We humans stand upright, but we look straight ahead. So for a long time I was blind to the mighty expanse of branch and foliage of my giant tree. I had passed it often and now and then reached out and touched it, for its mighty girth fascinated me. My Indian hunter gave me its name, Etaballi, and my botany added the less harmonious Vochisia. But it was my ear which first led my eye upward to a deep resonant humming which filled the dim air of the jungle. The sun was clouded as I looked, but the air was aglow with a solid dome of color, a gigantic mound of clear gold which eclipsed all the foliage and made the tree glorious. Humming-birds and bees, butterflies and nectar-loving wasps were there, and their wings of feathers, scales or mica tissue churned the air each with an individual note, the sum of which was a composite tone of wonderful quality.

Lizards and woodhewers scampered easily up the trunk, birds and insects flew where they willed, but I was bound to earth and by stretching could reach at the utmost only eight feet from the ground. I could kill any bird in the top of the tree, I could call myself one of the Lords of Creation, but that helped not at all in my wish to study this majestic jungle growth.

Day after day I watched new masses of flowers come into bloom. Finally, so hopeless seemed the outlook and so marvellous appeared the teeming life of the tree-top, that I directed two amiable murderers, who were trail-cutting for me, to fell the jungle Etaballi. It was late when they began and the wood proved as hard and tough as metal, so when the warder came for them they had made but slight impression on the giant bole.

Then using a brain far better for mechanical achievement than my own, we evolved a plan for surmounting these ninety feet to the first limb. The plan did what I always like plans to do—it combined the primitive and the sophisticated. With a bow and special arrow of an Akawai Indian, a slender cord would be shot over the branch, then a rope pulled over, and with boatswain’s seat and pulleys the rest would be easy.

The following day was one of great import both to the tree and myself. Much has been written of portents and warnings, and if I should narrate all the inexplicable things which have happened to me near the street called Prophecy, no one would believe the more ordinary events which occur as I traverse the avenue of Science. But in this case there was nothing. I left my friend in the late afternoon, standing in majestic quiet, leaves hanging motionless, although, a few hundred feet upward, white cloudlets were scudding before a mid-heaven trade breeze. I had seen this friendly tree lashed in tropic storms, I had watched it by day and night; parts of five years of our lives had been spent together, and I had seen but not observed its towering form as long ago as sixteen years when I passed up-river for the first time.

I had left Etaballi in the dusk, with its glory of gold pouring forth a stream of honeysuckle perfume and I looked forward to my new experiment in the morning, having to do with scaling its height. In the night arose one of the storms of the early rains. I heard the roar far down the Mazaruni and looked out of my tent to see first Pegasus and then the Pleiades erased when there sounded the patter of the first few drops, followed by the steady, long, audible lines of downpour. Once and only once there came a deep distant kr-ump! such as used to roll over the wide sands and drown the surf on the coast of Belgium when the Germans were vainly strafing to the north. This single sound, as of a subdued exclamation of some great God looking down upon the jungle, was the only hint of anything unusual, and no one could call a far-distant thunder mumble a portent.

Nothing is more pitifully out of place than a fallen tree. It is like a foundered, deserted ship with decks awash, covered with a maze of broken masts, remnants of sails and tangled rigging. Thus I found my Etaballi, brought low, but worthy even in the manner of its fall. Human murderers had nicked it, but the final surrender was at the demand of one of the natural elements, whose brothers had brought the tree into being and nourished it into maturity,—a stroke of lightning,—sister of the sun, the rain and the winds.

Down it had come, straight to the north and cut for itself a mighty glade. All other trees in its path, all stumps and saplings, had gone down with it, and where for centuries had been dimness was now clear sunlight and a great expanse of open sky. The surrounding trees leaned far outward as if looking down with some strange arboreal sympathy for their fallen comrade.

I walked up and down the mighty hole, I swung myself up among the high branches, and even from those crippled, dying limbs I looked down upon earth from as great a height as the summit of an ordinary tree. I began to realize that in the death of my great friend I might achieve intimacy with many unknown things.

At present all was silent except for the rustle of shrivelled leaves and an occasional deep groan as some overstrained mass of fibres gave way. If birds had been perched or nesting among its branches last night, they had fled; insects had been shaken off, or were now making their way to other trees, as rats swarm along a ratline from a sinking vessel.

