Two in the Bush (Bello)

by Gerald Durrell

  Stripped to the waist and wearing a large and extremely ancient straw hat borrowed from Geoffrey, I clasped a flying lizard firmly in one hand and proceeded to mount the step-ladder. This groaned and creaked and swayed so that I was full of all the fears for my safety that must have beset an apprentice going round the Horn for the first time in a Windjammer. Making sure that the fielders were in position and that Chris and Jim were lying on their backs beneath me, I launched the flying lizard into the air. I was not able to witness its flight, owing to the fact that the ladder took a very dim view of any untoward movement and my masterly over-arm casting of the lizard made the whole structure sway alarmingly. By the time I had it under control, Chris was standing there, beaming at me.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘but I think we will have to do it a few more times in order to get it exactly’

  I began to regret ever having mentioned flying lizards, for we spent the entire afternoon under the blistering sun, with me on top of the ladder, swaying to and fro like an extremely inept circus performer, hurling lizards into the air at intervals. But eventually Jim declared himself satisfied and we could retreat into the coolness of the house and have a shower, first having released our two stars. They, by this time, were so bored with the whole procedure that they did not even bother to run away but just sat on the branch of a tree, glaring at us.

  As a matter of interest, the resulting film – which was excellent – occupied some fifteen seconds of screen time and furthermore, nobody wrote to compliment us on this achievement. I hope that the many people who aspire to being animal photographers will bear this chastening example in mind before they embark on their careers.

  The art of travelling in Malaya is not to get bored with ferries. In most tropical countries the rivers and streams spread out as complicated and as intricate as the veins in a human body. To get to your destination, you may have to cross half a hundred of these; the shallow ones you drive through with gay abandon, ploughing up a great, discoloured fan of water with the nose of your vehicle; the slightly deeper ones you may have to be pulled across, depending on whether the Rain Gods have been kind to you; but the really wide, ponderous rivers, that look as though they have the consistency of glutinous sherry, can only be crossed by a ferry. Ferries, like bus services, vary in different parts of the world, but the extraordinary thing about the Malayan ferries is that they are always at the opposite bank when you arrive, and this means that you are in for at least a half-hour, if not a three-quarter hour, wait. Sometimes the tedium of this would be alleviated by the fact that on either side of the road where we had to park there would be delightful mangrove swamps, each mangrove standing on what appeared to be a twisted, basket-like ‘hand’ of roots, buried in most gorgeously glutinous and evil smelling mud. This was the home of a variety of things. If you were near the sea, and the water was brackish, you would get the mudskippers, those extraordinary fish whose heads look so like a hippopotamus – indeed, their behaviour is very hippo-like, for with their protuberant eyes, they can lie on the surface of the water and see what is going on while revealing the minimum of their body. But the mudskippers have another ability which, when you see them for the first time, is apt to cause alarm and despondency should you be one of those people who imagine that the right place for a fish is below water. The smooth, skating-rink-like surface of the mud below the mangrove roots is, as far as they are concerned, an ideal terrain, and they haul themselves out of the water and skitter about on the mud, occasionally even climbing up on to the basket-like roots of the mangroves.

