Two in the Bush (21 page)

‘Good evening good evening’ he called when he was within earshot, waving and beaming at me, ‘my God what a vunderful day, eh?’

I had spent a hot, sticky and profitless day in extremely prickly undergrowth, being sucked dry by leeches, but I didn’t want to dampen my new friend’s enthusiasm.

‘Wonderful!’ I shouted back.

He came panting up to me and stood there, grinning.

‘Ve have come on a fishing expedition, you know,’ he explained.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Is there good fishing here?’

‘Vunderful,
vunderful,’
he said, ‘best fishing in Malaya.’

He eyed my glass of beer with the air of one who had never seen such a phenomenon before, but was willing to try anything once.

‘Will you have a drink?’ I asked.

‘My dear sir, you are too kind,’ he said, seating himself with alacrity.

I called the steward, who brought a large tankard of beer which my new friend seized firmly, in case it tried to escape.

‘Your very good health,’ he said, and drank half of it at one gulp without pausing for breath.

He belched thoughtfully and wiped the froth off his moustache with a spotless handkerchief.

‘I need that,’ he explained untruthfully, ‘hot vork travelling.’

For the next half-hour he regaled me with a complicated and extremely amusing lecture on the art of fishing, and I was quite sorry when eventually he rose unsteadily to his feet and said that he
must go.

‘You must let us return your hospitality,’ he said earnestly. ‘Come over to our little house at about six and have a tiny drink, eh?’

I had had experience of tiny drinks with Sikhs before, and the tiny drink generally extended into the small hours of the morning, but he was so eager that it would have been churlish to refuse.
So I accepted, and he meandered away, waving cheerfully to me over his shoulder. Presently Jacquie and Chris joined me.

‘Who,’ enquired Chris, ‘was your friend – Santa Claus?’

‘He’s a very amusing Sikh,’ I said, ‘and he’s invited me over for a drink at six.’

‘I hope you didn’t accept,’ said Jacquie in alarm, ‘you know what these drinking orgies are like.’

‘Yes I have,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t very well refuse. But have no fear, I shall get Chris to come and rescue me at seven.’

‘Why
me
?’ enquired Chris bitterly. ‘I’m supposed to be a producer, not a sort of travelling Alcoholics Anonymous.’

At six o’clock, bathed and changed, I presented myself at the small rest house and was welcomed in by the fishing party. It consisted of five individuals, four of whom were tall, well
built men, while the fifth was a tiny and earnest-looking little man wearing an enormous pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. After the introductions had been made and they had poured me out a drink of
such massive proportions that I mentally praised my foresight in getting Chris to rescue me, we started the usual conversation about fishing and animal photography. When we had exhausted these
subjects there was a slight pause, while we all had another drink. Then suddenly (and to this day I cannot remember how) we were discussing homosexuality. This was a fine, rich subject for
discussion and we explored it thoroughly, ranging from Oscar Wilde to Petronius via the Shakespeare Sonnets and Burton’s
Arabian Nights
, taking in the
Kama Sutra
and
The
Perfumed Garden
en route. At this point, Chris arrived, and was thrust into a chair and given a drink, without causing the slightest ripple on the surface of our train of thought. During all
this the earnest little man with the outsize spectacles had sat there, clasping his glass and surveying each speaker through his spectacles, but contributing nothing to the conversation. Eventually
(when we had dealt at length with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire), we felt we had exhausted the subject and we all fell silent. It was the earnest little man’s great moment. He
leant forward and peered at me and cleared his throat. We all looked at him, expectantly.

‘What I say, Mr Durrell,’ he said impressively, summing up our flights of rhetoric in one pungent phrase, ‘what I say, is that every man should have his hobby.’

