Edge of the Jungle Part 9

To say that these are beautiful botanical gardens is like the statement that sunsets are admirable events. It is better to think of them as a setting, focusing about the greatest water-lily in the world, or, as we have seen, the strangest mammal; or as an exhibit of roots--roots as varied and as exquisite as a hall of famous sculpture; or as a wilderness of tapestry foliage, in texture from cobweb to burlap; or as a heaven-roofed, sun-furnaced greenhouse of blossoms, from the tiniest of dull-green orchids to the fifty-foot spike of taliput bloom. With this foundation of vegetation recall that the Demerara coast is a paradise for herons, egrets, bitterns, gallinules, jacanas, and hawks, and think of these trees and foliage, islands and marsh, as a nesting and roosting focus for hundreds of such birds.

Thus, considering the gardens indirectly, one comes gradually to the realization of their wonderful character.

The Victoria Regia has one thing in common with a volcano--no amount of description or of colored plates prepares one for the plant itself.

In a.n.a.lysis we recall its dimensions, colors, and form. Standing by a trench filled with its leaves and flowers, we discard the records of memory, and cleansing the senses of pre-impressions, begin anew. The marvel is for each of us, individually, an exception to evolution; it is a special creation, like all the rainbows seen in one's life--a thing to be reverently absorbed by sight, by scent, by touch, absorbed and realized without precedent or limit. Only ultimately do we find it necessary to adulterate this fine perception with definitive words and phrases, and so attempt to register it for ourselves or others.

I have seen many wonderful sights from an automobile,--such as my first Boche barrage and the tree ferns of Martinique,--but none to compare with the joys of vision from prehistoric _tikka gharries_, ancient victorias, and aged hacks. It was from the low curves of these equine rickshaws that I first learned to love Paris and Calcutta and the water-lilies of Georgetown. One of the first rites which I perform upon returning to New York is to go to the Lafayette and, after dinner, brush aside the taxi men and hail a victoria. The last time I did this, my driver was so old that two fellow drivers, younger than he and yet grandfatherly, a.s.sisted him, one holding the horse and the other helping him to his seat. Slowly ascending Fifth Avenue close to the curb and on through Central Park is like no other experience. The vehicle is so low and open that all resemblance to bus or taxi is lost. Everything is seen from a new angle. One learns incidentally that there is a guild of cab-drivers--proud, restrained, jealous. A hundred cars rush by without notice. Suddenly we see the whip brought up in salute to the dingy green top-hat, and across the avenue we perceive another victoria. And we are thrilled at the discovery, as if we had unearthed a new codex of some ancient ritual.

And so, initiated by such precedent, I have found it a worthy thing to spend hours in decrepit cabs loitering along side roads in the Botanical Gardens, watching herons and crocodiles, lilies and manatees, from the rusty leather seats. At first the driver looked at me in astonishment as I photographed or watched or wrote; but later he attended to his horse, whispering strange things into its ears, and finally deserted me. My writing was punctuated by graceful flourishes, resulting from an occasional lurch of the vehicle as the horse stepped from one to another patch of luscious gra.s.s.

Like Fujiyama, the Victoria Regia changes from hour to hour, color-s.h.i.+fted, wind-swung, and the mechanism of the blossoms never ceasing. In northern greenhouses it is nursed by skilled gardeners, kept in indifferent vitality by artificial heat and ventilation, with gaged light and selected water; here it was a rank growth, in its natural home, and here we knew of its antiquity from birds whose toes had been molded through scores of centuries to tread its great leaves.

In the cool fragrance of early morning, with the sun low across the water, the leaves appeared like huge, milky-white platters, with now and then little dancing silhouettes running over them. In another slant of light they seemed atolls scattered thickly through a dark, quiet sea, with new-blown flowers filling the whole air with slow-drifting perfume. Best of all, in late afternoon, the true colors came to the eye--six-foot circles of smooth emerald, with up-turned hem of rich wine-color. Each had a tell-tale cable lying along the surface, a score of leaves radiating from one deep hidden root.

