He took the hint and slowed his progress considerably.
Half-way across a small stream my shadow got in the way of the carrier behind me, he missed his footing and stumbled and deposited my bed and bedding into the water with a loud splash. He was very upset about it, although I pointed out that it was mainly my fault. We continued on our way, the carrier with the dripping load on his head ejaculating at intervals ‘Eh! Sorry, sah,’ in a loud and doleful voice.
The forest around us was full of tiny sounds: the faint cracking of twigs, an occasional call from a frightened bird, the steady throbbing cry of the cicadas on the tree-trunks, and now and again a shrill piping from a tree-frog. The streams we crossed were ice-cold and transparent, and they whispered and licked at the big boulders in a conspiratorial fashion. At one point Jacob, up ahead, let out a loud yelp and started to dance around wildly, swinging the lamp so that the shadows writhed and twisted among the tree-trunks.
‘Na whatee, na whatee?’ called the carriers.
‘Na ant,’ said Jacob, still twirling round, ‘blurry ant too much.’
Not looking where he was going, he had trodden straight in a column of Driver ants crossing the path, a black stream of them two inches wide that poured from the undergrowth on one side of the path and into that on the other side like a steady, silent river of tar. As his foot came down on them, the whole line seemed to boil up suddenly and silently, and within a second the ants were swarming over the ground in a horde, spreading further and further round the scene of the attack, like an inkstain on the brown leaves. The carriers and I had to make a detour into the forest to avoid their ferocious attentions.
As we left the shelter of the forest and walked out into the first moon-silvered grassfield, it started to rain. At first it was a fine drifting drizzle, more like mist; then, without warning, the sky let down a seemingly solid deluge of water, that bent the grass flat and turned the path into a treacherous slide of red mud. Fearing that my precious box of specimens would get drenched, and the Idiurus die in consequence, I took off my coat and draped it over the cage on the carrier’s head. It was not much protection, but it helped. We struggled on, up to our ankles in mud, until we came to the river which we had to ford. Crossing this took us, I suppose, roughly three minutes, but it was quite long enough, for the carrier with the Idiurus on his head stumbled and staggered over the rocky bed, while the current plucked and pushed at him, waiting an opportunity to catch him off balance. But we arrived intact on the opposite bank, and soon we saw the lights of the camp gleaming through the trees. Just as we got to the marquee the rain stopped.
The cage that Smith had prepared for the Idiurus was not really large enough, but I felt that the main thing was to get the creatures out of the box they were in as soon as possible, for it was dripping like a newly emerged submarine. Carefully we undid the door and stood watching with bated breath as the tiny animals scuttled into their new home. None appeared to have got wet, which relieved me, though one or two of them looked a bit the worse for wear after the journey.
‘What do they eat?’ inquired Smith, when we had gloated over them for five minutes.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. The one I caught yesterday didn’t eat anything, though God knows I gave him enough choice.’
‘Um, I expect they’ll eat when they settle down a bit.’
‘Oh, yes, I think they will,’ I said cheerfully, and I really believed it.
We filled the cage with every form of food and drink there was to be had in camp, until it looked like a native market. Then we hung a sack over the front of the cage and left the Idiurus to eat. My bed having absorbed rain and river water like a sponge, I was forced to spend a most uncomfortable night dozing in an upright camp chair. I slept fitfully until dawn, when I got up and hobbled over to the Idiurus cage, lifted the sacking and peered inside.
On the floor, among the completely untouched food and drink, lay a dead Idiurus. The others clung to the top of the cage like a flock of bats and twittered suspiciously at me. I retrieved the dead specimen and carried it over to the table, where I subjected it to a careful dissection. The stomach, to my complete surprise, was crammed with the partially digested red husk of the palm-nut. This was the very last thing I expected to find, for the palm-nut is, in the Cameroons at any rate, a cultivated product, and does not grow wild in the forest. If the rest of the colony had been eating palm-nuts on the night before they were captured by us, it meant that they must have travelled some four miles to the nearest native farm, and then come down to within a few feet of the ground to feed. This was all very puzzling, but at any rate it gave me something to work on, so the next night the Idiurus cage was festooned like a Christmas tree with bunches of red palm-nuts, in addition to the other foods. We put the food in at dusk, and for the next three hours Smith and I carried on long conversations that had nothing to do with Idiurus, and with an effort we pretended not to hear the squeaks and rustlings that came from their cage. After we had eaten, however, the strain became too great, and we crept up to the cage and gently lifted a corner of the sacking.
