This is very evocative, marvellous writing by Paul Salopek in the September 2005 National Geographic:
"Rain forests are light-struck places...The world beneath a jungle canopy is neither dim, nor gloomy, nor monochrome. It glows with the light of some alien order--a light so improbable it has a dreamed quality, the way colors in dreams can possess actual weight, or create sound, or stop time."
"I have looked up, startled, from my notebook to see the forest suddenly electric white: suffused with the calm, almost glacial cleanliness of a fluorescent-lit office. A few minutes later, or merely a few steps away, the jungle turns metallic. Falling rain, leaf shadows, the bloodied pelt of an arrowed monkey--all appear dipped in shivery tones of silver. Once, on the steamy banks of the Ituri River, I saw the twilit undergrowth erupt in unearthly constellations of fire: Sunset burned through the pin-holed canopy, and its deep, red laminar shafts spattered the sodden leaves like flecks of lava...[F]ew credit [the rain forests for] the kaleidoscopic richness of their light--ethereal and hallucinatory, filtered as though through antique glass,unlike any other in the world."
"Right now, at this precise instant,the jungle is blue--rinsed the color of indigo ink diluted in water, its shadows deep as the bluing on a gun."
"Musa Yambuka's glistening eyes are stained pale blue. The sweat on his face sparkles star blue.
...
"But what distracts me more than ever, what's got me disoriented, even a little spooked--my eyes, these days seem like borrowed things--isn't what these people do as much as the light they do it in: this miraculous and enigmatic empire of color that only the Mbuti know."
"It shifts again.
"Musa's ferociouis grin shines aquamarine. The drivers approach through a white-hot slab of brilliance that could burn diamonds. Dazzled, I look down at what, apparently, are my hands. In the bottom-of-the-sea sheen of the forest, the skin looks insubstantial. Almost translucent. The hands of a ghost."
*see also July 22, 2006.
"Rain forests are light-struck places...The world beneath a jungle canopy is neither dim, nor gloomy, nor monochrome. It glows with the light of some alien order--a light so improbable it has a dreamed quality, the way colors in dreams can possess actual weight, or create sound, or stop time."
"I have looked up, startled, from my notebook to see the forest suddenly electric white: suffused with the calm, almost glacial cleanliness of a fluorescent-lit office. A few minutes later, or merely a few steps away, the jungle turns metallic. Falling rain, leaf shadows, the bloodied pelt of an arrowed monkey--all appear dipped in shivery tones of silver. Once, on the steamy banks of the Ituri River, I saw the twilit undergrowth erupt in unearthly constellations of fire: Sunset burned through the pin-holed canopy, and its deep, red laminar shafts spattered the sodden leaves like flecks of lava...[F]ew credit [the rain forests for] the kaleidoscopic richness of their light--ethereal and hallucinatory, filtered as though through antique glass,unlike any other in the world."
"Right now, at this precise instant,the jungle is blue--rinsed the color of indigo ink diluted in water, its shadows deep as the bluing on a gun."
"Musa Yambuka's glistening eyes are stained pale blue. The sweat on his face sparkles star blue.
...
"But what distracts me more than ever, what's got me disoriented, even a little spooked--my eyes, these days seem like borrowed things--isn't what these people do as much as the light they do it in: this miraculous and enigmatic empire of color that only the Mbuti know."
"It shifts again.
"Musa's ferociouis grin shines aquamarine. The drivers approach through a white-hot slab of brilliance that could burn diamonds. Dazzled, I look down at what, apparently, are my hands. In the bottom-of-the-sea sheen of the forest, the skin looks insubstantial. Almost translucent. The hands of a ghost."
*see also July 22, 2006.
public occurrences
