Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

I wondered what sculpture the surface would show,--these two isolated spheres, shining like the third zodiacal sign against a dark green heaven. At the first look through the microscope I forgot all about surface and possible spines or hexagonal lattice-work; it was the contents which drew and held my attention. A butterfly egg in due course of time should yield a caterpillar, which before it emerges is wound into a curve to fit its minute spherical home. But here was a new cosmos,--a planetful of slowly moving creatures which had nothing in common with a heliconian caterpillar. Slowly they milled around their little world, living, like some Gulliverian organisms, on the inside looking out. The egg was an opalescent sphere, a twelfth of an inch across, and in my microscope field it seemed really suspended in space,--in a dark chlorophyll ether. More than once as my eye tired in watching I seemed to see the whole egg revolving while the inmates remained stationary. Now and then one of the egg-beings turned and went against the current, setting up a traffic whirlpool which caused all to cross and recross in confusion. The film of eggshell was translucent and clear immediately beneath my eye, clouding into exquisite purplish pearl at the periphery. One of the inmates came to rest directly beneath the surface, and I saw it was a tiny grub, legless, searching about blindly, feeling, sensing, living, after whatsoever manner grubs live who find themselves prisoned in a butterfly egg. The grub hastened on, fell into wriggle with its companions and soon slipped from view below the edge of its world. Doubtless in a few seconds it completed its internal orbit and again crossed my field of view, but like a circulating Roman army on the stage, or the sequence of ideas in some sphere not attached to jungle leaves, all seemed identical. I could never tell when the same one appeared again; indeed while they moved I could make no estimate even of their numbers. I only knew that some minute hymenopteron, doubtless a member of the wonderful tribe of Chalcids, had, a few days before, thrust her ovipositor through this translucent pearl and left within as many eggs as there now were grubs, then flown on to the next egg. I once was fortunate enough to observe this fairy egg-laying,[1] and now I was trembling with excitement at the unexpected treasure trove I had unwittingly brought to my table.

[1] _Edge of the Jungle_, pp. 38-40.

Closest examination from every side with high power lens revealed to me no hint of the place of entrance. Once when I crawled from the heart of great Cheops out through the robbers’ tunnel, and finally scraped and squeezed through the narrow crevice through which they had broken in, I thought it small indeed. But here was a phenomenon far more wonderful than a full-rigged ship in a bottle, a snow-storm in a paper weight, or the thieving Arabs’ entrance in the pyramid.

Four days passed, the wonderful globes lay before me, and then I examined them again. A remarkable change had been wrought, a living planet had devolved into a dead satellite; the egg had become a sarcophagus with a dozen mummies. The little cases were arranged around a central core of débris, some standing on end as in the Egyptian room of a museum, a group facing one another as some wordless gossip passed from one sealed mouth to the next. A single mummy doll rested against the opal shell, with eyes pressed close to the translucent pane, eyes which at present existed only in outward form as insensitive tissue. This one individual had chosen for his final pupal change a position at the very outer rim, where the first nerve tingles of sight would reflect the mysteries of the world beyond that sphere of food and fellows which had heretofore bounded his existence; my pronouns masculine are merely adumbrative.

So passed a week with the little silent mummies still unchanged; seven days,--sufficient time, Biblically speaking, for the creation of the world. But just as all the glorious truth and beauty of evolution is concealed within the metaphor of Genesis, so, hidden from our groping senses, miracles of change were being wrought within the butterfly’s egg. The following morning the spell had broken, and the sphere again seethed with life, resurrected, reincarnated. On the central compost heap were piled twelve suits of second-hand pupal skins, tissue paper cartoons of their wearers, glimmering weirdly through the shell. The tiny wasps had all emerged and were active, and already there was a hole bitten through, with small ships of splintered opal scattered outside. As I watched, a wasp midget shoved aside a group of idlers, pushed his way to the door and began to gnaw with all his might. His great bulging scarlet eyes blocked the way as he tried time after time to press through. The whole eggful knew that something of great import was happening, and the outside air must have carried exciting tidings, for all moved about as quickly as their crowded quarters permitted. Twice the Gnawer left his labors and walked about nervously, once making the entire circuit of the egg. His leadership, his pioneer daring was marked not only by action; I found that I could readily distinguish him from the others. He was a shade smaller, his lines were trimmer, and upon his back was a round insignium of gold which the others lacked.

Several others came to the opening, tried to pass and turned aside--none made attempt to aid in the escape from prison. Back came the ambitious one and fell to with all his strength. He lacked leverage, and only when three of his companions came up at once, was he able, by pressing his hind legs against their faces and bodies, to break off an unusually large bit of the horny shell. This made a splendid gap, and after two smaller bits had been chewed off, the little insect wriggled through the jagged hole, and stood upon the summit of his world. Tiny though he was, needing thirty-five of him to cover an inch of space, his coloring was exquisite; eyes dull scarlet, sparsely covered with golden hair, body armor of glistening black from head to tip of abdomen, with badge of yellow gold shining from between his wings. These wings were small, paddle-shaped and almost free of veining, while the scales on their surface glowed with iridescent play of lilac, yellow and pale green.

