anging bank had given
way and a tall tree had fallen headlong into the water, its roots
sprawling helplessly in mid-air. Like rats deserting 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; wood-roaches, 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 rapidly deserted. The tide came up and covered the
lower half of the prostrate tree, drowning what creatures had not
made their escape and quickening the air-plants with a false rain,
which in course of time would rot their very hearts.

But the first few days were only the overture of changes in this shift
of conditions. Tropic vegetation is so tenacious of life that it
struggles and adapts itself with all the cunning of a Japanese
wrestler. We cut saplings and thrust them into mud or the crevices of
rocks at low tide far from shore, to mark our channel, and before long
we have buoys of foliage banners waving from the bare poles above
water. We erect a tall bamboo flagpole on the bank, and before long
our flag is almost hidden by the sprouting leaves, and the pulley so
blocked that we have occasionally to lower and lop it.

So the fallen tree, still gripping the nutritious bank with a moiety
of roots, turned slowly in its fibrous stiffness and directed its life
and sap and hopes upward. During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk
and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided,
controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach
of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks
after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape
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