Two in the Bush (25 page)

‘Well, he’s doing something,’ I said. ‘If you help me, we can push that chest of drawers over to the wall and I can climb up and peep through the hole.’

‘You can’t do that!’ said Jacquie.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘This is a scientific investigation. I shall be able to make my fame and fortune by writing an article for the
Lancet
.’

‘You can’t go peeping over walls at people having baths,’ said Jacquie firmly.

‘Do you think it would help if I sang him a few bars of “Stormy Weather”?’ I enquired.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I do wish I knew what he was doing.’

Oblivious of our macabre interest in his activities, the Chinaman continued to splash and gurgle with all the verve of a drunken mermaid, and then suddenly all noise ceased.

‘Ah,’ said Jacquie, ‘he’s finished.’

‘Either that or he’s thrown all the water out of the bath,’ I suggested.

There was a long and ominous silence, broken only by deep breathing from the bathroom. Then, so suddenly that it made us jump, he turned on the shower at full pitch and proceeded once more to
snort and gurgle under this.

‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I must push the chest of drawers up to the wall and have a look. God knows, I like to spend a lot of time in the bath, but do you realise that he
has been in there for nearly two hours?’

In spite of Jacquie’s protests, I had got the chest of drawers three-quarters of the way across the room when, to my intense chagrin, the Chinaman turned off the shower and proceeded to
open the door and vacate the bathroom with such rapidity that I could only conclude he had sensed my manoeuvre. I rushed to our bedroom door and flung it open, determined to at least catch a
glimpse of this Asiatic water-baby, but there was absolutely no one to be seen.

The whole experience quite unnerved me, and for the rest of our time in that hotel, in between filming, I haunted the upstairs landing in the hopes of seeing this elusive and hygienic oriental.
I even got the chest of drawers in position, with a pile of books on top, in readiness for his next dip, but the only person I managed to see over the wall was Chris, having a shower – a
sight so repulsive that I gave up the experiment altogether.

That afternoon we took our circular electrician and his generator out to the turtle beach. This lay several miles from Dungun and near it was a small fishing village in which lived the egg
collectors. The beach was a long one with dazzling white sand, fringed with palm trees. The egg collectors informed us that the turtles would not put in an appearance before seven o’clock,
but any time after that we could expect them. Once the turtle was laying her eggs, nothing at all seemed to disturb her concentration; you could even touch her without it having the slightest
effect, but should she become alarmed on her way up the beach or when she was in the middle of digging her hole, she would rush back to the sea and not reappear. This meant that, having spotted our
turtle, we would have to make our way across the sand to wherever she was digging her nest, fix up the generator and then, as soon as she started to lay, switch on the lights and start filming. As
there was a very large expanse of beach and there could be no guarantee which section of it would be chosen by the reptile, it meant that we might have to hump the generator at a smart trot for
half a mile or so. We did an experimental run to see how it would turn out, and it was at this point that I decided that the use of the word ‘portable’ in connection with this generator
was the most gross euphemism I had ever come across. To begin with, the thing seemed to weigh about a ton and it was furnished with two minute handles on which it was almost impossible to maintain
one’s grip. Add to this the average daily temperature in Malaya and the fact that you were sinking up to your ankles in loose sand at every step, and you were very soon reduced to a state
bordering on hysteria.

We left the electrician and his fiendish contraption in the village and drove back to Dungun for dinner, then, at half past six, we piled ourselves and our equipment into the Land-Rover and
drove down to the turtle beach. It was a beautifully warm, moonless night, the ideal sort of night for the turtles to come ashore. When we arrived at the village, we found the headman, several egg
collectors and our circular electrician all jumping up and down excitedly at the edge of the road and waving their arms about. Apparently a large female turtle had just made her appearance and was
even now hauling herself up the beach some three hundred yards away. This was an unprecedented stroke of luck and so, groaning under the weight of the portable generator and the cameras, we hurried
after the egg collector who had spotted the female. Presently, panting and sweating and covered with sand (for we had an fallen down at least once before we reached the spot), we arrived at where
the turtle lay.

I knew they were big, but I had not been prepared for anything quite so massive. She lay on the sand like the hull of an overturned dinghy; her head was the size of a large dog’s, with
enormous, heavy lidded, filmstar eyes that gazed mournfully into space. With her hind flippers, that were curiously mobile and hand-like, she had scooped out a crater in the sand some four feet
across and two feet deep. Very carefully cupping her flippers, she was scooping out the damp sand to make a nice, cup-shaped hollow for the reception of her eggs. The exertion of having hauled
herself up the beach and of digging this hole, caused her to pant and wheeze distressingly, and periodically she would stop digging and have a rest, uttering, at the same time, a prolonged,
shuddering sigh that was quite heartrending. The mucus that normally lubricated her eyes and protected them against the sea water, now flowed copiously from them. It trickled down her cheeks and
hung there in long, shining, glutinous strands and this, combined with her heartrending sighs, gave the impression that she was suffering from a melancholy so deep and so anguished that nothing
could possibly alleviate it. Her shell was very curious, for it had the colouring and texture of a well-dubbined saddle with just the curious line of little pyramid shaped nodules of bone running
down the middle.