Now ensued an elaborate cleaning of every part of his body, and then he ran off at top speed. Several quick turns near-by on the leaf and back he came, gave a final wipe to his forelegs, climbed up, antennæd the hole and took his stand a wasp’s length away. This action came as a complete surprise; I never expected him to return after such a laborious escape.

Soon a second wasp came to the breach and squeezed through. Hardly had its combing and scraping been completed when, to my astonishment, the Gnawer rushed forward, roughly seized the second wasp and began to bang its head most unmercifully. At every push, the head of the unfortunate insect wobbled as if about to fall off. Suddenly it rose to its feet and the first wasp mated with it. I then realized that instead of assault and battery, this was courtship, that in place of horrible fratricide, this was the nuptials of brother and sister. The mating lasted but a second, when the first wasp returned to its watchful waiting, and the other spun its paddle-shaped wings and flew off as far as the confines of the covered glass dish permitted. I never took my eye from the lens as the miracle continued. One after another the sister wasps emerged, to the number of eleven, and in each case the male enacted his rough courtship and mated for not longer than two seconds. In each case, without a moment’s hesitation, the female flew swiftly away. Once, when three emerged quickly one after the other, they did not leave the egg but waited quietly for the male.

The whole thing began and ended so quickly that it was some time before I could review the whole wonderful performance from the conjectured laying of the eggs, through the grub, pupa and now the adult stage. I looked again at these midgets, only a thirty-fifth of an inch in length, and considered their necessities in life,--food, mate and a butterfly’s egg, and I realized the enormous advantage of this simplification of the mating problem. But the most astonishing thing of all was the thought of the anticipation, of the perfect adjustment of sex in the unformed organisms, the pre-natal compulsory affiancing, together with the apparently satisfactory disregard of inbreeding adumbrated in the very eggs themselves of the original mother wasplet.

No matter how imperfectly I have translated this event, disregarding my futile phrases and in spite of my inadequate description, it was a most wonderful happening, which for a time completely eclipsed all other affairs of my table top. In delicate achievement, astounding unexpectancy and magical matter-of-factness, it left the onlooker with a supreme realization of ignorance and a dominant sense of awe.

And so as I sit at my table, my little cosmos of space and time presents deaths by violence, and lives of quiet, unperturbed peace; acrid, burning odors and smashing, sweeping brilliancy of color; living skin soft and smooth as clay, or fretted like shagreen; voices almost high enough to become visible; comedy so delicate that appreciation never reaches laughter, and tragedy so cruel and needless that it stirs doubts of the very roots of things. All these and many more, begin, occur and pass before me,--things which go to make up a world.

III

A MIDNIGHT BEACH COMBING

A tropical night may be quiet and calm, and yet full of a strange restlessness. It was such a one when I lay in my bathing suit close to the grey granite of Boom-boom Point, and watched the low-hung North Star twinkling through the fretwork of mangrove roots. Three great planets added their separate lustre, Mars overhead in the very heart of Scorpio, Jupiter well down to the west, and Venus just setting, shining with the light of a half moon. It was, however, predominantly, a Night of the Milky Way. The great luminous highway stretched from horizon to horizon, illuminating hundreds of the tiny mica facets in my rocky couch. Great Cygnus climbed slowly, majestically, along the glowing path, and Pegasus reared his head just above the horizon. Has the composite light of these myriad stars the same sinister psychic effect as the moon rays? Else why were I and so many creatures restless? Only the giant tree-frogs, the Maximas, wahrooked in endless, stoical reiteration, unaffected by stars or planets, as endless as an after-dinner speech and as unintelligible. Now and then a trio of Typhon’s toads exploded in a short, hysterical outburst, as if intercalating _Hear! Hear!_ or _Cut it out!_--a very impudent, undesirable, nervous protest against the brain-fever repetitions of the great frogs.

I was ready for something unusual, and it came,--merely a sound, but one which will probably be as mysterious on the day of my death as it is now. Without warning through the air overhead, against the translucent celestial glow, came an _izzzzzzzz-wonk! wonk! wonk!_ as evanescent as the low twang of a bullet, wholly indescribable in its true weirdness and richness. No beetle ever turned as quickly as the _wonk! wonk! wonk!_ indicated; no bat ever achieved a twang with its velvet wings. It was no sound of bird or insect that I knew; and it came again and again from the same direction, and seemed to emanate from some creature which watched me. The _wonk! wonk!_ as of sudden, banking flight, happened close in front, over the water. I flashed my electric torch and saw nothing, although the sound continued, and for half an hour one or more mysterious beings swept about me close overhead. As once before, my mind went to Pterodactyls and I imagined a pair of the little web-fingered creatures launched out from some secret crevice in the distant mountains, for a brief time to hawk about in the light of the Milky Way, peering down with their great eyes, toothed beaks half open, whipping back and forth through the air, now and then snapping up a bat, and stirring the imagination of a curiosity-tortured human, who would willingly give a year of his life to see such a sight.

I had meant to spend part of the night among the mangroves, but the glimmer of the white sand drew me up instead of down the shore, and I crept over the rocks and padded silently over the sand to our swimming beach.

