Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which travellers are emphatically in one tale, is the innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we imitate at Kew--here filtered from its hostile engenderings--the maddening mosquitoes that swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic tundras; the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that prey upon the traveller’s kit and torture his skin like a shirt of Nessus; harpy moths that have to be driven from one’s food; swarms of earwigs which some African adventurers have found the hatefulest enemy of their march. Kew breeds no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural paradises where the blaze that scares away lions or leopards only attracts darting spiders and scurrying scorpions to a couch already made restless by buzzing and biting pests; where the ground hides flesh-burrowing ticks and fleas, and the air is thick with invisible stings, and the trees bear venomous caterpillars; where one durst not smell a flower for fear of inhaling some noxious parasite, and our loathsomest bugs would seem hardly worth noticing among bloated cockroaches and hideous centipedes; where countless flies lay seeds of death in man and beast, not to speak of clouds of locusts that sometimes darken the sky like a snow-storm, and if they could cross the Channel, might fall on this Thames-side garden to eat up its greenery in an hour. And the noises of those sweltering thickets, which at night a new-comer in South America compares to some factory worked by whirling, whistling and hissing demons! Even the gloomy stillness of noon, broken by the fall of some big fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball, or by some seed-capsule exploding with a report like a shot, even this heavy siesta of Nature is not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as Humboldt says, one can catch a faint stifled undertone, a buzz and hum of insects that crowd the earth and the lowest strata of air, a confused vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from the cracked bark of trees, from the soil burrowed by creeping things, proclaims life audibly manifest to him who listens. But it is the evening, our emblem of peace, the welcome twilight through which the ploughboy goes whistling home, that wakes tropical shades to an untuned concert of croaking, screaming, chattering, wailing, howling, and humming, when the darkness seems alive with invisible cracklings, patterings, scratchings, skippings and rustlings, silenced for the moment by the blood-curdling growl and crashing spring of some beast of prey, and the piercing death-screech of its victim echoing far where every foot of ground is scene for nightly tragedies. One need be no Macbeth to have one’s sleep murdered by alarms and excursions for which heated imagination acts as a megaphone. “The clamour of the jackals over a carcass suggests a band of hungry wolves. A mongoose having it out with a rat beneath the floor is like an animal Armageddon.