A JUNGLE BEACH 95 



alone conscious in the moonlight, watching 

 through the night with his great round, yellow 

 orbs, and thinking the thoughts that macaws al- 

 ways think in the moonlight. 



The next day the macaw and the monkey had 

 forgotten all about the midnight sound, but I 

 searched and found why there was no final boom. 

 And my search ended at my beach. A bit of 

 overhanging bank had given way and a tall tree 

 had fallen headlong into the water, its roots 

 sprawling helplessly in mid-air. Like rats de- 

 serting a sinking ship, a whole Noah's ark of 

 tree-living creatures was hastening along a single 

 cable shorewards: tree-crickets; ants laden with 

 eggs and larvae; mantids gesticulating as they 

 walked, like old men who mumble to themselves; 

 woodroaches, some green and leaf-like, others, 

 facsimiles of trilobites but fleet of foot and with 

 one goal. 



What was a catastrophe for a tree and a shift 

 of home for the tenants was good fortune for 

 me, and I walked easily out along the trunk and 

 branches and examined the strange parasitic 

 growths and the homes which were being so rap- 

 idly deserted. The tide came up and covered the 

 lower half of the prostrate tree, drowning what 



