Authors: Gerald Durrell
My meditations on the stupidity of mankind were interrupted by the sound of an engine and when we scrambled down the hillside to the road, we found Chris and Jim just decanting themselves from a
car.
‘What ho! What ho!’ shouted Chris in an unprecedented fit of exuberance, as he hurried down the road to meet us. He is a man of medium height with dark hair, green, rather heavily
lidded eyes, and a nose that makes that of the late Duke of Wellington pale into insignificance. Normally of a quiet, self-effacing nature, he was now flushed with enthusiasm at this, his first
major trip abroad, and he wrung our hands vigorously. Jim, the cameraman, was short and dark, with one of those rather handsome, finely etched faces you see on Roman medallions, and the most
mischievous and disarming grin imaginable. He spoke with a faint, pleasant West Country burr to his voice, one of those attractive English accents that reminds one of comfortable things like drowsy
beehives at dusk and cool apple orchards on a hot summer day.
‘Well, well,
well
,’ said Chris, still beaming with a self-satisfied air, as though he had created New Zealand himself. ‘If anyone had told me eight weeks ago that we
would meet on the shores of Lake Whangape, in the middle of New Zealand, exactly on time . . .’
‘You aren’t on time,’ said Brian sternly, ‘you’re half an hour late.’
‘We weren’t,’ said Chris indignantly, ‘we arrived half an hour ago but as you all weren’t here we’ve been up the road, shooting some wide angle shots of the
lake.’
‘Oh,’ said Brian, slightly mollified, ‘well, let’s all have a cup of tea and then we can go down to the lake.’
Over a pot of tea and a huge pile of toast, Chris and I discussed what shape the filming should take when we went down to the lake. The theme of the programmes we were going to try to make was,
of course, conservation. We wanted to show what was being done to preserve wildlife in the countries we visited, and try to point out the necessity for conservation, not only of the animals but of
their environment as well. As all the countries we were to visit were new to me, this presented quite a problem for as soon as we arrived I had to try to get as much information about conservation
as possible so that I could work out a rough shooting script for Chris and Jim to work from.
‘In the trip down from Auckland I’ve tried to pick Brian’s brains fairly thoroughly and as I see it the problems we ought to try and present are these,’ I said:
‘firstly, the incredibly stupid introduction of foreign animals to New Zealand, most of which have become major pests – the black swans down there are a good example – and
secondly, the altering of environment so that it affects both man and animal – the wholesale cutting down of the forests, as has happened in the past, and the overgrazing of the grasslands,
as is happening now. I’ll rough out a script of some sort on those lines tonight, but I think we ought to get some stuff on the swans because they are introduced, they are a pest and, at the
same time, they’re very spectacular and extremely graceful. What d’you think?’
Chris, as he always did when he was thinking, lidded his eyes like a hawk, retreated behind his nose and adopted an expression like a dispeptic Llama.
‘Um,’ he said at last, ‘I’d like to see the script first but obviously, as you say, the introduced species which have turned into pests are going to play an important
role, so I think we should get as much stuff on the swans as we can.’
‘They’ve got black swans at Bristol Zoo,’ said Jim through a mouthful of toast, ‘we could have filmed them there . . . no need to come rushing out to New Zealand . . .
waste of money. . . . quick trip to Bristol Zoo and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Take no notice of him,’ said Chris with dignity. ‘Cameramen are, by and large, an uncouth lot.’
‘Ah – ha!’ said Jim, ‘but at least I
know
I’m uncouth – that’s a saving grace, that is. Know yourself, that’s what I say. Look at Chris
here, goes through life full of faults and doesn’t recognise one of ’em. What I say is, enjoy your faults while you may. Who knows, tomorrow someone may come along and reform you and
then where would you be?’
‘They’d have an uphill struggle tying to reform
you,’
said Chris crushingly.
