copyright 1951 by James A. Michener
copyright 1950, 1951 by The Curtis Publishing Company
Excerpted from the Espiritu Santo section
The word jungle say the purists should never be used. It has an emotional coloring and no precise meaning. The scientific term is "the tropical rain forest." This term accurately describes most of the so-called jungles of the South Pacific, for they are not the frightful places that many would have us believe. Most often the rain forests are composed of very tall trees which form canopies over land that is rather fun to travel. The rain forest is much more like a warm Canadian woods than it is like a jungle.
I know rain forests that are like beautiful parks with no undergrowth, others that seem to be cathedrals with sunlight slanting through the rose windows. Brilliant birds fly through the solemn spaces, and I am always struck by the silent majesty of such sanctuaries and agree that to call them jungle is misleading.
But there is another kind of rain forest that is neither inspiring nor majestic, and the vast forests of Espiritu Santo are in that category. Here each tree is burdened with parasites. The sky is never seen, the ground never free of crawling growth. Malignant vines clutch at the intruder. Extensive swamps suck down his feet, and the atmosphere is rank.
Let me explain just what the Santo forest is like. At the end of the road there is a cascade which was much enjoyed by American troops. From this road a trail leads to a spot some four hundred yards above the waterfall. Once I used that trail and came to where I could hear the cascade tumbling down. I was inclined to cut across the short intervening distance and come back by the road but an Army officer with me felt we had not the time for such a trip, so we retraced our steps to the highway.
The next day three men followed the same trail, came to the same spot, heard the noisy waters. They took the short cut, and when they had gone fifty feet from the trail realized that the going would be tough. Great vines impeded their way dense growth of all kinds hemmed them in; so they decided to return to the trail, but in that short distance they had become lost.
For two days they tried to gain the cascade. They could hear it sometimes but from which direction it came they could not tell. If they climbed a tree to survey the ground, they could never get above the tangled canopy.
The nights were fearful. Insects of all kinds attacked them. Mosquitoes flocked about their faces. There was an armadillo-like millipede six inches long that euded an alkali which ate away the skin wherever it touched. Thin feelers of lawyer cane, sometimes forty feet long, tore at them with inverted fish hooks. There were prickly vines, itch plants, poisonous leaves. If they stepped upon a fallen log, it crumbled to dust. If in stumbling they scratched themselves on the rotten wood, the sore festered in six hours and might not heal for six months. They could not drink the water. They could not see the stars. And if they infected one of their thousands bites they ran the risk of blood poisoning.
At the end of two days one of the boys was dead. Another was out of his mind, and the third had stumbled into a coastal village. Through all their expereince they were wihin three miles of 100,000 men.
Perhaps the purists are right. Perhaps such malignant forests, so poisonous to men, are technically no different from the more clement forests where one may stroll with pleasure. But it seems to me there is a word in our language for the forest of Santo, and I shall use it: JUNGLE. Five time I helped organize search parties for G.I.'s lost in the Santo jungles. Three times we found them.