Two in the Bush (23 page)

Watching this grave, but obviously happy choir of siamangs, gave me immense pleasure. They clearly took their music very seriously and enjoyed every minute of it. It was nice to feel that in
that enormous section of protected forest there would always be groups of siamangs singing happily to each other in the bowers of green leaves.

The Giants’ Nursery

Making films is a weird business, and so I was not at all surprised to find myself, three days after we had left the National Park, standing on top of a step-ladder while Chris
and Jim lay in the grass below me and Jacquie and various other individuals were spread around in a circle like fielders on a cricket pitch. The reason for this rather peculiar activity was one of
the most curious animals that I have met.

We had set off across Malaya towards a place called Dungun on the east coast, in order to try to see one of the largest reptiles in the world, and en route we had got involved with a smaller,
but equally interesting reptile. We had been travelling for some time over a series of hills, and the road consisted of the longest series of hair-pin bends through the forest that I can ever
remember having travelled on. So numerous were they, and so close together, that Jim, who was lying in the back of the Land-Rover, presently asked whether we could stop. He lay there among the
equipment looking like a Roman emperor, the effect being heightened by the fact that he was clasping to his bosom the largest pineapple that I have ever seen in my life, which we had purchased at a
village a few miles back. His face was a startling shade of pea green.

‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ said Chris.

‘I’m feeling sick,’ said Jim sheepishly.

‘Dear God!’ said Chris. ‘Is there nothing that doesn’t make you feel sick?’

‘Well, I can’t help it,’ said Jim aggrievedly, ‘it’s all these twists and turns. No sooner do I get my stomach in alignment than you go round another beastly
bend.’

‘Well, let’s stop for a bit,’ said Jacquie, ‘and we can have lunch.’

Jim gave her an anguished look.

‘Do you think I am in any condition for lunch?’ he enquired.

‘Well, I’m hungry,’ said Jacquie callously

So we unpacked the food and sat by the roadside, while Jim sat with averted eyes as we picnicked. Presently, stuffed with cold meat and pineapple, we lay back to relax and I noticed, in some
trees a little way down the road, two birds which, from that distance, looked decidedly peculiar. Taking the field-glasses, I wandered down the road towards them and discovered that it was a pair
of racquet-tailed drongoes indulging in an abandoned bit of courtship in the tree tops. They are about the size of a blackbird, with curved crests and the two outer tail-feathers greatly elongated
and ending in a round, racquet shaped piece of feathering; they are metallic blue-green below and glossy black above. They were not only dancing after each other through the branches, their tails
streaming out behind them, but they were also flying up into the air and dive-bombing each other, and as they did so, the racquet shaped feathers on the end of their tails looked as though they
were being pursued by two curious, round beetles. They would periodically utter a low, rather harsh chattering at each other.

While I was watching them, my attention was caught by a small, pale putty coloured lizard that was darting to and fro on the back of the trunk, lapping up the streams of tree ants that were
ascending to their arboreal nest. He looked a dull and rather uninteresting little reptile and I was about to switch my field-glasses back to the drongoes when he suddenly did something that made
me, metaphorically speaking, jump about ten feet in the air: he protruded suddenly, from under his chin, a triangular white flap that looked rather like a sail. He kept flipping this in and out
very rapidly for a few moments and then he hurled himself off the bark of the tree into the air. As he started falling towards the ground there suddenly blossomed, along each side of his body a
pair of butterfly-like wings, which he held out stiffly and, with their aid, glided nonchalantly to another tree some hundred and fifty feet away. I realised that the apparently uninteresting
lizard that I had been just about to ignore was, in fact, one of the most exciting reptiles in the world, and one that I had always wanted to see. It rejoices in the name of
Draco volins
,
the flying dragon, and I had been incessant in my enquiries about it ever since we had arrived in Malaya. Nobody had been able to tell me very much; you saw them, they said, in a vague sort of way
that implied that you could spend fifty years in Malaya
without
seeing one, and then generally changed the subject. So there before me was a real, live flying dragon, a beast that I had
given up all hopes of seeing. I uttered an anguished roar that brought the other three pelting down the road towards me, but as they reached me,
Draco volins
took off again and zoomed off
into the forest.