Presently we drove down a rough track to the edge of the lake where the warden was waiting beside a large boat driven by a powerful outboard engine. We unpacked the camera gear and the recording
apparatus and piled it into the boat; Henry started the engine and we were away, skimming swiftly across the smooth waters of the lake towards the biggest concentration of swans. The first shots we
wanted to get were of the swans taking wing, as we thought this would show their impressive numbers to advantage, so Henry headed the boat towards an area of the lake surface where the water was
scarcely visible for the thick mass of swans, revved up the engine to full speed and then, when we were about a hundred yards or so away from the nearest swans, shut off the engine and let the boat
plough on under its own momentum. The great concourse of birds were all swimming away from us as rapidly as they could, but they could not compete in speed with the boat and very soon a few of the
more nervous ones took wing. This spread panic and within a few seconds something like five or six hundred swans were all desperately trying to get off the water. With their ash grey and black
plumage and their sealing-wax red beaks and feet, they were a splendid sight as they churned up the still waters in their take-off and then, as they rose and circled over us, the noise of their
wing-beats was like the applause of an immense audience in a gigantic, echoing concert hall. They flew over us, necks stretched out, like hundreds of black crosses in the sky, their white wingtips
flashing against the dark plumage of their bodies like lights. Soon the blue sky above the lake was full of wheeling swans, like a great burst of black confetti, and it was frightening to watch
this pageant of birds and realise that they were the outcome of the careless introduction of just a few pairs a little over a hundred years ago. As an example of how man blunders when he starts
interfering with nature, it could not have been more impressive.
We zoomed to and fro over the surface of the lake and came across several younger swans who were quite determined that we were not going to panic them into flight. They would swim along in a
sedate and correct swan-like fashion, wings folded carefully to show the curious, scalloped ruff of feathers where they lay along the body, neck curved in just the right elegant S shape. But
gradually, as the boat began to overtake them, they would start to get nervous: they would hold their wings further and further away from their bodies and their necks would gradually droop until
they were stretched out in a straight line. Then, as the boat got nearer still, they would utter honks of dismay, churn the water with wild wing-beats, and take off at last in a welter of foam,
trailing their brilliant red legs as they became airborne.
At last we had got all the film we needed and we headed back to the shore. We had hardly moored before the whirling black clouds of swans were settling once more on the surface of the lake,
arrowing the dark waters as they landed. We packed up the gear, feeling reasonably happy at the shots we had managed to obtain, and then, after another enormous pot of tea, and toast, started on
the next leg of our journey. Our destination was a town called Rotorua and it must surely be one of the most curious, as well as one of the most unsafe towns in the world, for the whole town is
built on what is, to all intents and purposes, a breeding ground for volcanoes.
The town, as you enter it, looks – as so many New Zealand towns do – like a Hollywood set for a cowboy film. You feel that if you went round the backs of the wooden houses fronting
the main street, you would find that they
had
no backs. But the most noticeable thing about Rotorua as you enter it is the smell, a smell that you first attribute to a million rotting eggs
but which, after the first two or three glorious lungfuls, you realise is pure sulphur. To anyone with a sensitive nose the smell is so strong you almost feel you can touch it. Then other rather
ominous signs show you that this town is different from others. At various points along the pavements, or even in the middle of the road, you will see a crack in the macadam through which a jet of
white steam is puffing merrily, as though it were the site of the premature burial of a small steam engine. This adds a certain macabre attraction to the street scenes but it can have its dangerous
side as well. Shortly before we arrived, Brian told us, a man was trying to do some renovations to his cellars when a swing of his pickaxe unleashed a jet of boiling steam that killed him. In his
enthusiasm he had punctured what might be called a major artery of a volcano and had died in consequence. Jim, on hearing this story, voted loudly and vociferously that we press on to the next town
and not stay overnight in Rotorua as we had planned, but he was overruled.
‘You’re all mad,’ he said with conviction, ‘you mark my words, we’ll all wake up in bed tomorrow like boiled halibut. And the
smell –
how do you expect
me to eat with this smell? Everything will taste the same.’
I must say that he was perfectly right in this contention, for all the food we ate in Rotorua had a strong but unmistakable flavour of rotting eggs. But then, as I pointed out, the food in the
average New Zealand hotel would, if anything, be improved by the flavour of sulphur.
