Darkness

by David Fletcher

  ‘Mike, we’ve turned into exterminators. And more than that, we’ve become an extermination event – as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Right. Well, you’ll also know that there have always been extinctions on this planet – at what is known as a “background rate”. Extinctions are certainly nothing new. But that background rate was so low it allowed other species to develop as the old models were dying out. And that all worked pretty well. But not anymore. Because it’s now accepted that the current extinction rate is somewhere between one hundred and one thousand times the old background rate. And, of course, it’s all our own doing. What’s more, the rate is predicted to accelerate to ten thousand times the background rate – very soon – and then continue to accelerate, so that by the end of this century up to half of all the plant and animal species that presently exist will become extinct. Which means that this so-called “Holocene extermination” is well on course to becoming the most devastating extermination event ever. And nobody seems to really care.’

  ‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ observed Mike. ‘After all, there are quite a few people who spend their lives doing conservation work – all over the world. And in places like this. I mean, our resident primatologist may have her flaws, but her whole life is dedicated to protecting gorillas, and you can hardly paint her as some sort of pathogen.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And I know I’m not being entirely fair. But how many dedicated primatologists are there – with or without social skills – and how many millions of rapacious, uncaring and simply unaware people are there on this planet? You could have a huge standing army of primatologists and conservationists and marine biologists conducting all sorts of good work and all sorts of captive breeding programmes, but it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. They’d be steamrollered – by all those billions of ignorant, selfish, stupid, God-fearing tossers whose only real concerns are themselves and their ability to produce more of their kind. And I’m talking here about the overwhelming majority of people on this planet. People who, if challenged to think about their legacy, would chatter on about their grandkids and would not begin to understand that their real legacy will be a disastrously impoverished world that will never really recover…’

  ‘Before they’ve suffered that catastrophic collapse in their numbers?’

  ‘Yes. I suspect they won’t have the decency to go first.’

  Here, Dan managed a smile, but it was short-lived. Because Mike posed a further question.

  ‘OK. Define “disastrously impoverished”. I mean, in terms of us and whatever’s left of other life forms.’

  Dan snorted.

  ‘Oh, come on…’

  ‘No. Really. I want you to give me a picture.’

  ‘I’ll tell you, but I don’t believe you haven’t already got a picture yourself.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘OK. Well, I don’t think there’s much of an argument that our current attitude to all other animals is that if we can’t eat them, ride them or get them to pull a cart, we’re more than likely to kill them or drive them away. And I might just add that if we’re talking about plants, it’s even worse. They don’t get a look in. They’re just the backdrop, a bit of scenery that we rip down and burn up at will…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK, so what I’m saying – again – is that we constitute this terrible extinction event, and the result of these multiple extinctions will be what a famous guy called E O Wilson termed the “Eremozoic Era” – which if your Greek is as poor as mine can be roughly translated as “The Age of Loneliness”. And what he meant by this, I think – and what I think myself – is that we will enter a final period of our existence where it is just us and whatever prosthetic environment we have created to delay our final demise.’

  ‘So no other animals at all – and presumably not much in the way of natural vegetation?’

  ‘Correct. It will be a nightmare world. And I predict that the first way we will try to come to terms with this nightmare is to “look to the heavens”. Somewhere up there, we will believe, lies our salvation. And if you think that’s rubbish, then just remember what Stephen Hawking once suggested: that we need to colonise other worlds to be able to survive. Only he overlooked the fact that we cannot live as a species on our own – and the fact that we will quickly fuck up anywhere else we colonise. Even assuming we could colonise somewhere as close as the moon.’

  ‘So even with this… erhh, “prosthetic environment”, you don’t think we could make a go of it on our own – as a single species?’

  ‘No. That “prosthetic environment” won’t ever work. Even if we manage to create it, either Gaia or we humans ourselves will bring about our end.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that… well, if we think of Gaia as the Earth’s self-regulating mechanisms, then these might tidy us up. Or if that doesn’t happen, then the side effects of trying to put together an ersatz world will do the job. And by that, I mean we’re bound to unleash either conflict or disease in this ghastly New World, and for what it’s worth, my money would be on conflict. By then we might have decided it’s a cleaner and quicker way to go than some dreadful pandemic.’

  ‘That’s not what you said before,’ announced Mike.

  ‘No. But then I wasn’t being optimistic. Whereas now – just to explore our impact on our fellow animals – I’m suggesting that we might be around long enough to get to the Age of Loneliness, and not eliminate ourselves in just the next few years.’

  ‘Optimistic?!’

  ‘Well, relatively…’

  Mike looked slightly aghast, but then he gathered himself to ask one further question.

  ‘So, despite your optimism you now seem to be saying that our numbers won’t just collapse – with maybe a remnant population left to pick up the pieces – but that we’ll wipe ourselves out completely. That by eliminating all our fellow creatures we will manage to do more than just shrink back to our “normal population”.’

  Dan grinned widely.

  ‘You interrogators remember everything, don’t you?’

  Mike didn’t respond to that one, so Dan carried on.

