Now this is where, according to all the best jungle literature, the king cobra, hissing malevolently, should have hurled himself at us and flung several coils round Chris’s body and then, just as he was about to sink his fangs into Chris’s throbbing jugular vein, I should have shot its head off with my revolver. I am sure this is what would have happened if it had not been for three things: firstly I had no revolver, secondly the cobra had obviously not read the right sort of jungle literature, and thirdly he seemed as horrified by our presence as we were by his. He had been swimming along quietly, minding his own business, towards a nice, friendly sandbank on which appeared to be a couple of decaying tree trunks. Then suddenly, to his horror, the tree trunks had turned into a couple of human beings! If a snake can be said to have an expression, then that cobra looked exceedingly astonished. He clapped on all his brakes and came to a standstill, reared himself a foot or so out of the water and stared at us for a brief second. I took comfort from the fact that all the herpetological literature I had read had informed me that death by cobra bite is comparatively painless, but the cobra had not the slightest intention of wasting good venom on us. He turned tail and shot off upstream as fast as he could swim, and about thirty yards away he made landfall on the bank and rushed into the forest as though hotly pursued.
‘There you are,’ I said to Chris, ‘that just shows you how deadly these king cobras are. An absolutely unprovoked attack!’
‘What do you mean?’ said Chris. ‘He was as scared of us as we were of him.’
‘Precisely,’ I said, ‘but the reputation for unprovoked attack is the thing that the king cobra enjoys.’
‘What a pity Jim was not here,’ said Chris musingly, ‘it would have given him something to moan about for the rest of the day.’
When Jim eventually returned with the canoe, we made our way two or three miles upstream and then landed to reconnoitre the forest to see if it would be suitable for the shots we had in mind. We had hardly gone more than a couple of hundred yards through the trees when to our right, on the crest of a hill, there broke out a cacophony of wild cries. Although basically similar to the gibbon’s call, they were much louder and deeper and each cry ended in an odd, reverberating sound like somebody tapping on a drum with their fingertips.
‘Siamang!’ said the boatman, and Chris’s eyes gleamed fanatically.
‘Let’s see if we can get close enough to try and get some shots of them,’ he whispered.
We made our way cautiously up the little hill, trying to make as little noise as possible, but when carrying cumbersome equipment and surrounded by plants very heavily endowed with spikes and hooks, our progress was anything but silent. However, it seemed that the siamangs were far too concerned with their choral practice to worry about us, for they sang continuously as we approached the trees in which we judged them to be. Just as we thought that we should be getting within sight of them, the singing stopped abruptly and the forest, by comparison, became so silent that our progress through the undergrowth sounded like the approach of a couple of madcap tanks. Suddenly the boatman halted and pointed up into the trees with his machete.
‘Siamang!’ he said again, with an air of great satisfaction.
Some seventy feet above us, in the crown of a rather elegant tree, sat a group of five siamangs. There was an adult male and female, two half grown ones and one baby. Their coal black fur gleamed in the sun and they were sitting nonchalantly on the branches with their long arms and slender hands drooping languidly. It was the arrangement of the group that interested me: the male was sitting on a large branch facing the other four animals, who sat in a row on a branch a little below him and some twelve feet away. It looked exactly as though he was about to give a short and erudite lecture on early siamang music. In case we should flatter ourselves that we had crept up on him unobserved, he periodically glanced down at us and raised his eyebrows as though he found our sweaty and dishevelled appearance somewhat distasteful. Eventually he seemed to get used to the idea that we had come to join his audience, so he turned his attention back to his family. Watching him through fieldglasses, I saw him shuffle his bottom on the branch to get more comfortable, and then he opened his mouth and started to sing.
