Jungle Peace

We sat in chairs in a tiny pharmacist shop—the artist and I—and were at once the center of a chattering, staring throng, a kaleidoscope of shifting colors. We shoved and dismissed to no avail, then the owner of the shop with a gentle "permitte-moi" threw a pailful of "not-too-clean" water over the crowd, including the artist and myself. The mob scattered shrieking and for a short time the surrounding space was open. Soon a larger crowd gathered, with the still dripping units of the first assemblage smiling expectantly in the offing, hovering at a safe distance. The second dispersal had a legal origin; the market policeman stole quietly along the wall of the shop and hurled himself like a catapult, butting goatlike into the heart of the crowd. A half-dozen fat negresses toppled over, and cassava, tin cups and stray fishes flew about. Even those who lost all their purchases showed no resentment but only a roaring appreciation of the joke. In this rush we were almost upset with the crowd, and we began to look forward with dread to any more strenuous defense of our comfort.

The little French mulatto pharmacist who was responsible for the occasional joyful outbursts of eau, seemed to profit by our presence, for a number of interested onlookers who had pushed into the shop to watch us from behind, when cornered and hailed by the irate owner, stammeringly asked for some small thing, by the purchase of which they bought their liberty. The regular business of this little shop alone was worthy one's whole attention. A prescription was being pounded up in a mortar and when the clerk reached out for a scoop and for something to scrape the sides clean, an eight of hearts was the nearest and with this the chemicals were mixed. Within the next fifteen minutes eight or ten different prescriptions, powders and crystals were measured, shaken, mixed and scraped by the same eight of hearts, and the combination of ingredients which the last purchaser obtained must surely have had some radical effect on his system—salubrious or otherwise.

Then came the unusual one—the super person who is always to be discovered sooner or later. Externally she was indistinguishable from the host of her sisters. She was garbed in a wrapper, flowing and reaching the ground, purple, and pocked with large white spots. A diminutive turban of yellow and red madras was surmounted by an ancient and crownless straw hat, but at the first word she was revealed. A British subject, she was here at the eruption fifteen years ago. That day she and one of her daughters happened to be far away from St. Pierre. When the explosion came, she was outside the danger zone, but her husband, son and other daughter were burned to death. She regretted the impoliteness of the French here and apologized for them for crowding us. Later she brought a gift of rose bananas to Mary Hammond, saying that Americans had given her food and clothes when she lost everything.

The crowd was curious, thoughtless, selfish, with the dominant hope of a laugh at some one's expense. Here was one who sought us out, who left unguarded her little tray of bananas and garlic to speak a word of thanks, to present a handful of fruit which in her station was a munificent gift, and who was satisfied and grateful with our sincere appreciation. She has sisters in graciousness over all the world, but they are rare and widely scattered, like the Akawai Indian squaw who gave me her last cassava, like the wrinkled Japanese crone who persuaded her son to become one of my best servants, like the wife of the headman of an isolated village in Yunnan, who from among her sodden, beastlike neighbors came forth and offered fowls and vegetables with a courteous spirit worthy of any station in life.

St. Lucia, a Study in Contrasts.—Each time I have visited Castries it has seemed more somber and less pleasant. It is colorless because it is full of coal and no change of weather brings amelioration. When the sun fills the air with a blinding glare and palpitating heat waves (as it occasionally does), each step raises a cloud of coal dust, and when the tropical rain falls in a steady downpour (as it usually does), the whole world seems covered with coal mud, as if about to dissolve into some carboniferous slime.

This is an important military and coaling station, which perhaps explains much. Military exigency compelled me to procure a special pass from the Chief of Police to paddle about its dreary streets, and which strictly forbade my climbing the comparatively clean and attractive mountains beyond these streets. As a coaling station I am sure of its success and popularity, for the coal carriers who comprise most of the natives, have apparently no time to wash between steamers. So intensive was the grime that the original dark hue of their skins offered no camouflage to the anthracite palimpsest which overlaid it. Such huge negro women, such muscles, such sense of power, I had never before sensed. I should dislike, were I an official of St. Lucia, to take any decided stand on an anti-feminine platform. So saturated are the people in coal, such is their lack of proper perspective of this material, they seem actually to be unconscious of its presence. Returning on board, one passes the Seaview Hotel, about which coal is piled to a much greater height than the roof. Such abstraction is worthy of mention at least.

Amid the memory of all the dirt and damp, dull sadness, two things were unforgetable, as untouched diamonds glisten in their matrix of wet blue clay. Amid sodden clothes, unwashed hands and bestial faces, a trayful of rainbow fishes gleamed opalwise—coral, parrot and angelfish, all awaiting some unsavory purchaser. Then came the little French negress, selling fans, out of the ruck of sexless bearers of coal. When we answered her appeal with a "Non merci," her face lighted up at the courtesy of the words; "Voyons!" said she, "comme c'est gracieusement refusé!" No mortal could have resisted buying her wares after such delicate sentiment.

About five in the afternoon we parted from the gritty wharf and steamed for hour after hour along the shore. We forgot the poor, filthy, ill-mannered coal carriers, and the thought of the misery and squalor of the town passed with its vanishing, still clad in its cloak of rain. As the natives appeared to us so inferior to those of the other islands, so by some law of compensation the coast was revealed correspondingly beautiful. At four bells the sun sank on the side away from the island, in a blaze of yellow and orange with one particular cloud touching the water line with flame color, as if a mighty distant volcano had just reared its head above the sea, still in the throes of molten erection. On the opposite side were passing the dark green headlands and fiords of the land, while upward, high into the sky, there arose now and then some tremendous cloud, on fire with rich rose or salmon afterglow, or a maze of other tints defying human name or pigment. In front was the living blue water dulled by the dimming light and above all the transparent blue of the tropic sky.

Without warning, from out of the soft folded edges of one of the filmy clouds, crept a curved edge of cold steel, like some strange kind of floating shell coming forth from its cloud of smoke, and a moment later the full moon was revealed, unlike any other color note in this marvelous scene. The icy, unchanging moon craters, the more plastic island mountains fringed by the wind-shapen trees, the still more shifting waters and the evanescent cloud mist, all were played upon and saturated and stained by colors which were beyond words, almost beyond our appreciation. Tiny villages, fronted by canoes and swathed in feathery cocoanut fronds, snuggled at the foot of great volcanic and coral cliffs.

But the crowning glory was reserved for the last, when we surged past the Trois Pitons, rearing their majestic heads above all the island, hundreds and hundreds of feet into the sky. Even the moon could not top one, and after cutting into sharp, silver silhouette every leaf and branch of a moon-wide swath of trees, it buried itself behind the peak and framed the whole mountain.