The tide was half-way down, silent and smooth as a mirror with every star doubled. As I watched, they were erased, one by one as if the reflections had become water-logged and sunk, and looking up I saw a mist swept by the high trade-winds across the sky, while around me not a breath of air stirred. I wriggled into a form half below the surface of the sand; I worked down lower and lower until I was at the very edge of the water, which is one of the most wonderful spots in the world. Being there is the very least part of it. Thousands of people are there all through the summer at Coney Island and Margate, but never think themselves anywhere but swimming at Coney Island or bathing at Margate.

Between tides is really the wildest place left in the world, the truest no-man’s-land, for while you may sail in all waters just beyond or loll in a hotel a few yards behind, you cannot remain where you are except anchored and in a diver’s suit. And whatever man erects there is sooner or later smashed into joyful chunks of cement by the storm waves. The delight of it is to feel yourself as I did at this moment, a third under water, a third buried in solid sand, and the rest of me bathed in and breathing the air. We sometimes feel a thrill at bestriding the border line of two states or countries. How tremendously more wonderful to snuggle close to the three states of matter, solid, liquid and gaseous, and then indeed to realize it and thrill to it with what seems a fourth state--the mental and spiritual.

The crunch of the sand grains, the lap of the water, the breath of air,--it makes the world very primitive and new. Without my flash I can detect no hint either of vegetable or animal kingdom--my little cosmos at the meeting place of the elements is wholly inorganic and mind. If only earth-fire were added, it would be complete, and here, a hundred feet from my cot, there would truly be an epitome of the primeval earth. I wonder however, whether it is all not more adumbrative of ages to come, when the last animal has fallen, the last leaf shrivelled, and only the inorganic and spirit remain, than of the infinite past.

My day-dreams or rather nocturnal meditations were leading me into hypnotic depths when, with a single bound, I deserted my most ancient medium, water. Momentarily I even left my more recently ancestral acquisition, earth, and entered the third which I had conquered only during the last eight years. Gravitation, faithful through all physical and mental vicissitudes, brought me down with a resounding thump. At first I was simply dazed. What had happened? From the infinite calm of abstract meditation I had been galvanized into the most violent paroxysm, and here I was sitting on the sand, unhurt, stupidly wide awake, with my heart trip-hammering. Then all at once the physical me calmed down and the mental took charge, first in a thrill of excitement at realization of what had happened, then in joyous recognition that, as at a well-planned dramatic dénouement of a play, the miracle had happened. Nature, tired of being ignored, had entered my inorganic make-believe cosmos, completed it and split it apart with a vengeance. Instead of sending a firefly into my ken, she had been more subtle, and an electric eel had brushed against the sole of my foot, and discharged his diminutive broadside. The shock had been slight, but unprepared as I was and completely relaxed, it had seemed to my nerves like the discharge from a third rail. With my flash I caught a momentary glimpse of the lithe black chap, and I dabbled my hand in his direction, but he eeled away and became one with the dark water.

I could not get back to my former isolation, even if I greatly desired to do so; the eel had changed all that. He seemed so modern, so conventional and specialized an organism drawing the lightning down into the dark waters, and liberating it at the will of his fishy brain.

I rolled over and flattened myself, and with my electric torch held at eye height, horizontally, I entered one of the strangest of worlds,--a beach at black midnight. My mind kept wandering back to my trio of elements, and I thought of the water ouzel which has conquered them all. In the wilderness of western China I have seen this delicate, thrush-like bird run rapidly in and out of a tangle, over leaves and sand to the edge of a high river bank, and then taking wing, fly in and out between the boulders of the stream, finally to dive headlong into the swift water and creep along the bottom, feeding as it went. Here, in the space of a minute or two, was exhibited mastery of earth, air and water; only the phœnix could claim superiority.

This evening I was to find a living rival to the ouzel, an insect, a cricket, which, like so many wonders, was not in the heart of the Asiatic continent, but at the very door of my British Guiana laboratory. In the level glare of my flash all the beach creatures became unreal and of low visibility, while their shadows took full possession. This fanciful phrase reflected a very real and interesting scientific fact, that the reason for this lay, not in the unusual lighting, as much as in the color of the little people themselves. Picking its way over the sand came a low-swung, weird, blackish thing, whose silhouetted head swung from side to side, and just above it there appeared a fearful thing, on long emaciated legs, which crept nearer and nearer, and finally rushed at the first and sank down upon it. The attack was so sudden and the images relatively so huge that I involuntarily sat up and raised my light. The two images rushed toward me and vanished and my eyes suddenly shifted to nearer focus. I had been watching the shadows of a small insect and a daddy-long-legs, the substance of which now appeared ridiculously small and close to me, with their shadows well under control beneath them. Slowly I lowered the flash again, and in spite of all I could do, my eyes gradually lost the creatures themselves and followed back along the lengthening lines of legs, to the gargoylesque false phantoms,--the gyrating monstrous phantasmagoria on the sands. Never have I seen a more completely sense-deceiving phenomenon. Sitting up, I looked down upon small, slowly moving, barely distinguishable beach beings; prone, I was surrounded by unnamable apparently ectoplasmic ghosts. If I should accurately describe their anatomy and actions as revealed by my low-hung light they would fit into no living or fossil phylum of earthly organisms. By shifting back and forth I again focussed on the terrible battle going on at my side, and now the giant had lifted the lesser beast bodily in its jaws, and was staggering about, mumbling it as it went. My scientific terms locustid and phalangid faded from mind with their substance, and I lay watching the midnight shadow struggle between Plash-goo and Lrippity Kang.

