The humming-bird always trusts itself to the air for however brief a distance, and flings its supple body about from one flower to another in vibrating flight. Now it hovers near without disordering a petal, now it hangs from tall grasses by the tip of its thornlike bill, a sparkling of wings with spurts of precious stones in a setting of petals, lost in another instant in wide air.
Never smutted by earth, because never touching it, the humming-bird juggles among the flowers. It never follows all the flowers of a single bush nor even exhausts all the sweetness of a single flower—“a dart, a glance, a sip, and away;” butterflies, a symbol of caprice, are not more fickle. This utterly erratic creature performing its aerial gambols holds within itself the reason for its being unmolested by any enemy—the chase not being worth the morsel!
Ineffable is the whole field of its labor. The coarsest materials of its nests are the finest straws it can pick up. Inside they are lined with down and spiders’ webs. Consistently they are attached to a pendent branch or long-swinging vine. Thither the humming-bird flies to supply a family’s microscopic wants.
To a giant looking through a microscope, what a revelation of the infinite industry of nature in worlds beyond the grasp of any sense of his, the humming-bird would be!
CHAPTER IV
ANIMALS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT
I
What a land of silence! The vast forest seems wholly uninhabited save for the chatter of a passing train of harlequin parrots or angry apes. And yet it is not silence. There is the great movement of lapsing and becoming perpetually going on; both composition and decomposition rustling on toward completion. They are mere phases of that “illimitable sun force which destroys as swiftly as it generates and generates again as swiftly as it destroys.”
“So fast do the flowers expand that an actual heat, which may be tested by the thermometer, is given off during fructification.” The tepid water forces all growing things to prodigious size. Exuberance seems to have no boundaries. The length of the young shoots is only less amazing than their growth in a single day. Leaves expand until they are twenty feet long, and ferns tangle their own fronds in haste to push out to the utmost limit of their nature. One sees things growing in the damp heat as one hears a yucca palm grow.
But where growth is on a stupendous scale, there decay is exuberant, for “the powers that build are the powers that putrefy.” Above are light, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of growth. Below are darkness, warmth, and moisture: such are conditions of decay. Which is more effectual, that mighty power of evolution elaborating “the rain-water hurrying aloft” into tissue of leaf and flower, or those great forces of dissolution which can so soon transmute the fallen trunk of iron-wood into a pregnant, humid mound? It merely lapses into those elements composing it, and is instantly absorbed by fresh leaves culminating to-night.
The noble heat blends the smell of laboring sap and that of aromatic mosses with the pungent odor of decay, the damp smell of death with those sweet poisons which drip off the trees and envelop like a caress. The incense tree was described by Martin Fernandez de Enciza in the early sixteenth century. “Incense doth hang at its boughs,” he said, “as the ice doth at the tiles of a house in the winter season.” Over-ripe fruit drops smashing on the ground with scent of strawberries. A musky humming-bird leaves behind a thin trail of heady perfume. The air is filled with vegetable breath, weird, far-off blossoms, mere ghosts of fragrance mingling in a wave of sweetness. Smell is indeed man’s most emotional sense. It gives a poignancy to a remembered scene which no detailed picture can, and sharpens the whole sight perception. An entire chapter should be written about jungle-perfume.