A small wandering rain storm drifted against the tallest piton and split in two, one half going away down the coast and the rest passing close enough to us to shower the decks with drops. As it fell astern, it spread out fanwise and in its heart developed a ghostly lunar rainbow—the spectrum cleansed and denuded of all the garish colors of day. At first we could only sense which was the warm, which the cold side of the bow, then it strengthened and the red appeared as dull copper or amber buff, and the violet as a deeper, colder blue, cloud hue. All the time, even when the rain was falling heaviest, the moon shone with full strength, and when at last we veered away from this wonder island, it was so high that there was no moonpath on the water, but only a living, shifting patch of a million electric wires, which wrote untold myriad messages in lunar script upon the little waves. From one fraction of time to another, the eye could detect and hold in memory innumerable strange figures, and the resemblance, if it be not sacrilege to make any simile, was only to script of languages long, long dead—the cuneiform of Babylon and the tendril spirals of Pali.

Once a faint light appeared upon the distant shore. Our steamer spoke in a short, sharp blast which thrilled us with its unexpectedness and the signal among the palms was quenched. From the great things of the cosmos, from brilliant Venus, and from the north star low in the sky, from the new splendor of Formalhaut, rising ever higher in the south, our thoughts were forced back to the littlenesses of the world war, whose faint influence reached even thus far to break the thread of our abstraction.

Barbados, in Eclipse and in Sun.—The vagaries of a naturalist are the delight of the uninitiated, and impress simple natives more than immoderate tips or the routine excesses of tourist folk. One's scientific eccentricities may even establish a small measure of fame, or rather notoriety. So it was that as I walked up the landing stage at Bridgetown, a small ebon personality pointed finger at me and confided to his neighbor, "See de mon—de tall mon da—he de mon who chase tree lizards in de cemetry!"

"Yes, George," I said, "I'm de mon who chased them with you two years ago, but this time we shall catch them as well."

"Anyting you say true, Boss, I'se yo boy."

But as is always true in sport, certainty robs it of the finest element of excitement, and our successful stalks that afternoon with grass stem nooses were less memorable than the frantic tree circlings and grave hurdlings of two years before.

On our return from the cemetery a breeze swept up from the sea, the palm fronds slithered against one another, and I suddenly caught myself shivering. The moment I became conscious of this I thought of fever and wondered if my life-long immunity had come to an end. Then I observed old hags wrapping themselves up; my eyes suddenly readjusted, I perceived that the glaring sunlight was tempered; again the strange mid-day breeze arose and finally I realized that I was witnessing an eclipse of the sun on the island of Barbados. The natives and the birds and even the patient little donkeys grew restless, the light became weaker and strange, and until the end of the eclipse we could think of nothing else. The most remarkable part to me, were the reflections. Looking however hastily and obliquely at the sun, I perceived nothing but a blinding glare, but walking beneath the shade of dense tropical foliage, the hosts of specks of sunlight sifting through, reflected on the white limestone, were in reality thousands of tiny representations of the sun's disk incised with the segment of the silhouetted moon, but reversed, just like the image through the aperture of a pinhole camera. I suppose it is a very common physical phenomenon, but to me it was a surprising thing to trace the curve of the eclipse clearly and with ease in the sunbeams on the pavement beneath my feet, while my retinas refused to face or register the original.

Barbados is very flat, thoroughly cultivated and said to be the most densely populated bit of land in the world; all of which guide-book gossip was discouraging to a naturalist. But besides the cemetery which was sanctuary for the jolly little lizards, I found a bit of unspoilt beach, with sand as white and fine as talcum powder, where dwelt undisturbed many assemblages of small folk. There were land-crabs which had come to have at heart more affection for the vegetable gardens at the beach top than for the waters of their forefathers. They had degenerated into mere commuters from their holes to the nearest melon patch. The lower part of the beach was that ever changing zone—that altar upon which each tide deposited some offering from the depths of the sea. This will some day have a worthy interpreter, a sympathetic recorder and commentator who will make a marvelous volume of this intermittent thread of the earth's surface, pulsing, changing—now showing as water, now as land—but always vital with exciting happenings.

I sat for an hour on the upper beach and watched the little native folk, autochthones who for innumerable generations had been so loyal to their arenaceous home that the sheltering mantle of its pale hue had fallen upon their wings and bodies. Here were tiny, grayish-white crabs, here were spiders, which, until they moved, were not spiders but sand. And when they did move, recognition usually came too late to some fly, which had trespassed on this littoral hunting ground. Tiger-beetles drifted about like sand-grain wraiths, whose life wanderings lay between low tide and the highest dune; veriest ghosts of their brilliant green brethren farther inland. Ashen wasps buzzed past, with compass and maps in their heads, enabling them to circle about once or twice, alight, take a step or two and, kicking down their diminutive front door, to enter the slanting sandy tube which for them fulfilled all the requirements of home.

From an aeroplane, Barbados would appear like a circular expanse of patchwork, or a wild futurist painting set in deepest ultramarine; a maze of rectangles or squares of sugar-cane, with a scattering of sweet potatoes and sea island cotton. I got a hint of this when I motored to the highest point of land, and then climbed the steeple of the loftiest church. At my feet was the Atlantic with great breakers, reduced by distance to tiny wavelets twinkling among the black boulders and feathery palms which were scattered along shore. For more than two hundred and seventy-five years the church had stood here, and not to be outdone by the strangeness of the little beach people, the graveyard boasted the remains of a descendant of a Greek Emperor, who long ago had been warden.

But again our steamer summoned us and we left the dusky natives with their weird legends and the tiny island which they love, and were rowed steadily out beyond the two miles of shallow coast.

When we steamed away from shore that night, no lights except those of the dining saloon were allowed. Yet the path of the vessel made a mockery of this concealment. The world did not exist a hundred feet away from the ship and yet there was no mist or fog. The outward curve of the water from the bow was a long slender scimitar of phosphorescence, and from its cutting edge and tip flashed bits of flame and brilliant steely sparks, apparently suspended above the jet-black water. Alongside was a steady ribbon of dull green luminescence, while, rolling and drifting along through this path of light came now and then great balls of clear, pure fire touched with emerald flames, some huge jelly or fish, or sargasso weed incrusted with noctiluca. Everywhere throughout the narrow zone of visibility were flickering constellations, suns and planets of momentary life, dying within the second in which they flashed into sight. Once Orion left a distinct memory on the retina—instantly to vanish forever. Perhaps to some unimaginably distant and unknown god, our world system may appear as fleeting. To my eyes it seemed as if I looked at the reflections of constellations which no longer swung across the heavens—shadows of shadows.

Then four bells struck—silveryly—and I knew that time still existed.

