Edge of the Jungle Part 4

With eyes that had forgotten the outside light, I leaned close to the opening and rested my forehead against the lichens of the wall of wood. The fly was frightened away, the gecko slipped lower, seemingly without effort, and in a hollowed side of the cavernous root I saw a mist, a quivering, so tenuous and indistinct that at first it might have been the dancing of motes. I saw that they were living creatures--the most delicate of tiny crane-flies--at rest looking like long-legged mosquitoes. Deep within this root, farther from the light than even the singing fly had ventured, these tiny beings whirled madly in mid-air--subterranean dervishes, using up energy for their own inexplicable ends, of which one very interested naturalist could make nothing.

Three weeks afterward I happened to pa.s.s at high tide in the canoe and peered into this pocket. The gecko was where geckos go in the s.p.a.ce of three weeks, and the fly also had vanished, either within or without the gecko. But the crane-flies were still there: to my roughly appraising eyes the same flies, doing the same dance in exactly the same place. Three weeks later, and again I returned, this time intentionally, to see whether the dance still continued; and it was in full swing. That same night at midnight I climbed down, flashed a light upon them, and there they whirled and vibrated, silently, incredibly rapid, unceasingly.

After a thousand hours all the surroundings had changed. New leaves had sprouted, flowers faded and turned to fruit, the moon had twice attained her full brightness, our earth and sun and the whole solar system had swept headlong a full two-score million miles on the endless swing toward Vega. Only the roots and the crane-flies remained. A thousand hours had apparently made no difference to them.

The roots might have been the granite near by, fashioned by primeval earth-flame, and the flies but vibrating atoms within the granite, made visible by some alchemy of elements in this weird Rim of the World.

And so a new memory is mine; and when one of these insects comes to my lamp in whatever part of the world, fluttering weakly, legs breaking off at the slightest touch, I shall cease to worry about the scientific problems that loom too great for my brain, or about the imperfection of whatever I am doing, and shall welcome the crane-fly and strive to free him from this fatal pa.s.sion for flame, directing him again into the night; for he may be looking for a dark pocket in a root, a pocket on the Edge of the World, where crane-flies may vibrate with their fellows in an eternal dance. And so, in some ordained way, he will fulfil his destiny and I acquire merit.

To write of sunrises and moonlight is to commit literary harikiri; but as that terminates life, so may I end this. And I choose the morning and the midnight of the sixth of August, for reasons both greater and less than cosmic. Early that morning, looking out from the beach over the Mazacuni, as we called the union of the two great rivers, there was wind, yet no wind, as the sun prepared to lift above the horizon.

The great soft-walled jungle was clear and distinct. Every reed at the landing had its unbroken counterpart in the still surface. But at the apex of the waters, the smoke of all the battles in the world had gathered, and upon this the sun slowly concentrated his powers, until he tore apart the cloak of mist, turning the dark surface, first to oxidized, and then to shining quicksilver. Instantaneously the same shaft of light touched the tips of the highest trees, and as if in response to a poised baton, there broke forth that wonder of the world--the Zoroastrian chorus of tens of thousands of jungle creatures.

Over the quicksilver surface little individual breezes wandered here and there. I could clearly see the beginning and the end of them, and one that drifted ash.o.r.e and pa.s.sed me felt like the lightest touch of a breath. One saw only the ripple on the water; one thought of invisible wings and trailing unseen robes.

With the increasing warmth the water-mist rose slowly, like a last quiet breath of night; and as it ascended,--the edges changing from silvery gray to grayish white,--it gathered close its shredded margins, grew smaller as it rose higher, and finally became a cloud. I watched it and wondered about its fate. Before the day was past, it might darken in its might, hurl forth thunders and jagged light, and lose its very substance in down-poured liquid. Or, after drifting idly high in air, the still-born cloud might garb itself in rich purple and gold for the pageant of the west, and again descend to brood over the coming marvel of another sunrise.

The tallest of bamboos lean over our low, lazy spread of bungalow; and late this very night, in the full moonlight, I leave my cot and walk down to the beach over a shadow carpet of j.a.panese filigree. The air over the white sand is as quiet and feelingless to my skin as complete, comfortable clothing. On one side is the dark river; on the other, the darker jungle full of gentle rustlings, low, velvety breaths of sound; and I slip into the water and swim out, out, out.

