Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  Wedged deep into the coral here and there were a number of large clams. All that could be seen of them were the rims of their scalloped shells, over which the edge of their mantle protruded, so they appeared to be grinning at you with thick, blue and iridescent green lips. These, each about the size of a coconut, were, of course, relatives of the famous giant clam found farther out on the reef — a monstrous shell that could weigh up to two hundred pounds and measure three feet. Many blood-curdling stories have been written about unfortunate divers who by chance have put their foot into one of these shells, which immediately slammed shut like a man-trap (as all clams do in moments of stress) thus consigning the diver to death by drowning. There does not appear to be an authenticated record of this ever having happened, although of course it is perfectly possible, for the shell could snap shut and unless the diver had a knife with which to cut the massive muscle that acts as both hinge and lock on the two halves of the shell, it would be as immovable and unopenable as a castle door. Again, in the case of these highly coloured clams, there is a curious symbiotic relationship, for in the brilliant mantle there are a number of small, unicellular algae, called by the rather attractive name of

  Zooxanthelae. These minute creatures obtain their sustenance from the food the clam sucks in, and in payment they give the clam an additional supply of oxygen. It is rather like paying for your daily bread with air, a thing most of us would like to do.

  I shifted my vantage point to the other side of the rock, making sure of the whereabouts of the Scorpion fish, and came upon yet another symbiotic relationship. There was a small shoal of various multi-coloured fish, which included a Box fish and three canary-yellow Surgeon fish. The Box fish was quite incredible. He was only three inches long, vivid orange with black polka-dots all over him; but it was not the colouration so much as the bizarre shape of the creature which amazed me, for the whole body is like a square box of bone and through holes in this protrude the creature’s fins, vent, eyes and mouth. This means that the tail has to wave around like the propeller of an outboard engine. This mode of locomotion, coupled with the fish’s big, round, perpetually surprising-looking pop-eyes, its square shape and polka-dot suiting, combine to make it one of the most curious inhabitants of the reef.

  The Surgeon fish were quite different. Their yellow bodies were roughly moon-shaped, they had high domed foreheads and their mouths protruded, almost like the snout of a pig. They get their name from the two sharp, scalpel-like knives set just behind the tail. These dangerous weapons can fold back like the blade of a pocket knife into a hidden groove.

  But, fascinating though these two species of fish were, it was what was happening to them that was so curious. The two Surgeon fish were close to the rock, hanging in a trance-like state while the Box fish puttered to and fro like some weird, orange boat, occasionally coming to a standstill. Among them darted three lithe little fish, small gobies with bright Prussian- blue and sky-blue markings. They were cleaner fish and they worked assiduously on their three customers, zooming in to suck the parasites off their skin and then, as it were, standing back to admire their handiwork before dashing in again, rather like effeminate hairdressers admiring the creation of a new hairstyle. Later on, on the big main reef, I sometimes saw queues of fish waiting their turn at the barber’s shop, where the little blue barbers worked in a frenzy to keep up with their customers.

  So captivated had I become by all I had seen, for every inch of what we came affectionately to call ‘St Paul’s’ was covered with tiny anemones, sea fans, feather worms, shrimps, crabs and a host of other things, that I discovered I had spent over an hour suspended in one spot and even then, had been unable to take it all in. Here, on this one rock, was a myriad of life which would require a naturalist to spend a dozen lifetimes even to start to unravel it. What, I wondered, as I swam slowly back to breakfast, was the reef going to be like? I was soon to know. It was overwhelming.

