by Karel Čapek
‘For a film. That would be a marvellous thing, Abe. Imagine me bathing at the edge of the sea - ’
‘You look great in that swimsuit,’ Abe blurted out in a hurry.
‘Don’t I? And those Tritons would fall in love with me and carry me off to the bottom of the sea. And I’d be their queen.’
‘On the seabed?’
‘Sure, under the water. In their mysterious realm, you know? Surely they’ve got cities there and everything.’
‘But Sweetiepie, you’d be drowned there!’
‘Don’t worry, I can swim,’ Sweetiepie Li said unconcernedly. ‘But once a day I’d swim up to the beach to fill my lungs with air.’ Li demonstrated a breathing exercise associated with a heaving of her bosom and soft arm movements. ‘Something like this, see? And on the beach there could be … a young fisherman who’d fall in love with me. And I with him. Terribly,’ Sweetiepie sighed. ‘You know, he’d be a handsome, strong man. And those Tritons would try to drown him, but I would save him and follow him to his hut. And the Tritons would besiege us - well, and then you could come and rescue us.’
‘Li,’ Fred said earnestly, ‘this is so idiotic that it might really make a film, cross my heart. I’d be surprised if old Jesse didn’t turn it into a film spectacular.’
Fred was right; in due course this was turned into a spectacular by Jesse Loeb Pictures, with Miss Lily Valley in the leading role; in addition the cast called for 600 young Nereids, one Neptune and 12,000 extras dressed up as various antediluvian reptiles. But before this came to pass a lot of water had to flow under the bridges and a great many events had to take place - in particular:
(1) The captured animal, kept in the tub in Sweetiepie Li’s bathroom, enjoyed the lively interest of the entire company for two whole days; on the third day it stopped moving and Miss Li insisted that the poor little thing was pining away; on the fourth day it began to smell and had to be dumped in an advanced stage of decomposition.
(2) Of the shots taken by the lagoon only two were usable. On one of them Sweetiepie Li was cowering in terror, desperately waving her arms at the erect animals. Everybody insisted that this was a marvellous sequence. The other clip showed three men and a girl, on their knees, with their noses on the ground; they were all taken from behind and they looked as if they were kowtowing to something. This sequence was suppressed.
(3) As for the suggested newspaper headlines, nearly all of them were used (even that with the antediluvian fauna in it) in hundreds and hundreds of American and foreign dailies, weeklies and magazines; added to them was an account of the whole event with numerous details and photographs, such as Sweetiepie Li among the lizards, a separate picture of the lizard in the bath-tub, a separate picture of Li in her swimsuit, separate pictures of Miss Judy, Mr Abe Loeb, Baseball Fred, the captain of the yacht Gloria Pickford, a separate picture of Taraiva Island, and a separate picture of the pearls, laid out on black velvet. Thus Sweetiepie Li’s career was assured; she even declined to appear in a variety show and declared to newspaper reporters that she intended to devote herself exclusively to Art.
(4) Admittedly there were some people who, on the pretext of a professional education, maintained that - as far as it was possible to judge from the pictures - the creatures were not prehistoric reptiles but some type of newt. People with even higher professional qualifications then maintained that this type of newt was not so far known to science and therefore did not exist. There was a prolonged discussion in the press, finally brought to an end by Professor J. W. Hopkins (Yale) with the announcement that he had examined the photographs submitted to him and that he considered them a fraud (‘a hoax’) or some trick photography; that the animals depicted were somewhat reminiscent of the Giant Covered-Gilled Salamander (Cryptobranchus japonicus, Sieboldia maxima, Tritomegas Sieboldii or Megalobatrachus Sieboldii), but inaccurately, clumsily and downright amateurishly copied. In this way the matter was scientifically settled for some time to come.
(5) Eventually, at the appropriate time, Mr Abe Loeb married Miss Judy. His closest friend, Baseball Fred, was his best-man at a wedding staged with great pomp and in the presence of numerous outstanding figures from political, artistic and other circles.