IV

It was, as I have said, a small party. Only two friends had been invited, and Ram and his companions had made very merry over a cooked cock-fowl and two bottles of rum. In the course of the night there was a fracas, and the face of one of Ram's friends had been somewhat disfigured, with a thick club and a bit of rock. He spent two months in the hospital, and eventually recovered. His injuries did not affect his speech, but, coolie-like, he would give little information as to his assailant.

And now the majesty of the law was about to inquire into this matter of Ram's party, and to sift to the uttermost the mystery which concerned the cooked cock-fowl and the rum, and the possibilities for evil which accrued to the sinister club and the bit of rock. I was invited to go, with my friends the Lawyer and the Judge, and our route lay from Georgetown westward, athwart two mighty Guiana rivers.

My mission to British Guiana was to find some suitable place to establish a Tropical Research Station, where three of us, a Wasp Man, an Embryo Man, and a Bird Man, all Americans, all enthusiastic, might learn at first-hand of the ways and lives of the wilderness creatures. After seven years of travel and bird-study in far distant countries, I had turned again to Guiana, the memory of whose jungles had never left me. In New York I had persuaded the powers of the Zoölogical Society that here lay a new, a worthy field of endeavor, hidden among the maze of water-trails, deep in the heart of the forests. For these were forests whose treasury of bird and beast and insect secrets had been only skimmed by collectors. The spoils had been carried to northern museums, where they were made available for human conversation and writing by the conferring of names by twentieth-century Adams. We had learned much besides from these specimens, and they had delighted the hearts of multitudes who would never have an opportunity to hear the evening cadence of the six-o'clock bee or the morning chorus of the howling monkeys.

But just as a single photograph reveals little of the inception, movement and dénouement of an entire moving-picture reel, so an isolated dead bird can present only the static condition of the plumage, molt, and dimensions at the instant before death. I am no nature sentimentalist, and in spite of moments of weakness, I will without hesitation shoot a bird as she sits upon her eggs, if I can thereby acquire desired information. But whenever possible, I prefer, for my own sake as well as hers, to prolong my observations, and thus acquire merit in the eyes of my fellow scientists and of Buddha.

I hoped the Pomeroon might prove such a desirable region, and fulfil my requirements to the extent that I might call it home for a season. So I accepted the invitation with a double pleasure, for I already knew what excellent company were friends Lawyer and Judge. As a site for my researches the Pomeroon failed; as an experience filled to the brim with interest and enjoyment, my visit left nothing to be desired.

Besides, I met Ram.

The big yellow kiskadees woke me at daybreak; my bedroom wren sang his heart out as I splashed in my shower; and before breakfast was over I heard the honking of my host's car. We glided over the rich red streets in the cool of early morning, past the thronged and already odoriferous market, and on to the tiny river ferry.

This was on Monday, but Ram Narine was to have yet another day of grace, by a twist in the nexus of circumstance which envelops all of us. The Lawyer's orderly had failed to notify his cabman that the Georgetown steamer left at six-fifty instead of seven. So when we finally left the stelling, with a host of twittering martins about us, it was with sorrowful faces. Not only were the master's wig and gown missing, besides other articles less necessary from a legal point of view, but the ham for luncheon was lacking. The higher law of compensation now became active, and the day of postponement gave me the sight of the Pomeroon Trail. This delay solved the matter of the wig and gown, and the ham was replaced by a curry equal to a Calcutta cook's best. This was served in the Colony House at Suddy Village, where one ate and slept in full enjoyment of the cool tradewind which blew in from the clear stretch of the Atlantic. And here one sat and read or listened to the droning of the witnesses in the petty cases held by the local magistrate in the courtroom below stairs.

I chose to do none of these things, but walked to the sandy beach and along it in the direction of the distant Spanish Main. It was a barren beach, judged by the salvage of most beaches; few shells, little seaweed, and the white sand alternating with stretches of brown mud. I walked until I came to a promontory and, amid splashing muddy waves, climbed out and perched where I ever love to be—on the outermost isolated pile of an old wharf. Scores of years must have passed since it was in use, and I tried to imagine what things had come and gone over it. Those were the days of the great Dutch sugar-plantations, when plantations were like small kingdoms, with crowds of slaves, and when the rich amber crystals resembled gold-dust in more than appearance. What bales of wondrous Dutch lace and furniture and goodies were unloaded from the old high-pooped sailing ships, and what frills and flounces fluttered in this same tradewind, what time the master's daughter set forth upon her first visit to the Netherlands! Now, a few rotted piles and rows of precise, flat Dutch bricks along the foreshore were all that was left of such memories. Inland, the wattled huts of the negroes had outlasted the great manor-houses.

Out at sea there was no change. The same muddy waves rose but never broke; the same tidal current swirled and eddied downstream. And now my mind became centered on passing débris, and in a few minutes I realized that, whatever changes had ruffled or passed over this coastal region of Guiana, the source of the muddy waters up country was as untouched now as when Amerigo Vespucci sailed along this coast four hundred and twenty years ago. I forgot the shore with its memories and its present lush growth and heat. For in the eddies of the wharf piles swirled strange things from the inland bush. First a patch of coarse grass, sailing out to sea, upright and slowly circling. On the stems I could distinguish unwilling travelers—crickets, spiders, and lesser wingless fry. Half-hollow logs drifted past, some deep and water-soaked, others floating high, with their upper parts quite dry. On such a one I saw a small green snake coiled as high as possible, and, serpent-like, waiting quietly for what fate should bring.

And now came an extraordinary sight—another serpent, a huge one, a great water-constrictor long dead, entangled in some brush, half caught firm and half dangling in the water. Attending were two vultures, ravenous and ready to risk anything for a meal. And they were risking a good deal, for each time they alighted, the brush and snake began to sink and allowed them time for only one or two frantic pecks before they were in water up to their bodies. They then had laboriously to take to flight, beating the water for the first few strokes. For several minutes one loop of the snake became entangled about a sunken pile, and now the scavengers boldly perched in the shallow water and fairly ducked their heads at each beakful. Next came a white ants' nest on a lichened trunk, with a multitude of the owners rushing frantically about, scores of them overrunning the confines of their small cosmos, to the great profit and delectation of a school of little fish which swam in the wake.

Most pitiful of all was a tiny opossum, with a single young one clinging tightly about her neck, which approached as I was about to leave. She was marooned on a hollow log which revolved in an arc while it drifted. As it turned, the little mother climbed, creeping first upward, then turning and clambering back, keeping thus ever on the summit. The tail of the baby was coiled about her mouth, and he was clinging with all his strength. It was a brave fight and well deserved success. No boat was in sight, so I could not hesitate, but, pulling off my shoes, I waded out as far as I could. At first I thought I must miss it, for I could not go in to my neck even for an opossum. But the wind helped; one or two heavy waves lapped conveniently against the sodden bark, and I succeeded in seizing the stub. As I reached for the little creature, the young opossum gave up and slipped into the water, and a ripple showed where a watchful fish had snapped it up. But I got hold of the mother's tail, and despite a weak hiss and a perfunctory showing of teeth, I lifted her and waded ashore. The last view I had, showed her crawling feebly but steadily along a branch into the heart of a dense thicket.

