In a recent Green Planet film David Attenborough strolls nonchalantly through a Costa Rica jungle, before introducing its constituents and inhabitants. The sequence instantly reminded me of an extraordinary evocation of a Malayan jungle by Isabella Bird in her 1870 book The Golden Chersonese and the way Thither. Miss Bird was a peerless (also fearless) explorer and vivid narrator. Her books on Malaya (the ‘Chersonese’) – which includes the first days of Hong Kong – on primitive Japan, on Hawaii, on the eastern U.S.A and Canada, on the Wild West (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains) on Persia, Kurdistan and Tibet are among the finest travelogues ever written. Her voice is confidential but her observation universal. She travels with me in my Kindle everywhere. Tune in and you will thank me for the introduction.
“Do not think of a jungle as I used to think of it, as an entanglement or thicket of profuse and matted scrub, for it is in these regions at least a noble forest of majestic trees, many of them supported at their roots by buttresses, behind which thirty men could find shelter. On many of the top branches of these, other trees have taken root from seeds deposited by birds and have attained considerable size; and all send down, as it appears, extraordinary cylindrical strands from two to six inches in diameter, and often one hundred and fifty feet in length, smooth and straight until they root themselves, looking like the guys of a mast. Under these giants stand the lesser trees grouped in glorious confusion, – coca, sago, areca, and gomuti palms, nipah and nibong palms, tree ferns fifteen and twenty feet high, the bread-fruit, the ebony, the damar, the india rubber, the gutta-percha, the cajeput, the banyan, the upas, the bombax or cotton tree, and hosts of others, many of which bear brilliant flowers.”
Miss Bird threads through this wilderness by night in a dug-out canoe, deafened by the racket, the shrieks, roars and crashes of the inhabitants, then lodges alone in a bungalow infested by snakes and surrounded by tigers, guarded by a policeman with a bayonet. If only the BBC film crew had been there.
