For more than an hour I lay motionless, every possible fraction of my body stretched in the full sunlight, my mind a blank except for the occasional mental nod of agreement with all tropical humanity for choosing to dwell where it does and more especially for refusing to do any but the bare minimum of work. When one's whole soul is approaching an earthly nirvana, one's senses must be considerably deadened, and for this reason it only slowly penetrated my brain that there was a peculiar muffled noise apparently distributed more or less evenly through the heavy atmosphere. Every time I raised my head it ceased; in fact it was the absence more that its presence that betrayed its very existence.
I was most mystified by its quality, once I had definately made up my mind that it was a noise at all. Lazily I turned the puzzle over in my mind, attempting to fit first this and then that cause to the general effect. Nothing that I struck upon seemed in the least plausible in a tropical jungle. Now it faintly resembled distant drumming, but its very irregularity precluded this, then it fell to a mere grumbling as if a giant political meeting were taking place deep down in the ground.
Ah! That was it, underground. I pressed my ear to the soft earth; the noise seemed somewhat more muffled. I became intensely eager to discover the true nature of this phenomenon. Cupping my hands behind my ears, I revolved this way and that like a sound detector. There was no amplification, and yet the disturbance seemed to come from all directions. I even got up and prowled around, all to no avail.
Can you picture to yourself the irritable dismay that this caused me? There were so many strange sounds in the jungle, but one can alway assign to them some cause- doubtless wrong in most cases, but nevertheless sufficient for the day. This was insistent, faint, irregular, and apparently impossible of location. Exasperated, I flopped back down onto the ground sheet to continue my ultra-violet-ray treatment and composed myself with my head pillowed on a large flat root that bulged out of the soil.
Instantly the sounds swelled up into a volume of great diversity. Instead of a gentle murmuring I discerned scratchings, rustlings, very, very small cracklings, and an unaccountable sound like that of soot falling in a chimney. It was all so very unexpected and irregular that I sat bolt upright as if I had been severly bitten. Had anybody been watching me during the following few minutes, I am quite sure that, convinced I was in a really dangerous condition, he would have run for the nearest doctor, despite the fact that the latter was several hundred miles away.
I grovelled on the ground, caressing the root with fingers, nostrils, and ears, for one can often feel or smell a sound better that one can hear it, such are the properties of one's sense organs. Once assured that I had located a faithful transmitter of the sound, I crawled about trying to trace the tree from which it originated, which is not nearly so simple as one might suppose. Two-hundred-foot trees that grow in a land of tornadoes must have substantial anchorage, and where the soil is shallow their roots may spread great distances around their bases. This particular root plunged straight down into the earth. I had half an hours hard digging before I came upon an angle and could judge in which direction it set off. This determined, I still had some thirty woody giants from which to choose and therefore decided that a systematic search with a trapper's friend was the best course to adopt.
I then began stalking trees. Approaching each with the utmost care and the minimum of noise, I listened in by pressing my ear to the trunk. When I was satisfied that there was no sound, I cut a small mark in the bark and proceeded to the next. I had marked eighteen trees when it suddenly struck me that the sounds might have been comming from some subterranean channels through which the root passed. I hesitated just behind the tent, full of doubt, irritation, and mystification.
Without warning there came a "plump" at my side. As I wheeled round, a little puff of rust-colored powder rose from the base of an enormous tree. I dived in among the foliage and discovered a large hole at its base. Peering into the darkness within, I heard all manner of squeaks, shufflings, and movements, and a continuous cascade of rotten wood and dust kept falling from above and rolling out the hole. All these strange noises were instantly explained. There must be animals moving about, scratching and grumbling in the recesses of this great hollow tree. Their activities above were causing an endless stream of dust, chips of rotten wood, lumps of fungus, and small logs to fall down into the base, making there a neat conical mound of considerable proportions. The noise in its cumulative effect was exactly like that of tons of soot falling in a colossal chimney. Close at hand I detected little chirps and squeaks.
Excitement at my discovery quite outdid my gratification upon having my intuition vindicated, but the explanation of one mystery only ushered in another. What were the animals causing all this disturbance?
Excerpt from "Animal Treasure", by Ivan T. Sanderson, The Viking Press, NY, 1937