I left at once and did not return for two weeks. After that I spent an hour or two of many days with the fallen tree, and if I could have had my way every hour of daylight would have found me there. I wrote and collected until my fingers and body ached, and gathered a mass of astonishing facts which, when digested, will fill many papers with a multitude of very true, but to the layman, very tiresome, technical observations.

But always there kept breaking through the mist of bare happenings, of actual blatant phenomena, glimpses of the dramatic and the romantic side of this little cosmos. For the tree-made glade became an individual thing, a veritable worldlet, and just as we go into a room and to our delight find new pictures on the walls and new books on the table, so here in my gladeroom no two days were alike.

While sitting quietly in armchair, straight back or lounge—for I had all to order among the branches—I was forever having my attention distracted from the business at hand of bark and wood to visitors who came to peer or hammer, to play or to carry on their courtship almost within arm’s reach. My angular figure and neutral garments were apparently an excellent camouflage among the maze of branches, and creatures came close which would have fled at first glance if I had been standing in mid-trail.

Every class of backboned animal except fish came to my fallen tree, and I have no doubt that to the leafy pools far down on the jungle floor, the land-travelling minnows had already made their way. Tree-frogs leaped past on damp, cloudy days and lizards of a half dozen species crept about, lapping up flies and other small fodder. A green tree snake came one day, but soon turned and went back to the protection of the surrounding foliage. An event was when a mighty boa constrictor, seventeen feet at the very least, weaved slowly in and out of the tangle. When he stopped he became but one more lichen-covered liana. In full sunlight he rested his great head flat upon a limb, and for many minutes no branch was more lifeless. Then I walked slowly toward him. When a few feet away he raised his head, looked at me, reached inquiringly forward with his pliant tongue, and slowly flowed away. We felt and showed mutual respect and each preferred to look, and then dignifiedly to turn aside, I the richer for the meeting, for I could add admiration and a thrill of real enthusiasm at the sight.

Monkeys came, a band of impudent Cebus, who dared descend to the branch tips, to shake them, and with many simian oaths to challenge me to come on. I took one step in their direction, and they fled chattering. Birds were almost always in sight—great yellow-headed vultures who swept down out of mid-heaven to see whether my prostrate body meant death. Doves boomed, toucans yelped, and after the first week a berry tree ripened its fruit, and no hour passed without flocks of parrots screeching full-lunged and sending down a rain of pits. Humming-birds fought overhead and fell, locked together bill and claw, at my feet; flycatchers found my glade a happy hunting ground.

One morning when I made up my mind to let no outside sight or sound through to my conscious concentration on the doings of the little people of bark and wood, I was suddenly startled into utter forgetfulness of my work. Here in the heart of the South American jungle there were reproduced for me the steep hills and valleys of northern Yunnan and Burma—the smells, the colors, the cold eddies of wind from the Tibetan snows—all were recrystallized in my mind by the notes of silver pheasants. From the underbrush behind my seat came the unmistakable low, liquid murmurs, breaking unexpectedly into the thrilling cackling. I dropped everything, and fifty feet away found a pair of distracted motmots who could not make their full-grown offspring behave, and were voicing their shattered nerves in this amazingly pheasantine outburst.

Herein lies the threefold charm of the labor of a scientist,—its unexpectedness, its mystery, and the eternal march of its phenomena, approaching, occurring, and passing into ever-vivid memory.

After the first week of observation my methods of close study had so sharpened my senses that the tree seemed to me to have passed into a resurrection of renewed vitality. Out of its death had come superabundant life. It recalled an observation by a stout fellow naturalist of mine, Samson by name, made many centuries ago. Some time after he had casually rent a lion in twain, he returned to look at the beast, and “behold there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion.”

No part of it from underground roots to shrivelled topmost foliage was free from a flutter and bustle of vibrant beings. Thousands upon thousands of lives would cease and their races become extinct were it not for the occasional death of such a jungle giant as this.

