he lives upon cecropia buds and dew, as Doctor Brehm declares, or upon armies of ants swarming in the hollow stems of the cecropia tree, it is certain that he haunts only that tree, which spreads out broad leaves whose white, lower sides reflect light into the sepulchral shade. It furnishes him with more food than he needs, and food is his only necessity.
The rain pours, he listlessly hugs his branch, a sorry spectacle, emitting from time to time a deep sigh. His eye is dull, he knows no joy, no sorrow. He needs no sleep, no relief from a life which is nothing but respite. The odds seem too great against him to perform the simplest acts of life.
The climax of activity is reached when, like a wad, he falls to the ground, apparently devoid of life.
After a while he unrolls and progresses with circumspection upon closed claws to the next cecropia tree. Then he climbs to the very top, where he begins to eat, supplied with food on the down journey. Hunger compelling, he unbends from a position of unusual discomfort and pushes himself along his branch upside down. Over-cautious in every motion, he never loosens his rigid hold from one limb until securely clamped to the next one. Each movement causes a long, sad yowl of pain. It is amazing that so cutting a sound can issue from his soft mouth.
His weird cry is a jungle symbol—mysterious hint of antediluvian days when the elephantine sloth lifted up a mammoth wail to be taken up by the glyptodon and the dodo.
In the desert man exclaims: “If only there were water! The soil is fertile. There is sunlight and warmth enough to make a tropical paradise. If only there were water!” And so, although he does not exactly worship water as the Yuncas of antiquity did, this man sings secretly in his heart a hymn to the god of water.
Up on the icy highlands man exclaims: “If only there were warmth! The soil is fertile, there is plenty of water, only warmth is lacking to make a paradise. If only there were warmth!” And he sympathizes with the Incas, whose god was the Sun, and waits through the long night-watches until, with his rising, life is renewed.
In the jungle, water brings fertility to a soil bathed in the light and warmth of a tropical sun. It pours down from melting snows of the mountain-tops and gushes from the ground to meet the rain. Here, where man might live with least effort, he squats on the lowest rung of the human ladder, his savage desires satisfied as soon as realized. The sun needs no propitiatory offerings, water needs no exhortation. Invisible powers have conferred all gifts which his mind could imagine or his heart desire.
But in the midst of luxuriant plenty, like the Indian above the mine, poverty-struck for want of the very riches he sits upon, he is merely dying out for lack of everything with which he is surrounded. With a remedy at his command for every ill, he hangs about his neck a string of tapirs’ claws in case of need. As there is lack of nothing to supply his wants, so there are few wants to be supplied. A whole tribe lives on a single species of tree, like insects depending on one fruit or leaf for subsistence, or the sloth hanging on the cecropia tree, which has senses sufficient to appreciate sights and sounds and smells, but remains insensible. The jungle people seem to recognize the likeness and call one another “beast of the cecropia tree.”