Part 11 (1/2)

One thing was evident early in my exploration: I was in a world of little people. No large insects were in any of the debris. The largest would be very small in comparison with a May beetle. And another thing was the durability of chitin. The remains of beetles, considering the rareness of living ones, were remarkable. The hard wing-cases, the thorax armor, the segments of wasps, eyeless head masks, still remained perfect in shape and vivid in color. Even in the deepest layers where all else had disintegrated and returned to the elements, these shards of death were as new.

And the smell of the mold, keen and strong as it came to my nostrils an inch away--it was pungent, rich, woody. It hinted of the age-old dissolution, century after century, which had been going on. Leaves had fallen, not in a sudden autumnal downpour, but in a never-ending drift, day after day, month after month. With a daily rain for moisture, with a temperature of three figures, for the quicker increase of bacteria, and an excess of humidity to foster quick decay, the jungle floor was indeed a laboratory of vital work--where only a.n.a.lytic chemistry was allowed full sway, and the mystery of synthetic life was ever handicapped, and ever a mystery.

Before the vessel docked I had completed my task and had secured over five hundred creatures of this lesser cosmos. At least twice as many remained, but when I made my calculations I estimated that the mold had sheltered only a thousand organisms plainly visible to the eye.

And when I had corked my last vial and the steward had removed the last pile of shredded debris, I leaned back and thought of the thousand creatures in my scant four square feet of mold. Then there came to mind a square mile of jungle floor with its thin layer of fallen leaves sheltering more than six billion creatures. Then I recalled the three thousand straight miles of jungle which had lain west of me, and the hundreds of miles of wonderful unbroken forest north and south, and my mind became a blank. And then from the mist of unnamable numerals, from this uncharted arithmetical census, there came to memory a voice, deep and guttural,--and this time the slow enunciation was jeering, hopeless of answer, _Wh--y?_ And soon afterwards, _Wh--y?_ And I packed up my last box of vials and went on deck to watch the sunset.

XI

JUNGLE NIGHT

Within gun-reach in front of me trudged my little Akawai Indian hunter.

He turned his head suddenly, his ears catching some sound which mine had missed, and I saw that his profile was rather like that of Dante.

Instantly the thought spread and the simile deepened. Were we two not all alone? and this unearthly hour and light--Then I chuckled softly, but the silence that the chuckle shattered shrank away and made it a loud, coa.r.s.e sound, so that I involuntarily drew in my breath. But it was really amusing, the thought of Dante setting out on a hunt for kinkajous and giant armadillos. Jeremiah looked at me wonderingly, and we went on in silence. And for the next mile Dante vanished from my thoughts and I mused upon the st.u.r.dy little red man. Jeremiah was his civilized name; he would never tell me his real one. It seemed so unsuited to him that I thought up one still less appropriate and called him Nupee--which is the three-toed sloth; and in his quiet way he saw the humor of it, for a more agile human being never lived.

Nupee's face was unclouded, but his position as hunter to our expedition had brought decisions and responsibilities which he had not known before. The simple life,--the unruffled existence in the little open _benab_, with hammock, ca.s.sava field, and an occasional hunt,--this was of the past. A wife had come, slipping quietly into his life, Indian-fas.h.i.+on; and now, before the baby arrived, decisions had to be made. Nupee longed for some store shoes and a suit of black clothes. He had owned a big _benab_ which he himself had built; but a G.o.dmother, like the cowbird in a warbler's nest, had gradually but firmly ousted him and had filled it with diseased relatives, so that it was unpleasant to visit. He now, to my knowledge, owned a single s.h.i.+rt and a pair of short trousers.

The shoes were achieved. I detected in him qualities which I knew that I should find in some one, as I do on every expedition, and I made him perform some unnecessary labor and gave him the shoes. But the clothes would cost five dollars, a month's wages, and he had promised to get married--white-fas.h.i.+on--in another month, and that would consume several times five dollars. I did not offer to help him decide. His Akawai marriage ceremony seemed not without honor, and as for its sincerity--I had seen the two together. But my lips were sealed. I could not tell him that a recementing of the ritual of his own tribe did not seem quite the equal of a five-dollar suit of clothes. That was a matter for individual decision.

But tonight I think that we both had put all our worries and sorrows far away, and I memory as well; and I felt sympathy in the quiet, pliant gait which carried him so swiftly over the sandy trail. I knew Nupee now for what he was--the one for whom I am always on the lookout, the exceptional one, the super-servant, worthy of friends.h.i.+p as an equal. I had seen his uncle and his cousins. They were Indians, nothing more.

