Part 6 (1/2)

It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall, while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again. Generally she won't be in a position to impale anyone she doesn't like the look of on a three foot horn, but in other respects it was similar.

The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be. It was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding.

At about forty yards' distance, the rhinoceros suddenly stopped eating and looked up. It turned slowly to look at us, and regarded us with grave suspicion while we tried very hard to look like the smallest and most inoffensive animal we could possibly be. It watched us carefully but without apparent comprehension, its small black eyes peering dully at us from either side of its horn. You can't help but try and follow an animal's thought processes, and you can't help, when faced with an animal like a three ton rhinoceros with nasal pa.s.sages bigger than its brain, but fail.

The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven't got a sense of smell - we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there's a gas leak, but generally it's all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, 'Don't wash - I'm coming home,' we are simply bemused and almost think of it as deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world which declares itself primarily to the sense of smells. It's not a world our mental processors can resolve - or, at least, they are no longer practised in resolving it. For a great many animals, however, smell is the chief of the senses. It tells them what is good to eat and what is not (we go by what the packet tells us and the sell-by date). It guides them towards food that isn't within line of sight (we already know where the shops are). It works at night (we turn on the light). It tells them of the presence and state of mind of other animals (we use language). It also tells them what other animals have been in the vicinity and doing what in the last day or two (we simply don't know, unless they've left a note). Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their faeces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is the sort of note we would not appreciate being left.

When we smell something slightly unexpected, if we can't immediately make sense of it and it isn't particularly bothersome, we simply ignore it, and this is probably equivalent to the rhino's reaction to seeing us. It appeared not to make any particular decision about us, but merely to forget that it had a decision to make. The gra.s.s presented it with something infinitely richer and more interesting to its senses, and the animal returned to cropping it.

We crept on closer. Eventually we got to within about twenty-five yards, and Charles signalled us to stop. We were close enough. Quite close enough. We were in fact astoundingly close to it.

The animal measured about six feet high at its shoulders, and sloped down gradually towards its hindquarters and its rear legs, which were chubby with muscle. The sheer immensity of every part of it exercised a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, huge muscles moved easily under its heavy skin like Volkswagens parking.

The noise of our cameras seemed to distract it and it looked up again, but not in our direction. It appeared not to know what to think about this, and after a while returned to its grazing.

The light breeze that was blowing towards us began to s.h.i.+ft its direction, and we s.h.i.+fted with it, which brought us round more to the front of the rhino. This seemed to us, in our world dominated by vision, to be an odd thing to do, but so long as the rhino could not smell us, it could take or leave what we looked like. It then turned slightly towards us itself, so that we were suddenly crouched in full. view of the beast. It seemed to chew a little more thoughtfully, but for a while paid us no more mind than that. We watched quietly for fully three or four minutes, and even the sound of our cameras ceased to bother the animal. After a few minutes we became a little more careless about noise, and started to talk to each other about our reactions, and now the rhino became a little more restive and uneasy. It stopped grazing, lifted its head and looked at us steadily for about a minute, still uncertain what to do.

Again, I imagine myself, sitting here in my study writing this through the afternoon and gradually realising that a slight smell I had noticed earlier is still there, and beginning to wonder if I should start to look for other clues as to what it could be. I would start to look for something, something I could see: a bottle of something that's fallen over, or something electrical that's overheating. The smell is simply the clue that there's something I should look for.

For the rhino, the sight of us was simply a clue that there was something he should sniff for, and he began to sniff the air more carefully, and to move around in a slow careful arc. At that moment the wind began to move around and gave us away completely. The rhino snapped to attention, turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.

We had seen our northern white rhinoceros, and it was time to go home.

The next day Charles flew us back across the ostrich skin savannah to Bunia airport where we were due once more to pick up a missionary flight returning to Nairobi. The plane was already there waiting and a representative from the airline a.s.sured us, against the evidence of all our previous experience, that there would be no problems, we could go straight to the plane. Then, a few minutes later we were told that we would just have to go quickly to the immigration office. We could leave our bags. We went to the immigration office, where we were told that we should bring our bags. We brought our bags. Expensive looking camera equipment.

We were then confronted by a large Zairois official in a natty blue suit whom we had noticed earlier hanging around watching us take our baggage out of Charles's plane. I had had the feeling then that he was sizing us up for something.

He examined our pa.s.sports for a goodish long time before acknowledging our presence at all, then at last he looked up at us, and a wide smile crept slowly across his face.

'You entered the country,' he asked, 'at Bukavu?

In fact he said it in French, so we made a bit of a meal of understanding him, which was something that experience had taught us to do. Eventually we admitted that, insofar as we had understood the question, yes, we had entered at Bukavu.

'Then,' he said, quietly, triumphantly, 'you must leave from Bukavu.'

He made no move to give us back our pa.s.sports.

We looked at him blankly.

He explained slowly. Tourists, he said, had to leave the country from the same port by which they had entered. Smile.

We utterly failed to understand what he had said. This was almost true anyway. It was the most preposterous invention. He still held on to our pa.s.sports. Next to him a young girl was sitting, studiously copying down copious information from other visitors' pa.s.sports, information that would almost certainly never see the light of day again.

