Dawn saw us, stiff and half-asleep, crouched under the nets, in a strange green light. The whole forest smelt warm and as redolent as a fruit cake freshly made from an oven. The scents of the earth and moss and leaves, air-warmed and rain-washed, were strong enough but transcending all these subtle olfactory treats was the bugle-blast of the Jak fruit, slung some twenty feet above us. Presently, the sky lightened and soon the bats reappeared, flapping languidly back to their roost. A number had passed us when, to our excitement, several veered away from what could be describedas the flight path and circled over our clearing in a suspicious, but interested manner, before flapping off to the mango tree. Encouraged by this show of interest, we spent the day rigging up more nets among the trees, helped by sudden downpours of rain.
Our two helpers from the Forestry Department, shocked by the fact that we had been out all night during one of the heaviest rainstorms Rodrigues had experienced in eight years, cut poles and banana leaves and constructed for us, well concealed in the bushes, a small banana-leaf hut, something a Congo pigmy might have considered a baronial hall. You cannot, however, look gift huts in the mouth and we decided that, if John left half his legs outside, it would provide us with adequate shelter against the weather.
We took the precaution of visiting the inevitable Chinese stores in Port Mathurin – there did not appear to be any other kind of store – and purchased some plastic sheeting and a few cheap blankets. When dark fell, and the bats had flown past us again, after some considerable argument, it was decided that Ann should go back to the hotel and get a decent night’s sleep and join us again at dawn. When she had departed, John and I made up makeshift beds of plastic sheeting and blankets in our banana-leaf cottage, and arranged our accoutrements – a good supply of sandwiches and chocolate; a Thermos of tea; torches; and a hopeful clutch of small, but delightful, wicker baskets, called Tantes, which are one of Rodrigues’s chief exports, and in which we hoped to incarcerate our catch of bats. We tossed for who should keep the first watch and I won, so I curled up happily and was soon asleep.
When it was my turn to assume sentry duty, I went for a short walk around the clearing to stretch my legs. The earth and vegetation were still saturated with moisture, although it had not rained for some hours, and the air was warm and so water-laden that each breath you took made you feel as though your lungs were absorbing moisture like a sponge. On the fallen and rotting branches that lay about, I found innumerable small, phosphorescent fungi that glowed with a bright greenish-blue light, so that part of the forest floor was illuminated like a city seen from the air at night. I collected some of these twigs and branches, and found that ten or twelve of these glowing fungi produced enough light to be able to read by, providing you kept your light source fairly close to the page.
It was while I was attempting to read by the light of the fungi that I heard a curious sound that seemed to emanate from the forest behind our little hut. It was a fairly loud scrunching noise. It sounded to me, for some bizarre reason, like a matchbox being crushed in the hands of a very powerful man. Reluctantly I was forced to admit that, eccentric though the Rodriguans might be, it was unlikely that they crept about rain-drenched forests at three in the morning crushing matchboxes. Taking a torch, I eased my way out of our fragile hut and went to investigate. This was not quite so intrepid as it may appear, since there is nothing harmful in the animal line in Rodrigues, if you ignore the human animal. I made a careful search of the forest behind the hut, but could find nothing living that looked as though its normal cry resembled the crushing of a matchbox, and met nothing more ferocious than a large moth which seemed intent on trying to fly up the barrel of my torch. I went back to the hut and sat there, thinking. I wondered if we would catch any bats in the morning. Time was running short and I was debating with myself whether to move the nets nearer to the colony’s roosting site. As I was pondering this problem, I was startled by the rasping matchbox noise again, this time very much closer and from several different directions. John, who had woken up, sat up and stared at me.
‘What’s that?’ he enquired, sleepily.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea, but it’s been going on for about ten minutes. I had a look round and I couldn’t see anything.’
Just then, there was a positive battery of rasping noises, and the walls and the roof of the hut started to vibrate.
‘What the hell can it be?’ asked John.