‘What’s the matter?’ enquired Jacquie, obviously under the impression that I had been bitten by something fatal.

‘
Draco volins, Draco volins
,’ I said incoherently.

They looked at me with a certain amount of curiosity.

‘What,’ enquired Jacquie, ‘is a
Draco volins
?’

‘That flying lizard job,’ I said impatiently ‘there was one up here, zooming about from tree to tree.’

‘Touch of the sun,’ said Tim judiciously, ‘had my suspicions when he first started talking about it.’

‘I tell you it was here,’ I said, ‘it flew from
that
tree to
that
tree and then when you all came running up, it went zooming off into the forest.’

‘A little lie down,’ said Jim, ‘that’s what you need. I’ll squeeze some pineapple juice on your brow.’

In spite of my protestations, they all seemed reluctant to believe my story, since they, too, had come to look upon the flying lizard as an almost mythical beast. So we continued on our journey
and I made their lives a misery, talking about flying lizards all the way.

We eventually stopped at a small town for the night, where some charming people called the Allens had, to their credit, offered to put us up. After the preliminary politenesses had been
exchanged, the conversation relapsed once again into talk of the flying lizard and Geoffrey Allen, a very competent animal photographer in his own right, listened to our acrimonious discussion with
some puzzlement.

‘Why,’ he enquired at length, ‘are you getting so fussed about the flying lizard?’

If he had not been my host, I would have felled him to the ground with a blow, but as he was my host and, moreover, was pouring me out an exceptionally large whisky, I resisted the impulse.

‘I’ve always wanted to see a flying lizard,’ I explained patiently. ‘The moment I arrived here I questioned everybody very closely on the subject of flying lizards, with
about as much result as asking questions in a Trappist Monastery. Then I saw one of the things on the road here and this set of morons that I’m forced to travel with refuse to believe
me.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Geoffrey casually, ‘the garden’s full of them.’

‘What!’ I said incredulously. ‘You mean
your
garden?’

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘dozens of them, flying about all day long.’

‘It’s the tropics,’ said Jim earnestly to Chris, ‘it gets them all in the end.’

‘Do you think we would have a chance of filming them?’ I asked Geoffrey.

‘I should think so,’ he said, ‘although they are pretty agile. Anyway, you have a look at them tomorrow morning and see what you think.’

The following morning, at dawn, I dragged Jacquie, Jim and Chris into the garden, and there, to my delight, I found that Geoffrey had spoken nothing but the truth. There were flying lizards in
every direction, gliding from tree to tree like paper darts. Jim, with the camera strapped round him, struggled to get some shots of them flying, while the rest of us beat the tree trunks with
sticks to try to frighten the lizards in the direction of the camera. After a couple of hours of this, we were all sweaty and Jim had exposed about eighteen inches of film, which he assured us
would be the finest shot of a completely blank sky that anybody had ever taken.

‘It’s no good,’ he said, ‘by the time I’ve found the damned thing in my viewfinder and focused, it’s landed. I don’t think we’re ever going to be
able to do it.’

‘There’s only one thing for it,’ I said, ‘and that is to catch one.’

‘What do we do with it when we have caught it?’ asked Chris.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘then we can go upstairs in the house and throw it out of the bedroom window when Jim says he is ready.’

‘Um . . .’ said Chris sceptically, ‘well I suppose we can try.’

So, armed with bamboos with nooses of string on the end, we spent another couple of hours endeavouring to catch flying lizards. Eventually, having found some that were more imbecilic than
others, we did succeed in catching two, then we repaired to the verandah for a well-earned drink before filming them. This gave me a chance to examine our captures closely.

