I was blind to the mighty expanse of branch and foliage of my giant
tree. I had passed it often and now and then reached out and touched
it, for its mighty girth fascinated me. My Indian hunter gave me its
name, Etaballi, and my botany added the less harmonious _Vochisia_.
But it was my ear which first led my eye upward to a deep resonant
humming which filled the dim air of the jungle. The sun was clouded as
I looked, but the air was aglow with a solid dome of color, a gigantic
mound of clear gold which eclipsed all the foliage and made the tree
glorious. Humming-birds and bees, butterflies and nectar-loving wasps
were there, and their wings of feathers, scales or mica tissue churned
the air each with an individual note, the sum of which was a composite
tone of wonderful quality.
Lizards and woodhewers scampered easily up the trunk, birds and insects
flew where they willed, but I was bound to earth and by stretching
could reach at the utmost only eight feet from the ground. I could
kill any bird in the top of the tree, I could call myself one of the
Lords of Creation, but that helped not at all in my wish to study this
majestic jungle growth.
Day after day I watched new masses of flowers come into bloom. Finally,
so hopeless seemed the outlook and so marvellous appeared the teeming
life of the tree-top, that I directed two amiable murderers, who were
trail-cutting for me, to fell the jungle Etaballi. It was late when
they began and the wood proved as hard and tough as metal, so when the
warder came for them they had made but slight impression on the giant
bole.
Then using a brain far better for mechanical achievement than my own,
we evolved a plan for surmounting these ninety feet to the first limb.
The plan did what I always like plans to do--it combined the primitive
and the sophisticated. With a bow and special arrow of an Akawai
Indian, a slender cord would be shot over the branch, then a rope
pulled over, and with boatswain’s seat and pulleys the rest would be
easy.
The following day was one of great import both to the tree and myself.
Much has been written of portents and warnings, and if I should narrate
all the inexplicable things which have happened to me near the street
called Prophecy, no one would believe the more ordinary events which
occur as I traverse the avenue of Science. But in this case there was
nothing. I left my friend in the late afternoon, standing in majestic
quiet, leaves hanging motionless, although, a few hundred feet upward,
white cloudlets were scudding before a mid-heaven trade breeze. I
had seen this friendly tree lashed in tropic storms, I had watched
it by day and night; parts of five years of our lives had been spent
together, and I had seen but not observed its towering form as long ago
as sixteen years when I passed up-river for the first time.
I had left Etaballi in the dusk, with its glory of gold pouring forth a
stream of honeysuckle perfume and I looked forward to my new experiment
in the morning, having to do with scaling its height. In the night
arose one of the storms of the early rains. I heard the roar far down
the Mazaruni and looked out of my tent to see first Pegasus and then
the Pleiades erased when there sounded the patter of the first few
drops, followed by the steady, long, audible lines of downpour. Once
and only once there came a deep distant _kr-ump!_ such as used to roll
over the wide sands and drown the surf on the coast of Belgium when the
Germans were vainly strafing to the north. This single sound, as of a
subdued exclamation of some great God looking down upon the jungle, was
the only hint of anything unusual, and no one could call a far-distant
thunder mumble a portent.
Nothing is more pitifully out of place than a fallen tree. It is like
a foundered, deserted ship with decks awash, covered with a maze of
broken masts, remnants of sails and tangled rigging. Thus I found my
Etaballi, brought low, but worthy even in the manner of its fall. Human
murderers had nicked it, but the final surrender was at the demand of
one of the natural elements, whose brothers had brought the tree into
being and nourished it into maturity,--a stroke of lightning,--sister
of the sun, the rain and the winds.
Down it had come, straight to the north and cut for itself a mighty
glade. All other trees in its path, all stumps and saplings, had gone
down with it, and where for centuries had been dimness was now clear
sunlight and a great expanse of open sky. The surrounding trees leaned
far outward as if looking down with some strange arboreal sympathy for
their fallen comrade.
I walked up and down the mighty hole, I swung myself up among the high
branches, and even from those crippled, dying limbs I looked down upon
earth from as great a height as the summit of an ordinary tree. I
began to realize that in the death of my great friend I might achieve
intimacy with many unknown things.
