The cyclone warning lasted for a week – a week of oppressive weather, rain and rough seas. To cap it all, I had started to feel unwell on Round Island and this now developed into one of those amoeboid infections, which are so irritating and debilitating. It seemed as though our chance of returning to the island to get the required number of snakes for our breeding programme was non-existent; and we had not even collected the other lizard we needed. This meant that we would have to leave the snakes with Wahab to be taken back to Round Island and released. They were far too rare to risk making a mistake with, and the youngster could not be sexed with certainty with the facilities we had in Mauritius. It would be criminal to take them back to Jersey only to find that both snakes were the same sex. I discussed this at length with Wahab, and he said that the long range forecast was that the cyclone was going to miss us after all, and we were moving into a period of smooth weather. ‘Would it not be possible for you to stay a little longer?’
I had, to my intense annoyance, since it had taken over seven years to arrange, just had to cancel a trip to Assam, which I was to have undertaken immediately on my return to Jersey, since the doctors in Mauritius advised against it. This gave me a little lee-way but even if we stayed, I decided, I was feeling too lousy to undertake the boat trip and the subsequent humping of heavy equipment round the island.
‘Could we,’ I asked, hopefully, ‘get the Government helicopter? First, it would make the whole journey there and back infinitely easier and, secondly, I have always longed to do a trip in a helicopter.’
Wahab pursed his lips and said it would be difficult, but he would try.
A few days later, with an air of smug satisfaction, he phoned me up to say that the Prime Minister had given permission for us to have the helicopter. We could go as soon as the weather was right. For several days, we had to hang about while two cyclones, one with the endearing name of ‘Fifi’, whirled about the Indian Ocean, making up their minds whether or not to pay Mauritius a visit. To our great relief, they decided not to, and the weather forecast being propitious, we got the all-clear to embark on the following Monday. As it coincided with a series of public holidays, Wahab decided to join us and bring with him a stalwart volunteer from the Forestry Department to help us in our task.
We were to pick up the helicopter in Port Louis and thence to fly to a football field in the north of the island, where the lorry, with our supplies, would meet us. From there, it was only a quarter of an hour’s flight to Round Island. We duly assembled at the Police Barracks in Port Louis and, with much solemnity the helicopter was wheeled out and opened up like a bubble car. We clambered in. Wahab and John sat behind, while I was in front with the jovial Indian pilot and his co-pilot. It was, I decided, rather like being in a goldfish bowl and, having no head for heights, I wondered what it was going to feel like when we took off.
‘My God, what a hot today,’ said the pilot, fastening his seat belt and giving a fair imitation of Peter Sellers. ‘What a bloody hot.’
‘It will be hotter on Round Island,’ I said.
‘Yes, my God,’ said the pilot, ‘there you will be roasting. What a hot.’
The propeller whirled round faster and faster, and suddenly we rose vertically like a lift, remained stationary for a moment and then zoomed off seventy feet above the roofs of Port Louis. The sensation was incredible; one realised, much more vividly even than in a small plane, what it was like to be a hawk or dragonfly, to be able to rise and descend vertically, to hover and swoop. As we sped one hundred feet above the squares of sugar cane, each with its central pile of huge, brown rocks that had been ploughed up, one had the impression that one was flying over a vast, green chess board, covered with monstrous elephant droppings. Along the road, the Flamboyant trees glowed like heaps of live coals, and the roads themselves were dotted, like an Impressionist painting, with little specks of colour, which were the women, in their multicoloured saris, going to market.
Presently we banked steeply – a not altogether pleasant sensation in a goldfish bowl, for you felt you were bound to crash through the glass and fall out – and came in to land on the football pitch, as lightly as a dandelion clock. Here, the lorry piled high with our tent, foodstuffs and sixteen huge jerry cans of water, was waiting for us, accompanied by Wahab’s side-kick from the Forestry Department, a young man called Zozo. He was a slender youth of Asian descent, with a wide and engaging grin, and a nose so retroussé that facing him was like looking up the barrels of a shotgun. His clothes were khaki drill, and he was wearing a huge pair of sunglasses and a large khaki solar topee – Forestry Department issue – of the type that used to be favoured by Stanley and Livingstone. He seemed an enchanting young man, terribly excited at the adventure. He confided to me that not only had he never left Mauritius before, but that he had never flown before, still less flown in a helicopter. To have three such extraordinary things happen in one day rendered him almost speechless.
