Anyway, the green typewriter was there all right. My intention had been to take it back with me to Zambia, but it was too heavy and so I only used it for the ten days I stayed on the island.
I hired a car and used it to pay visits to Pamplemousses and the big botanical gardens there. The island is covered in damp, heavy greenery, and in many places there are large sugar-cane plantations. The population is a mixture of Africans and Indians, and of course there have also been a group of whites, mainly Frenchmen, since colonial times. it’s only twenty years since Mauritius became independent of France and formed a republic.
The last thing I did on Mauritius was to visit the capital city, Port Louis. Apart from wandering around the city streets and watching the local population carrying out their everyday business, I had a specific aim: I wanted to go to the museum with a skeleton of the extinct bird Swedes call the dront, and the English, the dodo. If I remember rightly there was also a model replicating what the bird looked like, with flesh on its bones and a coat of feathers.
It is a remarkable experience, standing in front of a species that is now extinct. But the dodo didn’t die out like the dinosaurs millions of years ago; there were living dodos as recently as four hundred years ago.
The name ‘dront’ comes from ‘dodo’, which derives in turn from the Portuguese ‘doudo’, which simply means ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’. Portuguese sailors who landed on Mauritius noticed that this wingless bird was totally unafraid of people, since it had never before seen creatures walking upright as human beings do. And so it was very easy to kill dodos. You didn’t need to hunt them, or trap them, or shoot them. All you had to do was to walk calmly up to them and hit them on the head with a stick, or wring their necks. The birds had no idea how to preserve themselves.
Dodos were large. A fully grown bird could weigh as much as twenty kilos. If they were short of food, sailors simply needed to go ashore and collect as many birds as they required for the cooking pots. The meat wasn’t regarded as a delicacy, but of course it was better than nothing. Moreover, they could eat the eggs and pluck the feathers.
The dodo lived only on Mauritius. Individual species of animals living on remote islands is something that happens all over the world. As the dodo had no natural enemies until sailors came to the island, it had lost its ability to fly.
The dodo became extinct very quickly. Reports suggest that there were still large numbers of the birds on Mauritius in the late sixteenth century, but two hundred years later it was more or less extinct. A few living birds were taken to England, and others were painted by sailors who were also artists.
Human beings had nothing to do with the dying out of the dinosaurs – there were no humans at that time. But as far as the dodo is concerned, there is no doubt about it: it was human beings who exterminated ‘the stupid bird’.
Today several thousand species of animals are threatened with extinction. People no longer go hunting in order to exterminate frogs, deer or tigers. But rhinos are being hunted to extinction because some Asians imagine that their horns contain aphrodisiacs; they grind the horns to powder and inhale it. It would be a clever move to saw off all rhino horns to make poaching the beasts a pointless exercise; the animals would not suffer much. But if nothing dramatic is done, our grandchildren will only be able to see rhinos in zoos.
The extermination of animals is the price we have to pay for the way we live. Even if we are much more aware now than we were ten or twenty years ago of the consequences of our stripping the earth of its riches, we continue to plunder all we can.
Needless to say, there is opposition. Individuals join together to protest, and argue that by ruthlessly exploiting natural resources to improve our living standards and acting in ways that lead to the extinction of other creatures, we are belittling ourselves and endangering the future of the human race.
Can an individual species of bird be all that important? Yes. There can be no concessions when it comes to protecting our environment.
Of course, not everything that is done in the name of protecting wildlife is good. A lot of actions are not properly thought through and result in the opposite of what was intended. Releasing mink from mink farms in Sweden has resulted in the extermination of large numbers of seabirds in the Baltic Sea area, notably velvet scoter and eider ducks, thanks to the mink taking the birds’ eggs. Mink are not natural members of the fauna among the islands of Östergötland and Småland. No matter how much sympathy one had for the caged mink there could be no justification for the subsequent annihilation of so many seabirds whose numbers were previously regulated by organised hunting in the spring and autumn. There is no point in liberating one species and in so doing annihilating another. Who could possibly entertain such an idea? Only a human being, of course!
I have always spent a lot of time in the Swedish archipelagos. Every summer while I was growing up, and for many years after, I spent several weeks on an island in the Östergötland archipelago. Fishing was one of my favourite pastimes. The idea of perch one day disappearing altogether from the central islands was totally alien. It would be the equivalent of the moon ceasing to shine at night.
In the summer of 2013 I saw only one single perch, not much more than five centimetres long. The previous year I saw none at all.
The same applies to Sweden’s largest beetle, the stag beetle. They live in and around oak trees, and on the island I am talking about oaks are almost the only trees growing there. Stag beetles have never been numerous but they certainly existed and if you wanted to see one you didn’t need to search all that long. Now there aren’t any.
This unobtrusive extermination of animals and plants is taking place all over the world. Tigers and rhinos attract the greatest attention, while nobody thinks much about stag beetles. But it is the same thing that is threatening so many animals, irrespective of their size, wildness and beauty: our boundless urge to consume what the earth can give us only in limited and quite specific doses.
