The overloaded ark, p.15
The Overloaded Ark, page 15
I had gaily agreed to be at Fineschang at eleven o’clock. It had not occurred to me until the night before that I had no means of getting to my destination except by walking, and as Fineschang was ten miles away along a hot and dusty road, this idea was uninteresting. Frantic last-minute conferences with the staff had disclosed the fact that a district messenger was staying in the village, and he had with him a shiny new bicycle. The messenger was most helpful, and agreed to lend me his machine; so in the morning sun the great, heavy bicycle was solemnly wheeled up to our hut, and I prepared to depart. I had decided to take Daniel with me, as he was the smallest and lightest of the animal staff, and so could be accommodated on the crossbar. Apart from this passenger I had a large bag of collecting gear, and another one full of sandwiches and beer to sustain me on the journey. As I was tying these on the bicycle John appeared on the scene.
“Why are you taking all that beer?” he inquired.
“Well, to begin with, it’s going to be thirsty work shinning up that mountain, and apart from that I’ve found that beer has a very soothing effect on ju-jus and their owners.”
Daniel approached and eyed me nervously. It was obvious that he had very little faith in my cycling abilities.
“Where I go sit, sah?” he asked.
“Here on the crossbar,” I said.
I leant forward and hauled him up. He clutched wildly at the handlebars and twisted them round, and we fell to the ground in a tangled heap, amid the clanking of beer bottles.
“This does not look to me like the start of a scientific expedition,” said John gravely, “it looks more like an elopement.”
I righted the machine and hauled Daniel aboard, this time without mishap. We wobbled off down the path.
“Bye-bye, old boy,” called John earnestly.
“ ’Bye. . .” I yelled, steering cautiously round the potholes.
“See you to-night,” called John, with complete lack of conviction.
We sped down the hill and shot out on to the high road like a drunken snipe. Here I found the going easier, but my chief difficulty was to get Daniel to loosen his vice-like grip on the handlebars so that I could steer with greater accuracy. Cycling along a Cameroon road is an unforgettable experience: the rich, silky red dust spreads upwards in great clouds enveloping you and your machine; pot-holes of great depth and jagged edges loom suddenly under your front wheel, making you swerve wildly back and forth across the road; every hundred yards or so you come suddenly upon an area which has been liberally sprinkled with rocks of various sizes, and riding across these you feel that a fractured pelvis is the least you can hope to sustain. Every half-mile you crossed a bridge: these consisted of two thick beams laid from bank to bank, with planks laid crossways or, in some cases, length-ways. It was one of the latter type I was silly enough to try and ride over quite early in the trip. My front tyre slid delightedly into the groove between the two planks and stuck there and Daniel, the beer, and I, fell to the ground. By now the sun had come out from the mist and the heat on the open road was terrific. By the time we had reached the half-way mark I was pouring with sweat, and my mouth and eyes were clogged with dust. We swept down a hill, and at the bottom was the inevitable bridge, spanning a wide, shallow stream, with snow-white sandbanks and tall trees grouped round it casting deep shadows. I weakened.
“We go stop here small time, Daniel,” I said hoarsely, “sometime there go be beef for this small water.”
