Another unusual thing about these dragons: seeing them milling about as they grazed, one might get the impression that there was something, well, wrong with them. Instead of being thick and robust, their bodies looked like enormous, withered-up balloons. Yes, I know—the idea of seeing a deflated balloon dragging around on short little legs, with a big dragon-y head jutting out in front, is very strange indeed. But this strange physique was actually quite brilliant, as I will reveal.
These dragons did not exactly breathe fire, as most legends claim—but nor were the myths entirely off target. These particular dragons indeed had scaldingly hot breath. But their remains show that instead of breathing that scorching breath out, the dragons breathed it inward, using the hot air to inflate themselves like balloons each time they had finished grazing. (Their fossilized bodies reveal the oddest furnace-like mechanisms in their throats, which could have heated incoming air to nearly two thousand degrees Fahrenheit!) And then their bodies would rise into the sky, where the dragons would hover well out of the range of predatory, carnivorous animals—and digest their grass and leaves in peace.
I can just imagine the scene: the sun setting behind the mountains, the sky stained pink and purple, and hundreds of gleaming, rainbow-scaled Balloon Dragons floating like clouds above the land. It must have been quite magical. Not everyone in the area, however, was content to enjoy this fantastical scenery.
In a nearby cave in the mountain range lived a vicious little rabble of prehistoric monkeys; we found their nasty remains as well. Unlike the Balloon Dragons—who were beautiful and elegant and creative and harmless—these monkeys were ugly and had tiny brains, which were particularly shrunken in the lobes devoted to goodwill. Instead of eating flowers and shrubs, these monkeys hunkered down and ate mold and bugs; their brown fur was ragged and matted with dung and prone to falling out in repulsive little clumps (one can tell from the texture of their fossilized hides); they gave off a terrible stink that smelled like skunk fur on fire (actually, I am just making that last part up, but it would have served them right).
Each day, those mean little monkeys watched from afar as the Balloon Dragons gently grazed, and each night, they glared as the dragons rose quietly to the heavens, and one day, they apparently hatched a devilish plan to bring the dragons down. For the Balloon Dragons, it must have been a day like any other. Late in the afternoon, their stomachs full, they breathed in great, contented gusts of hot air and began to float up into the sky. Just then, hundreds of those rotten little monkeys came streaming down the mountains. They piled themselves into a great monkey heap that towered into the air, until they could just touch the soft bellies of the Balloon Dragons.
And then those beastly creatures did something quite horrible: grasping knife-sharp rocks, they punctured every single one of the Balloon Dragons, who slowly deflated and wilted back to the earth.
I am afraid to report that by morning, they had all been devoured by the local carnivores, who left behind only a few mangled carcasses for me to discover millions of years later.
As usual, Mother Wiggins chose this moment to pop into my head.
“Quite typical, isn’t it, Wendell,” she said, clucking in disapproval.
“Mother!” I shouted. “I am in the remote mountains of China. Can’t a son ever have privacy anywhere?”
I sulked in silence for a few minutes, hoping she would go away. She did not. I gave in, of course. “Well, all right, Mother. What do you mean by ‘typical’?”
“Everyone wants to tear down what they wish they were, but can’t be,” she said.
And once she’d had the last word—as usual—she vanished from my mind.
89. A neighborhood in London.
90. Mr. Fang is clearly describing a version of a telephone. Little did Dr. Wiggins know that many thousands of miles away, in America, a soon-to-be-famous inventor named Alexander Graham Bell had just patented a similar device.
91. Mr. Fang had clearly invented a crude version of the helicopter. It should come as no surprise that the first functional helicopter originated in China; after all, the earliest references to vertical flight have come from that country. Since around 400 BC, Chinese children have played with propellered bamboo flying toys. In the West, functional helicopters would not be invented until the twentieth century.