An hour of undiluted, blazing sun drove me back to the splintered stump for shelter. I walked around and around it and then mounted it and fell to studying the cross-section smoothed by the skilful ax-blows of my friends the dusky criminals. I counted carefully, marking every century with a smudge of ink from my fountain pen, and when I had reached the very heart, I stood up and looked at the mighty Etaballi with renewed awe. I felt as if I had been unduly familiar with a stranger who was suddenly revealed as some very famous, very great historical character. For when this huge plant first broke from its seed and took root in this very spot where I stood, Genghis Khan became emperor of the Mongols. When its first leaves struggled for light and air the Crusades were at their height; on the opposite side of the world troubadours and minnesingers were making music, and Columbus and his voyages were still three centuries in the future.

For many minutes I remained quiet, held in wonder at the long centuries of human achievement. Then I returned to the watching of the life of today. I saw the excited creatures coming over the ground, along tangled branches or upon swift wings, and I saw that they were marvellously equipped, forearmed.

As I pondered on these mysteries and watched a sliver of a beetle crawling on the bark, human history blurred, faded and passed from mind. When Genghis Khan reigned, the beetle’s ancestors were doing exactly what he is doing; double the years and Attila was making precedent for his successors—and identical beetle slivers crawled over dead bark. Ten times the years of this tree take us back beyond human history, add twenty or one hundred times its length of life, when our forebears were fighting to lift themselves above the other beasts, and in all probability not the slightest change could have been detected in the color, size, shape or habits of the flat predecessors of the tiny beetle under my lens.

When the bark begins to loosen a whole world comes by day and by night to creep beneath, and begin all the mysterious rites and achievements which fate allots to creatures of the under bark. All are positively thigmotactic which, as I once explained, is having the irresistible desire to touch or be touched by something, above, below, and—a thigmotac’s greatest joy—on all sides at once. Twice I have experienced this and found it very terrible; the first time when I crept out of Cheops by the ancient, rubbish-obscured robbers’ entrance, when sharp bits of alabaster so held me for a time that I could not move, and my imagination pictured the whole weight of the mighty pyramid pressing upon me. Another time was near the end of an obstacle race on a Toyo Kisen Keisha steamer, when each competitor, after fifteen minutes of constant, exhausting stunts on three decks, had to creep through a long, canvas ventilator laid flat on the deck. Half-way through, with the second man at my heels, I felt the canvas tube become narrower where an old tear had been sewn up, and my shoulders, even when pressed together, held the tube taut. Lungs full of coal dust, my blood beating in my ears like turbines,—no danger from savages or adventure with wild animals which I could recall, had ever given me a more ghastly minute.

I returned from my first day at the tree with a dozen beetles, and from a glance at them pinned in my collection, I can with certainty interpret their respective walks or creeps or crawls of life. A number are thin, but one is so amazingly flat that I am preserving it carefully among a few choice wonders of the insect world.

It is a small beetle, black and shiny as a new jet bead. It is oblong, and only by the most careful scrutiny can the faint details of the head, wings and body be detected. They seem no more than surface scratches and put to shame the most delicate watch or Japanese carving. I turn the beetle sideways and he becomes a mere black line, less in diameter than the slender pin which supports him. The under surface shows a more complex maze of lines, marking where jaws, antennæ, legs and feet are stowed away. He is a third of an inch long and a fiftieth thick. But above and below he wears his skeleton outside—a solid sheath of dense, hard chitin, and if we conservatively allot half of his thickness to this external armor, we have a space one hundredth of an inch into which is packed in perfect working order muscles for spinning his wings, walking, twiddling his antennæ and grinding his jaws; brain, nerves, eyes and other sense organs, mouth, stomach and intestine, and, if a lady beetle, ovaries whose scores of eggs are brought to maturity, with an intricate apparatus for depositing them. On another day I caught a wafer of an earwig whose bust measurement compared with its inch length, would, translated into human height, make a person just two inches in thickness. All the compactness of these shavings of vitality, these slivers of life, is in anticipation of the death of such a tree as this and the subsequent loosening of the bark.