  As soon as we could, I made arrangements for a boat and a boatman to come early each morning so that we would be able to spend a couple of hours on the reef without it interfering with our other activities. So, two days later, the boat puttered its way across the silk-smooth lagoon and ground, with a faint sigh, in the sand just outside our bedrooms. Abel entered our lives. He was a slender young Creole with extensive side whiskers and a moustache, a wide, engaging African grin and a curiously husky, high-pitched voice. He had been stricken with polio at 12 years old when Mauritius had a virulent epidemic of this frightful disease but though this had partially withered his right arm and leg, he was still agile in his boat and could swim and dive like a fish. Like most countrymen and fishermen, he was extraordinarily knowledgeable about the sea life and where to find it, but his learning was mixed up with much inaccurate folk lore. Nevertheless, his knowledge of the reef was superb and he could take you to see anything you asked him, from octopus to oysters; from long, pointed shells like unicorns’ horns, spattered with blood-red spots, to coral forests that defy description.

  The first day we went out with him, he explained that the reef was divided roughly into five sections. There was the deep water reef where you swam outside the lagoon; there was the sandy area with only a scattering of rocks (like ‘St Paul’s’) along the shoreline; and then there were the three separate sections of coral bed. In each one you saw something different. So, the first day he took us out to what we called the ‘Stags’ Graveyard’ or ‘Landseer’s Corner’.

  First, we crossed the sandy stretch. Lying on the tiny deck in the bows, with the early morning sun warming my back, I could gaze down into the clear water. First there were a host of sea slugs and the strange hosepipe-like Sinucta, then literally thousands of the big, red starfish, lying ghost-like, just buried under the sand, and interspersed with these on top of the sand, a great many cushion starfish. These are fat and round, like a pudding, and the arms are short and blunt so that the edges look almost scalloped. They are a yellowy-orange in colour and studded all over with slimy, jet-black, conical spikes like straight rose thorns.

  Gradually we passed over more and more crops of coral and then the sand disappeared and we were gliding over a multi-coloured Persian carpet of weed and coral, and schools of bright fish shot from under our bows. Reaching the spot he had chosen, Abel turned off his engine and tossed the anchor, a huge lump of iron with a ring on it, over the side. We came to a standstill in some six foot of water, so clear it would have made vodka look murky. Hastily, we donned our masks and slipped over the side of the boat into a world so enchanted that it surpassed all poetic descriptions of fairy land one had ever read or imagined. One’s first impression was of a blaze of colour, gold, purple, green, orange, red, and every conceivable shade in between. Once you had got over your astonishment at this polychromatic world, it was the shapes that captured your imagination. In this particular section, the predominant coral was Stag’s horn, exactly like a great graveyard of all the finest Victorian deer trophies, decked out in white and electric blue. Some were only a few feet high, but here and there the coral formed huge shapes like white and blue Christmas trees, through whose branches drifted flocks of small, multi-coloured fish, as parakeets drift and swoop through trees in a tropical forest. Interspersed with these forests of Stag’s horn were the Brain corals, some as big as plum pudding, others the size of an armchair, and interspersed between these, a bewildering array of delicate sea fans, soft corals and weeds.

  If their habitat was breathtaking and confusing by its diverse colouration and shape, then so were the inhabitants. I was interested in a certain similarity to the land. The small, multi-coloured fish flew through the forests of Stag’s horn like flocks of birds while below, the black and white Damsel fish in schools moved like herds of zebra among the sea fans. From the crevices in the coral, another dark chocolate and pink-coloured fish with large fins and a sulky, pouting mouth came out to threaten you when you invaded its territory, spreading its fins as an elephant spreads its ears when it charges. Then there were
smouldering orange and black fish, like tigers, prowling in the shadowy depths of coral and quick-moving flocks of slender orange-brown fish like gazelles or antelope. Here in crevices, like sleeping porcupines, lay sea urchins, vivid blue and jade-green, and others of palest lavender.

