it over my table, where it dried into a fluted dome of green tissue.
Three days passed with no sign of change from the chrysalids swinging
from their silken pendants, when my eye caught a glint of silver far
down the under side of this same leaf, near the tip. Another glance
made me think them inexplicable dewdrops, a third crystalized them into
pearl-like consistency, while a fourth careful scrutiny showed me they
were two eggs of a scarlet and black heliconid butterfly, the kind
which fluttered fearlessly ahead of me along the jungle paths. Here was
a splendid example of oblique discovery, of scientific second sight.
I wondered what sculpture the surface would show,--these two isolated
spheres, shining like the third zodiacal sign against a dark green
heaven. At the first look through the microscope I forgot all about
surface and possible spines or hexagonal lattice-work; it was the
contents which drew and held my attention. A butterfly egg in due
course of time should yield a caterpillar, which before it emerges is
wound into a curve to fit its minute spherical home. But here was a
new cosmos,--a planetful of slowly moving creatures which had nothing
in common with a heliconian caterpillar. Slowly they milled around
their little world, living, like some Gulliverian organisms, on the
inside looking out. The egg was an opalescent sphere, a twelfth of an
inch across, and in my microscope field it seemed really suspended in
space,--in a dark chlorophyll ether. More than once as my eye tired
in watching I seemed to see the whole egg revolving while the inmates
remained stationary. Now and then one of the egg-beings turned and went
against the current, setting up a traffic whirlpool which caused all to
cross and recross in confusion. The film of eggshell was translucent
and clear immediately beneath my eye, clouding into exquisite purplish
pearl at the periphery. One of the inmates came to rest directly
beneath the surface, and I saw it was a tiny grub, legless, searching
about blindly, feeling, sensing, living, after whatsoever manner
grubs live who find themselves prisoned in a butterfly egg. The grub
hastened on, fell into wriggle with its companions and soon slipped
from view below the edge of its world. Doubtless in a few seconds it
completed its internal orbit and again crossed my field of view, but
like a circulating Roman army on the stage, or the sequence of ideas
in some sphere not attached to jungle leaves, all seemed identical. I
could never tell when the same one appeared again; indeed while they
moved I could make no estimate even of their numbers. I only knew that
some minute hymenopteron, doubtless a member of the wonderful tribe of
Chalcids, had, a few days before, thrust her ovipositor through this
translucent pearl and left within as many eggs as there now were grubs,
then flown on to the next egg. I once was fortunate enough to observe
this fairy egg-laying,[1] and now I was trembling with excitement at
the unexpected treasure trove I had unwittingly brought to my table.
[1] _Edge of the Jungle_, pp. 38-40.
Closest examination from every side with high power lens revealed to me
no hint of the place of entrance. Once when I crawled from the heart of
great Cheops out through the robbers’ tunnel, and finally scraped and
squeezed through the narrow crevice through which they had broken in,
I thought it small indeed. But here was a phenomenon far more wonderful
than a full-rigged ship in a bottle, a snow-storm in a paper weight, or
the thieving Arabs’ entrance in the pyramid.
Four days passed, the wonderful globes lay before me, and then I
examined them again. A remarkable change had been wrought, a living
planet had devolved into a dead satellite; the egg had become a
sarcophagus with a dozen mummies. The little cases were arranged around
a central core of débris, some standing on end as in the Egyptian
room of a museum, a group facing one another as some wordless gossip
passed from one sealed mouth to the next. A single mummy doll rested
against the opal shell, with eyes pressed close to the translucent
pane, eyes which at present existed only in outward form as insensitive
tissue. This one individual had chosen for his final pupal change a
position at the very outer rim, where the first nerve tingles of sight
would reflect the mysteries of the world beyond that sphere of food
and fellows which had heretofore bounded his existence; my pronouns
masculine are merely adumbrative.