I climbed back to my outpost and dried my clothes in the sun, meditating on the curious psychology of a human which wanted opossums and would unhesitatingly sacrifice a score of opossums for a real scientific need, and yet would put itself to much discomfort to save a single one from going out to sea. Sentimental weakness is an inexplicable thing, and I finally made up my mind—as I always do—not to yield again to its promptings. In fact, I half turned to go in search of my specimen—and then didn't.

The tide had reached full ebb and the sun was low when I started back, and now I found a new beach many feet farther out and down. Still no shells, but a wonderful assortment of substitutes in the shape of a host of nuts and seeds—flotsam and jetsam from far up-river, like the snake and ants and opossum. There were spheres and kidney-shapes, half-circles and crescents, heads of little old men and pods like scimitars, and others like boomerangs. Some were dull, others polished and varnished. They were red and green, brown and pink and mauve, and a few gorgeous ones shaded from salmon into the most brilliant orange and yellow. Most were as lifeless in appearance as empty shells, but there were many with the tiny root and natal leaves sprouting hopefully through a chink. And just to be consistent, I chose one out of the many thousands piled in windrows and carried it high up on the shore, where I carefully planted it. It was a nut unknown to me at the time, but later I knew that I had started one of the greatest of the jungle trees on its way to success.

Ahead of me two boys dashed out of the underbrush and rushed into the waves. After swimming a few strokes they reached a great log and, heading it inward, swam it ashore and tied a rope to it. Here was a profession which appealed to me, and which indeed I had already entered upon, although the copper-skinned coolie boys did not recognize me as one of their guild. And small blame to them, for I was an idler who had labored and salvaged a perfectly good opossum and the scion of a mighty mora for naught. Here I was, no richer for my walk, and with only damp clothing to show for my pains. Yet we grinned cheerfully at each other as I went by, and they patted their log affectionately as they moored it fast.

Dusk was not far away when I reached Colony House and the Lawyer and I fared forth to seek a suit of pajamas. For the orderly had with him both luxuries and necessities, and so we went shopping. I may say at once that we failed completely in our quest, but, as is usually the case in the tropics, we were abundantly compensated.

We visited emporiums to the number of three,—all that the village could boast,—and the stare of the three Chinawomen was uniformly blank. They could be made in three days, or one could send to Georgetown for most excellent ones; we could not make clear the pressure of our need. The Lawyer grumbled, but the afterglow was too marvelous for anything to matter for long. Indeed, things—wonderful and strange, pathetic and amusing—were so numerous and so needful of all our faculties, that at one time my mind blurred like an over-talked telephone wire. My enthusiasm bubbled over and the good-natured Lawyer enjoyed them as I did.

Here were two among the many. There was the matter of the poor coolie woman who had injured a leg and who, misunderstanding some hastily given order, had left the hospital and was attempting to creep homeward, using hands and arms for crutches. Her husband was very small and very patient and he had not the strength to help her, although now and then he made an awkward attempt. While we sent for help, I asked questions, and in half-broken English I found that they lived six miles away. I had passed them early in the afternoon on the way to the beach, and in the intervening four hours they had progressed just about two hundred feet! This was patience with a vengeance, and worthy of compute. So, astronomer-like, I took notebook and pencil and began to estimate the time of their orbit. It was not an easy matter, for mathematics is to me the least of earth's mercies—and besides, I was not certain how many feet there were in a mile. By saying it over rapidly I at last convinced myself that it was "fivethousantwohunderaneighty."

I gasped when I finished, and repeated my questions. And again came the answers: "Yes, sahib, we go home. Yes, sahib, we live Aurora. Yes, sahib, we go like this ver' slow. No, sahib, have no food." And as he said the last sentence, a few drops of rain fell and he instantly spread his body-cloth out and held it over the sick woman. My mind instinctively went back to the mother opossum and her young. The coolie woman ceaselessly murmured in her native tongue and looked steadily ahead with patient eyes. Always she fumbled with her dusty fingers for a spot to grip and shuffle ahead a few inches.

Two hundred feet in four hours! And six full miles to the coolie quarters! This was on the fourteenth of a month. If my calculation was correct they would reach home on the tenth of the following month, in three weeks and five days. Truly oriental, if not, indeed, elemental patience! This planet-like journey was deviated from its path by a hospital stretcher and a swift return over the four-hour course, although this cosmic disturbance aroused comment from neither the man nor his wife. I checked off another helpless being salvaged from the stream of ignorance.

From serio-comic tragedy the village street led us to pure comedy. At the roadside we discovered a tiny white flag, and beneath it a bit of worn and grimy cloth stretched between a frame of wood. This was a poster announcing the impending performance of one "Profesor Rabintrapore," who, the painfully inked-in printing went on to relate, "craled from ankoffs" and "esskaped from cofens," and, besides, dealt with "spirits INvisibal." The professor's system of spelling would have warmed the heart of our modern schoolteachers, but his séances did not seem to be tempting many shekels from the pockets of coolie spiritualists.

After tea at the Colony House, I leaned out of my window and watched the moonlight gather power and slowly usurp the place of the sun. Then, like the succession of light, there followed sound: the last sleepy twitter came from the martin's nest under the eaves, and was sustained and deepened until it changed to the reverberating bass rumble of a great nocturnal frog.

In the moonlight the road lay white, though I knew in the warm sun it was a rich, foxy red. It vanished beyond some huts, and I wondered whither it went and remembered that tomorrow I should learn for certain. Then a ghostly goatsucker called eerily, "Who-are-you?" and the next sound for me was the summons to early coffee.

During the morning the missing orderly arrived, and with him the wig and gown and the ham. And now the matter of Ram Narine became pressing, and my friends Lawyer and Judge became less human and increasingly legal. I attended court and was accorded the honor of a chair between a bewigged official and the Inspector of Police, the latter resplendent in starched duck, gold lace, spiked helmet, and sword. Being a mere scientist and wholly ignorant of legal matters, I am quite like my fellow human beings and associate fear with my ignorance. So under the curious eyes of the black and Indian witnesses and other attendants, I had all the weaving little spinal thrills which one must experience on being, or being about to be, a criminal. There was I betwixt law and police, and quite ready to believe that I had committed something or other, with malicious or related intent.

