A single, heavy tapir, _anta_, the somber-colored wood-cow, roused by the rain and encouraged by the added gloom, wanders forth to tear off new sprouts within its reach. Peccaries rustle by in little droves--wild pigs which, it is said, will bite around a tree if their object of attack has climbed beyond reach. The minute, silky marmoset, filled with perennial terror and shivering at the rain, has crept into shelter, and just daring to show its wrinkled little face, howls dismally. It is after a rain, too, when the wondrous notes of the _organista_, the sweet flute-bird, drip through the trees, mellow, melancholy, yet with a musical accuracy of pitch as clear-cut as the circle of a drop of water fallen on a slab of alabaster. These notes share the mystery of the vast silence itself. Even savages rest on their paddles to listen. Would you capture the magician and carry the jungle-silence home? You can take the little gray bird--but it always dies in captivity. CHAPTER III JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN I Since the earth was first moistened by rain, and plants first grew, no limit has been set to the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway is uncontested. It has known no master. Its insatiable desire to reach up and out and down has been uncurbed and undirected. And heaven seems to wish it well. Intensest heat, light, and moisture are showered upon it. Under such conditions, life would spring spontaneously into being, were there not myriads of progenitors to be responsible for whatever form it chose to take. All the creative force of nature is behind the infinitely varying forms, and the frightful luxuriance of reproduction. Vegetation has the extravagance of first geologic ages, bursting with life, rejoicing in weird, vegetable arabesques and green out-thrusts of leaves.