Other beetles are antitheses of the first one, each a tiny cylinder with every surface rounded and every organ curved. The outer armor is a rich, glowing mahogany with a scattering of golden hairs and an absurd tail-piece, round, blunt and jagged. I did not realize the perfection of this arrangement, until, during the second week, I came upon a whole flock of these little chaps in their tunnels. After dark a flash-light showed only a tiny shaft driven into the heart of the wood, surrounded by cores of white, chewed-up wood pulp, but the moment the light struck down the hole, the faintest of shuffling could be heard by placing one’s ear close, and like magic the hole vanished. The inmate had somehow detected the unwelcome light and had hastily backed up and plugged the entrance with himself. Now, looking at the pinned insect, the funny, round, jagged end-piece, so silly and meaningless in itself, resolved into a perfection of adaptation. No one could jump his claim! Beetles like these are stolid folk, wholly lacking a sense of humor, and they go through life, deliberately, directly, with never a side-wise glance or a light thought. In all this they have much in common with turtles.

Quick as the beetles were to take advantage of the new manna, others were before them, and I believe the very first comers were small, flat, wingless roaches, which scurried away as I lifted bits of bark. Roaches form the conservative wing of the insect world, and have many characteristics of certain persecuted human races. They are found everywhere, contented with a safe, middle course of life, seldom aspiring to size or bright colors, never attacking or even defending themselves, or putting on side in their life-histories. Once a cockroach always a cockroach is their motto. They have no responsibility of grub or pupal stage, and from the Palæozoic Age, unknown millions of years ago, to the present moment when one scuttled from the flood of light which I threw into his refuge, roaches have changed but little.

After the roaches or with them, for they resent no company provided they are allowed to creep and thigmotac in safety, came the wedges and gimlets of beetles, and in the next two weeks successions of stages of these hard-backs. First all but invisible eggs, then pale grubs squirming about in the fermenting wood, and finally a dynasty when the bark catacombs were filled with groups of stiff little mummies.

I excavated the débris in a deep hollow in the tree which once had been a hundred feet above the ground, and experienced something of the thrill of those who delve into ancient cities. At the top was a layer of twigs and leaves shaken up by the concussion of the fall. An inch or two below I found many berry pits and fruit seeds and when I scooped out several handfuls there came to light a dried and shriveled carcass, unmistakable in beak and foot—a nestling toucan which had never lived to fly and yelp and pluck bright berries in the sunlight of the tree-tops. Down I went again, into the very bottom of this nest midden, and there came upon rotten chips and soft, downy feathers. Among them were two, broken, stiff tail feathers which could have come only from one bird, the giant Guiana woodpecker, almost half a yard in length, with bill of ivory, and plumage of black, scarlet and white. No one could tell whether these birds nested in this stub within the decade, or when Galileo faced the Inquisition,—for the age of the supporting limbs made such latitude possible.

Still another discovery was left in my arboreal palimpest. I was crumbling up the wood near the top of the hollow stub, where, long ago, it had been reduced by heat, water, fungi and insects to a rich, dark, pulpy mass. Suddenly, over a tiny chip, a weird little face peered at me, and a minute millipede, scurrying past, pushed over the wooden screen and exposed the quaintest being in the world. It was a doll or mummy—even the most technical scientist would admit the first, for he would call it a pupa, which was what little Roman children called their dolls. Being an average pupa it was motionless, and, propped up by accident against the dark, red background, it presented a multiple personality,—one thought of angel, curate, banker, clown, simultaneously. Around its head was an absurdly perfect replica of a halo, then came two mournfully sloped eyes, dark brown, sad, stolid; just midway down their diameter two translucent shields curved across, giving the little being the appearance of peering over horn-rimmed glasses; mouth parts were encased in crystalline coverings, a mouth which drooped at the corners—one felt that nought in past experience or future hope could ever twist that expression into a smile. Palpi were draped in each side like the side whiskers of a financier of the ’eighties. The two front legs, bent, with tips touching and elbows out, were laughably, like the comic paper idea of a country curate with finger tips spread and touching, gazing sadly over his glasses at some regretted irregularity of life. Then came the opal-sheathed wings, sweeping around in a beautiful curve across the whole of the underbody, as in old prints of guardian angels. Finally the tapering body-segments and their tip, fashioned in projecting styles. A hasty movement of mine sent down a shower of bits of wood, and buried the pupa. Carefully I uncovered him in his deep dark cavern and as I removed the last concealing chip, my little mummy gave me an unexpected surprise. From the hinder part of his body gleamed two dull lights, shining with a strong, steady glow, and illuminating the magenta walls of his sarcophagus. No wonder the appearance of these little chaps recalled most remarkable trilobite-like pupæ which I had found years ago in mid-Borneo, which proved to be firefly larvæ. I forgot all the comedy of halo, horn-glasses and finger tips, and with a little awe and much enthusiasm I watched the greenish-yellow shine. In the egg there is the first faint kindling—a dim, evanescent, rush-light glow; and here in the pupa, although it would have to wait perhaps many weeks before attaining adult beetlehood, its little lamps were trimmed and steadily alight, burning low it is true, and without the lighthouse rhythm of flash and blackness, flash and blackness. Already it was preparing for the all-important responsibility when upon the illumination would depend the chances of a mate and the future of its race.

