers for a last mad dash.
In this case the frog must have leaped into the deep water beyond the
usual barrier and while swimming been attacked by the equally voracious
fish. In addition to the regular croak of this species, it has a most
unexpected and unamphibian yell or scream, given only when it thinks
itself at the last extremity. It is most unnerving when the frog,
held firmly by the hind legs, suddenly puts its whole soul into an
ear-splitting _peent! peent! peent! peent! peent!_
Many a time they are probably saved from death by this cry which
startles like a sudden blow, but tonight no utterance in the world
could have saved it; its assailant was dumb and all but deaf to aerial
sounds. Its cries were smothered in the water as the fish dived and
nuzzled it about the roots, as bashas do with their food,--and it
became another link in the chain.
Like a miser with one unfilled coffer, or a gambler with an unfilled
royal flush, I went eagerly at the frog with forceps and scalpel. But
beyond a meagre residuum of eggs, there was nothing but shrunken organs
in its body. The rashness of its venture into river water was perhaps
prompted by hunger after its long maternal fast while it watched over
its egg-filled nest of foam.
Hopeful to the last, I scrape some mucus from its food canal, place it
in a drop of water under my microscope, and--discover Opalina, my last
link, which in the course of its most astonishing life history gives me
still another.
To the naked eye there is nothing visible--the water seems clear, but
when I enlarge the diameter of magnification I lift the veil on another
world, and there swim into view a dozen minute lives, oval little
beings covered with curving lines, giving the appearance of wandering
finger prints. In some lights these are iridescent and they then will
deserve the name of Opalina. As for their personality, they are oval
and rather flat, it would take one hundred of them to stretch an inch,
they have no mouth, and they are covered with a fur of flagella with
which they whip themselves through the water. Indeed the whole of their
little selves consists of a multitude of nuclei, sometimes as many as
two hundred, exactly alike,--facial expression, profile, torso, limbs,
pose, all are summed up in rounded nuclei, partly obscured by a mist of
vibrating flagella.
As for their gait, they move along with colorful waves, steadily and
gently, not keeping an absolutely straight course and making rather
much leeway, as any rounded, keelless craft, surrounded with its own
paddle-wheels, must expect to do.
I have placed Opalina under very strange and unpleasant conditions in
thus subjecting it to the inhospitable qualities of a drop of clear
water. Even as I watch, it begins to slow down, and the flagella move
less rapidly and evenly. It prefers an environment far different,
where I discovered it living happily and contentedly in the stomach
and intestines of a frog, where its iridescence was lost, or rather
had never existed in the absolute darkness; where its delicate hairs
must often be unmercifully crushed and bent in the ever-moving tube,
and where air and sky, trees and sun, sound and color were forever
unknown; in their place only bits of half-digested ants and beetles,
thousand-legs and worms, rolled and tumbled along in the dense gastric
stream of acid pepsin; a strange choice of home for one of our fellow
living beings on the earth.
After an Opalina has flagellated itself about, and fed for a time in
its strange, almost crystalline way on the juices of its host’s food,
its body begins to contract, and narrows across the center until it
looks somewhat like a map of the New World. Finally its isthmus thread
breaks and two Opalinas swim placidly off, both identical, except
that they have half the number of nuclei as before. We cannot wonder
that there is no backward glance, or wave of cilia, or even memory of
their other body, for they are themselves, or rather it is they, or
it is each: our whole vocabulary, our entire stock of pronouns breaks
down, our very conception of individuality is shattered by the life of
Opalina.
Each daughter cell or self-twin, or whatever we choose to conceive it,
divides in turn. Finally there comes a day (or rather some Einstein
period of space-time, for there are no days in a frog’s stomach!) when
Opalina’s fraction has reached a stage with only two nuclei. When
this has creased and stretched, and finally broken like two bits of
drawn-out molasses candy, we have the last divisional possibility.
The time for the great adventure has arrived, with decks cleared for
action, or, as a protozoölogist would put it, with the flagellate’s
protoplasm uni-nucleate, approximating encystment.
The encysting process is but slightly understood, but the tiny
one-two-hundredth-of-its-former-self--Opalina curls up, its
paddle-wheels run down, it forms a shell, and rolls into the current
which it has withstood for a Protozoan’s lifetime. Out into the world
drifts the minute ball of latent life, a plaything of the cosmos,
permitted neither to see, hear, eat, nor to move of its own volition.