But my thoughts were soon given another turn as a loud rapping summoned us to our feet at the entrance of the Judge. A few minutes before, we had been joking together and companionably messing our fingers with oranges upstairs. Now I gazed in awe at this impassive being in wig and scarlet vestments, whose mere entrance had brought us to our feet as if by religious or royal command. I shuddered at my memory of intimacies, and felt quite certain we could never again sit down at table as equals. When we had resumed our seats there was a stir at the opposite end of the courtroom, and a half-dozen gigantic black policemen entered, and with them a little, calm-faced, womanly man—Ram Narine, the wielder of the club and the rock. He ascended to the fenced-in prisoners' dock, looking, amid all his superstrong barriers to freedom, ridiculously small and inoffensive, like a very small puppy tethered with a cable. He gazed quietly down at the various ominous exhibits. A and B were the club and the rock, with their glued labels reminding one of museum specimens. Exhibit C was a rum-bottle—an empty one. Perhaps if it had been full, some flash of interest might have crossed Ram's face. Then weighty legal phrases and accusations passed, and the Judge's voice was raised, sonorous and impressive, and I felt that nothing but memory remained of that jovial personality which I had known so recently.

The proceeding which impressed me most was the uncanny skill of the official interpreter, who seemed almost to anticipate the words of the Judge or the Clerk. And, too, he gestured and shook his finger at the prisoner at the appropriate places, though he had his back fairly to the Judge and so could have had none but verbal clues. Ram Narine, it seems, was indicted on four counts, among which I could distinguish only that he was accused of maltreating his friend with intent to kill, and this in soft Hindustani tones he gently denied. Finally, that he had at least done the damage to his friend's face and very nearly killed him. To this he acquiesced, and the Court, as the Judge called himself, would now proceed to pass sentence. I was relieved to hear him thus re-name himself, for it seemed as if he too realized his changed personality.

And now the flow of legal reiteration and alliteration ceased for a moment, and I listened to the buzzing of a marabunta wasp and the warbling of a blue tanager among the fronds. For a moment, in the warm sunshine, the hot, woolly wigs and the starched coats and the shining scabbard seemed out of place. One felt all the discomfort of the tight boots and stiff collars, and a glance at Ram Narine showed his slim figure clothed in the looped, soft linen of his race. And he seemed the only wholly normal tropic thing there—he and the wasp and the tanager and the drooping motionless palm shading the window. In comparison, all else seemed almost Arctic, unacclimatized.

Then the deep tones of the Court rose, and in more simple verbiage,—almost crude and quite unlegal to my ears,—we heard Ram Narine sentenced to twelve months' hard labor. And the final words of the interpreter left Ram's face as unconcerned and emotionless as that of the Buddhas in the Burmese pagodas. And the simile recurred again and again after it was all over. So Ram and I parted, to meet again a few weeks later under strangely different conditions.

Robes and wigs and other legal properties were thrown aside, and once more we were all genial friends in the little automobile, with no trace of the terribly formal side of justice and right. The red Pomeroon road slipped past, and I, for one, wished for a dozen eyes and a score of memories to record the unrolling of that road. It was baffling in its interest.

The first ten or twenty miles consisted of huge sugar estates, recently awakened to feverish activity by the war prices of this commodity. Golden Fleece, Taymouth Manor, Capoey, Move Success, Anna Regina, Hampton Court—all old names long famous in the history of the colony. In many other districts the Dutch have left not only a heritage of names, such as Vreeden-Hoop and Kyk-over-al, but the memory of a grim sense of humor, as in the case of three estates lying one beyond the other, which the owners named in turn, Trouble, More Trouble, and Most Trouble. Unlike our southern plantations, the workers' quarters are along the road, with the big house of the manager well back, often quite concealed. The coolies usually live in long, communal, barrack-like structures, the negroes in half-open huts.

This first part of the Pomeroon road was one long ribbon of variegated color: Hundreds of tiny huts, with picturesque groups of coolies and negroes and a smaller number of Chinese, all the huts dilapidated, some leaning over, others so perforated that they looked like the ruins of European farmhouses after being shelled. Patched, propped up, tied together, it was difficult to believe that they were habitable. All were embowered in masses of color and shadowed by the graceful curves of cocoanut palms and bananas. The sheets of bougainvillea blossoms, of yellow allamandas, and the white frangipani temple flowers of the East, brought joy to the eye and the nostril; the scarlet lilies growing rank as weeds—all these emphasized the ruinous character of the huts. Along the front ran a trench, doubling all the glorious color in reflection, except where it was filled with lotus blossoms and Victoria regia.

As we passed swiftly, the natives rushed out on the shaky board-and-log bridges, staring in wonder, the women with babies astride of their hips, the copper-skinned children now and then tumbling into the water in their excitement. The yellows and reds and greens of the coolies added another color-note. Everything seemed a riot of brilliant pigment. Against the blue sky great orange-headed vultures balanced and volplaned; yellow-gold kiskadees shrieked blatantly, and, silhouetted against the green fronds, smote both eye and ear.

We were among the first to pass the road in an automobile. Awkward, big-wheeled carts, drawn by the tiniest of burros and heaped high with wood, were the only other vehicles. For the rest, the road was a Noah's Ark, studded with all the domestic animals of the world: pigs, calves, horses, burros, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and hordes of gaunt, pariah curs. Drive as carefully as we might, we left behind a succession of defunct dogs and fowls. For the other species, especially those of respectable size, we slowed down, more for our sake than theirs. Calves were the least intelligent, and would run ahead of us, gazing fearfully back, first over one, then the other shoulder, until from fatigue they leaped into the wayside ditch. The natives themselves barely moved aside, and why we did not topple over more of the great head-carried loads I do not know. We left behind us a world of scared coolies and gaping children.

The road was excellent, but it twisted and turned bewilderingly. It was always the same rich red hue—made of earth-clinker burned under sods. Preparing this seemed a frequent occupation of the natives, and the wood piles on the carts melted away in the charcoal-like fires of these subterranean furnaces. Here and there tiny red flags fluttered from tall bamboo poles, reminiscent of the evil-spirit flags in India and Burma. But with the transportation across the sea of these oriental customs certain improvements had entered in,—adaptations to the gods of ill of this new world. So the huts in course of alteration, and the new ones being erected, were guarded, not only by the fluttering and the color, but by a weird little figure of a dragon demon himself drawn on the cloth, a quite unoriental visualizing of the dreaded one.

As we flew along, we gradually left the villages of huts behind. Single thatched houses were separated by expanses of rice-fields, green rectangles framed in sepia mud walls, picked out here and there by intensely white and intensely Japanesque egrets. Great black muscovy ducks spattered up from amber pools, and tri-colored herons stood like detached shadows of birds, mere cardboard figures, so attenuated that they appeared to exist in only two planes of space.

The rice-fields gave place to pastures and these to marshes; thin lines of grass trisected the red road—the first hint of the passing of the road and the coming of the trail. Rough places became more frequent. Then came shrub, and an occasional branch whipped our faces. Black cuckoos or old witch-birds flew up like disheveled grackles; cotton-birds flashed by, and black-throated orioles glowed among the foliage. Carrion crows and laughing falcons watched us from nearby perches, and our chauffeur went into second gear.

