29. Grey Jungle, Crystal Pool
Chapter 29
Grey Jungle, Crystal Pool
Ponnammal, whose cancer had been discovered in April 1913, became very ill again in the following year. Several times she heard music when no earthly music was being played. Amy took it as one of “the many things of life which we may only know in part until for us too the curtain of sense wears thin.”
The epistle of James says that the sick should call for the elders of the church to anoint them. Should they do that now? They were not sure. Amy was used to being given some sign to confirm a Scripture verse. So they prayed that if they should, someone who was earnest about following this primitive church custom should come along. He came, an old friend from Madras. It was a solemn meeting around the sickbed, the women dressed as usual in their hand-loomed saris, but white ones for this occasion. They laid a palm branch across Ponnammal’s bed as a sign of victory and accepted whatever answer God might give, certain that whether it was to be physical healing or not, He would give victory and peace. It sounds like a simple formula. It was an act of faith, but certainly accompanied by the anguish of doubt and desire which had to be brought again and again under the authority of the Master.
The answer that came was that Ponnammal, from the very day of the anointing, grew rapidly worse. She lay for days without speaking, her dull eyes half-open, seeming to see nothing. The pain was violent, kept under only by large doses of morphia. “She has been walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I never knew how dense that shadow could become, for I never before watched anyone dying in this slow, terrible way. . . . Nothing was visible but the distress and depression of this most fearful disease.”
Once when she seemed to be in unimaginable misery she told Amy how she had longed to be allowed to stay. She thought she could help a little “if the pain did not pass this limit.” “It seemed to me the most unselfish word I had ever heard from human lips.” Ponnammal touched the limit at last—the limit divinely set to pain—and her “warfare was accomplished” on August 26, 1915. She would never be replaced. She had been among the best. But “we shall have our best again, purified, perfected, assured from change forever.” That was the ground of hope.
There was relief in September from the long strain when Amy took a group of children up into the forest near Dohnavur for a few weeks in a government bungalow. It was no longer possible to move such a family to the distant hill resorts, and Amy, always zealously protective of her children, feared European influences there that would contribute nothing to their spiritual welfare. There were worldly distractions which might sow discontent among her children. She saw the need for rest and change, however, and asked God for some provision.
It was an experiment, and the house was primitive. The floor was cement, there were no facilities, it was dank and cold when it rained. Everything but water had to be transported from the plain by coolies. But the weeks were glorious, full of flower collecting, swimming and diving in the pool of a rushing mountain river, hunting for animal tracks (wild elephant tracks by the hundred), bears’ holes, tiger spoor. Amy and three cohorts gave the others “a shivering half hour” by hiding behind a tree and growling. “There was a wild rush up to the house, and then to our immense gratification we saw the whole household turn out with sticks, led by Sella-mutthu, horribly alarmed but valiant.”
What the holiday did for the children was salutary. What it did for Amy was something else. In October she was very ill, so ill that, according to a private note in a journal, she “gave way.” To her friends at home she said nary a word about her health, but admitted that “various things happened which interrupted the even flow of life.” (A biographer would be hard put to single out two days in a row when the flow of life in Dohnavur could be described as “even.”) By giving way she probably meant that she let someone else know she was in pain. Perhaps she had to go to bed. “Distress of thought of doctor being called to leave far needier people for me. Distress of finding some dear ones overburdened because I had given way.” She prayed, perhaps not for the first time and certainly not for the last, “Do not let me be ill and a burden or anxiety to anyone. O let me finish my course with joy and not with grief. . . . Let me die of a battle-wound, O my Lord, not of a lingering illness. Forgive this prayer if it be wrong.”
In the same month it was discovered that Arulai, who had been pronounced cured of tuberculosis, now had Bright’s disease, “another of those grave trials which give us a chance to prove the things we believe.” Arulai, Amy’s “Star,” treasure of all treasures, the Elisha on whom Amy had begun to believe the mantle was to fall. On one of the worst days Amy was walking in the circle of nursery cottages called the Round, praying and thinking of Walker, Ponnammal, Arulai—“our three strongest spiritual influences, the three upon whom I could always count for strength of character as well as for spiritual power: Lord, must Thou take them all?” In early November the answer seemed to be yes. Arulai’s pulse faded, she refused her medicine, and could not speak. Amy sent a message to a friend: Come. Arulai dying. She rallied and survived another twenty-four years.
Amy’s determination not to draw attention to herself had not weakened since she first took the nom-de-plume “Nobody” in the little family journal in Belfast. When her biography of Walker was published, a blurb on the dust jacket—praise she was sure she did not deserve—made her “too ashamed to take any pleasure in the book. O my God, I am ashamed before Thee.” The same motive of self-effacement must have been at least part of what inspired the periodic binges of “covering her tracks” by destroying diaries, a habit which creates tantalizing gaps in the story. Arulai once succeeded in rescuing part of a notebook before Amy had done away with the whole thing, but only God knows how much went into the fire, or into the maws of termites.