  I swam through this enchanted world, drugged by the colours and bizarre shapes, until I rounded a coppice of Stag’s horn with vivid blue tips to each spike, and came on a small, sandy clearing, with sea slugs and purple and black sea urchins littering the bottom. Over them lay in the water perhaps fifty or so small fish which were to become my favourites. They were about four inches long and at first glance, because of their position, they seemed to be all pale leaf-green, the tender and beautiful green of lime trees with their buds just about to burst but with an iridescence as if each fish had been varnished. As I swam closer, however, I discovered the most spectacular thing about them. Slightly wary of my proximity, they swam past me. As I followed them, they turned, in one blink of the eye, from their delicate leaf-green to the most beautiful blue, the blue they used to use in medieval paintings for the robes of the Virgin Mary, a Madonna blue, with the same iridescence.

  Enchanted, I made haste to swim past them and then turn back again, and so in a flash they turned back once more to green. So beautiful was this effect that I spent half an hour harrying the poor school so that they turned now this way and now that, changing from green to blue and back to green again as the sunlight caught them. What was so astounding was that, as they all turned at the same moment, each fish changed instantly with its neighbour. Eventually, bored with my attention, they swam off determinedly into the forest of Stag’s horn where I could not follow them at speed, and so I soon lost them; but for me, they had become one of the most beautiful fish of the reef. All the others — purple, yellow, bronze, wine-red; spotted, striped, sequined; of bizarre shapes and sizes — were fascinating but my Leaf fish as I call them, as they have no common name and rejoiced only in the scientific Cromiis selurialis, became, for me, the personification of the reef.

  Abel was not taciturn, indeed he could be very loquacious if he thought the occasion warranted it, but if he thought your observations or instructions were of an imbecile nature, he would not reply.

  ‘Abel,’ you would say, sternly, ‘we only want to go a short way today.’

  Abel would be riveted by something in the blue distance, or maybe fall into a trance.

  ‘Only a short way. We must be back by eight-thirty,’ you would say.

  Abel would look at you, unseeingly.

  ‘Did you hear?’ you would shout above the stutter of the engine.

  His eyes, expressionless, would flick on to you briefly and then go back to their contemplation of the horizon. You would get back to the hotel by half past nine, owing Abel twice what you intended, but it was always worth every penny. He knew what you wanted and you did not.

  Once we had been several times to taste the pleasures of the Stag’s horn area, Abel, without any reference to us, took us to an area which we eventually named the ‘crockery shop’. We dropped over the side expecting the prickly ‘Swiss forest’ of the Stag’s horn, and were amazed at what we found. Here, the coral was in great plates or bowl shapes and was brown and with perforations like a brandy snap. In places, it was in tottering piles like a giant’s washing-up, and in other places, it had formed monstrous candelabra or the sort of rococo fountains that you find in the beautiful gardens of remote French chateaux or Italian villas. This was totally unlike the Stag’s horn forest, where you could swim with the fish, for here, if you got too close, they simply disappeared amongst the crockery, where you could not follow them. You had to adopt a new technique. You simply drifted slowly along and let the fish come to you.

  It was here that I saw my first Moorish idol, one of the strangest-looking of fish. If you could imagine a delta-winged aircraft with wings curved into a point, a small, blunt tail and a very protuberant engine, the whole thing flying on its side and striped in yellow and white, and black, you would have some conception of this strange fish.

  It was in the crockery shop too, that I was engulfed suddenly by a large school of coral-pink and orange fish, some eight to ten inches long and with enormous dark eyes. I had been floating there, watching a sea slug standing up on end and wondering what it was doing, when I caught a flash of red out of the corner of the side windows of my mask, and the next minute this flock of colourful fish surrounded me, swimming very languidly and coming close enough for me to touch, gazing at me with their soulful black eyes. I recognised them with delight as being a fish I had always wanted to meet, which rejoices in the name of the Wistful Squirrel fish. They certainly look wistful. They gazed at me with a sort of lugubrious expression that gave the impression that they had all just returned from an exceptionally trying interview with their bank managers. Their eyes seemed to be full of tears and they looked so depressed that I longed to comfort them in some way. Hoping to relieve their gloom, I dived down and overturned a slab of dead coral lying on the bottom, thus unearthing a host of titbits in the shapes of shrimps, crabs, minute worms and diabolical-looking black starfish with their writhing, snake-like limbs covered in what looked like fur. Normally, fish delighted in this largesse, but the Wistful Squirrel fish merely gazed at me in a grief-stricken way, and quietly edged away. Obviously I was not sufficiently sympathetic.

