Third-below Coelogyne

Description

An epiphytic orchid with hanging racemes. The pressed clump has four ovoid pseudobulbs, each 3–4 cm long and ridged when dry, and each bears a pair of narrowly elliptic leaves up to 19 cm long. One arching raceme carries six flowers about 4 cm across. The sepals and petals are cream, and the three-lobed lip has ochre keels and brown side lobes. Grey velamen roots still clasp a strip of bark from the host tree, a Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima).

Observations

Children who spend their first three years in the house below the host chestnut cannot hold a pitch on their own. Their speech is normal. Singing, humming, calling across a slope and the long vowel of a shout all fail: the breath passes and the larynx moves, but no tone comes out.

When another voice is singing within hearing, these children can sing at once, but only the third below the nearest singer, major or minor as the key requires. They cannot sing the melody, a unison or any other interval. With two such children and one adult, the voices stack, each a third below the one beside it.

The household dogs sleep under the same tree and are affected in the same way.

On the specimen, each flower hangs a little below and behind another. The terminal bud had no flower beside it and did not open.

The file

The file was put together by M. Lessing and D. Hartigan, who agreed on the accession and on nothing after it. Lessing kept everything the family sent, and Hartigan initialled his objections in the margins. The family appears under four surnames across three generations. Hartigan’s filing slip reads file under the tree. Lessing accessioned the dog’s collar separately as H-0540.2.

Third-below Coelogyne (Coelogyne subtertia)

Draft entry for the Conservatory’s pocket guide to Upper Nu Valley epiphytes, by M. Lessing, with margins by D. Hartigan

The family asked for something they could keep in the house, so this entry is written up from their own accounts. Each section names the generation that supplied it.

Identification

After He Yanping, granddaughter. A medium-sized Coelogyne of chestnut trunks, growing 3–9 m up. It has ovoid pseudobulbs and paired leaves, and cream flowers on a hanging spray in March. In a mixed clump, look for the spray on which no flower hangs alone.

[D.H.: The only plant in this guide that cannot be identified by looking at it.]

Habitat

After Mi Yuehua, grandmother. One chestnut above the house at Aludi, on the east face of the trunk, within earshot of the chapel across the gully. She knew of no other tree.

Voice

After Ma Cuilian, mother. It has no voice of its own. Children raised beneath it take the part below whoever is singing nearest. In the chapel they are always altos. In a house full of altos, someone has to take the tune.

Similar species

Coelogyne corymbosa grows on the same trunk and has no effect on anyone. C. flaccida, lower on the slope, has none either.

Do not confuse with

A shy child. Sing to the child, and wait.

[D.H.: I object to a field guide for this. Nobody should come across it.] [M.L.: Nobody did. It was posted to us.]

Incident log, H-0540

Conservatory incident log for H-0540, kept by M. Lessing and D. Hartigan. Entries before 2023 come from family testimony.

M.L. entered the entries before 2023 from the family’s testimony. D.H. has marked each one hearsay.

25 December 1949 — The family chord

Mi Yuehua, aged ten, sings in the house at Aludi with her father and three younger siblings. Her father takes the tune, and each child sings a third below the one beside them. The youngest, aged four, opens her mouth for a note below the range of a four-year-old and produces only breath.

[D.H.: Hearsay, seventy-four years removed.]

6 April 1980 — The first note

Ma Cuilian was born under the tree in 1962 and grew up while hymn singing was forbidden in the valley. No one sang in the house, so the family assumed she could not call, and she was kept off the high fields. At Easter, in the reopened chapel at Lishadi, she sings for the first time, aged seventeen, a third below the woman on her left.

14 March 2023 — The parcel

He Yanping, postwoman at Lishadi, franks a clump from the chestnut at her own counter and posts it to us. Her son, Feng Jiamu, aged four, has lived under the tree since birth. Her covering note says the dog, Ahei, only howls when someone else is singing. Accessioned by M.L.

2–12 September 2023 — The collar

At M.L.’s request, a recorder is stitched to Ahei’s collar, a leather strap that has passed through three of the family’s dogs. Over eleven nights, Ahei howls on nine. Each time it is during evening hymns, a third below Jiamu, who is a third below his mother. On the two nights when no one sang, the recorder holds the bell and nothing else.

[D.H.: A dog in a choir is not a finding.] The recorder stays on.

18 October 2024 — The chestnut harvest

Jiamu, now five, becomes separated from the harvest party at dusk, with Ahei. The party calls him for two hours. The collar holds 2 h 14 min of the bell, the calls and his breathing. At 19:52 his mother, back from her round, sings from the road. Eleven seconds later his voice comes in a third below hers, then Ahei’s. He is found 340 m downslope.

[D.H.: Logged without comment.]

2 February 2025 — The last night

Mi Yuehua dies at Aludi, aged eighty-five. Ahei is asleep under her bed with the recorder running. At 03:40 it records her singing the lower part of a hymn, which her family identifies as the one from 1949. Ahei comes in a third below her. The house was asleep and the chapel was dark. Nothing on the recording is a third above her.

Genetic analysis

Nuclear sequencing of the pressed clump gives a GC content of 36.8%, which is unremarkable for the genus. It finds one insertion: 36 bases, in frame, inside the first exon of a SEPALLATA-like MADS-box gene. The insert is built from alternating repeat units of five and four bases (ccatg, ccat). Five against four is the frequency ratio of a just major third. The insert is absent from C. corymbosa sampled from the same trunk.

Hartigan notes that the children sing minor thirds as readily as major ones, and that a ratio is not a mechanism. Lessing notes that the five-base unit always comes first: the higher number above, the lower below. Both notes are filed.

Cultivation

Not cultivated. The Conservatory holds only the pressed clump. No living material was requested and none was offered.

Other clumps remain on the chestnut at Aludi, about six metres up the east face. The family has not taken them down, and the Conservatory has not asked. Mi Yuehua’s view, recorded in 2023, was that the tree was there before the house.

For reference, the genus is grown cool to intermediate, mounted on bark in bright shade, with a dry rest after flowering. None of this has been tried.

Effects

The effect passes through the tree, not through the family. Mi Yuehua, Ma Cuilian and Feng Jiamu were raised beneath it and are affected. He Yanping was raised in the county town and is not.

• Affected children speak, hear and learn normally, but cannot call across a slope. Jiamu now goes to the fields only with an adult who will sing.
• He Yanping sings the whole length of her delivery round so that he can answer from wherever he is. Households along the Lishadi road say they can tell her arrival time by it.
• In the chapel, the family has filled the alto line every Sunday since 1980 and has never sung the tune.
• Three dogs in succession have worn the same collar. None of them has been heard to howl alone.