Up through mud and black trench-water came the leaf, like a tiny fist of wrinkles, and day by day spread and uncurled, looking like the unwieldy paw of a kitten or cub. The keels and ribs covering the under-side increased in size and strength, and finally the great leaf was ironed out by the warm sun into a mighty sheet of smooth, emerald chlorophyll. Then, for a time,--no one has ever taken the trouble to find out how long,--it was at its best, swinging back and forth at its moorings with deep upright rim, a notch at one side revealing the almost invisible seam of the great lobes, and serving, also, as drainage outlet for excess of rain.

A young leaf occasionally came to grief by reaching the surface amid several large ones floating close together. Such a leaf expanded, as usual, but, like a beached boat, was gradually forced high and dry, hardening into a distorted shape and sinking only with the decay of the underlying leaves.

The deep crimson of the outside of the rim was merely a reflection tint, and vanished when the sun shone directly through; but the ma.s.ses of sharp spines were very real, and quite efficient in repelling boarders. The leaf offered safe haven to any creature that could leap or fly to its surface; but its life would be short indeed if the casual whim of every baby crocodile or flipper of a young manatee met with no opposition.

Insects came from water and from air and called the floating leaf home, and, from now on, its surface was one of the most interesting and busy arenas in this tropical landscape.

In late September I spread my observation chair at the very edge of one of the dark tarns and watched the life on the leaves. Out at the center a fussy jacana was feeding with her two spindly-legged babies, while, still nearer, three scarlet-helmeted gallinules lumbered about, now and then tipping over a silvery and black infant which seemed puzzled as to which it should call parent. Here was a clear example, not only of the abundance of life in the tropics, but of the keen compet.i.tion. The jacana invariably lays four eggs, and the gallinule, at this lat.i.tude, six or eight, yet only a fraction of the young had survived even to this tender age.

As I looked, a small crocodile rose, splashed, and sank, sending terror among the gallinules, but arousing the spur-wing jacana to a high pitch of anger. It left its young and flew directly to the widening circles and hovered, cackling loudly. These birds have ample ability to cope with the dangers which menace from beneath; but their fear was from above, and every pa.s.sing heron, egret, or harmless hawk was given a quick scrutiny, with an instinctive crouch and half-spread wings.

But still the whole scene was peaceful; and as the sun grew warmer, young herons and egrets crawled out of their nests on the island a few yards away and preened their scanty plumage. Kiskadees splashed and dipped along the margin of the water. Everywhere this species seems seized with an aquatic fervor, and in localities hundreds of miles apart I have seen them gradually desert their fly-catching for surface feeding, or often plunging, kingfisher-like, bodily beneath, to emerge with a small wriggling fish--another certain reflection of overpopulation and compet.i.tion.

As I sat I heard a rustle behind me, and there, not eight feet away, narrow snout held high, one tiny foot lifted, was that furry fiend, Rikki-tikki. He was too quick for me, and dived into a small clump of undergrowth and bamboos. But I wanted a specimen of mongoose, and the artist offered to beat one end of the bush. Soon I saw the gray form undulating along, and as the rustling came nearer, he shot forth, moving in great bounds. I waited until he had covered half the distance to the next clump and rolled him over. Going back to my chair, I found that neither jacana, nor gallinules, nor herons had been disturbed by my shot.

While the introduction of the mongoose into Guiana was a very reckless, foolish act, yet he seems to be having a rather hard time of it, and with islands and lily-pads as havens, and waterways in every direction, Rikki is reduced chiefly to gra.s.shoppers and such small game. He has spread along the entire coast, through the cane-fields and around the rice-swamps, and it will not be his fault if he does not eventually get a foothold in the jungle itself.

No month or day or hour fails to bring vital changes--tragedies and comedies--to the network of life of these tropical gardens; but as we drive along the broad paths of an afternoon, the quiet vistas show only waving palms, weaving vultures, and swooping kiskadees, with bursts of color from bougainvillea, flamboyant, and queen of the flowers. At certain times, however, the tide of visible change swelled into a veritable bore of life, gently and gradually, as quiet waters become troubled and then pa.s.s into the seething uproar of rapids. In late afternoon, when the long shadows of palms stretched their blue-black bars across the terra-cotta roads, the foliage of the green bamboo islands was dotted here and there with a scattering of young herons, white and blue and parti-colored. Idly watching them through gla.s.ses, I saw them sleepily preening their sprouting feathers, making ineffectual attempts at pecking one another, or else hunched in silent heron-dream. They were scarcely more alive than the creeping, hour-hand tendrils about them, mere double-stemmed, fluffy petaled blossoms, no more strange than the nearest vegetable blooms--the cannon-ball mystery, the sand-box puzzle, sinister orchids, and the false color-alarms of the white-bracted silver-leaf. Compared with these, perching herons are right and seemly fruit.

