The Golden Mole Page 2
The Roman poet Horace was stridently anti-giraffe. The animal was, he believed, conceptually untidy: ‘If a painter had chosen to set a human head on a horse’s neck [or] if a lovely woman ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish, could you stifle laughter, friends?’ His account of the giraffe in Ars Poetica (c.8 BCE) ends on a plea: ‘Let the work be what you like, but let it be one, single thing.’ When Julius Caesar brought a giraffe back to Rome from Alexandria in 46 BCE (a gift, some said, from Cleopatra), those lining the streets saw, as Horace did, a creature made of two parts. Cassius Dio wrote in his Historia Romana that it was ‘like a camel in all respects except that its legs are not all of the same length, the hind legs being the shorter … Towering high aloft, it … lifts its neck in turn to an unusual height. Its skin is spotted like a leopard.’ But the crowds rejoiced in the creature’s bravura hybridity. ‘And for this reason,’ Dio wrote, ‘it bears the joint name of both animals.’ Camelopardalis: camelopard.
Throughout history we have tried, with more enthusiasm than accuracy, to explain how something so mixed and miraculous came to be. The Persian geographer Ibn al-Faqih wrote in 903 that the giraffe occurs when ‘the panther mates with the [camel mare]’. Zakariya al-Qazwini, a cosmographer from the thirteenth century, suggested in his Wonders of Creation (which also includes among its marvels al-mi’raj, a rabbit with the horn of a unicorn) that its genesis was the result of a two-part concatenation: ‘The male hyena mates with the female Abyssinian camel; if the young one is a male and covers the wild cow, it will produce a giraffe.’ Both possibilities sound more stressful than would be ideal from an evolutionary point of view. Others have declared it magical: the early Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He brought two giraffes to Nanjing and cherished them as qilin, a gentle hooved chimera. Charles I’s chaplain, Alexander Ross, wrote in Arcana Microcosmi in 1651 that the sheer fact of the giraffe made it impossible for naturalists to ‘overthrow the received opinion of the ancients concerning griffins … seeing there is a possibility in nature for such a compounded animal. For the gyraffa, or camelopardalis, is of a stranger composition, being made of the leopard, buffalo, hart and camel.’
Ross was right: the truths of the giraffe are more fabulous and potent than our fictions. Giraffes are born with no aid from the camel or hyena, but even so their birth is a wonder: they gestate for fifteen months, then drop into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth. It looks as brisk and simple as emptying out a handbag. Within minutes, they can stand on their trembling, catwalk-model legs and suckle at their mother’s four teats, biting off the little wax caps that have formed in the preceding days to keep the milk from leaking out. Soon they are ready to run, but still liable to trip over their own hind legs, a hazard they never learn entirely to avoid.
Once full grown they can gallop at sixty kilometres an hour on feet the size of dinner plates, but it remains safer not to: they self-entangle. Their tongue, which is dark purplish-blue to protect it from the sun and more powerful than that of any other ungulate, is fifty centimetres long: they can scrape the mucus from deep inside their own nostrils with the tip. And they are the skyscrapers of mammals, unmatched: the tallest giraffe ever recorded, a Masai bull, measured 5.9 metres. The explorer John Mandeville only mildly exaggerated when he wrote of the ‘gerfauntz’, in the first English-language account in 1356, that it had a neck ‘twenty cubytes long [about nine metres] … he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a fictional appellation for an unknown man, some laxity in measurements is to be expected.) But though so tall, they are hospitable to the small. They have been known to host tiny yellow-billed oxpeckers on their bodies: the small birds remove ticks from their skin, and clean the food from between their teeth. Giraffes have been photographed at night with clusters of sleeping birds tucked into their armpits, keeping them dry.
In Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie your giraffe to a streetlamp. It is not illegal, though, to import a cushion made from a freshly shot giraffe’s head with the eyelashes still attached. The United States is one of the largest markets in the world for giraffe parts, because America has refused to designate the animals endangered, despite the fact that there are fewer than sixty-eight thousand left in the wild, a forty per cent drop in thirty years. In a recent ten-year period, American hunters imported 3744 dead giraffes – about five per cent of the total number alive. Today you could, if you felt like externalising the apocalyptic whiff of your personality, buy both a floor-length giraffe coat and a Bible in a giraffe-skin cover. Rarer breeds are on the very edge of vanishing: the population of Nubian giraffe has fallen by ninety-eight per cent in the last four decades, and they will soon be extinct in the wild. Their own beauty imperils them. As the great Roman naturalist Pliny wrote, the proof of wealth is ‘to possess something that might be absolutely destroyed in a moment’.
We don’t know why the giraffe looks as it does. Until relatively recently, its neck was explained in the way Darwin suggested: the ‘competing browsers hypothesis’ posits, commonsensically, that competition from browsers such as impala and kudu encouraged the gradual lengthening of the neck, allowing it to reach food the others couldn’t. Recently, though, it has been shown that giraffes spend relatively little time browsing at full height, and the longer-necked individuals are more likely to die in times of famine. It is possible that it gives males an advantage when they engage in ‘necking’ – swinging their necks against one another, seemingly to establish dominance. (There will surely be more to discover about necking, too, in years to come: it often leads to sexual activity between the warring males. Indeed, most sex between giraffes is homosexual: in one study, same-sex male mounting accounted for ninety-four per cent of all sexual behaviour observed.) Whatever its reason, the neck comes at a price. Each time a giraffe dips down to drink, legs splayed, the blood rushes to its brain; as it bends, the jugular vein closes off blood to the head, to stop it fainting when it straightens up again. Even when water is plentiful, they drink only every few days. It is a dizzying thing, being a giraffe.
There is something in giraffes that unhinges us in our delight. In 1827, a giraffe walked into Paris. She was not the first giraffe in Europe – Lorenzo de’ Medici had brought a giraffe through Italy in 1487, Florentines leaning perilously out of second-floor windows to feed it – but she was the best dressed. Wearing a two-piece custom-made raincoat embroidered with fleurs-delis, she was a gift from the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali to Charles X. She travelled for more than two years from Sennar by boat and on foot, arriving in Paris in high summer; there she bent to eat rose petals from the king’s hand. She was known as la Belle Africaine, le bel animal du roi and, most often, la girafe: like God and the king, there was only one. She was housed in the royal menagerie in an enclosure with a polished parquet floor (‘truly the boudoir of a little lady’, the keeper wrote) and Parisians, filing past to see her in their thousands, went giraffe crazy. Shops filled with giraffe porcelain, soap, wallpaper, cravats, giraffe-print dresses; the colours of the year were ‘Giraffe belly’, ‘Giraffe in love’ and ‘Giraffe in exile’. Hair was worn vertically in Paris that season. Women smeared their hair with hogs’ lard pomade fragranced with orange flower and jasmine, and wound it to resemble the giraffe’s ossicones. There were reports of women sitting on the floors of their carriages, so high did their coiffures à la girafe rise.
But we tire of everything, even miracles. Charles X abdicated, his son ruled for twenty minutes, and la girafe outlived her fame. She died unvisited in 1845, was taxidermied and put in the foyer of the Jardin des Plantes. Delacroix, under the false impression that she was male, went to see the body: the giraffe, he wrote, died ‘in obscurity as complete as his entry in the world had been brilliant’. But the wild Parisian reaction, it seems to me, was the only reasonable one. It should never have died down: we should still be wearing our hair in twelve-inch towers. Why did we ever stop? The earth is so glorious and so unlikely: the giraffe, stranger than the griffin, tall
er than a great high house, offers us the incomparable gift of being proof of it.
