Part 9
One could watch the changing seasons of the great tropical jungle from the same wonder windows of Kalacoon. A dull rose suffused the tree-tops, deepening day by day, and finally the green appeared, picked out everywhere by a myriad blossoms--magenta, mauve, maroon, carmine, rose, salmon-pink. Yet the glass showed only top-gallant foliage of wilted, parti-colored leaves. Illusion upon illusion: these were not wilted, but newborn leaves which thus in their spring glory rivaled our autumnal tints. One never forgot the day when the first mora burst into full bloom--a great mound of lavender pigment, swung nearly two hundred feet in mid-air, dominating all the surrounding jungle growth. This was the lush, prodigal way in which the tropics announced spring.
Whether I had spent the day in hard tramping or stalking in the jungle, or at my laboratory table trying to disentangle the whys and wherefores from the physical skein of my specimens, toward sunset I always went down to the cement floor of an orchid-house long fallen in decay. This was under the open sky, and from this spot on the highest hilltop in all this region, I watched the end of the day.
No sunset should ever be described, and the Kalacoon sunsets were too wonderful for aught but wordless reverence. They were explosions of wild glory, palettefuls of unheard-of pigments splashed across the sky, and most bewildering because they were chiefly in the east or north. This evening on which I write was sealed with a sunset of negligible yellow, but the east was a splendor of forest fires and minarets, great golden castles and pale-green dragons and snow-capped mountains all conceived and molded from glorious tumbled cloud-masses, and ultimately melting back into them again. The moriche orioles met the beauty of the heavens with their silver notes, and as the sky cooled, there arose the sweet, trilled cadence of the little tinamou heralding the voices of night. The silvery collared nighthawks began their eternal questioning _who-are-you! who-are-you!_ and the coolness banished all thought of the blistering sunshine now pouring down upon the waters of the Pacific.
Not until later, when the night-life was fairly under way, and all the beings of the sun hidden and asleep, did the deep bass rumble of the big toads commence, and the tinkling chorus of the little frogs. Last of all came the essence of the nocturnal--the sound furthest removed from day. All other voices seemed to become for an instant hushed, and the poor-me-one spoke--a wail which rose, trembled, and broke into a falling cadence of hopeless sighs.
And now, with the crescent moon writing its heliograph cipher upon the water, a new sound arose, low and indistinct, lost for a moment, then rising and lost again. Then it rang out rich and harmonious, the full-throated paddling chanty of a gold-boat of blacks coming down river with their tiny pokes of glittering dust. It tore at the heart-strings of memory, and in its wildness, its sad minor strain, was strangely moving. The steersman set the words and in high, quavering tones led the chorus, which broke in, took up the phrase, different each time, and repeated it twice over, with a sweet pathos, a finality of cadence which no trained white chorus could reproduce.
There was much of savage African rhythm in these boat-songs, and instead of the drum of the Zulus came the regular _thump-thump, thump-thump_, of paddles on the thwarts. They were paddling slowly, weary and tired after a long day of portaging, passing with the tide down to Bartica. Then on to a short, exciting period of affluence in Georgetown, after which they would return for another six months in the gold bush. They were realizing their little El Dorados in these very waters more successfully than Sir Walter Raleigh was able to do.
I have said that the wonder windows would take one to the Far East; and hardly had the gold-boat passed out of hearing when the never-to-be-forgotten _beat-beat-beat-beat_ of a tom-tom rose without hint or introduction, and straightway the cecropias became deodars and the palms dwarfed to _pîpuls_ and _sal_, and the smells of the Calcutta bazaars and the dust of Agra caravans lived again in that sound.
A voice in soft Hindustani tones was heard below--the low, inarticulate phrases framing themselves into a gentle _honk-honka, honk, honk-honka_. Then, still out of sight, came a voice on the stairway: "Salaam, sahib, will sahib come see dance and see wedding?"
