Part 2 (1/2)
At last things calm down and your eyelids begin to slide thankfully together in the blessed predawn hush, and then, about five minutes later, the c.o.c.kerels finally get it right.
An hour or two later, bleary and rattled, we stood on the waterfront surrounded by our piles of expeditionary baggage and gazed as intrepidly as we could across twenty miles of the roughest, most turbulent seas in the East - the wild and dangerous meeting point of two immense opposing bodies of water, a roiling turmoil of vortices and riptides.
It was like a millpond.
Ripples from distant fis.h.i.+ng boats spread out across the wide sea towards the sh.o.r.e. The early sun shone across it like a sheet.
Lesser frigatebirds and white-bellied sea eagles wheeled serenely above us, according to Mark. They looked like black specks to me.
We were there but Mr Condo was not. After about an hour, however, Kiri turned up to fulfil his regular role of explaining that Mr Condo was not coming, but that he, Kiri, was coming instead, and so was his guitar. And the captain wasn't the actual captain, but was the captain's father. And we were going in a different boat. The good news was that it was definitely Komodo we would be going to and the trip should only take about four hours.
The boat was quite a smart twenty-three-foot fis.h.i.+ng vessel called the Raodah, and the entire complement, once we were all loaded and under way, consisted of the three of us, Kiri, the captain's father, two small boys aged about twelve who ran the boat, and four chickens.
The day was calm and delightful. The two boys scampered about the boat like cats, rapidly unfurling and raising the sails whenever there was a whisper of wind, then lowering them again, starting the engine and falling asleep whenever the wind died. For once there was nothing we had to do and nothing we could do, so we lounged around on the deck watching the sea go by, watching the crested terns and sea eagles that flew over us, and watching the flying fish that swarmed occasionally round the boat.
The four chickens sat in the prow of the boat and watched us.
One of the more disturbing aspects of travel in remote areas is the necessity of taking your food with you in non-perishable form. For Westerners who are used to getting their chickens wrapped in polythene from the supermarket it is an uncomfortable experience to share a long ride on a small boat with four live chickens who are eyeing you with a deep and dreadful suspicion which you are in no position to allay.
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural and pleasant life than one raised on a. battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
As it happened we would not be eating all four of them ourselves. Whichever G.o.d it is in the complicated Hindu pantheon who has the lowly task of determining the fate of chickens was obviously in a rumbustious mood that day and was planning a little havoc of his own.
And then at last the island of Komodo was ahead of us, creeping slowly towards us from the horizon. The colour of the sea around the boat was changing from the heavy, inky black it had been for the last few hours to a much lighter, translucent blue, but the island itself seemed, perhaps to our impressionable senses, to be a dark and sombre ma.s.s looming over the water.
As it approached, its gloomy form gradually resolved into great serrated heaps of rocks and, behind them, heavy undulating hills. Closer still we could begin to make out the details of the vegetation. There were palm trees, but in meagre numbers. They were stuck sporadically across the brows of the hills, as if the island had spines, or as if someone had chucked little darts into the hills. It reminded me of the ill.u.s.tration from Gulliver's Travels, in which Gulliver has been tethered to the ground by the Lilliputians, and has dozens of tiny Lilliputian spears sticking into him.
The images that the island presented to the imagination were very hard to avoid. The rocky outcrops took on the shape of ma.s.sive triangular teeth, and the dark and moody grey brown hills undulated like the heavy folds of a lizard's skin. I knew that if I were a mariner in unknown waters, the first thing I would write on my charts at this moment would be 'Here be dragons'.
But the harder I looked at the island as it crept past our starboard bow, and the harder I tried to filter out the promptings of a suggestible imagination, the more the images nevertheless insisted themselves upon me. The ridge of a hill that stretched in a thick folding shape down into the water, heavily wrinkled round its folds, had the contours of a lizard's leg - not in the actual shape, of course, but in the natural interplay of its contours, and in the heavy thickness of its textures.
This was the first time that I had such an impression, but several times during the subsequent trips that we made during this year the same feeling crept up on me: each new type of terrain we encountered in different parts of the world would seem to have a particular palette of colours, textures, shapes and contours which made it characteristically itself; and the forms of life that you would find in that terrain would often seem to be drawn from that same distinctive palette. There are obvious mechanisms we know about to account for .some of this, of course: for many creatures camouflage is a survival mechanism, and evolution will select in its favour. But the scale on which these intuited, perhaps half-imagined, correspondences seem to occur is much larger and more general than that.
We are currently beginning to arrive at a lot of new ideas about the way that shapes emerge in nature, and it is not impossible to imagine that as we discover more about fractal geometry, the 'strange attractors' which lie at the heart of newly emerging theories of chaos, and the way in which the mathematics of growth and erosion interact, we may discover that these apparent echoes of shape and texture are not entirely fanciful or coincidental. Maybe.
I suggested something along these lines to Mark and he said I was being absurd. Since he was looking at exactly the same landscape as I was, I have to allow that it might all simply have been my imagination, half-baked as it was in the Indonesian sun.
We moored at a long, rickety, wooden jetty that stuck out from the middle of a wide pale beach. At the landward end the jetty was surmounted by an archway, nailed to the top of which was a wooden board which welcomed us to Komodo, and therefore served slightly to diminish our sense of intrepidness.
The moment we pa.s.sed under the archway there was suddenly a strong smell. You had to go through it to get the smell. Until you'd been through the archway you hadn't arrived and you didn't get the strong, thick, musty, smell of Komodo.
