I had not found a tree. Apparently I had discovered some sort of bone or horn shaped like a tree. Subsequent investigation revealed another extraordinary find, if I do say so myself. Attention, world: Dr. Wiggins has done it again; he has uncovered yet another fantastical creature of the ancient world!
As I dug into the earth around the trunk of the bone “tree,” I found that it stood not on top of a mass of roots, but on a skull. Attached to this skull: a most unusual skeleton. And from this skeleton, along with the soil surrounding it, I surmised the following: long ago, around a hundred million years back, a boggy swamp appears to have covered this area. And in this swamp lurked a magnificent mammoth elephant that had some rather unusual qualities.
For starters: tall, gnarled horns the shape of slender trees jutted from its huge crown. Secondly, a hide of fish-like silver scales covered its back, instead of a typical leathery elephant hide. Thirdly, these mighty Tree-Elephants—or Trelephants, as I shall call them—were carnivores, unlike today’s elephants, which eat only vegetation.66 And finally: if one had peeked behind their enormous, flapping elephant ears, that person would have discovered gills, like those on a fish. That is what made these Trelephants particularly sneaky: they could stay underwater indefinitely—which was a great asset to their survival.
Each day, they would submerge themselves in the waters of the swamp; thanks to their scale-covered backs, they would have appeared from above to be large fish. Birds unwittingly fluttered down and perched upon the Trelephants’ “branches” and settled in to enjoy the cool early-evening breezes.
And then, at that moment, the Trelephants would whisk their trunks up into the air, catch the unfortunate birds, and chomp them up for dinner. The birds never seemed to learn their lesson, for the Trelephants sometimes ate as many as a hundred of them a day (like today’s cows, they had four stomachs!).
Life must have been perfectly lovely for the swampy Trelephants, and they might have lurked there in the bog indefinitely had the climate not changed in another part of the African continent, forcing a gaggle of poison-winged falcons to relocate to the Trelephants’ vicinity and nestle in their “branches.” Just a quarter of a teaspoon of that falcon poison would have been enough to stop a Trelephant’s heart—and we found dozens of falcon skeletons in the stomachs of the great beasts. Needless to say, that is how they met their end.
Just then, an image of old Mother Wiggins came into my mind: she was ripping feathers out of a chicken, getting ready to shovel it into her cookstove.
“I always told you, Wendell,” she griped. “Good things never last forever. One day you’re out and about, having a grand old time, and the next day, you eat a bad chicken and the curtain goes down.”
She was right; Fortune works in mysterious ways. This was definitely true in the case of the Trelephants. I just hope, for their sake, that those poisonous falcons tasted good as they went down.
65. This beautiful East Africa nation lies along the warm Indian Ocean. Still an independent country when Dr. Wiggins visited in 1869, Kenya would be colonized by Germany and England less than two decades later.
66. Today’s regular elephants devote sixteen to eighteen hours of every day to eating; they consume grasses, small plants, bushes, fruit, twigs, tree bark, and roots.
September 1870
Tanzania
In Which I Discover … Thunder Vulcusts
(Tonitrus Vulturis Locusta)
Yes, yes: I know that I say this about nearly all of the places in which I excavate, but Tanzania contains particularly ancient remains.67 Like Kenya, which sits just to the north, this glorious country has been home to the most divine wildlife for hundreds of millions of years. So naturally we hoofed it down here after wrapping up our Trelephant investigation.
However, the country did not greet us as enthusiastically as we greeted it. This morning, when we woke up, clouds hung low over the ravine where we were camped, and in the distance the sky had turned purple and yellow. A storm was heading our way; soon white forks of lightning zigzagged across the sky. So, back into the tent we went; soon the wind howled around us and the rain pounded down angrily. The thunder nearly deafened us: each terrible clap quaked the earth beneath us.
Suddenly I felt seasick. How odd! The tent did seem to be swaying gently, as though we were drifting about at sea. I crept to the flaps of the tent, peeked out, and found that our tent was floating down the ravine in a gushing stream.
