Jungle days

Many, many, many years ago, in some distant place, among trees or rocks, perhaps on the banks of a river, certainly in the warm light of the sun, one of your ancestors and mine became tired of squatting on a branch or on the ground, and sat himself—or herself—on a fallen log. If it was himself then he must soon have felt the need of a lap on which to rest things—his hands if nothing else. And from that day to this, his male descendants still feel that lack down to the last unfortunate who is handed a cup of tea or a three-legged egg-shell of cocoa, a serviette and a cake with no support other than wholly inadequate knees.

Of the first table I can relate nothing with certainty, but of the last I could gossip endlessly, limited only by writer’s cramp and my supply of adjectives. For I am at this moment sitting at the last table ever made—last because it is not quite finished. I am forever tacking on a little shelf or an annex at one side, and so I feel a right to place it at the opposite end of our distant forebear’s piece of bark or stiff frond or whatever it was that he balanced on his hairy, bowed knees. And yet his table and mine are much more alike than the mahogany roll-top with swinging telephone and octave of assistants’ push buttons to which our more sophisticated but less happy bank presidents sit down.

That reminds me, however, that my laboratory table is also of mahogany, because here in the jungle of British Guiana it is the cheapest material in the form of boards.

The crab-wood top grew in this very jungle, its first, rich red-brown cells fashioned from the water and earth and sun at least a century and a half ago. It is possible to detect the double character of the rings, indicating the two annual rainy seasons—the two springs which quickened the sap and leafage, and the two periods of drought when the life of the tree slowed down. Close to the heart of the great board is a strange ring, or rather node between rings—a wide, even space, which my reckoning places about 1776; about the time when our fore-fathers were fighting for freedom, whose memory we cannot toast even in wine; they had just penned a Declaration of Independence, whereas we are considering passing a law to keep monkeys in their proper place. I pause in my table talk long enough to thank heaven that we are still allowed to believe in the rotundity of the earth, that the Indians’ gift of tobacco is still permitted us, and that tea is not yet thrown overboard!

The year 1776 at Kartabo was one of almost continual rain,—so much my broad, crab-wood space shows—with no slack-growth period for this slender sapling. And imagination helps us still farther when we recall something of the human history of the place. Ever since 1600 the Dutch had strived to make this region habitable. The little fort, on the island off shore had barely pointed its guns down river, had fired its well-weathered cannon in victory, and had silenced them in defeat to English and French privateers (often an old-fashioned way of pronouncing pirate!). Hundreds of Indian slaves had worked on the four large plantations and only in 1772 had the settlers admitted that this region was fit only for jungle, wild animals, and future enthusiastic scientists with tables. And now I realized that my table-top had sprouted in the very year that the Dutch left for the coast—one of the first wild things to spring up in their retreating footsteps, a pioneer in again “letting in the jungle.”

The magic of my jungle table is always apparent in one way or another. No thoughts which it generates, nor happenings on its surface are aught but vivid, vital, memorable: It is an event to hurry out to in early morning, it is a regret to leave for jungle tramps and for meals, it is only exhaustion which excuses its midnight abandonment. A magic carpet transports one’s body from place to place, whereas my table impels mental gamuts from quiet meditation to dire tragedy, from righteous anger, to wonder at the marvellous sights it vouchsafes me, and despair at thought of their interpretation. Only once have I ever become impatient with my artificial lap, when an injury to my foot compelled me to remain indoors for a time. Then indeed the jungle called and les affaires de ma table palled,—a commentary on my lack of philosophy.