At present all was silent except for the rustle of shrivelled leaves
and an occasional deep groan as some overstrained mass of fibres gave
way. If birds had been perched or nesting among its branches last
night, they had fled; insects had been shaken off, or were now making
their way to other trees, as rats swarm along a ratline from a sinking
vessel.
I left at once and did not return for two weeks. After that I spent
an hour or two of many days with the fallen tree, and if I could have
had my way every hour of daylight would have found me there. I wrote
and collected until my fingers and body ached, and gathered a mass of
astonishing facts which, when digested, will fill many papers with a
multitude of very true, but to the layman, very tiresome, technical
observations.
But always there kept breaking through the mist of bare happenings, of
actual blatant phenomena, glimpses of the dramatic and the romantic
side of this little cosmos. For the tree-made glade became an
individual thing, a veritable worldlet, and just as we go into a room
and to our delight find new pictures on the walls and new books on the
table, so here in my gladeroom no two days were alike.
While sitting quietly in armchair, straight back or lounge--for I had
all to order among the branches--I was forever having my attention
distracted from the business at hand of bark and wood to visitors
who came to peer or hammer, to play or to carry on their courtship
almost within arm’s reach. My angular figure and neutral garments were
apparently an excellent camouflage among the maze of branches, and
creatures came close which would have fled at first glance if I had
been standing in mid-trail.
Every class of backboned animal except fish came to my fallen tree, and
I have no doubt that to the leafy pools far down on the jungle floor,
the land-travelling minnows had already made their way. Tree-frogs
leaped past on damp, cloudy days and lizards of a half dozen species
crept about, lapping up flies and other small fodder. A green tree
snake came one day, but soon turned and went back to the protection of
the surrounding foliage. An event was when a mighty boa constrictor,
seventeen feet at the very least, weaved slowly in and out of the
tangle. When he stopped he became but one more lichen-covered liana.
In full sunlight he rested his great head flat upon a limb, and for
many minutes no branch was more lifeless. Then I walked slowly toward
him. When a few feet away he raised his head, looked at me, reached
inquiringly forward with his pliant tongue, and slowly flowed away. We
felt and showed mutual respect and each preferred to look, and then
dignifiedly to turn aside, I the richer for the meeting, for I could
add admiration and a thrill of real enthusiasm at the sight.
Monkeys came, a band of impudent Cebus, who dared descend to the branch
tips, to shake them, and with many simian oaths to challenge me to
come on. I took one step in their direction, and they fled chattering.
Birds were almost always in sight--great yellow-headed vultures who
swept down out of mid-heaven to see whether my prostrate body meant
death. Doves boomed, toucans yelped, and after the first week a berry
tree ripened its fruit, and no hour passed without flocks of parrots
screeching full-lunged and sending down a rain of pits. Humming-birds
fought overhead and fell, locked together bill and claw, at my feet;
flycatchers found my glade a happy hunting ground.
One morning when I made up my mind to let no outside sight or
sound through to my conscious concentration on the doings of the
little people of bark and wood, I was suddenly startled into utter
forgetfulness of my work. Here in the heart of the South American
jungle there were reproduced for me the steep hills and valleys of
northern Yunnan and Burma--the smells, the colors, the cold eddies
of wind from the Tibetan snows--all were recrystallized in my mind
by the notes of silver pheasants. From the underbrush behind my seat
came the unmistakable low, liquid murmurs, breaking unexpectedly into
the thrilling cackling. I dropped everything, and fifty feet away
found a pair of distracted motmots who could not make their full-grown
offspring behave, and were voicing their shattered nerves in this
amazingly pheasantine outburst.
Herein lies the threefold charm of the labor of a scientist,--its
unexpectedness, its mystery, and the eternal march of its phenomena,
approaching, occurring, and passing into ever-vivid memory.
After the first week of observation my methods of close study had
so sharpened my senses that the tree seemed to me to have passed
into a resurrection of renewed vitality. Out of its death had come
superabundant life. It recalled an observation by a stout fellow
naturalist of mine, Samson by name, made many centuries ago. Some time
after he had casually rent a lion in twain, he returned to look at the
beast, and “behold there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass
of the lion.”