The entire colony of Idiurus was down on the floor of the cage, and all of them were busily engaged in eating palm-nuts. They squatted on their haunches and held the nuts in their minute pink forepaws like squirrels, turning the nuts quickly as their teeth shredded off the scarlet rind. They stopped eating as we lifted the sacking and peered at us; one or two of the more timid ones dropped their nuts and fled to the top of the cage, but the majority decided that we were harmless and continued to eat. We lowered the sacking into place and executed a war dance round the marquee, uttering loud cries to indicate our pleasure, cries that awoke the monkeys and set them chattering a protest and brought the staff tumbling out of the kitchen to see what was the matter. When they heard the good news that the new beef was chopping at last, they grinned and cracked their knuckles with pleasure, for they took our work very much to heart. All day gloom had pervaded the camp because the new beef would not chop, but now everything was all right, so the staff returned to the kitchen, chattering and laughing.
But our joy was short-lived, for on going to the cage next morning we found two Idiurus dead. From then on our little colony diminished steadily, week by week. They would eat only palm-nuts, and, apparently, this was not enough for them. It was quite astonishing the variety of food we put in the cage, and which they refused – astonishing because even with the most finicky animal you will generally strike something it likes, if you offer it a wide enough choice of food. It appeared that the Idiurus were not going to be easy to get back to England.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Wilderness of Monkeys
Perhaps the most noisy, the most irritating, and the most lovable creatures that shared our marquee were the monkeys. There were forty of them altogether, and life under the same roof with forty monkeys is anything but quiet. The adult animals were not so bad; it was the baby monkeys that caused so much trouble and extra work for us; they would scream loudly if left alone, demand bottles full of warm milk at the most ungodly hours of night and morning; they would get stricken with all sorts of baby complaints and frighten us to death; they would escape from the nursery and get near the Golden Cat’s cage, or fall into kerosene tins full of water, and generally drive us to the edge of a nervous breakdown. We were forced to think up the most Machiavellian schemes for dealing with these babies, and some of them were quite extraordinary. Take the case of the baby Drills; these baboons are extremely common in the forests of the Cameroons, and we were always being brought babies of all ages. The Drill is that rather ugly-looking creature you can see in most zoos, who has a bright pink behind and does not hesitate to share its glory with you. Very young Drills are among the most pathetic and ridiculous-looking creatures in the world: they are covered with a very fine silvery grey fur, and their heads, hands, and feet look at least three times too big for their bodies. The hands, feet and face are a shade that we used to describe as boiled baby pink, and their m
inute bottoms were the same colour. The skin on their bodies was white, spotted in places with large areas, exactly like big birth-marks, of bright china blue. Like all baby monkeys, they have staring eyes, and their arms and legs are long and attenuated and tremble like the limbs of a very old person. This should give you some idea of a baby Drill.
The early days of a Drill’s life are spent clinging with its muscular hands and feet to the thick fur of its mother. So our baby Drills, when they had transferred their affections to us and decided that we were their parents, demanded loudly and vociferously that they should be allowed to cling to us. Next to vast quantities of food, the most important thing in a young Drill’s life is to feel that it has a good grip on the provider of the food. As it is almost impossible to work when you have four or five baby Drills clinging to you like miniature, cackling Old Men of the Sea, we had to devise some plan to keep them happy. We found two old coats and slung these over the backs of chairs in the centre of the marquee; then we introduced the babies to them. They were used to seeing us in these coats, and I expect the garments retained a certain characteristic odour, so they apparently decided that the coats were a sort of skin that we had discarded. They clung to the empty sleeves, the lapels, and the tails of these two coats as though they had been glued on, and while we went on with our work around the camp they would hang there, half asleep, occasionally waking up-to carry on a cackling conversation with us.