The sahib would; and I followed the wavering lantern of the bride's father down the steep, rocky path which, at the water's edge, turned toward the half-dozen huts of the East Indians.
For a week the coolie women had done no work in the fields, but had spent much of their time squatted in chanting circles. I learned that a marriage was to take place, and, to my surprise, the bride proved to be Budhany, the little child who brought us milk each day from the only cow south of the Mazaruni. Another day, as I passed to the tent-boat, I saw the groom, naked save for his breech-clout, looking very foolish and unhappy, seated on a box in the center of the one short street, and surrounded by six or eight women, all who could reach him rigorously slapping him and rubbing him with oil from head to foot. Every evening, to the dull monotone of a tom-tom, the shrill voices of the women were carried up to Kalacoon; but tonight a louder, more sonorous drum was audible and the moaning whine of a short, misshapen Hindi violin.
Amid a murmur of salaams we seated ourselves on grocery boxes while the audience ranged itself behind. In the flickering light of torches I recognized my friends one by one. There was Guiadeen who had brought in the first ant-eater; he seated us. Then Persaïd of the prominent teeth, who had tried to cheat me of a sixpence already paid for a mouse-opossum with her young. Persaïd gave us only a hasty salaam, for he was a very busy and fussy master of ceremonies. From behind came the constant droning chant of the priest, lingeringly reading from a tattered Pali volume, an oil torch dripping close to his white turban. His voice was cracked, but his intonation was careful and his words well articulated. The day before we had greeted him and chaffingly admonished him to marry them well.
"God only could promise that," he had replied with a quick smile.
Others of the little village I knew: Rahim the milkman, and Mahabol, with the head and beard of a Sikh on the legs of a Bengalee, and a thin Bengalee at that. The audience which pressed close behind, looked and smelled Calcutta and Darjeeling, and a homesickness which was pain came over me, to be once more among the great Himalayas. The flickering torch showed all my retinue threaded along the outer rim of onlookers; my following who formed a veritable racial tower of Babel. There was Nupee the Akawai, and Vingi the Machusi and Semmi the Wapiano--red Indians from forest and savannah. Near them the broad, black African face of little Mame, all eyes and mouth in the dim light. Then de Freitas the Portuguese, and all the others of less certain lineage.
Meanwhile Persaïd had brought forth an oily, vile-smelling liquid with which he coated a square yard of earth, and then with pounded maize and rice he marked out a mystic figure--two squares and diagonals. As the ceremony went on I lost much of the significance, and the coolies themselves seemed very vague. They were all of low caste and preserved more of the form than knowledge of the intricate rites.
We were at the groom's end of the absurd street, and before long Madhoo himself appeared and was led a few steps away by his female tormentors. This time they scrubbed and washed and rinsed him with water, and then dressed him in a soft white waist-cloth draped coolie-wise. Then a long tight-sleeved pink dress was pulled with much difficulty over his head. Madhoo now looked like a woman dressed in a fashion long extinct. Next, a pink turban was wound wonderfully about his head and he was led to one side of the rice figure, where he sat down on a low stool.
Sam, my black factotum, sat close to me, translating when my slender knowledge of Hindustani gave out. Suddenly he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. I saw that he was staring at the groom, the whites of his eyes glistening in astonishment.
"Chief," he whispered at last, "see where my socks, my shoes!"
And sure enough, we saw Persaïd pulling the purple-striped socks, which had been Sam's delight, over the unaccustomed ankles of the groom. These were followed by cheap white tennis shoes, causing another ejaculation on the part of Sam.
"Hello, shoes!" I heard him murmur to himself.
Sam always personified those parts of his environment which touched his feelings most deeply, whether clothes, curries, thorns, or gravitation. When unloading the tent-boat a few nights before, he had left his shoes on the bank; and during a trip up the hill to Kalacoon they had vanished. For a moment I was not sure that Sam, like the hero in some melodrama, would not rise and forbid the marriage. Then I heard him chuckling and knew that his sense of humor and regard for our evening's entertainment had nobly overcome what must have been a very real desire to possess again those gorgeous articles of attire. And, besides, I felt sure that the morrow would witness a short, pithy interview regarding these same articles, between Sam and either Madhoo or Persaïd.
