Twice, deeper in the jungle, we squatted and listened, and twice
the silence remained unbroken and the air unmoved. Happening to
look up through a lofty, narrow canyon of dark foliage, I was
startled as by some sudden sound by seeing a pure white cloud,
moonlit, low down, pass rapidly across. It was first astounding,
then unreal: a bit of exceedingly poor work on the part of the
property man, who had mixed the hurricane scenery with that of the
dog-days. Even the elements seemed to have been laved with magic.
The zone of high wind, with its swift-flying clouds, must have
been flowing like a river just above the motionless foliage of the
tree-tops.
This piece of ultra-unnaturalism seemed to break part of the spell
and the magic silence was lifted. Two frogs boomed again, close at
hand, and now all the hound similitude was gone, and in its place
another, still more strange, when we think of the goggle-eyed
author far up in the trees. The sound now was identical with the
short cough or growl of a hungry lion, and though I have heard the
frogs many times since that night, this resemblance never changed
or weakened. It seemed as if the volume, the roaring outburst,
could come only from the throat of some large, full-lunged mammal.
A sudden tearing rush from the trail-side, and ripping of vines
and shrubs, was mingled with deep, hoarse snorts, and we knew that
we had disturbed one of the big red deer--big only in comparison
with the common tiny brown brockets. A few yards farther the
leaves rustled high overhead, although no breath of wind had
as yet touched the jungle. I began a slow, careful search with
my flashlight, and, mingled with the splotches and specks of
moonlight high overhead, I seemed to see scores of little eyes
peering down. But at last my faint electric beam found its mark
and evolved the first bit of real color which the jungle had
shown--always excepting the ruby tail-light. Two tiny red globes
gleamed down at us, and as they gleamed, moved without a sound,
apparently unattached, slowly through the foliage. Then came a
voice, as wandering, as impersonal as the eyes--a sharp, incisive
_wheeeeeat!_ with a cat-like timbre; and from the eyes and voice I
reconstructed a night monkey--a kinkajou.
Then another notch was slipped and the jungle for a time showed
something of the exuberance of its life. A paca leaped from
its meal of nuts and bounced away with quick, repeated pats; a
beetle with wings tuned to the bass clef droned by; some giant
tree-cricket tore the remaining intervals of silence to shreds
with unmuted wing-fiddles, _cricks_ so shrill and high that they
well-nigh passed beyond the upper register of my ear out into
silence again. The roar of another frog was comforting to my
ear-drum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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