I shone my torch at the banana-leaf roof and saw it was quivering and swaying, as though in an earthquake.
Before we could do anything intelligent, the whole roof gave way and a cascade of giant landsnails, each the size of a small apple, descended upon us. They were fat, glossy and wet, and they gleamed in the torchlight, frothing gently and leaving an interesting pattern of slime on our beds. It took us ten minutes to rid our shelter of these unwanted gastropods and to repair the roof. John curled up and went to sleep again, and I sat wondering if the bats, perhaps, had the same feeling about the Jak fruit as I had, and that this was why we had not met with success. An hour later, John woke up and claimed he was hungry.
‘I think I’ll have a sandwich or two,’ he said, ‘can you bung some over to me?’
I switched on the torch and shone it in the corner of the shelter that acted as our commissariat. To my dismay, I saw that all the giant landsnails we had so painstakingly evicted from our hut had silently and surreptitiously returned, and now formed a glittering, amber pile on our sandwiches, eating the bread with evident relish. They were aided and abetted by a half-grown, grey rat with glossy fur, white paws, and a forest of black whiskers. The snails were not alarmed by the torchlight and continued browsing happily on our supper, but the rat was of a more nervous disposition. As the torch beam hit him, he froze for an instant, only his whiskers quivering and his eyes rolling; then, with a piercing soprano scream, he turned round and rushed straight under the blanket into bed with me. He seemed convinced that this was a haven of safety, and I dislodged him with considerable difficulty by taking my bed to pieces. Having shooed him out of the hut and into the forest, I then retrieved the remainder of the sandwiches from the snails and while John was sorting out the less ragged and more edible ones, I banished the snails once more to the outer edges of the clearing. An hour or so later, John woke up again and claimed himself still hungry.
‘You can’t be still hungry,’ I said, ‘you only had some sandwiches an hour ago.’
‘I only had what the snails had left,’ said John, aggrievedly. ‘Didn’t we have some biscuits? Biscuits and a cup of tea. That would be nice.’
Sighing, I switched on the torch and, to my amazement, found the identical scene in our kitchen area. The snails had oozed their way back and were now feeding on the biscuits, as was my friend, the rat. Once again, as the torchlight hit him, the latter uttered his hysterical scream and dived into bed with me; this time, presumably so that I could give him even greater protection, he tried to climb up inside my shorts. I banished him with some firmness into the forest, hurled the snails after him, and removed the remainder of our food over to John’s side of the hut. I felt it was his turn to get on intimate terms with the rat. By this time, of course, we were so wide awake that we could not get to sleep, so sat and talked in a desultory fashion, waiting for it to get light. Just before dawn, we heard Ann stumbling through the forest towards us.
‘Caught anything?’ she asked when she arrived.
‘No,’ I said, ‘if you discount snails and a rat. But we might get something when it gets lighter.’
Gradually, the sky paled primrose yellow and the light strengthened as we left our snail-eaten hut and moved down to the trees nearer the nets.
‘I can’t understand why they don’t come,’ I said. ‘They must be able to smell that damned Jak fruit in Chicago!’
‘I know,’ said John, ‘what I think is …’
But what he thought was never vouchsafed to us, for he leant forward, peering intently.
‘What’s t
hat?’ he said, pointing. ‘Surely it’s something in the net. Is it a bat?’
We all strained our eyes, staring into the clearing where the mist nets, fine as gossamer, vanished against the trees and shadows.
‘Yes,’ said Ann, excitedly, ‘I can see it. I’m sure it’s a bat.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, ‘but how the hell did he get in there without us knowing?’
At that moment, a bat entered the clearing, did a swift and cautious investigation and then flew away, demonstrating first of all the complete silence of its approach and, secondly, the fact that from where our hut was, higher up the hill, we could not have seen it, for once it entered the clearing, it vanished into the broken shadows.