So passed a week with the little silent mummies still unchanged; seven
days,--sufficient time, Biblically speaking, for the creation of the
world. But just as all the glorious truth and beauty of evolution is
concealed within the metaphor of Genesis, so, hidden from our groping
senses, miracles of change were being wrought within the butterfly’s
egg. The following morning the spell had broken, and the sphere again
seethed with life, resurrected, reincarnated. On the central compost
heap were piled twelve suits of second-hand pupal skins, tissue paper
cartoons of their wearers, glimmering weirdly through the shell. The
tiny wasps had all emerged and were active, and already there was a
hole bitten through, with small ships of splintered opal scattered
outside. As I watched, a wasp midget shoved aside a group of idlers,
pushed his way to the door and began to gnaw with all his might. His
great bulging scarlet eyes blocked the way as he tried time after time
to press through. The whole eggful knew that something of great import
was happening, and the outside air must have carried exciting tidings,
for all moved about as quickly as their crowded quarters permitted.
Twice the Gnawer left his labors and walked about nervously, once
making the entire circuit of the egg. His leadership, his pioneer
daring was marked not only by action; I found that I could readily
distinguish him from the others. He was a shade smaller, his lines were
trimmer, and upon his back was a round insignium of gold which the
others lacked.
Several others came to the opening, tried to pass and turned
aside--none made attempt to aid in the escape from prison. Back
came the ambitious one and fell to with all his strength. He lacked
leverage, and only when three of his companions came up at once, was
he able, by pressing his hind legs against their faces and bodies,
to break off an unusually large bit of the horny shell. This made a
splendid gap, and after two smaller bits had been chewed off, the
little insect wriggled through the jagged hole, and stood upon the
summit of his world. Tiny though he was, needing thirty-five of him to
cover an inch of space, his coloring was exquisite; eyes dull scarlet,
sparsely covered with golden hair, body armor of glistening black from
head to tip of abdomen, with badge of yellow gold shining from between
his wings. These wings were small, paddle-shaped and almost free of
veining, while the scales on their surface glowed with iridescent play
of lilac, yellow and pale green.
Now ensued an elaborate cleaning of every part of his body, and then
he ran off at top speed. Several quick turns near-by on the leaf and
back he came, gave a final wipe to his forelegs, climbed up, antennæd
the hole and took his stand a wasp’s length away. This action came
as a complete surprise; I never expected him to return after such a
laborious escape.
Soon a second wasp came to the breach and squeezed through. Hardly
had its combing and scraping been completed when, to my astonishment,
the Gnawer rushed forward, roughly seized the second wasp and began
to bang its head most unmercifully. At every push, the head of the
unfortunate insect wobbled as if about to fall off. Suddenly it rose
to its feet and the first wasp mated with it. I then realized that
instead of assault and battery, this was courtship, that in place of
horrible fratricide, this was the nuptials of brother and sister.
The mating lasted but a second, when the first wasp returned to its
watchful waiting, and the other spun its paddle-shaped wings and flew
off as far as the confines of the covered glass dish permitted. I never
took my eye from the lens as the miracle continued. One after another
the sister wasps emerged, to the number of eleven, and in each case
the male enacted his rough courtship and mated for not longer than two
seconds. In each case, without a moment’s hesitation, the female flew
swiftly away. Once, when three emerged quickly one after the other,
they did not leave the egg but waited quietly for the male.
The whole thing began and ended so quickly that it was some time before
I could review the whole wonderful performance from the conjectured
laying of the eggs, through the grub, pupa and now the adult stage.
I looked again at these midgets, only a thirty-fifth of an inch in
length, and considered their necessities in life,--food, mate and
a butterfly’s egg, and I realized the enormous advantage of this
simplification of the mating problem. But the most astonishing thing
of all was the thought of the anticipation, of the perfect adjustment
of sex in the unformed organisms, the pre-natal compulsory affiancing,
together with the apparently satisfactory disregard of inbreeding
adumbrated in the very eggs themselves of the original mother wasplet.
No matter how imperfectly I have translated this event, disregarding
my futile phrases and in spite of my inadequate description, it was
a most wonderful happening, which for a time completely eclipsed all
other affairs of my table top. In delicate achievement, astounding
unexpectancy and magical matter-of-factness, it left the onlooker with
a supreme realization of ignorance and a dominant sense of awe.