I had always thought of daddy-long-legs as harmless living skeletons, who clambered aimlessly about and dropped their legs at a touch. Now I found that they could be ravenous beasts, their dwarfed and rounded body swung high aloft on their eight thready legs, creeping over the sand, and actually running down, pouncing on and killing insects as large as themselves. In this case it was a green grasshopper nymph who was seized, bitten and worried with an unnecessary amount of dragging about and vicious chewing. I leaned slowly forward with my hand lens until I could see every detail, and if daddy-long-legs were magnified in life only fifteen times I should flee in terror from what would be a worse danger than any wold. The horrid eyes, grouped in their solid clump seemed to be even now watching me malignantly, and the great needle-sharp fangs were sunk deep in the grasshopper, and being worked back and forth as the juices of the still living insect were sucked up.

Soon the creature set to work to sever the abdomen from the rest of the insect, and the head and legs fell to the sand, the feet waving slowly and vaguely. The daddy-long-legs did not move, except now and then to lift one or two legs and hold them aloft when a passing ant brushed against them; twenty minutes later it was still there, draining the last drop from the shrivelled grasshopper.

My attention was attracted to the approaching shadow of another spectre, only in this case the shadow was indefinite, humped; it might have enshrouded a low fluttering moth or awkward beetle. Instead of which, when I followed down the shadow path to its substance there loomed suddenly a figure even more terrifying than the daddy-long-legs. But this was awful in a wholesome way. You started at first sight, then smiled, then felt a liking for the apparition. It was decidedly the Personality of the beach, claiming full attention as long as it was in sight, clownlike in its comicality, and childlike in its seriousness and the affection it aroused. Many will doubtless wonder mildly at thought of the possibility of holding a mole cricket in affection or esteem. Yet it is true that when I return in memory to Kartabo, my thoughts of beauty go to the great blue morpho butterflies, of grace to the soaring vulture, of adorableness to infant sloths, and of amusement and affection to the jolly white mole crickets of the sand.

These are the chaps who fairly outdo the water ouzel, outflying, outrunning and outswimming that bird, and in addition being powerful leapers and the most perfect burrowing machines in the world. Unlike their neighboring relations of the jungle these shore crickets have taken on the color of the sand, keeping only a few hieroglyphics of dark pigment. Their eyes alone remain solid black. No matter how deserted the beach, how lifeless the tropical jungle may seem, I was always certain of finding these optimists abroad after dark, scurrying here and there, or popping unexpectedly up from the wet sand which a few minutes before had been covered with the tide.

As my new visitor approached, after my first emotion I was able to call him by name, a name as bristling with sharp-angled syllables as the tips of his front legs. Indeed his sponsors must have been profoundly impressed with these great limbs for in _Scapteriscus oxydactylus_ they dubbed him the Shovel-winged, Sharp-fingered One.

In the month of March I found little spurts of wet sand on the upper beach, and following down each tiny hole for an inch, I surprised a diminutive white cricket, almost a replica of the large ones, just hatched and bravely starting out in life for itself. In the following months their numbers sadly diminished and the size of the few remaining individuals increased, being gaugeable exactly by the calibre of their hole which they open when the tide goes down. Now, later in the year, the adult mole crickets were in the full prime of life, vital, virile, meeting on equal terms all the dangers and advantages of nocturnal life on a tropical beach. I appreciated these insects all the more because of their local distribution, being found nowhere up or down the river, except on our short stretch of sandy beach.

The hind legs are swollen with muscles for leaping, and with broad, flat soles for pushing, the middle legs are normal supports, but the front ones are a study as scientific, mechanically perfect excavators. There are sharp, horny, downward-projecting pickaxes, lighter pitchforks, backed by spade-shape implements, and bordered with stiff, broom-straw edges for sweeping away the loose débris. In fact this little insect has everything but dynamite for making easy its passage underground. It even has long feelers behind as well as in front of the body.

Like the kick-off of a big football game, or Fred Stone, or a shark on your fish line, when one of my mole crickets came into sight, I knew that something exciting was certain to follow. On this midnight, while the big insect had zigzagged toward me, the tide undermined my sandy elbow-rest, and I slipped. At the first scrape of sand, he put both oxydactyl hands together over his head and half buried himself with three flicks. But he was neither coward nor ostrich and after a moment he had turned and rested his great arms upon the mound of sand, the strangest parody upon Raphael’s cherubs imaginable. His head turned from side to side as he watched, and, I almost added, listened, for the source of danger. I remembered in time that his ears were on his front arms just below the elbows, sandwiched between the pitchfork and the shovel. He twisted sharply to the left at the same instant that a miniature hidden mine was sprung, and a spray of sand shot upward. Almost before my eye could follow, a second mole cricket appeared, and each saw in the other the summation of all past troubles and future hatreds; they hesitated not a second, but flew at each other.