  ‘I don’t know. Ask me again tomorrow, and I might tell you that I think we might survive – in very small numbers. And later in the day that we will disappear entirely and that lots of the species that we’re currently trying to exterminate will still be around – and thriving. And that Earth will forget that it was ever infected by such a terrible disease, an aberrant life form deluded enough to think that it was the only important life form on the planet – or that it was important in any way at all.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ responded Dan. ‘And do you think that I’ve answered your original question?’

  ‘What was that? I can’t remember.’

  ‘No, neither can I. But can I ask one of you?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ responded Mike.

  ‘Well, tell me – do interrogators get paid overtime?’

  Mike said nothing but offered Dan an enormous grin.

  ‘Well, assuming they don’t,’ continued Dan, ‘and assuming also that you now have all you want, I suspect I should let you get to bed. After all, we have some gorillas to see tomorrow – before we wipe them all out.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ agreed Mike. ‘Oh, and I have never been paid overtime in my life – for anything. I just thought you ought to know.’

  Dan looked at his companion and he now suspected that the kudu story had not been a device. It was just something his companion had wanted to tell him – because the kudu’s death still haunted him terribly. It made him feel more comfortable with Mike than with anybody he had ever known before – other than Kim.

  He would still feel this way the next morning.

  fifteen

  Inside the hotel it wasn’t very
warm. Nor was it very organised. It seemed to Dan that those running the place, as well as being ill-prepared for cold weather, were largely ill-prepared for the arrival of a gaggle of guests, all of whom had probably been booked in for months. The result was a pile-up of birders in the hotel’s reception area and a great deal of noise as the hotel’s assorted employees began shouting at each other. This appeared to be the local traditional way of distilling order out of chaos. It was somewhat entertaining but not very efficient. Accordingly, it was a full twenty minutes before Dan and Kim were installed in their room, a vestibule just off the reception area in which they could listen to the continuing shouting for a further ten minutes. Alternatively, they could take in the ambience of their room. It wasn’t very appealing.

  Their accommodation had the same sort of dimensions as that room in which they had eaten their lunch. That is to say, it was more a corridor than a room and it had the same high ceiling – and, indeed, the same poor lighting. The walls were unadorned and, in a nod to minimalism, there were no chairs and no tables, but instead just three beds covered with white sequinned shrouds. It was a little, thought Dan, like the sort of room one might find oneself in if one ventured into a red-light district of Cairo – always assuming that all the red lights in that city hadn’t now been extinguished by fundamentalism. But in any event, Dan and Kim’s first “desert” bedchamber was a big disappointment and it was just as cold as it had been in reception. It appeared to have no sort of heating whatsoever.

  In view of there being no warmth and nothing in their room to catch their interest – other than a cockroach scuttling across the floor – Dan and Kim decided to leave it and seek out the bar. It couldn’t, they reckoned, be any colder, and it might even have some beer. They were not the only guests of the hotel to have made this decision, and when they arrived in what was actually the hotel’s restaurant rather than a proper bar, there were already a number of their party there and most of them had a drink. This was encouraging. The hotel could definitely provide what looked like alcoholic refreshment. However, everything else about the restaurant-cum-bar was entirely discouraging. In the first place, despite it being decorated with elaborate Islamic swirls on its walls and its ceiling, it was horribly over-lit, and consequently stark as opposed to inviting. And in the second place, it was not noticeably warmer than anywhere else in the hotel, which was why all the assembled drinkers were still wearing their various coats, cagoules and jackets. They, like Dan and Kim, had not relinquished their outerwear, and were not likely to do so until they retired for the night – always assuming, that is, that sequinned shrouds would afford a sufficient amount of warmth.

  The newcomers to this cold and uninviting drinking den joined a quartet of their fellow travellers who were seated at a low table, and as they waited for one of the restaurant waiters to take their drinks order, they tried to engage them in conversation. This was not easy. Their subjects were two married couples, and all four of them displayed the same blend of dullness, incuriosity and apathy. They really were hard work, and when his drink arrived Dan found himself employing it as a distraction while Kim struggled on in her attempt to kindle some sort of discussion. But it wasn’t going to happen. They were all a lost cause and Dan had already decided that when a promised meal appeared, he would whisk his wife off to one of the dining tables where other members of the party were already seated. And that was any other members of the party, as in none of the original quartet.

  His strategy worked. He and Kim had some new companions with whom to share their meal and initially they seemed far more promising. However, within only a few minutes, socialising turned into a chore as one after another of their new birding comrades proved themselves either tedious or opinionated. Matters were in no way helped by the meal itself. This was “tajine food” again, and it was just as poor and just as tasteless as the tajines they had been served at lunchtime. Its only redeeming feature was that it could be washed down with more of the local Flag beer, which was a distinct improvement on “not even water”. Furthermore, nobody appeared with a banjo, and Dan and Kim were able to complete their unique dining experience – still with their jackets on – by indulging in some passable coffee and a whispered private conversation. This discussion was then continued at a normal sound level when they had returned to their room, and it had a theme.

