ANIMAL LIFE. 505 



As for the soil it is needless to think of looking at it; it lies as far below 

 us as the bottom of the sea; it disappeared ever so long ago, under the heaping 

 of debris, under a sort of manure tliat has been acounmlating there since crea- 

 tion; you sink into it as into slime; you walk upon petrified trunks in a dust 

 that has no name. Here indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of 

 what vegetable decrepitude signifies; a lurid light — as wan at noon as the light 

 of the moon at midnight, confounds forms and lends them a vague and fantastic 

 aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all parts; an odor of death prevails; 

 and a calm which is not silence (for the ear fancies it can hear the great 

 movements of composition and decomposition perpetually going on within) 

 tends to inspire you with the old mysterious horror which the ancients felt in 

 the primitive forests of Germany and Gaul. 



Hearn adds : 



But the sense of awe inspired by the view of a tropical forest is unutterably 

 greater than any mystical fear which any wooded wilderness of the north could 

 ever have inspired. The very brilliancy of these colors — that seem preternatural 

 to northern eyes — is terrifying; but the vastness of the mile-broad and mile-high 

 masses of frondage, their impenetrability, the violet blackness of the few rare 

 apertures in their perpendicular facades where mountain torrents break through 

 to the sun, and their enormous murmurs, made up of a million crawling, creeping, 

 crumbling sounds — all combine to produce the conception of a creative force that 

 appalls. Man feels here like an insect, fears like an insect ever on the alert 

 for merciless enemies. To enter these green abysses without a guide were mad- 

 ness; even with the best of guides it is perilous. Nature is dangerous here; 

 the powers that build here are also the powers that putrefy. Here life and 

 death are perpetually interchanging office in the never-ceasing transformation 

 of force, melting down and reshaping living substances simultaneously within 

 the same awful crucible. There are trees distilling venom; there are plants 

 that have fangs; there are perfumes that affect the brain; there are cold green 

 creepers whose touch consumes the flesh like fire, while in all the recesses and 

 the shadows is a swarming of unfamiliar life, beautiful or hideous, insect, 

 reptile, bird, interwarring, drowning, devouring, preying. Strange spiders 

 of burning colors, immense lizards, scaribs cuirassed in all tints of metal, 

 humming-birds plumaged in all splendor of jeweled radiance, flies that flash like 

 fire, centipedes of gigantic growth. And the lord of all these, the despot of 

 these vast domains is the terrible Fer de lance. . . . 



Here, then, is "unlimited food, abundant moisture, warmth and light, 

 and no wonder animal life has grown apace, multiplied and modified 

 its form — and adapted itself to forest conditions. 



Along this forest route come certain strange, peculiar molluscs, 

 which far from the native haunts of their allies have succeeded in 

 establishing themselves in apparently successful occupation against 

 more active forms. Insects, unnumbered, occupying every part from 

 solid wood of the tree heart to outermost bark or leaf, a few fishes even 

 leave their water haunts for temporary quarters up a tree, and frogs 

 are here to stay, while snakes, lizards, chameleons, are at home await- 

 ing callers. To birds the trees become a most natural harbor and home 

 to rest, to nest, to eat and die. Ungainly sloths, helpless elsewhere, 



