Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey

Author:Richard Fortey [Fortey, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-76118-7
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2011-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Silent Forests, Crowded Oceans

TREE-TRUNKS RISE to more than thirty metres. They are sheer, virtually unbranched up to their crowns. The air is so humid that the moisture congeals upon your shoulders into great drops which trickle away down your back. The canopy of the trees far above is cutting out much of the light; in some directions the way is dark, but where a tree has come crashing down there are bright shafts of sunlight, picked out in wisps of mist, which illuminate a thousand ferns, sprouting like green fountains from the forest floor. The upturned tree has shallow roots that bifurcate regularly, held up like a great hand blocking the way. It is hard to move through the forest because everywhere roots are tangled, and there are rotting logs across the path, some crusted with the satiny green of liverworts, others slick with damp moss. The browns and greens are unrelieved by splashes of colour; there is a sense of dimness, of almost oppressive growth. Everywhere, too, there is a warm smell of decay. Touch the bark of one of the great trees and it feels rough: its surface is tessellated with lozenge-shaped protuberances. There is no sound—no distant howlings, no birdsong. Somewhere ahead, a glimpse of a dark stream, or maybe a pool, snaking between the trees. Suddenly there is a splash, a distinct sound of movement. An animal swims lazily near the edge of the pool—a small crocodile, perhaps? Look more closely and you see other evidence of life. Two very large cockroaches scuttle rapidly away beneath the rotting stump of a tree-like fern. They flee the light, their antennae tucked away in the darkness. Flitting slowly through the moist atmosphere there are flying insects, too, some of them large, fleshy and ungainly. None resembles the butterflies you half expect to see in this swampy forest. When one lands on you—probably mistaking you for a tree—you instinctively brush it off, and it falls, struggling, into a pool. Perhaps you have disturbed something by your sudden movements, for from inside a log there are subtle scraping noises. It could be a scorpion. You shudder and walk on.

This is a walk through a Carboniferous coal forest, 330 million years ago. The world is full of trees, and hidden creatures. There have been many changes since the greening of the Earth in the Devonian. The vegetation which previously clothed the land only tentatively now triumphantly smothers it. It is easy to see a resemblance to today’s tropical rain forests in the soaring trunks and the humid atmosphere, a place in which decay and regeneration are so intimately entwined. There are even liana-like herbs that twist through and over the trunks of the great trees, and through all the silence there is a kind of expectant stillness that comes only from fecundity. But in other ways it is so different. It is silent because there is nothing that knows how to make a noise. The only sounds are generated by the scrape of insect limbs, or maybe a low amphibious hiss.

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