She dug on solidly for about half an hour and then, apparently satisfied, she shifted her position slightly so that her tail and rear end were directly over the hole. Then, without any apparent
effort, she started to lay. The first egg dropped into the nest, gleaming white and sticky in the lamplight like a huge pearl. There was a slight pause and then there was a positive fusillade of
eggs, dropping as rapidly as gigantic hailstones into the nest. Most of the eggs were about the size of a billiard ball but here and there were some which were only the size of a ping-pong ball and
others the size of a large marble. Whether these stunted eggs would ever have hatched is, I think, a moot point, but of the ninety-odd eggs she laid, there were at least ten or fifteen of these
deformities. When she had finished laying, she started to shovel the sand back into the hole, using principally her hind flippers, and stopping every now and then to pat the sand down tight. When
the eggs were well covered, her front flippers came into play, and she used these with a scything movement to scoop up the sand on her broad-bladed paddles and throw it behind her, so that her hind
flippers could stamp it into position. When the hole was completely filled in, she shuffled her great body over it, allowing her weight to do the final pile-driving of packing the sand into
position; then she hauled herself forward a few feet and started hurling sand backwards with her front flippers with complete abandon. At first I could not quite see the point of this manoeuvre,
until I realised that what she was doing was camouflaging the nest, for a smooth, flattened area on the beach would have been instantly noticeable, whereas now, under this hail of loose sand, it
very soon became indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. When she was satisfied that she had obliterated all traces of her presence, she started to haul her great nine foot bulk down the
beach, a slow and laborious process which took her about half an hour, interrupted by long rests during which she sighed and gasped and blew bubbles, and the long chains of mucus hanging from her
eyes became more and more encrusted with sand. Then she reached the very edge of the sea and a wave broke and washed her face clean. She lay for a few minutes, luxuriating in the feel of the water,
and then slid forward across the wet sand. The waves broke over her and then suddenly lifted her, arid from being a gigantic, ungainly creature, she became swift and agile. She turned on her side,
waved one flipper at us in a rather saucy gesture of farewell and, with speed and grace, shot out to sea.

Several more turtles came out that night and so by about midnight we had obtained all the shots we wanted and, tired but happy, made our way back to Dungun.

The following morning we returned to the beach to see and film the conservation measures that were being taken to preserve the turtle. This scheme was quite a recent innovation and had only been
in operation for one season prior to our arrival. The man in charge of the operation, from the Fisheries Department, explained the system to me. The nests, as I said before, were purchased at the
current market price from the concessionaire; these nests were then carefully dug up and the eggs transported to a special fenced off area of the beach. Here a new nest hole was dug at just the
right depth, the eggs placed in it and then the sand carefully packed down on top of them: it was very important to try to simulate exactly the conditions of the real nest. Then each nest was
marked with a little wooden cross on which was written the date on which the eggs were laid, the number of eggs, and later, the number that hatched. The result of this was that the fenced off area
of the beach looked rather like a lilliputian war cemetery with its rows and rows of little wooden crosses solemnly stuck in the sand. They had buried, the previous year, ninety-five nests, which
amounted to some eight thousand eggs, out of which more than three thousand had hatched successfully. In the normal course of events, when the baby turtles hatch, they dig their way to the surface
and then rush down the beach as fast as they can and into the sea. By some curious, telepathic means, most of the ocean’s predators such as sharks and barracudas, seem to know when the
succulent babies are about to hatch, and so they line the shallow water in a hungry barrier and the babies have to run the gauntlet through this barrier to survive. What with the large proportion
of babies lost in this way, plus the fact that the eggs were being harvested in such quantity, the outlook for the leathery turtles was pretty grim. In order to circumnavigate the line of hungry
sharks and barracudas, each of the little war graves was surrounded, when it neared the time of hatching, with a circle of chicken wire so that when the babies hatched, they could not make their
way down the beach. They were then collected in buckets and tubs and taken on the Fisheries launch some two or three miles out to sea, where they were scattered over a wide area. In this way they
stood a much greater chance of survival.

When they first hatch, the babies bear very little resemblance to their ponderous parents – some four inches long, they wear gay, pinstriped suits of bright green and yellow and are rather
enchanting-looking little creatures. Nobody knows how long it takes one of these little pinstriped babies to grow to maturity, but one imagines that it must be in the neighbourhood of twenty to
thirty years before they are old enough to come back to the beach of their birth and dig their own nests.

So far, this scheme has been a great success and I hope that it will continue to be so. The great, white beach at Rantau should always be a safe nursery for these giants of the sea.

Summing up

So we came to the end of our journey, which had taken us some 45,000 miles through three countries, and during which we had met dozens of fascinating animals. I feel that
– as I have rather tended to concentrate on these animals to the exclusion of everything else – I may have given a rather lopsided and too glowing a picture of conservation. I would
like to try to remedy that now.

Firstly, what does conservation mean? It is not merely the saving from extinction of such species as the notornis, the leadbeater’s possum or the leathery turtle; this is important work
but it is only part of the problem. You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate
the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation
of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself – a point that seems to escape many people.

We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest
principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the
bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion by cutting down forests and
overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities – water – with industrial filth, and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the brown rat, and
wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.

The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish. When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cuddly
and appealing) is, ‘what use is it?’ by which they mean, what use is it to them? To this one can only reply, ‘what use is the Acropolis?’ Does a creature have to be of
direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question ‘what use is it?’ you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your
own.