By now, the light had strengthened considerably and, to our excitement, we could see not one, but ten bats hanging in the nets. To say that we were elated was putting it mildly, for, secretly, I think all of us had felt our chances of success were slight.
The bats were hanging, immobile, in the nets and as they were not struggling and panicking, we decided to wait for a while and see if we caught any more before releasing them. Several bats flew into the clearing during the next half-hour, but they were too cautious and kept too high to get entangled in the mist nets. At length, it became obvious that we were not going to catch any more, and so we got our supply of Tantes ready and set about the task of disentangling the ones we had caught.
First of all, we sexed them. To our irritation, they were all males. They were even more beautiful close to than from a distance, for their backs were a bright chestnut fox red, changing to glittering spun gold on the shoulders and belly. The soot black wings were as fine and soft as chamois leather. Their funny little, chubby, golden faces with pale, straw-coloured yellow eyes, made them look like strange, indignant, miniature, flying teddy bears. The fine mesh of the net had done a good job and the delicate wings of each bat were intricately entangled; after spending a quarter of an hour trying to free one wing unsuccessfully, we gave up and simply cut the animals loose. Even this had to be done with great care to make sure you did not cut or tear the delicate wing membrane, and at the same time we tried to do as little damage as possible to the net.
It was a difficult job, not made any easier by the anger of the bats, who seized every opportunity to sink their needle-sharp teeth into unwary fingers. But, at last, we had cut them all loose without doing too much damage to the nets, and placed them safely in individual Tantes. Then we attended to the laborious business of mending the nets and re-hanging them aloft again. By this time, our two helpers had arrived to take over the day shift, and were vastly amused by our story of the house and the sandwich-eating snails. They set about rebuilding our banana-leaf shelter. We left them, promising to return in the evening, and carried our bats in triumph down to Port Mathurin.
The local school, with extreme generosity, had offered us a newly-built classroom – as yet untenanted by the knowledge-hungry youth of Rodrigues – in which to keep our bats. It was a room some twenty feet by ten feet, newly painted and decorated, and ideal, as far as we were concerned, for keeping bats in. We had decked it out with plenty of branches and various hanging trays of wire on which we were going to serve the galaxy of fruit we had brought from Mauritius. We decided that we would let all the males we had caught loose in the room, and keep any females we got in Tantes. Lest I be accused of being a Chauvinist Pig, let me hasten to say that this apparent discrimination was due entirely to the fact that the females we got would be immensely more valuable than the males, and so we would have to be very careful with them.
Late in the afternoon, we returned to the glade and our two faithful bat watchers. In the fading afternoon light, we climbed to our vantage point in the valley and watched the colony. By and large, there was little movement, although the bats slept fitfully and frequently, and with great agility changed sleeping positions, moving through the branches with the aid of the hooks on their wings, with extraordinary skill. Only occasionally did one take flight and flap languidly round, before returning to the same roost or finding a new one.
On the whole, the colony was very silent; there was occasional bickering when a bat got too close to one of its sleeping compatriots, but this was seldom.
There was, however, one bat in the colony that was far from silent. It was a fat baby that we had christened ‘Ambrose’, and he was being weaned by his mother and was not taking kindly to the process. Although he was almost as big as she was he did not see why he should not cling to her as he had always done, nor why he should give up suckling whenever he felt like it. His mother, however, was being firm about it and his rage and petulance were horrible to hear. Screeching and twittering, he pursued his unfortunate mother from branch to branch, endeavouring to pull her within range with the hooks on his wings, and letting out outraged shrieks of frustration when he failed. The only let-up to this awful noise came when his mother, nerves cracking under the strain, would take flight and settle in a tree some distance away. Then Ambrose would stop screaming briefly, because he was concentrating all his efforts on screwing up the courage to fly after her. Eventually he would join her and as soon as he had recovered from the journey, his whining and importuning would start all over again.
‘What a ghastly bat,’ said Ann, ‘I’d slaughter it if it were mine.’