The light of fireflies is one of the few things in this world which merit the term perfect. A gas flame is only three percent efficient, developing ninety-seven percent of useless, invisible heat or chemical rays; the blazing glare of the electric arc is only ten percent of what it ought to be, and most astonishing of all is the fact that sunshine gives off only thirty-five percent of visible light rays. Unlike Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers” the glow, deep-cloaked within the body of a firefly is wholly lacking in heat; it is one hundred percent pure flame.

I returned to the loosening bark and found that close upon the heels of the beetles came thrips, although these stout little fellows preferred the high, arched, dead branches to the main prostrate trunk. Few people have ever seen a thrips, but those who can find delightful the sound of the world itself have part compensation. When the time comes and one has seen and enjoyed a live thrips or a thousand thrips, then life will have acquired a new molecule of pleasure. If I say the word comes thrippingly to the tongue, it is only because I have just been consorting with a host of thrips, and their joy of life, their apparent love of play is infectious. Thrips are among the lesser folk of earth and if one attains the length of a third of an inch he is a Goliath of a thrips. But this, apparently like everything in nature, is comparative, for a thrips barely a fifth of an inch in length may harbor two hundred parasitic worms, who doubtless consider their host as gigantic. These tiny creatures are peculiar in many ways, as for example in their name which is both singular and plural. Also for unknown, but comparatively long periods of time, male thrips are wholly superfluous both for the continuance of the race, or companionship, or whatever other functions gentlemen thrips may be fitted to perform. In loyalty to my sex I pass this by, thoughtfully but without comment.

In the sizzling midday sun I first became aware that the era of thrips had arrived at my fallen tree. It seemed as if the samisen cicada players and myself were the only things awake in the world. The bark under my eyes suddenly assumed a salmon hue and my lens showed uncountable hosts of minute, scarlet thrips, all doing a frantic, zoroastrian dance. They were slender bits of life, with nondescript head and a tapering body looking like a string of scarlet buttons. They ran swiftly to and fro on their six legs, holding the body high aloft or thrashing it from side to side. Sometimes a half dozen thrashed together, in some diminutive wild rhythm, or two circled around each other, or antennæd some thripian scandal. Under the shoulder of one bit of bark dust three infant thrips practiced thrashing (a good tongue-twisting phrase!) until I tired of watching. All these were larvæ, or rather immature thrips, scarlet and wingless. Now every young insect with which I have ever been acquainted had thought and action only for food, but here was a whole generation of thrips—all under age—dancing and whirling about and waving their wild tails for hours during the hottest part of several days. I thought well of thrips for this unique casualness.

Every now and then an adult thrips appeared, somewhat larger, glossy black with scarlet seams and four marvellous wings. As wings they seemed hopelessly inadequate, but as ornaments they had much merit. If a crow were to shed all his wing feathers and was provided instead with four, small ostrich plumes, we would not expect him to fly. A mature thrips sports four delicate feathers with narrow shafts and wide, soft fringes down each side.

I was once astonished to see a bony horse hitched to a decrepit car, slowly traversing a cross street in New York City, and learned that it was a mere gesture, a childish fulfilling of certain legal phrases in order to hold the franchise of the horse-car line. I recalled this when I saw an adult thrips coming through the air, slowly, uncertainly, with dangling body and pitiful feather wings barely sustaining the owner. This too was a gesture, a needless effort, for he landed heavily on the same branch, quite exhausted, a few feet away from the point of departure. On foot he could have made the distance quickly and with little exertion. Again I admired the thrips, for as in his youth he had played and danced as well as eaten, so now in adult phase he made the beau geste—the pitiful clinging to the franchise of his volant ancestors. His wings might be dwarfed by disuse, frayed by degeneration, but he could still cast with shrivelled muscles a shadow of past achievements.

