The insects alighted, facing in any direction, but veered at once, heading upbreeze. Along the riverside of markets of tropical cities I have seen fleets of fishing boats crowded close together, their gay sails drying, while great ebony Neptunes brought ashore baskets of angel fish. This came to mind as I watched my flotillas of butterflies.
I leaned forward until my face was hardly a foot from the outliers, and these I learned to know as individuals. One sulphur had lost a bit of hind wing, and three times he flew away and returned to the same spot. Like most cripples, he was unamiable, and resented a close approach, pushing at the trespasser with a foreleg in a most unbutterfly-like way. Although I watched closely, I did not see a single tongue uncoiled for drinking. Only when a dense group became uneasy and pushed one another about were the tongue springs slightly loosened. Even the nervous antennæ were quiet after the insects had settled. They seemed to have achieved a Rhopaloceran Nirvana, content to rest motionless until caught up in the temporary whirlwinds of restlessness which now and then possessed them.
They came from all directions, swirling over the rocks, twisting through nearby brambles, and settling without a moment's hesitation. It was as though they had all been here many times before, a rendezvous which brooked not an instant's delay. From time to time some mass spirit troubled them, and, as one butterfly, the whole company took to wing. Close as they were when resting, they fairly buffeted one another in mid-air. Their wings, striking one another and my camera and face, made a strange little rustling, crisp and crackling whispers of sounds. As if a pile of Northern autumn leaves, fallen to earth, suddenly remembered days of greenness and humming bees, and strove to raise themselves again to the bare branches overhead.
Down came the butterflies again, brushing against my clothes and eyes and hands. All that I captured later were males, and most were fresh and newly emerged, with a scattering of dimmed wings, frayed at edges, who flew more slowly, with less vigor. Finally the lower patch was washed out by the rising tide, but not until the water actually reached them did the insects leave. I could trace with accuracy the exact reach of the last ripple to roll over the flat sand by the contour of the remaining outermost rank of insects.
On and on came the water, and soon I was forced to move, and the hundreds of butterflies in front of me. When the last one had left I went away, returning two hours later. It was then that I witnessed the most significant happening in the Bay of Butterflies—one which shook to the bottom the theory of my lepidopterist friend, together with my thoughtless use of the word normal. Over two feet of restless brown water covered the sand patches and rocked the scouring rushes. A few feet farther up the little bay the remaining sand was still exposed. Here were damp sand, sand dotted with rushes, and sand dry and white in the sun. About a hundred butterflies were in sight, some continually leaving, and others arriving. Individuals still dashed into sight and swooped downward. But not one attempted to alight on the exposed sand. There was fine, dry sand, warm to a butterfly's feet, or wet sand soaked with draughts of good Mazaruni water. But they passed this unheeding, and circled and fluttered in two swarms, as low as they dared, close to the surface of the water, exactly over the two patches of sand which had so drawn and held them or their brethren two hours before. Whatever the ultimate satisfaction may have been, the attraction was something transcending humidity, aridity, or immediate possibility of attainment. It was a definite cosmic point, a geographical focus, which, to my eyes and understanding, was unreasonable, unsuitable, and inexplicable.
As I watched the restless water and the butterflies striving to find a way down through it to the only desired patches of sand in the world, there arose a fine, thin humming, seeping up through the very waves, and I knew the singing catfish were following the tide shoreward. And as I considered my vast ignorance of what it all meant, of how little I could ever convey of the significance of the happenings in the Bay of Butterflies, I felt that it would have been far better for all of my green ink to have trickled down through the grains of sand.