There is a battle taking place between those who in various ways are trying to protect animals and plants and put a stop to the current senseless plundering, and those who look the other way and think that everybody in the world who wants a car and has enough money to buy one should be able to do so.
How many new cars appear on the roads of China every day? Forty thousand? More? And what will the purchasers of these cars do when even the multi-lane motorways are so clogged up with traffic jams that it is almost impossible to go anywhere?
Of all the images and comparisons that describe most clearly the overcrowded world we live in, there is one I think about more than any other. It is a photograph taken from an aeroplane or a helicopter over the network of motorways around Los Angeles. No doubt a similar photograph could be taken of roads around any large city in the world – Shanghai, São Paulo or Mexico City. The winding and clogged-up lanes are reminiscent of the conveyor belt sequence in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The ant-like motor vehicles are jammed together in endless queues, and hovering above them is the foul-smelling air characteristic of modern cities.
These motorways, exhaust fumes and the extinct dodo are all linked together.
Our rate of progress is dizzying, but the constructive and destructive outcomes of that progress are increasingly out of balance.
Nowadays there is talk of being able to recreate extinct animals as a result of modern DNA techniques. But surely that is no more than wishful thinking, glossing over everything that has happened and is still happening?
Death exists. As does extermination. In the rational world nothing returns from the dead.
The skeleton of the dodo will be all we have left of that bird that had no chance of surviving once the first sailor had set foot on the beach in Mauritius.
The dodo didn’t know what an enemy was. And hence, of course, it was considered to be stupid.
48
Who will be there in the end to listen?
Entering a cave is like going into a dense forest. Light changes. It gets
darker until eventually it becomes pitch black. The sound that surrounded you on all sides becomes fainter, and in the end all is silent.
But deep inside the cave another phenomenon occurs, which has captured our imagination down the ages. There is an echo. You can whisper something, and the echo comes back to you much louder. If you move just a few paces in any other direction, the echo changes. It can come from many directions at the same time, or it can flit around you in circles. The echo is alive.
It is hardly surprising that people living some 40,000 years ago were convinced that echoes were the voices of supernatural beings. In the pitch darkness inside a cave, the walls began speaking. You couldn’t see any faces or bodies, but the voices were there. And they spoke the same language as human beings.
But echoes are even more surprising than that. A marvellous discovery was made by archaeologists about thirty years ago.
In the mid-1980s the music researcher Iégor Reznikoff went wandering alone through the French caves at Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy. It is a cave system with a large number of wall paintings that are at least 20,000 years old. Reznikoff noticed that most of the paintings were where it was darkest and most inaccessible, more or less as far into the caves as it was possible to go. He also noticed that the same thing applied in many other caves. Why had the people who made the paintings not chosen locations where the light was better and the working conditions easier?
He wandered around in the darkness, speaking loudly and softly, sometimes whispering, sometimes singing. All the time he listened carefully to the echoes and how they changed. In places where the echo had very special characteristics he would stop. It transpired that in such places, without exception, the number of wall paintings increased. It couldn’t possibly be just a coincidence. He researched one cave system after another, searching for spots where the echo had special characteristics in the darkness, then switching on one of his torches. According to the results he presented later the outcome was always the same. The echo and the wall paintings were interrelated.
He could also see that the motifs of the paintings could be linked with the special acoustic form of the echoes. If the echo was especially loud, or a conglomeration of many echoes coming from different directions, he could be certain of seeing a herd of large buffaloes or mammoths looking as if they were running away.
When the echo had different variations there could be individual splashes of colour on the cliff wall, or a line of dots – sometimes even the impression of a hand.
This is not just a phenomenon that has been discovered in Europe. Exactly the same patterns occur in various ravines in Utah and Arizona. The paintings on the cliff walls correspond to the shifting character of the echoes.
We cannot be certain why these wall paintings were made, nor why the echoes played such an important role. Cave paintings from those times depicted images from real life – animals, hands, ships. But it was a long time before the Lion Man was created. The cave painters were not yet artists in the sense we give to that term nowadays – i.e. that they use their creativity to produce images of things that don’t exist in the real world. Abstractions which assume that people observing the work of art have the ability to create associations implying its significance.
The cave painters were influenced by echoes. Their decisions about where they would paint and what they would depict were in direct relation to how the echoes changed. But does that mean the cave painters experienced echoes as a kind of ‘music’? We cannot know the answer to that. What we do know, however, is that at the same time as cave painters were listening to echoes, other people were making flutes that they could play music on.
The people living 40,000 years ago couldn’t explain those echoes. There were no echoes on open plains. Cliff walls or caves were needed to produce them. They presumably thought that echoes were magical beings or spirits living inside the rocks and talking to human beings by means of returning the sounds people made in a somewhat distorted form that might be so deformed as to be almost unrecognisable.