  The other most obvious inhabitants of this odoriferous terrain are the calling crabs, who dig their burrows in the mud and are as multi-coloured as butterflies. In the tropics you always get those damp sections of bank along rivers where the butterflies like to congregate to sip up the moisture; these vast congregations sit there, sipping quietly, and occasionally opening and closing their wings so that what is normally a rather drab area of earth suddenly turns, momentarily, into the most flamboyant firework display. Calling crabs also fulfil this aesthetic function in the mangrove swamps. They come out of their burrows and edge forward, glowing in the sunlight, their one gigantic claw forever moving, beckoning the female and threatening the male in one economical gesture, stopping periodically to stuff dainty portions of mud into their mouths, which they mumble around to extract the algae on which they live. They look ludicrously like somebody eating very daintily with chopsticks in a sewer. The effect is quite extraordinary; you walk up to a great, glistening sheet of mud and you are briefly aware of what appears to be little flashes of multi-coloured light that disappear down holes in the smooth surface. Then you crouch on your haunches and wait patiently and presently, out of one hole, and then another, and another, you see the claws appearing; slowly and with infinite caution, the crabs edge their way out of the safety of their burrows and pause to make sure the danger is gone. They glow like miniature lights in an armour of scarlet, purple, green and yellow, and even when they are immobile, searching for danger, there is still the nervous tic in the large claws, which flick gently back and forth. If you keep still enough, they eventually gain courage and scuttle further out to the mud; first the braver ones venture out and, when they are feeding and apparently coming to no harm, the more timid ones suddenly flood out of their burrows, and before your eyes the drab, grey, smelly section of mud that you have been looking at suddenly becomes transformed into a kaleidoscopic Persian carpet. Indeed, it has all the charm of a kaleidoscope, for no sooner are you tired of one pattern of crabs than you raise a hand and immediately, like a magician, you have a smooth surface of shining grey mud in front of you. Their movement of retreat into their burrows is so fast that you can hardly follow it – it is rather like having a child’s magic slate on which grows the most complicated and beautiful pattern of colours which you can wipe away with a stroke of your hand.

  After our sixth or seventh ferry, the others, to my astonishment, started to display a singular lack of interest in the calling crabs and/or mudskippers. They paced up and down, muttering to themselves and complaining bitterly about the length of time it took to get the ferry from one bank to another. In an effort to placate them I explained that the ferrymen were excusably slow because they were taking extra care. They greeted this explanation with a certain suspicion until I elaborated by saying that not two weeks ago a large bus, crammed to the gills with gay abandoned Malayans, had driven on to one of these ferries, which had then suddenly turned turtle and drowned three-quarters of the contents of the bus. Jim immediately wanted to know why we could not get to our destination by land.

  It was not until we got to our fifteenth ferry that we had any indication that the reptile we had travelled so far to see did, in fact, exist. The ferry took slightly longer than normal to reach us and we had exhausted the possibilities of the calling crabs in the surrounding mud. I noticed that at one side of the road there was a small hut, into which everyone was constantly diving and reappearing with refreshing looking bottles in their hands. I suggested to Jacquie that we investigate this phenomenon, as we were all, by that time, in urgent need of some liquid refreshment. It was too much to hope, I thought, that this palm-leaf hut would contain anything as exotic as beer, but, as it was now midday and we had been travelling for some hours, I was quite prepared to make do with a Coca-Cola. We entered the little hut and, to my astonishment, I found that inside was a well-laid-out shop, including a large deep freeze that was humming away to itself and keeping a large batch of beer beautifully cool. While we were waiting to be served, I noticed on the edge of the counter a large plate in which reposed what appeared to be gigantic ping-pong balls that seemed very much the worse for wear.

  ‘Look at those!’ I said to Jacquie excitedly.

  She surveyed them suspiciously.

  ‘What are they?’ she asked.

  ‘They’ I said, picking one up, ‘are the eggs of Dermochelys Coriaced.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

/>   ‘That is the creature that we have taken so much time, trouble and expense to come and see,’ I said, ‘This is a leathery turtle’s egg.’

  The leathery turtle is not only one of the largest, but one of the most interesting reptiles in the world. It can grow to a length of nine feet and weigh nearly a ton. Unlike the other members of the turtle and tortoise tribe, who have a hard, horny carapace, the leathery turtle’s back is covered with skin, with a few protruding knobs of bone down the middle to show that it is related to the tortoises. Nobody knows very much about this large and rather sad creature; it feeds on fish and other sea food and occasionally on seaweed, and presumably it must have been, at one time, much more wide-spread than it is today At the time that we were in Malaya, there were only three known breeding grounds for the leathery turtle: one in Puerto Rico, one in Ceylon and the one we were heading for, in Malaya. But, unfortunately for the leathery turtle, the fact that its eggs are so palatable had led to a wholesale exploitation of its breeding grounds in Puerto Rico and Ceylon, and indiscriminate collecting of the eggs had eventually driven off the turtles. So the Malayan beach at Dungan was the last place in the world where the nurseries of the leathery turtle could be found. I was anxious to see them for two reasons: firstly, because unless you catch a leathery turtle coming out on to the beach to lay its eggs, you do not stand a very great chance of ever seeing one; secondly, because the Malayan government had just instituted an extremely sensible method of conservation and I was anxious to see how this was working.