Clad now in this added glory, the groom waited, like the tethered heifer, looking furtively at his circle of well-wishers. His little, shriveled mother came and squatted close behind him, toboggan-fashion, and flung a fold of her cloth over his back. Then she waved various things three times over his head: a stone grain-crusher, a brass bowl of water, and tossed rice and pellets of dough in the four directions. Red paint was put on her toes and feet and caste marks on her son.
Meanwhile the dancer had begun and his musicians were in full swing; but of these I shall speak later. The groom was backed into an elaborate head-dress, a high, open-work affair of long wired beads with dangling artificial flowers. First it was placed on the mother's head and then on the turban of the long-suffering young man. An outflaring of torches and a line of white-robed and turbaned coolies from the other end of the street of six houses roused the groom and his friends to new activity. He climbed upon one of the men, straddling his neck, and what appeared to be a best man, or boy, mounted another human steed. They were then carried the few feet to the house of the bride, the shiny, black-rubber soles of the filched tennis shoes sticking absurdly out in front. A third man carried a bundle,--very small, to which no one seemed to attach much importance,--which was said to contain clothes for the bride.
After an undignified dismounting, the groom squatted by a new rice-and-maize square and removed his shoes and socks, to his own evident relief and Sam's renewed excitement. Then coppers passed to the priest and many symbolic gifts were put in the groom's hands; some of these he ate, and others he laid in the square. Whenever money passed, it was hidden under sweet-smelling frangipani blossoms, or temple-flowers, as they are called in India. The bride's mother came out and performed numerous rites to and around the groom; finally, a small person in white also achieved one or two unimportant things and disappeared.
While we waited for some culminating event, the groom stood up, skilfully lit a cigarette through the meshes of the dangling head-dress, and walked with his friends to the porch of the opposite house, where he squatted on the earthen floor in the semi-darkness. Then came Persaïd and announced, "Marriage over; man wait until daylight, then carry off bride to honeymoon house"--the 'dobe hut plastered all over with the imprints of hundreds of white, outspread fingers and palms.
The marriage over! This was a shock. The critical moment had come and passed, eluding us, and Budhany, the little bride, had appeared and vanished so hurriedly that we had not recognized her.
The dancer had throughout been the focus of interest for me. There was no perfunctory work or slurring over of the niceties of his part, and his sincerity and absorption inspired and stimulated his four assistants until they fairly lost themselves in _abandon_ to the rhythm and the chant. His name was Gokool and he had come up from one of the great coastal sugar plantations. Nowhere outside of India had I seen such conscientious devotion to the dancer's work.
Rammo the tent-boat captain played the cretinous violin; he it was who never tired of bringing us giant _buprestids_ and rails' eggs, and whose reward was to watch and listen to our typewriter machine through all the time that he dared prolong his visit to our laboratory. Dusráte played the tiny clinking cymbals; Mattora, he of the woman's voice, held the torch always close before the dancer's face; while the drummer--the most striking of them all--was a stranger, Omeer by name. Omeer, with the double-ended tom-tom in a neck-sling, followed Gokool about, his eyes never leaving the latter's face. Little by little he became wholly rapt, absorbed, and his face so expressive, so working with emotion, that I could watch nothing else.
Gokool was a real actor, a master of his art, with a voice deep, yet shifting easily to falsetto quavers, and with the controlled ability of emphasizing the slightest intonations and delicate semi-tones which made his singing full of emotional power. He got his little orchestra together, patting his palms in the _tempo_ he wished, then broke suddenly into the wailing, dynamic, abrupt phrases which I knew so well. Had not my servants droned them over my camp-fires from Kashmir to Myitkyina, and itinerant ballad-singers chanted them from Ceylon to the Great Snows!