Well, not the tent itself: that would have been impossible. But the thunder had shaken loose the chunk of land on which our tent stood, and the rain had swirled into a fierce torrent. I gave a yelp and huddled in a ball with Gibear (still silver!) and Mr. Devilsticks as the current swept us away. For hours, we bobbed and lurched along, until the rain tired itself out. The ravine suddenly flattened into a great plain and spat us out. The river spread across the land in a thin sheet and seeped away, plunking our tent island down in the middle of nowhere.68
The first thing we noticed when we emerged: hundreds of strangely shaped little plateaus jutted out from the ground, each as tall and wide as a grown man. Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks scampered around them, sniffing at them with great interest.
Upon inspecting them, I realized that from above, each one resembled a huge bird’s wing. When I inspected one of these plateaus at length, I promptly discovered that not only were they wing-shaped, but they had once been actual wings. The ravine river had washed Gibear, Mr. Devilsticks, and me into a vast graveyard of wondrous creatures I have dubbed Thunder Vulcusts. (And yes, I did do a little triumphant dance when this discovery was made.) I estimate that this flock lived around fifty million years ago, and my goodness! What a revolting plague of beasts. We are most fortunate that they no longer exist.
Now, most people have heard of modern locust swarms: the obnoxious insects in these clusters fly around by the millions and then descend to the land below, devouring every bit of vegetation in sight. What they leave behind: a barren wasteland.
Well, according to their remains, the creatures nestled here in the Tanzanian plains appear to have been part locust and part giant vulture: as grisly a combination as was ever conjured up by Nature. A vulture head—wobbly gizzard and all—stuck out on top of an insect-like body, powerful vulture wings stuck out of its sides, and haunchy legs kicked out in the back.
From below, the Thunder Vulcust flock would have looked like a horrible black cloud: their powerful wings thrashed in unison, and from far away, their fleet would have sounded like rumbling thunder (hence my clever little nickname for them). Their bodies cast a nightmarish shadow across the plains as they swooped down together: except unlike locusts, which eat only plants, these Thunder Vulcusts wolfed down every living thing in sight—from lions to beetles and even the sun-bleached bones of long-dead creatures—leaving the land as lifeless as the surface of Mars.
Yet as we now know, Nature never allows any species to reign for long. One day, while the flock was swooping around, perhaps hovering above a particularly juicy gazelle herd, a real storm appears to have swept in. Lightning ripped through the air, and suddenly a blue bolt struck one of the Vulcusts. Since they all traveled in such a tight pack, the electric shock ran through every single one of them, killing the whole lot at once. They plunged to the earth, their bodies sparking away. This is the only explanation behind the charred nature of their remains; such phenomenons occasionally still occur with modern flocks of birds.
I am willing to bet that the animals of the valley rejoiced as they set upon the Thunder Vulcust flock for a great feast; after all, it was their first cooked supper.
“It never does pay to wander about in a pack all the time,” echoed Mother Wiggins’s voice in my mind. She has been telling me that for years, and mothers have been saying such things to their children since the beginning of time. Yet we never seem to learn: even today, great herds of buffalo are said to stampede all at once right over the edges of cliffs. Not a terribly sensible thing to do, but some creatures w
ould rather be stupid than lonely, I suppose.
67. In terms of modern humans, Tanzania is currently thought to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas on earth; fossil remains of humans and pre-human hominids have been found dating back over two million years.
68. It is believed that Dr. Wiggins had been deposited somewhere near the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. There, in 1959, two archaeologists named Louis and Mary Leakey discovered remains of the two-million-year-old Homo Habilis, or the earliest known human ancestor. Of course, thanks to Dr. Wiggins, we now know that human-like tribes existed long before that.
December 1872
The Cape Colony69
In Which I Discover … Cloud-Dwelling Hummingbird People … and Solve the Mystery of the Mile-Long Shadow
It was a long overland journey to our next destination, and we immediately became entangled in the oddest situation. It all began like this: there I was, sitting outside my tent on a perfectly lovely evening, waxing my mustache into neat little curls with my Gum Tree Wax,70 happy to be alone in the world. Suddenly, something approached me from behind, and a voice bellowed out in English:
“Do these belong to you?”