Then I turn over and float along with the almost tangible moonlight flooding down on face and water. Suddenly the whole air is broken by the chorus of big red baboons, which rolls and tumbles toward me in ma.s.ses of sound along the surface and goes trembling, echoing on over sh.o.r.e and jungle, till hurled back by the answering chorus of another clan. It stirs one to the marrow, for there is far more in it than the mere roaring of monkeys; and I turn uneasily, and slowly surge back toward the sand, overhand now, making companionable splashes.

And then again I stop, treading water softly, with face alone between river and sky; for the monkeys have ceased, and very faint and low, but blended in wonderful minor harmony, comes another chorus--from three miles down the river: the convicts singing hymns in their cells at midnight. And I ground gently and sit in the silvered shadows with little bewildered shrimps flicking against me, and unlanguaged thoughts come and go--impossible similes, too poignant phrases to be stopped and fettered with words, and I am neither scientist nor man nor naked organism, but just mind. With the coming of silence I look around and again consciously take in the scene. I am very glad to be alive, and to know that the possible dangers of jungle and water have not kept me armed and indoors. I feel, somehow, as if my very daring and gentle slipping-off of all signs of dominance and protection on entering into this realm had made friends of all the rare but possible serpents and scorpions, sting-rays and perai, vampires and electric eels. For a while I know the happiness of Mowgli.

And I think of people who would live more joyful lives in dense communities, who would be more tolerant, and more certain of straightforward friendship, if they could have as a background a fundamental hour of living such as this, a leaven for the rest of what, in comparison, seems mere existence.

At last I go back between the bamboos and their shadows, from unreal reality into a definiteness of cot and pajamas and electric torch. But wild nature still keeps touch with me; for as I write these lines, curled up on the edge of the cot, two vampires hawk back and forth so close that the wind from their wings dries my ink. And the soundness of my sleep is such that time does not exist between their last crepuscular squeak and the first wiry twittering of a blue tanager, in full sunshine, from a palm overhanging my beach.

V

A BIT OF USELESSNESS

A most admirable servant of mine once risked his life to reach a magnificent Bornean orchid, and tried to poison me an hour later when he thought I was going to take the plant away from him. This does not mean necessarily that we should look with suspicion upon all gardeners and lovers of flowers. It emphasizes, rather, the fact of the universal and deep-rooted appreciation of the glories of the vegetable kingdom. Long before the fatal harvest time, I am certain that Eve must have plucked a spray of apple blossoms with perfect impunity.

A vast amount of bad poetry and a much less quant.i.ty of excellent verse has been written about flowers, much of which follows to the letter Mark Twain's injunction about Truth. It must be admitted that the relations existing between the honeysuckle and the bee are basely practical and wholly selfish. A b.u.t.terfly's admiration of a flower is no whit less than the blossom's conscious appreciation of its own beauties. There are ants which spend most of their life making gardens, knowing the uses of fertilizers, mulching, planting seeds, exercising patience, recognizing the time of ripeness, and gathering the edible fruit. But this is underground, and the ants are blind.

There is a bird, however--the bower bird of Australia--which appears to take real delight in bright things, especially pebbles and flowers for their own sake. Its little lean-to, or bower of sticks, which has been built in our own Zoological Park in New York City, is fronted by a cleared s.p.a.ce, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably, something to do with courtship, which should inspire a sonnet.

From the first pre-Egyptian who crudely scratched a lotus on his dish of clay, down to the jolly f.e.c.kenham men, the human race has given to flowers something more than idle curiosity, something less than mere earnest of fruit or berry.

At twelve thousand feet I have seen one of my Tibetans with nothing but a few shreds of straw between his bare feet and the snow, probe around the south edge of melting drifts until he found brilliant little primroses to stick behind his ears. I have been ushered into the little-used, musty best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flowers--so recently placed for my edification, that drops of water still glistened like dewdrops on the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in the seat of honor of a Dyak communal house, looked up at the circle of all too recent heads, and seen a gay flower in each hollow eye socket, placed there for my approval. With a cl.u.s.ter of colored petals swaying in the breeze, one may at times bridge centuries or span the earth.

