Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

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.

Eventually my guide reappeared and we went on our way. After a time I walked in a sort of trance, the sweat running down into my eyes unheeded. That part of the trip seems to be a complete blank. I came to as we burst out of the forest into a tiny grass field, bleached white by the sun, and a troop of Mona Guenons rushed from the grass and leapt into the trees with a crashing of leaves. We could hear them crashing off, shouting “oink . . . oink . . ” to each other, as Monas do. The hunter led me to the edge of the grass field where there was an enormous rock, as big as a house, perched on the edge of the cliff we had just climbed. Scrambling to the top of this a wonderful sight met my eyes.

In every direction stretched the forest below us, miles and miles of undulating country, here and there rising into a curious shaped hill, all of it covered with a thick pelt of trees in every shade and combination of greens. Far away below us, like a faint chalk stripe among the trees, lay the road, and following it along with my eyes I could see Bakebe and, perched on the hill above, the big hut that housed our collection. In front of us the forest rolled away to the French border and beyond, and to our right, seen dimly shimmering in the heat haze, more like a faint fingerprint on the blue sky, I could see Mount Cameroon, nearly eighty miles away. It was a breath-taking and beautiful sight, and for the first time I fully realized the vastness of the incredible forest. From the plain below where we sat the forest stretched, almost unbroken, right across Africa, until it merged into the savannah land of the east: Kenya, Tanganyika, and Rhodesia. It was an astonishing thought. I sat there smoking a much-needed cigarette, and wondering how many beef there were to a square mile, but after a few minutes of intense mental arithmetic I began to feel dizzy at the thought of such numbers and I gave it up.

The hunter lay on the rock and went to sleep. I sat there and examined a vast area of forest with the aid of my field-glasses, and I found it a fascinating occupation. I followed the flight of the hornbills across the tops of the trees, which, from this distance, resembled the head of a cauliflower: I watched a troop of monkeys, only visible by the movement of the leaves as they jumped from tree to tree.