  The beach is some five miles long and a certain local villager has always held the concession for harvesting the turtle eggs which, as they are considered such a delicacy, is an extremely lucrative business. But, like most people, the concessionaire was only interested in immediate profit and so he gave no thought to the fact that slowly, year by year, he was killing the turtles that laid the golden eggs. This is where the government, with the help of the Malayan Nature Society, stepped in. They offered to purchase, every year, a certain number of nests at the current market price; these they then took and hatched out and released. By this method, not only was the future of the turtles secured, but also the ultimate livelihood of the man and his sons. On paper it looked to be one of the most sensible and progressive pieces of conservation that I had come across, but I knew from bitter experience that a piece of conservation legislation might look beautiful on paper but generally failed to operate successfully in fact.

  Spurred on by the sight of the eggs, we continued on the last leg of our journey and eventually arrived at the small, neat town of Dungun. We had known, from various reports, that in order to be able to film the turtles on the beach we would have to have lights, for they only come up at night. How to provide sufficient light for photography on a beach some thirty or forty miles from the nearest power supply was a problem which had been kindly solved for us by the Malayan Agricultural Department, who had sent up to Dungun a short, almost circular electrician and a portable generator. He greeted us, blandly beaming, and said that he had booked us into the best place in the town, which was a Chinese hotel. It turned out to be clean and neat, if somewhat spartan, and by a stroke of good luck, Jacquie and I chose the bedroom next door to the bathroom.

  I say good luck advisedly, for the proximity of the bathroom enabled me to do some scientific investigation into the cleanliness of the Chinamen. The wall separating our room from the bathroom ended some six inches from the ceiling, so that every movement, every drop of water expended by the occupant, could be heard and measured. The first couple of people who used it had a brisk, but satisfactory swish down and left, whistling cheerfully, but the third man who entered the bathroom was of a different species.

  He entered the bathroom at a run, as though hotly pursued by some enemy, and slammed and locked the door with such vigour that I thought the bolt might come off in his hand. This was enough to rivet my attention and I sat spellbound on the bed, listening to his activities. Having locked the door, he then spent the next five minutes or so breathing deeply, as though expecting his enemy to start breaking down the door at any minute. Was he, I wondered, being pursued by some strange Malayan Tong? Would his blood-stained corpse be found hanging from the towel rail when I next entered the bathroom? However, apparently his fears died down after a time, for he stopped his deep breathing exercises and proceeded to do what – I can only conclude – was to pat the bath. Strange, sonorous, cathedral-like notes floated over the partition as he banged vigorously at the porcelain. This went on for some time and I was just about to beat on the wall and suggest that this was the wrong way to escape observation from a pursuing Tong, when he stopped. His next action, so far as I could judge, was to scrub the floor with a dry scrubbing brush; this went on for a long time too. Having banged the bath and scrubbed the floor into a suitable condition, he then at last turned on the water. Absolute silence reigned except for the sound of the taps and I visualised him standing there, mute and terrified, staring at the filling bath.

  After a quarter of an hour had passed, I began to get a little restive. Surely, I thought, no bath could be so capacious that it could contain that volume of water without overflowing. I looked uneasily at the base of our bedroom wall, but there was no sign of any liquid seeping through. Had he perhaps drowned? Ought I to go and knock on the door? Perhaps, having turned on the taps, he had slipped and fallen and knocked himself out and was now lying face down in the bath. My anxiety for his welfare was alleviated when he suddenly turned off the taps and then (and again I cannot be sure, since I did not witness this with my own eyes) apparently leapt into the bath from a height of some twenty feet. The boom and swish of water had to be heard to be believed. Jacquie and I were now completely spellbound by our mental visions of what was going on through the wall next door and we sat nervously on the edge of the bed, sipping beer and waiting for the next revelation. It was not long in coming. He proceeded to utter a series of loud, strangled noises reminiscent of an extremely satisfied water buffalo in a particularly succulent wallow, and he accompanied this by hurling vast quantities of water up in the air so that they fell back into the bath with a resounding splash. I am convinced, to this day, that he must have used a saucepan or some similar piece of equipment, as I am quite sure that the human hands, even if exceptionally large, are not capable of picking up that volume of water and throwing it into the air. As a matter of casual interest I had glanced at my watch when he first made his entry into the bathroom and, on looking at it again, I saw that he had been incarcerated in there for half an hour. He continued to snort and gurgle and hurl water about for three-quarters of an hour more by my watch.

