A Midnight Beach-Combing
I
A TROPICAL night may be quiet and calm, and yet full of a strange restlessness. It was such a one when I lay in my bathing-suit close to the gray granite of Boom-boom Point, and watched the low-hung North Star twinkling through the fretwork of mangrove roots. Three great planets added their separate lustre — Mars overhead, in the very heart of Scorpio, Jupiter well down to the west, and Venus just setting, shining with the light of a half-moon. It was, however, predominantly a night of the Milky Way. The great luminous highway stretched from horizon to horizon, illuminating hundreds of the tiny mica facets on my rocky couch. Great Cygnus flew slowly, majestically, along the glowing path, and Pegasus reared his head just above the horizon.
Has the composite light of these myriad stars the same sinister psychic effect as the moon rays? Else, why were I and so many creatures restless? Only the giant tree-frogs, the Maximas, wahrooked in endless, stoical reiteration, unaffected by stars or planets, as endless as an after-dinner speech, and as unintelligible. Now and then a trio of Typhon’s toads exploded in a short, hysterical outburst, as if intercalating ‘Hear! Hear!' or ‘Cut it out!’ — a very impudent, understandable, nervous protest against the brainfever repetitions of the great frogs.
I was ready for something unusual, and it came — merely a sound, but one which will probably be as mysterious on the day of my death as it is now. Without warning, through the air overhead, against the translucent celestial glow, came an izzzzzzzzy-wonk! wonk! wonk! as evanescent as the low cry of a bullet, wholly indescribable in its true weirdness and richness of twang.
No beetle ever turned as quickly as the wonk! wonk! indicated; no bat ever achieved a twang with its velvet wings. It was no sound of bird or insect that I knew; and it came again and again from the same direction, and seemed to emanate from some creature that watched me. The wonk! wonk! as of sudden, banking flight, happened close in front, over the water. I flashed my electric torch, and sawnothing, even while the sound continued; and so for half an hour one or more mysterious beings swept about me, close overhead. As once before, my mind went to pterodactyls, and I imagined a pair of the little webfingered creatures launched out from some secret crevice in the distant mountains, for a brief time to hawk about in the light of the Milky Way, peering down with their great eyes, toothed beaks half open, whipping back and forth through the air, now and then snapping up a bat, and stirring the imagination of a curiositytortured human who would willingly give a year of his life to see such a sight.
I had meant to spend part of the night among the mangroves; but the glimmer of the white sand drew me up, instead of down, the shore, and I crept over the rocks and padded silently over the sand to our swimmingbeach.
The tide was half-way down, silent and smooth as a mirror, with every star doubled. As I watched, they were erased, one by one, as if the reflections had become water-logged and sunk; and looking up, I saw a mist, swept by the high trade-winds, wind across the sky, while around me not a breath of air stirred. I wriggled into a form half below the surface of the sand; I worked down lower and lower, until I was at the very edge of the water, which is one of the most wonderful spots in the world. Being there is the very least part of it. Thousands of people are there all through the summer, at Coney Island and Margate, but never think themselves anywhere but swimming at Coney Island or bathing at Margate.
Between tides is really the wildest place left in the world — the truest No Man’s Land; for while you may sail in all weathers just beyond, or loll in a hotel a few yards behind, you cannot remain where you are except anchored and in a diver’s suit. And whatever man erects there is sooner or later joyfully smashed by the storm-waves into shapeless chunks of cement. The delight of it is to feel yourself, as I did at this moment, a third under water, a third buried in solid sand, and the rest of you bathed in and breathing the air. We sometimes feel a thrill at bestriding the border-line of two states or countries. How tremendously more wonderful to snuggle close to the three states of matter,—solid, liquid, and gaseous, —and then, indeed, to realize it and thrill to it with what seems a fourth state — the mental and spiritual.
The crunch of the sand-grains, the lap of the water, the breath of air — it makes the world very primitive and new. Without my flash I can detect no hint of either vegetable or animal kingdom — my little cosmos at the meeting-place of the elements is wholly inorganic, and mind. If only earth-fire were added, it would be complete, and here, a hundred feet from my cot, there would truly be an epitome of the primeval earth. I wonder, however, whether it is not all more adumbrative of ages to come, when the last animal has fallen, the last leaf shriveled, and only the inorganic and spirit remain, than of the infinite past.