At first there was considerable side-stepping and feinting, and they whirled about one another until a well-marked ring was worn in the damp sand. Then they clinched and to my horror a leg flew up and off into the darkness. Now the timeworn, and at best inadvisable simile was reversed, and ploughshares as well as shovels, brooms, scissors and pitchforks were in a twinkling transformed into slap-sticks, swords, pikes and daggers. Twice the insects reared up on their hind legs, their arms working like flails. Now and then the lace-like wings unrolled and shot out as balancers, glistening like metal in the light of my flash. One cricket fell for a moment, the other pounced and a whole front arm rolled away. Nothing daunted, and indeed apparently lightened by the loss of his left arm, my cricket leaped at the other and bowled him over. I cheered--they both reared again--and were washed away in a tiny swirl of water,--the tide had turned and the first of the trios of incoming wavelets had caught all of us unawares. _Le duel minuit de les courtilières_ was over. Each opponent had lost a leg, yet they scampered off and dug in with little appearance of crippling,--one limped a bit and the other sank his well somewhat obliquely, that was all. I remembered my first experience with these crickets, when I confined four together in a glass dish, and next morning found but one, large, plump and happy, surrounded with the crumbs of eighteen limbs; and I recalled the diminution in numbers of the broods of infant crickets, and I wondered whether I had better not slur over part of the home life of my little friends if I wished the mirror of my affection to remain untarnished.

I turned my light toward the water which was lapping shoreward, and on the surface were two white spots, mole crickets again, scurrying here and there with short strokes of the forearms, which had now become efficient oars. They soon sculled to shore and vanished, and a threat of moralizing came into my mind; how wonderful it would be if any of us could so completely master the conditions of life in our environment! Here were two sandy depressions where the crickets had disappeared; in a few minutes the tide would cover them, and for eight hours thereafter the two bundles of vitality would remain buried beneath the waves, able somehow to breathe and to resurrect, to scamper about on their business of life on what remained of their legs, to spread their wings and fly wherever they wished--one place at least being to the lighted lamp on my laboratory table.

The wash of the tide made me restless and I swept my flash about in a last survey, when I saw a multitude of little orange-red lamps drifting toward me. Holding the light obliquely I saw the wraiths of many shrimps with their periscope eyes illumined by my electric wire. They swam steadily ahead, half blinded by the glare, until suddenly there came Nemesis with a rush and a swirl. I caught sight of long waving tentacles, a gaping mouth, flash after flash of glittering silver, and there at my feet was a catfish, half stranded with its headlong rush. Mindful of poisonous spines I flicked him up the beach with a hand blanket of sand, where he lay protesting with rasping twitters and peevish grunts until I salvaged him.

My last glance at the beach showed something so strange that I turned back, and discovered a wholly new field for enthusiasm. Many years ago I found that tracks in the snow could best be observed and photographed in slanting rays of the sun, and now my final, casual sweep threw out into strong relief a series of rabbit tracks; this in spite of the fact that I was some two thousand miles from the nearest bunny. Looking down at the tracks they completely vanished, not a depression or marking could be detected, but oblique lighting showed the scar of claw marks, all four feet close together, with a good eighteen inches between leaps. I puzzled long over it, I traced it almost to the water and up to the soft, dry sand. At last a thought came to me, and I went up to where I knew there would be, day or night, a file of leaf-cutting ants. There solemnly watching, and waiting for some favorable omen to begin her midnight supper, squatted my pseudo-rabbit, a huge, friendly grandmother of a toad. She blinked, and I reached down and tickled her side, whereat she grunted and puffed out prodigiously.

At this moment my eye wandered to a near-by bush and I made a discovery which whole hours and half days of intensive search and watch had up to this time failed to reveal. The line of leaf-cutting Atta ants led up this low shrub and many scores were deployed over the leaves busy on their eternal work of cutting off circular pieces. For years I had watched them carry these leaves back, and had seen the free rides which many small individual ants took back to the nest on these wavering bits of leaf. Here, in the light of my flash, a medium-sized ant staggered along beneath a load, as if a man should balance a barn door on edge on his head. Like small boys hitching on behind a wagon, there were seven small ants clinging to the top and sides of the bit of leaf, probably doubling the weight, and altering the whole centre of gravity. I have seen a Japanese acrobat in the circus balancing a ladder with several men clinging to it, but this feat was infinitely more difficult. And there was no display to this. It was all in the night’s work. These ants know not the meaning of play or vacations or any moment of unnecessary rest, and yet here were seven of them for their own convenience making much more difficult the labor of their larger brother, or rather sister. I knew there was some vital reason, some _quid pro quo_, but hitherto I had been able only to guess at it.

The small bush made all clear. There were enemy ants in the bush, who were attempting to drive away the Attas, and their scouts made attack after attack on the busy harvesters. Unless actually attacked and bitten, the Atta workers paid no attention to their assailants. I saw one partly crippled and yet go on with his load as best he could, playing pacifist for duty’s sake. Their work was definite and inviolable, to cut a leaf and to transport it to the nest. The huge Atta soldiers, fat and enormous, who guard the depths of the nest and occasionally wander aimlessly along the line of march, getting in the way of their fellows, were nowhere to be seen, but the battalions of the Minims were in full action. They were too small to cut leaves or carry them, and had not even strength enough to walk both ways, to and from the nest. But on the leaves, facing the legions of the giant tree ants, they showed their worth, their _raison d’être_. I have never seen such fighters. They equalled the army ants, and lost leg after leg, even the whole abdomen, without slacking their efforts in the least.