As I watched them I suddenly stiffened in sympathy, as I saw all vegetable sloth drop away and each bird become a detached individual, plucked by an electric emotion from the appearance of a thing of sap and fiber to a vital being of tingling nerves. I followed their united glance, and overhead there vibrated, lightly as a thistledown, the first incoming adult heron, swinging in from a day's fis.h.i.+ng along the coast. It went on and vanished among the fronds of a distant island; but the calm had been broken, and through all the stems there ran a restless sense of antic.i.p.ation, a zeitgeist of prophetic import. One felt that memory of past things was dimming, and content with present comfort was no longer dominant. It was the future to which both the baby herons and I were looking, and for them realization came quickly.

The sun had sunk still lower, and great clouds had begun to spread their robes and choose their tints for the coming pageant.

And now the vanguard of the homing host appeared,--black dots against blue and white and salmon,--thin, gaunt forms with slow-moving wings which cut the air through half the sky. The little herons and I watched them come--first a single white egret, which spiralled down, just as I had many times seen the first returning Spad eddy downward to a cl.u.s.ter of great hump-backed hangars; then a trio of tricolored herons, and six little blues, and after that I lost count. It seemed as if these tiny islands were magnets drawing all the herons in the world.

Parrakeets whirl roostwards with machine-like synchronism of flight; geese wheel down in more or less regular formation; but these herons concentrated along straight lines, each describing its individual radius from the spot where it caught its last fish or shrimp to its nest or the particular branch on which it will spend the night. With a hemicircle of sufficient size, one might plot all of the hundreds upon hundreds of these radii, and each would represent a distinct line, if only a heron's width apart.

At the height of the evening's flight there were sometimes fifty herons in sight at once, beating steadily onward until almost overhead, when they put on brakes and dropped. Some, as the little egrets, were rather awkward; while the tricolors were the most skilful, sometimes nose-diving, with a sudden flattening out just in time to reach out and grasp a branch. Once or twice, when a fitful breeze blew at sunset, I had a magnificent exhibition of aeronautics.

The birds came upwind slowly, beating their way obliquely but steadily, long legs stretched out far behind the tail and swinging pendulum-like whenever a s.h.i.+ft of ballast was needed. They apparently did not realize the unevenness of the wind, for when they backed air, ready to descend, a sudden gust would often undercut them and over they would go, legs, wings, and neck sprawling in mid-air. After one or two somersaults or a short, swift dive, they would right themselves, feathers on end, and frantically grasp at the first leaf or twig within reach. Panting, they looked helplessly around, reorientation coming gradually.

At each arrival, a hoa.r.s.e chorus went up from hungry throats, and every youngster within reach scrambled wildly forward, hopeful of a fish course. They received but scant courtesy and usually a vicious peck tumbled them off the branch. I saw a young bird fall to the water, and this mishap was from no attack, but due to his tripping over his own feet, the claws of one foot gripping those of the other in an insane clasp, which overbalanced him. He fell through a thin screen of vines and splashed half onto a small Regia leaf. With neck and wings he struggled to pull himself up, and had almost succeeded when heron and leaf sank slowly, and only the bare stem swung up again. A few bubbles led off in a silvery path toward deeper water, showing where a crocodile swam slowly off with his prey.

For a time the birds remained still, and then crept within the tangles, to their mates or nests, or quieted the clamor of the young with warm-storage fish. How each one knew its own offspring was beyond my ken, but on three separate evenings scattered through one week, I observed an individual, marked by a wing-gap of two lost feathers, come, within a quarter-hour of six o'clock, and feed a great awkward youngster which had lost a single feather from each wing. So there was no hit-or-miss method--no luck in the strongest birds taking toll from more than two of the returning parents.