8
Andrias Scheuchzeri
There is no limit to human curiosity. It was not enough for Professor J. W. Hopkins (Yale), the greatest living authority on reptiles, to declare those mysterious creatures to be an unscientific hoax and pure fantasy; an increasing number of reports began to appear both in specialised publications and in the daily press of the discovery of hitherto unknown animals, resembling giant salamanders, in the most various parts of the Pacific. Relatively reliable data referred to such discoveries in the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Island, on Kapingamarangi, Butarita and Tapeteuea, as well as on a whole group of lesser islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukonono and Fukaofu, and finally on Hiau, Uahuka, Uapu and Pukapuka. There were the legends of Captain van Toch’s devils (mainly in the Melanesian region) and of Miss Lily’s Tritons (more usually in Polynesia); so the papers concluded that these were probably different kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters, especially as the silly season had begun and there was nothing else to write about. Submarine monsters are a sure-fire success with the reading public. In the United States, in particular, Tritons became fashionable; in New York the lavish review featuring Poseidon, with 300 of the prettiest girl Tritons, Nereids and Sirens ran to 300 performances; in Miami and on the Californian beaches young people wore Triton and Nereid swimsuits (i.e. three strings of pearls and nothing else), while in the Midwestern states and the Bible Belt the Movement for the Suppression of Immorality (MSI) recorded an extraordinary increase in support; in this connection mass demonstrations took place and a number of negroes were either hanged or burnt to death.
Finally there appeared in The National Geographic Magazine a report by the Columbia University Scientific Expedition (mounted at the expense of J. S. Tincker, known as the Tinned Food King); that report was signed by P. L. Smith, W. Kleinschmidt, Charles Kovar, Louis Forgeron and D. Herrero, internationally renowned experts especially in the fields of fish parasites, ringworms, plant biology, infusorians and mites. We quote from their voluminous report:
On Rakahanga Island the expedition for the first time encountered the imprints of the hind-feet of an unknown giant salamander. The imprints show five digits with a toe length of 3 to 4 cm. Judging by the number of tracks the coast of Rakahanga Island would seem to be literally swarming with those salamanders. Because of the absence of fore-feet imprints (except for one four-digit print, apparently of a young specimen) the expedition concluded that these salamanders evidently move on their hindlegs.
It should be pointed out that there are no rivers or swamps on Rakahanga Island, so that these salamanders must live in the sea and are probably the only representatives of their order with a pelagic habitat. It is, of course, known that the Mexican axolotl (Amblystoma mexicanum) inhabits brackish lakes; however, there is no reference to any pelagic (sea-inhabiting) salamanders even in the classic work of W. Korngold Caudate Amphibians (Urodela), Berlin 1913.
… We waited until the afternoon in order to capture or a least to catch sight of a living specimen, but in vain. Regretfully we left the charming little island of Rakahanga, where D. Herrero succeeded in discovering a beautiful new species of Tingidae …
We were much more fortunate on the island of Tongarewa. We were waiting on the beach with our rifles in our hands. After sunset the heads of salamanders emerged from the water: relatively large and slightly flattened. After a while the salamanders crawled up on the sand, walking on their hindlegs with a swaying gait but quite nimbly. When seated they were a little over a metre high. They sat down in a wide circle and with a strange motion began to twist their upper bodies; it looked as if they were dancing. W. Kleinschmidt stood up in order to get a better view. The salamanders turned their heads towards him and for a brief moment remained rigid; then they approached him at r
emarkable speed, uttering hissing and barking sounds. When they were about seven feet away from him we fired our rifles at them. They fled very quickly and flung themselves into the sea; they did not reappear that evening. Left on the beach were two dead salamanders and one with a broken spine, which uttered a strange sound like ‘ogod, ogod, ogod’. He subsequently died when W. Kleinschmidt opened his pleural cavity with a knife … (This is followed by anatomical details which would be incomprehensible to the lay reader; we refer the expert reader to the above-mentioned report.)
It is clear, therefore, from the characteristics listed above, that we are concerned with a typical member of the order of caudate reptiles (Urodela), to which, as is well known, belongs the family of real salamanders (Salamandrida), which in turn comprises the genera of newts (Tritones) and salamanders (Salamandrae), as well as the family of perinnibranchs (Ichthyoidea), which in turn comprises the cryptobranchiate (Cryptobranchiata) and branchiate (Phanerobranchiata) forms. The salamander recorded on the island of Tangarewa would seem to be most closely related to the perinnibranch cryptobranchiates; in many respects, such as size, it resembles the Japanese Giant Salamander (Megalobranchus Sieboldii) and the American hellbender, known as the ‘swamp devil’, though it differs from these by its well-developed sensory organs and its longer and more powerful extremities, which enable it to move with marked agility both in the water and on dry land. (This is followed by further comparative anatomical details.)