And so as I sit at my table, my little cosmos of space and time
presents deaths by violence, and lives of quiet, unperturbed peace;
acrid, burning odors and smashing, sweeping brilliancy of color; living
skin soft and smooth as clay, or fretted like shagreen; voices almost
high enough to become visible; comedy so delicate that appreciation
never reaches laughter, and tragedy so cruel and needless that it stirs
doubts of the very roots of things. All these and many more, begin,
occur and pass before me,--things which go to make up a world.
III
A MIDNIGHT BEACH COMBING
A tropical night may be quiet and calm, and yet full of a strange
restlessness. It was such a one when I lay in my bathing suit close to
the grey granite of Boom-boom Point, and watched the low-hung North
Star twinkling through the fretwork of mangrove roots. Three great
planets added their separate lustre, Mars overhead in the very heart
of Scorpio, Jupiter well down to the west, and Venus just setting,
shining with the light of a half moon. It was, however, predominantly,
a Night of the Milky Way. The great luminous highway stretched from
horizon to horizon, illuminating hundreds of the tiny mica facets in
my rocky couch. Great Cygnus climbed slowly, majestically, along the
glowing path, and Pegasus reared his head just above the horizon. Has
the composite light of these myriad stars the same sinister psychic
effect as the moon rays? Else why were I and so many creatures
restless? Only the giant tree-frogs, the Maximas, wahrooked in
endless, stoical reiteration, unaffected by stars or planets, as
endless as an after-dinner speech and as unintelligible. Now and then
a trio of Typhon’s toads exploded in a short, hysterical outburst,
as if intercalating _Hear! Hear!_ or _Cut it out!_--a very impudent,
undesirable, nervous protest against the brain-fever repetitions of the
great frogs.
I was ready for something unusual, and it came,--merely a sound,
but one which will probably be as mysterious on the day of my death
as it is now. Without warning through the air overhead, against the
translucent celestial glow, came an _izzzzzzzz-wonk! wonk! wonk!_ as
evanescent as the low twang of a bullet, wholly indescribable in its
true weirdness and richness. No beetle ever turned as quickly as the
_wonk! wonk! wonk!_ indicated; no bat ever achieved a twang with its
velvet wings. It was no sound of bird or insect that I knew; and it
came again and again from the same direction, and seemed to emanate
from some creature which watched me. The _wonk! wonk!_ as of sudden,
banking flight, happened close in front, over the water. I flashed
my electric torch and saw nothing, although the sound continued, and
for half an hour one or more mysterious beings swept about me close
overhead. As once before, my mind went to Pterodactyls and I imagined
a pair of the little web-fingered creatures launched out from some
secret crevice in the distant mountains, for a brief time to hawk
about in the light of the Milky Way, peering down with their great
eyes, toothed beaks half open, whipping back and forth through the
air, now and then snapping up a bat, and stirring the imagination of a
curiosity-tortured human, who would willingly give a year of his life
to see such a sight.
I had meant to spend part of the night among the mangroves, but the
glimmer of the white sand drew me up instead of down the shore, and I
crept over the rocks and padded silently over the sand to our swimming
beach.
[Illustration: “Silent and smooth as a mirror”]
The tide was half-way down, silent and smooth as a mirror with every
star doubled. As I watched, they were erased, one by one as if the
reflections had become water-logged and sunk, and looking up I saw a
mist swept by the high trade-winds across the sky, while around me not
a breath of air stirred. I wriggled into a form half below the surface
of the sand; I worked down lower and lower until I was at the very edge
of the water, which is one of the most wonderful spots in the world.
Being there is the very least part of it. Thousands of people are there
all through the summer at Coney Island and Margate, but never think
themselves anywhere but swimming at Coney Island or bathing at Margate.
Between tides is really the wildest place left in the world, the truest
no-man’s-land, for while you may sail in all waters just beyond or loll
in a hotel a few yards behind, you cannot remain where you are except
anchored and in a diver’s suit. And whatever man erects there is sooner
or later smashed into joyful chunks of cement by the storm waves. The
delight of it is to feel yourself as I did at this moment, a third
under water, a third buried in solid sand, and the rest of me bathed
in and breathing the air. We sometimes feel a thrill at bestriding the
border line of two states or countries. How tremendously more wonderful
to snuggle close to the three states of matter, solid, liquid and
gaseous, and then indeed to realize it and thrill to it with what seems
a fourth state--the mental and spiritual.
The crunch of the sand grains, the lap of the water, the breath of
air,--it makes the world very primitive and new. Without my flash I can
detect no hint either of vegetable or animal kingdom--my little cosmos
at the meeting place of the elements is wholly inorganic and mind. If
only earth-fire were added, it would be complete, and here, a hundred
feet from my cot, there would truly be an epitome of the primeval
earth. I wonder however, whether it is all not more adumbrative of ages
to come, when the last animal has fallen, the last leaf shrivelled, and
only the inorganic and spirit remain, than of the infinite past.
My day-dreams or rather nocturnal meditations were leading me into
hypnotic depths when, with a single bound, I deserted my most ancient
medium, water. Momentarily I even left my more recently ancestral
acquisition, earth, and entered the third which I had conquered only
during the last eight years. Gravitation, faithful through all physical
and mental vicissitudes, brought me down with a resounding thump. At
first I was simply dazed. What had happened? From the infinite calm
of abstract meditation I had been galvanized into the most violent
paroxysm, and here I was sitting on the sand, unhurt, stupidly wide
awake, with my heart trip-hammering. Then all at once the physical me
calmed down and the mental took charge, first in a thrill of excitement
at realization of what had happened, then in joyous recognition that,
as at a well-planned dramatic dénouement of a play, the miracle had
happened. Nature, tired of being ignored, had entered my inorganic
make-believe cosmos, completed it and split it apart with a vengeance.
Instead of sending a firefly into my ken, she had been more subtle,
and an electric eel had brushed against the sole of my foot, and
discharged his diminutive broadside. The shock had been slight, but
unprepared as I was and completely relaxed, it had seemed to my
nerves like the discharge from a third rail. With my flash I caught a
momentary glimpse of the lithe black chap, and I dabbled my hand in his
direction, but he eeled away and became one with the dark water.
I could not get back to my former isolation, even if I greatly desired
to do so; the eel had changed all that. He seemed so modern, so
conventional and specialized an organism drawing the lightning down
into the dark waters, and liberating it at the will of his fishy brain.
I rolled over and flattened myself, and with my electric torch held at
eye height, horizontally, I entered one of the strangest of worlds,--a
beach at black midnight. My mind kept wandering back to my trio of
elements, and I thought of the water ouzel which has conquered them
all. In the wilderness of western China I have seen this delicate,
thrush-like bird run rapidly in and out of a tangle, over leaves and
sand to the edge of a high river bank, and then taking wing, fly in and
out between the boulders of the stream, finally to dive headlong into
the swift water and creep along the bottom, feeding as it went. Here,
in the space of a minute or two, was exhibited mastery of earth, air
and water; only the phœnix could claim superiority.
This evening I was to find a living rival to the ouzel, an insect,
a cricket, which, like so many wonders, was not in the heart of
the Asiatic continent, but at the very door of my British Guiana
laboratory. In the level glare of my flash all the beach creatures
became unreal and of low visibility, while their shadows took full
possession. This fanciful phrase reflected a very real and interesting
scientific fact, that the reason for this lay, not in the unusual
lighting, as much as in the color of the little people themselves.
Picking its way over the sand came a low-swung, weird, blackish thing,
whose silhouetted head swung from side to side, and just above it
there appeared a fearful thing, on long emaciated legs, which crept
nearer and nearer, and finally rushed at the first and sank down upon
it. The attack was so sudden and the images relatively so huge that I
involuntarily sat up and raised my light. The two images rushed toward
me and vanished and my eyes suddenly shifted to nearer focus. I had
been watching the shadows of a small insect and a daddy-long-legs,
the substance of which now appeared ridiculously small and close
to me, with their shadows well under control beneath them. Slowly
I lowered the flash again, and in spite of all I could do, my eyes
gradually lost the creatures themselves and followed back along the
lengthening lines of legs, to the gargoylesque false phantoms,--the
gyrating monstrous phantasmagoria on the sands. Never have I seen a
more completely sense-deceiving phenomenon. Sitting up, I looked down
upon small, slowly moving, barely distinguishable beach beings; prone,
I was surrounded by unnamable apparently ectoplasmic ghosts. If I
should accurately describe their anatomy and actions as revealed by
my low-hung light they would fit into no living or fossil phylum of
earthly organisms. By shifting back and forth I again focussed on the
terrible battle going on at my side, and now the giant had lifted the
lesser beast bodily in its jaws, and was staggering about, mumbling it
as it went. My scientific terms locustid and phalangid faded from mind
with their substance, and I lay watching the midnight shadow struggle
between Plash-goo and Lrippity Kang.