On one leaf I saw a most exciting engagement. Three workers were cutting along the edge near the tip, and five small Minims were standing about with jaws raised suspiciously, when three black tree ants came on at once. One got past on the under side, tackled a worker and was seized in turn by one of the tiny bulldogs. The black ant let go the worker and tried to get at his tormentor, who had a good grip on his tender antenna. Chop went a leg of the Atta, but then another came to the rescue and got his jaws in a crevice of the armor beneath the black body. This was too much and the trio fell from the leaf, out of the range of my light, into the darkness of the sand below. There were left three Minims and two black ants, the latter four times their size, and yet so furiously did the little chaps wage battle that the invaders had no chance to get past to the workers at the leaf edge. Another black ant now appeared, but close on his heels six Minims, and in the face of this squad they all fled minus a leg or two, and carrying three Minims with them who refused to let go, one of which had little of him left but his jaws which still retained their grip.

I saw only two workers killed or forced to drop their loads in spite of all the black tree ants could do. All the time new contingents of Minims were arriving, and in the midst of the hardest fighting, a little warrior would now and then climb upon a passing leaf and settle down for a rough trip home. It was as if they belonged to some autocratic labor union and had to punch a time clock at the nest, regardless of how things were going in the front line trenches. So the Mediums are the workers, the providers. The Maxims are the home guard, and the Minims are the standing army for border warfare, trudging bravely as far as they are needed to convoy the outgoing workers, but after battle or their share of watchful waiting getting a free ride home on any passing chlorophyll lorry.

Immensely pleased with the discovery of another detail of the Attas’ life history I returned to my search for more sand tracks. Walking along the reeds with light held low, I saw clearly where an opossum had come out shortly before, dug a little in the sand and passed on, and most amusing was the record, in an isolated patch of clear, soft sand, of where a young one had fallen from her back, and straightway clambered on again. Farther on a big lizard had shuffled along, but the next track took me thousands of miles northward to New England sands in autumn,--the fairy footwork of a pair of spotted sandpipers which that evening, had teetered along the edge of this tropical river.

One last thrill my beach gave when, drawn by some instinct, I scanned the sand just beyond a clump of sedge. There, fresh and strongly etched, was a broad, sinuous line up from the water’s edge, flanked alternately by crescents, deep bitten into the wet surface. This had been made by no creature with legs, but by some long, heavy body, alternately pushed up the beach,--the line and crescent sand signet of a great anaconda--king of all these waters, who, while I watched shadows a few feet away, had slowly drawn his mighty length past me, up into the gully beyond,--who shall say where or why!

No wonder this night, so calm and peaceful on the surface had aroused an ill-defined suspicion of hidden things far otherwise. I looked out over the water, again alight with reversed constellations, I listened to the soft lapping of the rising tide, felt the first faint breath of the new day, and thought of the tragedies I had witnessed--the mole crickets nursing their wounds in their dugouts deep beneath sand and water, of the dead grasshopper nymph, the shrimp, the fire in whose orange eyes was forever quenched, and of the death struggles of the ants going on in the darkness at my feet.

The opossum was searching for food for itself and its young, and somewhere the great snake was coiled, watching with lidless, untiring eyes for its share in some life of lesser strength. It seemed somehow so cruel, this eternal alternation of life and death. If only the lower animals,--and then I remembered that perhaps at this very moment my Indian hunter was pulling trigger on an unsuspecting agouti or curassow or peccary for my next dinner; it came to me that the very emotions of compassion and sympathy which moved me, were materialized and sustained by the strength derived from the sacrifice of many, many lives of these same lower animals. I stopped thinking, stepped carefully over the line of insanely industrious Attas, and went to my hammock.

IV

FALLING LEAVES

Next to the dynamic crashing syncopation of a regimental band, or the subtle, infinitely more emotionally hypnotic beat of a tomtom, comes the thrilling rhythm hour after hour, of a double row of paddles tearing and eddying through water in unison, not only the thump and splash from the dugouts of tropical savages but the deep-dipped rush and swirl from bark canoes. This is the obvious, the much-described, but how many of us have listened for, and heard, the low, sibilant swish of the blades through the air, as they reach forward for the next stroke. Until mind and ear are focussed it is inaudible, but when once caught it out-sings more blatant sounds of water and voice. The blind spots of our perceptions conceal many phases of delicate beauty in the things around us, aspects which are dulled by the opacity of familiarity, passed over by the unseeing activity of our surface-skimming minds.

The living leaf--both singly and in foliage mass--has been epitaphed, eulogized, sung, praised and similed for centuries, but except for occasional references to the “sere and yellow leaf,” dying, falling and dead leaves have been left where they lie, with only the incense of their funeral pyres woven into the haze of Indian Summer.