The great numbers of people who used to visit our campsite and look round the collection always seemed most affected by our group of baby monkeys. A baby monkey, in all its ways, is very like a human baby, only infinitely more pathetic. The women in these parties would gaze at our young monkeys with melting eyes, making inarticulate crooning noises and generally brimming over with mother love. There was one young lady who visited us several times and was so affected by the pathetic expressions of the young monkeys that she unwisely took it upon herself to deliver a lecture to me about the extreme cruelty of taking these poor little creatures from their mothers and incarcerating them in cages. She waxed quite poetical on the joys of freedom, and contrasted the carefree, happy existence these babies would have in the tree-tops with the ghastly imprisonment for which I was responsible. That morning a baby monkey had been brought in by a native hunter, and since the young lady seemed to be such an expert on monkey life in the tree-tops, I suggested that she might like to help me perform a little task that had to be gone through with each new monkey that arrived. She agreed eagerly, seeing herself in the role of a sort of simian Florence Nightingale.
The little task consisted, quite simply, in searching the new baby for internal and external parasites. I explained this, and the young lady looked surprised: she said that she did not know that monkeys had parasites – beyond fleas, of course. I produced the little basket that the monkey was brought in, and removing some of its excreta I spread it out on a clean piece of paper and showed her the numbers of threadlike worms it contained. My helper remained strangely silent. Then I brought out the baby: he was a Putty-nose Guenon, an adorable little fellow clad in black fur, with a white shirt-front and a gleaming, heart-shaped patch of white fur on his nose. I examined his tiny hands and feet and his long slender fingers and toes and found no fewer than six jiggers comfortably ensconced. These minute creatures burrow their way into the skin of the feet and hands, particularly under the nails, where the skin is soft, and there they eat and swell and grow, until they reach the size of a match-head. Then they lay their eggs and die; in due course the eggs hatch and the baby jiggers continue the good work that their parent had begun. If a jigger infection is not dealt with in the early stages it can lead to the loss of the joint of a toe or finger, and in extreme cases it can destroy all the toes or fingers, for the jiggers go on burrowing and breeding until they have hollowed the part out to a bag of skin filled with pus. I have had jiggers in my foot on several occasions, and can vouch for the fact that they can be extremely painful. All this I explained to my helper in graphic detail. Then I got the tube of local anaesthetic, froze the fingers and toes of the little Guenon, and with a sterilized needle proceeded to remove the jiggers and disinfect the wounds they left. I found this local anaesthetic a boon, for the operation is painful and the baby monkeys would not sit still otherwise.
When this was over I ran my fingers down the monkey’s tail and felt two sausage-shaped swellings, each as long as the first joint of my little finger and about the same circumference. I showed these to my companion, and then parted the hair so that she could see the circular, porthole-like opening at the end of each swelling. Looking through this porthole into the interior of the swelling, you could see something white and loathsome moving. I explained, with my best Harley Street air, that a certain forest fly lays its eggs on the fur of various animals, and when the maggot hatches it burrows down into the flesh of its host and lives there, fattening like a pig in a sty, getting air through the porthole, and, when it finally leaves to turn into a fly, the host has a hole the circumference of a cigarette in its flesh, which generally becomes a suppurating sore. I showed my helper, who was by now quite pale, that it was impossible to hook these maggots out. I got the needle and, parting the hair, showed her the creature lying in its burrow like a miniature barrage ballon; as soon as the tip of the needle touched it, however, it just compressed itself into a wrinkled blob, folding up like a concertina, and slid back into the depths of the monkey’s tail. Then I showed her how to get them out – a method I had invented: pushing the nozzle of the anaesthetic tube into the porthole, I squirted the liquid inside until I had frozen the maggot into immobility; then, with a scalpel, I enlarged the porthole slightly, stabbed the maggot with the end of the needle and withdrew it from its lair. As I pulled the wrinkled white horror out of the bloodstained hole, my helper left me suddenly and precipitately. I removed the second maggot, disinfected the gaping holes they had left and then joined her at the other side of the camp clearing. She explained that she was late for a lunch date, thanked me for a most interesting morning, and took her leave, never to visit us again. I always think it rather a pity that people don’t learn more about the drawbacks of life in the jungle before prating about the cruelty of captivity.