The swift is sky-suited like no other bird. Weighing less than a hen’s egg, with wings like a scythe and a tail like a fork, it eats and sleeps on the wing. They gather nesting material only from what’s in the air, which means that there have been accounts of still-flapping butterflies wedged in among the leaves and twigs. They mate in brief mid-sky collisions, the only birds to do so, and to wash they hunt down clouds and fly through gentle rain, slowly, wings outstretched.
Most remarkable of all is their night. Swifts can find a state of unihemispheric sleep; they shut off one half of their brain at a time, while the other remains functioning, alert to changes in the wind, so that the bird wakes in exactly the same place where it fell asleep; or, if migrating, on the precise course it set itself. The left side closes first, then the right, so that it sways a little in the air as it sleeps. Geoffrey Chaucer knew it long before we did: in the Canterbury Tales he wrote about small birds who ‘slepen al the nyght with open ye’. And a French pilot during the First World War, flying by the light of a full moon on a reconnaissance mission near the Vosges, saw a ghostly cloud of them, apparently hovering entirely still in the air:
As we came to about ten thousand feet … we suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds which seemed to be motionless, or at least showed no noticeable reaction. They were widely scattered and only a few yards below the aircraft, showing up against a white sea of cloud underneath. None was visible above us. We were soon in the middle of the flock.
Nobody believed him, at the time: it seemed impossible, because swifts do seem impossible.
The swift is of the family Apodidae, from the Greek ápous, ‘footless’, because they were once believed to have no legs. We still know very little about them, because they’re so hard to catch and study, but we do at least know that they have legs, albeit tiny, weak ones. Adult swifts can walk if they absolutely have to, but younglings can’t, and, if all goes well, do not need to. They tip themselves from the nest and fly straight to Africa, some not alighting again for ten months, some for two years or four, and a few never stopping at all. We know that to prepare for their great flight, the young chicks in the nest strengthen their wings from a month old by doing feathery press-ups; lifting their bodies up off the nest by pressing down on their wings, until they can hold themselves there, suspended, for several seconds. Then they’re ready.
We still don’t know with absolute certainty how they know with such absolute certainty where to go. But we know that they’re fast. They are the swiftest of all birds in level flight (a peregrine can outstrip them in a dive, but they can outfly her in a flat race); the top speed ever officially recorded was 111.6 kph, but there are reports of the needle-tailed swift, found in Africa and Asia, reaching 170 kph. A swift flies about 200,000 kilometres a year; the Earth has a circumference at the equator of 40,075 kilometres; so a swift flies far enough each year to put five girdles round the Earth. It would be exhausting to contemplate, except that I have never seen a swift that looks exhausted.
That sky-high stamina – and their raucous, questing cry – has long thrilled us. In heraldry, the swift is one of the inspirations for the imaginary martlet, a stylised bird without feet. Unable to land, the martlet is a symbol of restlessness and pursuit: of the constant search for knowledge and adventure and learning. They were used in coats of arms as the mark of the fourth son, on the reckoning that the first son got the money, the second and third went to the Church, and the fourth was free to seek his fortune. Edward the Confessor, a king so morally upright he was practically levitating, was given five martlets, posthumously, on his shield: gold, to match the sun they fly after.
The Apodidae family is ancient: it separated off from other birds about seventy million years ago, so they’re old enough as a species to have had a nodding acquaintance with the Tyrannosaurus. They evolved to have deep-set eyes with bristles in front, which act as sunglasses against the glare of the equatorial sun. There are more than a hundred species, from the tiny pygmy swiftlet, just nine centimetres across and found only in the Philippines, to the white-naped swift, a huge twenty-five centimetres across the wing, which is silent when alone and calls almost ceaselessly when with its flock, cree cree cree.