I have seen an orang-utan build him a sleeping platform of leaves in less than three minutes, so it is not improbable that the first artificial home our more direct ancestors knew was a leafy nest. Leaves at least formed the sole clothing of our early parents, according to Scripture, and from nursery days we have always known that falling leaves were a shroud for the babes in the wood. More than this, botanists tell us that the leaf is the foundation of flower and fruit, so that it was really only a mass of highly specialized leaves which introduced Newton to gravitation.

But the importance and interest of falling leaves in this world needs no brief from me. I merely want to know them better for my own pleasure, I wish to hear and see and feel them, and so I leave my laboratory after a day of intensive technical work and slip into the jungle, where millions of leaves are falling during my lifetime, and hundreds of millions fell before I was born.

I am sitting at the edge of a tropical swamp and for the moment trying to close my mind and sense to the sounds and sights of birds and insects, and focus on leaves, and especially dead ones. This is no more difficult than it would have been to have forgotten Caruso and the orchestra in order to meditate on the kind of wood of which the chairs were fashioned.

Further than this I am putting out of my mind the letters L E A V E S and thinking of them innominately as a vast multitude of spread-out sheets of green and brown tissue. They are really the jungle, for without them it would be like the bare masts and rigging of a vessel. High overhead beyond the clouds of chlorophyll are other white clouds of moisture, driven swiftly westward by the steady trade-wind. Around me the air is as quiet as in a room, and, as so often the case, of just the right temperature to be forgotten, neither too hot nor too cold, a distinct effort being necessary to realize that I am not in some great enclosed chamber; so calm and equable are the surroundings.

It is the dry season, and the short daily shower does little to soften the crackle of the fallen leaves. Even after a month of heavy unseasonable rain when our records show that it is the dry season, the noise of treading on the jungle floor reveals the actual lack of humidity at times other than actual precipitation. Now and then, near my feet, a leaf draws its edges together, turns a little and rustles gently all by itself as if even in death it dreamed of some pleasant trifle, something which would please a green leaf, in sunlight, swaying high in air. Then, like a crumpled bit of paper in a wastebasket, it settles lower among its fallen fellows. Here it will wait patiently for the impact of the heavy rains, three or four months hence, to soften its stiff, crinkling tissues, and re-mold it into incarnations of other leaves to come.

Fallen leaves have a wind song all their own which is to be heard only when listened for consciously. When a fitful breeze is blowing, if the ear is held close to the ground, a low intermittent clatter and shuffling is audible, with occasionally a real rustle as a delicately balanced leaf is blown over. Stand up and the carpet of dead leaves becomes silent, their gentle talk lost in the hubbub of living, moving foliage.

In this quiet, cool swamp I am impressed with the vast number of leaves which have started to fall but have not reached the earth. Some have landed in crotches, or become entangled in masses of vines, others have driven their stems clear through the live tissue of leaves in their downward path and hang dangling. Just above me a living and a dead palmated frond have their leafy fingers intertwined like the outer points of fighting buckles, with no chance of release until the death and fall of the second leaf.

As I watched, three leaves fell, each with characteristic motion. I once made a key to more than a dozen kinds of jungle trees, based on the way the leaves fell, and to anyone who wishes to enter an untrodden botanical field I commend this idea. The third leaf fluttered and eddied, fighting with all its expanse of plane against the pull of gravitation, and at the very last, came to rest on a mattress of fern frond--a respite merely, for the first real gust would send it to the ground. As it touched the fern a butterfly rose, a black heliconian, with a large red spot on each wing. Its flight was astonishingly like that of the descending leaf, a tremulous fluttering just carrying it along, now rising, now descending--a flight wholly deceiving, for these butterflies can thread the mazes of jungle vines all day without tiring. But this butterfly was also like the leaf in its sear and faded garb. The wings were frayed and torn--the black was a thread-bare brown, the red weathered to faded salmon, and the seams of its wings showed plainly. Life was nearly over, yet weak as it was, it would probably die no violent death. The most awkward bird or predatory insect could catch it at will, yet it flew slowly along, unmolested by jacamars and cuckoos, dragon and robber flies. Its conspicuous colors and slow, tantalizing flight, like all else in the jungle, had a reason--it was its own advertisement of inedibility. Soon, however, this Wandering Jew of a butterfly would slip from its sleeping porch, and, like the fluttering leaf, make a last ineffectual struggle against the pull of earth and its wings would lie among the leaves.

Before the butterfly passed from view, I was startled by a sudden, rough rip of sound,--and just overhead a macaw put all the harshness of its beak and the blatancy of its coloring into its voice, and almost the leaves around me seemed to rustle. Into a clear space of sky four great, flame-winged birds passed, and with flight direct as arrows, but otherwise exactly like the falling leaf and the butterfly, they vibrated northward.