Now and then some strange human being passed,—man or woman, we could hardly tell which,—clad in rags which flapped in the breeze, long hair waving, leaning unsteadily on a staff, like a perambulating scarecrow. The eyes, fixed ahead, were fastened on things other than those of this world, so detached that their first sight of an automobile aroused them not at all. The gulf between the thoughts of these creatures and the world today was too deep to be bridged by any transient curiosity or fear. They trudged onward without a glance, and we steered aside to let them pass.

The grass between the ruts now brushed the body of the car; even the wild people passed no more, and the huts vanished utterly. Forest palms appeared, then taller brush, and trees in the distance. Finally, the last three miles became a scar through the heart of the primeval jungle, open under the lofty sky of foliage, the great buttresses of the trunks exposed for the first time to the full glare of day. The trail was raw with all the snags and concealed roots with which the jungle likes to block entrance to its privacy; and, rocking and pitching like a ship in the waves, we drew up to a woodpile directly in our path. Standing up in our seats, we could see, just beyond it, the dark flood of the Pomeroon surging slowly down to the sea. Seven years ago I had passed this way en route from Morawhanna, paddled by six Indians. Maintenant ce n'est qu'une mémoire.

For centuries the woodskins of the Indians had passed up and down and left no trace. Only by this tidal road could one reach the mouth of tributaries. And now the sacred isolation of this great tropical river was forever gone. The tiny scar along which we had bumped marked the permanent coming of man. And his grip would never relax. Already capillaries were spreading through the wilderness tissues. Across the river from our woodpile were two tiny Portuguese houses—those petty pioneers of today whose forefathers were worldwide explorers. Around us, scarcely separable from the bush, was the coffee plantation of one Señor Serrao. He and his mother greeted us, and with beaming courtesy we were led to their wattled hut, where a timid sister gave us grapefruit. I talked with him of his work and of the passing of the animals of the surrounding forest. Tapir were still common, and the wild pigs and deer waged war on his vegetables. Then a swirl drew our eyes to the brown flood and he said, "Perai."

And this was the end of the tropical trail which had started out as a road, with its beginning, for me, in the matter of Ram Narine. Along its route we had passed civilization as men know it here, and had seen it gradually fray out into single aged outcasts, brooding on thoughts rooted and hidden in the mystery of the Far East. From the water and the jungle the trail had vouchsafed us glimpses and whispers of the wild creatures of this great continent, of the web of whose lives we hoped to unravel a few strands. The end of the trail was barred with the closed toll-gate of memory.

V

We started at last, and only a few miles of glistening rails had passed beneath us when, finally, proof of the complete schism between police and weather bureaus became evident: the fresh tradewind dispersed the rain! The clouds remained, however—low, swirling masses of ashy-blue, billowing out like smoke from a bursting shell, or fraying in pale gray tatters, tangling the fronds of lofty palms. For the rest of the day the light came from the horizon—a thrillingly weird, indirect illumination, which lent vividness and intensity to every view. The world was scoured clean, the air cleansed of every particle of dust, while the clouds lent a cool freshness wholly untropical, and hour after hour the splendid savannah lands of the coast of Guiana slipped past, as we rumbled swiftly southward along the entire shore-front.

At first we passed close to the sea, and this was the most exciting part of the trip. In places the dikes had given way and the turbulent muddy waters had swept inland over rice and cane-fields, submerging in one implacable tide the labor of years. A new dike, of mud and timbers and sweet-smelling hurdles of black sage, had been erected at the roadside, and past this went all traffic. Now and then an automobile had to slow up until a great wave broke, and then dash at full speed across the danger-spot. In spite of the swiftness, the wind-flung spray of the next wave would drench the occupants. The lowering sea-water glistened among the sickly plants, and strange fish troubled the salty pools as they sought uneasily for an outlet to the ocean. A flock of skimmers looked wholly out of place driving past a clump of bamboos.

Then the roadbed shifted inland, and lines of patient, humped zebus trailed slowly from their sheds—sheds of larger size and better built than the huts of their owners. These open-work homes were picturesque and unobtrusive; they fitted into the landscape as if, like the palms, they had come into being through years of quiet assimilation of water and warmth. Their walls were of mud, adobe, mere casual upliftings of the sticky soil which glistened in every direction. Their roofs were of trooly-palm fronds, brown and withered, as though they had dropped from invisible trees high overhead. Like the coolies themselves, the houses offered no note of discord.

I had just come from the deep jungle of the interior with its varying lights and shadows, its myriad color-grades, pastel, neutral in quality. Here was boldness of stroke, sharpness of outline, strength of pigment. All the dominant tones of this newly washed coastal region were distinct and incisive. Clear-cut silhouettes of vultures and black witch-birds were hunched on fence-posts and shrubs. Egrets, like manikins cut from the whitest of celluloid, shone as far as the eye could see them. As if the rain had dissolved and washed away every mixed shade and hue, the eye registered only flaming, clashing colors; great flocks of birds black as night, save for a glowing scarlet gorget; other black birds with heads of shining gold, flashing as the filigree nose-beads flash against the rich dark skin of the coolies.

Like the colors, the sounds were individualized by sharpness of tone, incisiveness of utterance. The violent cries of flycatchers cleft the air, and, swiftly as we passed, struck on my ear fair and strong. The notes of the blackbirds were harmonious shafts of sound, cleaving the air like the whistle of the meadowlark. Hawks with plumage of bright cinnamon and cream, hurled crisp, piercing shrieks at the train. Only the vultures, strung like ebony beads along the fronds of the cocoanut palms, spread their wings to dry, and dumbly craned their necks down as we passed.

Past Mahaica and Abary we rushed, the world about us a sliding carpet of all the emerald tints in the universe. And just as the last tint had been used up and I knew there must be some repetition, the clouds split and a ray of pure sunlight shot through the clear air and lit up a field of growing rice with living green of a still newer hue, an unearthly concentrated essence of emerald which was comparable to nothing but sprouting rice in rain-washed sunlight. Whether this be on the hot coastlands of Java, in tiny sod-banked terraces far up on the slopes of Dehra Dun, or in the shadow of Fuji itself, makes no manner of difference. The miracle of color never fails.

