Authors: Gerald Durrell
The only day we were lucky enough to see siamang turned out to be quite an auspicious day from a number of points of view. It had started early in the morning with Chris insisting that he wanted
to get some shots of Jacquie and myself on top of a hill that lay downstream. No amount of argument on anyone’s part would convince him that these shots could equally well be done in a more
accessible position, and so we headed downstream in a large canoe fitted with an outboard engine. We landed on a long white shingle beach and then, humping our heavy equipment, we entered the
forest and started to climb. The hill got steeper and steeper and we got hotter and hotter. The low undergrowth in the Malayan forest has evolved some of the spikiest and most malignant bushes it
has ever been my misfortune to come into contact with. Delicate, pale green, fern-like growths shimmer at you innocently. They look so fragile that you feel a harsh word would make them wilt and
die, and so you brush them out of your path with great tenderness, only to find that the underside of each of these innocent looking fronds is furnished with a set of curved, needle-sharp hooks.
Immediately, the plant sinks these vegetable grappling-irons into your flesh and clothing, and the more you struggle the more deeply involved you become, until you begin to feel like – and
are bleeding as copiously as – an early Christian martyr. Jim had an even greater penchant for getting himself caught by these evil plants than I had, and so our progress up the hillside was
slow. We had to keep stopping and disentangling him, at the same time trying to stifle his screams for fear that they would frighten away any animals which we might otherwise be lucky enough to
see. Eventually, bloodstained and sweaty, we arrived at a small clearing at the top of the hill and sat down to have a rest.
Now, most of the Malayan forest is infested with leeches, but for some reason or other this particular clearing had more than its fair share, and they seemed to be twice as voracious. When we
sat down in the clearing there was not a leech to be seen. Whether they got to know of your presence by vibrations of the ground as you move, or whether they smell you, is a thing that I could
never satisfactorily decide, but no sooner had we sat down and lit cigarettes than out of the undergrowth on all sides of the clearing there appeared a creeping carpet of them, humping their way
across the leaves like small black looper caterpillars. Occasionally they would stand right up on end, waving their heads about as if they were testing the air for scent. It was utterly impossible,
wherever you went in the forest, to keep the leeches off you; all you could do was hope that they would not attach themselves to some inaccessible nook or cranny of your anatomy. They will creep
through the tiniest places and their movements are so gossamer light that you do not know they are on you until you suddenly see their black bodies, bloated with blood, hanging from you like small
figs. The only two methods of dealing with them, always provided you know they are on you, is a lighted cigarette end or a pinch of common salt. Both these methods of attack make the leeches
release their hold and drop off. Should you be unwise enough to pull them off, they leave their mouthparts embedded in your flesh and you get a nice suppurating sore for your pains.
So we sat there, trying to recover our breath, while the swarms of leeches engulfed us.
‘Charming!’ said Jim bitterly. ‘I did manage to save half an ounce of blood from those damned plants and now even that’s going to be drained out of me by these filthy
things.’
His temper was not improved when Chris, in a rather crest-fallen manner, admitted that the top of the hill was not suitable for the shots that he had in mind after all. So, carrying a full cargo
of leeches, we picked up the equipment and staggered down the hill again. When we arrived on the sandbank, we all discreetly stripped and de-leeched each other with the aid of cigarettes.
‘Now,’ said Jim, pulling on his trousers, ‘what jolly little thing would Chris like us to do now? How about swimming across the river, Gerry? With a bit of luck you might see a
crocodile. What a good sequence that would make!’
‘Actually, what I was thinking,’ said Chris musingly, ‘is that if you took the canoe up those rapids there, we could get some rather impressive shots.’
I gazed at the area he indicated, where some great brown slabs of rock bisected the river like a row of ancient and discoloured dentures. Between these rocks the water was squeezed and tangled
and gushed in a series of rapids with all the forces of a fire hose.
‘Are you nuts?’ I enquired of our producer.
‘No,’ said Chris, ‘it looks much worse than it is, actually.’
‘Yes!’ said Jim enthusiastically. ‘And think of the thrill after you’ve done it of being told he doesn’t want the shots after all.’
