Sleep does not come quickly to a mind depressed. As I lie awake and listen, the noises of the night reverberating through the forest, with the rush of the wind in the tree tops, blend together in one vast chorus, whose music is a funeral march.
The materialistic modern mind calls the universe a machine. But the old Norsemen of the forest said that it is a tree, the tree Igdrasil, that lured the mind of a great modern mystic. Often in the night-forest have I recalled the Norse legend of the tree Igdrasil, the tree of existence. It is watered by three streams, the past, the present and the future. The branches are human history, the leaves are the actions and the words of men; the wind sighing through it is the sobbing of men’s sorrows.
But the forest is as variable in her moods as the mind of a man. Stern at times and sometimes awful, yet again she loves to soothe the mind and impart a gentle cheer. If you would know the charm of the night-forest in her most intimate and communicative mood you must wait until some time, as if in response to an inaudible summons, you waken after several hours of deep, restful sleep that is one of the secrets of the forest. Under a roof and between close walls a wakeful hour is monotonous and miserable and the habit of wakefulness is a malady that were fit penance for mortal sins. But in the open forest, especially when there is a glimmer of stars shining through the screen of dark foliage, a wakeful hour passes easily. One is never lonely in such an hour, for a mystic life pervades the night-forest, and one realizes that it is something more and greater than the definite forms which the eye sees by day. When these are dissolved in darkness one is more sensible of the underlying, mysterious life, as of a spiritual presence. Forms, whether material or creedal, sometimes conceal the reality which they represent. The noises of the night-forest, the mingled voices of innumerable crickets, tree-toads, frogs and croaking night-birds, the chatter of the stream over the stones, the rushing of the wind above the trees, with many unfamiliar sounds, each almost indistinguishable in the thrilling volume, seem but the sights of the silent day transformed into sound, and one feels that the interpretation of the sound would be also the interpretation of the forms and shapes, of colours, of shadows and broken light-beams.
This illusion may be promotive of the native belief in animistic nature. For the eye does not see those animate creatures in the day, and to the child-mind it might easily seem that the myriad noises of the night issue from rock and hill and stream and tree.
Lying thus awake but restful, the blended noises of the resounding forest fall upon the passive ear like the confused echo of some world-orchestra, or a broken strain from the music of the planets and the stars as they sweep through vast orbits, on and on forever. For the night-forest, unlike the day, speaks always musically to the ear that is attuned to hear it.
The soft sound of the wind among the leaves of the highest branches again lulls the wakeful listener into sleep; and he enjoys it the more because of the brief disturbance.
VI
A HOME IN THE BUSH
Efulen, my first African home, I saw for the first time in July 1893. It is in Cameroon, among the Bulu people, directly behind Batanga, less than sixty miles from the coast, and about two hundred miles north of the equator.
Efulen is situated upon a hill two hundred and fifty feet high and nearly two thousand feet above the sea-level, and is surrounded by mountains. The scenery is beautiful and magnificent and resembles the mountainous parts of Pennsylvania; but in that tropical climate there are atmospheric effects seldom seen in the colder latitudes. Mountain and valley are covered with a forest of green with here and there a tree of red or scarlet, and so dense that one might think he could walk on it. From the top of Efulen hill one looks out on a rolling plain of foliage that stretches away over valley and hill, until it becomes extinct in the dim distance of the empurpled hills. Often in the morning, when the atmosphere of the valleys is clear, an overhanging mist cuts off the tops of the mountains, which appear as elevated table-lands, all of the same height, and precisely level. A few minutes later the scene is magically transformed. The mist has descended and filled the valleys as if all the clouds of the heavens had fallen down, while the mountain-peaks, radiant with the sunlight, rise out of the mist like islands out of a deep sea.