Nupee had slipped into the place left vacant for a time by Aladdin, and by Satan and s.h.i.+mosaka, by Drojak and Trujillo--all exceptional, all faithful, all servants first and then friends. I say ”for a time,” for all hoped, and I think still hope with me, that we shall meet and travel and camp together again, whether in the Cinghalese thornbush, or Himalayan daks, in Dyak canoes or among the camphor groves of Sakarajama.

Nupee and I had not been thrown together closely. This had proved a static expedition, settled in one place, with no dangers to speak of, no real roughing it, and we met only after each hunting trip. But the magic of a full moon had lured me from my laboratory table, and here we were, we two, plodding junglewards, becoming better acquainted in silence than I have often achieved with much talk.

It was nearly midnight. We traversed a broad trail of white sand, between lines of saplings of pale-barked rubber trees, flooded, saturated, with milky-gray light. Not a star appeared in the cloudless sky, which, in contrast to the great silver moon-plaque, was blue-black.

These open sandy stretches, so recently etched into what had been primitive jungle, were too glowing with light for most of the nocturnal creatures who, in darkness, flew and ran and hunted about in them. And the lovers of twilight were already come and gone. The stage was vacant save for one actor--the nighthawk of the silvery collar, whose eerie _wheeeo!_ or more leisurely and articulate _who-are-you?_ was queried from stump and log. There was in it the same liquid tang, the virile ringing of skates on ice, which enriches the cry of the whip-poor-will in our country lanes.

Where the open trail skirted a hillside we came suddenly upon a great gathering of these goatsuckers, engaged in some strange midnight revel.

Usually they roost and hunt and call in solitude, but here at least forty were collected on the white sand within an area of a few yards. We stopped and watched. They were dancing--or, rather, popping, as corn pops in a hopper. One after another, or a half dozen at a time, they bounced up a foot or two from the ground and flopped back, at the instant of leaving and returning uttering a sudden, explosive _wop!_ This they kept up unceasingly for the five minutes we gave to them, and our pa.s.sage interrupted them for only a moment. Later we pa.s.sed single birds which popped and wopped in solitary state; whether practicing, or sn.o.bbishly refusing to perform in public, only they could tell. It was a scene not soon forgotten.

Suddenly before us rose the jungle, raw-edged, with border zone of bleached, ashamed trunks and lofty branches white as chalk, of dead and dying trees. For no jungle tree, however hardy, can withstand the blasting of violent sun after the veiling of emerald foliage is torn away. As the diver plunges beneath the waves, so, after one glance backward over the silvered landscape, I pa.s.sed at a single stride into what seemed by contrast inky blackness, relieved by the trail ahead, which showed as does a ray of light through closed eyelids. As the chirruping rails climbed among the roots of the tall cat-tails out yonder, so we now crept far beneath the level of the moonlit foliage.

The silvery landscape had been s.h.i.+fted one hundred, two hundred feet above the earth. We had become lords of creation in name alone, threading our way humbly among the fungi and toadstools, able only to look aloft and wonder what it was like. And for a long time no voice answered to tell us whether any creature lived and moved in the tree-tops.

The tropical jungle by day is the most wonderful place in the world. At night I am sure it is the most weirdly beautiful of all places outside the world. For it is primarily unearthly, unreal; and at last I came to know why. In the light of the full moon it was rejuvenated. The simile of theatrical scenery was always present to the mind, the illusion lying especially in the completeness of transformation from the jungle by daylight. The theatrical effect was heightened by the sense of being in some vast building. This was because of the complete absence of any breath of air. Not a leaf moved; even the pendulous air-roots reaching down their seventy-foot plummets for the touch of soil did not sway a hair's breadth. The throb of the pulse set the rhythm for one's steps.

The silence, for a time, was as perfect as the breathlessness. It was a wonderfully ventilated amphitheater; the air was as free from any feeling of tropical heat, as it lacked all crispness of the north. It was exactly the temperature of one's skin. Heat and cold were for the moment as unthinkable as wind.