My daydreams, or rather, nocturnal meditations, were leading me into hypnotic depths when, with a single bound, I deserted my most ancient medium — water. Momentarily I even left my more recent ancestral acquisition,— earth, — and entered the third, which I had conquered only during the last eight years. Gravitation, faithful through all physical and mental vicissitudes, brought me down with a resounding thump. At first I was simply dazed. What had happened? From the infinite calm of abstract meditation I had been galvanized into the most violent paroxysm and here I was, sitting on the sand, unhurt, stupidly wide-awake, with my heart trip-hammering. Then, all at once, the physical me calmed down and the mental took charge, first in a thrill of excitement at realization of what had happened, then with joyous recognition that, as at a well-planned dramatic dénouement of a play, the miracle had happened. Nature, tired of being ignored, had entered my inorganic make-believe cosmos, completed it, and split it apart with a vengeance. Instead of sending lightning or a firefly into my ken, she had been more subtle, and an electric eel had brushed against the sole of my foot, and discharged his diminutive broadside. The shock had been slight; but, unprepared as I was and completely relaxed, it had seemed to my nerves like the short-circuiting of a third rail. With my flash I caught a momentary glimpse of the lithe black chap, and I dabbled my hand in his direction; but he eeled away and became one with the dark water.
II
I could not get back to my former isolation, even if I greatly desired to do so: the eel had changed all that. He seemed so modern, so conventional and specialized an organism, drawing the lightning down into the dark waters, and liberating it at the will of his fishy brain.
I rolled over and flattened myself, and with my electric torch held at eye-height, horizontally, I entered one of the strangest of worlds — a beach at black midnight. My mind kept wandering back to my trio of elements, and I thought of the water ouzel which has conquered them all. In the wilderness of western China I have seen this delicate, thrush-like bird run rapidly in and out of a tangle, over leaves and sand, to the edge of a high river-bank, and then, taking wing, fly in and out between the boulders of the stream, finally to dive headlong into the swift water and creep along the bottom, feeding as it went. In the space of a minute or two, it exhibited mastery of earth, air, and water; only the phoenix could claim superiority.
This evening I was to find a living rival to the ouzel — an insect, a cricket, which, like so many wonders, was not in the heart of the Asiatic continent, but at the very door of my British Guiana laboratory. In the level glare of my flash, all the beach creatures became unreal and of low visibility, while their shadows took full possession. This fanciful phrase reflected the very real and interesting scientific fact, that the reason for this lay, not in the unusual lighting, so much as in the color of the little people themselves. Picking its way over the sand came a low-hung, weird, blackish thing, whose silhouetted head swung from side to side; and just above it there appeared a fearful phantasm, on long emaciated legs, which crept nearer and nearer, and finally rushed at the first and sank down upon it. The attack was so sudden, and the images relatively so huge, that I involuntarily sat up and raised my light. The two rushed toward me and vanished, and my eyes suddenly shifted to nearer focus. I had been watching the shadows of a small insect and a sand-colored daddy longlegs, the substance of which now appeared ridiculously small and close to me, with their shadows well under control beneath them.
Slowly I lowered the flash again, and, in spite of all I could do, my eyes gradually lost the creatures themselves and followed back, along the lengthening lines of legs, to the gargoylesque phantoms — gyrating Brocken spectres of the sands. Never have I seen a more completely sense-deceiving phenomenon. Sitting up, I looked down upon small, slowly moving, barely distinguishable beach beings; prone, I was surrounded by unnamable monsters. If I should accurately describe their anatomy and actions as revealed by my low-hung light, they would fit into no living or fossil phyle of earthly organisms. By shifting back and forth, I again focused on the terrible battle going on at my side; and now the giant had lifted the lesser beast bodily in its jaws, and was staggering about, mumbling it as it went. My scientific terms, Locustid and Phalangid, faded from mind with their substance, and I lay watching the midnight shadow struggle between Plash-goo and Trippity-kang.
I had always thought of daddy longlegs as harmless living skeletons, who clambered aimlessly about and dropped their legs at a touch. Now I found that they could be ravenous beasts, their dwarfed and rounded bodies swung high aloft on their eight thready legs, creeping over the sand, and actually running down, pouncing on, and killing insects as large as themselves. In this case it was a green grasshopper nymph, which was seized, bitten, and worried, with an unnecessary amount of dragging about and vicious chewing. I leaned slowly forward with my hand lens, until I could see every detail; and if daddy longlegs were magnified in life only fifteen times, I should flee in terror from what would be a worse danger than any wolf. The horrid eyes, grouped in their solid clump, seemed to be even now watching me malignantly, and the great needle-sharp fangs were sunk deep in the grasshopper, and being worked back and forth as the juices of the still living insect were sucked up.
