It was in this area that an incident happened that took me back to my childhood in Greece, when I used to go out with the fishermen. I was swimming down a canyon between the multi-coloured pieces of coral, when I came to an open, sandy area where I arrived simultaneously with an octopus, with tentacles some four feet long, who had just decided to shift from one area of the reef to another. When he saw me, he increased speed across the sand, looking unpleasantly like a hunchback with a trailing cloak of tentacles. He could not make it to the reef proper, so he took refuge in a large coral head in the middle of a sandy area. I swam over to see what he was up to, and found that he had wedged himself, or rather squished himself, into a small crevice and had slitted his eyes, as octopus do when in danger, for the eyes are very obvious otherwise. His skin was flashing and blushing, as octopus always do in moments of stress, in a startling variety of colours, including peacock blues and greens. Instead of making him more obvious, this firework display of colours helped him to merge in with his colourful background. I was within three or four feet of him, wondering if I could flush him out, when a trident slid down over my shoulder and plunged into the octopus, which immediately became a writhing, Medusa head of tentacles. Great gouts of black ink stained the water as Abel, who had manoeuvred the boat up behind me, triumphantly hauled the wriggling octopus on board.
Having a dying octopus spouting ink pulled up nearly into my face was not the pleasantest memory I had of the reef, which is a ravishing place, indescribably beautiful and complex. At present, it is exploited and over-fished; shells are collected for sale and the coral is dynamited so that bits may be carried home by triumphant tourists, pathetic pieces of once-beautiful living organisms to collect dust on some distant mantelpiece. It is to be hoped that the Mauritian Government will follow the enlightened lead of other Governments, such as those of the Seychelles and Tanzania, and declare its reefs Marine National Parks so that their beauty may be a joy for ever to visitors and to Mauritians alike; for the reef is an elixir that is within reach of all.
As I write this, the sky outside is grey and a fine snow is falling, but I have only to close my eyes and I can recall the splendours of the reef and they warm and cheer me.
In the flower garden one day I suddenly came upon a huge concourse of Leaf fish. There must have been a couple of thousand of them, spread over an area of fifty or sixty square feet. I swam with them for half an hour and it was unforgettable; one moment it was like being in a forest of green leaves greeting the spring, the next like floating through bits of Mediterranean-blue sky that had miraculously fallen into the sea in the shape of fish. At length, drugged and dazzled, I found a smooth coral head free from urchins and Scorpion fish and sat on it in two feet of water. I took off my mask and there, in the distance, were the mountains of Mauritius humped and shouldering their way to the horizon, like uneasy limbs under a bed covering of green forest and patchwork quilt of sugar cane with here an elbow and there a knee of hill sticking up. Across this were looped no less than five rainbows. I decided I liked Mauritius very much indeed.
6. Boa-Hunt
The boat thrust its way across the blue hummocks of waves and against the yellow and green dawn sky the carapace of Round Island loomed up, grim and forbidding.
A year had passed and we had come this time for four days, so we were well equipped for that most inhospitable spot. As well as the normal camping equipment, we had jerry cans of precious water and plenty of food. On an island where you might be trapped by sudden bad weather, it was essential that you took enough food and water to provide for this eventuality. However, the sheer weight and quantity of our supplies dictated that our camp should be somewhat near the landing rock, far enough away as to avoid heavy seas but not so far that it was impossible to lug our equipment there.
The weather was kind to us and the landing of our supplies and equipment was not as hazardous as it might have been, but the transporting of the stuff two or three hundred feet to the cleft in the rocks we had chosen for a camp site proved very exhausting, even though the sun was only just above the horizon well hidden by the island’s bulk. Cursing and sweating, we lugged the tent and foodstuffs, and heavy jerry cans of water, up through the rocks, thinking what fools we were to embark on such an enterprise. It was not the only time during our stay on the island that this thought occurred to us.
