Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/509

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As for the soil it is needless to think of looking at it; it lies as far below us as the bottom of the sea; it disappeared ever so long ago, under the heaping of debris, under a sort of manure that has been acummulating there since creation; you sink into it as into slime; you walk upon petrified trunks in a dust that has no name. Here indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable decrepitude signifies; a lurid light—as wan at noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confounds forms and lends them a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm which is not silence (for the ear fancies it can hear the great movements of composition and decomposition perpetually going on within) tends to inspire you with the old mysterious horror which the ancients felt in the primitive forests of Germany and Gaul.

Hearn adds:

But the sense of awe inspired by the view of a tropical forest is unutterably greater than any mystical fear which any wooded wilderness of the north could ever have inspired. The very brilliancy of these colors—that seem preternatural to northern eyes—is terrifying; but the vastness of the mile-broad and mile-high masses of frondage, their impenetrability, the violet blackness of the few rare apertures in their perpendicular facades where mountain torrents break through to the sun, and their enormous murmurs, made up of a million crawling, creeping, crumbling sounds—all combine to produce the conception of a creative force that appalls. Man feels here like an insect, fears like an insect ever on the alert for merciless enemies. To enter these green abysses without a guide were madness; even with the best of guides it is perilous. Nature is dangerous here; the powers that build here are also the powers that putrefy. Here life and death are perpetually interchanging office in the never-ceasing transformation of force, melting down and reshaping living substances simultaneously within the same awful crucible. There are trees distilling venom; there are plants that have fangs; there are perfumes that affect the brain; there are cold green creepers whose touch consumes the flesh like fire, while in all the recesses and the shadows is a swarming of unfamiliar life, beautiful or hideous, insect, reptile, bird, interwarring, drowning, devouring, preying. Strange spiders of burning colors, immense lizards, searibs cuirassed in all tints of metal, humming-birds plumaged in all splendor of jeweled radiance, flies that flash like fire, centipedes of gigantic growth. And the lord of all these, the despot of these vast domains is the terrible Fer de lance. . ..

Here, then, is unlimited food, abundant moisture, warmth and light, and no wonder animal life has grown apace, multiplied and modified its form—and adapted itself to forest conditions.

Along this forest route come certain strange, peculiar molluscs, which far from the native haunts of their allies have succeeded in establishing themselves in apparently successful occupation against more active forms. Insects, unnumbered, occupying every part from solid wood of the tree heart to outermost bark or leaf, a few fishes even leave their water haunts for temporary quarters up a tree, and frogs are here to stay, while snakes, lizards, chameleons, are at home awaiting callers. To birds the trees become a most natural harbor and home to rest, to nest, to eat and die. Ungainly sloths, helpless elsewhere,