Soon the creature set to work to sever the abdomen from the rest of the insect, and the head and legs fell to the sand, the feet waving slowly and vaguely. The daddy longlegs did not move, except now and then to lift one or two legs and hold them aloft, when a passing ant brushed against them; twenty minutes later it was still there, draining the last drop from the shriveled grasshopper.
My attention was attracted to the approaching shadow of another spectre, only in this case the shadow was indefinite, humped: it might have enshrouded a low fluttering moth or awkward beetle. Instead of which, when I followed down the shadowpath to its substance, there loomed suddenly a figure even more terrifying than the daddy longlegs. But this was awful in a wholesome way. You started at first sight, then smiled, then felt a liking for the apparition. It was decidedly the Personality of the beach, claiming full attention as long as it was in sight, clownlike in its comicality and childlike in its seriousness and the affection it aroused. Many will doubtless wonder mildly at thought of the possibility of holding a mole-cricket in affection or esteem. Yet it is true that, when I return in memory to Kartabo, my thoughts of beauty go to the great blue Morpho butterflies, of grace, to the soaring vultures, of adorableness, to infant sloths, and of amusement and affection, to the jolly white mole-crickets of the sand.
These are the chaps who fairly outdo the water ouzel, out flying, outrunning and outswimming that bird; and, in addition, being powerful leapers, and the most perfect burrowing machines in the world. Unlike their neighboring relations of the jungle, these shore crickets have taken on the color of the sand, keeping only a few hieroglyphics of dark pigment. Their eyes alone remain solid black. No matter how deserted the beach, how lifeless the tropical jungle may seem, I was always certain of finding these optimists abroad after dark, scurrying here and there, or popping unexpectedly up from the wet sand, which, a few minutes before, had been covered with the tide.
As my new visitor approached, I was able, after my first emotion, to call him by name — a name as bristling with sharp-angled syllables as the tips of his front legs. Indeed, his sponsors must have been profoundly impressed with these great limbs, for in Scapteriscus oxydactylus they dubbed him the Shovel-winged, Sharp-fingered One.
In the month of March I found little spurts of wet sand on the upper beach, and following down each tiny hole for an inch, I surprised a diminutive white cricket, wingless, but otherwise almost a replica of the large ones, just hatched and bravely starting out in life for itself. In the following months their numbers sadly diminished, and the size of the few remaining individuals increased, being gaugeable exactly by the calibre of their holes, which they open when the tide goes down. Now, later in the year, the adult molecrickets were in the full prime of life, vital, virile, meeting on equal terms all the dangers and advantages of nocturnal life on a tropical beach. I appreciated these insects all the more because of their local distribution, they being found nowhere, up or down the river, except on our short stretch of sandy beach.
The hind legs are swollen with muscles for leaping, and with broad, flat soles for pushing; the middle legs are normal supports; but the front ones are a study, as scientific, mechanically perfect excavators. There are sharp, horny, downward-projecting pickaxes, lighter pitchforks, backed by spadeshaped implements, and bordered with stiff, broom-straw edges for sweeping away the loose débris. In fact, this little insect has everything but dynamite for making easy its passage underground. It even has long feelers behind, as well as in front of, the body.
Like the kick-off of a big football game, or Fred Stone, or a sharp tug on your fishline, when one of my molecrickets came into sight, I knew that something exciting was certain to follow. On this midnight, while the big insect had zigzagged toward me, the tide undermined my sandy elbow-rest, and I slipped. At the first scrape of sand, he put his oxydactyl hands together over his head, and half buried himself with three flicks. But he was neither coward nor ostrich, and after a moment he half turned and rested his great arms on the mound of sand — the strangest imaginable parody on Raphael’s cherubs. His head turned from side to side as he watched —and, I almost added, listened — for the source of danger. I remembered in time that his ears were on his front arms just below the elbows, sandwiched between the pitchfork and the shovel. He twisted sharply to the left, at the same instant that a miniature hidden mine was sprung, and a spray of sand shot upward. Almost before my eye could follow, a second mole-cricket appeared, and each saw in the other the summation of all past troubles and future hatreds; they hesitated not a second, but flew at each other.