We had great difficulty in pitching the tent, for in that terrain the ground was either too hard to allow even a steel spike to be driven in, or else the tuff splintered and crumbled to dust. Eventually, exhausted, we had the tent pitched after a fashion. It was precariously tied to jagged projections of tuff which we hoped would hold in a high wind, but the tent gave us that much-needed commodity on Round Island – shade. Until one has spent all day under a blistering sun in a sun-baked terrain, one does not appreciate that even the shade cast by a toy umbrella can be as welcome as a deep, cool cave. Nor does one realise that even hot water to drink is better than no water at all.
Having seen us safely installed and made sure that we knew how to use the portable radio – our only link with the outside world – Wahab went back to the good ship Sphyrna which means Hammer-head shark. Soon they were a mere speck against the sea, heading far past Gunner’s Quoin along towards the blurred, blue, distant mountains of Mauritius. By the time we had finished rearranging the jerry cans, to our surprise we were very tired and so, after a meagre supper, for the heat, we found, took our appetite away, we went to bed just after sunset.
Next morning, we were up before dawn and made our way up to the old Screw pine or vacoa, known as the picnic tree, since it is the first shade-giving tree of consequence you come to on your climb up from the landing stage, and so it is there that everyone picnics. From here, we decided to make our way in a straight line, or as straight a line as is possible on Round Island, through the palm belt, northwards. We would work fifty feet or so apart, zig-zagging from Latania palm to Latania palm, in which, reputedly, the boas lived, and make a thorough search of each one. When it got too hot, we intended to drop down fifty feet and make our way back to camp. By this means, we hoped to have examined every likely palm in a hundred-foot strip for about half a mile’s length. To anyone who does not think this sounds like a very arduous undertaking, may I suggest they go out to Round Island and try it.
For the first hour, we searched assiduously. We were constantly having false alarms when we found placid and friendly Telfair’s skinks or bushbaby-eyed Gunther’s geckos in the axil of the palm leaves – a skink or gecko’s tail, when that is all you can see, looks very like a snake at first glance. It was nice to notice, however, that the Telfair’s population had increased by leaps and bounds since the previous year and, more important, the Gunther’s gecko population had increased as well. Everywhere there were fat babies in evidence.
We understood from everyone who had seen or captured one of the boas that the commoner of the two species – if you can call an estimated population of seventy-five common – could be found lurking in the axil of the leaves of the Latania palm. To those who had never seen a Latania, these seemed concise, straight-forward instructions, nothing could have been simpler. The Latanias, however, make life very difficult. The fronds grow on a thick, straight stalk that ends in something like a giant green fan. The stalk has all the resilience of cast iron and the fan part appears to be manufactured out of thick and indestructible green plastic. The tip of the fan is armed with tiny spikes, sharp enough to put out one’s eye. So looking for the Round Island boa, one had to approach a Latania, part the fronds and push one’s face into the interior of the palm until one could see the axils of the leaves, exerting considerable pressure on the leaves and hoping meanwhile that the stalk did not slip through one’s sweaty hand and allow the fan to lacerate or blind one.
The other species, the Burrowing boa, is fossorial and to find this one had to dig hopefully, like a pig in an oak wood, into the shallow area of earth trapped round the base of each palm. On the face of it, this
too should have proved easy but it was not, for the dead leaves of the Latania, though they turned brown and fell earthwards, still remained attached by their stalks to the parent tree; thus they formed a sort of resilient brown tent of fan-shaped leaves round the base of each tree, and these had to be moved aside before one could grub in the earth they concealed. To say that this was thirst-and sweat-provoking work was an understatement; you were bathed in perspiration and yet your body glowed with heat, and your tongue appeared to have taken up residence in a cave composed of very old and very dry chamois leather. The tuff grew so hot that you could have coddled an egg on it. From above, the heat hit you like a physical blow, while it rebounded from the tuff, and hit you in the face with a blast like opening a foundry oven. We lost more moisture in sweat walking a hundred yards than one would have thought the body could contain.