The pouch under the throat was shaped rather like an elongated and slender strawberry; normally it lay folded back, so that it was invisible, but when the lizard wanted to display (and, as far
as I could see, this white ornament was only used when guarding his territory), he apparently inflated it with air, so that it flashed up and down at about once a second. The wings were even more
extraordinary: the rib bones of the reptile had become elongated and these supported the thin skin fabric of the wing, like the ribs of an umbrella. When not in use, the wings folded back along the
sides of the body, again like a furled umbrella, and were so thin and fragile that they were not noticeable. The whole creature looked incredibly prehistoric and, watching it furl and unfurl its
wings as you touched it, you could well understand how similar reptiles had gradually evolved into the birds that we know today.

When we had quenched our thirst and cooled off a bit, we set about organising the filming of our lizards. In order to get a really good shot of the flight and the wings, we needed the lizard
silhouetted against the sky. This meant that Chris and Jim had to lie on the lawn with the cameras at the ready while Jacquie, Geoffrey and his wife Betty stood well back in order to re-capture the
lizard before it escaped. Having got everybody in position, I then went up into the bedroom, extracted one of the lizards from the jar in which it was incarcerated and, on being given the signal
from the supine cameramen below, I hurled it out into the air. Immediately, it spread its wings and glided down to land on the lawn, where it was smartly fielded by Geoffrey. The cameramen,
however, were not pleased with the result, so once more I had to toil up to the bedroom and throw the lizard out of the window.

Altogether we did this some twenty-five times, and both I and the lizards were getting a little bit bored and fragile round the edges, so we called a halt and drank some iced beer while we
discussed the problem.

The chief difficulty was that throwing the lizard from the bedroom window allowed only a small area of sky against which it was silhouetted, so obviously the bedroom window was not the
answer.

‘How about a step-ladder?’ Geoffrey suggested. ‘Because then you could move it about whenever you wanted it.’

Fired with this idea, we went into Geoffrey’s storeroom and dug out a pair of ten foot steps, which were rickety in the extreme. If anyone was watching us without knowing what we were
trying to do, they would have been pardoned for thinking that Geoffrey’s large and spacious garden was the grounds of the local mental home. Chris and I staggered along carrying the ungainly,
giraffe-like body of the steps, preceded by Jim, who would periodically lie down on his back, and followed by Geoffrey, Jacquie and Betty, carrying various vital items of equipment and the two
lizards in their jam jar. Eventually, after we had gone round the garden about three times, Jim picked himself a site and we erected the ladder and got ready for action. By this time it was midday
and the whole of Malaya had reached the temperature at which the human body attains melting point.

Stripped to the waist and wearing a large and extremely ancient straw hat borrowed from Geoffrey, I clasped a flying lizard firmly in one hand and proceeded to mount the step-ladder. This
groaned and creaked and swayed so that I was full of all the fears for my safety that must have beset an apprentice going round the Horn for the first time in a Windjammer. Making sure that the
fielders were in position and that Chris and Jim were lying on their backs beneath me, I launched the flying lizard into the air. I was not able to witness its flight, owing to the fact that the
ladder took a very dim view of any untoward movement and my masterly over-arm casting of the lizard made the whole structure sway alarmingly. By the time I had it under control, Chris was standing
there, beaming at me.

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘but I think we will have to do it a few more times in order to get it exactly’

I began to regret ever having mentioned flying lizards, for we spent the entire afternoon under the blistering sun, with me on top of the ladder, swaying to and fro like an extremely inept
circus performer, hurling lizards into the air at intervals. But eventually Jim declared himself satisfied and we could retreat into the coolness of the house and have a shower, first having
released our two stars. They, by this time, were so bored with the whole procedure that they did not even bother to run away but just sat on the branch of a tree, glaring at us.

As a matter of interest, the resulting film – which was excellent – occupied some fifteen seconds of screen time and furthermore, nobody wrote to compliment us on this achievement. I
hope that the many people who aspire to being animal photographers will bear this chastening example in mind before they embark on their careers.