rior knowledge, called it "Mimosa Pudica," which left me little wiser.
"Stand quiet," he said, "and I'll give you something to write home about."
Then
with his finger he touched the nearest leaf of a plant on the edge of a
field. And then a marvelous thing happened. As the touch of a button
may light a whole town, so his touching one single leaf in this
community of plants set all the leaves of all the plants in that plain
folding back upon their stems.
Here
was magic indeed, it seemed, a most wonderful and never-to-be-forgotten
sight. It impressed itself upon me as nothing else had done before or
has done since. And I realized that some members of the vegetable
kingdom, at least, may possess an awareness closely bordering on that
consciousness which is man's greatest privilege and proudest possession.
On
our return to the citadel Dicky Gibbs promised to take me some night
when it was tolerably safe to a spot where he knew of a cluster of
sacred orchids which bloomed only once in so many years and then for
only one hour on the first night of the new moon. He said that the
natives went out then in crowds to worship the flowers; but perhaps
their motive was to admire rather than to worship. Orchids, indeed,
are closely associated in my mind with Jolo, because there was not a
porch of any house without them. The Chinese or Filipino homes, the
American customs house, the military barracks, the hospital, all
displayed orchids suspended from a rafter in moss-filled halves of
coconut shells.
Many
of the blooms were anything but rare, but they were exquisite in shape
and tint; others were less beautiful but were hard to come by; and some
again were both rare and so beautiful that I could not take my eyes
off them. What unearthly mysterious blooms orchids are! Have they come
to us from some other planet?
But
now trade began to revive again. Before many months the scare which
Gekira, the pirate, and the lesser piratical lights had caused among
the Sulu island-folk had subsided.