  ‘What on earth’s he doing?’ said Jacquie.

  ‘He’s probably an exceptionally large Chinaman,’ I suggested. ‘But he can’t be washing. He’s just throwing water about.’

  The noise went on unabated for another half-hour.

  ‘He can’t be washing all this time,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘Well, he’s doing something,’ I said. ‘If you help me, we can push that chest of drawers over to the wall and I can climb up and peep through the hole.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’ said Jacquie.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘This is a scientific investigation. I shall be able to make my fame and fortune by writing an article for the Lancet.’

  ‘You can’t go peeping over walls at people having baths,’ said Jacquie firmly.

  ‘Do you think it would help if I sang him a few bars of “Stormy Weather”?’ I enquired.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I do wish I knew what he was doing.’

  Oblivious of our macabre interest in his activities, the Chinaman continued to splash and gurgle with all the verve of a drunken mermaid, and then suddenly all noise ceased.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jacquie, ‘he’s finished.’

  ‘Either that or he’s thrown all the water out of the bath,’ I suggested.

  There was a long and ominous silence, broken only by deep breathing from
the bathroom. Then, so suddenly that it made us jump, he turned on the shower at full pitch and proceeded once more to snort and gurgle under this.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I must push the chest of drawers up to the wall and have a look. God knows, I like to spend a lot of time in the bath, but do you realise that he has been in there for nearly two hours?’

  In spite of Jacquie’s protests, I had got the chest of drawers three-quarters of the way across the room when, to my intense chagrin, the Chinaman turned off the shower and proceeded to open the door and vacate the bathroom with such rapidity that I could only conclude he had sensed my manoeuvre. I rushed to our bedroom door and flung it open, determined to at least catch a glimpse of this Asiatic water-baby, but there was absolutely no one to be seen.

  The whole experience quite unnerved me, and for the rest of our time in that hotel, in between filming, I haunted the upstairs landing in the hopes of seeing this elusive and hygienic oriental. I even got the chest of drawers in position, with a pile of books on top, in readiness for his next dip, but the only person I managed to see over the wall was Chris, having a shower – a sight so repulsive that I gave up the experiment altogether.

  That afternoon we took our circular electrician and his generator out to the turtle beach. This lay several miles from Dungun and near it was a small fishing village in which lived the egg collectors. The beach was a long one with dazzling white sand, fringed with palm trees. The egg collectors informed us that the turtles would not put in an appearance before seven o’clock, but any time after that we could expect them. Once the turtle was laying her eggs, nothing at all seemed to disturb her concentration; you could even touch her without it having the slightest effect, but should she become alarmed on her way up the beach or when she was in the middle of digging her hole, she would rush back to the sea and not reappear. This meant that, having spotted our turtle, we would have to make our way across the sand to wherever she was digging her nest, fix up the generator and then, as soon as she started to lay, switch on the lights and start filming. As there was a very large expanse of beach and there could be no guarantee which section of it would be chosen by the reptile, it meant that we might have to hump the generator at a smart trot for half a mile or so. We did an experimental run to see how it would turn out, and it was at this point that I decided that the use of the word ‘portable’ in connection with this generator was the most gross euphemism I had ever come across. To begin with, the thing seemed to weigh about a ton and it was furnished with two minute handles on which it was almost impossible to maintain one’s grip. Add to this the average daily temperature in Malaya and the fact that you were sinking up to your ankles in loose sand at every step, and you were very soon reduced to a state bordering on hysteria.