The Singers in the Trees

The Taman Negara – which used to be called The King George V National Park – was created in 1937. It is a gigantic slab of untouched forest measuring some 1,677
square miles, spreading into the states of Kelantan, Pahang and Trengganu. Only a small portion of the park is easily accessible to the average visitor; the rest of it can be investigated, but only
with extreme difficulty. Therefore, there are some areas of the park that are still unexplored. Within its boundaries you can see, if you are lucky, nearly every member of the Malayan jungle fauna.
Probably one of the park’s most important functions is that it provides a sanctuary for the few remaining specimens of the Sumatran rhino. There are probably not more than a hundred of these
creatures left in existence. Like all the other Asiatic rhinos, they have been unmercifully hunted in order to procure their horns, which are ground into powder and shipped to China, where it is
sold at exorbitant sums to aged, decrepit or sterile Chinese who have the touching belief that it will act as an aphrodisiac. Why a country so hideously over populated should waste its time and
energy in such a pursuit defeats the imagination, but because of this belief nearly all the Asian species of rhino have been reduced in numbers to the very borders of extermination and, because
they are getting increasingly hard to find, a similar attack is now being made on the rhinos of Africa.

The fact that the park was full of wildlife meant nothing.

In that dense and extremely tall forest, the difficulty was firstly to come into contact with the animals and secondly, once you had made contact with them, to try to film them. But gradually,
little by little, we managed to build up a picture of the inhabitants of the park and their daily routine. There were the small herds of seladang, for example, a powerful, handsome species of wild
ox with their dark chocolate brown or black coats and white socks and handsomely curved, thick white horns. They would graze in small clearings in the forest throughout the morning until the sun
became increasingly hot, when they would retreat into the cooler recesses among the trees, where they would muse and doze until the cool of the evening; then they would rouse themselves and spend
the night drifting through the forest in search of food. The seladang is so big and powerful and so quickly aroused to terrible defensive rage that it has few enemies brave enough to tackle it. The
two chief predators are, of course, the tiger and the leopard. The tiger appears to be on the decline in Malaya, but the leopard is still relatively common. While the tiger will tackle, on
occasions, a fully powerful seladang, the leopard, being a smaller and less powerful cat, generally prefers to try its hand at the youngsters; but there is easier game in the forest than
seladang.

For the great majority of the forest creatures, night is the time when they are up and about. The sun sets and there is a very brief twilight when the whole forest and the sky is washed in a
pale, almost luminous apple-green light.

Suddenly the whole sky becomes freckled with tiny black dots that drift over the tree tops in great waves like columns of smoke. They are the large, honking, leathery-winged fruit bats on their
way into the interior of the park to search for food. All day long they have hung upside down in a dead tree some two miles downstream. Why they chose this leafless tree I could never make out, but
they hung there in great clusters like badly made umbrellas, occasionally stretching their wings out and fanning themselves vigorously to try to cool their bodies under the torrid rays of the sun.
Once the bats were aloft in the sky, honking and flapping their way in untidy clouds towards their feeding grounds, it was the signal that the night shift had taken over.

Now the Seladang started to move, the tigers and the leopards yawned and stretched and sniffed appreciatively, gourmet fashion, at the exciting night-time smells of the forest. Now the tiny,
mahogany-coloured mouse deer appeared, neatly camouflaged with white spots and stripes, their fragile legs no thicker than a pencil. Knowing that they were favourite food for nearly every predator,
they lived in a permanent state of high tension bordering on hysteria, and seemed to shimmer through the leaves and low undergrowth. The slightest sound or movement and they would flash away with
such rapidity that the eye could not follow them and you wondered how on earth any predator was skilful enough to catch them. Up in the canopy of the forest, where the daytime chorus of those
insane and incessant zitherers, the cicadas, had now given place to a more fully fledged orchestra of tree frogs, various other creatures would be uncurling themselves and thinking about food. The
tree shrews – squirrel-like but with long, pointed faces and little pink noses that were perpetually twitching like geiger counters – would scuttle along the branches and pass from tree
to tree along the lianas. These lashed the trees together and acted like some curious vegetable switch-back through the forest. At first glance, you might be pardoned for thinking that a tree shrew
was a rather unsuccessful cross between a squirrel and a rat, and you would be amazed and possibly indignant if somebody suggested that you were looking at a relative of yours, but the tree shrew
is related to the great group of primates which includes everything from bushbabies to apes, from Aborigines to Members of Parliament. It is, in fact, from such a lowly creature as the tree shrew
that the whole primate group has evolved, but when you see them fussing around the tree tops, chattering shrilly at each other, or scrunching up beetles with all the aplomb of a debutante engulfing
ortolans, there appears to be no shadow on its conscience.