The coming of the thrips was sudden, their ways were inexplicable, their going wholly mysterious. One day there were uncounted millions. Shortly afterward, needing a new more notes on their activities I went out and found every one gone,—not a single one remained. In their haunts were growths of evil-looking fungi, semi-liquid drops of scarlet trembling on yellow stalks, and around and among these sinister growths crept vast numbers of extremely small mites. These—plant and animal—were in turn evanescent and lasted but two days, but the going of the thrips will never be explained,—whether by migration, poison from the omnipotent fungus, or, as with so many other peoples of earth, through enervating lives of ease.

By sense of smell I could tell that radical chemical changes were going forward in the fallen tree. At first the glade was filled with the tang of aromatic wood, the clean, fresh odor of new split plant tissues; then the sap became heated and fermentation set in. The first stages were unpleasant, musty and acrid, but finally a malty whiff developed, which during my hours of research, awoke exhilarating pre-prohibition memories. If my coarse sense could detect these successive changes, what staggering olfactory blows must have been dealt to the delicate flies which came with the first hint of ruptured plant cells. Unlike the beetles they undertook their business in life with an apparent joyousness, and like the thrips they all had an inordinate love of the dance. It is a strange thing that at carrion and decaying wood we find so much graceful and intricate action, such varied courtship, so much effort only indirectly concerned with the odorous maelstrom which has summoned them all together. The visitors to beautiful and sweet-scented flowers and fruit, on the contrary, come and sip and leave, without delay or distraction.

I soon realized that I could spend all my time for at least a year on the study of the flies alone which came to the fallen tree. For ten mornings there came hundreds of small marble-wings, which wave their two, parti-colored banners alternately about. I looked closer and saw that they were clustered in groups of six to twelve, or more usually seven to thirteen. All the fortunate ones who had secured a mate were busy every moment protecting her from roaming males. The female fly had very short legs on which she walked briskly about, searching for suitable crevices to deposit her eggs. Her mate, on his elongated legs, stalked just above her, apparently anticipating every move. The pair would progress by quick, short spurts until a wing-waving stranger hove in sight. No introduction or preliminary challenge was necessary. The newcomer rushed up and tried to butt the husband out of the way. The rightful fly would haunch his thorax and brace his legs, for all the world like a football player meeting interference. Running swiftly around, the assailant would make another attempt on the opposite side. Meanwhile the female, apparently oblivious of all this strife on the second floor, went calmly on her way, making the engagement very confused and ineffective by thus constantly shifting the field of battle.

We should emphasize this admirable, domestic preoccupation to the full, for otherwise it pains me to record a lamentable lack of Lucystonism. The lady flies seemed indeed to care little what might be the outcome of the battles. When, now and then, her faithful guardian was overthrown and pushed into outer loneliness, the new protector was accepted without demur. In fact her bark-searching position allowed her glimpses of little more than the ankles of her Lord and Master, and it must indeed be difficult to be deeply moved emotionally by choice of ankles alone.

The battling of the mates was as it should be and has been since the beginning of time—brave gentlemen waging war over the weaker sex, but what shall we say of another group of seven where the seventh was an ignored wall flower! The poor little virgin did not accept her neglect in humble resignation, but proved herself a militant feminist, and made one attempt after another to drag her more fortunate sisters from the protection of their towering mates. She was always rebuffed and the last I saw of her, she was washing her face and hands, fly-fashion, after an ignominious tumble into a thimbleful of dirty water, which is fly-size for lake. How I longed to tell her of a scene being enacted only a few inches away, where I observed the meeting of two lonely bachelors. They began a most terrific head-pulling contest, until finally they separated unharmed and quite exhausted, and went peacefully off, perhaps realizing that after all in their case there was nothing in particular to fight about.

From a fly’s eye height I looked down the prostrate trunk with twenty or thirty groups of tussling marble-wings in sight, their earnest but futile efforts to injure one another very comic to my eyes, but to them as serious as only fate can be serious.

