Jungle days

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.