No part of it from underground roots to shrivelled topmost foliage
was free from a flutter and bustle of vibrant beings. Thousands upon
thousands of lives would cease and their races become extinct were it
not for the occasional death of such a jungle giant as this.
An hour of undiluted, blazing sun drove me back to the splintered stump
for shelter. I walked around and around it and then mounted it and fell
to studying the cross-section smoothed by the skilful ax-blows of my
friends the dusky criminals. I counted carefully, marking every century
with a smudge of ink from my fountain pen, and when I had reached the
very heart, I stood up and looked at the mighty Etaballi with renewed
awe. I felt as if I had been unduly familiar with a stranger who was
suddenly revealed as some very famous, very great historical character.
For when this huge plant first broke from its seed and took root in
this very spot where I stood, Genghis Khan became emperor of the
Mongols. When its first leaves struggled for light and air the Crusades
were at their height; on the opposite side of the world troubadours
and minnesingers were making music, and Columbus and his voyages were
still three centuries in the future.
For many minutes I remained quiet, held in wonder at the long centuries
of human achievement. Then I returned to the watching of the life
of today. I saw the excited creatures coming over the ground, along
tangled branches or upon swift wings, and I saw that they were
marvellously equipped, forearmed.
As I pondered on these mysteries and watched a sliver of a beetle
crawling on the bark, human history blurred, faded and passed from
mind. When Genghis Khan reigned, the beetle’s ancestors were doing
exactly what he is doing; double the years and Attila was making
precedent for his successors--and identical beetle slivers crawled over
dead bark. Ten times the years of this tree take us back beyond human
history, add twenty or one hundred times its length of life, when our
forebears were fighting to lift themselves above the other beasts, and
in all probability not the slightest change could have been detected in
the color, size, shape or habits of the flat predecessors of the tiny
beetle under my lens.
When the bark begins to loosen a whole world comes by day and by
night to creep beneath, and begin all the mysterious rites and
achievements which fate allots to creatures of the under bark. All
are positively thigmotactic which, as I once explained, is having the
irresistible desire to touch or be touched by something, above, below,
and--a thigmotac’s greatest joy--on all sides at once. Twice I have
experienced this and found it very terrible; the first time when I
crept out of Cheops by the ancient, rubbish-obscured robbers’ entrance,
when sharp bits of alabaster so held me for a time that I could not
move, and my imagination pictured the whole weight of the mighty
pyramid pressing upon me. Another time was near the end of an obstacle
race on a Toyo Kisen Keisha steamer, when each competitor, after
fifteen minutes of constant, exhausting stunts on three decks, had to
creep through a long, canvas ventilator laid flat on the deck. Half-way
through, with the second man at my heels, I felt the canvas tube become
narrower where an old tear had been sewn up, and my shoulders, even
when pressed together, held the tube taut. Lungs full of coal dust,
my blood beating in my ears like turbines,--no danger from savages or
adventure with wild animals which I could recall, had ever given me a
more ghastly minute.
I returned from my first day at the tree with a dozen beetles, and
from a glance at them pinned in my collection, I can with certainty
interpret their respective walks or creeps or crawls of life. A
number are thin, but one is so amazingly flat that I am preserving it
carefully among a few choice wonders of the insect world.
It is a small beetle, black and shiny as a new jet bead. It is oblong,
and only by the most careful scrutiny can the faint details of the
head, wings and body be detected. They seem no more than surface
scratches and put to shame the most delicate watch or Japanese carving.
I turn the beetle sideways and he becomes a mere black line, less in
diameter than the slender pin which supports him. The under surface
shows a more complex maze of lines, marking where jaws, antennæ, legs
and feet are stowed away. He is a third of an inch long and a fiftieth
thick. But above and below he wears his skeleton outside--a solid
sheath of dense, hard chitin, and if we conservatively allot half of
his thickness to this external armor, we have a space one hundredth
of an inch into which is packed in perfect working order muscles for
spinning his wings, walking, twiddling his antennæ and grinding his
jaws; brain, nerves, eyes and other sense organs, mouth, stomach and
intestine, and, if a lady beetle, ovaries whose scores of eggs are
brought to maturity, with an intricate apparatus for depositing them.
