We picked our way across this slippery and somewhat dangerous terrain until we came to the banks of a small stream that babbled eagerly over its bed of stones wearing a shifting coat of steam, the water being a reasonable ninety-odd degrees. Crossing this, we made our way further down the valley and suddenly came upon the mud holes, which to me were so fascinating that they kept me absorbed for the next half hour. These pools varied in size: some covered quite large areas, others were only the circumference of a small table, and they varied in colour, some being pale cafe-au-lait and others a rich, dark brown. The mud in these pools was the consistency and colour of boiling milk chocolate, and boiling was exactly what it appeared to be doing. In actual fact the mud, although warm, was not boiling but gave this impression because of the small jets of steam that had to force their way to the surface through this glutinous mass. The surface of a pool would be smooth and unblemished, looking good enough to dip a spoon into and eat; then suddenly this placid surface would be disturbed by a bubble that would form – a tiny bubble the size of a blackbird’s egg. Very slowly this would rise above the surface and grow until it was the size of a ping-pong ball or even the size of an orange if the consistency of the mud was thick enough. Then it would burst, with a curiously loud ‘Glup’ noise, and form a miniature moon crater which would slowly be absorbed back into the smooth surface of the pool until the next build-up of steam repeated the performance. In some pools where the steam was pushing through fairly rapidly, you would get little bevies of bubbles, sometimes as many as six or seven, forming in a circle and – as it were – singing together. It reminded me rather of bell-ringing, for the bubbles were not all of the same size and so they made different noises as they burst and, as the steam was coming through at regular intervals, you got these groups of fat bubbles playing tunes: Glop . . . plip . . . Glug . . . plip . . . Splop . . . plip . . . Glug . . . plish . . . Splop . . . plip . . . and so on. It was fascinating and I crouched over the mud pools completely absorbed in these bubble orchestras. I had just found a particularly talented group of seventeen who were playing something so harmonious and complicated that I was convinced it had been written by Bach, and was working out a scheme whereby I could get them to sign a contract so that I could take them back to England to appear at the Festival Hall (perhaps with Sir Malcom Sargent conducting), when I was brought rudely back to earth by Chris, who appeared out of the mist looking like a slightly distraught Dante.
‘Come along, dear boy,’ he said, ‘stop playing mud pies. I’ve got six geysers lined up, all spouting like anything, and I want to get a shot of you and Jacquie walking along in front of them.’
‘You do get the most charming ideas!’ I said bitterly, as I tore myself away from the singing bubbles and followed him into the mists.
Sure enough, there were six geysers, each some twelve to fourteen feet high, almost in a row, all spouting merrily and uttering hoots and whistles to each other.
‘There,’ said Chris proudly, ‘now what I want Jacquie and you to do is walk from that rock there, across the front of them and stop about there.’
‘Do we get danger money?’ enquired Jacquie. Her dark hair was covered with a fine mist of tiny water droplets, so she looked as though she had gone prematurely grey.
‘You only get danger money if Big Bertha goes off,’ said Chris, grinning.
‘What is Big Bertha?’ I enquired.
Chris pointed to a fairly large hole in the rock surface not far from the area he wanted us to walk across.
‘Big Bertha’s in that hole,’ he explained, ‘she’s apparently the largest of the geysers here but she only goes off at irregular intervals, about once every ten or fifteen years. When she really gets going she’s about fifty foot high, they say. Must be quite a sight.’ There was a wistful note in his voice, and I fixed him with a stern eye.
‘Let us be quite clear about this,’ I said, ‘I have not the slightest intention of mucking about with a fifty foot geyser under any circumstances!’
Jacquie and I made our way to the spot Chris had pointed out and waited patiently until the camera and sound recording equipment was ready; then, at a signal from Chris, we started to walk across the rocks, the small geysers behind us spouting vigorously and making quite an impressive sight.
We were halfway across when the ground started to tremble under our feet, there was a noise like a gargantuan belch followed by a hiss, and a jet of boiling steam the circumference of a medium-sized tree mink suddenly vomited forth from Big Bertha’s blow-hole and towered above us. It climbed higher and higher, the hissing getting louder, and then the top curved over like a fountain and rained scalding drops of water on us. Throwing discretion to the winds, Jacquie and I turned and ran. In fact, apart from the time I was chased by an infuriated gnu, I can never remember having run so fast. We arrived, panting, at the place where Chris and Jim were leaping up and down with excitement and Brian was standing with a broad, proud grin on his face as if he had personally Organised Big Bertha.
‘Wonderful,’ shouted Chris above the hissing of Big Bertha, ‘simply wonderful – it couldn’t have been better.’
Jacquie and I sat down on a damp rock to recover our breath and gazed at each other.
‘Such an interesting life you lead, Mr Durrell,’ she said. ‘How I envy you.’
‘Yes, it’s one endless round of thrills and pleasure,’ I said, wiping the water off my face and endeavouring to light a cigarette with a sodden match.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ said Chris, ‘you were well clear of it’.