When we had found our board and lodging for the night, Brian took us down to what he kept calling the ‘thermal springs’ and I can’t say that I was particularly keen to see
them, for the term – for me at any rate – conjured up some of the more frightful places I have been to during my life, where ancient and decrepit men and women propel themselves from
spring to spring in bath chairs, hawking and spitting and imbibing the most revolting water that well (or so it smells) from the very bowels of the earth. To anyone who thinks that witchcraft is
dead, a short sojourn in one of these watering places is extremely instructive. However, Brian’s idea of thermal springs and mine, I soon found, were totally different, and I would not have
missed it for anything, for what he showed us was quite incredible. We drove to the edge of the town, left the Land-Rover and made our way down into a valley Immediately the smell of rotting eggs
intensified a thousand-fold and the air
20
seemed to be damper and warmer. Then, round a corner of the path, it was as though we had suddenly been transported back millions of years to the
days when the earth was still young, unformed and uncooled. Here the rocks had folded and twisted into strange shapes, and through holes and splits in their surface, jets of steam – some
small, some six or eight feet high – gushed forth at intervals, as blood spurts out of a cut artery, obeying some strange pulse in the earth’s depths. Through every little fissure in
the rocks tiny wisps of steam curled sluggishly, so the air was filled with moisture and you viewed everything through a shifting veil of steam. Some of the bigger geysers – twelve or
fourteen feet in height – would keep up a steady column of steam for some ten minutes or so, mysteriously die away and then, after a pause, suddenly shoot forth again with a strange hooting,
whistling sound. If you happened to be standing over the blowhole at that precise moment the results could have been fatal, since even the spray from these columns of boiling steam was well above
average bath temperature.
We picked our way across this slippery and somewhat dangerous terrain until we came to the banks of a small stream that babbled eagerly over its bed of stones wearing a shifting coat of steam,
the water being a reasonable ninety-odd degrees. Crossing this, we made our way further down the valley and suddenly came upon the mud holes, which to me were so fascinating that they kept me
absorbed for the next half hour. These pools varied in size: some covered quite large areas, others were only the circumference of a small table, and they varied in colour, some being pale
cafe-au-lait
and others a rich, dark brown. The mud in these pools was the consistency and colour of boiling milk chocolate, and boiling was exactly what it appeared to be doing. In actual
fact the mud, although warm, was not boiling but gave this impression because of the small jets of steam that had to force their way to the surface through this glutinous mass. The surface of a
pool would be smooth and unblemished, looking good enough to dip a spoon into and eat; then suddenly this placid surface would be disturbed by a bubble that would form – a tiny bubble the
size of a blackbird’s egg. Very slowly this would rise above the surface and grow until it was the size of a ping-pong ball or even the size of an orange if the consistency of the mud was
thick enough. Then it would burst, with a curiously loud ‘Glup’ noise, and form a miniature moon crater which would slowly be absorbed back into the smooth surface of the pool until the
next build-up of steam repeated the performance. In some pools where the steam was pushing through fairly rapidly, you would get little bevies of bubbles, sometimes as many as six or seven, forming
in a circle and – as it were – singing together. It reminded me rather of bell-ringing, for the bubbles were not all of the same size and so they made different noises as they burst
and, as the steam was coming through at regular intervals, you got these groups of fat bubbles playing tunes: Glop . . . plip . . . Glug . . . plip . . . Splop . . . plip . . . Glug . . . plish . .
. Splop . . . plip . . . and so on. It was fascinating and I crouched over the mud pools completely absorbed in these bubble orchestras. I had just found a particularly talented group of seventeen
who were playing something so harmonious and complicated that I was convinced it had been written by Bach, and was working out a scheme whereby I could get them to sign a contract so that I could
take them back to England to appear at the Festival Hall (perhaps with Sir Malcom Sargent conducting), when I was brought rudely back to earth by Chris, who appeared out of the mist looking like a
slightly distraught Dante.