Part 14

Just, indeed, and legitimate, is the traveller's hesitancy at the entrance of these fearful forests where Tropical Nature, under forms oftentimes of great beauty, wages her keenest strife. It is the place to pause when one knows that the most formidable defence of the Spanish fortresses is found in a simple grove of cactus, which, planted around them, speedily swarms with serpents. You frequently detect there a strong odour of musk, a nauseous, a sinister odour. It tells you that you are treading on the very dust of the dead: the wreck of animals which possessed that peculiar savour, tiger-cats, and crocodiles, vultures, vipers, and rattle-snakes.

The peril is greatest, perhaps, in those virgin-forests where everything is eloquent of life, where nature's seething crucible eternally boils and bubbles.

Here and there their living shadows thicken with a threefold canopy--the colossal trees, the entwining and interlacing lianas, and herbs of thirty feet high with magnificent leaves. At intervals, these herbs sink into the ancient primeval slime; while, at the height of a hundred feet, the lofty and puissant flowers break through the deep night to display themselves in the burning sun.

In the clearances--the narrow alleys where his rays penetrate--there is a scintillation, an eternal murmuring, of beetles, butterflies, humming-birds, and fly-catchers--gems animated and mobile, which incessantly flutter to and fro. At night--a far more astonishing scene!--begins the fairylike illumination of shining fire-flies, which, by thousands of millions, weave the most fantastic arabesques, dazzling fantasias of light, magical scrolls of fire.

With all this splendour there lurks in the lower levels an obscure race, a hideous and foul world of caymans, of water-serpents. To the trunks of enormous trees the fanciful orchids, the well-loved daughters of fever, the children of a miasmatic atmosphere, quaint vegetable butterflies, suspend themselves in seeming flight. In these murderous solitudes they take their delight, and bathe in the putrid swamps, drink of the death which inspires them with vitality, and, by the caprice of their unheard-of colours, make sport of the intoxication of nature.

Do not yield--defend yourself--let not the fatal charm bow down your sinking head. Awake! arouse! under a hundred forms the danger surrounds you. Yellow fever lurks beneath these flowers, and the black vomito; reptiles trail at your feet. If you gave way to fatigue, a noiseless army of implacable anatomists would take possession of you, and with a million lancets convert all your tissues into an admirable bit of lacework, a gauze veil, a breath, nothingness.

To this all-absorbing abyss of devouring death, of famished life, what does God oppose to re-assure us? Another abyss, not less famished, thirsty of life, but less implacable to man. I see the Bird, and I breathe!

What! is it in you, ye living flowers, ye winged topazes and sapphires, that I shall find my safety? Your saving vehemence it is, excited to the purification of this superabundant and furious fecundity, that alone renders practicable the entrance to this dangerous realm of faëry. Were you absent, jealous Nature would perform her mysterious labour of solitary fermentation, and not even the most daring savant would venture upon observing her. Who am I here? And how shall I defend myself? What power would be sufficient? The elephant, the ancient mammoth, would perish defenceless against a million of deadly darts. Who will brave them? The eagle or the condor? No; a people far more mighty--the intrepid and the innumerable legion of fly-catchers.

Humming-birds, colibris, and their brothers of every hue, live with impunity in these gleaming solitudes where danger lurks on every side, among the most venomous insects, and upon those mournful plants whose very shade kills. One of them (crested, green and blue), in the Antilles, suspends his nest to the most terrible and fatal of trees, to the spectre whose fatal glance seems to freeze your blood for ever, to the deadly manchineal.

Wonder of wonders! It is this parroquet which boldly crops the fruits of the fearful tree, feeds upon them, assumes their livery, and appears, from its sinister green, to draw the metallic lustre of its triumphant wings.

Life in these winged flames, the humming-bird and the colibri, is so glowing, so intense, that it dares every poison. They beat their wings with such swiftness that the eye cannot count the pulsations; yet, meanwhile, the bird seems motionless completely inert and inactive. He maintains a continual cry of hour! hour! until, with head bent, he plunges the dagger of his beak to the bottom of the flowers, exhausting their sweets and the tiny insects among them; all, too, with a motion so rapid that nothing can be compared to it--a sharp, choleric, extremely impatient motion, sometimes transported by fury--against what? against a great bird, which he pursues and hunts to the death; against an already rifled blossom, which he cannot forgive for not having waited for him. He rends it, devastates it, and scatters abroad its petals.

Leaves, as we know, absorb the poisons in the atmosphere; flowers exhale them. These birds live upon flowers, upon these pungent flowers, on their sharp and burning juices, in a word, on poisons. From their acids they seem to derive their sharp cry and the everlasting agitation of their angry movements. These contribute, and perhaps much more directly than light, to enrich them with those strange reflects which set one thinking of steel, gold, precious stones, rather than of plumage or blossoms.

The contrast between them and man is violent. The latter, throughout these regions, perishes or decays. Europeans who, on the borders of these forests, attempt the cultivation of the cacao and other colonial products, quickly succumb. The natives languish, enfeebled and attenuated. That part of earth where man sinks nearest the level of the beast is the scene of triumph of the bird, where his extraordinary pomp of attire, luxurious and superabundant, has justly won for him the name of bird of paradise.