‘That,’ I said, ‘is not the point. You assured me that the bloody thing only went off once a century or something. Suppose I had, in a fit of boyish enthusiasm, decided to go and stand over that hole? It would have been the enema to end all enemas.’
While Chris and Jim took a few more shots of Big Bertha from different angles, Jacquie and I went back and played with the mud pools, and then presently we packed up the equipment and climbed out of the valley. At the top I paused and looked back at the twisted and tortured rock formation, the columns of hissing steam and the gleaming area of the mud pools, all seen dimly now through the thickening mist that Big Bertha’s eruption had caused. It looked like an illustration by Gustave Doré and I would not have been surprised to see a dinosaur suddenly appear round a shoulder of rock on its way for a quick dip in a mud pool.
After the night at Rotorua (during which we were not boiled in our beds, as Jim had so mournfully predicted) we set off once again down towards Wellington, at the tip of North Island. After a few hours of driving, when we were all getting bored with suddenly shouting ‘Look!’ only to find it was a hedge sparrow or a chaffinch, Brian drove us down a road that led along the shores of a large and placid lake surrounded by tall stands of timber, and here at last we started to see some New Zealand birds. The lake was, of course, heavily besprinkled with its quota of black swans, but there was not a sufficient concentration of them to have completely eliminated the indigenous wildfowl and so we leapt out of the Land-Rover with enthusiasm, armed with cameras and binoculars, and were soon all busy with our different tasks: Chris and Jim filming, Jacquie, Brian and I watching the birds, while Brian identified them for us and gave us a thumbnail portrait of their distribution and habits. By far the commonest and most beautiful were the paradise ducks, several pairs of which were feeding in the shallow water within thirty or forty feet of us. One of the most extraordinary things about them was the difference between the male and the female; at first glance they looked like two totally unrelated species. The male had the head, neck and breast shining black; the back was also black, but delicately pencilled with white lines, and the underside was a rich fox red, also pencilled with fine white lines. In complete contrast, the female had the back black, as in the male, pencil-led with white, the breast and underside fox red with white lines, and a completely white head and neck. Never having seen these beautiful ducks before, I was under the impression that the
female was the male, since her colouring made her stand so dominantly, until Brian disillusioned me. It still seems to be a curious thing that the female should be so much more conspicuous than the male for she, after all, has the hazardous job of sitting on the nest, when you would have thought that camouflage was an essential. Next to the paradise duck the other commonest New Zealand species was the black teal, but these were much more wary and swam in small groups way out on the lake, so we had to content ourselves with getting glimpses of them with our binoculars. They were neat, compact little birds with rather short, stubby beaks, and they swam in a swift and rather furtive manner. The head and neck were black, with a purplish sheen above and a greenish one below, while what you could see of their body above the waterline was black. This rather sombre plumage was nicely set off by a white band on the wing, the slate blue beak and a bright yellow eye.
After we had spent several hours pleasantly occupied, by the lake, we climbed into the Land-Rover and continued our journey to Wellington. Here we were booked in at a hotel which, like all the other New Zealand hotels we had so far inhabited, left practically everything to be desired. We met with such pure, unadulterated kindness from everyone in New Zealand during our stay that it made our reception in the hotels worse by contrast.
Rising early the next morning we drove down towards the coast. Brian had insisted that, before we left North Island we visit Kapiti, a tiny island lying of the coast, which was a bird sanctuary. Tired by my constant moaning about blackbirds and thrushes, he had assured me that on Kapiti I really would see a good cross section of native New Zealand birds. So we reached the coast and parked the Land-Rover alongside a stretch of sandy beach on which gentle rollers were breaking. Directly before us lay Kapiti, a long, humpbacked island thickly covered with trees and looking, in the pale morning light, dark and grim and not the slightest bit inviting. Jim gazed at the creaming rollers and then measured the distance between the shore and the island.
‘How do we get out there?’ he asked nervously. ‘Swim?’
‘No, no. George Fox – he’s the warden of the island – is going to pick us up in his launch,’ said Brian, glancing at his watch. ‘He should be here any minute now.’
We unloaded all the equipment and piled it along the sea wall in readiness, and presently we saw the tiny shape of the launch leave the edge of the island and come bouncing over the rollers towards us. Jim viewed its exuberant progress with increasing alarm.
‘I shall be sick,’ he announced in a sepulchral voice.
‘Nonsense,’ said Chris, ‘it’s not rough – and anyway, you can’t be sick over such a short distance.’
‘I was once sick in an army lorry crossing the Rhine,’ said Jim with immense dignity.
There was a short pause while we all assimilated this extraordinary statement.
‘I have no wish to appear more ignorant than I am,’ I said carefully, ‘but I fail to see how you can be sick in an army lorry crossing the Rhine – what was it, an amphibious lorry?’
‘No,’ said Jim, ‘it was on a pontoon bridge, see? And as we were going across the pontoon bridge kept going up and down.’
‘Well?’ prompted Chris, fascinated.
‘So I was sea-sick,’ said Jim simply.
Silently I wrung his hand.
‘I am proud,’ I said, ‘to meet a man who has enough courage to be sea-sick crossing a river on a pontoon bridge in an army lorry. No wonder we won the war.’