It hopes (only it cannot even desire) to find itself in water, it must
fall or be washed into a pool with tadpoles, one of which must come
along at the right moment and swallow it with the débris upon which it
rests. The possibility of this elaborate concatenation of events has
everything against it, and yet it must occur or death will result. No
wonder that the population of Opalinas does not overstock its limited
and retired environment!
Supposing that all happens as it should, and that the only chance in a
hundred thousand comes to pass, the encysted being knows or is affected
in some mysterious way by entrance into the body of the tadpole. The
cyst is dissolved and the infant Opalina begins to feed and to develop
new nuclei. Like the queen ant after she has been walled forever into
her chamber, the life of the little Onecell would seem to be extremely
sedentary and humdrum, in fact monotonous, until its turn comes to
fractionize itself, and again severally to go into the outside world,
multiplied and by installments. But as the queen ant had her one
superlative day of sunlight, heavenly flight and a mate, so Opalina,
while she is still wholly herself, has a little adventure all her own.
Let us strive to visualize her environment as it would appear to her if
she could find time and ability, with her single cell, to do more than
feed and bisect herself. Once free from her horny cyst she stretches
her drop of a body, sets all her paddle-hairs in motion and swims
slowly off. If we suppose that she has been swallowed by a tadpole an
inch long, her living quarters are astonishingly spacious or rather
elongated. Passing from end to end she would find a living tube two
feet in length, a dizzy path to traverse, as it is curled in a tight,
many-whorled spiral,--the stairway, the domicile, the universe at
present for Opalina. She is compelled to be a vegetarian, for nothing
but masses of decayed leaf tissue and black mud and algæ come down
the stairway. For many days there is only the sound of water gurgling
past the tadpole’s gills, or glimpses of sticks and leaves and the
occasional flash of a small fish through the thin skin periscope of its
body.
Then the tadpole’s mumbling even of half-rotted leaves comes to an end,
and both it and its guests begin to fast. Down the whorls comes less
and less of vegetable detritus, and Opalina must feel like the crew of
a submarine when the food supply runs short. At the same time something
very strange happens, the experience of which eludes our utmost
imagination. Poe wrote a memorable tale of a prison cell which day by
day grew smaller, and Opalina goes through much the same adventure.
If she frequently traverses her tube, she finds it growing shorter
and shorter. As it contracts, the spiral untwists and straightens
out, while all the time the rations are cut off. A dark curtain of
pigment is drawn across the epidermal periscope and as books of dire
adventure say, the ‘horror of darkness is added to the terrible mental
uncertainty.’ The whole movement of the organism changes; there is no
longer the rush and swish of water, and the even, undulatory motion
alters to a series of spasmodic jerks,--quite the opposite of ordinary
transition from water to land. Instead of water rushing through the
gills of her host, Opalina might now hear strange musical sounds, loud
and low, the singing of insects, the soughing of swamp palms.
Opalina about this time, should be feeling very low in her mind from
lack of food, and the uncertainty of explanation of why the larger her
host grew, the smaller, more confined became her quarters. The tension
is relieved at last by a new influx of provender, but no more inert
mold or disintegrated leaves. Down the short, straight tube appears
a live millipede, kicking as only a millipede can, with its thousand
heels. Deserting for a moment Opalina’s point of view, my scientific
conscience insists on asserting itself to the effect that no millipede
with which I am acquainted has even half a thousand legs. But not to
quibble over details, even a few hundred kicking legs must make quite
a commotion in Opalina’s home, before the pepsin puts a quietus on the
unwilling invader.
From now on there is no lack of food, for at each sudden jerk of the
whole amphibian there comes down some animal or other. The vegetarian
tadpole with its enormously lengthened digestive apparatus, has crawled
out on land, fasting while the miracle is being wrought with its
plumbing, and when the readjustment is made to more easily assimilated
animal food, and it has become a frog, it forgets all about leaves and
algæ, and leaps after and captures almost any living creature which
crosses its path and which is small enough to be engulfed.
With the refurnishing of her apartment and the sudden and complete
change of diet, the exigencies of life are past for Opalina. She has
now but to move blindly about, bathed in a stream of nutriment, and
from time to time, nonchalantly to cut herself in twain. Only one other
possibility awaits, that which occurred in the case of our Opalina.