At first there was considerable sidestepping and feinting, and they whirled about, until a well-marked ring was worn in the damp sand. Then they clinched, and to my horror a leg flew up and off into the darkness. Now the timeworn—and at best, inadvisable — simile was reversed, and ploughshares as well as shovels, brooms, scissors, and pitchforks, were in a twinkling transformed into slapsticks, swords, pikes, and daggers. Twice the insects reared up on their hind legs, their arms working like flails. Now and then the lace-like wings unrolled and shot out as balancers, glistening like metal in the light of my flash. One cricket fell for a moment, the other pounced, and a whole front arm rolled away. Nothing daunted, and indeed apparently lightened by the loss of his left armory, my cricket leaped at the other and bowled him over. I cheered; they both reared again — and were washed away in a tiny swirl of water: the tide had turned, and the first of the trios of incoming wavelets had caught all of us unawares. Le duel nocturne des courtilières was over. Each opponent had lost a leg; yet they scampered off and dug in with little appearance of crippling — one limped a bit, and the other sank his well somewhat obliquely: that was all.
I remembered my first experience with these crickets, when I confined four together in a glass dish, and the next morning found but one, large, plump, happy, quite surrounded with the crumbs of eighteen limbs; and I recalled the diminution in numbers of the broods of infant crickets, and wondered whether I had not better slur over part of the home life of my little friends if I wished the mirror of my affection to remain untarnished!
I turned my light toward the water, which was lapping shoreward, and on the surface were two white spots, mole-crickets again, scurrying here and there with short strokes of the forearms, which had now become efficient oars. They soon sculled to shore and vanished, and a threat of moralizing came into my mind: how wonderful it would be if any of us could so completely master the conditions of life in our environment! Here were two sandy depressions where the crickets had disappeared; in a few minutes the tide would cover them; and for eight hours thereafter the two bundles of vitality would remain buried beneath the waves, able somehow to breathe and to resurrect, to scamper about on their business of life on what remained of their legs, to spread their wings and fly wherever they wished — one place, at least, being to the lighted lamp on my laboratory table.
The wash of the tide made me restless, and I swept my flash about in a last survey, when I saw a multitude of little orange-red lamps drifting toward me. Holding the light obliquely, I saw the wraiths of many shrimps, with their periscope eyes illumined by my electric wire. They swam steadily ahead, halfblinded by the glare, until suddenly there came Nemesis with a rush and a swirl. I caught sight of long waving tentacles, a gaping mouth, flash after flash of glittering silver, and there at my feet was a catfish, half stranded with its headlong rush. Mindful of poisonous spines, I flicked him up the beach with a hand blanket of sand, where he lay, protesting, with rasping twitters and peevish grunts, until I salvaged him.
III
My last glance at the beach showed something so strange, that I turned back, and discovered a wholly new field for enthusiasm. Many years ago I found that tracks in the snow could best be observed and photographed in slanting rays of the sun; and now my final, casual sweep threw out into strong relief a series of rabbit-tracks — this in spite of the fact that I was some two thousand miles from the nearest bunny. As I looked down at the tracks, they completely vanished; not a depression or marking could be detected; but oblique lighting showed the series of claw-marks, all four feet close together, with a good eighteen inches between leaps. I puzzled long over it, I traced it almost to the water, and up to the soft, dry sand. At last, a thought came to me, and I went up to where I knew there would be, day or night, a file of leaf-cutting ants. There, solemnly watching, and waiting for some favorable omen to begin her midnight supper, squatted my pseudo-rabbit — a huge, friendly grandmother of a toad. She blinked, and I reached down and tickled her side, whereat she grunted and puffed out prodigiously.
At this moment my eye wandered to a near-by bush, and I made a discovery which whole hours and half days of intensive search and watch had up to this time failed to reveal. The line of leaf-cutting Atta ants led up this low shrub, and many scores were deployed over the leaves, busy on their eternal work of cutting off circular pieces. For years I had watched them carry these leaves back, and had seen the free rides which many small individual ants took back to the nest on these wavering bits of leaf. Here, in the light of my flash, a medium-sized ant staggered along beneath a load, as if a man should balance the Hippodrome curtain on edge on his head. Like small boys hitching on behind a wagon, there were seven small ants clinging to the top and sides of the bit of leaf, probably doubling the weight, and altering the whole centre of gravity. I have seen a Japanese acrobat in the circus balancing a ladder with several men clinging to it, but this feat was infinitely more difficult. And there was no ‘side,’ no display to this. It was all in the night’s work. These ants know not the meaning of play, or vacations, or any moment of unnecessary rest; and yet here were seven of them, for their own convenience, making much more difficult the labor of their larger brother — or, rather, sister.