On another day I caught a wafer of an earwig whose bust measurement
compared with its inch length, would, translated into human height,
make a person just two inches in thickness. All the compactness of
these shavings of vitality, these slivers of life, is in anticipation
of the death of such a tree as this and the subsequent loosening of the
bark.
Other beetles are antitheses of the first one, each a tiny cylinder
with every surface rounded and every organ curved. The outer armor
is a rich, glowing mahogany with a scattering of golden hairs and an
absurd tail-piece, round, blunt and jagged. I did not realize the
perfection of this arrangement, until, during the second week, I came
upon a whole flock of these little chaps in their tunnels. After dark
a flash-light showed only a tiny shaft driven into the heart of the
wood, surrounded by cores of white, chewed-up wood pulp, but the moment
the light struck down the hole, the faintest of shuffling could be
heard by placing one’s ear close, and like magic the hole vanished. The
inmate had somehow detected the unwelcome light and had hastily backed
up and plugged the entrance with himself. Now, looking at the pinned
insect, the funny, round, jagged end-piece, so silly and meaningless
in itself, resolved into a perfection of adaptation. No one could jump
his claim! Beetles like these are stolid folk, wholly lacking a sense
of humor, and they go through life, deliberately, directly, with never
a side-wise glance or a light thought. In all this they have much in
common with turtles.
Quick as the beetles were to take advantage of the new manna, others
were before them, and I believe the very first comers were small,
flat, wingless roaches, which scurried away as I lifted bits of
bark. Roaches form the conservative wing of the insect world, and
have many characteristics of certain persecuted human races. They
are found everywhere, contented with a safe, middle course of life,
seldom aspiring to size or bright colors, never attacking or even
defending themselves, or putting on side in their life-histories.
Once a cockroach always a cockroach is their motto. They have no
responsibility of grub or pupal stage, and from the Palæozoic Age,
unknown millions of years ago, to the present moment when one scuttled
from the flood of light which I threw into his refuge, roaches have
changed but little.
After the roaches or with them, for they resent no company provided
they are allowed to creep and thigmotac in safety, came the wedges and
gimlets of beetles, and in the next two weeks successions of stages
of these hard-backs. First all but invisible eggs, then pale grubs
squirming about in the fermenting wood, and finally a dynasty when the
bark catacombs were filled with groups of stiff little mummies.
I excavated the débris in a deep hollow in the tree which once had
been a hundred feet above the ground, and experienced something of the
thrill of those who delve into ancient cities. At the top was a layer
of twigs and leaves shaken up by the concussion of the fall. An inch or
two below I found many berry pits and fruit seeds and when I scooped
out several handfuls there came to light a dried and shriveled carcass,
unmistakable in beak and foot--a nestling toucan which had never
lived to fly and yelp and pluck bright berries in the sunlight of the
tree-tops. Down I went again, into the very bottom of this nest midden,
and there came upon rotten chips and soft, downy feathers. Among them
were two, broken, stiff tail feathers which could have come only from
one bird, the giant Guiana woodpecker, almost half a yard in length,
with bill of ivory, and plumage of black, scarlet and white. No one
could tell whether these birds nested in this stub within the decade,
or when Galileo faced the Inquisition,--for the age of the supporting
limbs made such latitude possible.
