THE CONVICT TRAIL
I am thinking of a very wonderful thing and words come laggardly. For it is a thing which more easily rests quietly in the deep pool of memory than stirred up and crystalized into words and phrases. It is of the making of a new trail, of the need and the planning and the achievement, of the immediate effects and the possible consequences. For the effects became manifest at once, myriad, unexpected, some sinister, others altogether thrilling and wholly delightful to the soul of a naturalist. And now, many months after, they are still spreading, like a forest fire which has passed beyond control. Only in this case the land was no worse and untold numbers of creatures were better off because of our new trail.
Of the still more distant consequences I cannot write, for the book of the future is tightly sealed. But we may recall that a trail once was cut through coarse, high grass and belts of cedar, which in time became the Appian Way. And a herd of aurochs breasting in single file dense shrubby oaks and heather toward a salt lick may well have foreshadowed Regent Street; the Place d'Etoile was perhaps first adumbrated by wild boars concentrating on a root-filled marsh. And why should not the Indian trail which became a Dutch road and our Fifth Avenue, have had its first hint in a moose track down the heart of a wooded island, leading to some hidden spring!
We left our boats stranded on the Mazaruni River bank and climbed the steep ascent to our new home in the heart of British Guiana. Our outfit was unpacked, and the laboratory and kitchen and bedrooms in the big Kalacoon house were at last more than names.
And now we surveyed our little kingdom. One path led down to our boats, another meandered eastwards through the hills. But like the feathered end of the magnetic arrow, we drifted as with one will to the south. Here at the edge of our cleared compound we were confronted by a tangle. It was not very high—twenty feet or so—but dense and unbroken. Like newly trapped creatures we paced back and forth along it looking for an opening. It was without a break. We examined it more closely and saw a multitude of slender, graceful cane stems hung with festoons and grass-like drapery. One of us seized a wisp of this climbing grass and pulled downward. When he dropped it his hand dripped blood. He might as well have run a scroll saw over his fingers. The jungle had shown its teeth.
We laughed and retreated to the upper floor for consultation. The sight we saw there decided us. In the distance "not too far," to use the hopelessly indefinite Guiana vernacular, high over the tumbled lower growths towered the real jungle—the high bush. This was the edge of that mighty tropical ocean of foliage, that sea of life with its surface one hundred, two hundred feet above the earth, stretching unbroken to the Andes: leagues of unknown wonderland. And here we were, after thousands of miles of voyaging to study the life of this great jungle, to find our last few yards blocked by a mass of vegetation. There was no dissenting voice. We must cut a trail, and at once, straight to the jungle.
Before we begin our trail, it will be wise to try to understand this twenty-foot tangle, stretching almost a mile back from Kalacoon. Three years before it was pure jungle. Then man came with ax and saw and fire and one by one the great giants were felled—mora, greenheart, crabwood—each crashing its way to earth after centuries of upward growth. The underbrush in the dark, high jungle is comparatively scanty. Light-starved and fungus-plagued, the shrubs and saplings are stunted and weak. So when only the great stumps were left standing, the erstwhile jungle showed as a mere shambles of raw wood and shriveled foliage. After a time fire was applied, and quickly, as in the case of resinous trees, or with long, slow smolderings of half-rotted, hollow giants, the huge boles were consumed.
For a period, utter desolation reigned. Charcoal and gray ash covered everything. No life stirred. Birds had flown, reptiles and insects made their escape or succumbed. Only the saffron-faced vultures swung past, on the watch for some half-charred creature. Almost at once, however, the marvelous vitality of the tropical vegetation asserted itself. Phoenix-like, from the very heart of the ashes, appeared leaves of strange shape and color. Stumps whose tissues seemed wholly turned to charcoal sent forth adventitious shoots, and splintered boughs blossomed from their wounds. Now was the lowest ebb of the jungle's life, when man for the success of his commercial aims, should take instant advantage. But plans miscarried and the ruin wrought was left to nature.
The destruction of the jungle had been complete and the searing flames had destroyed all forest seeds. In their place, by some magic, there sprang up at once a maze of weeds, vines and woody shrubs, reeds, ferns and grasses, all foreign to the dark jungle and whose nearest congeners were miles away. Yet here were their seeds and spores, baffling all attempts at tracing their migration or the time they had laid dormant.
When we had begun to penetrate this newborn tangle we found it possible, by comparing various spots, to follow its growth in past time. The first things to appear in the burned jungle area were grasses or grass-like plants and prostrate vines. These latter climbed over the fallen tree-trunks and covered the charred stumps with a glory of blossoms—white convolvulus gleaming everywhere, then pale yellow allamandas, and later, orchid-like, violet, butterfly peas which at first flowered among the ashes on the ground, but climbed as soon as they found support. Little by little, a five-finger vine flung whole chains of bloom over stumps, logs and bushes, a beautiful, blood-red passion flower, whose buds looked like strings of tiny Chinese lanterns.