Gerald Durrell (33 page)

In the afternoon
the second hunter arrived back with nothing but a Pygmy kingfisher, but the
poor mite was so encrusted with “lubber’ that it took me half an hour to clean
him sufficiently to release him. When I opened my hand he sat for a moment on
my finger, grasping it with difficulty in his tiny feet. He settled a few
feathers that had become disarranged with the bath I had given him, and then
flew off across the lake, straight as an arrow. The third hunter returned in
the evening, and in his little wicker basket was a Shining-blue kingfisher.
This settled down as well as the Pied had, but it seemed a trifle more nervous.
I was jubilant, and told my hunters to try for the Giant the next day. I could
imagine John’s face if I walked in with three species of kingfisher for him.
But my dream was not to be realized, for the next day the hunters reported that
the “lubber” was not strong enough to hold the Giant kingfisher. Apparently,
out in the blazing sun, the lime dried up slightly and, although it was
sufficient to hold the smaller birds, one with the strength of the Giant could
easily break away. However, they did bring me one more Pied and one more
Shining-blue, so with this I had to be content.

That afternoon I
was lolling in the warm waters near my hut and watching the small, fluttering
schools of fish investigating my legs, when a man came down from the village
with a message from the Schiblers asking me to go up at once as a man had
brought beef for me. I found a crowd gathered around what appeared to be, at
first glance, a great flattish stone. Looking closer, however, I saw it was the
biggest freshwater turtle I had ever seen. It was a species known as the
Soft-shelled Turtle: the shell is fairly smooth and domed, and it protruded
round the edge in a great soft rim, like damp cardboard. The young ones look
not unlike thick and flabby pancakes. The nose of this remarkable reptile is
protruded into a pair of miniature trunks, so that the beast can stick these
above the surface of the water and breathe, without displaying any of its body.
This unfortunate creature had been harpooned in the neck, and it expired just as
I arrived on the scene. However, even when its head had been severed from its
body the cruel razor-sharp jaws would snap a bit of wood and splinter it. I had
no idea that these turtles grew to this enormous size: this one measured four
feet in length, arid took two men to lift. After I had examined him and
implored his capturer to get me one alive, the creature was cut up, and we ate
him in a stew. The flesh proved to be most palatable, like a rich and slightly
oily veal. But I never obtained a live one of these gigantic reptiles, and I
was very disappointed.

The day of our
departure dawned, we shook hands with the villagers, paddled across the placid
and beautiful lake, and landed on the shore near the path. Before we started I
took one last look at the island, lying in the great expanse of sun-shimmering
water, ringed with the thick and vivid forest. Then we set off through the
trees, and I had to concentrate on watching my carriers to see they did not
bump the cages against overhanging branches, or place them in the fierce sun
when we rested. Twice I fed the precious kingfishers en route, for I had
brought a tin can filled with water, and this contained a mass of tiny fish.
One of the Pied kingfishers seemed very wild and would not feed, but the others
did not seem to be minding the journey.

In the brief
twilight we reached the road, paid off the carriers, and climbed thankfully
into the kit-car. It was dark when I arrived back at the school-house and found
John just sitting down to dinner. Even John’s delight at the kingfishers could
not lighten the gloom that I suddenly felt, for I realized that I had just made
my last trip. Within ten days we were to leave Africa. I climbed into bed, and
as I drifted off to sleep I remembered the warm waters of the lake, the curious
little island, the village and its charming and happy inhabitants. One day, I
promised myself, I would go back to the village in the lake, just for a
holiday. I would swim among the fish and drift alongside the dead trees in a
canoe and watch the kingfishers.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

THE ARK DEPARTS

It is easy
enough to get a passage on a ship until you explain that most of your luggage
consists of a hundred-odd crates of birds, mammals, and reptiles, all very much
alive. We had quite a lot of trouble, until the kindness of Elders and Fyffes
enabled us to obtain a passage on one of their ships. Once the sailing date was
known to us we discovered to our dismay that we had less time to prepare for
the voyage than we had anticipated. You cannot just climb aboard a ship with
your animals and expect the cook to feed them. There are stores to be bought,
meat to be ordered, last-minute repairs to the cages to make sure that nothing
will escape on board, and a hundred and one other things. We had to send
members of the staff 200 miles upcountry to obtain certain commodities for us
which were not grown on the lowlands: ordinary potatoes, for example. At Kumba
you could get any amount of sweet potatoes, but no ordinary ones. Then there
was corn: when you are buying things in bulk you find it cheaper to buy in the
area in which the stuff is grown, and the highlands of the Cameroons are the
agricultural areas. We had to have ten dozen eggs, forty stems of bananas in
various stages of ripeness, fifty pawpaws, a hundred oranges, twenty
pineapples, four sacks of corn, four of sweet potatoes and four of ordinary,
two sacks of beans, and the carcase of a whole bullock for meat. All this, as I
say, had to be collected from different areas of the Cameroons and brought down
to us, and it had to be done quickly if we did not want to sail without some of
our precious foodstuffs.