Trees were so rare that one was compelled to take notice of them. High above the bamboos, high above even those arboreal towers of Pisa, the cocoanut palms, rose the majestic silk-cotton trees, bare of leaves at this season, with great branches shooting out at breathless heights. Like strange gourd-like fruit, three sizes of nests hung pendant from these lofty boughs: short, scattered purses of yellow orioles, colonied clusters of the long pouches of yellow-backed bunyahs, and, finally, the great, graceful, woven trumpets of the giant black caciques, rarely beautiful, and, like the trees, scarce enough to catch and hold the eye. The groves of cocoanut palms, like a hundred enormous green rockets ever bursting in mid-air, checkered the sunlight, which sifted through and was made rosy by a host of lotus blooms beneath. Then the scene changed in a few yards, and low, untropical shrubs filled the background, while at our feet rose rank upon rank of cat-tails, and we might be passing across the Jersey meadows.

Each little station was the focus of a world of its own. Coolies and blacks excitedly hustled to place on board their contribution to the world's commerce:—tomatoes no larger than cherries, in beautifully woven baskets; a crate of chickens or young turkeys; a live sheep protesting and entangled in the spokes of an old-fashioned bicycle; a box of fish, flashing silver and old rose. Some had only a single bundle of fodder to offer. At one station, quaintly named De Kinderen, a clear-faced coolie boy pushed a small bunch of plantains into the freight van, then sat on the steps. As the train started to move he settled himself as if for a long ride, and for a second or two closed his eyes. Then he opened them, climbed down, and swung off into the last bit of clearing. His face was sober, not a-smile at a thoughtless lark. I looked at his little back as he trudged toward his home, and wondered what desire for travel, for a glimpse of the world, was back of it all. And I wished that I could have asked him about it and taken him with me. This little narrow-gauge link with the outside world perhaps scatters heartaches as well as shekels along its right of way.

I was watching a flock of giant anis, which bubbled cheerfully on their slow flight across the fields, when a wide expanse of water blocked our way, and we drew up at the bank of the Berbice River.

In the course of five days at New Amsterdam we achieved our object. We found hoatzins, their nests, eggs, and young, and perpetuated in photographs their wonderful habits handed down through all the ages past, from the time when reptiles were the dominant beings, and birds and mammals crept about, understudying their rôle to come, as yet uncertain of themselves and their heritage. When we needed it the sun broke through the rain and shone brightly; when our lenses were ready, the baby hoatzins ran the gamut of their achievements. They crept on all fours, they climbed with fingers and toes, they dived headlong, and swam as skilfully as any Hesperornis of old. This was, and I think always will be, to me, the most wonderful sight in the world. To see a tiny living bird duplicate within a few minutes the processes which, evolved slowly through uncounted years, have at last culminated in the world of birds as we find it today—this is impressive beyond words. No poem, no picture, no terrible danger, no sight of men killed or injured has ever affected me as profoundly as this.

Thus the primary object of the trip was accomplished. But that is a poor expedition indeed which does not yield another hundred per cent. in oblique values, of things seen out of the corner of one's eyes.

If one is an official or an accredited visitor to Berbice, the Colony House is placed at one's service. I am sure that it is quite the ugliest of all colony houses, and surrounded by what I am equally sure is one of the most beautiful of tropical gardens. If Berbice held no other attraction it would be worth visiting to see this garden. The first floor of Colony House is offices, the second is the Supreme Court, and when I peeped in I saw there were three occupants—a great yellow cat curled up in the judge's chair, and two huge toads solemnly regarding each other from the witness-box and the aisle.

Three stories in Guiana constitute a skyscraper, and that night I slept on a level with the palm fronds. It was a house of a thousand sounds. During the day hosts of carpenters tore off uncountable shingles devastated by white ants. Two antithetical black maids attended noisily but skilfully to all my wants. At night, cats and frogs divided the vocal watches, and a patient dog never tired of rolling the garbage-can downstairs past the Supreme Court to the first floor. I thought of this at first as some strange canine rite, a thing which Alice could have explained with ease, or which to Seumas and to Slith would have appeared reasonable and fitting. I used to wait for it before I went to sleep, knowing that comparative silence would follow. I discovered later that this intelligent dog had learned that, by nudging the can off the top step, the cover would become dislodged at about the level of the Supreme Court, and from there to the government offices he could spend a night of gastronomic joy, gradually descending to the level of the entrance.

A kind planter put me up at the club, the usual colonial institution where one may play bridge or billiards, drink swizzles, or read war telegrams "delayed in transit." These were the usual things to do, daily duties, timed almost regularly by the kiskadees' frantic farewell to the day or the dodging of the first vampire among the electric-light bulbs. But in this exciting country, with hoatzins asleep within a half-mile, I could not bring my mind to any of these things, and wandered about, idly turning the leaves of dull periodicals, looking at cases of cues and the unfinished records of past billiard tournaments, yellowed with age. The steward approached timidly.

"Would the sahib like to see the library?"

Yes, the sahib decidedly would. We climbed the stairs, creaking as if they complained at the unaccustomed weight of footsteps, to the upper room of the club. It was large, barn-like in its vacantness, with a few little tables, each surrounded by a group of chairs, like chickens crowded about a hen. The walls were lined with books and there was an atmosphere about the room which took hold of me at once. I could not identify it with any previous experience, certainly not with the libraries of Georgetown in which I had spent days. This was something subtle, something which had to discover itself. The steward led me proudly about, making it plain that his affection was here rather than with the mixing of swizzles below. No, he had never read any of them, but he would feel honored if I found any pleasure in them and would condescend to borrow one. He seemed rather emphatic on this point; he especially desired that I take one to Colony House. Then he left me.

The books were without a speck of dust, each volume in its place and aligned with precision. Little by little, as I made my round, nibbling at a book here and there, the secret of the place came to me: it was a library of the past, a dead library. There seemed something uncanny, something unreal about it. Here were hundreds of books, there tables and chairs, but no one ever used them. Yet it was in the center of a large town just above the most frequented gathering-place. More than this the library itself was obsolete. No volume had been added for many years. Most of them were old, old tomes, richly bound in leather and tree calf. Nearly all were strange to me—little-known histories and charmingly naïve "Conversations" and memoirs of generations ago. They were delicately, gracefully worded, many of them; one could feel the lace and velvet of the sleeve which had touched them; the subtle musty odors of the yellowed page and crumbling leather seemed tinged with faint, strange perfumes. It was astounding and very affecting, and my interest increased with every minute.

The evening chorus of the tropical night had commenced outside, and a glance out of the window showed a network of motionless fronds dimly outlined against the rose-colored clouds over the waters of the Berbice. Below I heard the soft click of billiard balls. Then I returned to the books. Their rich bindings were falling apart, musty, worm-eaten, many held together only by a string. It was as if I had entered the richly filled library of some old manor-house which had been sealed up for two-score years, and yet kept lovingly dusted. It was this sense of constant care which served to emphasize the weird isolation, the uncanny desolation.