‘It needs to be sent to a public school,’ said John, judiciously.
‘A reform school would be better,’ suggested Ann.
‘All I can say is that I hope we don’t, by some mischance, catch it in the nets. If we do, it will be one we will certainly let go, even if it’s female,’ I said.
‘Too true,’ said John. ‘Imagine having that screeching around you all day.’
When it grew dark, we moved down to our banana-leaf home and spent the night with some persistent giant snails, several million mosquitoes, and one or two large and belligerent centipedes. The rat did not visit us, and I can only suppose he was in his burrow having a nervous breakdown. In the morning, we found we had caught two more bats and these, to our delight, proved to be females. We cut them loose and transported them carefully to the schoolroom, where our previous captives had settled down very well. The floor was deep in guano, and there was fruit everywhere.
We were booked to leave on the flight to Mauritius that took off at two o’clock the following day, so this meant that we had to catch our full quota of bats early that morning. It was obviously going to be touch and go, but in the green light of dawn, to our relief, we saw that we had caught thirteen bats and that among them were the females we required. In all, we had caught twenty-five bats; seven of the males we were going to release. Having extracted the thirteen bats from the nets and put them in their individual Tantes, we folded up the nets and for the last time climbed up the rocky path, out of Cascade Pigeon. As we left, we could hear Ambrose still screeching imploringly to his mother. That was one bat who was determined not to become extinct if he could help it!
When we got to the schoolroom, we had to go through the process of checking on all the male bats and picking out the right proportion of fully adult and of younger males, so that we would have the right age balance in our colonies. This done, we gathered up all the surplus males in Tantes and drove out of town to the beginning of the Cascade Pigeon to let them go. We chose a really high vantage point and threw the bats, one at a time, into the air. They all turned towards the colony further up the valley. There was quite a stiff breeze blowing down the valley, and it was interesting to note that the bats flying against it made very heavy weather and had to land in the trees frequently for a rest. We wondered how they would fare in a cyclone lasting three or four days, or a week.
So, eventually, we had all our bats in their individual Tantes and we drove down to the airport. The immigration and police waved us a cheerful farewell as we loaded our strange cargo on to the plane. We taxied down the dusty runway and took off, flying low over the reef. I was sorry to leave Rodrigues; for from what I had
seen of it, it seemed an enchanting and unspoiled island. I hoped that it would long remain so, for once tourism discovered its whereabouts, it would suffer the same fate as has befallen so many beautiful places on earth.
When we got back to Mauritius, we drove the bats down to the aviaries at Black River, which Dave had prepared for their reception. They had travelled very well and they settled down, hanging from the wire top of the aviary, chittering gently to each other and displaying great interest in the wide variety of food which Dave had prepared for them. Flushed with success, we went back to the hotel, had baths and then went in to dinner. When it came to the sweet course, Horace asked me what I would like.
‘Well, what have you got?’ I enquired, determined not to be caught, as we had been with the lobsters.
‘Some nice fruit, Sir,’ he said.
I looked at him. He did not appear to be pulling my leg. ‘What sort of fruit?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got some beautiful, ripe Jak fruit, Sir,’ he said enthusiastically.
I had cheese.
5. The Enchanted World
Outside the French windows that led from the sitting-room of the hotel suite lay a spacious and cool verandah. Step off this, and one walked twenty yards or so across coarse grass planted with tall casuarina trees that sighed like lovers in the wind, until one came to the wide, frost-white beach with its broken necklace of corals and coloured shells, lying wavering across the shoreline. In the distance lay the reef, white and thunderous with surf, and beyond it the royal blue of the Indian Ocean. Between the white beach, decorated with its biscuit-brittle graveyard of coral fragments, and the wide reef with its ever-changing flower bed of foam, lay the lagoon. Half a mile of butterfly-blue water, smooth as a saucer of milk, clear as a diamond, which hid an enchanted world like none other on earth.