Well, I nearly leaped right out of my skin! There stood the most bedraggled old man I had ever clapped my eyes on. A wooden peg served as the lower half of his left leg; a patch covered his right eye; one of his hands sported only a pinkie finger. And, to add insult to injury, Mr. Devilsticks had wrapped himself around the old man’s head and tore away at his snowy hair, and Gibear hung by his teeth on the man’s trouser leg, snarling and biting. They had turned into regular little guard dogs, my pets! (It is about time, too, Gibear.)
“Get down, you beasts,” I commanded, and hastily escorted the man to the campfire. “I am terribly sorry; it has been a while since we have had company. They have clearly forgotten how to behave nicely.”
“Don’t care,” said the old man, and then he fell silent.
“Do stay and have some supper,” I urged, making a rather big fuss over fishing the dinner plates and cups out of my rucksack. It had been a very long time since I had had a conversation with another human, and for once, I was ravenous for a good long chat. “We just roasted quite a juicy gazelle. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins. And what is your name, good sir?”
“Smit,” said the man.71
I told him that it was a fine Dutch name, and inquired after his first name. “Smit,” he said again.
My heart sank a bit. This Smit Smit character was hardly turning out to be a riveting conversationalist. Changing the subject, I asked him how he had acquired his stump leg. Yes, it was rude of me to ask, but I fear that my time in the wilderness has made me rather crude.
“Lion got it,” replied Smit Smit.
“And there?” I pointed to his nearly fingerless hand.
“Hyena. Got my eye, too. How I miss that eye.”
I said that was perfectly understandable, and that was the end of that chat. We dined on the roasted gazelle in silence, while Gibear drank his evening coffee and Mr. Devilsticks shoveled tree bark into his mouth. Soon Smit Smit let out a noisy belch, patted his stomach, and asked me why I had set up shop in the middle of nowhere.
“I am on an international mission to understand the ancient animal world,” I said grandly. “I believe that realm holds the key to understanding ourselves and will give insight into our destiny. I am, I suppose, a solver of mysteries.”
“I know one mystery you will never solve,” said Smit Smit, picking his teeth with a bone. “The mystery of the Mile-Long Shadow.”
“What is that?” I leaned in eagerly. Suddenly Smit Smit had become the most fascinating man on the planet.
“Pack up and I will show you.”
For three days and three nights we traveled across the country. Smit Smit led me to the top of a big cliff. Clouds swirled at the edge, and when they parted, I saw the most peculiar dark line cutting across the valley below.
“That,” declared Smit Smit, “is the Mile-Long Shadow.”
I squinted at it. “It cannot be a shadow. Nothing stands there to cast it.”
“Yes, but watch: it moves with the sun.”
I sat on the edge of the cliff and watched the line for hours. And, sure enough, it moved, as though the sun were circling around a tall column.
“How odd!” I exclaimed. “What is the legend behind it?”
But I got no answer. When I turned around, Smit Smit had vanished. This valley was clearly riddled with mysteries.
Down in the valley, I stalked and shoveled—and yet I turned up no clues. I was going quite mad. There simply had to be a scientific explanation!
Then, one morning, Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks had a spectacular fight. What sparked it off, I shall never know, but when I turned around, the monkey was tearing out great chunks of Gibear’s silver hair and throwing them on the ground. When Gibear bit off the tip of Mr. Devilsticks’s tail, the monkey shrieked and leaped at least ten feet into the air.
Here is the curious thing: Mr. Devilsticks did not come back down.
Gibear and I looked up toward the sky: Mr. Devilsticks hovered there, as though clinging to the trunk of a tree—but nothing appeared to be there.
I made a huge pile of rocks under Mr. Devilsticks and climbed up, groping around in the air as I went. Suddenly I grasped onto something that felt like tree bark.