There comes a time when the sudden leap is not followed by an inrush
of food, but by another leap and still another and finally a headlong
dive, a splash and a rush of water, which, were protozoans given to
reincarnated memory, might recall times long past. Suddenly came a
violent spasm, then a terrible struggle, ending in a strange quiet:
Opalina has become a link.
All motion is at an end, and instead of food comes compression,
closer and closer shut the walls and soon they break down and a new
fluid pours in. Opalina’s cyst had dissolved readily in the tadpole’s
stomach, but her own body was able to withstand what all the food of
tadpole and frog could not. If I had not wanted the painting of a
vulture’s head, little Opalina, together with the body of her life-long
host, would have corroded and melted, and in the dark depths of the
tropical waters her multitude of paddle-hairs, her more or fewer
nuclei, all would have dissolved and been re-absorbed, to furnish their
iota of energy to the swift silvery fish.
This flimsy little, sky-scraper castle of Jack’s, built of isolated
bricks of facts, gives a hint of the wonderland of correlation. Facts
are necessary, but even a pack-rat can assemble a gallon of beans in
a single night. To link facts together, to see them forming into a
concrete whole; to make A fit into ARCH and ARCH into ARCHITECTURE,
that is one great joy of life which, of all the links in my chain, only
the Editor, You and I--the Mammals--can know.
II
MY JUNGLE TABLE
Many, many, many years ago, in some distant place, among trees or
rocks, perhaps on the banks of a river, certainly in the warm light of
the sun, one of your ancestors and mine became tired of squatting on
a branch or on the ground, and sat himself--or herself--on a fallen
log. If it was himself then he must soon have felt the need of a lap
on which to rest things--his hands if nothing else. And from that day
to this, his male descendants still feel that lack down to the last
unfortunate who is handed a cup of tea or a three-legged egg-shell
of cocoa, a serviette and a cake with no support other than wholly
inadequate knees.
Of the first table I can relate nothing with certainty, but of the last
I could gossip endlessly, limited only by writer’s cramp and my supply
of adjectives. For I am at this moment sitting at the last table ever
made--last because it is not quite finished. I am forever tacking on a
little shelf or an annex at one side, and so I feel a right to place
it at the opposite end of our distant forebear’s piece of bark or
stiff frond or whatever it was that he balanced on his hairy, bowed
knees. And yet his table and mine are much more alike than the mahogany
roll-top with swinging telephone and octave of assistants’ push buttons
to which our more sophisticated but less happy bank presidents sit down.
That reminds me, however, that my laboratory table is also of mahogany,
because here in the jungle of British Guiana it is the cheapest
material in the form of boards.
The crab-wood top grew in this very jungle, its first, rich red-brown
cells fashioned from the water and earth and sun at least a century
and a half ago. It is possible to detect the double character of the
rings, indicating the two annual rainy seasons--the two springs which
quickened the sap and leafage, and the two periods of drought when the
life of the tree slowed down. Close to the heart of the great board is
a strange ring, or rather node between rings--a wide, even space, which
my reckoning places about 1776; about the time when our fore-fathers
were fighting for freedom, whose memory we cannot toast even in wine;
they had just penned a Declaration of Independence, whereas we are
considering passing a law to keep monkeys in their proper place. I
pause in my table talk long enough to thank heaven that we are still
allowed to believe in the rotundity of the earth, that the Indians’
gift of tobacco is still permitted us, and that tea is not yet thrown
overboard!
The year 1776 at Kartabo was one of almost continual rain,--so much
my broad, crab-wood space shows--with no slack-growth period for
this slender sapling. And imagination helps us still farther when we
recall something of the human history of the place. Ever since 1600
the Dutch had strived to make this region habitable. The little fort,
on the island off shore had barely pointed its guns down river, had
fired its well-weathered cannon in victory, and had silenced them in
defeat to English and French privateers (often an old-fashioned way of
pronouncing pirate!). Hundreds of Indian slaves had worked on the four
large plantations and only in 1772 had the settlers admitted that this
region was fit only for jungle, wild animals, and future enthusiastic
scientists with tables. And now I realized that my table-top had
sprouted in the very year that the Dutch left for the coast--one of the
first wild things to spring up in their retreating footsteps, a pioneer
in again “letting in the jungle.”