The next blow to our sense of intrepidness was the rather neatly laid out path. This led from the end of the jetty parallel to the sh.o.r.e towards the next and major blow to our sense of intrepidness, which was a visitors' village.
This was a group of fairly ramshackle wooden buildings: an administration centre from which the island (which is a wildlife reserve) is run, a cafeteria terrace, and a small museum. Behind these, ranged around the inside of a steep semi-circular slope were about half a dozen visitors' huts - on stilts.
It was about lunchtime, and there were nearly a dozen people sitting in the cafeteria eating noodles and drinking 7-Up; Americans, Dutch, you name it. Where had they come from? How had they got here? What was going on?
Outside the administration but was a wooden sign with regulations all over it, such as 'Report to National Park office', 'Travel outside visitors' centre only with guards', 'Wear pants and shoes', and 'Watch for snakes'.
Lying on the ground underneath this was a small stuffed dragon. I say small, because it was only about four feet long. It had been modelled in completely spreadeagled posture, lying flat on the ground with its forelimbs stretched out in front and its back limbs lying alongside its long tapering tail. I was a little startled to see it for a moment, but then went up to have a look at it.
It opened its eyes and had a look at me.
I rocketed backwards with a yell of astonishment, which provoked barks of derisive laughter from the terrace.
'It's just a dragon,' called out an American girl.
I went over.
'Have you all been here long? I asked.
'Oh, hours,' she said. 'We came over on the ferry from Labuan Bajo. Done the dragons. Bored with them. The food's terrible.'
'What ferry? I asked.
'Comes over most days.'
'Oh. Oh, I see. From Labuan Bajo?
'You have to go and sign the visitors' book in the office,' she said, pointing at it.
Rather ruffled, I went and joined Mark and Gaynor.
'This isn't at all what I expected,' said Mark, standing there in the middle of our pile of intrepid baggage, holding the four chickens. 'Did we need to bring these? he asked Kiri.
Kid said that it was always a good idea to bring chickens for the kitchen. Otherwise we'd just have to eat fish and noodles.
'I think I prefer fish,' said Gaynor, Kid explained that she was wrong and that she preferred chicken to fish. Westerners, he explained, preferred chicken. It was well known. Fish was only cheap food for peasants. We would be eating chicken which was s.e.xy and which we preferred.
He took the chickens, which were tethered together with a long piece of string, put them down by our baggage and ushered us up the steps to the park office, where one of the park guards gave us forms and a pencil. just as we were starting to fill them in, giving details of our pa.s.sport numbers, date, country and town of birth and so on, there was a sudden commotion outside.
At first we paid it no mind, wrestling as we were to remember our mothers' maiden names, and trying to work out who to elect as next of kin, but the racket outside increased, and we suddenly realised that it was the sound of distressed chickens. Our chickens.
We rushed outside. The stuffed dragon was attacking our chickens. It had one of them in its mouth and was shaking it, but as soon as it saw us and others closing in, it scurried rapidly round the corner of the building and off across the clearing behind in a cloud of dust, dragging the other distraught chickens tumbling along in the dust behind it, still tethered together with the string and screeching.
After the dragon had put about thirty yards between it and us it paused, and with a vicious jerk of its head bit through the string, releasing the other three chickens which scrambled off towards the trees, shrieking and screaming and running in ever decreasing circles as park guards careered after them trying to round them up. The dragon, relieved of its excess chickens, galloped off into thick undergrowth.
With a lot of 'after you', 'no, after you', we ran carefully towards where it had disappeared and arrived breathless and a little nervous. We peered in.
The undergrowth covered a large bank, and the dragon had crawled up the bank and stopped. The thick vegetation prevented us getting closer than a yard from the thing, but we weren't trying terribly hard It lay there quite still. Protruding from between its jaws was the back end of the chicken, its scrawny legs quietly working the air. The dragon lizard watched us unconcernedly with the one eye that was turned towards us, a round, dark brown eye.
There is something profoundly disturbing about watching an eye that is watching you, particularly when the eye that is watching you is almost the same size as your eye, and the thing it is watching you out of is a lizard. The lizard's blink was also disturbing. It wasn't the normal rapid reflex movement that you expect from a lizard, but a slow considered blink which made you feel that it was thinking about what it was doing.
The back end of the chicken struggled feebly for a moment, and the dragon chomped its jaw a little to let the chicken's struggles push it further down its throat. This happened a couple more times, until there was only one scrawny chicken foot still sticking ridiculously out of the creature's mouth. Otherwise it did not move. It simply watched us. In the end it was us that slunk away, trembling with an inexplicable cold horror.
Why? we wondered as we sat in the terrace cafeteria and tried to calm ourselves with 7-Up. The three of us were sitting ashen faced as if we had just witnessed a foul and malignant murder.
At least if we had been watching a murder the murderer wouldn't have been looking us impa.s.sively in the eye as he did it. Maybe it was the feeling of cold unflinching arrogance that so disturbed us. But whatever malign emotions we tried to pin on to the lizard, we knew that they weren't the lizard's emotions at all, only ours. The lizard was simply going about its lizardly business in a simple, straightforward lizardly way. It didn't know anything about the horror, the guilt, the shame, the ugliness that we, uniquely guilty and ashamed animals, were trying to foist on it. So we got it all straight back at us, as if reflected in the mirror of its single unwavering and disinterested eye.
Subdued with the thought that we had somehow been horrified by our own reflection, we sat quietly and waited for lunch.