One's body seemed wholly negligible. In soft padding moccasins and easy swinging gait close behind my naked Indian hunter, and in such khaki browns that my body was almost invisible to my own downward glance, I was conscious only of the play of my senses--of two at first, sight and smell; later, of hearing. The others did not exist. We two were unattached, impersonal, moving without effort or exertion. It was magic, and I was glad that I had only my Akawai for companion, for it was magic that a word would have shattered. Yet there was this wonderfully satisfying thing about it, that most magic lacks: it exists at present, today perhaps, at least once a month, and I know that I shall experience it again. When I go to the window and look out upon the city night, I find all extraneous light emaciated and shattered by the blare of gas and electricity, but from one upreaching tower I can see reflected a sheen which is not generated in any power-house of earth. Then I know that within the twenty-four hours the _terai_ jungles of Garhwal, the tree-ferns of Pahang, and the mighty _moras_ which now surround us, will stand in silvery silence and in the peace which only the wilderness knows.

I soon took the lead and slackened the pace to a slow walk. Every few minutes we stood motionless, listening with mouth as well as ears. For no one who has not listened in such silence can realize how important the mouth is. Like the gill of old which gave it origin, our ear has still an entrance inward as well as outward, and the sweep of breath and throb of the blood are louder than we ever suspect. When at an opera or concert I see some one sitting rapt, listening with open mouth, I do not think of it as ill-bred. I know it for unconscious and sincere absorption based on an excellent physical reason.

It was early spring in the tropics; insect life was still in the gourmand stage, or that of pupal sleep. The final period of pipe and fiddle had not yet arrived, so that there was no hum from the underworld. The flow of sap and the spread of petals were no less silent than the myriad creatures which, I knew, slumbered or hunted on every side. It was as if I had slipped back one dimension in s.p.a.ce and walked in a shadow world. But these shadows were not all colorless. Although the light was strained almost barren by the moon mountains, yet the glow from the distant lava and craters still kept something of color, and the green of the leaves, great and small, showed as a rich dark olive. The afternoon's rain had left each one filmed with clear water, and this struck back the light as polished silver. There was no tempered illumination. The trail ahead was either black, or a solid sheet of light. Here and there in the jungle on each side, where a tree had fallen, or a flue of clear s.p.a.ce led moonwards, the effect was of cold electric light seen through trees in city parks. When such a shaft struck down upon us, it surpa.s.sed simile. I have seen old paintings in Belgian cathedrals of celestial light which now seems less imaginary.

At last the silence was broken, and like the first breath of the tradewind which clouds the Mazaruni surface, the mirror of silence was never quite clear again--or so it seemed. My northern mind, stored with sounds of memory, never instinctively accepted a new voice of the jungle for what it was. Each had to go through a reference clearing-house of sorts. It was like the psychological reaction to words or phrases. Any strange wail or scream striking suddenly upon my ear instantly crystallized some vision of the past--some circ.u.mstance or adventure fraught with similar sound. Then, appreciably as a second thought, came the keen concentration of every sense to identify this new sound, to hear it again, to fix it in mind with its character and its meaning.

Perhaps at some distant place and time, in utterly incongruous surroundings, it may in turn flash into consciousness--a memory-simile stimulated by some sound of the future.

I stood in a patch of moonlight listening to the baying of a hound, or so I thought: that musical ululation which links man's companion wolfwards. Then I thought of the packs of wild hunting dogs, the dreaded ”warracabra tigers,” and I turned to the Indian at my elbow, full of hopeful expectation. With his quiet smile he whispered, ”_kunama_” and I knew I had heard the giant tree-frog of Guiana--a frog of size and voice well in keeping with these mighty jungles. I knew these were powerful beenas with the Indians, tokens of good hunting, and every fortunate benab would have its dried mummy frog hung up with the tail of the giant armadillo and other charms. Well might these batrachians arouse profound emotions among the Indians, familiar as they are with the strange beings of the forest. I could imagine the great goggle-eyed fellow sprawled high near the roof of the jungle, clutching the leaves with his vacuum-cupped toes. The moonlight would make him ghostly--a pastel frog; but in the day he flaunted splashes of azure and green on his scarlet body.

At a turn in the trail we squatted and waited for what the jungle might send of sight or sound. And in whispers Nupee told me of the big frog _kunama_, and its ways. It never came to the ground, or even descended part way down the trees; and by some unknown method of distillation it made little pools of its own in deep hollows and there lived. And this water was thick like honey and white like milk, and when stirred became reddish. Besides which, it was very bitter. If a man drank of it, forever after he hopped each night and clasped all the trees which he encountered, endlessly endeavoring to ascend them and always failing.

And yet, if he could once manage to reach a pool of _kunama_ water in an uncut tree and drink, his manhood would return and his mind be healed.