Without intention, but very happily, I found I had chosen my seat between extremes in leaves. Close along one side lay a fallen leaf which began eight feet behind and extended twenty-three feet in front,--thirty-one feet of palm frond. In its fall it had crushed several young mora saplings and many lesser growths. The least movement near it aroused a crashing which could be heard to the river. The leaflets, two hundred in number, lay stretched out four to six feet on each side, and the mighty stem was like a length of channel iron, with edges sharp as razors. It was parched and shrunken and had probably hung dead for a long time before it fell. A billion ordinary leaves fall unnoticed in the tropics, while in the north we lump this vast assemblage of happenings under the one word “autumn.” But the fall of a palm leaf is an event. Once as I was leaving my Station for a trip north, I noticed that one of the leaves of our sentinel cuyuru palm was drooping and browned. Months later when I returned, it was still hanging, and two weeks afterwards fell in the night with a crash which wakened us all. Dynasties of history might be dated by the falling of such a leaf, and if I could have been present at the dropping of all the leaves of my palm, whose scars were still so plain, there would be material for an epic. The remark of Charles the Second on his deathbed could be applied to the dead leaf at my side, for these gigantic fronds grow and live their lives much more rapidly than they die and disintegrate. Years from now I could probably find traces of the reinforced cellulose-hardened main stem.

And now my faded and forlorn heliconian butterfly fluttered again toward me, and almost alighted on this paper, but turning at the last moment, it rose a bit, and came to rest at my elbow, on a stem lined with small leaflets. Hardly had the insect furled its wings, when it fluttered and took to flight again. The cause delighted me beyond measure,--it had been unseated and frightened by the movement of a living leaf! At the impact of its delicate feet, the leaflets of the sensitive plant closed abruptly together and the stem sank. So exquisite was the reaction that the several leaflets beyond the insect were unmoved. A few seconds later while I was still watching, an adjoining twiglet closed every one of its leaflets and dropped 120° upon its parent branch. Nothing had touched it, no breath of air had moved it. I was puzzled. Lifting it very gently, it broke off and fell to the ground, green, fresh,--as far as I could see quite without cause. I picked it up and examined the base and there I found the source of the trouble. A tiny beetle had cut it almost off, and the slight fall of the twig, together with my touch had parted the few remaining fibres. The beetle was very small and must have been laboring for a long time, and it was a mystery why the featherdom tread of a butterfly’s feet had accomplished what the hacking and sawing of the beetle’s jaws had not.

All the leaves on the mimosa would not have equalled one of the lesser leaflets of the palm frond, and on the ground they were almost invisible, sinking almost at once into the mold. The sensitive leaves had the semblance of animal nerves and movement; the palm leaf would have brained me if it had fallen while I passed beneath.

In these jungles a falling leaf has a whole scale of sounds, as it runs the descending gamut of collisions. From the top of a tall tree a leaf may take fifteen or twenty seconds to reach the earth, disregarding the very good chance of lodgment, and each touch of vine, leaves,--living and dead,--the caroming off of branches and ripping through thorns, gives forth a different sound, of which our poor ears can distinguish very few, and which our language, spoken and written, is wholly helpless in reproducing. I would like very much to find a word or sound which would bring to mind the fall of a leaf upon leaves. I know it perfectly--the generic timbre--the composite echo etched into my mind by a thousand conscious listenings. But it will not get past my consciousness to my lips, and utterly refuses to siphon down my arm and pen.

Fallen leaves are of tremendous importance to those of us who do much hunting in the jungle, and chiefly on account of their susceptibility to moisture in the air. In the wet season it is possible to creep up to some of the wariest of animals, the thick mat of soft, damp leaves forming an admirable muffler. In the dry season this is hopeless, every step is ascream with crackling, and only when a leaf-rattling breeze is blowing can one pass through the jungle without blatant advertisement. This, however, is of slight assistance in hunting, for the blowing of the leaves conceals as well the audible whereabouts of the game. When the fallen leaves are dry the only method is to walk to some favorable spot, and there sit and wait for approaching or passing animals to register their footfalls. In estimating the abundance of jungle life I have constantly to check a tendency to underestimate numbers in the wet season. Ameiva lizards appear to be many times as abundant in times of drought, crashing along with the noise of a peccary, yet they have no season of æstivation, but only of silent progress.

We do not realize the acuteness of hearing of wild animals until we try to stalk them over dry leaves. A giant leaf may crash down from branch to branch and never cause a curassow or deer to start. I have seen a labba feeding in late afternoon under a nut tree when a whole branch with clusters of dead leaves hurtled to earth a few yards away, and the big, spotted rodent merely glanced up, casually munching as it looked. My next step slipped an inch sideways and crumbled a tiny leaf crust, and without a second’s investigation the animal gave one terrified squeal and fled headlong.

There are silent and there are boisterous leaves. Some, with finely pinnated foliage, have a pact of silence with the elements, from which wind and rain strive in vain to awaken them. Even when these filigree ones are dead and cling long to the branches, they give before the blasts, they let the rain drip from their finger tips without a sound. But a single, half-loose cecropia frond can imitate a rainstorm, the roar of a flushed covey of pheasants or a passing troop of monkeys, all by itself. More than this, it will begin uncannily to quiver and shake and rattle wildly about, while every adjacent leaf dangles as silently as if painted. Thus does its sensitive balance and crinkled shard betray the wandering little wind spouts which are born deep in the jungle, and, like other aquatic cousins, stretch straight upward in a tiny, clean-cut whorl of air.