October 1882
The Empire of Japan
In Which I Discover … Behemoth Cleaning Squid
(Ingentis Purgationis Teuthida)
This island nation is most compelling. And the English and Japanese have much more in common than one might think. For example, we both love tea. The English are cuckoo about teatime—which happens at home every day at four o’clock in the afternoon—and the Japanese take their tea ceremonies quite seriously.
Where Japan and England are different: for starters, Japan is exceedingly clean—even its cities. (Not at all like dirty old London, where snow turns black from the soot in the air.)92 How this entire nation stays so clean, I will never know.
In terms of my own ancient-animal-world-fact-finding mission, I have always been very keen to excavate here. There are hundreds of Japanese myths about fantastical animals that once roamed the country and its surrounding seas—and I am certain that at least some of them stem from real creatures. I began my research in Tokyo,93 where I visited a bookseller specializing in ancient mythology. There I unrolled a beautiful, crumbling old scroll detailing many folklore creatures. Some of them are very imaginative:
• The Bake-kujira, a ghostly whale skeleton that drifts along the coastline
• The Basan, a large chicken monster that breathes fire
• The Kappa, a troublemaking, frog-like little river-dwelling monster that likes to play pranks, such as loudly passing gas in polite company and looking up ladies’ dresses
• The Kurage-no-hinotama, a jellyfish-shaped fireball that hovers near the sea and covers victims with red sap
• The Samebito, an odd sea-dwelling creature that cries jewels instead of tears
• The Umibozu, a gargantuan black shadow that looks like a monk and emerges from the sea to capsize the boats of anyone who dares to speak to it
There were also quite a few creatures that appeared to be as concerned with tidiness as the present-day citizens of Japan are, such as one called Ashiaraiyashiki, a huge demon that bossily demands that its leg be washed, and Akaname, a spirit that lurks in bathrooms and licks them clean (quite a repulsive destiny, if you ask me!). The country even came up with Tenjoname, a spirit that licks ceilings clean, for heaven’s sake.
I sat back and had a little think. Well, if so many of these creatures hailed from the sea, that seemed like the best place to start my exploration. So Gibear and I left for the Sea of Japan, and we’ve settled into a house in a little fishing village overlooking the water. We needed to work quickly, for winter loomed and I did not relish scrounging around for fossils on ice-covered beaches. I suggested to Gibear that we split up during the days and investigate separately, therefore doubling the amount of ground covered.
Something a bit odd happened as a result of this sensible suggestion.
Each day, I would come back to our little shack on the cliffs overlooking the Sea covered in algae and fish scales and seaweed—but Gibear, on the other hand, whose white fur should have turned green and very tangled, arrived each evening looking even whiter and more spotless than he had the day before! I became determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.
So, one morning, I secretly followed him as he trotted down to the beach. He nosed around in the sand, scratching here, sniffing there. He dug a deep hole, found nothing of interest, and filled it back up. Late in the afternoon, as the sun lazed toward the horizon, Gibear meandered into a cave and stayed for quite some time. I peeked inside and watched him. First, my pet rubbed himself against a strange sponge-like object jutting out from the wall; it appeared to lather him up like soap. His fur, which had been rather dirty when he went into the cave, turned bright whi
te again! And then he rubbed himself against an odd bristle, which combed out his coat.
“Aha!” I bellowed, and leaped into the cave, startling Gibear. “The mystery is solved.”
But one mystery often belies another: the curious spongy and bristly objects interested me enormously. Firstly, they appeared to be very old; secondly, they had clearly once been alive; and finally, they were obviously connected to a greater mass somewhere inside the cave wall. Once again, my pet had led me to a possible paleozoological gold mine. I fetched my tools and went to work.
It appears that Japan’s ancient inhabitants were as tidy as its modern and mythical ones. The fossilized remains in this cave showed evidence of a most unusual variety of sea creature, dead now for around twenty-five million years: a family of absolutely enormous squid—each one perhaps the size of fifty elephants clustered together.94 Yet it was not only their immense size that set them apart from today’s common squid. These squid had been biologically equipped for a most unlikely duty: cleaning the ocean floor.