The first three or four cries were short and staccato, and the effect upon his throat was fascinating. With each cry his throat inflated more and more as he pumped air into his extraordinary gular sac which, as it inflated, gleamed fiery pink beneath his fur. When it was large enough to please him, he launched into the song proper and it was interesting to note that at the end of each verse, as it were, his sac would start deflating until the next verse pumped air into it again. It was obviously this strange vocal sac that produced the odd, drum-like tapping at the end of each verse, and I could only presume it was made by the sound of air being expelled from this soundbox. As soon as he had finished his song there was a short pause, while his family, who had been listening with rapt attention, gazed at him fixedly. Then the big female, one of the smaller ones, or occasionally even the baby, would utter a series of high-pitched staccato cries that sounded rather like applause and were presumably accepted as such by the male, for he would react to it by launching himself into yet another verse of his song. This went on for about a quarter of an hour, the family group inciting him to sing more every time he stopped, and each time he sang he displayed more and more symptoms of excitement; it was rather like watching a pop singer working himself up to a final burst of song for his fans. First he started reaching out with his long arms and snapping off leaves from the surrounding branches; then he bounded up and down on his bottom and the family’s applause became even more vociferous. Carried away by this, his next action was to run up and down the branch, his arms crooked and his hands dangling in that lovely pansy way that gibbons have; the family group grew positively ecstatic over this. Now he came to his finale and launched himself in a flying leap from the branch, dropped about thirty feet like a stone, his arms and legs completely relaxed and then, as you were almost sure he was hurtling to his doom, with a casual air he reached out a long arm, grabbed a passing branch, and swung there like a black, furry pendulum, singing his heart out.
Watching this grave, but obviously happy choir of siamangs, gave me immense pleasure. They clearly took their music very seriously and enjoyed every minute of it. It was nice to feel that in that enormous section of protected forest there would always be groups of siamangs singing happily to each other in the bowers of green leaves.
The Giants’ Nursery
He skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped, Till fainting he fell to the ground.
Hunting of the Snark
Making films is a weird business, and so I was not at all surprised to find myself, three days after we had left the National Park, standing on top of a step-ladder while Chris and Jim lay in the grass below me and Jacquie and various other individuals were spread around in a circle like fielders on a cricket pitch. The reason for this rather peculiar activity was one of the most curious animals that I have met.
We had set off across Malaya towards a place called Dungun on the east coast, in order to try to see one of the largest reptiles in the world, and en route we had got involved with a smaller, but equally interesting reptile. We had been travelling for some time over a series of hills, and the road consisted of the longest series of hair-pin bends through the forest that I can ever remember having travelled on. So numerous were they, and so close together, that Jim, who was lying in the back of the Land-Rover, presently asked whether we could stop. He lay there among the equipment looking like a Roman emperor, the effect being heightened by the fact that he was clasping to his bosom the largest pineapple that I have ever seen in my life, which we had purchased at a village a few miles back. His face was a startling shade of pea green.
‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ said Chris.
‘I’m feeling sick,’ said Jim sheepishly.
‘Dear God!’ said Chris. ‘Is there noth
ing that doesn’t make you feel sick?’
‘Well, I can’t help it,’ said Jim aggrievedly, ‘it’s all these twists and turns. No sooner do I get my stomach in alignment than you go round another beastly bend.’
‘Well, let’s stop for a bit,’ said Jacquie, ‘and we can have lunch.’
Jim gave her an anguished look.
‘Do you think I am in any condition for lunch?’ he enquired.
‘Well, I’m hungry,’ said Jacquie callously
So we unpacked the food and sat by the roadside, while Jim sat with averted eyes as we picnicked. Presently, stuffed with cold meat and pineapple, we lay back to relax and I noticed, in some trees a little way down the road, two birds which, from that distance, looked decidedly peculiar. Taking the field-glasses, I wandered down the road towards them and discovered that it was a pair of racquet-tailed drongoes indulging in an abandoned bit of courtship in the tree tops. They are about the size of a blackbird, with curved crests and the two outer tail-feathers greatly elongated and ending in a round, racquet shaped piece of feathering; they are metallic blue-green below and glossy black above. They were not only dancing after each other through the branches, their tails streaming out behind them, but they were also flying up into the air and dive-bombing each other, and as they did so, the racquet shaped feathers on the end of their tails looked as though they were being pursued by two curious, round beetles. They would periodically utter a low, rather harsh chattering at each other.