One of the most delightful monkeys we had was a baby moustached Guenon, whom Smith procured on a trip up-country. He was the smallest monkey I had ever seen, and, except for his long slender tail, he could fit comfortably into a tea-cup. He was a greenish-grey in colour, with buttercup-yellow cheek-patches and a white shirt-front. But the most remarkable thing about him was his face, for across his upper lip was a broad, curving band of white hair that made him look as though he had an impressive moustache. For his size, his mouth was enormous, and could quite easily accommodate the teat of the feeding-bottle. It was a most amusing sight to see this tiny, moustached animal hurl himself on to the bottle when it arrived, uttering shrill squeaks of joy, wrap his arms and legs round it tightly, and lie there with his eyes closed, sucking away frantically. It looked rather as though he was being suckled by a large white airship, for the bottle was three times his size. He was very quick to learn, and it was not long before we had taught him to drink his milk out of a saucer. He would be put on the camp table to be fed, and the moment he saw the saucer approaching he would get quite hysterical with excitement, trembling and twitching, and screaming at the top of his voice. As soon as the saucer was placed before him he would, without any hesitation, dive head first into it. He would push his face completely under the milk, and only come up for air when he could hold out no longer. Sometimes, in his greed, he would wait too long, and a shower of bubbles would break the surface, and he would follow them, coughing and sneezing and spattering himself and the table with a fountain of milk. There were times during his meal when he would become convinced that you were hanging around waiting an opportunity to take his saucer away from him, and, giving a quavering scream of rage, he would frustrate your plan by the simple expedient of leaping into the air and landing
in the centre of the saucer with a splash, where he would sit glaring at you triumphantly. At meal-times he would get his head and face so covered with milk that it was only with difficulty you could tell where his moustache began and ended, and the table would look as though someone had milked a large and healthy cow over it.
The two most forceful characters in our monkey collection were, of course, the chimpanzees Mary and Charlie. Charlie had been the pet of a planter before he came to us, so he was fairly domesticated. He had a small, wrinkled, sorrowful face and melting brown eyes; he looked as though the world had treated him harshly but that he was too much of a saint to complain. This wounded, dejected air was a lot of moonshine, for in reality Charlie, far from being an ill-treated, misunderstood ape, was a disgraceful little street urchin, full of low cunning and deceit. Every day we used to let him out of his cage for exercise, and he would roam about the camp looking radiantly innocent until he thought he had lulled you into believing in his integrity. Then he would wander nonchalantly towards the food-table, give a quick glance round to see if he was observed, grab the largest bunch of bananas within reach, and dash madly away towards the nearest tree. If you gave chase he would drop the fruit and skid to a standstill. Then he would sit in the dust while you scolded him, gazing up at you sorrowfully, the picture of injured innocence, the expression on his face showing quite plainly that he was being wrongfully accused of a monstrous crime, but that he was far too noble to point that out to you if you were too obtuse to realize it. Wave the bunch of stolen fruit under his nose and he would regard it with faint surprise, mingled with disgust. Why should you imagine that he had stolen the fruit? his expression seemed to say. Were you not aware of the fact that he disliked bananas? Never in his whole life (devoted to philanthropy and self-denial) had he felt the slightest inclination to even sample the loathsome fruit, much less steal any. The scolding over, Charlie would rise, give a deep sigh, throw you a look of compassion tinged with disgust, and lope off to the kitchen to see what he could steal there. He was quite incorrigible, and his face was so expressive that he could carry on a long conversation with you without any need of speech.