大学英语综合教程 第四册 Unit 8A

[00:00.00]Annie Dillard tells of her visit to the Napo River in the heart of the Ecuadorian jungle
[00:07.00]one of nature's most unspoiled places.
[00:11.23]She describes the beauty of the forest and her admiration for the people who live there.
[00:17.87]IN THE JUNGLE                                                      by Annle Dillard            
[00:21.97]Like any out-of-the-way place,the Napo River in the Ecuadorian jungle seems real enough when you are there
[00:30.38]even central.Out of the way of what?I was sitting on a stump at the edge of a bankside palm-thatch village
[00:40.33]in the middle of the night,on the headwaters of the Amazon.
[00:44.77]Out of the way of human life,tenderness,or the glance of heaven?
[00:50.91]A nightjar in deep-leaved shadow called three long notes,and hushed.The men with me talked softly:
[01:00.21]three North Americans,four Ecuadorians who were showing us the jungle.We were holding cool drinks
[01:08.44]and idly watching a hand-sized tarantula seize moths that came to the lone bulb on the generator shed beside us
[01:17.24]It was February,the middle of summer.Green fireflies spattered lights across the air and illumined for seconds
[01:27.01]now here,now there,the pale trunks of enormous,solitary trees.
[01:33.20]Beneath us the brown Napo River was rising,in all silence;
[01:39.27]it coiled up the sandly bank and tangled its foam in vines that trailed from the forest and roots that looped the shore
[01:48.62]Each breath of night smelled sweet.Each star in Orion seemed to tremble and stir with my breath
[01:57.29]All at once,in the thatch house across the clearing behind us came the sound of a recorder,playing a tune
[02:06.01]that twined over the village clearing,muted our talk on the bankside,and wandered over the river,dissolving downstream
[02:15.60]This will do,I thought.This will do,for a weekend,or a season,or a home.
[02:24.35]Later that night I loosed my hair from its braids and combed it smooth not for myself,
[02:32.19]but so the village girls could play with it in the morning.
[02:36.58]We had disembarked at the village that afternoon,and I had slumped on some shaded steps,
[02:43.76]wishing I knew some Spanish or some Quechua so I could speak with the ring of little girls
[02:50.66]who were alterntely staring at me and smiling at their toes.I spoke anyway,and fooled with my hair,
[02:58.96]which they were obviously dying to get their hands on,and laughed,
[03:03.48]and soon they were all braiding my hair,all five of them,
[03:08.47]all fifty fingers,all my hair,even my bangs.
[03:13.25]And then they took it apart and did it again,laughing,and teaching me Spanish nouns,
[03:20.18]and meeting my eyes and each other's with open delight,while their small brothers in blue jeans
[03:27.33]climbed down from the trees and began kicking a volleyball around with one of the North American men.
[03:34.47]Now,as I combed my hair in the little tent,another of the men,a free-lance writer from Manhattan
[03:42.77]was talking quietly.He was telling us the tale of his life,describing his work in Hollywood,his apartment in Manhattan
[03:52.62]his house in Paris…It makes me wonder,"he said,"what I'm doing in a tent under a tree in the village of Pompeya
[04:02.10]on the Napo River,in the jungle of Ecuador."After a pause he added,"It makes me wonder why I'm going back.
[04:13.02]The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything
[04:20.68]It is simply to see what is there.We are here on the planet only once,and might as well get a feel for the place
[04:30.08]We might as well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived,