Nepenthes of Borneo
It may not be so strange that a bed of bamboo slats, in a jungle eight thousand miles and a million years from one’s urban flat, a hundred miles south of the equator, a hundred miles from the nearest human, a hundred perils behind and yet ahead of us, would feel like a home. It is our home. It is where we came from. It is where we return to from where we went, drifting in and out of sleep in the steady garble of rain pulsing through our fetal forms there on those bamboo slats.
During the main part of the day, between the wild sounds of the dusk and dawn (which in themselves sandwiched the near-silence of the night), there was a constant whistle in the air. A trilling whistle, or a long, wet whistle. It never ceased, but we became used to it. We walked a mile along a column of ants. There was a motionless, shiny white slug, or something like it, a marbly, glistening orb of ectoplasm the size of my fist on a fallen tree on the forest floor. Elsewhere down the mossy log, which was sinking into the peat and turning slowly to mulch, insects dressed in seersucker scurried about, unaware of the big picture. The whistle overhead was almost percussive, less a whistle than a rapid beating on a gourd. And as was common at those higher altitudes, when we looked up from the orb, the giant beetle, the insects, the ants, we saw we were in a forest of pitcher plants, whose rococo shapes and ornamentation seemed apropos to the Edwardian rajas their discoverers named them for: nepenthes edwardsiana, nepenthes burbidgea, nepenthes rafflesiana, nepenthes lowii.
The pitcher plant usually is shaped like a fluted vase, some with longer necks than others, some no larger than a thumb, some you could fit your fist into, but wouldn’t dare. The inside of the pitcher is covered with a coat of down-thrust barbs, and at the bottom of the pitcher is a pool of botanical bile that digests whatever wanders into the barbed chamber and cannot go anywhere but down into it. It is not a sure death trap, as certain cheeky insects have been observed climbing out of the pitchers, scuttling freely over the tops of the barbs by virtue of their physiognomy. That a few of the millions of species of insects get a free pass is insignificant to the survival of the pitcher plant; they have thrived in the tropical rainforests of Madagascar, the Seychelles, India, Sri Lanka, and the Malay Archipelago for seventy million years.
The pitcher plant passively captures many kinds of both flying and terrestrial insects—crickets, cockroaches, moths, flies, scorpions, and even lizards and frogs. The nepenthes albomarginata is believed to have evolved to specialize in capturing termites, which specialization protects the tree to which the candelabra of epiphytic plants are attached. Moreover, pitcher plants have been seen to host some species without harming them, most commonly the small red crab spider, which lurks in the pitcher to capture prey as it ventures in, a remarkable co-operation between two creatures whose sapience and capacity for planning or communication is equivalent to that of moss with stone. Similar is the exclusive relation between the camponotus schmitzi ant and the nepenthes bicalarata. It seems these ants are observed only on this particular family of pitcher plant and in no other habitat at all anywhere in the forest, living on its lips and inner walls, and swimming in the pitcher fluid, where they devour the carcasses of insects there. By cleaning up this detritus they prevent it from accumulating and putrifying inside the pitcher.
A mystery: Specimens of pitcher plants transplanted to greenhouses in Europe have proved to survive perfectly well without digesting insects, but on the nutrient humus alone in which they are replanted. The apparent satisfaction of the pitcher plant, transplanted and pursuing none of its usual wiles, suggests we cannot yet see, nor even imagine, the true symmetries of the processes of confidence. Nor therefore the nature of this force, that “through the green fuse drives the flower.” It seems that if there were a prima voce, a designer of the universe, it would have demonstrated far less variety of liaisons and types and complexity. It would have read like a penny dreadful had there been an author to this universe. It could be we observe—even among our own species—survival strategies that have survived, that mean nothing, the lucky (not plucky, for they are essentially mindless) survivors of an all-devouring universe.
After Lou Morrison’s father retired from the Army in 1961, they lived on the road. Read more.
“Nepenthes of Borneo” has been excerpted from a book-length study, A Stranger in Every Sense: Reading Melville's 'The Confidence-Man' During a Transection of the Island of Borneo.