After a certain amount of argument we decided to leave the casting vote to the boatman. He, to my intense annoyance, said that he would be only too charmed to take the canoe up the rapids, so
there was nothing for it. Jim and Chris took up their stations by the camera, while Jacquie and I climbed into the canoe and set off. The canoe had seemed fairly precarious when we had started off
in her that morning, but she seemed to become frailer and frailer and less and less seaworthy the nearer we got to the rapids. The boatman appeared to be enjoying the whole thing immensely, and was
poling the boat along vigorously, periodically uttering wild, gibbon-like cries, apparently indicative of a
joie de vivre
which neither Jacquie nor I shared. As he was poling the boat from
the back and we were sitting up towards the bows, it meant that we got the full benefit of the water when we struck the rapids. Great, hissing waves hit the prow of the canoe and spread themselves
lavishly all over us, and within thirty seconds we were both so wet that we might just as well have swum up the rapids. To my astonishment, we eventually passed through the jagged chain of rocks
unscathed and got into calmer water.
‘Marvellous,’ bellowed Chris, leaping up and down on the bank, ‘now just do it once more so that we can get the close-ups.’
So once again, muttering unprintable things about our producer, we re-shot the rapids.
‘Well,’ said Jacquie after we had successfully passed through them for the second time, ‘that’s my lot. You can now take me back to the rest house so that I can
change.’
Chris, who knew mutiny when he saw it, agreed to this.
‘We’ll leave Jacquie at the rest house,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll go upstream and get a few more shots.’
Jim gave me an eloquent look.
Having dumped my damp and irritable wife back at the rest house, we chugged off upstream. After we had been travelling for about half an hour, the outboard motor suddenly made a strange series
of popping noises and then died on us. In the pregnant silence that ensued, Jim whistled a few bars of ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ said Chris, glaring at the engine in an affronted fashion.
‘It’s stopped,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ he said irritably, ‘but why?’
The boatman, meanwhile, with an air of puzzled preoccupation, had attacked the engine with a spanner and appeared to be disemboweling it. Presently, with a wide smile of pleasure, he produced a
section of its internal anatomy which even I could see was irrevocably broken. He informed us that he would have to go back to the rest house in order to replace this vital part.
‘Well, there’s no sense in going with him,’ said Chris, ‘let’s wait here’.
‘One of us is going with him,’ I said firmly, ‘I’ve been caught on this sort of lark before. He’ll get talking to his best friend’s wife and that’s the
last we’ll see of him for the next three days. I suggest you and I stay here, with the equipment, and Jim can go back with him.’
So we unloaded the equipment on to a sandbank and watched Jim being paddled downstream.
Chris and I were squatting on our haunches on the sandbank, with our backs to the river, deeply immersed in discussing the film sequence we hoped to obtain if and when Jim returned with the
canoe. We were taking absolutely no notice of our surroundings, so in consequence what happened next came as a considerable shock to us both. I half turned my head to flip my cigarette into the
river and there, some fifteen feet away and swimming towards us at a rate of knots, was an exceptionally large and lethal looking king cobra. He must have been about eight feet long, and his head
and neck protruded a good six inches above the water; he had large, glittering eyes and from their expression I judged him to be of an irascible nature. If he kept on his present course, he would
land on the sand-bank exactly between Chris and myself. Ardent naturalist though I am, I felt that to have a king cobra on such intimate terms was an experience I could well do without.
‘Look out!’ I shouted, and leapt to my feet. Chris, after darting one horrified glance over his shoulder, did likewise and we both retreated hurriedly up the sandbank.
Now this is where, according to all the best jungle literature, the king cobra, hissing malevolently, should have hurled himself at us and flung several coils round Chris’s body and then,
just as he was about to sink his fangs into Chris’s throbbing jugular vein, I should have shot its head off with my revolver. I am sure this is what
would
have happened if it had not
been for three things: firstly I had no revolver, secondly the cobra had obviously not read the right sort of jungle literature, and thirdly he seemed as horrified by our presence as we were by
his. He had been swimming along quietly, minding his own business, towards a nice, friendly sandbank on which appeared to be a couple of decaying tree trunks. Then suddenly, to his horror, the tree
trunks had turned into a couple of human beings! If a snake can be said to have an expression, then that cobra looked exceedingly astonished. He clapped on all his brakes and came to a standstill,
reared himself a foot or so out of the water and stared at us for a brief second. I took comfort from the fact that all the herpetological literature I had read had informed me that death by cobra
bite is comparatively painless, but the cobra had not the slightest intention of wasting good venom on us. He turned tail and shot off upstream as fast as he could swim, and about thirty yards away
he made landfall on the bank and rushed into the forest as though hotly pursued.