Another night-time prowler was the slow loris, which looks somewhat like a miniature, silver-pink teddy bear. Its enormous, owl-like eyes stare wildly through the branches as though the creature
were on the borders of an acute and sustained nervous breakdown. This effect is enhanced by the fact that it has a dark rim of fur round each eye which makes it look as though it is suffering from
two permanent black eyes. Normally the loris moves with all the speed and bounce of an elderly and excessively corpulent clergyman suffering from angina pectoris and in-growing toe-nails. This slow
movement is, of course, useful to him in capturing his prey, but it is deceiving, for try to catch a loris up a tree and he will put on a turn of speed that is amazing. After the loris the
binturongs would appear, strange creatures that look like badly made hearth rugs, with tufted ears and rather curious, oriental looking eyes. They would plod their way through the branches in a
somnambulistic sort of way, making use of their prehensile tails as an anchor every time they stopped. Anything is grist to the binturong’s mill – fruit, unripe nuts, tree frogs, baby
birds or eggs – all are engulfed with great relish – The binturong is another of those unfortunate animals that the Chinese have decided possesses magical properties, and so its blood,
bones and internal organs are in great demand; in consequence, this placid, harmless and completely unmagical creature is on the decrease throughout its range.

Once the whole forest is up and about, then the last but by no means the least of the animals makes its appearance: the elephant. Throughout the hot day they have been musing and swaying in some
cool recess of the forest, but now they rouse themselves and drift to their feeding grounds like great grey shadows, their bodies moving through the undergrowth so gently that the only sound you
can hear is the faintest whisper of leaves, as though caused by a tiny breeze. Sometimes, in fact, a herd of elephants will move so cautiously and silently through the tangled undergrowth that you
are only aware of their presence by the one noise over which they have no control – the loud, prolonged and sonorous rumbling of their tummies. Elephants adore water, and even the elderly and
more sedate matriarchs and patriarchs of herds will get positively skittish when there is any water around.

We watched and filmed an old female with her baby which, towards evening, she had brought down to a stream in order to cool off. She stepped into the shallow water and paused, musing to herself,
as if to test the temperature of the water; then she waded out and slowly lowered herself until she was lying down. The baby, who had had a certain difficulty in negotiating the steep bank of the
stream, arrived at the water’s edge and gave a ridiculous squeak of delight, like the noise of a small, falsetto tin bugle. He then hurled himself into the stream and rushed across to where
his mother was lying, placidly squirting water over her head and back. To the female, of course, the water was not deep, but the baby was well out of his depth; this, however, did not deter him in
the slightest. He just disappeared beneath the surface of the water and used his trunk like a periscope. Having reached his mother’s side, he scrambled out on to her wet flank, giving little
squeals of pleasure to himself. He then evolved a game which I could only presume to be the elephant equivalent of playing submarines. Disappearing beneath the water, he circled round and round his
mother, attacking her from different angles under the surface until she reached down into the water with her trunk and hauled him up by his ear. We watched them for an hour or so, until it grew too
dark to see, and the baby was still indulging in his underwater game with undiminished vigour.

By the time dawn comes to the forest, in a blaze of scarlet, gold and blue stripes, most of the nocturnal animals have retreated to holes in trees or caves, and now the diurnal animals take
over. There is a great, echoing burst of bird song, and in the morning dew the cicadas start zithering experimentally, getting in trim for the great orchestral effort that they will produce during
the heat of the day. Then the forest suddenly rings with its most characteristic noise – the wild, exuberant cries of the gibbons. These singers in the trees are found everywhere, and at all
times of the day you can hear their joyous, whooping cries that rise to a crescendo and then trail away into a hysterical giggle. The biggest of the gibbon family is the siamang, a huge black ape
whose throat, when he sings, swells up to the size of a small grapefruit and produces the most astonishingly resonant volume of sound.