Text 1: Night survey, by Nadia Haque

An original contemporary online feature.

My job, for six weeks every year, is to count frogs. This sounds charming until you learn that the frogs come out at night, along streams, in a forest where the temperature never drops below twenty-four degrees and the humidity makes your clothes feel as if they have been boiled.

We work in pairs, but on the evening I want to describe my partner, Ali, had a fever, and I went to the near stream alone. I told myself it was a short transect, four hundred metres, and that I had walked it thirty times. Within half an hour I was absorbed: a tree frog no bigger than a thumbnail, its eyes gold in my head torch; a stick insect the length of my forearm; a log glowing faintly green with fungus, as if somebody had left a night light on.

I did not notice the rain because the canopy above me took it first. What I noticed was the sound of the stream, which changed from a chatter to a growl. When I turned my torch on the water, it had turned brown and was rising visibly, swallowing the stones I had been stepping on. The path back crossed the stream twice.

I climbed the bank instead, hauling myself up by roots, and sat with my back against a buttress root as tall as a door while the water roared below. Leeches found my ankles. Something large moved through the undergrowth and stopped. I switched off my torch to save the battery, and the darkness was so complete that I held my hand in front of my face and could not see it.

At two in the morning I saw a light weaving through the trees and heard Ali’s voice, hoarse with fever, calling my name. He had woken, found my bed empty, and come out with the station manager. I have never been so glad to be told off. The next night we went back together, and the frogs were still there, singing as if nothing had happened.

Text 2: Lost among the trees, by Edmund Clare

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, kept in 1851, a naturalist collecting insects in South America describes getting lost.

March 14th. A day I shall not soon forget. Soon after breakfast a butterfly of a kind I had never before seen, its wings of the deepest blue, settled upon the path near the village, and I followed it with my net into the forest. It led me on, settling and rising, for perhaps an hour, and when at last I caught it and looked about me, I had not the least idea where I was.

There is no gloom in England to compare with the gloom of these forests. The trees rise like the pillars of some vast cathedral to a roof of leaves a hundred feet above, through which the sun is seen only as a pale glimmer. Every way I turned looked exactly like every other. I shouted until I was hoarse, and the forest swallowed my voice as a sponge swallows water.

Towards noon the silence became terrible to me. It was broken only by the dropping of fruit, the creaking of the great trees and, once, a howling from the monkeys overhead so loud and dismal that it seemed to come from a crowd of men in torment. My water was gone. Ants of a fiery sort had found their way into my boots, and the heat lay upon me like a heavy coat.

At length I remembered that every stream must run to the river, and the river ran past the village. I found a little brook and followed it down, wading where the banks were thick, and after some three hours I heard dogs barking and saw the smoke of a cooking fire. The women of the village laughed at my torn clothes, and a boy of ten gave me water and a banana. My butterfly, I am glad to say, was quite unharmed.

Both of these texts are about being alone and in danger in a tropical forest.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of being in the forest
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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