Gokool's dress was wide and his skirt flaring, so that, when he whirled, it stood straight out, and it was stiff with embroidery and scintillating with tinsel. From his sleek, black hair came perfume, that musky, exciting scent which alone would summon India to mind as with a rub of Aladdin's lamp. His anklets and bracelets clinked as he moved; and suddenly, and to our Western senses always unexpectedly, he would begin the swaying, reeling motion, almost that of a cobra in hood. Then after several more phrases, chanted with all the fire and temperamental vigor which marks Hindu music, he would start the rigid little muscular steps which carried him over the ground with no apparent effort, though all the time he was wholly tense and working up into that ecstasy which would obsess him more and more. His songs were of love and riches and war, and all the things of life which can mean so little to these poor coolies.
Exhausted at last, he stopped; and I found that I too suddenly relaxed--that I had been sitting with every muscle tense in sympathy. Gokool came and gave me a salaam, and as he turned away for a hand-hollowed puff of hemp I spoke a little word of thanks in his own tongue.
He looked back, not believing that he had heard aright. I repeated it and asked if he knew "Dar-i-Parhadoor," this being my phonetic spelling of a certain ballad of ancient India.
"Koom, sahib," he said; and kneeling touched my foot with his head.
Then we talked as best we could, and I found he was from the Hills, and knew and adored the Parhadoor, and was even more homesick for the Great Snows than I. But once something had snapped in his head and he could not work in the sun, and could dance but rarely; so now he earned money for his daily rice only and could never return.
Then he gathered his musicians once more and sang part of the majestic Parhadoor, which is full of romance and royal wars, and has much to do with the wonders of the early Rajputs. And he sang more to me than to the groom, who neither looked nor listened, but kept busy with his clothes.
Out of all the pressing throng a little coolie boy came and squatted close, and his eyes grew large as he listened to the tale, and from time to time he smiled at me. He had once brought me a coral snake, but I could not call him by name. Now I knew him for the one unlike the rest,--worthy perhaps of a place in my memory roll of supercoolies,--who worked at weeding day after day, like the rest of the men, but who thought other thoughts than those of Mahabol and Guiadeen. I wished I had known of him sooner.
So Gokool sang to us two, the coolie boy and me, a song of ancient India, and danced it by moonlight here in this American jungle, and I dotted his dancing circle with pence, and a few bits, and even a shilling or two. And Gokool thanked me with dignity. And his face will long remain vivid, tense with feeling, forgetful of all but the loud-cadenced phrases, the quavering chant which broke in and out of falsetto so subtlely that no Western voice may imitate it. And I like to think that he enjoyed dancing for a sahib who loved Lucknow and the old ballads. And so we parted.
* * * * *
After I cached the vampire lantern behind its intrenched bulwark of books and magazines, I leaned far out of a window and thought over the night's happenings. It was long after midnight, and the steady throb of the tom-tom still kept rhythm with the beat of my temples, and I gave myself up to the lure of the hypnotic monotone.
One thought kept recurring--of the little girl far back in the dark depths of the wattled hut. She was so little, so childish, and her part that evening had been so slight and perfunctory, not as much as that of any of the other women and girls who had slovenly performed the half-understood rites. She had brought us milk regularly, and smiled when we wished salaam to her.
She knew less of India than I did. Guiana, this alien land, as humid and luxuriant as the Great Plains were dry and parched--this was her native country. And this evening was her supreme moment; yet her part in it had not seemed fair. She would have liked so much to have worn that pink dress which made her future husband a caricature; she would have adored to place the shining, tinseled head-dress on her black hair--more with a child's delight than a woman's. And now she would live in a house of her own, and not a play-house, and obey this kind-faced young man--young, but not in comparison with her, whose father he could have been. And she would have anklets and bracelets and a gorgeous nose-button if he could save enough shillings,--I almost said rupees,--and ultimately she would go and cut grass with the other women, and each day take her little baby astride her hip down to the water and wash it, as she, so very short a time ago, had been washed.