I knew perfectly well that there would be no beef of importance in such a place, but I wanted to soak in the clear glinting waters and get some of the dust off my body. We left the cycle in the ditch and made our way down the slope to the water, where we stripped and plunged in, and watched the red dust washed from our bodies like swirls of blood in the clear waters. Half an hour later we were still sitting in the shallows, relaxed and cool with the waters playing over us, when I suddenly saw a strange thing, which immediately roused me out of my trance. A long brown ribbon of water weed which was attached to the rock near me, detached itself suddenly and swam away. I gazed after it in astonishment, then floundered to my feet with a cry and started in pursuit. The weed swam quickly upstream and went to earth under a small boulder. With Daniel’s aid I shifted the stone and we captured this piece of aquatic flora. Cupped in my hands I held the most extraordinary fish. It was long, narrow, thin, and brown, exactly like a long ribbon of weed. Its face was pulled out into a little snout, and its eyes were round and staring, but they seemed to have more intelligence in them than any ordinary fish’s. I recognized it because I had spent many happy hours hunting its relatives in the weed beds in the Southern Mediterranean. It was a Pipe-fish. I was astonished, for I had not expected to find a freshwater Pipe-fish pretending to be a bit of water weed in an African river. I fashioned a small pool for it and placed it inside. It at once fastened itself to a small rock and turned into a bit of weed, curving and shimmering with the current. I pondered over it unhappily: I longed to know what its habits were, where it laid its eggs and hatched its young, and a hundred other things about it, but I realized mournfully, and not for the first time, that when you are collecting for a living you cannot spend your time unravelling the life history of an obscure fish. Reluctantly, annoyed at the harshness of life, I released the Pipe-fish and watched it swim off into deep water. But the capture of the fish had roused me out of my dream-like trance.
We left the river and returned to the road, and remounted the bicycle which, by now, I was beginning to dislike intensely. I pounded miserably onwards, feeling the dust settling once more on my body and clothes.
Half an hour later we were free-wheeling down a long gentle incline, when I saw a figure in the distance marching towards us. As we drew closer I saw that the man was carrying a small basket fashioned out of green palm leaves, a sure sign that he was bringing an animal to sell.
“Dat man get beef; Daniel?” I asked, putting on the brakes.
“I tink so, sah.”
The man came padding along the dusty road, and as he drew closer he doffed his cap and grinned, and I recognized him as an Eshobi hunter.
“Welcome,” I called. “You done come?”
“Morning, sah!” he answered, holding out his green basket. “I done bring beef for Masa.”
“Well, I hope it’s good beef,” I said, as I took it, “or else you’ve walked a long way for nothing.”
Daniel and the hunter shook hands and chattered away in Banyangi while I undid the mouth of the basket and peered inside.
I don’t know what I expected to see: a Pouched rat, or possibly a squirrel, certainly nothing very unusual. But there, blinking up at me out of great golden eyes from the bottom of the basket, was an Angwantibo!
There are certain exquisite moments in life which should be enjoyed to the full, for, unfortunately, they are rare. I certainly made the most of this one, for both Daniel and the hunter thought I had gone mad. I executed a war dance in the middle of the road, I whooped so loudly in my excitement that I sent all the hornbills for miles around honking into the forest. I slapped the hunter on the back, I slapped Daniel on the back, and I would, if I could have managed it, have slapped myself on the back. After all those months of searching and failure I held a real live Angwantibo in my hands, and delight at the thought went to my head like wine.
“Which day you done catch this beef?” I asked, as soon as my excitement had died down somewhat.
“Yesterday, sah, for night-time.”
That meant that the precious creature had been without food and water for twenty-four hours. It was imperative that I got it back to Bakebe immediately and gave it something to eat and drink.
“Daniel, I go ride quickly-quickly to Bakebe to give dis beef some chop. You go follow with dis hunter-man, you hear?”
“Yes, sah.”
I loaded him down with the collecting gear and the beer, and then I hung the basket containing the Angwantibo round my neck and set off along the road to Bakebe. I sped along like a swallow, taking dust, pot-holes, and bridges in my stride and not even noticing them. My one desire was to get the priceless little beast now hanging round my neck into a decent cage, with an adequate supply of fruit and milk. Bakebe was reached at last, and leaving the cycle in the village I panted up the hill towards our hut. Half-way up a dreadful thought occurred to me: maybe my identification had been too rapid, maybe it wasn’t an Angwantibo after all, but merely a young Potto, an animal very similar in appearance. With a sinking heart I opened the basket and peered at the animal again. Quickly I checked identification of various parts of its furry anatomy: shape and number of fingers on its hands, size of ears, lack of tail. No, it really was an Angwantibo. Heaving a sigh of relief I continued on my way.
As I came within sight of the hut I could see John moving along the row of cages, feeding his birds; bursting with pride and excitement I bellowed out the good news to him, waving my hat furiously and breaking into a run:
“John, I’ve got one . . . an Angwantibo . . . alive and kicking. . . . AN ANGWANTIBO, d’you hear?”