The first magic which my table made was to prove to be alive. The top was undeniably dead, well seasoned and inert, but my black boy Sam had cut the legs from jungle saplings. I put my hand down one day and felt a soft tissue something, half way to the floor. It seemed a moth’s wings or a tangle of dense cobwebs, but to my surprise I saw that my table was sprouting leaves, rather pale and dwarfed, limp and flabby, to be sure, but of rapid growth, and besides there were four other buds just started. I had put cans of water on the floor beneath the legs to discourage ants, and the sap of the new-cut poles had greedily sucked this up, and even in the dimness of the laboratory light had begun to spread into foliage. It was proving a real jungle table and I was rather thrilled to see that the warfare of the wilderness had already begun at arm’s reach,—a tiny caterpillar had crawled from somewhere to the new blown leaves and had eaten out a bit. I pictured my table as sprouting, growing higher and higher, until, in lieu of Alice’s toadstool, I cut jungle saplings for my chair legs too, and mounted with the table! The Indian summer of my table legs soon passed however, the sap dried, the leaves wilted, and from saplings they became furniture.

But the magic continued. If the crab-wood boards of the top were not quickened into even passing vitality, they could do equally surprising things, the first of which was to become vocal. Day after day there arose a low grating throb, lasting for a few seconds, and sometimes increasing in rapidity and pitch until it assumed a true musical quality. Its direction eluded me until I happened to have my ear close to the table, when the vibrations seemed to sound at my very ear-drum. Then one day I noticed a tiny pile of sawdust on the floor and traced it to a rounded hole from which at intervals came the sound. For three months my musical table continued its monotone, day and night, until in the quiet of midnight it became part of the silence, and I was aware of it only with effort. Then it ceased, and its cessation held my attention more than its occurrence had done.

Months later when the last of my small table furnishings had been packed, I tipped up the table to carry it away, and there in the hole from which the monotone and the sawdust had flowed there hung suspended a gorgeous, mummified beetle, its long antennæ of salmon and black curved up and over its back, while its fluted cuirass shone through dust and dim light, deep forest green framed with a delicate border of primuline yellow. My table top had furnished nourishment, sanctuary, sounding board, through all the long period of immaturity, but at the climax of this little life, the hardened vegetable fibre had held firm, despite all the efforts of the green beetle, and cruelly withheld freedom by some slight, needless entanglement of its hind legs. So passed two tragedies of my table,—the first vegetable, the second animal.

Usually my table is littered with beautiful mysterious things which, to a casual onlooker, could have absolutely no meaning. There is a small, exquisitely molded bony cup or vase, partly covered at the top, and with a long, daintily curved handle, which I keep suspended as a receptacle for pins. It might well be a delicate netsuke carved in pre-democratic Japan by some craftsman who wrought for love; it might be almost anything but a music-box. And now my reverie was interrupted by a sound from the neighboring jungle,—a sound common but never old. As the bony box might have been far other than it was, so the deep vibrations could well be elemental,—a distant wind, sinister as if it came straight from blowing across terrible fields after battle, or through cities wracked with pestilence; the eaves around which it had howled must have been very evil, roofing ancient castles which sheltered thoughts of treachery and deeds of unfair violence. But I knew that the rich primeval resonances came echoing from bog bony boxes exactly like my pin holder, in the throats of a tree-top circle of beings like aged, thick-necked dwarfs squatting high on swaying branches, looking out toward me over the expanse of quicksilver water. At the climax, when it seemed impossible that any one animal could produce such an appalling volume of sound, a blur swiftly feathered the surface of the river, as if the impinging ululations of monkey voices had actually been translated into visibility—as liquid in a glass is troubled in sympathy with certain chords of music. My ear changed focus, and like a search-light shifting from distant cloud to airplane, attended a sound at my very elbow, throbbing, muffled—and again my table sang.

Amazing things, things apparently well within the realm of black magic occur and recur on my table. Late this evening a windless tropical rain fell so evenly and steadily that the monotone on the bamboos seemed intended for some other sense than the ear. I sat describing the delicate arrangement of the tiny bones and muscles of the syrinx of a flycatcher, striving to understand how there could emanate from this instrument such an intricate vocabulary of screams and whistles, trills and octaves as this bird and its fellows uttered every day in the laboratory compound.