Echoes were both magical and divine. We can’t prove it, but we can well imagine that human beings could pray to sounds in the same way as they prayed to the spirits within rocks or trees. Very early in the history of mankind there may have been some sort of priest whose calling was to speak to echoes.
It is possible to take a step further along these lines. The caves in which echoes were particularly outstanding could have functioned as cathedrals, or even as a kind of theatre. Illuminated by flaming torches at spots where shadows and light brought the depicted animals to life, almost as if they had broken free from the cliff walls, people might have gathered to pray to them, and their many voices could have transformed the echoes into a remarkable choir. Perhaps the people also performed rhythmical dances – either all of them together or just those leading the rituals.
The ceremonies need by no means have been characterised by solemn seriousness. Perhaps their prayer sessions were full of joy and lust for life? It is easy to imagine our forefathers being gloomy and melancholy as their lives were so hard, food so difficult to obtain and survival anything but a foregone conclusion.
The echoes are still there in the caves, just like the wall paintings. The feeling of magic is never far away. Although we can now explain echoes as an acoustic phenomenon, that does not undermine the fact that the experience was uplifting at that time. Perhaps the reverse is true. Maybe the magic moment when the echo flitted around the cliff walls gave those present the strength to survive in a way that is beyond our present-day comprehension?
What happened inside those caves is a mixture of the credible and some kind of reality that we can only guess at. Were the magical and religious rituals something of what we would nowadays call ‘ceremonial occasions’?
The people of those days were probably not so very different from us. One might even be justified in expressing it thus: We are like they were. We are and will always be members of the same family.
How did those early forefathers of ours regard the opposite of those sounds and echoes – silence? Was it important to them in a comforting sort of way, or was it frightening? Since they lived in a world that was so very much quieter than ours, perhaps they regarded silence as normal. There were no machines, no cities, no mechanical vehicles or loudspeakers. The world was silent, apart from the sounds created by nature – the sighing of the wind, the roaring of storms, the twittering of birds.
Nowadays silence is increasingly rare. I sometimes wonder if silence is on the way to becoming extinct.
But echoes will outlive human beings. Even when our voices no longer exist, stones will become loose and fall with a crash that is multiplied and amplified by echoes.
But who will be there to listen to them?
49
Salt water
I once had a well drilled down into the rock of an island. The well that had been dug a hundred years earlier was no longer producing sufficient drinking water. As the island was not in an inland lake with fresh water but out in the sea, I decided to employ some experienced well-drillers. They turned out to have a surprising ability to deduce the geology of the archipelago’s rocks and to find the exact spot for reaching fresh water and thus avoid having brackish or salty water coming up through the bore hole. They didn’t have special technical equipment, but relied on experience.
They loaded their drilling machine onto an old adapted cattle ferry and came to the island one day in early September. There was a clear sky, no wind at all, frost was coming closer by the day and the last of the migratory birds had left for southern climes, usually at night. All one could hear was a swishing sound from their wings; they left Sweden without being seen, but their wings sang to us.
It took just over half an hour to walk round the island, which was divided by a ravine between two high, rounded hills. When I played there as a child I thought of it as a vast wilderness in which cliffs, precipices, caves, anthills, stag beetles and the occasional adder provided plenty of op
portunities to inspire my imagination. It was Moomin Valley and Winnie-the-Pooh country at one and the same time. But it was also the barren deserts of unknown continents – Australia and the parched African plains.
The two well-drillers had selected the spot where they were going to start drilling. They were going to dig down into the rock beyond sea level, and after that they were not sure how deep they would need to go before reaching water. They were aware that things could go wrong, that the rock could be damaged and split, and that the nearest they had to a guarantee for finding drinking water was their combined experience, which told them this was the best place to drill.
The hours passed as they drilled down through the rock – ten metres, twenty metres…Around noon they came to water – but it was not just brackish, it was very salty seawater. But that didn’t seem to worry the pair.
‘It’s a pocket of salt water,’ they said. ‘When it’s emptied it will fill up again with fresh drinking water. All we need to do is to pump out the salt water.’
One of them took a glass out of a rucksack and polished it with a handkerchief. He held it up against the autumn sun to check that it was clean. Then he filled it with salt water from the bore hole and handed it to me.
‘Taste that,’ he said.
‘What?’ I said in surprise. ‘Salt water?’
‘Dip your tongue into it. Swallow a few drops. It won’t kill you. Afterwards I’ll tell you exactly what it is that you’ve been drinking.’
I thought at first he was having me on – a bit like tricking passengers unused to boats into drinking the delicious liqueur created by the wake. But something told me that wasn’t the case. I took the glass and swallowed a few drops. It was distinctly salty. I handed back the glass.
‘What you have just drunk,’ he said, ‘comes from a pocket of salt water forty metres down in the rocky ground. That water has been lying there ever since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. When the ice melted away some of the salty seawater collected in pockets like that. it’s been lying there now for 10,000 years – or about three hundred generations, if you like to put it that way. Only now has it come up to the surface again.’