And so, close to the wonder windows, we had seen a marriage of strange peoples, who were yet of our own old Aryan stock; whose ceremonies were already ancient when the Christians first kept faith, now transported to a new land where life was infinitely easier for them than in their own overcrowded villages; immigrants to the tropical hinterland where they rubbed elbows with idle Africans and stolid Red Indians. And I was glad of all their strange symbolic doings, for these showed imagination and a love of the long past in time and the distant in space.
I wished a good wish for Budhany, our little milkmaid, and forgot all in the sound, dreamless sleep which comes each night at Kalacoon.
VIII
THE CONVICT TRAIL
I am thinking of a very wonderful thing and words come laggardly. For it is a thing which more easily rests quietly in the deep pool of memory than stirred up and crystalized into words and phrases. It is of the making of a new trail, of the need and the planning and the achievement, of the immediate effects and the possible consequences. For the effects became manifest at once, myriad, unexpected, some sinister, others altogether thrilling and wholly delightful to the soul of a naturalist. And now, many months after, they are still spreading, like a forest fire which has passed beyond control. Only in this case the land was no worse and untold numbers of creatures were better off because of our new trail.
Of the still more distant consequences I cannot write, for the book of the future is tightly sealed. But we may recall that a trail once was cut through coarse, high grass and belts of cedar, which in time became the Appian Way. And a herd of aurochs breasting in single file dense shrubby oaks and heather toward a salt lick may well have foreshadowed Regent Street; the Place d'Etoile was perhaps first adumbrated by wild boars concentrating on a root-filled marsh. And why should not the Indian trail which became a Dutch road and our Fifth Avenue, have had its first hint in a moose track down the heart of a wooded island, leading to some hidden spring!
We left our boats stranded on the Mazaruni River bank and climbed the steep ascent to our new home in the heart of British Guiana. Our outfit was unpacked, and the laboratory and kitchen and bedrooms in the big Kalacoon house were at last more than names.
And now we surveyed our little kingdom. One path led down to our boats, another meandered eastwards through the hills. But like the feathered end of the magnetic arrow, we drifted as with one will to the south. Here at the edge of our cleared compound we were confronted by a tangle. It was not very high--twenty feet or so--but dense and unbroken. Like newly trapped creatures we paced back and forth along it looking for an opening. It was without a break. We examined it more closely and saw a multitude of slender, graceful cane stems hung with festoons and grass-like drapery. One of us seized a wisp of this climbing grass and pulled downward. When he dropped it his hand dripped blood. He might as well have run a scroll saw over his fingers. The jungle had shown its teeth.
We laughed and retreated to the upper floor for consultation. The sight we saw there decided us. In the distance "not too far," to use the hopelessly indefinite Guiana vernacular, high over the tumbled lower growths towered the real jungle--the high bush. This was the edge of that mighty tropical ocean of foliage, that sea of life with its surface one hundred, two hundred feet above the earth, stretching unbroken to the Andes: leagues of unknown wonderland. And here we were, after thousands of miles of voyaging to study the life of this great jungle, to find our last few yards blocked by a mass of vegetation. There was no dissenting voice. We must cut a trail, and at once, straight to the jungle.
Before we begin our trail, it will be wise to try to understand this twenty-foot tangle, stretching almost a mile back from Kalacoon. Three years before it was pure jungle. Then man came with ax and saw and fire and one by one the great giants were felled--mora, greenheart, crabwood--each crashing its way to earth after centuries of upward growth. The underbrush in the dark, high jungle is comparatively scanty. Light-starved and fungus-plagued, the shrubs and saplings are stunted and weak. So when only the great stumps were left standing, the erstwhile jungle showed as a mere shambles of raw wood and shriveled foliage. After a time fire was applied, and quickly, as in the case of resinous trees, or with long, slow smolderings of half-rotted, hollow giants, the huge boles were consumed.