Observing this vesper migration in different places, I began to see orderly segregation on a large scale. All the smaller herons dwelt together on certain islands in more or less social tolerance; and on adjoining trees, separated by only a few yards, scores of hawks concentrated and roosted, content with their snail diet, and wholly ignoring their neighbors. On the other side of the gardens, in aristocratic isolation, was a colony of stately American egrets, dainty and graceful. Their circ.u.mference of radiation was almost or quite a circle, for they preferred the ricefields for their daily hunting. Here the great birds, snowy white, with flowing aigrettes, and long, curving necks, settled with dignity, and here they slept and sat on their rough nests of sticks.

When the height of homing flight of the host of herons had pa.s.sed, I noticed a new element of restlessness, and here and there among the foliage appeared dull-brown figures. There occurred the comic explanation of white herons who had crept deep among the branches, again emerging in house coat of drab! These were not the same, however, and the first glance through binoculars showed the thick-set, humped figures and huge, staring eyes of night herons.

As the last rays of the sun left the summit of the royal palms, something like the shadow of a heron flashed out and away, and then the import of these facts was impressed upon me. The egret, the night heron, the vampire--here were three types of organisms, characterizing the actions and reactions in nature. The islands were receiving and giving up. Their heart was becoming filled with the many day-feeding birds, and now the night-s.h.i.+ft was leaving, and the very branch on which a night heron might have been dozing all day was now occupied, perhaps, by a sleeping egret. With eyes enlarged to gather together the scanty rays of light, the night herons were slipping away in the path of the vampires--both nocturnal, but unlike in all other ways.

And I wondered if, in the very early morning, infant night herons would greet their returning parents; and if their callow young ever fell into the dark waters, what awful deathly alternates would night reveal; or were the slow-living crocodiles sleepless, with cruel eyes which never closed so soundly but that the splash of a young night heron brought instant response?

XI

THE BAY OF b.u.t.tERFLIES

b.u.t.terflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had s.h.i.+fted to rocks. The ink was refractory and a vigorous flick sent a shower of green drops over the sand on which I was sitting, and as I watched the ink settle into the absorbent quartz--the inversions of our grandmothers' blotters--I thought of what jolly things the lost ink might have been made to say about b.u.t.terflies and rocks, if it could have flowed out slowly in curves and angles and dots over paper--for the things we might have done are always so much more worthy than those which we actually accomplish. When at last I began to write, a song came to my ears and my mind again looped backward. At least, there came from the very deeps of the water beyond the mangroves a low, metallic murmur; and my Stormouth says that in Icelandic _sangra_ means to murmur. So what is a murmur in Iceland may very well be a song in Guiana. At any rate, my pen would have to do only with words of singing catfish; yet from b.u.t.terflies to rock, to fish, all was logical looping--mental giant-swings which came as relaxation after hours of observation of unrelated sheer facts.

The singing cats, so my pen consented to write, had serenaded me while I crossed the Cuyuni in a canoe. There arose deep, liquid, vibrating sounds, such as those I now heard, deep and penetrating, as if from some submarine gong--a gong which could not be thought of as wet, for it had never been dry. As I stopped paddling the sound became absolute vibration, the canoe itself seemed to tremble, the paddle tingled in my hands. It was wholly detached; it came from whatever direction the ear sought it. Then, without dying out, it was reinforced by another sound, rhythmical, abrupt, tw.a.n.ging, filling the water and air with a slow measure on four notes. The water swirled beside the canoe, and a face appeared--a monstrous, complacent face, such as Bocklin would love--a face inhuman in possessing the quality of supreme contentment.

Framed in the brown waters, the head of the great, grinning catfish rose, and slowly sank, leaving outlines discernible in ripples and bubbles with almost Ches.h.i.+re persistency. One of my Indians, pa.s.sing in his dugout, smiled at my peering down after the fish, and murmured, "Boom-boom."