The magic of my jungle table is always apparent in one way or another.
No thoughts which it generates, nor happenings on its surface are
aught but vivid, vital, memorable: It is an event to hurry out to
in early morning, it is a regret to leave for jungle tramps and for
meals, it is only exhaustion which excuses its midnight abandonment.
A magic carpet transports one’s body from place to place, whereas my
table impels mental gamuts from quiet meditation to dire tragedy, from
righteous anger, to wonder at the marvellous sights it vouchsafes me,
and despair at thought of their interpretation. Only once have I ever
become impatient with my artificial lap, when an injury to my foot
compelled me to remain indoors for a time. Then indeed the jungle
called and _les affaires de ma table_ palled,--a commentary on my lack
of philosophy.
The first magic which my table made was to prove to be alive. The top
was undeniably dead, well seasoned and inert, but my black boy Sam had
cut the legs from jungle saplings. I put my hand down one day and felt
a soft tissue something, half way to the floor. It seemed a moth’s
wings or a tangle of dense cobwebs, but to my surprise I saw that my
table was sprouting leaves, rather pale and dwarfed, limp and flabby,
to be sure, but of rapid growth, and besides there were four other buds
just started. I had put cans of water on the floor beneath the legs to
discourage ants, and the sap of the new-cut poles had greedily sucked
this up, and even in the dimness of the laboratory light had begun
to spread into foliage. It was proving a real jungle table and I was
rather thrilled to see that the warfare of the wilderness had already
begun at arm’s reach,--a tiny caterpillar had crawled from somewhere
to the new blown leaves and had eaten out a bit. I pictured my table
as sprouting, growing higher and higher, until, in lieu of Alice’s
toadstool, I cut jungle saplings for my chair legs too, and mounted
with the table! The Indian summer of my table legs soon passed however,
the sap dried, the leaves wilted, and from saplings they became
furniture.
But the magic continued. If the crab-wood boards of the top were not
quickened into even passing vitality, they could do equally surprising
things, the first of which was to become vocal. Day after day there
arose a low grating throb, lasting for a few seconds, and sometimes
increasing in rapidity and pitch until it assumed a true musical
quality. Its direction eluded me until I happened to have my ear close
to the table, when the vibrations seemed to sound at my very ear-drum.
Then one day I noticed a tiny pile of sawdust on the floor and traced
it to a rounded hole from which at intervals came the sound. For three
months my musical table continued its monotone, day and night, until
in the quiet of midnight it became part of the silence, and I was aware
of it only with effort. Then it ceased, and its cessation held my
attention more than its occurrence had done.
Months later when the last of my small table furnishings had been
packed, I tipped up the table to carry it away, and there in the hole
from which the monotone and the sawdust had flowed there hung suspended
a gorgeous, mummified beetle, its long antennæ of salmon and black
curved up and over its back, while its fluted cuirass shone through
dust and dim light, deep forest green framed with a delicate border of
primuline yellow. My table top had furnished nourishment, sanctuary,
sounding board, through all the long period of immaturity, but at the
climax of this little life, the hardened vegetable fibre had held firm,
despite all the efforts of the green beetle, and cruelly withheld
freedom by some slight, needless entanglement of its hind legs. So
passed two tragedies of my table,--the first vegetable, the second
animal.
Usually my table is littered with beautiful mysterious things which,
to a casual onlooker, could have absolutely no meaning. There is a
small, exquisitely molded bony cup or vase, partly covered at the top,
and with a long, daintily curved handle, which I keep suspended as
a receptacle for pins. It might well be a delicate netsuke carved in
pre-democratic Japan by some craftsman who wrought for love; it might
be almost anything but a music-box. And now my reverie was interrupted
by a sound from the neighboring jungle,--a sound common but never old.
As the bony box might have been far other than it was, so the deep
vibrations could well be elemental,--a distant wind, sinister as if
it came straight from blowing across terrible fields after battle,
or through cities wracked with pestilence; the eaves around which it
had howled must have been very evil, roofing ancient castles which
sheltered thoughts of treachery and deeds of unfair violence. But I
knew that the rich primeval resonances came echoing from bog bony
boxes exactly like my pin holder, in the throats of a tree-top circle
of beings like aged, thick-necked dwarfs squatting high on swaying
branches, looking out toward me over the expanse of quicksilver water.