  This theme was that they had somehow managed to append themselves to a group of people who were unappealing in the extreme, and with this group they appeared to be travelling through a country that was possibly even more unappealing. The weather was awful. The food and their present accommodation was awful. The local urbanisation of the desert was awful. And the local manifestations of the local culture… left a lot to be desired. However, they were trapped, and they would just have to make the best of it. They would have to enjoy the wildlife, they would have to seek interest in all the aspects of this very foreign place, and for some light relief they would have to seek amusement wherever they could find it.

  That last goal proved not difficult at all. Within minutes of their returning to their room, another shouting match erupted in reception. Its purpose was unknown, as were its participants, but it was conducted with such enthusiasm and with so little restraint that Dan and Kim could only find it amusing. Indeed, it was nearly as amusing as the noises they heard an hour or so later. These were snoring noises, and they were penetrating the wall between their own room and the one adjoining it as though it wasn’t there. This, deduced Kim, was because that wall, like every other aspect of this hotel, was a fraud. It might look like a real wall made up of bricks or breezeblocks and coated with plaster, but it could only have been some sort of hardboard or cardboard coated in the stuff, and would probably, suggested Kim, succumb to a determined punch. It might even, she ventured, collapse if one leaned on it.

  Their combined loud laughter failed to wake their snoring neighbour, and they eventually subsided into sleep in the full knowledge that they could cope with any amount of awfulness thrown at them either by their zealous but tedious companions or by Morocco. And furthermore, as had already been pointed out by Dan, things could hardly get worse.

  How wrong he would prove to be…

  sixteen

  As Dan left his cabin in the morning, he was able to take in his first real view of Ngaga camp. The previous evening’s rain had persisted for most of the night, and as a result there was a significant morning mist hanging in the air. Nevertheless, he could still see that his own cabin was one of eight stretched out along a densely vegetated escarpment, and above these cabins sat the camp’s main building, which housed its restaurant and lounge. This was no great surprise. The camp’s layout was more or less as he’d imagined it would be. But what did take him aback was the nature of the vegetation which ran through the grounds of the camp and which looked essentially impenetrable. Indeed, to make his way to the main building, he soon found himself walking along a path which had been carved through the thick greenery and, in the absence of a machete, it was the only path he could possibly take.

  Over an early breakfast he would learn what this dense vegetation was and why it was here. Kate would be his teacher, and she started her lesson by telling Dan that the whole of the Lossi Gorilla Sanctuary had previously been logged. Valuable mature trees had been cut down and taken away, and their removal had created the perfect growing conditions for something called marantaceae. Indeed, so perfect were these conditions that this rampant, large-leaved, thicket-forming plant had colonised the whole of the sanctuary – including the grounds of the camp. This was not good news in one way, but in another way it was very good news – for gorillas. Because marantaceae constitutes a gorilla’s ideal food source, and of course this was why the whole area – and not the nearby national park – had been designated as a sanctuary for these endangered animals. The forest might have been degraded by the former logging activity, but it now constituted a magnet for endangered Western lowland gorillas and a sanctuar
y for them in the real sense of the word. Not everything we do, mused Dan, is without merit, even if, as in this case, the merit arises from some not-entirely-intended consequences.

  Soon it was time to stop musing and to finish his breakfast. Because it was now time for a briefing, for some last-minute instructions on how to conduct oneself while tracking gorillas. These instructions were to be delivered by their guide for the morning, Connor, and under the watchful and super-critical eye of David. He was the improbably named local tracker – from Mbomo – and he appeared to have contracted some of the primatologist’s disdain for unwanted ignorant visitors. He certainly looked impatient as Connor embarked on his directions, and this impatience seemed to morph into resentment as Connor carried on. Nevertheless, Connor did his job proficiently, and certainly briskly enough to assuage some of that resentment. He lost no time at all in impressing on his audience the need to stay together as a group, to be responsive to David’s commands, and to be aware of just how much of a threat a contingent of highly scrubbed and hygiene-conscious visitors still posed to these precious – and fragile – gorillas. With their cargo of germs, even superficially antiseptic outsiders like Dan could easily transmit what might prove deadly diseases to these isolated animals. What this meant in practice, Connor explained, was that even before they were anywhere near the gorillas, his charges would have to adopt some essential precautions – involving, if necessary, a spade and a spot of serious digging. Because to eliminate the slightest possibility of contamination, any “liquid discharge” would be allowed only in an excavated hole of at least one foot in depth, and anything that might constitute a more solid threat would call for a hole of at least three feet in depth.

  It was when this information had been imparted – and before Connor concluded with an explanation of the use of surgical masks – that Dan understood why he was in receipt of this pre-tracking briefing with only Mark and Bruce. Clearly, Svetlana had not only learnt of the exertions involved in tracking gorillas, but she had probably also got wind of some of its other demands. And even if somebody else did the digging for her, Dan could not imagine her coming to terms with the mechanics of either form of alfresco relief. No doubt she was still in her cabin and she would remain there until Bruce returned from the forest – enjoying, as much as she could, its ambience and its civilised facilities. And, of course, she would never see gorillas.