I knew there was some vital reason, some quid pro quo; but hitherto I had been able only to guess at it. The small bush made all clear. There were enemy ants in the bush, who were attempting to drive away the Attas; and their scouts made attack after attack on the busy harvesters. Unless actually attacked and bitten, the Atta workers paid no attention to their assailants. I saw one partly crippled and yet going on with his load as best he could, playing pacifist for duty’s sake. Their work was definite and inviolable — to cut a leaf and transport it to the nest. The huge Atta soldiers, fat and enormous, who guard the depths of the nest and occasionally wander aimlessly along the line of march, getting in the way of their fellows, were nowhere to be seen; but the battalions of the Minims were in full action. They wore too small to cut leaves or carry them, and had not even strength enough to walk both ways, to and from the nest. But on the leaves, facing the legions of the giant tree-ants, they showed their worth, their raison d’être. I have never seen such fighters. They equaled the army ants, and lost leg after leg, even the whole abdomen, without slacking their efforts in the least.
On one leaf I saw a most exciting engagement. Three workers were cutting along the edge near the tip, and five small Minims were standing aboul with jaws raised suspiciously, when three black tree-ants came on at once. One got past on the under side, tackled a worker, and was seized in turn by one of the tiny bulldogs. The black ant let go the worker and tried to get at his tormentor, who had a good grip on his tender antenna. Chop went a leg of the Atta; but then another came to the rescue, and got his jaws in a crevice of the armor beneath the black body. This was too much, and the trio fell from the leaf, out of the range of my light, into the darkness of the sand below. There were left three Minims and two black ants, the latter four times their size; and yet, so furiously did the little chaps wage battle that the invaders had no chance to get past to the workers at the leafedge. Another black ant now appeared, but close on his heels followed six Minims, and in the face of this squad they all fled, minus a leg or two, and carrying three Minims with them, who refused to let go, one of whom had little of him left but his jaws, which still retained their grip.
In spite of all the black tree-ants could do, I saw only two workers killed or forced to drop their loads. All the time new contingents of Minims were arriving, and in the midst of the hardest fighting, a litlle warrior would now and then climb upon a passing leaf and settle down for a rough trip home. It was as if they belonged to some autocratic labor-union, and had to punch a time clock at the nest, regardless of how things were going in the front-line trenches. So the Mediums are the workers, the providers; the Maxims are the home guard; and the Minims are the standing army for border warfare, trudging bravely as far as they are needed to convoy the outgoing workers, but after battle, or their share of watchful waiting, getting a free ride home on any passing chlorophyll lorry.
Immensely pleased with the discovery of another detail of the Attas’ life-history, I returned to my search for more sand-tracks. Walking along the reeds with light held low, I saw clearly where an opossum had come out shortly before, dug a little in the sand, and passed on; and most amusing was the record, in an isolated patch of clear, soft sand, of where a young one had fallen from her back and straightway clambered on again. Farther on, a big lizard had shuffled along; but the next track took me thousands of miles northward, to New England sands in autumn — the fairy footwork of a pair of spotted sandpipers, which that evening had teetered along the edge of this tropical river.
One last thrill my beach gave when, drawn by some instinct, I scanned the sand just beyond a clump of sedge. There, fresh and strongly etched, was a broad, sinuous line up from the water’s edge, flanked alternately by crescents, deep bitten into the wet surface. This had been made by no creature with legs, but by some long, heavy body, alternately pushed up the beach — the line-and-crescent sand signet of a great anaconda, king of all these waters, who, while I watched shadows a few feet away, had slowly drawn his mighty length past me into the gully beyond — who shall say where or why!
No wonder this night, so calm and peaceful on the surface, had aroused an ill-defined suspicion of hidden things far otherwise. I looked out over the water, again alight with reversed constellations; I listened to the soft lapping of the rising tide, felt the first faint breath of the new day, and thought of the tragedies I had witnessed — the mole-crickets nursing their wounds in their dugouts deep beneath sand and water, the dead grasshopper nymph, the shrimp in whose orange eyes fire was forever quenched, and the deathstruggles of the ants going on in the darkness at my feet.
The opossum was searching for food for itself and its young, and somewhere the great snake was coiled, watching with lidless, untiring eyes for its share in some life of lesser strength. It seemed somehow so cruel, this eternal alternation of life and death. If only the lower animals — and then I remembered that perhaps, at this very moment, my Indian hunter was pulling trigger on an unsuspecting agouti or curassow or peccary for my next dinner; it came to me that the very emotions of compassion and sympathy, which moved me, were materialized and sustained by the strength derived from the sacrifice of many, many lives of these same lower animals.
I stopped thinking, stepped carefully over the line of insanely industrious Attas, and went to my hammock.