At the climax, when it seemed impossible that any one animal could
produce such an appalling volume of sound, a blur swiftly feathered the
surface of the river, as if the impinging ululations of monkey voices
had actually been translated into visibility--as liquid in a glass is
troubled in sympathy with certain chords of music. My ear changed
focus, and like a search-light shifting from distant cloud to airplane,
attended a sound at my very elbow, throbbing, muffled--and again my
table sang.
[Illustration: “Well within the realm of black magic”]
Amazing things, things apparently well within the realm of black magic
occur and recur on my table. Late this evening a windless tropical
rain fell so evenly and steadily that the monotone on the bamboos
seemed intended for some other sense than the ear. I sat describing
the delicate arrangement of the tiny bones and muscles of the syrinx
of a flycatcher, striving to understand how there could emanate from
this instrument such an intricate vocabulary of screams and whistles,
trills and octaves as this bird and its fellows uttered every day in
the laboratory compound.
Suddenly something flew swiftly past my face and alighted clumsily
among my vials and instruments. I saw a giant wood roach all browns and
greys, with marbled wings, strange as to pigment and size, but with the
unmistakable head and poise and personality of a New York “Archie.” The
insect had flown through the rain and into the window, but a glance
showed that it was in dire extremity, being in the grasp of a two-inch
ctenid spider. The eight long legs held firmly, but had not been able
to prevent the roach from flying. At the moment of alighting the
arachnid shifted its grip, and secured the wings so that further escape
was impossible. Both were desirable specimens and I instantly slipped
a deep stender dish over them and again lost myself in my binocular
microscope.
Fifteen minutes later I looked up and saw a sight so strange that
Sime himself would hesitate to delineate it. The spider still clung
tenaciously to its victim, but the wood roach had her revenge. She
was barely alive, yet in a quarter of an hour she had changed from a
strong, virile creature to an empty husk, dry and hollow, while over
her and the spider, over glass and table-top scurried fifty-one active
roachlets. They had burst from their mother fully equipped and ready
for life, leaving her but a vacant, gaping shell, a maternal film, the
ghost of a roach: Tiny, green, transparent, fleet, they raced back and
forth over the spider. He grasped in vain at their diminutive forms at
the same time still clutching the dying, flavorless shred of a mother
roach, holding fast as though he hoped that this unnatural miracle
might reverse itself at any moment, and his victim again become fat and
toothsome.
I knew that some of the fish swimming in the aquarium near by lay
thousands of eggs, and that other insects leave myriads of offspring,
yet this magic of the wood roach, this resolution of one into fifty
made wonderfully vivid the reproductive powers of tropical creatures.
When in a moment of time, relatively speaking, a single insect can
be broken up into half a hundred active, functioning duplicates of
herself, the chance for variation, for new adjustments, for survival of
the more delicately adapted is faintly understood. Here was spontaneous
generation with a vengeance.
To hark back again to sounds and voices; I could fashion a whole essay
on the calls and songs and noises which come to me at my table, from
river, compound and jungle. On very still days I can hear the giant
catfish thrumming deep beneath the water, and the cry of hawk-eagles
high in the heavens; at hot, high noon Attila, the brain-fever Cotinga,
calls and calls and calls, while through the hush of midnight there
comes the hopeless cadence of the poor-me-one; I know from a sudden
babel of humming-bird squeaks and frenzied shrieks of flycatchers that
a tree snake has been discovered in the bamboos; I am certain without
looking that it is very close to five o’clock, when the first old witch
cuckoo begins whaleeping on its regular evening excursion for a drink
in the river, and so on.
Probably by virtue of my table’s magic, I have learned, like Chubu
and Sheemish, to work a little miracle all by myself. My principal
technical work just now is the study of the syrinx of birds, their
remarkable, complex organ of voice placed far down beyond the throat,
in the very body itself, and the correlation of its structure with
the actual voice of the bird. At present I try to solve some knotty
problems of tinamous, strange, bob-tailed game-birds, related both
to fowls and to ostriches, which live on the jungle floor, lay eggs
like burnished turquoise and age-purpled jade, and call to one another
with sweet, liquid whistles. My Indians bring in numbers of these
birds for the mess, so I have an abundance of material for study. I
try an experiment on my table which has been already successful in
other cases. I decapitate a bird before it is plucked for the pot, and
holding it firmly on its back, I strike a sharp blow on the muscles of
the breast. Nothing results, so I shift position and try again. This
time a short, high note is produced. I draw out the neck a little and
obtain a lower note, still further and strike a half tone lower in the
scale. If I could prolong these I could reconstruct the whole plaintive
evening call of the variegated tinamou here on my very table top.