By this time the launch was nosing its way through the small breakers at the shoreline and it grounded in the sand with a gentle scrunch. George Fox appeared out of the tiny wheelhouse, leapt over the side and waded ashore to greet us. He was a short, stocky man with a brown, weatherbeaten face and clear blue eyes. His manner was reserved, almost taciturn, but I was to learn that this was not his usual approach to people. It was simply that, in the past, he had had many naturalists invading his island to see his birds, and for the most part they appeared to have been a boorish lot. So naturally each fresh consignment of nature lovers and filmmakers was treated by George with a certain amount of suspicion until they had proved themselves.
The launch bounced merrily over the half-mile or so of water that separated Kapiti from the mainland, and Jim sat grimly in the wheelhouse with an expression of foreboding on his face. However, we reached the tiny landing stage before any major disaster overtook him. At close sight the island looked even more forbidding than it had done from the mainland. The hillside rose sheer above us, covered with dark green beech forest that seemed uncannily silent and deserted. We unloaded the equipment and humped it up a narrow path up the hillside and, as we walked through the dense, gloomy forest, the drumming began.
At first it sounded as though a pigmy, hidden somewhere in the undergrowth to our left, was belting out a gentle tattoo on a tiny tom-tom. The sound lasted a few seconds and then stopped. After a short pause, it was replied to by another pigmy concealed somewhere on our right: a brief tattoo and then silence. Suddenly, as if some message had been received and understood, the tom-toms started throbbing all around us, working out complicated patterns of sound, questioning and answering each other in an intricate conversation.
‘When do the pigmies attack?’ I asked Brian, for it really sounded as though these were drums working some minute tribe up into a warlike frenzy. Brian grinned.
‘I told you you’d see some real New Zealand birds here,’ he said. ‘Those are the wekas. One of the most inquisitive birds in New Zealand. They always want to know who’s arrived on the island and what they’re up to. You’ll see them in a minute.’
We continued up the path and then suddenly came out into a sun-filled clearing in which stood George Fox’s neat little bungalow. Here we were greeted by his sister, who immediately won all our hearts by offering us hot coffee and home-made cakes. As we sat outside in the sunshine, gorging ourselves on this most welcome repast, I suddenly saw a brown head appear from behind a rock, peer at me interestedly with large, dark eyes and then disappear.
‘Brian,’ I said, ‘a brown bird just poked its head out from behind that rock.’
‘Yes,’ said Brian through a mouthful of cake, ‘that was a weka. They’ll all be here in a minute. They can’t resist anything new.’
As Brian said this another brown head appeared out of some undergrowth, regarded us with a knowing look and then carefully retreated. They kept peeping at us like this for some time, now from behind a rock, now from the depths of a patch of ferns, but after a few minutes of this intensive scrutiny they decided that we were harmless and then, like a conjuring trick, we were suddenly surrounded by wekas. They clustered around us (appearing from the most unlikely places) and examined all the camera equipment minutely, pecking gently at the leather cases and the tin boxes full of film, regarding the tripods with their heads on one side, and all the time keeping up an endless tom-tom conversation with each other, for all the world as if they were customs officers who suspected us of smuggling. They were handsome, if somewhat sombre-looking birds that reminded me of extremely large corncrakes. They had a typical rail-like walk, placing their large feet rather carefully on the ground as if they suffered from corns, and with the head and neck stretched out in an inquisitive fashion. Their top half was a nice autumnal rufous colour, spotted here and there with black, while the throat and underside, together with a dashing stripe over the eye, were grey. The beak was reddish, like the feet, and the eye, which had looked quite dark from a distance, now turned out to be an attractive reddish-brown.
Having given the equipment the once-over they then approached us and investigated our clothing and shoes, pecking at our feet very gently and moving to and fro among us in the most sedate fashion, still thrumming away to each other. This noise, when heard at close range, had an extraordinary ventriloquial quality: the weka at your feet would drum suddenly and you could see him doing it, yet the sound appeared to come from some distance away. In spite of their placidity we soon found that a handful of cake
crumbs scattered on the path brought on the most disgraceful free-for-all, with much barging and shoving and indignant drumming. The whole time we were on Kapiti the wekas stayed with us, scuttling around like little brown gnomes, busy-bodying about, tripping us up and keeping up their incessant drumming. They were charming but exhausting companions.
At first it seemed as though wekas were the only bird inhabitants of Kapiti but once we had got the equipment out and the cameras and tripods set up, the other birds started to appear. The first to arrive for a quick snack at the small bird table George Fox had fitted up was a bellbird. He hid in the trees nearby for some time before he came down to the table, but while we waited for him to show himself he entertained us with a concert of wonderful, flute-like notes, wild and liquid and beautiful. When the bird itself appeared it was rather a disappointment, looking extremely like – at first glance – a common European greenfinch, except that the head was a deep purplish colour. After some food and a drink he perched himself on a branch just above the food table and gave us another short concert, and you felt you could forgive him his rather uninspiring appearance for the sake of the wonderful Pan pipes he could play with such elegance and ease.