A JUNGLE BEACH 97 
shorewards, the taut liana strand was again 
crowded with a mass of passing life—a maze of 
vines and creepers, whose tendrils and. suckers 
reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting 
for gangway to shore, through days and weeks, 
as the animal life which preceded them had made 
the most of seconds and minutes. 
The half-circle of exposed raw bank became 
in its turn the center of a myriad activities. 
Great green kingfishers began at once to bur- 
row; tiny emerald ones chose softer places up 
among the wreckage of wrenched roots; wasps 
came and chopped out bits for the walls and par- 
titions of their cells; spiders hung their cobwebs 
between ratlines of rootlets; and hummingbirds 
promptly followed and plucked them from their 
silken nets, and then took the nets to bind their 
own tiny air-castles. Finally, other interests in- 
tervened, and like Jennie and Robert, I 
gradually forgot the tree that fell without an 
echo. 
In the jungle no action or organism is sep- 
arate, or quite apart, and this thing which came 
to the three of us suddenly at midnight led by 
devious means to another magic phase of the | 
shore. 