While I was watching them, my attention was caught by a small, pale putty coloured lizard that was darting to and fro on the back of the trunk, lapping up the streams of tree ants that were ascending to their arboreal nest. He looked a dull and rather uninteresting little reptile and I was about to switch my field-glasses back to the drongoes when he suddenly did something that made me, metaphorically speaking, jump about ten feet in the air: he protruded suddenly, from under his chin, a triangular white flap that looked rather like a sail. He kept flipping this in and out very rapidly for a few moments and then he hurled himself off the bark of the tree into the air. As he started falling towards the ground there suddenly blossomed, along each side of his body a pair of butterfly-like wings, which he held out stiffly and, with their aid, glided nonchalantly to another tree some hundred and fifty feet away. I realised that the apparently uninteresting lizard that I had been just about to ignore was, in fact, one of the most exciting reptiles in the world, and one that I had always wanted to see. It rejoices in the name of Draco volins, the flying dragon, and I had been incessant in my enquiries about it ever since we had arrived in Malaya. Nobody had been able to tell me very much; you saw them, they said, in a vague sort of way that implied that you could spend fifty years in Malaya without seeing one, and then generally changed the subject. So there before me was a real, live flying dragon, a beast that I had given up all hopes of seeing. I uttered an anguished roar that brought the other three pelting down the road towards me, but as they reached me, Draco volins took off again and zoomed off into the forest.
‘What’s the matter?’ enquired Jacquie, obviously under the impression that I had been bitten by something fatal.
‘Draco volins, Draco volins,’ I said incoherently.
They looked at me with a certain amount of curiosity.
‘What,’ enquired Jacquie, ‘is a Draco volins?’
‘That flying lizard job,’ I said impatiently ‘there was one up here, zooming about from tree to tree.’
‘Touch of the sun,’ said Tim judiciously, ‘had my suspicions when he first started talking about it.’
‘I tell you it was here,’ I said, ‘it flew from that tree to that tree and then when you all came running up, it went zooming off into the forest.’
‘A little lie down,’ said Jim, ‘that’s what you need. I’ll squeeze some pineapple juice on your brow.’
In spite of my protestations, they all seemed reluctant to believe my story, since they, too, had come to look upon the flying lizard as an almost mythical beast. So we continued on our journey and I made their lives a misery, talking about flying lizards all the way.
We eventually stopped at a small town for the night, where some charming people called the Allens had, to their credit, offered to put us up. After the preliminary politenesses had been exchanged, the conversation relapsed once again into talk of the flying lizard and Geoffrey Allen, a very competent animal photographer in his own right, listened to our acrimonious discussion with some puzzlement.
‘Why,’ he enquired at length, ‘are you getting so fussed about the flying lizard?’
If he had not been my host, I would have felled him to the ground with a blow, but as he was my host and, moreover, was pouring me out an exceptionally large whisky, I resisted the impulse.
‘I’ve always wanted to see a flying lizard,’ I explained patiently. ‘The moment I arrived here I questioned everybody very closely on the subject of flying lizards, with about as much result as asking questions in a Trappist Monastery. Then I saw one of the things on the road here and this set of morons that I’m forced to travel with refuse to believe me.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Geoffrey casually, ‘the garden’s full of them.’
‘What!’ I said incredulously. ‘You mean your garden?’
‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘dozens of them, flying about all day long.’
‘It’s the tropics,’ said Jim earnestly to Chris, ‘it gets them all in the end.’
‘Do you think we would have a chance of filming them?’ I asked Geoffrey.