A few years later the governor of Madras sent a wire of congratulation on her having been included in the Royal Birthday Honors List. Consternation was her response. A medal? For service in India, service to Him who had died for her? “I have done nothing to make it fitting, and cannot understand it at all,” she wrote to Lord Pentland. “It troubles me to have an experience so different from His Who was despised and rejected, not kindly honored.” She was persuaded at last that it would be ungracious to refuse the award, but she put her foot down when it came to attending the presentation ceremony.
The time spent in the government bungalow in the forest convinced everyone that such a place, though a more commodious one, was needed. The sign was asked for and given, and after several rugged and strenuous expeditions across the plain, into the thickets and up the steep ascents to three or four thousand feet, the perfect spot was found—a small, disused coffee plantation, the Grey Jungle. Money came in for a house, and building began. There were innumerable setbacks. Coolies quit working. Rains came at inopportune times and walls collapsed. Caste conflicts arose among the workers, so that the children took over the carrying of mud and bricks and tiles. At times the sawyers refused to saw so the carpenters were out of work. When the masons failed to protect the tops of walls and huddled in their huts while it rained, Amy and the children and Arul Dasan (who with his wife, Muttammal, had joined the work in Dohnavur) stood in the downpour handing up the mats to keep the walls from dissolving again. The house was finished during the last year of the war for five hundred pounds. They named it the Forest House.
“Green, green forest stretching as far as the eye can see on three sides, rising in mighty billows up the mountains, leaving bare only the rocky tops; high climbing, low dipping forest. A valley, like the trough of the wave of forest green. In the middle of the smother of green the red roof of a house, our forest house. . . . In front the trees drop sharply down, like a cliff dropping to the sea, the green, green sea of the forest.” So she described the place in the opening chapter of From the Forest. And the pool, the joy of their ravine, “jade-green, clear, wonderful water-green, and when the angels are in a very kind mood they send a blue kingfisher to fish there. Then the pool is something quite too lovely for this everyday earth, and sets one thinking what the pools must be among the green woods of Paradise. Then, too, it is deep, deep enough for diving, and its floor of clean white sand, the powdered dust of mountains. In this pool we, the holiday children and whoever is up with them, daily turn into water-babies. . . . If you have troubles, the pool washes them off. Worries are just kissed away.”
In the next few years a number of houses were built in the ravine, including the Jungle House and the Jewel House. They met the need for a place to “come apart,” as the Lord called His disciples, to “rest awhile.”
Amy loved the forest with a passion. She drank its beauty, literally caressed its rocks and trees, sang about it in countless children’s songs. Here, for example, are a couple of lines she wrote to the elephant:
His great big flat feet pound and pound
With a rumpety—dumpety—crumpety sound.
and to the mosquito:
Take good advice and promptly go,
Abominable Mosquito.
Her long poems on the meaning of suffering, Pools and The Valley of Vision, were probably written here, as well as a number of other books, where isolation, quiet, and coolness made the task of writing less arduous than it was in Dohnavur where such commodities were in short supply. “There is so much sadness in the world, so many hearts ache, so many tears fall, it is rather wonderful to be away for a little while in a tearless world, left just as God made it. . . . these elemental things seem to carry one back to the beginnings, the fundamentals, the things that cannot be shaken, ancient verities of God.”1
She explored every foot of the purchased land. Long-suffering servants toiled with her up steep cliffs, blazing trails wherever she wanted to go, lugging up crockery and food when the fancy took her to have a picnic by a just-discovered waterfall, or tea on top of a lookout rock. Children swept the paths daily, decorated the house with flowers, were taught not to disturb other forest dwellers—except for snakes and scorpions, and only if they came into the house. “Then I am afraid we must slay them, for they are where they ought not to be.”
She was most insistent that the children learn to swim. She had learned in Millisle and Strangford Lough, but once nearly drowned in the forest pool when a child dragged her under. Never mind, she told them, the sensation of drowning was lovely. No need to alarm the family back in Dohnavur by mentioning it.
On a peaceful Sunday morning, in the midst of Sabbath quiet, “like a stone falling plump into a clear still pool,” a fat Brahman gentleman arrived at the Forest House. Amy told the servant who announced his coming to send him to where she sat under a tree. He was a most unwelcome visitor with his retinue, and spoke to her cookboy in a tone “a badly brought up hippopotamus might conceivably use in addressing vermin.” But she asked the servant to bring a cup of milk, and while the man poured it down his throat without touching the cup to his lips, she sat on her stone, reproving herself for disliking the intrusion of this man reputed to be “learned and cultured and full of public charities.” Later reflection produced “A Song for One in Like Temptation”:
No, not for you He thirsted as He died:
No, not for you my Lord was crucified;
Woods, streams, and mountains, innocent are ye:
Not yours, but mine, the shame of Calvary.
And dear as ye must be to Him, ye trees,
And running waters in your purity,
To heart that broke to save them, dearer these,
Sons of a poor undone humanity. . . .
Give me Thy thirst: kindle, O Christ, Thy fire,
Passion of fire, and love’s sincerity;
My wild wind-harp, take, make of it a lyre
Whose music shall win men to turn to Thee.
1. Amy Carmichael, From the Forest, p. 78.