I had always thought of daddy-long-legs as harmless living skeletons,
who clambered aimlessly about and dropped their legs at a touch. Now
I found that they could be ravenous beasts, their dwarfed and rounded
body swung high aloft on their eight thready legs, creeping over the
sand, and actually running down, pouncing on and killing insects as
large as themselves. In this case it was a green grasshopper nymph who
was seized, bitten and worried with an unnecessary amount of dragging
about and vicious chewing. I leaned slowly forward with my hand lens
until I could see every detail, and if daddy-long-legs were magnified
in life only fifteen times I should flee in terror from what would be
a worse danger than any wold. The horrid eyes, grouped in their solid
clump seemed to be even now watching me malignantly, and the great
needle-sharp fangs were sunk deep in the grasshopper, and being worked
back and forth as the juices of the still living insect were sucked up.
Soon the creature set to work to sever the abdomen from the rest of the
insect, and the head and legs fell to the sand, the feet waving slowly
and vaguely. The daddy-long-legs did not move, except now and then to
lift one or two legs and hold them aloft when a passing ant brushed
against them; twenty minutes later it was still there, draining the
last drop from the shrivelled grasshopper.
My attention was attracted to the approaching shadow of another
spectre, only in this case the shadow was indefinite, humped; it might
have enshrouded a low fluttering moth or awkward beetle. Instead of
which, when I followed down the shadow path to its substance there
loomed suddenly a figure even more terrifying than the daddy-long-legs.
But this was awful in a wholesome way. You started at first sight, then
smiled, then felt a liking for the apparition. It was decidedly the
Personality of the beach, claiming full attention as long as it was in
sight, clownlike in its comicality, and childlike in its seriousness
and the affection it aroused. Many will doubtless wonder mildly at
thought of the possibility of holding a mole cricket in affection or
esteem. Yet it is true that when I return in memory to Kartabo, my
thoughts of beauty go to the great blue morpho butterflies, of grace to
the soaring vulture, of adorableness to infant sloths, and of amusement
and affection to the jolly white mole crickets of the sand.
These are the chaps who fairly outdo the water ouzel, outflying,
outrunning and outswimming that bird, and in addition being powerful
leapers and the most perfect burrowing machines in the world. Unlike
their neighboring relations of the jungle these shore crickets have
taken on the color of the sand, keeping only a few hieroglyphics of
dark pigment. Their eyes alone remain solid black. No matter how
deserted the beach, how lifeless the tropical jungle may seem, I was
always certain of finding these optimists abroad after dark, scurrying
here and there, or popping unexpectedly up from the wet sand which a
few minutes before had been covered with the tide.
As my new visitor approached, after my first emotion I was able to call
him by name, a name as bristling with sharp-angled syllables as the
tips of his front legs. Indeed his sponsors must have been profoundly
impressed with these great limbs for in _Scapteriscus oxydactylus_ they
dubbed him the Shovel-winged, Sharp-fingered One.
In the month of March I found little spurts of wet sand on the upper
beach, and following down each tiny hole for an inch, I surprised a
diminutive white cricket, almost a replica of the large ones, just
hatched and bravely starting out in life for itself. In the following
months their numbers sadly diminished and the size of the few remaining
individuals increased, being gaugeable exactly by the calibre of their
hole which they open when the tide goes down. Now, later in the year,
the adult mole crickets were in the full prime of life, vital, virile,
meeting on equal terms all the dangers and advantages of nocturnal life
on a tropical beach. I appreciated these insects all the more because
of their local distribution, being found nowhere up or down the river,
except on our short stretch of sandy beach.