Then I take the windpipe and carefully work out the wonderful
architecture of the whole organ, the delicate adaptation and adjustment
of each part fulfilling its special function, the whole working
together as no man-made machine ever could. From throat to syrinx
the windpipe extends, composed of thin membranous tissue, kept open
by a series of a hundred and twenty-five perfect rings. Here we have
assurance of an entrance for air forever clear and open, so mobile
that it bends back double, yet with no chance of closure through any
contortion of the neck. The throat end is guarded by a slit which opens
and closes at the slightest need; the opposite end marks the top of
the syrinx and the division into two tubes each leading to a lung.
For twenty rings above this point, the windpipe is slightly enlarged
and almost solid, forming a bony sounding board which acts, in a
less degree, like the throat box of the red howling monkeys; giving
resonance and carrying power to the voice.
The syrinx itself is boxed in by four pairs of large rings and
semi-rings, which protect two pairs of cartilage pads. The pads of
each pair touch one another along their inner sides, and when the
windpipe is relaxed the seam between them is closed tight. A slight
tug, as in my decapitated bird, corresponding to a raising of the
head and neck in a live individual, and the pads revolve slightly,
bringing a constricted part of each into the seam, forming a tiny
gap. Through this the air from the lungs and air-sacs rushes and we
have the mechanism of the first, high, clear note of the call, a
superlatively sweet whistle on middle C, carrying a mile through the
thick jungle. Although quite another story, my mind rushes on, away
from the technical anatomical problem, to the realization that this
sound is a summons from the very advanced female of this species to
any unattached male bird, an announcement that she is ready to lay an
egg for him, provided he will incubate it, hatch it and assume entire
charge of the young bird. And I do not know whether to cheer or blush
for my sex when I state that the woods hereabouts are full of amiable,
domestically inclined males who are eager and willing to agree to this
rather one-sided contract. Their syringes are almost identical but the
loud evening calls are invariably those of the idler sex. Notes for
Women! must have been the slogan of the long since successful tinamou
suffragists.
It is amusing to trace a circular gamut of human interest in animal
sounds: Listening to various screams, warbles, whistles, roars, chirps,
trills and twitters in the jungle, an intelligent interest impels us
to desire to know the author; having accomplished this by patient
stalking and watching, and if needs be, shooting, the wish is aroused
to discover the accompanying emotion, the incentive, and then the
fascinating problem presents itself of the answer, whether in terms
of action or vocal, whether filial, amorous, pugnacious, or merely
companionable. This is more difficult, but in many cases possible.
Almost always this ends the quest, while it is still incomplete. The
method, the physical mechanism is after all, the foundation of the
phenomenon, and when we have secured a specimen, taken it to our
table,--a tinamou in the present instance--then we may produce the
call artificially, and by tireless and detailed dissection detect air
channel, resonance chamber, syrinx mechanism, vocal chords, controlling
muscles, and envy the enormous bodily reservoir of air--lungs, sacs,
the very hollow bones themselves. Leaning back and listening to a
living, wild tinamou calling in the neighboring forest, feeling rich in
the possession of its Who! Why! and How!, we realize the fullest joy of
intimacy with the furtive beings of earth, with the elusive small folk
of the jungle.
After a long jungle tramp I was leaving Hacka Trail for the Station
clearing when I caught sight of a group of small objects on the under
side of a gigantic bromeliad leaf. If the leaf had been fifty feet up
they might have been great fruit bats, if twenty feet their size would
have equalled that of vampires, but as they were only of arms’ reach
above my head they could not be more than an inch in length. When I had
hacked off the leaf and dodged its fall, I found nine little chrysalids
clustered together, and even on close scrutiny their resemblance to
a group of diminutive bats was still absurdly real. This intimate
association of chrysalids is a rare thing, as rare as the nocturnal
association of butterflies sleeping in jungle glades.