Mr. Devilsticks had discovered a huge, rootless, transparent tree, whose bottom hung ten feet above the land. With Gibear on my shoulder, I heaved myself up onto its trunk and began to climb. A person standing on the plain below would have been treated to quite a farcical sight: a man, a monkey, and a strange silver mop of hair slinking up toward the sky as though pulled by invisible strings. And after a little while, that person would not have seen us at all—that is how high we went. Soon white clouds surrounded us; then we were above the clouds, and found ourselves in a bramble of branches.
What we had discovered: the tallest, strangest, totally colorless flat-topped tree in Africa—and perhaps the entire world. And this was not even the most extraordinary part. For in those branches clustered the remains of an extremely odd ancient treetop tribe, many millions of years old. I did not even need my shovel and pick to uncover them, hallelujah! But I set about studying their bodies immediately, and this is what I learned:
This area had been home to a thicket of very tall, flat-topped trees, and a peculiar tribe of hummingbird-like humans lived in this forest. Their wings flapped so quickly that they blurred; long beaks jutted from their faces. I have rarely seen such strange skeletons: clear as ice, delicate as spun sugar. Yet while actual hummingbirds flutter from flower to flower, sucking out pollen and dew, these creatures instead subsisted on the colors of leaves. They might descend on a dark green bush, and moments later, that bush would have been as colorless as glass. (Well, in reality, they dined on the chlorophyll that makes plants green—but it just sounds so much more poetic to say that they dined on colors!)
It appears that the tribe also fell victim to hungry beasts in the area—perhaps they were considered specialties. After all, they were quite exotic: imagine being served a quail stuffed with pomegranates at a terribly fancy banquet. This is how these hummingbird-people creatures became regarded. I have to give them credit for a very creative approach to survival, even if it did lack a bit of foresight: the tribe picked the tallest flat-topped tree around and climbed up its trunk; soon after, they chopped off the tree’s roots. The entire tribe then lifted the tree by its topmost branches so it floated fifty feet above the ground; no beasts could scamper up the trunk, and the hummingbird humans congratulated themselves on their genius. The tribespeople took turns holding the tree up, their wings beating wildly; those on the rest shift replenished themselves on the green of the tree itself.
Yet a rootless tree has no way of sustaining itself, and soon the color began to drain from the leaves and branches of the hummingbird humans’ tree.
Eventually the trunk itself lost its rich chocolate hue and turned a watery gray—and then became as clear as glass. Then the color was drunk out of the branches, and then came the day when the green was slurped out of the very last leaf on that tree. Needless to say, without nourishment, the Cloud-Dwelling Hummingbird People languished in the treetop, too weak to even climb down the trunk.
Yet for some reason, the tree continued to hover there, millions of years after the tribe had died. How is this possible? For that question, I am ashamed to admit that I have no scientific explanation, although there must be one. Perhaps it is caught in a perpetual wind eddy up there, rooting it to the sky.
As for the creatures themselves: Mother Wiggins always used to say, “That’s what you get for living with your head in the clouds all the time,” and I suppose that there is some wisdom to that. And I suppose we should remember that no matter how much we would like to escape the world and live apart from it all, it is likely that none of us can survive long on our own.
69. Now part of contemporary South Africa, this land was first colonized by the Dutch, then the French, and then the British.
70. See Dr. Wiggins’s entry on Trelephants to learn more about this wax.
71. Smit had likely been a Dutch colonist or trader.
Journal No. 5
Asia & Australia
September 1873
The Indian Ocean
In Which Mr. Devilsticks Gets His Due
It was only a matter of time, I suppose: after all, Mr. Devilsticks has always been a terribly rascally monkey. The moment we boarded a ship from Cape Town,72 headed for the Asia part of my world tour, Mr. Devilsticks began to misbehave. Perhaps being on the open sea pried a screw loose in his little monkey brain. His antics were unfathomable! First he gnawed through every single hammock belowdecks, leaving the sailors with nowhere to sleep. Shortly thereafter, he untied a sail from a mast: it ballooned out over the sea and nearly whipped away in the wind. The sailors descended upon the monkey, ready to pitch him overboard, but Mr. Devilsticks thoughtfully snatched up the captain’s hat, put it on, and did such a fine impression of the captain that the sailors spared him.
The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins Page 11