And now as I sit writing these words in my jungle laboratory, a small dusky hand steals around an aquarium and deposits a beautiful spray of orchids on my table. The little face appears, and I can distinguish the high cheek bones of Indian blood, the flattened nose and slight kink of negro, and the faint trace of white--probably of some long forgotten Dutch sailor, who came and went to Guiana, while New York City was still a browsing ground for moose.

So neither race nor age nor melange of blood can eradicate the love of flowers. It would be a wonderful thing to know about the first garden that ever was, and I wish that "Best Beloved" had demanded this. I am sure it was long before the day of dog, or cow, or horse, or even she who walked alone. The only way we can imagine it, is to go to some wild part of the earth, where are fortunate people who have never heard of seed catalogs or lawn mowers.

Here in British Guiana I can run the whole gamut of gardens, within a few miles of where I am writing. A mile above my laboratory up-river, is the thatched _benab_ of an Akawai Indian--whose house is a roof, whose rooms are hammocks, whose estate is the jungle. Degas can speak English, and knows the use of my 28-gauge double barrel well enough to bring us a constant supply of delicious bushmeat--peccary, deer, monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But Grandmother has no language but her native Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and we hold long conversations, neither of us bothering with the letter, but only the spirit of communication. She is a tiny person, bowed and wrinkled as only an old Indian squaw can be, always jolly and chuckling to herself, although Degas tells me that the world is gradually darkening for her. And she vainly begs me to clear the film which is slowly closing over her eyes. She labors in a true landscape garden--the small circle wrested with cutla.s.s and fire from the great jungle, and kept free only by constant cutting of the vines and lianas which creep out almost in a night, like sinister octopus tentacles, to strangle the strange upstarts and rejungle the bit of sunlit glade.

Although to the eye a ma.s.s of tangled vegetation, an Indian's garden may be resolved into several phases--all utterly practical, with color and flowers as mere by-products. First come the provisions, for if Degas were not hunting for me, and eating my rations, he would be out with bow and blowpipe, or fish-hooks, while the women worked all day in the ca.s.sava field. It is his part to clear and burn the forest, it is hers to grub up the rich mold, to plant and to weed. Plots and beds are unknown, for in every direction are fallen trees, too large to burn or be chopped up, and great sprawling roots. Between these, sprouts of ca.s.sava and banana are stuck, and the yams and melons which form the food of these primitive people. Ca.s.sava is as vital to these Indians as the air they breathe. It is their wheat and corn and rice, their soup and salad and dessert, their ice and their wine, for besides being their staple food, it provides _casareep_ which preserves their meat, and _piwarie_ which, like excellent wine, brightens life for them occasionally, or dims it if overindulged in--which is equally true of food, or companionship, or the oxygen in the air we breathe.

Besides this cultivation, Grandmother has a small group of plants which are only indirectly concerned with food. One is _kunami_, whose leaves are pounded into pulp, and used for poisoning the water of jungle streams, with the surprising result that the fish all leap out on the bank and can be gathered as one picks up nuts. When I first visited Grandmother's garden, she had a few pitiful little cotton plants from whose stunted bolls she extracted every fiber and made a most excellent thread. In fact, when she made some bead ap.r.o.ns for me, she rejected my spool of cotton and chose her own, twisted between thumb and finger. I sent for seed of the big Sea Island cotton, and her face almost unwrinkled with delight when she saw the packets with seed larger than she had ever known.

Far off in one corner I make certain I have found beauty for beauty's sake, a group of exquisite caladiums and amaryllis, beautiful flowers and rich green leaves with spots and slashes of white and crimson. But this is the hunter's garden, and Grandmother has no part in it, perhaps is not even allowed to approach it. It is the _beena_ garden--the charms for good luck in hunting. The similarity of the leaves to the head or other parts of deer or peccary or red-gilled fish, decides the most favorable choice, and the acrid, smarting juice of the tuber rubbed into the skin, or the hooks and arrows anointed, is considered sufficient to produce the desired result. Long ago I discovered that this demand for immediate physical sensation was a necessary corollary of doctoring, so I always give two medicines--one for its curative properties, and the other, bitter, sour, acid or anything disagreeable, for arousing and sustaining faith in my ability.