For example, a thick crown of gritty coral adorned each squid head; with this coral, the animal would thoughtfully buff and smooth jagged rocks that might injure other sea creatures. While suckers cover the arms of normal squid, the arms of this kind of squid instead sported squishy sponges, which appear to have dispensed some sort of sudsy natural bleach. And finally, from its two extra tentacles stemmed bristly brushes, with which the squid would gently comb out the seaweed gardens growing along the sea’s basin.
How sweet and dutiful these silent creatures must have been as they floated along, lovingly polishing stones and smoothing out sand and generally making the water pretty for other maritime inhabitants. In fact, the portion of the brain responsible for happiness was particularly pronounced in these creatures, indicating that they were quite content with their lives.
(Just then, Mother Wiggins materialized in her usual specter form—this time holding a raggedy mop in one hand and a suds-filled bucket in the other.
“Don’t fool yourself, Wendell,” she barked. “No one likes cleaning. That’s why they call it a chore.”
“These squid liked tidying up, Mother,” I retorted. “Not everyone feels that they have to complain all the time.”
“No, it’s a chore, all right,” she said. “Especially when you’re cleaning up for ingrates. Look at the evidence, and you’ll see soon enough that I am right.”)
For the record, I wanted very badly to prove her wrong. Yet as I probed the area for further information about the fate of the Behemoth Cleaning Squid, I reluctantly had to admit that Mother Wiggins had been at least partially correct.
For millions of years, the Behemoth Cleaning Squid went about their work, much appreciated by their fellow fish and mollusks. But then ancient humans came onto the scene and began to dump all sorts of repulsive rubbish into the water. The squid would have had to work harder than ever to keep up, and I am certain that they grew worried and exhausted. As the ancient humans made the water ever dirtier, the Behemoth Cleaning Squid could never get ahead; soon they grew quite morose and resentful. Eventually they gave up altogether and drifted like huge phantoms off into the deep, where they could clean the ocean floor in peace.
For all I know, some may still exist.95
* * *
When Gibear and I returned to Tokyo, something rather entertaining occurred. There we were, walking down the street and minding our own business, when a great shout went up from a street stall behind us.
“Kesaran-pasaran! Kesaran-pasaran!” yelled a man, pointing at Gibear.
My heart sank, for I remembered from my mythology studies that a Kesaran-pasaran is a mysterious fluffy white creature of legend; it is supposed to bestow good luck.
A large crowd closed in around us, and people of all ages and sizes yanked out tufts of Gibear’s fur. My pet yelped in pain: Giii-bear! Giii-bear! I tried to whack the crowd away with my notebook, but I was shoved quite rudely onto the ground.
Suddenly everyone leaped back in shock: before our eyes, Gibear’s downy white fur fell out, and from his body grew clammy, seaweed-like tendrils. And what is more, these tendrils gave off the terrible stench of rotten eggs.
I stood up, held my nose with one hand, and picked him up with the other. He felt like a bowl of quivering jelly. “Do you really have to go to such extremes?” I asked him as I carried him home.
His new fur gave off such a stench that I had to sleep outside in the alley behind our little rented house that evening.
But when I crabbily lumped back into the house the next day, the stinky tendrils had fallen out, and a pale coat had once again begun to grow all over my pet’s little body.
92. Recall that at the time Dr. Wiggins was writing, England had just undergone a great industrial revolution, and soot from the factories filled the air like fog.
93. Japan’s capital since 1868.
94. Until Dr. Wiggins’s discovery became known, the biggest squid classified were the colossal squid, approximately forty feet long—tiny in comparison.
95. Dr. Wiggins may be correct: to this day, even modern giant squid have never been observed in their natural habitats, for they live in the deepest, darkest waters—unreachable by humans.