We loaded our stuff into the helicopter, which had to make two trips because of the weight of the water, and took off. We swept low over the goalposts and the crowd of children, assembled to watch us, scattered and ran, laughing and screaming. Then we roared up over the shaggy-headed palms and zoomed out over the emerald waters of the lagoon, over the foam flower bed of the
reef, and then across the deep blue waters towards Round Island, that crouched, like a desiccated green and brown tortoise, on the horizon, fourteen miles away.
On the maps of Round Island, there are two areas in the south, marked ‘Big Helipad’ and ‘Small Helipad’. With these grandiose titles, you might imagine a smooth area of tarmac, wind socks, perhaps, and even a Customs and Immigration shed and a Tourist Bureau. Fortunately no such amenities exist. The helipads are simply two flattened areas, one larger than the other, which are, indeed, the only flattened areas of any size on the island. Here, the wind and the rain had beaten, broken and smoothed the tuff into patches which, if not exactly smooth as a ballroom, were a reasonably level sort of moonscape. We landed on the smaller one, the whirling of our propellers sending the White- and Red-tailed tropic birds and the dark, rather sinister, Trinidad petrels, whirling and calling around us. The petrels had the most peculiar and ethereal cry, that started off with a series of croaks and ended with a bubbling song of great beauty and wildness, not the sort of noise you would expect from a drab seabird. In contrast, the fairy-like beauty of the tropic birds did not lead you to expect a noise like somebody having difficulty in getting a champagne cork out of a bottle.
Struggling and sweating, we manhandled our tent and supplies across the helipad and down the valley that ran alongside it, while the tropic birds dive-bombed us like white icicles, creaking their strange cries, and the petrels, effortlessly gliding two feet above the ground, accompanied us like highly polished sheep dogs guarding a flock of unruly and irresponsible sheep.
The camp site we chose was on the banks of the eroded, wind- and water-sculptured gully which ran, like a miniature Grand Canyon, towards the sea. Here, the tuff lay in great, grey sheets and between these, there were areas where it had been scratched and powdered into a form of soil by a combination of rabbits and seabirds. Over this grew a green layer of small, fleshy-stemmed plants which, at first glance, looked not unlike watercress. Fortunately it was not eaten by the rabbits, so it formed a protective covering for those precious areas of soil. The patches looked like a series of incongruous green meadows with a scattering of palms in the harsh, eroded landscape. They seemed innocent enough and devoid of life, except for insects and a few prowling skinks, but as soon as darkness fell, the whole picture changed.
It took us until dark to get the camp set up and functioning properly. As the green twilight faded and the sky turned velvety black, awash with stars, as if at a given signal there arose the most extraordinary noise from the bowels of the earth. It started softly, almost tunefully, a sound like a distant pack of wolves, howling mournfully across some remote, snowbound landscape. Then, as more and
more voices joined the chorus, it became a gigantic, mad mass being celebrated underground in some Bedlamite cathedral. You could hear the lunatic cries of the priests and the wild responses from the congregation. This lasted for about half an hour, the sounds rising and falling, the ground throbbing with the noise, and then, as suddenly as if the earth had burst open and released all the damned souls from some Gustave Doré subterranean hell, out of the holes concealed by the green meadows, mewing and honking and moaning, the baby Shearwaters burst forth.
They appeared in hundreds, as if newly arisen from the grave, and squatted and fluttered around our camp, providing such a cacophony of sound that we could hardly hear each other speak. Not content with this, the babies, being of limited intelligence, decided that our tent was a sort of superior nest burrow, designed for their special benefit. Squaking and moaning, they fought their way in through the openings and flapped over and under our camp beds, defecating with great freedom, and if handled without tact, regurgitating a fishy, smelly oil all over us.
‘Really, this is too much,’ I said, as I evicted the twentieth baby from my bed, ‘I know I am supposed to be an animal lover, but there are limits.’