  One of the exhausting things about swimming on the reef was the bewildering number of life forms that surrounded you everywhere you looked. In the four-and-a-half months that we were in Mauritius, we went out on the reef nearly every day and on each occasion, we would all see at least four new species of fish that we had not identified before. However, I really began to despair when, towards the end of our stay, Abel took us to the area we came to call the ‘flower garden’; for it was here, in an hour’s swim, that I hit the mind-boggling, all-time record of seeing sixteen species of fish I had not seen before during four months of snorkelling!

  The flower garden was a very shallow reef, mostly three to three-and-a-half feet with parts of it only just over a foot in depth, so that you had to search for a channel through the coral lest you scrape your chest or knees. In this shallow water, the colours seemed even brighter and there were species of coral which one did not find elsewhere — the Mushroom coral, for example, which is free-living; that is to say, it does not form a reef as the other corals do, but lies about on the bottom, moving from place to place. It looks like the underside of a large, pinky- red and brown mushroom and only when the small, pale yellow tentacles come out from between the gills and wave about, do you realise that it is alive. Then there were the corals that looked like mounds of tiny green chrysanthemums, the size of a little finger nail. These were in constant movement and so they looked like great mounds of flowers being blown by some underwater breeze. And there were the startlingly vivid blue corals, a really bright cobalt blue; and the red corals which varied from the colour of blood to the palest sunset-pink. One could see heads of coral that looked as though they had been neatly clipped into round shapes by an expert in topiary. Each of these heads was so neat that you could not believe they had grown like that. Closer inspection revealed that each of these heads (about the size of a large bouquet of flowers) consisted of pieces of coral shaped like small, snow-covered Christmas trees.

  It was these coral heads that were particularly favoured by the Leaf fish, which would float in schools near them and take refuge from danger by diving in amongst the Christmas trees. It was near one of these corals that I found a school of about fifty baby Leaf fish. At that age, I discovered, they do not possess the green iridescence but are sky blue, a much lighter shade than the adults, but just as exquisite. I amused myself for a long time by simply stretching out my hand towards this glittering group of minute fish, whereupon they would dive into the coral and disappear. The moment my hand was withdrawn, they would reappear out of the coral head like blue confetti bursting from a snow-covered pine forest.

&nb
sp; It was in the flower garden that you saw the greatest number of species in the smallest area, and it was particularly attractive because, owing to the shallow water, you could get closer to them. The File fish were always a joy to watch. These were leaf-shaped fish with a curved, unicorn’s horn on their foreheads, a brilliant green with longitudinal lines and bright orange spots, an orange striped snout and orange and black striped eyes. They get their name from the rough file-like quality of their skins. A relative of the File fish is the Trigger fish which goes locally by the jaw-breaking name of Humu-humu-nuku-nuku-a-puaa. They are a deep-bodied fish, roughly leaf-shaped but instead of having a protracted mouth like the File fish, the Trigger fish has a pouting, belligerent face like a Brigadier-General watching slovenly recruits. This is helped by its striped uniform of black and white and grey, and a bright blue band across the top of its nose, which makes it look as though it has got bushy eyebrows. The Trigger fish gets its name from a rather extraordinary defence mechanism. Like the File fish, it has a sort of curved horn, but this lies behind the eyes and can lie flat. When the fish is pursued by an enemy, however, this spine erects and another, smaller spine locks it into position to keep the trigger erect and immovable. This not only makes the fish a difficult and dangerous mouthful, but when it dives into the coral and erects its trigger, it is impossible to dislodge it without dismantling the whole coral head.