Suddenly something flew swiftly past my face and alighted clumsily among my vials and instruments. I saw a giant wood roach all browns and greys, with marbled wings, strange as to pigment and size, but with the unmistakable head and poise and personality of a New York “Archie.” The insect had flown through the rain and into the window, but a glance showed that it was in dire extremity, being in the grasp of a two-inch ctenid spider. The eight long legs held firmly, but had not been able to prevent the roach from flying. At the moment of alighting the arachnid shifted its grip, and secured the wings so that further escape was impossible. Both were desirable specimens and I instantly slipped a deep stender dish over them and again lost myself in my binocular microscope.

Fifteen minutes later I looked up and saw a sight so strange that Sime himself would hesitate to delineate it. The spider still clung tenaciously to its victim, but the wood roach had her revenge. She was barely alive, yet in a quarter of an hour she had changed from a strong, virile creature to an empty husk, dry and hollow, while over her and the spider, over glass and table-top scurried fifty-one active roachlets. They had burst from their mother fully equipped and ready for life, leaving her but a vacant, gaping shell, a maternal film, the ghost of a roach: Tiny, green, transparent, fleet, they raced back and forth over the spider. He grasped in vain at their diminutive forms at the same time still clutching the dying, flavorless shred of a mother roach, holding fast as though he hoped that this unnatural miracle might reverse itself at any moment, and his victim again become fat and toothsome.

I knew that some of the fish swimming in the aquarium near by lay thousands of eggs, and that other insects leave myriads of offspring, yet this magic of the wood roach, this resolution of one into fifty made wonderfully vivid the reproductive powers of tropical creatures. When in a moment of time, relatively speaking, a single insect can be broken up into half a hundred active, functioning duplicates of herself, the chance for variation, for new adjustments, for survival of the more delicately adapted is faintly understood. Here was spontaneous generation with a vengeance.

To hark back again to sounds and voices; I could fashion a whole essay on the calls and songs and noises which come to me at my table, from river, compound and jungle. On very still days I can hear the giant catfish thrumming deep beneath the water, and the cry of hawk-eagles high in the heavens; at hot, high noon Attila, the brain-fever Cotinga, calls and calls and calls, while through the hush of midnight there comes the hopeless cadence of the poor-me-one; I know from a sudden babel of humming-bird squeaks and frenzied shrieks of flycatchers that a tree snake has been discovered in the bamboos; I am certain without looking that it is very close to five o’clock, when the first old witch cuckoo begins whaleeping on its regular evening excursion for a drink in the river, and so on.

Probably by virtue of my table’s magic, I have learned, like Chubu and Sheemish, to work a little miracle all by myself. My principal technical work just now is the study of the syrinx of birds, their remarkable, complex organ of voice placed far down beyond the throat, in the very body itself, and the correlation of its structure with the actual voice of the bird. At present I try to solve some knotty problems of tinamous, strange, bob-tailed game-birds, related both to fowls and to ostriches, which live on the jungle floor, lay eggs like burnished turquoise and age-purpled jade, and call to one another with sweet, liquid whistles. My Indians bring in numbers of these birds for the mess, so I have an abundance of material for study. I try an experiment on my table which has been already successful in other cases. I decapitate a bird before it is plucked for the pot, and holding it firmly on its back, I strike a sharp blow on the muscles of the breast. Nothing results, so I shift position and try again. This time a short, high note is produced. I draw out the neck a little and obtain a lower note, still further and strike a half tone lower in the scale. If I could prolong these I could reconstruct the whole plaintive evening call of the variegated tinamou here on my very table top.