The exhausting part was that you were never on the level. Either you were straining your muscles to climb uphill, or straining them against the downward slope. Even when you walked in a straight line, you felt you were walking with one leg shorter than the other. We searched for two hours and then sat down to have a much-needed drink and an orange apiece. We found, as we got more used to hunting on Round Island, that oranges were better value to take with you than the heavy bottles of water, for they provided you with moisture as well as food, and left your clogged mouth feeling clean.
By now, the sun had crept up and peered over the carapace of the island, glowering down at us like the monstrous red-hot eye of some giant dragon. We knew that it would soon be really too hot to continue our search. We moved downhill some fifty feet and started back to camp, searching as we went. I parted the leaves of a Latania for what seemed like the thousandth time, and saw the tail of what I thought was a Telfair’s skink. I was about to move along to the next palm, when I thought I had better make sure it was a Telfair’s. I had a brief struggle with the leaves and shifted my vantage point.
It was not a Telfair’s but a fully-grown and very beautiful Round Island boa, which lay coiled around the Latania stems where the bases formed a sort of cup round the palm’s trunk. From my viewpoint, I could see him lying there, languid and unafraid. The only portion of him I could catch hold of was the extreme end of his tail. This struck me as being a bad policy from every point of view. For one thing the tail was slender and, although unlikely to snap, could bruise more easily than the rest of his length. For another, if I grabbed him by the tail, he might bite me. This was no problem as far as I was concerned, as his mouth was tiny, but I did not want to risk breaking off some of his fish-bone-like teeth in my hand, which could then easily lead to his getting canker of the mouth. He was too valuable to risk anything like that. So, rather than move my position and risk disturbing him and maybe losing my find I called John who was upside down, like a dabbling duck, in the depths of the Latania farther down the hill.
‘John,’ I shouted, ‘I’ve got a snake here, come and give a hand.’
He emerged, scratched, tousled and perspiring, his spectacles misted over, from the depths of his palm. He wiped his brow.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy with the one hundred and fifty I’ve got here.’
‘Don’t be a nincompoop,’ I said. ‘I’m not joking.’
‘Seriously?’ said John, and then he ran towards me, stumbling and slipping on the tuff, and arrived panting.
‘Go round to the other side of the palm and grab him,’ I instructed. ‘That’s where his head is. And don’t let him bite you, I don’t want him to get canker of the mouth.’
With me acting as the rear guard, John parted the fronds, found out where the snake’s head was deployed, and then simply inserted a long arm, picked him up by the back of the neck, gently disentangled him from the Latania leaves, and drew him out.
He was about three feet long; basically a pale olive-green colour, with a speckling of dull yellow towards the tail. The head was long and narrow, almost leaf-shaped. Altogether, he did not look very boa-like.
To say that we were exuberant was an understatement. To have captured one of the rarest snakes in the world in such difficult terrain, after only a two-hour search, was incredible; to have captured it, as it were, with its full co-operation, was even more extraordinary. We went back to our hunting with redoubled zeal. However, the sun rose higher and higher, and grew hotter and hotter, and the Latanias seemed tougher and tougher to wrestle with, so eventually we went back to camp and the luxury of fresh coconut milk, water melon, and camp beds that bucked like unbroken horses on the uneven terrain. In what we referred to, with some sarcasm, as the cool of the evening, when the temperature had dropped to a mere 85°F and you could sit on the exposed tuff without burning yourself, we did another sweep through the Latanias, but with no success. That night, it rained and the water poured down the sheets of tuff and through our tent so that, lying in our camp beds, it felt as if one were afloat on one of the less salubrious canals of Venice.