Following the preparation of the slain animals’ skeletons we made a most interesting discovery: the skeletons of these salamanders are an almost perfect match of a fossil imprint of a salamander skeleton found on a stone slab from the Oeningen quarry by Dr Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer and illustrated in his Homo diluvii testis published in 1726. For the benefit’ of less informed readers it should be explained that the above-mentioned Dr Scheuchzer regarded that fossil as the remains of antediluvian man. ‘The figure here presented,’ he writes, ‘which I hereby submit to the world of learning, is beyond any doubt the image of Man who witnessed the Great Flood. These are not lines from which but a lively imagination must needs construe something that would resemble Man, but everywhere there is complete conformity and perfect concordance with the several parts of the human skeleton. Petrified Man is here counterfeited from the front: behold a memorial to an extinct human race older than all Roman, Greek, and even Egyptian and other oriental tombs.’ Subsequently Cuvier identified the Oeningen imprint as the skeleton of a fossilised salamander, which was named Cryptobranchus primaevus or Andrias Scheuchzeri Tschudi and considered to be a long-extinct species. Osteological comparison now enabled us to identify our salamanders as the prehistoric Andrias salamander which had been presumed extinct. The mystery proto-lizard, as the newspapers have dubbed it, is nothing other than the fossil crypto branchiate salamander Andrias Scheuchzeri; or, should a new name be needed, Cryptobranchus Tinckeri erectus or the Polynesian Giant Salamander.
… It remains a mystery why this interesting giant salamander should, until now, have eluded scientific attention, even though it occurs in large numbers at least on the islands of Rakahanga and Tongarewa in the Manihiki archipelago. It is not mentioned by Randolph and Montgomery in their work Two Years on the Islands of Manihiki (1885). The local population maintains that this animal - which incidentally they believe to be venomous - only began to show itself during the past six or eight years. They claim that the ‘sea devils’ can talk (sic) and that they build entire systems of barriers and dams in the bays they inhabit, in the nature of submarine cities; they say the water in these bays is as smooth as a millpond all the year round; they also state that they dig out, under the water, burrows and passages many metres long and that they stay in these during the day; at night they are said to steal sweet potatoes and yams from the fields, and even carry off hoes and other tools. Altogether the people do not like them and are even afraid of them; in a number of instances they have actually preferred to move away to other places. Obviously this is just a case of primitive legends and superstitions based presumably on the repulsive appearance and the erect quasi-human walk of these harmless giant salamanders.
… Travellers’ accounts according to which these salamanders are found also on islands other than the Manihiki archipelago should be received with a good deal of reserve. On the other hand, there cannot be the least doubt about identifying a recent imprint of a hind-foot, found on the beach of Tongatabu Island and published by Capt. Croisset in La Nature, as belonging to Andrias Scheuchzeri. This find is of especial significance in that it links the animals’ occurrence in the Manihiki Islands with the Australian-New Zealand zone, where so many survivors of an ancient fauna have been preserved: we need only think of the ‘antediluvian’ lizard Hatterii or Tuaturu, still living on Stephen Island. On these remote and for the most part sparsely populated little islands, almost untouched by civilisation, individual relics of animal types extinct elsewhere have succeeded in surviving. Thanks to Mr J. S. Tincker the fossil lizard Hatterii is now joined by an antediluvian salamander. The good Dr Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer would now have witnessed the resurrection of his Oeningen Adam …
This learned account should surely have been sufficient to illuminate scientifically the question of those mysterious marine monsters of which we have already spoken at length. Unfortunately, simultaneously with it, there appeared a report by the Dutch researcher van Hogenhouck, who classified these cryptobranchiate giant salamanders as belonging to the family of true salamanders or Tritons, naming them Megatriton moluccanus and establishing their occurrence on the Dutch Sunda Islands Dgilolo, Morotai and Ceram; there was also a report by the French scientist Dr Mignard, who classified them as typical salamanders, placed their original occurrence on the French islands of Takaroa, Rangiroa and Raroira, and named them quite simply Cryptobranchus salamandroides; then there was a report by H. W. Spence, who saw them as a new family, Pelagidae, native to the Gilbert Islands and capable of acquiring zoological existence under the generic name of Pelagotriton Spencei. Mr Spence succeeded in transporting a live specimen all the way to the London Zoo; there it became the object of further research, from which it emerged under the names of Pelagobatrachus Hookeri, Salamandrops maritimus, Abranchus giganteus, Amphiuma gigas, and a great number of others. Some scientists argued that Pelagotriton Spencei was identical with Cryptobranchus Tinckeri and that Mignard’s salamander was nothing other than Andrias Scheuchzeri; there was a lot of argument about priority and about other purely scientific questions. Thus it came about that eventually the natural history of every nation had its own giant salamanders and was waging a furious scientific war against the giant salamanders of other nations. As a result, that whole important business of the salamanders was never sufficiently resolved on the scientific side.
