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 mete 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 larve; 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 