‘I should think so,’ he said, ‘although they are pretty agile. Anyway, you have a look at them tomorrow morning and see what you think.’
The following morning, at dawn, I dragged Jacquie, Jim and Chris into the garden, and there, to my delight, I found that Geoffrey had spoken nothing but the truth. There were flying lizards in every direction, gliding from tree to tree like paper darts. Jim, with the camera strapped round him, struggled to get some shots of them flying, while the rest of us beat the tree trunks with sticks to try to frighten the lizards in the direction of the camera. After a couple of hours of this, we were all sweaty and Jim had exposed about eighteen inches of film, which he assured us would be the finest shot of a completely blank sky that anybody had ever taken.
‘It’s no good,’ he said, ‘by the time I’ve found the damned thing in my viewfinder and focused, it’s landed. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to do it.’
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ I said, ‘and that is to catch one.’
‘What do we do with it when we have caught it?’ asked Chris.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘then we can go upstairs in the house and throw it out of the bedroom window when Jim says he is ready.’
‘Um . . .’ said Chris sceptically, ‘well I suppose we can try.’
So, armed with bamboos with nooses of string on the end, we spent another couple of hours endeavouring to catch flying lizards. Eventually, having found some that were more imbecilic than others, we did succeed in catching two, then we repaired to the verandah for a well-earned drink before filming them. This gave me a chance to examine our captures closely.
The pouch under the throat was shaped rather like an elongated and slender strawberry; normally it lay folded back, so that it was invisible, but when the lizard wanted to display (and, as far as I could see, this white ornament was only used when guarding his territory), he apparently inflated it with air, so that it flashed up and down at about once a second. The wings were even more extraordinary: the rib bones of the reptile had become elongated and these supported the thin skin fabric of the wing, like the ribs of an umbrella. When not in use, the wings folded back along the sides of the body, again like a furled umbrella, and were so thin and fragile that they were not noticeable. The whole creature looked incredibly prehistoric and, watching it furl and unfurl its wings as you touched it, you could well understand how similar reptiles had gradually evolved into the birds th
at we know today.
When we had quenched our thirst and cooled off a bit, we set about organising the filming of our lizards. In order to get a really good shot of the flight and the wings, we needed the lizard silhouetted against the sky. This meant that Chris and Jim had to lie on the lawn with the cameras at the ready while Jacquie, Geoffrey and his wife Betty stood well back in order to re-capture the lizard before it escaped. Having got everybody in position, I then went up into the bedroom, extracted one of the lizards from the jar in which it was incarcerated and, on being given the signal from the supine cameramen below, I hurled it out into the air. Immediately, it spread its wings and glided down to land on the lawn, where it was smartly fielded by Geoffrey. The cameramen, however, were not pleased with the result, so once more I had to toil up to the bedroom and throw the lizard out of the window.
Altogether we did this some twenty-five times, and both I and the lizards were getting a little bit bored and fragile round the edges, so we called a halt and drank some iced beer while we discussed the problem.
The chief difficulty was that throwing the lizard from the bedroom window allowed only a small area of sky against which it was silhouetted, so obviously the bedroom window was not the answer.
‘How about a step-ladder?’ Geoffrey suggested. ‘Because then you could move it about whenever you wanted it.’
Fired with this idea, we went into Geoffrey’s storeroom and dug out a pair of ten foot steps, which were rickety in the extreme. If anyone was watching us without knowing what we were trying to do, they would have been pardoned for thinking that Geoffrey’s large and spacious garden was the grounds of the local mental home. Chris and I staggered along carrying the ungainly, giraffe-like body of the steps, preceded by Jim, who would periodically lie down on his back, and followed by Geoffrey, Jacquie and Betty, carrying various vital items of equipment and the two lizards in their jam jar. Eventually, after we had gone round the garden about three times, Jim picked himself a site and we erected the ladder and got ready for action. By this time it was midday and the whole of Malaya had reached the temperature at which the human body attains melting point.