Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

"Turtle," he said, "come out to lay its eggs."

He went to the end of the track and started to dig in the sand, and about six inches down he unearthed a clutch of ten eggs, each the size of a small hen's egg, with a thin leathery shell. He opened one by tearing the shell of the end, disclosing the rather glutinous white and the bright yellow yolk, and emptied the contents into his mouth. Following his example, I discovered that turtles' eggs are the most delicious of foods; eaten raw like that, warmed slightly by the sun, they had a sweet nutty flavour that was most delightful. We sat on the sand and ate the rest of the eggs at one sitting, and a little further along the bank I found another nest, and these eggs we took back to have cooked for supper. Hard boiled, I discovered, they tasted like sweet chestnuts.

Presently, wiping the egg-stains from our mouths, we made our way across the sandbank and plunged into what appeared to be thick forest. But it turned out to be only a dense, narrow belt of trees bordering the river, and we soon found ourselves out on the savannah once more, moving waist-high through the crisp, sun-withered grasses. The going was difficult, for interspersed with the ordinary tough savannah grass was another kind which turned out to be one of the most annoying plants I have come across. It grew in great clumps, with each leaf about seven feet long, green and slender, coiling and sprouting across our path with Machiavellian cunning, looking lush, dainty and cool. Yet the edge of each leaf was sharper than most razor blades, and was microscopically nicked along its edge like a hacksaw blade. The merest touch of it and your skin was slashed in a dozen places, long, deep grooves like scalpel cuts. After trying to brush a large clump out of the way with my bare arm I was covered with these shallow incisions, which bled profusely and made me look as though I had been having a tussel with a couple of jaguars. Bob, who found it difficult to distinguish the razor grass from the ordinary sort, sat down on a large clump for a rest and registered the fact even through his trousers.

After crossing the grassland we came to another strip of wood which bordered a placid lake fed by a small and sluggish tributary from the main stream. The lake was almost circular, and in the very centre, six feet of its trunk underwater, grew a tall, straight tree, its branches laden with strange flask-shaped nests woven from palm fibres and grass, looking like a crop of weird fruit. Fluttering from branch to branch and diving in and out of the nests were the owners, a colony of yellow backed caciques, birds the size of a thrush with lemon yellow and black plumage and long, sharp, ivory-coloured beaks. Every detail of the tree, the swinging nests and the host of fluttering, wheezing, brilliant birds were reflected in the still, honey-coloured waters in which the tree stood.

Occasionally this water picture would blur and tremble for an instant as a falling leaf or twig pricked the water into a quivering net of black ripples.

As we sat watching the birds there was the slightest disturbance of the water at the edge of the lake, a faint wrinkle on the glossy surface as a long, gnarled snout surmounted by protuberant eyes rose into view.

"That's old One Eye," said McTurk, as the cayman swam towards us, its head seeming to glide over the surface of the water almost imperceptibly. When he came nearer we could see that one of his eye sockets was empty and shrivelled, and we watched how he manoeuvred himself so that his blind eye was always turned away from us. He had been king of this little lake for as long as McTurk could remember. How he had come to lose his eye was a mystery: perhaps some Amerindian arrow had pierced it, or perhaps he had fought with a jaguar long ago, and in the struggle the great cat's claws had burst the ball. Whatever the cause, the accident did not seem to affect him, for he lived happily in the lake, lording it over the smaller cayman like a reptilian Nelson.

He swam up to within thirty feet of where we were sitting, and then turned and made off to the other end of the lake.

There he floated with his blind eye towards us. McTurk picked up a stick and struck the trunk of a tree with a resounding crack that echoed across the quiet waters, causing the caciques to stop their chatter. At once One Eye submerged smoothly and efficiently, and when he rose to the surface again he had his good eye fixed on us. As we walked round the edge of the lake he swam out into the middle and revolved like a slow-motion top, keeping us carefully in view.

We made our way to a spot where a great tree leant out over the water at an angle of seventy-five degrees, its trunk festooned with great bunches of Spanish moss and clumps of orchids bearing dozens of large, waxy magenta blooms. We climbed up to the topmost branches and found ourselves as though hanging in an enchanted, orchid-filled balcony high above the water. Below we could see our reflections, shivering slightly where the orchid petals we had dislodged were still waltzing down on to the surface. As we sat there looking out over the lake McTurk suddenly pointed at a spot below us, some fifty feet off along the bank.

"Watch that spot," he commanded.

We strained our eyes, but the surface of the water remained unbroken. I was just about to ask what we were supposed to be looking for, when there was a loud plop, something broke the surface briefly and was gone, leaving only a few ripples and a handful of golden bubbles shaking themselves up from the depths.

"Arapaima," said McTurk with satisfaction, "heading this way. Watch down below."

I stared down at the water, determined not to miss such a sight. There was another plop, and then another, each one nearer to us. Then, suddenly, we could see the great fish swimming lazily below us, its great body drifting through the translucent amber water. For a brief moment we saw its ponderous, torpedo-shaped body, a deep fin curving along its back like a fan, and a tail that seemed small and blunt for a fish of that size, and then it was gone among the multicoloured reflections of our tree, and we could see it no longer.

This, I regret to say, was the only glimpse we had of an arapaima, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, although they were common enough in the lakes and rivers of the Rupunum. These tremendous fish grow to a length of six or seven feet and weigh between two and three hundred pounds. McTurk told us that the largest he had ever caught measured nine feet in length They are so large and so swift that probably their only enemies are man and the ever present jaguar. Man hunts them with spear and bow and arrow, but the jaguar has another method He will wait until the great fish swims close to the bank and then hurl himself into the water on top of it and proceed to 'box' it ashore with his powerful paws, rather as a domestic cat will box with a leaf.

McTurk said that he could quite easily spear an arapaima for me if I wanted to examine one, but I felt it would be a shame to kill one of these lovely fishes for no reason; to catch one alive was, of course, out of the question, for even if we had succeeded there would be the question of transporting it down to the coast, together with several hundred gallons of water. Even I, enthusiastic though I was, reluctantly had to abandon the idea of taking a live arapaima back to Georgetown with me.

McTurk told us a curious thing about these fish, which has not, so far as I can find out, been recorded before. During the breeding season the female arapaima develops a form of gland on the back of the head, which exudes a white, milk-like substance. He said that on several occasions he had observed young arapaima clustering round their mother's head and apparently feeding on this white 'milk'. This astonished me, and I hoped that we might be lucky enough to see such a sight during our stay in the Rupununi, but unfortunately we did not. The discovery of a fish that 'suckles' its young would, I feel, cause no little sensation among zoologists and ichthyologists.