We stood and argued while our plane sat out on the Tarmac 'waiting to take off to Nairobi, but the official simply sat and held our pa.s.sports. We knew it was nonsense. He knew we knew it was nonsense. That was clearly part of the pleasure of it. He smiled at us again, gave us a slow contented shrug, and idly brushed a bit of fluff off the sleeve of the natty blue suit towards the cost of which he clearly expected a major contribution.

On the wall above him, gazing seriously into the middle distance from a battered frame, stood the figure of President Mobuto, resplendent in his leopardskin pillbox hat.

Heartbeats in the Night

If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles round the world and filled it with birds then you'd be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on G.o.d's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

It is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at. Mountains and clouds jumbled on top of each other, immense rivers of ice cracking their way millimetre by millimetre through the ravines, cataracts thundering down into the narrow green valleys below, it all s.h.i.+nes so luminously in the magically clear light of New Zealand that to eyes which are accustomed to the grimier air of most of the western world it seems too vivid to be real.

When Captain Cook saw it from the sea in 1773 he recorded that 'inland as far as the eye can see the peaks are crowded together as to scarcely admit any valleys between them'. The great forked valleys have been carved out by glaciers over millions of years, and many are flooded by the sea for many miles inland.

Some of the cliff faces drop hundreds of feet sheer into the water, and continue sheer for hundreds of feet below it. It still has the appearance of a work in progress. Despite relentless las.h.i.+ng by the wind and rain it is sharp and jagged in its immensity.

Much of it has still not been explored at ground level. The only roads that approach the Fiordland National Park peter out quickly in the foothills, and most visiting tourists only ever explore the fringe scenery. A few backpackers plunge further in, and very, very few experienced campers try to get anywhere near the heart of it. Looking out across its serrated ma.s.ses and its impossibly deep ravines, the very idea of trying to cross it on foot seems ludicrous, and most serious exploration is of small local pockets, reached by helicopter, which is how we came to it.

Bill Black is said to be one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the world, and he needs to be. He sits like a cuddly old curmudgeon hunched over his joystick and chews gum slowly and continuously as he flies his helicopter directly at sheer cliff faces to see if you'll scream. Just as the helicopter seems about to smash itself against the rock wall an updraught catches it and wafts it impossibly up and over the top of the ridge which then falls away again precipitously on the other side, leaving us swinging out over a void. The valley lurches sickeningly away beneath us and we drop down a few feet, twisting to face up the next ravine as we do so, as if we are being swung by a giant on the end of an immense rubber rope.

The helicopter puts its nose down and goes thrumming its way along the ravine wall. We startle a couple of birds that scatter up into the air way ahead of us, flying with fast sharp wing beats. Mark quickly scrabbles under his seat for his binoculars.

'Keas!' he says. I nod but only very slightly. My head already has quite enough contrary motions to contend with.

'They're mountain parrots,' says Mark. 'Very intelligent birds with long curved beaks. They can rip the windscreen wipers off cars and often do.'

I'm always startled by the speed with which Mark is able to recognise birds he's never seen before, even when they're just a speck in the distance.

'The wing beat is very distinctive,' he explains. 'But it would be even easier to identify them if we weren't in a helicopter with all this noise. It's one of those birds which very helpfully calls out its own name when it's flying. Kea! Kea! Kea! Birdwatchers love them for that. It would be great if the Pallas's gra.s.shopper warbler would learn the same trick. Make warbler identification a lot easier.' He follows them for a few seconds more, until they round a large outcrop and disappear from view. He puts down his binoculars. They are not what we have come to look for.

'Interesting birds, though, with some odd habits. Very fussy about getting the design of their nests right. There was one kea nest that was found which the birds had started to build in 1958. In 1965 they were still sorting it out and adding bits to it but hadn't actually moved in yet. Bit like you in that respect.'

As we reach the narrow end of the ravine we pause briefly a few yards from a cataract cras.h.i.+ng down its sides to fill the river hundreds of feet beneath us. We peer out at it from our floating gla.s.s bubble and I feel suddenly like a visitor from another planet, descending from the sky to study the minutiae of an alien world. I also feel sick but decide to keep this information to myself.

With a slight shrug Bill heaves the helicopter way up out of the ravine and into the clear air again. The sheer immensity of the volumes of rock and s.p.a.ce that turn easily around us continually overwhelms the spatial processors of the brain. And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

We are skimming over the tops of glaciers. The sudden splurge of light blinds us for a moment, but when the light coalesces into solid shapes they are like shapes from dreams. Great top-heavy towers resembling the deformed torsos of giants; huge sculpted caves and arches; and here and there the cracked and splayed remains of what looks like a number of Gothic cathedrals dropped from a considerable height: but all is snow and ice. It's as if the ghosts of Salvador Dali and Henry Moore come here at night with the elements and play.

I have the instinctive reaction of Western man when confronted with the sublimely incomprehensible: I grab my camera and start to photograph it. I feel I'll be able to cope with it all more easily when it's just two square inches of colour on a light box and my chair isn't trying to throw me round the room.

Gaynor, our radio producer, thrusts a microphone at me and asks me to describe what we're looking at.

What? I say, and gibber slightly.

'More,' she says, 'more!'

I gibber some more. The blades of the helicopter rotor are spinning mere inches from a tower of ice.

She sighs. 'Well, it will probably edit up into something,' she says and turns the tape off' again.

We take one more mind-wrenching turn around the giant ice sculptures and then head off down the ravines once more, which now seem almost domestic by comparison.