The Indian's medicine plants, like his true name, he keeps to himself, and although I feel certain that Grandmother had somewhere a toothache bush, or pain leaves--yarbs and simples for various miseries--I could never discover them. Half a dozen tall tobacco plants brought from the far interior, eked out the occasional tins of cigarettes in which Degas indulged, and always the flame-colored little buck-peppers lightened up the shadows of the _benab_, as hot to the palate as their color to the eye.

One day just as I was leaving, Grandmother led me to a palm nearby, and to one of its ancient frond-sheaths was fastened a small brown branch to which a few blue-green leaves were attached. I had never seen anything like it. She mumbled and touched it with her shriveled, bent fingers. I could understand nothing, and sent for Degas, who came and explained grudgingly, "Me no know what for--_toko-nook_ just name--have got smell when yellow." And so at last I found the bit of uselessness, which, carried onward and developed in ages to come, as it had been elsewhere in ages past, was to evolve into botany, and back-yard gardens, and greenhouses, and wars of roses, and beautiful paintings, and music with a soul of its own, and verse more than human. To Degas the _toko-nook_ was "just name," "and it was nothing more." But he was forgiven, for he had all unwittingly sowed the seeds of religion, through faith in his glowing caladiums. But Grandmother, though all the sunlight seemed dusk, and the dawn but as night, yet clung to her little plant, whose glory was that it was of no use whatsoever, but in months to come would be yellow, and would smell.

Farther down river, in the small hamlets of the bovianders--the people of mixed blood--the practical was still necessity, but almost every thatched and wattled hut had its swinging orchid branch, and perhaps a hideous painted tub with picketed rim, in which grew a golden splash of croton. This ostentatious floweritis might furnish a theme for a wholly new phase of the subject--for in almost every respect these people are less worthy human beings--physically, mentally and morally--than the Indians. But one cannot shift literary overalls for philosophical paragraphs in mid-article, so let us take the little river steamer down stream for forty miles to the coast of British Guiana, and there see what Nature herself does in the way of gardens.

We drive twenty miles or more before we reach Georgetown, and the sides of the road are lined for most of the distance with huts and hovels of East Indian coolies and native Guiana negroes. Some are made of boxes, others of bark, more of thatch or rough-hewn boards and barrel staves, and some of split bamboo. But they resemble one another in several respects--all are ramshackle, all lean with the grace of Pisa, all have shutters and doors, so that at night they may be hermetically closed, and all are half-hidden in the folds of a curtain of flowers. The most shiftless, unlovely hovel, poised ready to return to its original chemical elements, is embowered in a mosaic of color, which in a northern garden would be worth a king's ransom--or to be strictly modern, should I not say a labor foreman's or a comrade's ransom!

The deep trench which extends along the front of these sad dwellings is sometimes blue with water hyacinths; next the water disappears beneath a maze of tall stalks, topped with a pink mist of lotus; then come floating lilies and more hyacinths. Wherever there is sufficient clear water, the wonderful curve of a cocoanut palm is etched upon it, reflection meeting palm, to form a dendritic pattern unequaled in human devising.

Over a hut of rusty oil-cans, bougainvillia stretches its glowing branches, sometimes cerise, sometimes purple, or allamanders fill the air with a golden haze from their glowing search-lights, either hiding the huts altogether, or softening their details into picturesque ruins. I remember one coolie dwelling which was dirtier and less habitable than the meanest stable, and all around it were hundreds upon hundreds of frangipanni blooms--the white and gold temple flowers of the East--giving forth of scent and color all that a flower is capable, to alleviate the miserable blot of human construction. Now and then a flamboyant tree comes into view, and as, at night, the head-lights of an approaching car eclipse all else, so this tree of burning scarlet draws eye and mind from adjacent human-made squalor.

In all the tropics of the world I scarcely remember to have seen more magnificent color than in these unattended, wilful-grown gardens.

In tropical cities such as Georgetown, there are very beautiful private gardens, and the public one is second only to that of Java.