Journal No. 6
Antarctica & the North Pole
May 1884
The Outer Rungs of Antarctica
In Which I Discover … a Face-Tree Made of Ice
(Caput Arbor Glacies)
There are few parts of the globe that we have not yet explored. I have saved the most harrowing for last, which may have been unwise: after all, I am a man of rather advanced years now. And at first I also worried about how poor Gibear would fare in this polar chill: I often forget that I discovered him all those years ago—over thirty years ago, in fact—in a sweltering, steamy rain forest.
I need not have worried. No sooner had our ship entered the icy clime96 around Antarctica than my pet decided to grow a copper-like coat so thick that he now resembles a shiny, dense ball of heat-retaining metallic threads.97 What is more: while the rest of us breathe out common little clouds of breath in the cold air, Gibear entertains me endlessly on this long voyage by breathing out clouds in the shapes of animals we have discovered together. Sometimes I wake up and the Brittle Bones shimmer in the air; the next day, the mighty Trelephants stomp across the deck of our boat and disappear.
This has, of course, made us quite popular with our crew. After our foray in Japan, Gibear and I went to Russia to stock up on fur coats for me and coffee for him; then we commissioned the scrappiest, toughest, most thick-hided crew we could scrounge up—including our ship’s leader, Captain Blotski, so hard-bitten a man that he often eats matches for breakfast and washes them down with castor oil!
The ship itself bears the name Buyan, which means “roughneck” in Russian. Not exactly the most refined arrangement, I must admit—but no matter. A fearsome expedition awaits us, not a grandmotherly tea party. After all, a voyage to a frozen, uncharted98 world is most certainly not for those with dainty habits.
I was slumbering in my quarters when someone shook me awake quite violently. I peeked out from under my wolf-fur blanket: the cold air nearly froze my eyeballs right out of my head. Captain Blotski stood over me.
“What is the meaning of this rude awakening?” I demanded.
“We see the land,” said the captain.
“Why did you not say so sooner,” I shouted, and kicked off the blanket.
Craggy, glistening cliffs of ice towered above Buyan’s decks; snow-covered chunks of ice circled the hull in the water below. I wondered aloud about the best way to get to the top.
“This is not a good place to stop and climb,” said Captain Blotski. “It is an iceberg, not a landmass.”
“Was it ever attached to the mainland?” I pressed.
“Perhaps,” said Captain Blotski, and belched an oily-smelling burp.
“Then I must explore it as well,” said I, and immediately marched
below the deck to retrieve my tools. When I reemerged, Captain Blotski had anchored Buyan, but by then the iceberg had managed to drift away. We pulled up the anchor and headed toward the berg—but once again, the mountain of ice scuttled away, as though on legs beneath the surface. Finally we got close enough to harpoon ropes into the side of the iceberg, and tied them to the boat. We stared up at the cliff, which hovered at least a hundred feet above our heads.99
“It will be impossible to get up the side,” scoffed Captain Blotski.
Suddenly, Gibear grabbed the end of a long rope in his mouth and leaped off the boat onto the iceberg’s wall. And then, to our total astonishment, my pet walked right up the face of the cliff and disappeared over the top. The rope dangled down the side of the iceberg. A few minutes later, his face appeared again at the top of the cliff; he gave a short Giii-bear! bark and tugged several times on the rope with his mouth. I shook my head in amazement.
“Do you understand what this extraordinary, magnificent creature is telling us?” I said to the crew, beaming with pride. “He has affixed the rope to something strong on top of the iceberg, and secured my passage up the side.”
Captain Blotski looked incredulous. “You go first, then,” he said.
“Fine, I shall,” I said huffily, annoyed at this lack of faith in Gibear’s genius. And, grasping the rope, I heaved myself quite successfully up the icy wall. When I reached the top and peered over the ledge, such a stunning sight awaited me that I nearly let go of the rope and fell into the boat below.
“To what did your strange animal tie the rope?” called the captain.
I crawled over the top and gawked at the object in question, my voice stuck somewhere deep in my throat. When it came back to me, I called down:
The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins Page 14
