The Amazon at Night: Torchlight, Spiders, and the Forest Speaking

The spiders were immediate and considerable. Webs between every available anchor point, and in the webs, spiders of sizes and configurations that require a genuine revision of what you thought spiders looked like. The largest we encountered had a body the diameter of a golf ball and legs extending to something approaching the span of a hand, sitting in the centre of a web that caught the torchlight in a way that was structurally impressive and viscerally alarming. Freddy pointed it out with the manner of someone showing you a particularly well-designed piece of engineering, which is more or less what it is. The spider was indifferent to us. Most of what lives in the Amazon is indifferent to you, provided you are indifferent back. The arrangement is not complex but it requires confidence in the principle that the creatures around you have no particular agenda for you.

Freddy asked us to turn off our torches and stand still for a few minutes. The darkness was absolute in the way that no built environment produces darkness, no ambient light from any direction, the forest canopy eliminating the sky. The sound that replaced the visual information was: insects at a density that registers as a continuous tone, the specific calls of nocturnal birds resolving out of the general noise when you stopped listening for sound as a category and started listening for specific sounds, the movement of monkeys in the upper canopy distinguished from wind in the leaves by the pattern of the disturbance, irregular and purposeful. The forest at night is not quiet. It is extremely loud but in a register that human beings are not calibrated to hear as noise because we did not evolve inside it.

We stood there for probably three minutes. It felt longer, in the good sense. When Freddy turned his torch back on, we continued to the clearing where the cayman vigil would take place. He was right about one thing: the creatures are more afraid of you than you are of them, which is both true and insufficient as a comfort, because “more afraid” in this context still allows for “extremely afraid and therefore behaving unpredictably,” which is not a reassurance that holds up under examination. We came back to the ship without incident. The wall of insects that descended on the torchlight during the river portion of the evening did not detract from this. Significantly.