Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation with an increase of vital impulse. The instant a plant has reached a sense of completeness, it is sprung upon, twitched from decay into the vitality of some lovely form whose time has come. Whatever lapses into the past is at once metamorphosed. Whatever should look forward for opportunity would be snuffed out by some exuberant growth determined on immediate perfection.
There can be no seasons in the jungle, no general periods of growth, maturity, or rest. All stages of development are flaunting from independent plants in a single locality. Each is appropriating whatever it can use in the elements or in its neighbor to weave into its own perfecting tissue. Each is as little influenced by the other as are two trees rubbing against each other with the wind, mingling their branches and blending their foliage. Though forced during a lifetime to closest proximity, they are members of remote families, and the nature of neither is modified in the slightest degree.
Indeed, all seasons concentrate on a single tree; for some of the massive fruits require more than a year to ripen, so that fruit is maturing and flowers are budding on the same tree.
Only heat can penetrate. Light is almost excluded by the unbroken canopy of interlaced branches. It is left up above, absorbed into whirls of vivid flower or expanding the luscious leaves. Heat and moisture are imprisoned. Plants flourish in “the boundless, deep immensity of shade.” Left in wan half-light they push up into the “green gloaming,” adapted to the dimness yet straining upward to the light which would kill them if they could reach it. Even bats sometimes make mistakes and emerge at noonday, unhooking themselves from branches on which the sun has never shone. All forms are confused, and the strange shapes but half-seen are concealed by others no less vague.
Deep within the wilderness, more silent than the noiseless solitude itself, lies a mysterious lagoon sacred to the giant Mother of Waters. All about, coiled in the half-putrescent, vegetable mould, are myriads of venomous creatures, gliding, writhing, crawling in and out. Minute snakes, whose bite is death, curl in tendrils or lie like coral necklaces upon the leaves. Larger ones drape in vinelike garlands overhead, to be distinguished from a blossoming festoon only by a sudden, loose-swinging end.
But the pool! What wet blackness and horrid mystery! The surface of the water is never ruffled by a breeze. It has no moods. Unperturbed in perpetual gloom it lies in quivering stagnation, oozing nauseous odors under the twilight of a full, tropical noon. No roseate spoonbill, no delicate white heron tilts about upon its banks. The black, stagnant water can barely cover the solid, seething mass of “hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters, without name ... wallowing, interwriggling, and devouring each other.”
Here sleeps the Mother of Waters, congenially imbedded, her shining coils slipping about over each other—the great yacumama—the mighty boa-constrictor, who can swallow almost any creature whole, and whose breath withers any beast lured within reach by her fascinating poison. Humanely she intoxicates before squeezing the unyielding bones to pulp of digestible consistency.
Sometimes she unfolds her darkly iridescent coils out into the hospitable closeness of the jungle. Laboriously she winds upward in over-arching trees; but, as if too languid, leaves part of her frightful weight dragging below. She looks moss-grown, like the stem of an old tree, and treelike, remains motionless for days at a time. When she does wander forth in search of prey, a track follows through the lush, yielding vegetation—her huge weight lingering heavily upon succulent stems.
II
The atmosphere is full of color—weird, miasmic exhalations. Next to the shade lingering under the dark velvet foliage on the edges of streams, the glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light or reflect a “russet glamour” from their under sides. Beds of yellow butterflies settle along river banks and concentrate the sunlight with blinding intensity. Every leaf seems to blaze like a gem; even the black shadows pulsate with inner light. It is part of jungle mystery that even the light comes in iridescence.