‘We can lace up the ends of the tent, Gerry,’ said Wahab, ‘but it will be very hot.’
‘Well, I think I’d rather suffocate than share my bed with this avian cohort. Already my bed looks as though it were one of the more productive guano islands of Peru,’ I said bitterly, rescuing a baby Shearwater which had just fallen into my soup.
So we laced up the ends of the tent. Beyond sending the temperature up into the hundreds, this had little effect, for the babies, undaunted, started burrowing under the sides of the tent. Every time they successfully did this, we had to unlace the ends to throw them out. In the end, we had to lay our jerry cans of water along the edges of the tent to repel the determined invaders. Defeated at last, the babies sat outside the tent and gave us the benefit of their singing throughout the night.
‘Waaah, waaah, wooo,’ one crowd would shout, and the others would reply, ‘Waaah, waaah, wooee,’ while a rival group sang ‘Ooo, ooh, ooh, OOOHHH, ooh,’ and were backed up by a chorus ‘Waah, waah, waah, ooeeee, waah, waah.’
This lasted until dawn. The only thing to break the monotony was when the parent birds flew in with food, and the strange cries of the babies were interspersed with peculiar and not very attractive sounds like a bath, full of liquid manure, running out. This was the parent birds regurgitating semi-digested fish. The tent began to smell like the interior of a whaling ship after a rich haul.
Towards dawn, when, through sheer exhaustion, we were falling into a fitful sleep in spite of the noise, the babies discovered a new virtue of the tent. Its sides were designed with beautifully arranged canvas slopes. The baby birds took it in turn to fly up on to the ridge of the tent and then to slide down the side, their claws making a noise like ripping calico on the canvas, while their brethren sat in a circle round about and made admiring cries, such as ‘Caaw, cooRR, COORR,’ and ‘Oooh, Coorr, Coorr.’ On mature reflection, I decided that this was the most uncomfortable night I had ever spent in my life.
The following morning, just before dawn, we awoke from our inadequate doze and staggered out from the tent, tripping and stumbling to have a wash through the hordes of Shearwaters which still sat, honking, outside their burrows. The sky was pink, orange and green, with a handful of dark clouds scattered carelessly along the horizon. The sea was calm, a deep, cobalt blue. Over my head, the palms rustled their leaves with a sound like spectral rain, their
fronds stamped black against the sky. Resting among them in an abandoned position on her back, was a fragile sickle moon, white as a tropic bird. The sky was freckled with the shapes of Shearwaters, flying and calling in a dawn chorus, and everywhere the dusky babies shuffled through the tobacco plants and scuttled into their holes.
Having had breakfast, we set off to the palm belt and here, we instructed Zozo in the art of snake catching. He asked, with a fine insouciance, whether he was actually to catch the snakes or just to find them. We said it would be fine if he just found them. So, pushing his solar topee on to the back of his head, and settling his sunglasses more firmly on his Pekinese nose, he set off. Within half an hour, to our astonishment, he called out that he had found a snake. We bore down on the Latania by which he was standing. Secretly, I felt sure that what he had discovered would be the tail of a Telfair’s skink, but there, in the leaves, lying placidly, without fear, was a semi-grown boa. It had a fine, slender head and its colouring – in contrast to the greenish shade of the adult and the vivid, fox-red and yellow of the baby – was dark olive with a lacy network of dull yellow patches on its neck, parts of its back and the base of its tail. We congratulated Zozo on his brilliance until his grin of delight almost encircled his head; and so we continued on our way, exhilarated that we had met with such success so swiftly.
During our search for snakes, we, of course, still pursued the Gunther’s geckos for we wanted some more young females, as well as the Bojeri and Telfair’s skinks. Zozo, flushed with enthusiasm at his prowess as a snake hunter, got so daring that he actually caught several of the agile, glittering Bojeri skinks and then confessed to me, having glanced round to make sure that he was not overheard, that before this expedition, he had actually been afraid of lizards. We searched on until the sun grew too hot for comfort, and then made our way back to camp. We were well satisfied, for we had eight Bojeri skinks, six young Telfair’s skinks and three half-grown Gunther’s geckos, as well as the snake. Later in the afternoon, when a little of the heat had gone out of the sun, we made another sortie through the Latania belt, but with no success. That night, we once again had a cacophonous company of the Shearwaters and slept fitfully.