Then I take the windpipe and carefully work out the wonderful architecture of the whole organ, the delicate adaptation and adjustment of each part fulfilling its special function, the whole working together as no man-made machine ever could. From throat to syrinx the windpipe extends, composed of thin membranous tissue, kept open by a series of a hundred and twenty-five perfect rings. Here we have assurance of an entrance for air forever clear and open, so mobile that it bends back double, yet with no chance of closure through any contortion of the neck. The throat end is guarded by a slit which opens and closes at the slightest need; the opposite end marks the top of the syrinx and the division into two tubes each leading to a lung. For twenty rings above this point, the windpipe is slightly enlarged and almost solid, forming a bony sounding board which acts, in a less degree, like the throat box of the red howling monkeys; giving resonance and carrying power to the voice.

The syrinx itself is boxed in by four pairs of large rings and semi-rings, which protect two pairs of cartilage pads. The pads of each pair touch one another along their inner sides, and when the windpipe is relaxed the seam between them is closed tight. A slight tug, as in my decapitated bird, corresponding to a raising of the head and neck in a live individual, and the pads revolve slightly, bringing a constricted part of each into the seam, forming a tiny gap. Through this the air from the lungs and air-sacs rushes and we have the mechanism of the first, high, clear note of the call, a superlatively sweet whistle on middle C, carrying a mile through the thick jungle. Although quite another story, my mind rushes on, away from the technical anatomical problem, to the realization that this sound is a summons from the very advanced female of this species to any unattached male bird, an announcement that she is ready to lay an egg for him, provided he will incubate it, hatch it and assume entire charge of the young bird. And I do not know whether to cheer or blush for my sex when I state that the woods hereabouts are full of amiable, domestically inclined males who are eager and willing to agree to this rather one-sided contract. Their syringes are almost identical but the loud evening calls are invariably those of the idler sex. Notes for Women! must have been the slogan of the long since successful tinamou suffragists.

It is amusing to trace a circular gamut of human interest in animal sounds: Listening to various screams, warbles, whistles, roars, chirps, trills and twitters in the jungle, an intelligent interest impels us to desire to know the author; having accomplished this by patient stalking and watching, and if needs be, shooting, the wish is aroused to discover the accompanying emotion, the incentive, and then the fascinating problem presents itself of the answer, whether in terms of action or vocal, whether filial, amorous, pugnacious, or merely companionable. This is more difficult, but in many cases possible. Almost always this ends the quest, while it is still incomplete. The method, the physical mechanism is after all, the foundation of the phenomenon, and when we have secured a specimen, taken it to our table,—a tinamou in the present instance—then we may produce the call artificially, and by tireless and detailed dissection detect air channel, resonance chamber, syrinx mechanism, vocal chords, controlling muscles, and envy the enormous bodily reservoir of air—lungs, sacs, the very hollow bones themselves. Leaning back and listening to a living, wild tinamou calling in the neighboring forest, feeling rich in the possession of its Who! Why! and How!, we realize the fullest joy of intimacy with the furtive beings of earth, with the elusive small folk of the jungle.

After a long jungle tramp I was leaving Hacka Trail for the Station clearing when I caught sight of a group of small objects on the under side of a gigantic bromeliad leaf. If the leaf had been fifty feet up they might have been great fruit bats, if twenty feet their size would have equalled that of vampires, but as they were only of arms’ reach above my head they could not be more than an inch in length. When I had hacked off the leaf and dodged its fall, I found nine little chrysalids clustered together, and even on close scrutiny their resemblance to a group of diminutive bats was still absurdly real. This intimate association of chrysalids is a rare thing, as rare as the nocturnal association of butterflies sleeping in jungle glades.

I carried off the leaf curved into a great emerald arch, and fastened it over my table, where it dried into a fluted dome of green tissue. Three days passed with no sign of change from the chrysalids swinging from their silken pendants, when my eye caught a glint of silver far down the under side of this same leaf, near the tip. Another glance made me think them inexplicable dewdrops, a third crystalized them into pearl-like consistency, while a fourth careful scrutiny showed me they were two eggs of a scarlet and black heliconid butterfly, the kind which fluttered fearlessly ahead of me along the jungle paths. Here was a splendid example of oblique discovery, of scientific second sight.

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.

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.