THE CONVICT TRAIL 201 



noticed a scattering of soft yellow cashews 

 fallen here and there, and simultaneously there 

 arrived the hosts of fruit-eating birds. From 

 the most delicate turquoise honey-creepers to 

 great red and black grosbeaks, they thronged 

 the trees. All day a perfect stream of tanagers 

 — green, azure and wine-colored — flew in and 

 about the manna, callistes and silver-beaks, dac- 

 nis and palm tanagers. And for a whole week 

 we gloried in this new feast of color, before the 

 last riddled cashew dropped, to be henceforth 

 the prize of great wasps and gauze-winged flies, 

 who guzzled its fermented juice and helped in 

 the general redistribution of its flesh — back to 

 the elements of the tropic mold, to await the 

 swarms of fingering rootlets, a renewed syn- 

 thesis — to rise again for a time high in air, 

 again to become part of blossom and bird and 

 insect. 



It was along this Convict Trail that I sank 

 the series of pits which trapped unwary walkers 

 of the night, and halfway out at pit number 

 five, the army ants waged their wonderful 

 warfare. 



In fact it was while watching operations in 

 another sector of this same battle-front that I 