Next morning, we decided to leave extra early, to make our way to one of the highest points of the island and then work downwards towards the sea. Climbing upwards, even that early in the morning, was an exhausting process and by the time we reached the highest vantage point, we were bathed in sweat. Here one saw how eroded the island was, with the cliffsides of tuff falling sheer as a ski-slope down to the sea, grooved and veined into channels by the rain. Here and there lay boulders that had been unearthed from the tuff and tumbled into gullies in toppling piles, awaiting the next deluge to take them farther down towards their final resting place in the sea. At the summit the great sheets of tuff were hard enough, but we had had a little rain in the night and in places it had dissolved into something like the consistency of a slab of chocolate in a schoolboy’s pocket, sticky slippery and full of foreign bodies. On these slopes, you had to move with extreme care for if you lost your footing, you would roll unhindered three or four hundred feet, until you crashed into the palm belt, or else, if you fell in a gully, nothing would impede your descent until you hit the sea some seven hundred feet below.
Gazing down at these steep slopes of tuff gouged into massive wrinkles by the rain, with what palms there were leaning over precariously in their efforts to retain their grip, and below, a carpet of tuff silt lying on the bottom of the sea, you realised forcibly that here was a unique, miniature world that had, by a miracle of evolution, come into being and was now being allowed to bleed to death. The twisted sheets and shelves of tuff were being drained away, while over them sprawled the trailing, inadequate tourniquets of the convolvulus plants, with their purple funeral flowers. While everyone argued over what to do about the rabbits, and got no forrader, this unique speck of land was diminishing day by day. It seemed to sum up in miniature what we were doing to the whole planet, with millions of species being bled to death for want of a little, so little, medicare.
For an hour or so, we made our way slowly seawards, zig-zagging down the steep sides, investigating the little copses of Latanias that huddled grimly wherever they could get a roothold. Even at this height, I found that these miniature woodlands of palms contained a myriad of creatures. There were cockroaches and crickets; beetles, flies, a stran
ge larva wearing a case that looked like an ice-cream cone; stick insects, spiders; and on every exposed area a billion tiny mites, scarlet as huntsmen, rushing, apparently aimlessly, about the tuff. In holes under the dead Latania leaves curious purple-coloured land crabs with pale, cream-coloured claws which they waved to and fro, looking like bank clerks who had spent their lives endlessly counting other people’s money and now could not stop the reflex action of their hands. All around the Latanias lived the Telfair’s skinks, and you only had to sit down for a minute for them to come clustering round you with the curiosity of children, trying to eat your shoe laces or your trouser bottoms, and devouring everything else that you threw down, from orange peel to paper. Here, in the grassy areas around the Latanias, lived the Bojeri, moving like quicksilver in the sun on their perpetual hunt for food, and on the Latanias themselves lived Vinson’s geckos, green as grass, with blue and scarlet heads.
I paused in the shade of a moderate-sized Latania to have an orange, and was treated to a very curious sight, which showed me how many Vinson’s geckos a palm could support, and also what a predatory nature the Telfair’s skink possessed.
I was sitting there, joyfully sucking my orange, when I heard a pattering noise on the leaves above me. I thought we were having a shower of rain, and it was raindrops I could hear on the stiff, cardboard-like fronds. The pattering went on, however, and I suddenly realised that I could not see any rain, nor could I feel any. Curious, I looked up at the fronds above me. Each great, green hand was made transparent by the sun and so I could see, scuttling and jumping, a shadow play of Vinson’s geckos. Sometimes, one would stop for a moment and peer round the edge of the frond, before rushing farther up the palm. There were easily forty of them, from fully adult specimens to fragile babies about an inch long. They leapt from frond to frond with the agility of frogs; they were all moving upwards and it was obvious that something was causing them to panic. It was an extremely pretty sight to see their little bodies in black silhouette, running and jumping across the screen of green leaves.