Still another discovery was left in my arboreal palimpest. I was
crumbling up the wood near the top of the hollow stub, where, long
ago, it had been reduced by heat, water, fungi and insects to a rich,
dark, pulpy mass. Suddenly, over a tiny chip, a weird little face
peered at me, and a minute millipede, scurrying past, pushed over the
wooden screen and exposed the quaintest being in the world. It was a
doll or mummy--even the most technical scientist would admit the first,
for he would call it a pupa, which was what little Roman children
called their dolls. Being an average pupa it was motionless, and,
propped up by accident against the dark, red background, it presented
a multiple personality,--one thought of angel, curate, banker, clown,
simultaneously. Around its head was an absurdly perfect replica of a
halo, then came two mournfully sloped eyes, dark brown, sad, stolid;
just midway down their diameter two translucent shields curved across,
giving the little being the appearance of peering over horn-rimmed
glasses; mouth parts were encased in crystalline coverings, a mouth
which drooped at the corners--one felt that nought in past experience
or future hope could ever twist that expression into a smile. Palpi
were draped in each side like the side whiskers of a financier of the
’eighties. The two front legs, bent, with tips touching and elbows out,
were laughably, like the comic paper idea of a country curate with
finger tips spread and touching, gazing sadly over his glasses at some
regretted irregularity of life. Then came the opal-sheathed wings,
sweeping around in a beautiful curve across the whole of the underbody,
as in old prints of guardian angels. Finally the tapering body-segments
and their tip, fashioned in projecting styles. A hasty movement of mine
sent down a shower of bits of wood, and buried the pupa. Carefully
I uncovered him in his deep dark cavern and as I removed the last
concealing chip, my little mummy gave me an unexpected surprise. From
the hinder part of his body gleamed two dull lights, shining with
a strong, steady glow, and illuminating the magenta walls of his
sarcophagus. No wonder the appearance of these little chaps recalled
most remarkable trilobite-like pupæ which I had found years ago in
mid-Borneo, which proved to be firefly larvæ. I forgot all the comedy
of halo, horn-glasses and finger tips, and with a little awe and much
enthusiasm I watched the greenish-yellow shine. In the egg there is
the first faint kindling--a dim, evanescent, rush-light glow; and here
in the pupa, although it would have to wait perhaps many weeks before
attaining adult beetlehood, its little lamps were trimmed and steadily
alight, burning low it is true, and without the lighthouse rhythm of
flash and blackness, flash and blackness. Already it was preparing
for the all-important responsibility when upon the illumination would
depend the chances of a mate and the future of its race.
The light of fireflies is one of the few things in this world which
merit the term _perfect_. A gas flame is only three percent efficient,
developing ninety-seven percent of useless, invisible heat or chemical
rays; the blazing glare of the electric arc is only ten percent of what
it ought to be, and most astonishing of all is the fact that sunshine
gives off only thirty-five percent of visible light rays. Unlike
Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers” the glow, deep-cloaked within the body
of a firefly is wholly lacking in heat; it is one hundred percent pure
flame.
I returned to the loosening bark and found that close upon the heels of
the beetles came thrips, although these stout little fellows preferred
the high, arched, dead branches to the main prostrate trunk. Few people
have ever seen a thrips, but those who can find delightful the sound
of the world itself have part compensation. When the time comes and
one has seen and enjoyed a live thrips or a thousand thrips, then
life will have acquired a new molecule of pleasure. If I say the word
comes thrippingly to the tongue, it is only because I have just
been consorting with a host of thrips, and their joy of life, their
apparent love of play is infectious. Thrips are among the lesser folk
of earth and if one attains the length of a third of an inch he is a
Goliath of a thrips. But this, apparently like everything in nature,
is comparative, for a thrips barely a fifth of an inch in length may
harbor two hundred parasitic worms, who doubtless consider their host
as gigantic. These tiny creatures are peculiar in many ways, as for
example in their name which is both singular and plural. Also for
unknown, but comparatively long periods of time, male thrips are wholly
superfluous both for the continuance of the race, or companionship, or
whatever other functions gentlemen thrips may be fitted to perform. In
loyalty to my sex I pass this by, thoughtfully but without comment.
In the sizzling midday sun I first became aware that the era of
thrips had arrived at my fallen tree. It seemed as if the samisen
cicada players and myself were the only things awake in the world.
The bark under my eyes suddenly assumed a salmon hue and my lens
showed uncountable hosts of minute, scarlet thrips, all doing a
frantic, zoroastrian dance. They were slender bits of life, with
nondescript head and a tapering body looking like a string of scarlet
buttons. They ran swiftly to and fro on their six legs, holding the
body high aloft or thrashing it from side to side. Sometimes a half
dozen thrashed together, in some diminutive wild rhythm, or two
circled around each other, or antennæd some thripian scandal. Under
the shoulder of one bit of bark dust three infant thrips practiced
thrashing (a good tongue-twisting phrase!) until I tired of watching.
All these were larvæ, or rather immature thrips, scarlet and wingless.
Now every young insect with which I have ever been acquainted had
thought and action only for food, but here was a whole generation of
thrips--all under age--dancing and whirling about and waving their wild
tails for hours during the hottest part of several days. I thought well
of thrips for this unique casualness.