Then came a day when one of these huge, amiable, living smiles blundered into our net, a smile a foot wide and six feet long, and even as he lay quietly awaiting what fate brought to great catfish, he sang, both theme and accompaniment. His whole being throbbed with the continuous deep drumming as the thin, silky walls of his swim-bladder vibrated in the depths of his body. The oxygen in the air was slowly killing him, and yet his swan song was possible because of an inner atmosphere so rich in this gas that it would be unbreathable by a creature of the land. Nerve and muscle, special expanse of circling bones, swim-bladder and its tenuous gas--all these combined to produce the aquatic harmony. But as if to load this contented being with largesse of apparently useless abilities, the two widespreading fin spines--the fins which correspond to our arms--were swiveled in rough-ridged cups at what might have been shoulders, and when moved back and forth the stridulation troubled all the water, and the air, too, with the m.u.f.fled, tw.a.n.ging, _rip_, _rip_, _rip_, _rip_. The two spines were tuned separately, the right being a full tone lower, and the backward drawing of the bow gave a higher note than its forward reach. So, alternately, at a full second tempo, the four tones rose and fell, carrying out some strange Silurian theme: a m.u.f.fled cadence of undertones, which, thrilled with the mystery of their author and cause, yet merged smoothly with the cosmic orchestra of wind and ripples and distant rain.

So the great, smooth, arching lift of granite rocks at our bungalow's sh.o.r.e, where the giant catfish sang, was ever afterward Boom-boom Point. And now I sat close by on the sand and strove to think anew of my b.u.t.terflies, for they were the reason of my being there that brilliant October afternoon. But still my pen refused, hovering about the thing of ultimate interest as one leaves the most desired book to the last. For again the ear claimed dominance, and I listened to a new little refrain over my shoulder. I pictured a tiny sawhorse, and a midget who labored with might and main to cut through a never-ending stint of twigs. I chose to keep my image to the last, and did not move or look around, until there came the slightest of tugs at my knee, and into view clambered one of those beings who are so beautiful and bizarre that one almost thinks they should not be. My second singer was a beetle--an awkward, enormous, serious, brilliant beetle, with six-inch antennae and great wing covers, which combined the hues of the royal robes of Queen Thi, tempered by thousands of years of silent darkness in the underground tombs at Sakhara, with the grace of curve and angle of equally ancient characters on the hill tombs of Fokien. On a background of olive ochre there blazed great splashes and characters of the red of jasper framed in black. Toward the front Nature had tried heavy black stippling, but it clouded the pattern and she had given it up in order that I might think of Egypt and Cathay.

But the thing which took the beetle quite out of a world of reasonable things was his forelegs. They were outrageous, and he seemed to think so, too, for they got in his way, and caught in wrong things and pulled him to one side. They were three times the length of his other limbs, spreading sideways a full thirteen inches, long, slender, beautifully sculptured, and forever reaching out in front for whatever long-armed beetles most desire. And his song, as he climbed over me, was squeaky and sawlike, and as he walked he doddered, head trembling as an old man's shakes in final acquiescence in the futility of life.

But in this great-armed beetle it was a nodding of necessity, a doddering of desire, the drawing of the bow across the strings in a hymn of hope which had begun in past time with the first stridulation of ancient insects. To-day the fiddling vibrations, the Song of the Beetle, reached out in all directions. To the majority of jungle ears it was only another note in the day's chorus: I saw it attract a flycatcher's attention, hold it a moment, and then lose it. To me it came as a vitally interesting tone of deep significance, for whatever emotions it might arouse in casual ears, its goal was another Great-armed Beetle, who might or might not come within its radius.

With unquestioning search the fiddler clambered on and on, over me and over flowers and rocks, skirting the ripples and vanis.h.i.+ng into a maelstrom of waving gra.s.s. Long after the last awkward lurch, there came back zizzing squeaks of perfect faith, and I hoped, as I pa.s.sed beyond the periphery of sound, that instinct and desire might direct their rolling ball of vibrations toward the one whose ear, whether in antenna, or thorax or femoral tympanum had, through untold numbers of past lives, been attuned to its rhythm.

Two thousand miles north of where I sat, or ten million, five hundred and sixty thousand feet (for, like Bunker Bean's book-keeper, I sometimes like to think of things that way), I would look out of the window one morning in days to come, and thrill at the sight of falling flakes. The emotion would very probably be sentiment--the memory of wonderful northland snowstorms, of huge fires, of evenings with Roosevelt, when discussions always led to unknowable fields, when book after book yielded its phrase or sentence of pure gold thought. On one of the last of such evenings I found a forgotten joy-of-battle-speech of Huxley's, which stimulated two full days and four books re-read--while flakes swirled and invisible winds came swiftly around the eaves over the great trophies--_poussant des soupirs_,--we longing with our whole souls for an hour of talk with that splendid old fighting scientist.

