Rubber. Edith A. Browne
be together as much as do you and your dog.
“Why does he carry that very long bit of cane? And he doesn’t seem to have a bow with him, so of what use are those arrows in that pouch which is strung round his waist?”
The long cane is a very simple weapon called a “blowpipe”; the arrows are the missiles for it. Whenever yon savage sees anything he wants to kill, he loads his pipe, puts it to his lips, blows, and out flies an arrow with terrific force and deadly aim.
Maybe this son of the wilds is out on a hunting jaunt on behalf of his tribe. Just as likely he is taking a walk; for quite possibly he has been suffering of late from an attack of wander-thirst—a common complaint among barbarians, to whom freedom is one of the most blessed possessions in life—so he has left the camp to roam it off. Weeks, months even, may elapse before he returns to his fellows. Meanwhile, he can easily supply all his wants, for he can shoot his meat, trap his fish, and gather an abundance of tasty and nutritious nuts and roots. Also, he can amuse himself by making a fine collection of pretty seeds and gay feathers, wherewith to adorn himself on the next festival occasion at the camp.
Like all his fellows, he is an enterprising savage in that he is constantly on the lookout for forest products which can be turned to account in everyday life. See him now stopping to try the sap of a certain tree. With a flint axehead he probes the bark, when out oozes a thick white fluid, some of which drops on his hand. He rubs thumb against fingers to get it off, whereupon it gets thicker and thicker, and finally breaks loose as a bit of something solid. He experiments with this strange gift of the forest, and finds that it will stretch and rebound. He collects more of the sap, catching it this time in the palm of one hand. Into this liquid he drops the first little pellet he made, and proceeds to roll it round and round therein with his free hand. Soon the freshly collected sap begins to solidify on the pellet, and his treasure grows appreciably bigger. We watch this interesting experiment repeated time after time. The pellet has grown into a fair-sized ball; suddenly that ball slips from the grasp of the man who is so intelligently playing at work. Surely it is bewitched; for the moment it touches the ground, it tries to jump into the air. Why, if only he had known what was going to happen, if only he had stooped down a second earlier, he might have caught it before it again fell to earth. No wonder he looks pleased; he has discovered a new product that can be made into a plaything. He notes the kind of tree which has supplied him with the material for his highly amusing toy; then he picks up his blowpipe, calls his parrot back to its travelling perch, and goes his way.
Yes, certainly we will follow this interesting discoverer, but first we must ask Mother Witch to borrow for us some of those magic cloaks which render the wearer invisible; for, as I have told you, were yon son of the wilds to see us, one way or another our adventures might be brought to an untimely end.
CHAPTER II
THE ROMANCE OF RUBBER—continued
Our leader seems to be pursuing a haphazard course as we shadow him about the forest. Nevertheless, it is not many months ago since he wandered this same way, and only a few weeks have gone by since a little party of the tribe rebeat with their footsteps this path, which was originally designed and cleared by remote ancestors as a cut to a good fishing stream. But fresh vegetation springs up with mushroom growth in this land of tropical luxuriance, and to-day the trail has been wellnigh hidden from view by a new tangle of undergrowth. There is no fear, however, of our leader losing himself in the maze; he has the tribal instinct for finding his way through the forest; the scenery, which seems to us so hopelessly bewildering, reveals to his trained eye many a signpost, and the thickest covering of shrubs, creepers, fallen leaves, broken branches, and storm-strewn trees cannot lead him astray from a path which he has roamed again and again ever since he was quite a little boy. Although he seems to be forcing a passage at random, he is following a trail which is as familiar to him as are the highways and byways of our native town to us, and sooner or later, according as the fancy takes him to go the long way round, or turn aside into a short cut, he will get back to the camp.
Whatever may have been his purpose when he started out on his wanderings, clearly his chief desire now is to find trees of the same kind as that from which he obtained the strange material that he has made into a ball. Sometimes he comes upon two or three within a hundred yards or so of each other; sometimes he has to walk a good mile from his last find before he espies another of the forest giants for which he is seeking.
After a few hours’ diligent search, he walks ahead without stopping to test the sap of any more trees, and at length we realize that during the last hour he has been making straight for the camp. The moment he arrives here he shows his quaint toy to his fellows. The tribe are all very interested in it, very delighted with it, and it is tossed from hand to hand. The chief questions him, and there follows a conclave, at which it is decided that a party shall set forth on the morrow to collect more of the newly discovered material.
At dawn we leave the camp clearing, and once more plunge into the thick of the bush. With what a novel procession we join company and once more strike the trail! Evidently it is not the custom to wear clothes in this part of the world, but personal ornaments seem to be in high favour. Nearly everyone is bedecked with some “pretty” knick-knack, such as a necklet of tiger’s teeth, a jingling girdle of seeds, or a plaited-fibre armlet; and the majority seem to make “pincushions” of their chin and lips—the fishbones you see sticking out therefrom are pegs on which they hang decorations of feathers and seeds when they are merrymaking.
From the way these primitive folk set about getting a supply of the newly discovered product, we soon realize that they have more intelligence than we had previously given the savage credit for possessing; for when the discoverer points out to his companions a specimen of the tree which yields the desired gum, a member of the party proceeds to carry out an experiment that would seem to be of both a practical and imaginative nature. A hole is scratched in the ground at the base of the tree, and a few inches above, in a straight line with this, several notches are hacked in the trunk. The sap, which immediately begins to ooze out, trickles down into the hollow beneath. You see at once that a more wholesale method of collecting has been devised than that of catching driblets of the sap by hand. But in the plan which is now being tried there lurks still more intelligence, inspiration, reason, instinct, or whatever you like to call it. For at the conclave in the camp, general opinion favoured the idea that heat was the agent which transformed the liquid into a solid. And if the warmth of a man’s hand could bring about such a remarkable change, surely, it is argued, the heat of the sun would more readily have the same effect. So the sap is now to be left in the collecting hole, where it will come under the influence of baking hot tropical earth and thirsty tropical air.
Sap is still issuing from the wounded trunk when the party go off in search of other specimens of the tree. After a few hours, we find that they have been steering a course which brings them back to the first tree on which they operated. No wonder they are all so pleased when they arrive at this goal, for they can see at a glance that their experiment has proved successful. True, the sap has now ceased to flow, but it is more than likely that some fresh wounds would produce a further supply. And sufficient for the moment is the joy of finding in the hole beneath the tree a big lump of solid something, like the material of the toy which their guide made yesterday. It is scooped out of its semicircular mould, is found to be still soft enough to work, and is quickly rounded by hand into the form of a ball.
* * * * *
Many years have passed since this new kind of gum was discovered; but we are still living in the days of Once Upon a Time when we pay our second visit to the country where flourishes the tree of supply. In the interval since our first visit, the aborigines have had no communication with the civilized world. Yet they have contrived to make their new material serve more purposes than the original one of providing them with playthings. They have found out that it is waterproof, so they now smear it over pouches for holding treasures which they want to protect against a tropical downpour. And see the mere savage discovering a new use for this product which is destined to put the whole civilized world under a debt