At this all the staff, both animal and household, dashed out to meet me and see this beef that I had talked about incessantly for so long, and for which I had offered such a fantastic price. They all grinned and jabbered at my obvious delight and excitement. John, on the other hand, displayed complete lack of interest in the earth-shaking event; he merely glanced over his shoulder and said, “Good show, old boy,” and continued to feed his birds. I could have quite cheerfully kicked him had not my pleasure been so great.
No other animal’s arrival had created half the upheaval that the Angwantibo’s did: a family of Pouched rats that were sleeping peacefully in their cage were routed out unceremoniously, and the cage was swept and cleaned as a temporary abode for the creature. The carpenter was given a big box and told to produce, in record time, the biggest and best cage he could construct, or else suffer a dreadful fate. Various members of the staff were sent scurrying in all directions to procure eggs, pawpaw, banana, and dead birds. At last, when the cage had been furnished with a nice set of branches and there were plates of food and drink on the clean sawdust floor, the great moment came. With a thick crowd around me, hardly daring to breathe in case they disturbed this valuable animal and thus earned my wrath, I carefully tipped the Angwantibo out of the basket and into his temporary home. He stood on the floor for a moment, looking about him; then he walked over to one of the plates, seized a bit of banana in his mouth, and then climbed swiftly up into the branches, and crouching there commenced to eat the fruit greedily. This was a very pleasant surprise; after my experiences with other nervous creatures I had not expected him to eat at once. As I watched him sitting on the branch mumbling his banana I felt quite unreasonably proud, as though I had captured him myself.
“John,” I called in a hoarse whisper, “come and see him.”
“Oh, he’s quite a pretty little animal,” he said.
This was the highest praise you could get out of John for anything without feathers. And indeed he was a pretty little animal. He looked not unlike a teddy-bear, with his thick golden-brown fur, his curved back, and golden eyes. He was about the size of a four-week-old kitten, and though his body was fat and furry enough, his legs, in proportion, seemed long and slender. His hands and feet were extraordinarily like a human’s, except that on his hands the first and second fingers had been reduced to mere stumps. This, of course, gave him a much greater grasping power, for without the first two fingers in the way he could get his little hands round quite a thick branch, and once having got a grip he would cling on as though glued.
After I had stood in silent and awed contemplation of the beast for half an hour, during which time he ate one and a half bananas, he scrambled on to a suitably sloping branch, grasped it firmly with hands and feet, tucked his head between his front legs, his forehead resting on the wood, and went to sleep. Reverently I covered the cage with a cloth so that the sunlight should not disturb him, and tiptoed away.
Every half-hour or so I would creep back to the cage and peep at him to make sure that he had not dropped down dead or been spirited away by some powerful ju-ju, and for the first two days I would leap out of bed in the morning and rush to his cage, even before imbibing my morning cup of tea, a most unheard-of event. John also became infected with my nervousness, and would peer out from under his mosquito-net like a woodpecker from its hole and watch me anxiously as I removed the sacking from the cage front and looked inside.
“Is it all right?” he would inquire. “Has it eaten?”
“Yes, half a banana and the whole of that dead bird.”
Now, there were several reasons for the fuss that was made over the Angwantibo, or, to give it its correct title, Arctocebus calabarensis. The first was that the animal is extremely rare, being found only in the forests of the British and French Carneroons, and even there they do not seem common. The second reason was that they had long been wanted by the London Zoo, and they had asked us specially to try and obtain them a specimen.
Though the Angwantibo had been known to science since 1859, the British Museum have still only some dozen specimens of it, and all naturalists who have searched for the animal in its native haunts agree that it is extremely rare and hard to find. The Angwantibo is a lemuroid, a group of animals closely related to the monkeys. Only once before had this little creature been kept alive in captivity and studied, but this was the first time that anyone had tried to bring one back alive to England. If we were successful it meant that for the first time zoologists and anatomists would be able to observe the habits and movement of a live Angwantibo. So, naturally, we weren’t taking any chances with losing the one we had, for we thought it might well be the only one we should get.