These are thoughts which come at first-snow, thoughts humanly narrow and personal compared to the later delights of snow itself--crystals and tracks, the strangeness of freezing and the mystery of melting.

And they recurred now because for days past I had idly watched scattered flurries of lemon-yellow and of orange b.u.t.terflies drift past Kartabo. Down the two great Guiana rivers they came, steadily progressing, yet never hurrying; with zigzag flickering flight they barely cleared the trees and shrubs, and then skimmed the surface, vanis.h.i.+ng when ripples caught the light, redoubled by reflection when the water lay quiet and polished. For month after month they pa.s.sed, sometimes absent for days or weeks, but soon to be counted at earliest sunup, always arousing renewed curiosity, always bringing to mind the first flurry of winter.

We watch the autumn pa.s.sing of birds with regret, but when the bluebirds warble their way southward we are cheered with the hope and the knowledge that some, at least, will return. Here, vast stretches of country, perhaps all Guiana, and how much of Brazil and Venezuela no one knows, poured forth a steady stream of yellow and orange b.u.t.terflies. They were very beautiful and they danced and flickered in the sunlight, but this was no temporary s.h.i.+fting to a pleasanter clime or a land of more abundant flowers, but a migration in the grim old sense which Cicero loved, _non dubitat_ ... _migrare de vita_. No b.u.t.terfly ever turned back, or circled again to the glade, with its yellow ca.s.sia blooms where he had spent his caterpillarhood. Nor did he fly toward the north star or the sunset, but between the two.

Twelve years before, as I pa.s.sed up the Essequibo and the Cuyuni, I noticed hundreds of yellow b.u.t.terflies each true to his little compa.s.s variation of NNW.

There are times and places in Guiana where emigrating b.u.t.terflies turn to the north or the south; sometimes for days at a time, but sooner or later the eddies straighten out, their little flotillas cease tacking, and all swing again NNW.

To-day the last of the migration stragglers of the year--perhaps the fiftieth great-grandsons of those others--held true to the Catopsilian lodestone.

My masculine p.r.o.nouns are intentional, for of all the thousands and tens of thousands of migrants, all, as far as I know, were males.

Catch a dozen yellows in a jungle glade and the s.e.xes may be equal.

But the irresistible maelstrom impels only the males. Whence they come or why they go is as utterly unknown to us as why the females are immune.

Once, from the deck of a steamer, far off the Guiana coast, I saw hosts of these same great saffron-wings flying well above the water, headed for the open sea. Behind them were sheltering fronds, nectar, soft winds, mates; before were corroding salt, rising waves, lowering clouds, a storm imminent. Their course was NNW, they sailed under sealed orders, their port was Death.

Looking out over the great expanse of the Mazaruni, the fluttering insects were usually rather evenly distributed, each with a few yards of clear s.p.a.ce about it, but very rarely--I have seen it only twice--a new force became operative. Not only were the little volant beings siphoned up in untold numbers from their normal life of sleeping, feeding, dancing about their mates, but they were blindly poured into an invisible artery, down which they flowed in close a.s.sociation, _veritables corpuscules de papillons_, almost touching, forming a bending ribbon, winding its way seaward, with here and there a temporary fraying out of eddying wings. It seemed like a wayward cloud still stained with last night's sunset yellow, which had set out on its own path over rivers and jungles to join the sea mists beyond the uttermost trees.

Such a swarm seemed imbued with an ecstasy of travel which surpa.s.sed discomfort. Deep cloud shadows might settle down, but only dimmed the painted wings; under raindrops the ribbon sagged, the insects flying closer to the water. On the other hand, the scattered hosts of the more ordinary migrations, while they turned neither to the north nor to the west, yet fled at the advent of clouds and rain, seeking shelter under the nearest foliage. So much loitering was permitted, but with the coming of the sun again they must desert the pleasant feel of velvet leaves, the rain-washed odors of streaming blossoms, and set their antennae unquestioningly upon the strange last turn of their wheel of life.