IV 
A JUNGLE BEACH 
A JUNGLE moon first showed me my beach, 
For a week I had looked at it in blazing sunlight, 
walked across it, even sat on it in the intervals 
of getting wonted to the new laboratory; yet I 
had not perceived it. Colonel Roosevelt once 
said to me that he would rather perceive things 
from the point of view of a field-mouse, than be 
a human being and merely see them. And in my 
case it was when I could no longer see the beach 
that I began to discern its significance. 
This British Guiana beach, just in front of 
my Kartabo bungalow, was remarkably diversi- 
fied, and in a few steps, or strokes of a paddle, 
I could pass from clean sand to mangroves and 
muckamucka swamp, thence to out-jutting rocks, 
and on to the Edge of the World, all within a dis- 
tance of a hundred yards. For a time my beach 
walks resulted in inarticulate reaction. After 
months in the blindfolded canyons of New York’s 
streets, a hemicircle of horizon, a hemisphere of 
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