I will give this little fellow his due and state that he was no trouble at all. At once he showed a preference for bananas and the plump breast of a dead bird. This he would wash down with a drink of milk. Then he would have a light snack of half a dozen grasshoppers just before we went to bed. All day he would sleep, clinging tightly to the branch, his head buried between his front legs. In the evening, just before sunset, he would wake up, give himself a rapid grooming, yawn once or twice, showing his bright pink tongue, and then he would start on his stroll about the cage to work up an appetite. He would climb down one side of the cage, walk across the floor to the other side, hoist himself into the branches, scramble along them until he was back where he started, and then repeat the whole performance over again. This little circular tour he would continue for about an hour, until it was time to feed. As soon as his plate was put in he would start to eat, showing no sign of fear at all. Sometimes he would come down and stand on the floor, his head hanging low and his back humped up, looking more like a miniature bear than ever. Occasionally, if his plate was placed directly under a convenient branch, he would hang down by his feet, and grab the pieces of banana with his pink hands and stuff them into his mouth, smacking his lips and licking the juice from his nose. During all the time that I had him I never heard him make any noise except a cat-like growl and a faint hissing when I tried to handle him. To get him off a branch required considerable effort, for with his queer misshapen hands and feet he would grip the branch with incredible strength. To get him off you were forced to grab him round the chest and pull, and he would counter this by ducking his head between his front legs and biting you in the thumb with his needle-sharp teeth.
After a week, when I was sure that Arcto, as we called him, had thoroughly settled down, I again attempted my reconnaissance of N’da Ali. Once again Daniel and I rode through the dust and pot holes, but this time we were not turned back, and we arrived hot and dishevelled at Fineschang round about eleven one morning. I found the hunter awaiting me, and a more surly, objectionable character I have never met. Apart from his face, which left much to be desired, his feet were swollen to twice normal size with elephantiasis, and he had those peculiar patches all over his legs which you sometimes see among the natives: areas like large birth-marks which are devoid of the natural brown pigment, and are a horrible pale pink, with the surface of the skin shiny like patent leather. We started without delay, leaving Daniel in the village, for I thought that such a climb would be too much for one so young and of such frail physique. It wasn’t until we were half-way up that I discovered my own physical condition left much to be desired.
The hunter walked up the slope of the mountain, which appeared to be a gradient of two in one, at a tremendous speed, and I scrambled behind with the sweat pouring down my face, doing my best to uphold the White Man’s prestige. Only once did the hunter check his speed, and that was at one point where a green mamba, probably the fastest and most deadly of West African snakes, whisked across our path like a streak of green lightning. It appeared round the trunk of one tree, wiggled across the path some three feet in front of the hunter’s misshapen feet, and disappeared among the bushes; the hunter stopped dead and went a pale cheese colour. He gazed ferociously in the direction the reptile had taken, and then turned to me:
“Ugh!” he said vehemently and comprehensively. It was the only remark he had made since we started, so I felt I ought to be sociable.
“Ugh!” I agreed.
We continued upwards in silence.
When we had reached the half-way mark the hunter led me to a large shallow pool at the base of the waterfall, and here he removed his sarong and proceeded to bathe. I did likewise, choosing a position upstream from him as I had no particular desire to catch any of the great variety of diseases he was suffering from. When he had washed he drank vigorously, belching in between gulps . . . a remarkable and sustained performance. I squatted on a rock to open a bottle of beer; it was then that I discovered the opener had been left behind. Offering a brief prayer for the soul of the person who had packed the bag, I broke the neck off the bottle and drank gratefully, hoping that there was not too much glass inside. The hunter had now disappeared behind some rocks, with becoming modesty, and was performing what appeared to be, to judge from the noise he was making, his annual catharsis. Not wishing to intrude on so private and, it seemed, so painful a matter, I amused myself by wandering among the rocks at the base of the falls, in search of frogs.