It matters not! Whatever their plumage, their hues, their forms, this great winged populace, the conqueror and devourer of insects, and, in its stronger species, the eager hunter of reptiles, sweeps over all the land as man's pioneer, purifying and making ready his abode. They swim intrepidly on this vast sea of death--this hissing, croaking, crawling sea--on the terrible, miasmatic vapours, inhaling and defying them.

It is thus that the great sanitary work, the time-old combat of the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the world uninhabitable by man, is continued throughout the earth. Quadrupeds, and even man, take in it but a feeble part. It is ever the war of the winged Hercules.

To him, indeed, inhabited regions owe all their security. In the furthest Africa, at the Cape, the good serpent-eater defends man against the reptiles. Peaceable in disposition and gentle in aspect, he seems to engage without passion in his dangerous encounters. The gigantic jabiru does not labour less in the deserts of Guiana, where man as yet ventures not to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately inundated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the sunshine with a horrible population of monsters as yet unknown, possess, as their superior inhabitant, their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle, retaining some relics of the ancient weapons with which the primeval birds were very probably provided in their struggle against the dragon. These are a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings. With the first it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its enemy. The others serve as a guard and defence: the reptile which hugs and folds it in its embrace, at the same time plunges into its own body these keen darts, and by its constriction, its own actual exertions, is poniarded.

This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of the ancient worlds and a surviving witness to forgotten encounters, which is born, lives, and dies in the slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct raises and supports him above it. His grand and formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedéa cornuta), as he is called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, a species which is not divided.

Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight together; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks: "Sic vivendum, sic pereundum,"--"To life, to death." When this tender companionship, this consoling succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to protract his existence; he rejoins the loved one which he cannot survive.

PURIFICATION.

In the morning--not at the first blush of dawn, but when the sun already mounts the horizon--and at the very moment when the cocoa-nut tree unfolds its leaves, the urubus (or little vultures), perched in knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their brilliant ruby eyes. The toils of the day demand them. In indolent Africa a hundred villages invoke them; in drowsy America, south of Panama or Caraccas, they, swiftest of cleansers, must sweep out and purify the town before the Spaniard rises, before the potent sun has stirred the carcass and the mass of rottenness into fermentation. If they failed a single day, the country would become a desert.

When it is evening-time in America--when the urubu, his day's work ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree--the minarets of Asia sparkle in the morning's rays. Not less punctual than their American brothers, vultures, crows, storks, ibises, set out from their balconies on their various missions: some to the fields, to destroy the insect and the serpent; others, alighting in the streets of Alexandria or Cairo, hasten to accomplish their task of municipal scavengering. Did they but take the briefest holiday the plague would soon be the only inhabitant of the country.

Thus, in the two hemispheres, the great work of public health is performed with solemn and wonderful regularity. If the sun is punctual in fertilizing life, these scavengers--sworn in and licensed by nature--are no less punctual in withdrawing from his rays the shocking spectacle of death.

Seemingly they are not ignorant of the importance of their functions. Approach them, and they will not retreat. When they have received the signal from their comrades the crows, which often precede them and point out their prey, you will see the vultures descend in a cloud from one knows not whence, as if from heaven! Naturally solitary, and without communication--mostly silent--they flock to the banquet by the hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They quarrel not among themselves, they take no heed of the passer-by. They imperturbably accomplish their functions in a stern kind of gravity; with decency and propriety; the corpse disappears, the skin remains. In a moment a frightful mass of putrid fermentation, which man had never dared to draw near, has vanished--has re-entered the pure and wholesome current of universal life.

It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are, to regard them in their true rôle, as the beneficent cressets of living fire through which nature passes everything that might corrupt the higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an admirable apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without ever rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself. Let them devour a hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the gulls (those vultures of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel! They will dissect it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers. As long as aught of it remains they remain; fire at them, and they intrepidly return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges the vulture on the carcass of a hippopotamus. Levaillant killed one of these birds, which, though mortally wounded, still plucked away scraps of flesh. Was he starving? Not he; food was found in his stomach weighing six pounds!

This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their neck.

Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the ministers of death; but of death tranquil and natural, and not of murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at bottom innocent--rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs everything, they are subject, more than any other beings, to general influences; are swayed by the conditions of atmosphere and temperature; essentially hygrometrical, they are living barometers. The morning's humidity burdens their heavy wings; the weakest prey at that hour might pass with impunity before them. So great is their subjection to external nature, that the American species, perched in uniform ranks on the cocoa-nut branches, follow, as we have said, the exact hour when the leaves fold up, retire to rest long before evening, and only awake when the sun, already high above the horizon, re-opens the leaves of the tree and their white, heavy eyelids.

These admirable agents of that beneficent chemistry which preserves and balances life here below, labour for us in a thousand places where we ourselves may never penetrate. We clearly discern their presence and their services in our towns; but no one can measure the full extent of their benefits in those deserts where every breath of the winds is death. In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under the impure shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the corpses of two worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the great purifying army seconds and shortens the action both of the waves and the insects. Woe to the inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown toil ceased but for an instant!

In America these public benefactors are protected by the law.