9
Andrew Scheuchzer
One Thursday morning, when the London Zoo was closed to the public, it so happened that Mr Thomas Greggs, a keeper in the Lizard House, was cleaning out the tanks and enclosures of his charges. He was alone in the salamander section, whose exhibits consisted of the Japanese Giant Salamander, the American Hellbender, Andrias Scheuchzeri, and a great number of lesser newts, salamanders, axolotls, eels, sirenia and amphibians, pleurodeles and branchiates. Mr Greggs was busying himself with a broom and a cloth, and whistling Annie Laurie, when suddenly somebody behind him spoke with a croak:
‘Look, mummy.’
Mr Thomas Greggs looked round, but there was nobody there; only the hellbender was smacking about in its swampy pool, and that big newt, that Andrias, was leaning with his forepaws on the edge of the tank and twisting its body. Must have dreamt it, thought Mr Greggs, and went on sweeping the floor for all he was worth.
‘Look, a newt,’ came a voice from behind him.
Mr Greggs spun round; that black newt, that Andrias, was looking at him, blinking its lower lids.
‘Yuk, isn’t it ugly?’ the newt suddenly said. ‘Let’s go on, darling.’
Mr Gre
ggs’s mouth gaped in amazement. ‘What’s that?’
‘Does it bite?’ the newt croaked.
‘You … you can talk?’ stammered Mr Greggs, not believing his senses.
‘I’m scared of it,’ the newt jerked out. ‘Mummy, what does it eat?’
‘Say good morning,’ said the startled Mr Greggs.
The newt twisted its body. ‘Good morning,’ it croaked. ‘Good morning. Good morning. Can I feed him some cake?’
Confused, Mr Greggs fished into his pocket and produced a piece of roll. ‘Here you are.’
The newt took the roll in its paw and started to nibble it. ‘Look, a newt,’ it grunted contentedly. ‘Daddy, why is he so black?’ Suddenly it slipped into the water, leaving only its head sticking out. ‘Why is he in the water? Why? Yuk, isn’t he horrid?’
Mr Thomas Greggs scratched his neck in surprise. I see, it repeats what it hears people say. ‘Say Greggs,’ he tried.
‘Say Greggs,’ the newt repeated.
‘Mister Thomas Greggs.’
‘Mister Thomas Greggs.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Good morning, sir. Good morning. Good morning, sir.’ It seemed the newt would never tire of talking; but Mr Thomas Greggs was not a very talkative person. ‘OK, now you shut up,’ he said. ‘And when I’m through I’ll teach you to talk.’
‘OK, now you shut up,’ the newt mumbled. ‘Good morning, sir. Look, a newt. I’ll teach you to talk.’
However, the Zoo management did not like the keepers to teach their animals any tricks; an elephant was different, but the rest of the animals were there for instructional purposes and_not to perform any circus tricks. That was why Mr Greggs spent his time in the salamander section more or less surreptitiously, when everybody had left. As he was a widower nobody thought his recluse’s life in the Reptile House at all odd. Everyone had his hobbies. Besides, the salamander section was not visited by a lot of people: the crocodile might enjoy universal popularity, but Andrias Scheuchzeri spent his days in relative seclusion.