I chose this
trying time to go down with malaria. I did not realize it was malaria, but
thought I was simply run down, and so I struggled on for nearly a week, feeling
like death, until I decided that there must be something the matter with me,
and so I paid a visit to the local hospital. The doctor examined me, gave me a
huge injection in a most painful part of my anatomy, and ordered me to bed. Very
reluctantly I spent two days in bed, while chaos and confusion reigned in the
animal house, and John struggled to feed his birds, examine sacks of potatoes,
and see that the monkeys were fed. We had decided to travel by night down to
the coast, arriving at dawn on the day we were due to get the collection on
board and sail. It was the day before we were to start our journey when the
doctor, called to see me once more. Our hut now resembled a market: there were
sacks of food, boxes of eggs, baskets of fruit, all over the floor. The doctor
picked his way through this litter, took my temperature, and prepared to give
me another injection. While he was holding the needle up to the light and
squirting quinine through it (a horrible habit doctors have), and I lay there
and quaked, he asked me why there was so much activity.

“Oh, we’re
leaving to-morrow night,” I said cheerfully, eyeing the needle.

“What do you
mean, leaving?”

“Leaving to get
the ship. We’ve to be on board by ten-thirty on Tuesday.”

“Are you lying
there and telling me that you propose to travel down to Tiko and catch a ship
tomorrow in your condition?” he rasped. I might have been having a baby from
his tone.

“But I’m not so
ill,” I protested, “I felt fine this morning.”

“Listen to me,”
said the doctor in wrath, “you had a temperature of nearly a hundred and three,
on an average, for the last week. You should be kept in bed for at least a
fortnight. You can’t travel on that ship.”

“But I’ve
got
to, doctor, we had hell’s own job getting this passage. If we call it off we’ll
never get another. We’ve simply got to get that ship.”

“You might not
reach the ship. In your condition, to take that sort of journey is lunacy: if
you had a relapse when you reach the coast (and it’s more than likely), you
will have to go into hospital, or . . .”

“Or what?” I
asked.

“Or die,” he
said bluntly. And then he jabbed the needle into me with great skill.

As soon as I
could speak:

“But we
can’t
cancel it now. We’ve got to go.”

“All right,”
said the doctor, “but I won’t accept any responsibility for you.” And he
marched out through the sacks and the baskets and into the night.

The next evening
the lorries arrived, the collection was loaded, and then all the food, the
sacks of potatoes, corn, beans, the boxes of eggs, and the bullock carcase
wrapped in wet sacks to keep it cool. By the time we were ready to start I felt
that I was very unpleasantly drunk and my head was throbbing like a drum. I
climbed into the cab of my lorry with Sue, the baby chimp, wrapped in a blanket
on my knees, and our cavalcade started. It was a nightmare journey, for the
first rains of the season had fallen and turned the red earth into a quagmire
of sticky clay over which the lorry skidded madly, bumping and jolting over
unseen rocks. I could hear the monkeys chattering a frenzied protest from the
back of the vehicle and I wondered what rare, and now irreplaceable specimen,
would be weakened, perhaps killed, by the jolting. I got some sleep, but it was
fitful and uneasy, and once I awoke icy cold and with my teeth chattering, and
was forced to stop the lorry and dive into the back to look for blankets to
cover myself with. Within ten minutes I was sweating so much I had to unwrap
myself once again. At one point we were held up by John’s lorry getting a
puncture, and John walked down to inquire how I was, and we drank a much-needed
cup of tea out of the Thermos flask.

“How are the
birds bearing up?” I asked.

“I don’t know,”
said John gloomily, “we’ve been over some frightful bumps. I really daren’t
look in the back until we reach Tiko.”

“I know, I feel
the same about mine. Still, we can’t do anything until we unload, so let’s keep
praying.”

As we skirted
the lower slopes of the Cameroon Mountain and the road dipped towards the sea,
a thin cold drizzle started to fall, obscuring still further the landscape that
was veiled in the dawn mist. We came to the first of the palm plantations as
the rising sun was struggling to shine through the grey clouds that hung low
over the mountain. Soon, driving along the edge of the escarpment, we could see
stretched below us the great area of flat land that lies around Tiko. This was
a bit of civilized Africa, and I shivered as I looked at it: mile upon mile of
nothing but banana trees in a great characterless sheet, arranged in neat rows
like a green chess-board. Hideous regimentation, a thousand million banana
trees standing in serried ranks, obediently bearing fruit that was plucked from
them, still green, and carried aboard the waiting ships. Nothing to see but
flapping wet banana leaves, like great green shields, sodden and dangling, in
endless lines. Occasionally the monotony of this would be broken by a clearing
containing a white bungalow, in which lived a European overseer; or a row of
horrible corrugated iron sheds, in which lived the banana pickers. Our lorries
squelched onwards in the fine drifting rain, and at last came to a standstill
alongside a miniature railway. Up and down the tiny track shuffled chuffing
engines pulling flat coaches behind them piled high with stems of green
bananas. The trains had to cross a swampy area on to the quayside where the
ship, with gaping holds, awaited the fruit.

We found, to our
dismay, that we had arrived several hours too early, and we could not get the collection
aboard for some time; so we left the animals in the lorries, as it was at least
a protection from the rain, and there was no sun to make the cages too hot. No
sooner had we decided on this than the sun broke through the clouds and shone
down on us fiercely, and the rain dwindled and died away. So we set to and
unloaded all the crates, piling them in the shade along the side of the train
track, peering anxiously into each to make sure its occupant was still all
right. When everything was unloaded John and I compared notes.