I glanced at Lives of the Lindsays, by Lord Lindsay, a work of sixty-five years ago, unknown to me, quaint and delightful. This rubbed covers with Lockhart's Life of Scott. On another shelf I recall The Colloquies of Edward Osborne, Citizen and Clothmaker of London, which held me until I knew that the Colony House dog would get all of my dinner if I did not start homewards. The next volume to this was a friend, Thier's The Consulate and the Empire. Then I walked past stacks of old-fashioned novels, nearly all in three volumes. Their names were strange, and I suppose they would prove deadly reading to our generation; but I am sure that in their day they fascinated many eyes reading by the flickering light of tapers and rushes. And even now they stood bravely alongside Dickens and Scott.

Finally I reached up to the highest row and chose one of a series of heavy tomes whose titles had completely fallen away with age and climate. I untied the binding string, opened at random and read thus:—

"It is vain, then, any longer to insist on variations of organic structure being the result of habits or circumstances. Nothing has been elongated, shortened or modified, either by external causes or internal volition; all that has been changed has been changed suddenly, and has left nothing but wrecks behind it, to advertise us of its former existence."

Thus wrote the Baron Cuvier many years ago. And this brought me back to reality, and my study of those living fossils now asleep in the neighboring bunduri thorn bushes, whose nestlings so completely refute the good baron's thesis.

As I reached the door I selected a volume at random to take back to Colony House. I put out the lights and turned a moment to look about. The platinum wires still glowed dully, and weak moonlight now filled the room with a silver grayness. I wondered whether, in the magic of some of these tropical nights, when the last ball had been pocketed and the last swizzle drunk belowstairs, some of the book-lovers of olden times, who had read these volumes and turned down the creased pages, did not return and again laugh and cry over them. There was no inharmonious note: no thrilling short stories, no gaudy chromatic bindings, no slangy terse titles, no magazines or newspapers. Such gentlefolk as came could have sat there and listened to the crickets and the occasional cry of a distant heron and have been untroubled by the consciousness of any passage of time.

I learned that this Library Club had been the oldest in the West Indies, founded about three quarters of a century ago. It had long ceased to exist, and no one ever disturbed the quietness of the gradual dissolution of this admirable collection of old works. I walked slowly back, thinking of the strange contrast between what I had seen and the unlovely, commercialized buildings along the street. I was startled from my reverie by the challenge of the sentry, and for a moment could not think what to answer. I had well-nigh forgotten my own personality in the vividness of the stately early Victorian atmosphere.

Long after the Colony House dog had noisily announced the beginning of his nocturnal feast, I lay behind my net poring over the Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as related by herself in conversations with her physician, comprising her opinions and anecdotes of some most remarkable persons, and I came to the conclusion that by far the most remarkable of them all was Lady Hester herself.

Berbice, we were told by residents elsewhere, was behind the times. I found it up to date, colonially speaking, and, indeed, possessing certain ideas and ideals which might advantageously be dispersed throughout the colony. But New Amsterdam, with all its commercial hardness of outline and sordid back streets, flashed out in strangely atavistic touches now and then; a sort of quintessence of out-of-dateness which no inhabitant suspected, and which was incapable of legislative change. First, there were hoatzins, hinting of æons of years ago; then, the library, which preserved so perfectly the atmosphere of our great grandparents. And now, as I left the compound of Colony House in the early morning, I watched with fascination a coolie woman bearing a great bundle of loosely bound fagots on her head. As she walked, they kept dropping out, and instead of leaning down or squatting and so endangering the equilibrium of all the rest, she simply shifted her weight to one foot, and felt about with the other. When it encountered the fallen stick, the big toe uncannily separated and curled about it, and she instantly bent her knee, passed up the stick to her hand and thence to the bundle again. It surpassed anything I had ever seen among savages—the hand-like mobility of that coolie woman's toes. And I thought that, if she was a woman of Simla or of the Western Ghats, then my belief in the Siwalik origin of mankind was irrevocable!

It seemed as if I could not escape from the spell of the past. I walked down to a dilapidated stelling to photograph a mob of vultures, and there found a small circle of fisherfolk cleaning their catch. They were wild-looking negroes and coolies, half-naked, and grunting with the exertion of their work. A glance at the fish again drove me from Berbice into ages long gone by. Armored catfish they were, reminiscent of the piscine glories of Devonian times—uncouth creatures, with outrageously long feelers and tentacles, misplaced fins, and mostly ensconced in bony armor, sculptured and embossed with designs in low relief. I watched with half-closed eyes the fretted shadows of the palms playing over the glistening black bodies of the men, and the spell of the strange fish seemed to shift the whole scene centuries, tens of centuries, backward.

The fish, attractive in the thought suggested by their ancient armor, were quite unlovely in their present surroundings. Piles of them were lying about in the hot sun, under a humming mass of flies, awaiting their unhurried transit to the general market. When the fishermen had collected a quantity of heads, apparently the chief portions considered inedible, these were scraped off the stelling to the mud beneath. At this there arose a monstrous hissing and a whistle of wings, and a cloud of black vultures descended with a rush and roar from surrounding roofs and trees.

While watching and photographing them, I saw an antithesis of bird-life such as I had never imagined. The score of vultures fought and tore and slid about in the black noisome mud exposed by the low tide. Sometimes they were almost back downward—fairly slithering through the muck to seize some shred of fish, hissing venomously; and at last spreading filthy, mud-dripping pinions to flap heavily away a few paces. In disgust at the sight and sound and odor, I started to turn back, when in the air just above the fighting mass, within reach of the flying mud, poised a hummingbird, clean and fresh as a rain-washed blossom. With cap of gold and gorget of copper, this smallest, most ethereal, and daintiest of birds hung balanced just above the most offensive of avian sights. My day threatened to be one of emotion instead of science.

Berbice vouchsafed one more surprise, a memory from the past which appeared and vanished in an instant. One of the most delightful of men was taking me out to where the hoatzins lived. We went in his car, which, and I use his own simile, was as truly a relic as anything I have mentioned. I have been in one-horse shays. I have ridden for miles in a Calcutta gharry. I was now in a one-cylinder knockabout which in every way lived up to its name. It was only after a considerable time that I felt assured that the mud-guards and wheels were not on the point of leaving us. When I had also become accustomed to the clatter and bang of loose machinery I was once more able to look around. I had become fairly familiar with the various racial types of Guiana, and with some accuracy I could distinguish the more apparent strains. Halfway through the town we passed three girls, one a coolie, the second dominantly negroid, while the third showed the delicate profile, the subtle color, the unmistakable physiognomy of a Syrian. She might have posed for the finest of the sculptures on a Babylonian wall. I turned in astonishment to my host, who explained that years ago some Syrian peddlers had come this way, remained, prospered, and sent for their wives. Now their children had affiliated with the other varied types—affiliated in language and ideas perhaps, but not, in one case at least, at the expense of purity of facial lineament of race.