Other flies had very different ensigns and dances. In one the wings were divided lengthwise, the front half being black, the rear transparent. These wandered singly over the bark and as they went, they swung first to one side, then to the other, at each swing opening out the wing on that side. The movement was exactly that of a skater taking long, oblique strokes, and swinging his arms far out to the side (a simile which could have no meaning for any native of this country). When two flies meet they do the outer edge around one another, closing in to battle if of the same sex, or to courtship if of the opposite. Others are perky peacock flies, with head and tail lifted in a position of eternal alertness, who slither along without perceptible individual leg motion, going sideways or backwards with equal ease. Their battle technique is like that of the bulldog, leaping from a distance, but the ferocity of their intent far exceeds their power of injury, and they bounce harmlessly off each other. They remind me of

“Empusa’s crew, so naked-new, they may not face the fire,
But weep that they bin too small to sin to the height of their desire.”

The creatures who come to gnaw and chew the dead wood are only one component of the complex maelstrom of life, siphoned hither by the smell of sap and decaying bark. One day an army of white fungus tents sprang up on a rotting branch, and a foot away even my poor human sense could detect a mildewy odor from them. Hundreds of insects scattered far and wide through the jungle, to whom the infinitely more powerful sap smell had meant nothing, were now vitalized into instant action, and there came into existence a whirlpool within the maelstrom. Great wine-colored beetles and smaller ones of various pigments, gathered in scores, dancing flies which were never seen on bark or carrion were summoned, and strange short-winged beings with scarlet tips to their slender bodies which they waved in mid-air like mock torches. As I knew from past experience the delicate, lace umbrellas would last only three days, and I watched with interest the race which these vital beings ran against time. No tunnels or mines for them, no prolonged courtship, but a quick mating and depositing of eggs which became grubs or maggots almost on the instant. Two days later, grubs were eating and molting with frenzied haste, and on the third day, when their nutritious shelters blackened and melted away, the larvæ dropped with them into the mat of leaf mold beneath.

The dilettante flies of the fungus puzzled me. Theirs were aerial dances, and for hour after hour they swung and feinted, swooped or hung like motionless motes. This mystery was solved when I took a number of the beetle pupæ to the laboratory and confined them in a glass observation dish. In a few days, instead of beetles, out came dancing flies. No wonder they had no need of haste; as parasites they could batten at leisure on others’ labors. I looked askance at the rich regard of life and the new generation granted to what my Puritan fore-fathers would have decried as sinful, ungodly gaiety.

Returning again to my bark I found a hundred similar cases. Spiders and wasps and many other enemies were gathering. Day by day the chains of life were forged longer and longer. Within my first week at the tree I could write the following from direct observation:

This is the bird
That caught the lizard
That ate the wasp
That stung the spider
That sucked the fly
That killed the grub
The son of the beetle
That gnawed the tree
That fell in the storm at Kartabo.

Or to be more technically explicit:

This is the Attila
That caught the Cnemidophorus
That ate the Pompilid
That stung the Ctenid
That sucked the Tachinid
That killed the immature Coleopteron
The son of the Elater
That gnawed the Vochisia
That fell in the meteorological disturbance of Kartabo.

And so the wonderful adventure went on. It had happened a thousand thousand times, and for uncounted miles in all directions were untold numbers of these trees whose lives would sooner or later terminate. My Etaballi, whose roots reached deep into the ground, and more than seven centuries into time, was dissolving. Bark and branch, sap and heartwood, by the alchemy of life were being rekneaded into a host of lesser beings—crawling, flying, dull and brilliant, hard and soft, clever and stupid, and as these poured forth from crevice or tunnel, cocoon or pupa, and their gauzy wings dried, their armor crystallized into malachite or emerald, there confronted them enemies in every guise and form. And presently the substance of the Etaballi, translated into the bodies of the borers, was resurrected into spider, lizard and bird.

Now and then I turn back to my journal for May the twelfth, and read the sentence: “The giant Etaballi fell last night.” Science, Religion, Philosophy—how clear all these would be if we could solve this one mystery. I had hoped for some faint clew to the meaning of it all. I left my tree for the last time certain only of the profound inadequacy of my human mind.