‘There you are,’ I said to Chris, ‘that just shows you how deadly these king cobras are. An absolutely unprovoked attack!’
‘What do you mean?’ said Chris. ‘He was as scared of us as we were of him.’
‘Precisely,’ I said, ‘but the reputation for unprovoked attack is the thing that the king cobra enjoys.’
‘What a pity Jim was not here,’ said Chris musingly, ‘it would have given him something to moan about for the rest of the day.’
When Jim eventually returned with the canoe, we made our way two or three miles upstream and then landed to reconnoitre the forest to see if it would be suitable for the shots we had in mind. We
had hardly gone more than a couple of hundred yards through the trees when to our right, on the crest of a hill, there broke out a cacophony of wild cries. Although basically similar to the
gibbon’s call, they were much louder and deeper and each cry ended in an odd, reverberating sound like somebody tapping on a drum with their fingertips.
‘Siamang!’ said the boatman, and Chris’s eyes gleamed fanatically.
‘Let’s see if we can get close enough to try and get some shots of them,’ he whispered.
We made our way cautiously up the little hill, trying to make as little noise as possible, but when carrying cumbersome equipment and surrounded by plants very heavily endowed with spikes and
hooks, our progress was anything but silent. However, it seemed that the siamangs were far too concerned with their choral practice to worry about us, for they sang continuously as we approached
the trees in which we judged them to be. Just as we thought that we should be getting within sight of them, the singing stopped abruptly and the forest, by comparison, became so silent that our
progress through the undergrowth sounded like the approach of a couple of madcap tanks. Suddenly the boatman halted and pointed up into the trees with his machete.
‘Siamang!’ he said again, with an air of great satisfaction.
Some seventy feet above us, in the crown of a rather elegant tree, sat a group of five siamangs. There was an adult male and female, two half grown ones and one baby. Their coal black fur
gleamed in the sun and they were sitting nonchalantly on the branches with their long arms and slender hands drooping languidly. It was the arrangement of the group that interested me: the male was
sitting on a large branch facing the other four animals, who sat in a row on a branch a little below him and some twelve feet away. It looked exactly as though he was about to give a short and
erudite lecture on early siamang music. In case we should flatter ourselves that we had crept up on him unobserved, he periodically glanced down at us and raised his eyebrows as though he found our
sweaty and dishevelled appearance somewhat distasteful. Eventually he seemed to get used to the idea that we had come to join his audience, so he turned his attention back to his family. Watching
him through fieldglasses, I saw him shuffle his bottom on the branch to get more comfortable, and then he opened his mouth and started to sing.
The first three or four cries were short and staccato, and the effect upon his throat was fascinating. With each cry his throat inflated more and more as he pumped air into his extraordinary
gular sac which, as it inflated, gleamed fiery pink beneath his fur. When it was large enough to please him, he launched into the song proper and it was interesting to note that at the end of each
verse, as it were, his sac would start deflating until the next verse pumped air into it again. It was obviously this strange vocal sac that produced the odd, drum-like tapping at the end of each
verse, and I could only presume it was made by the sound of air being expelled from this soundbox. As soon as he had finished his song there was a short pause, while his family, who had been
listening with rapt attention, gazed at him fixedly. Then the big female, one of the smaller ones, or occasionally even the baby, would utter a series of high-pitched staccato cries that sounded
rather like applause and were presumably accepted as such by the male, for he would react to it by launching himself into yet another verse of his song. This went on for about a quarter of an hour,
the family group inciting him to sing more every time he stopped, and each time he sang he displayed more and more symptoms of excitement; it was rather like watching a pop singer working himself
up to a final burst of song for his fans. First he started reaching out with his long arms and snapping off leaves from the surrounding branches; then he bounded up and down on his bottom and the
family’s applause became even more vociferous. Carried away by this, his next action was to run up and down the branch, his arms crooked and his hands dangling in that lovely pansy way that
gibbons have; the family group grew positively ecstatic over this. Now he came to his finale and launched himself in a flying leap from the branch, dropped about thirty feet like a stone, his arms
and legs completely relaxed and then, as you were almost sure he was hurtling to his doom, with a casual air he reached out a long arm, grabbed a passing branch, and swung there like a black, furry
pendulum, singing his heart out.