But for the most part one is as conscious of the very dreadful borders of brick, or bottles, or conchs, as of the flowers themselves. Some one who is a master gardener will some day write of the possibilities of a tropical garden, which will hold the reader as does desire to behold the gardens of Carca.s.sonne itself.

VI

GUINEVERE THE MYSTERIOUS

Again the Guiana jungle comes wonderfully to the eye and mysteriously to the mind; again my khakis and sneakers are skin-comfortable; again I am squatted on a pleasant mat of leaves in a miniature gorge, miles back of my Kartabo bungalow. Life elsewhere has already become unthinkable. I recall a place boiling with worried people, rent with unpleasing sounds, and beset with unsatisfactory pleasures. In less than a year I shall long for a sight of these worried people, my ears will strain to catch the unpleasing sounds, and I shall plunge with joy into the unsatisfactory pleasures. To-day, however, all these have pa.s.sed from mind, and I settle down another notch, head snuggled on knees, and sway, elephant-fashion, with sheer joy, as a musky, exciting odor comes drifting, apparently by its own volition, down through the windless little gorge.

If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the source to be a pa.s.sing bug,--a giant bug,--related distantly to our malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression--as an earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles. There is no breeze, no slightest shift of air-particles; yet down the gorge comes this cloud,--a cloud unsensible except to nostrils,--eddying as if swirling around the edges of leaves, riding on the air as gently as the low, distant crooning of great, sleepy jungle doves.

With two senses so perfectly occupied, sight becomes superfluous and I close my eyes. And straightway the scent and the murmur usurp my whole mind with a vivid memory. I am still squatting, but in a dark, fragrant room; and the murmur is still of doves; but the room is in the cool, still heart of the Queen's Golden Monastery in northern Burma, within storm-sound of Tibet, and the doves are perched among the glitter and tinkling bells of the paG.o.da roofs. I am squatting very quietly, for I am tired, after photographing carved peac.o.c.ks and junglefowl in the marvelous fretwork of the outer balconies, There are idols all about me--or so it would appear to a missionary; for my part, I can think only of the wonderful face of the old Lama who sits near me, a face peaceful with the something for which most of us would desert what we are doing, if by that we could attain it. Near him are two young priests, sitting as motionless as the Buddha in front of them.

After a half-hour of the strange thing that we call time, the Lama speaks, very low and very; softly:

"The surface of the mirror is clouded with a breath."

Out of a long silence one of the neophytes replies, "The mirror can be wiped clear."

Again the world becomes incense and doves,--in the silence and peace of that monastery, it may have been a few minutes or a decade,--and the second Tibetan whispers, "There is no need to wipe the mirror."

When I have left behind the world of inharmonious colors, of polluted waters, of soot-stained walls and smoke-tinged air, the green of jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think of all the green things I have loved--of malachite in matrix and table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese emperors--jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right color. I think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost in a flash at a dance; of the air-cooled, living green of curling breakers; of a lonely light that gleams to starboard of an unknown pa.s.sing vessel, and of the transparent green of northern lights that flicker and play on winter nights high over the garish glare of Broadway.

Now, in late afternoon, when I opened my eyes in the little gorge, the soft green vibrations merged insensibly with the longer waves of the doves' voices and with the dying odor. Soon the green alone was dominant; and when I had finished thinking of pleasant, far-off green things, the wonderful emerald of my great tree-frog of last year came to mind,--Gawain the mysterious,--and I wondered if I should ever solve his life.

In front of me was a little jungle rainpool. At the base of the miniature precipice of the gorge, this pool was a thing of clay. It was milky in consistence, from the roiling of suspended clay; and when the surface caught a glint of light and reflected it, only the clay and mud walls about came to the eye. It was a very regular pool, a man's height in diameter, and, for all I knew, from two inches to two miles deep. I became absorbed in a sort of subaquatic mirage, in which I seemed to distinguish reflections beneath the surface. My eyes refocused with a jerk, and I realized that something had unconsciously been perceived by my rods and cones, and short-circuited to my duller brain. Where a moment before was an unbroken translucent surface, were now thirteen strange beings who had appeared from the depths, and were mumbling oxygen with trembling lips.