We were up before sunrise and just as the sky was turning greeny gold, we made our first sweep through the palm belt. I was much cooler that morning, for there had been a stiff breeze blowing, flecking the blue sea with white petals of foam and drawing great, flat flotillas of cloud across the sky which frequently masked the sun and gave us a few minutes’ respite. We searched for three hours but although we saw lots of lizards, there were no snakes. When we stopped for a rest and an orange, John expounded a theory.
‘You know, there is plenty for them to eat,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen no end of green geckos and baby skinks, which make ideal food.’
‘There is certainly no shortage of food,’ I said.
‘Well, why are they so rare?’ persisted John.
‘Probably because they find it so hard to find each other in these damn Latanias,’ I said bitterly.
‘I think it’s because they are preyed upon when they are young.’
‘Preyed upon? What by?’
‘Telfair’s skinks. I’ve been watching the big ones and you know they eat anything from chewing gum to orange peel. Well, I saw a Telfair’s just now, eating quite a large Bojeri skink. The snakes can’t be all that big when they are born. A fully-grown Telfair’s is a formidable beast, and they are everywhere.’
‘You’re probably right, it hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘In fact,’ said John, ‘to help the snake in its wild state, it might be necessary to catch up four or five hundred Telfair’s and transport them to Gunner’s Quoin or Flat Island.’
‘Now you are going too far,’ I said, hopefully burying my orange pips in some loose tuff. ‘You know there are two things that make all conservationists as hysterical as maiden aunts when they are suggested. One is captive breeding and the other is translocation of species.’
‘Well, I think it would help the boa,’ said John, stubbornly.
‘It probably would. When we get our teeth really stuck into the Round Island problem, we’ll suggest it. Meanwhile, let’s have another tilt at these Latanias.’
Half an hour later, John’s theory had some evidence to strengthen it. He had called me over to help him with a group of Latanias which were growing tightly together and which he found he was unable to explore single-handed. While I held the fresh leaves back, he grubbed around at the base of the palm among the dead fronds. He uprooted one of these, over which the rains had plastered a layer of tuff, and, suddenly, out fell what at first sight I took to be a large centipede, which lay, writhing, on the ground. Next moment, I realised it was a bright brick-red and yellow baby snake, some twelve inches long and as thick as a pencil. It was its astonishing colour that had me think it was a centipede, for I was unprepared for the juvenile colouration being so very vivid in contrast to the sober adult. We gathered up the baby in triumph, placed it tenderly in a cloth bag, and stumbled back to camp with it.
‘There you are,’ panted John, as we slipped and slithered over Round Island’s back. ‘This little chap would have been helpless against the b
ig Telfairs’s, and it would have just made a nice meal for one of them too.’
That night, it not only rained heavily but the wind blew so hard that we were in danger of losing the tent altogether. It was a most uncomfortable night, and we were glad when the dawn came. We did our normal, routine hunt through the Latanias and returned at eleven o’clock. The sea had become considerably rougher and the sky was clouded over. The wind was coming in sudden vehement gusts, and it looked as if we were in for more rain before the day was out. During the course of lunch, I happened to stick my head outside the tent when I saw, to my astonishment, the good shipSphyrna gallantly ploughing her way towards us, making heavy weather, for the sea was now quite rough. We speculated on what curious mission she could be involved in such inclement weather; then it gradually became obvious that she was heading for Round Island. We wondered what vital supplies Wahab could be sending us. It never occurred to us that it might be the weather itself that was the reason for the boat’s hasty visit. When she got close to the landing rock and had put her anchor down, the captain hailed us.
‘Cyclone,’ he shouted. ‘Force two warning in Mauritius. I’ve come to take you back, you must hurry.’
The idea of being marooned for an indeterminate period on Round Island while it underwent a cyclone of whatever magnitude was so unappealing that we hardly needed the captain’s exhortation to hurry. Never was a camp broken and packed with such speed. Getting everything into the boat and then from the boat into the Sphyrna was an extremely hazardous experience, but eventually we, our gear and our two precious snakes were being buffeted and tossed by the waves on our way to Mauritius.