If you see a bird settled on a telegraph wire or a tree, it’s not a swift. No sociable windowsill singers, no Disney-Princess-finger-perchers, they fly wild, and they fly like a stroke of luck incarnate. But they would, like most living things, be far luckier without us; the only swift found in Britain, Apus apus, which arrives in the UK for the mating season, is not yet critically endangered, but the last two decades have seen a fifty per cent drop in their breeding numbers. Apus apus mate for life, returning every year from Africa to the same spot to nest, usually in spaces under roof tiles and in the eaves of old houses and barns. As we knock down and seal up old buildings, the swifts can find nowhere safe to lay their eggs before the breeding season is over. They also suffer from mass industrialised pesticide use and global warming, both of which affect the insect population; swifts can eat only what’s in the air, and a swift with chicks needs to gather as many as a hundred thousand insects a day, storing them in batches of a thousand in a bulge in their throat. And then there’s our own familiar deadly hunger, our compulsion to feast at another’s expense: bird’s nest soup, thought to clear the complexion and rejuvenate the body, requires the harvesting of vast numbers of the endangered swiftlets’ nests. These days, the swift’s cry could quite reasonably be heard as a warning, or a sharp and angry accusation.
Ted Hughes wrote a love poem to swifts in the 1970s. It catches at their glory, their racing high-pitched valiance, although it reads a little differently now:
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come –
It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom – but lemurs are, I think, an exception. They live in matriarchal troops, with an alpha female at their head. When ring-tailed lemurs are cold or frightened, or when they want to bond, they group together in a furry mass known as a lemur ball, forming a black-and-white sphere that ranges in size from a football to a bicycle wheel. They intertwine their tails and paws, and press against one another’s walnut-sized swiftly beating hearts. To see it feels like an injunction of sorts: to find a lemur ball of one’s own.
The first lemur I ever met was a female, and she tried to bite me, which was fair, because I was trying to touch her, and because humans have done nothing to recommend themselves to lemurs. She was an indri lemur, living in a wildlife sanctuary outside the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo; she had an infant, which was riding not on her front, like a baby monkey, but on her back, like a miniature Lester Piggott. She had wide yellow eyes. William Burroughs, in his lemur-centric eco-surrealist novella Ghost of Chance, described the eyes of a lemur as ‘changing colour with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond’. The stare of this indri resembled that of a chemically enhanced young man at a nightclub who urgently wishes to tell you about his belief system, but her fur was the softest thing I have ever touched. I was a child, and the indri, which is the largest extant species of lemur, came up to my ribs when standing on her hind legs. She looked, as lemurs do, like a cross between a monkey, a cat, a rat and a human.
Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and the wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves to evolve in, they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in ‘stink-fighting’, battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or other animal retreats. It feels no madder than most current forms of diplomacy. It’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemu
rs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive.
There are at least 101 species and subspecies of lemur in Madagascar; there were once lemurs the size of small men, but after humans arrived on the island two thousand years ago the larger lemurs were hunted to extinction. At the smallest end of the scale is the Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, the smallest primate in the world, which weighs thirty grams on average and at full stretch couldn’t cover your hand. Somewhere in the middle is the northern giant mouse lemur, whose testes comprise 5.5 per cent of its body mass; the equivalent proportions in a man would be testicles the size of grapefruits. They are strange, then, and beautiful, and occasionally disconcerting seen from below.
The indri lemur was right to try to bite me; more right than she knew. The early human arrivals on the island eradicated at least fifteen species of lemur. Now, largely due to deforestation, twenty-four species are critically endangered, forty-nine are endangered and ninety-four per cent of all species are threatened. Until recently there was a strong taboo on hunting lemurs. Rural traditions held eating lemur flesh to be second in horror only to human flesh; some stories told that the lemurs were human ancestors who had become lost in the Madagascan rainforest and changed themselves into lemurs to survive. Other stories told of a man who, falling to certain death from a high tree, was caught by an indri lemur and set upright on the ground. The taboo was first eroded through poverty and desperation: in rural households where lemur was eaten the children were almost invariably found to be malnourished. As is often the case, one key route to conservation would be to urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition, and so as a by-product eradicate the need for hunting endangered creatures.