So, eventually, we had all our bats in their individual Tantes and we drove down to the airport. The immigration and police waved us a cheerful farewell as we loaded our strange cargo on to the plane. We taxied down the dusty runway and took off, flying low over the reef. I was sorry to leave Rodrigues; for from what I had seen of it, it seemed an enchanting and unspoiled island. I hoped that it would long remain so, for once tourism discovered its whereabouts, it would suffer the same fate as has befallen so many beautiful places on earth.
When we got back to Mauritius, we drove the bats down to the aviaries at Black River, which Dave had prepared for their reception. They had travelled very well and they settled down, hanging from the wire top of the aviary, chittering gently to each other and displaying great interest in the wide variety of food which Dave had prepared for them. Flushed with success, we went back to the hotel, had baths and then went in to dinner. When it came to the sweet course, Horace asked me what I would like.
‘Well, what have you got?’ I enquired, determined not to be caught, as we had been with the lobsters.
‘Some nice fruit, Sir,’ he said.
I looked at him. He did not appear to be pulling my leg.
‘What sort of fruit?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got some beautiful, ripe Jak fruit, Sir,’ he said enthusiastically.
I had cheese.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ENCHANTED WORLD
Outside the French windows that led from the sitting-room of the hotel suite lay a spacious and cool verandah. Step off this, and one walked twenty yards or so across coarse grass planted with tall casuarina trees that sighed like lovers in the wind, until one came to the wide, frost-white beach with its broken necklace of corals and coloured shells, lying wavering across the shoreline. In the distance lay the reef, white and thunderous with surf, and beyond it the royal blue of the Indian Ocean. Between the white beach, decorated with its biscuit-brittle graveyard of coral
fragments, and the wide reef with its ever-changing flower bed of foam, lay the lagoon. Half a mile of butterfly-blue water, smooth as a saucer of milk, clear as a diamond, which hid an enchanted world like none other on earth.
Any naturalist who is lucky enough to travel, at certain moments has experienced a feeling of overwhelming exultation at the beauty and complexity of life, and a feeling of depression that there is so much to see, to observe, to learn, that one lifetime is an unfairly short span to be allotted for such a paradise of enigmas as the world is. You get it when, for the first time, you see the beauty, variety and exuberance of a tropical rain forest, with its cathedral maze of a thousand different trees, each bedecked with gardens of orchids, epiphytes, enmeshed in a web of creepers; an interlocking of so many species that you cannot believe that number of different forms have evolved. You get it when you see for the first time a great concourse of mammals living together, or a vast, restless conglomeration of birds. You get it when you see a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis; a dragonfly from its pupa; when you observe the delicate, multifarious courtship displays, the rituals and taboos, that go into making up the continuation of a species. You get it when you first see a stick or a leaf turn into an insect, or a piece of dappled shade into a herd of zebras. You get it when you see a gigantic school of dolphins stretching as far as the eye can see, rocking and leaping exuberantly through their blue world; or a microscopic spider manufacturing from its frail body a transparent, apparently never-ending line that will act as a transport as it sets out on its aerial explorations of the vast world that surrounds it.
But there is one experience, perhaps above all others, that a naturalist should try to have before he dies, and that is the astonishing and humbling experience of exploring a tropical reef. It seems that in this one action you use nearly every one of your senses, and one feels that one could uncover hidden senses as well. You become a fish, hear, and see and feed as much like one as a human being can; yet at the same time you are like a bird, hovering, swooping and gliding across the marine pastures and forests.
I had obtained my first taste of this fabulous experience when I was on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia but there, unfortunately, we had only masks and no snorkels, and my mask let in water. To say that it was fascinating, was putting it mildly, for there below me was this fascinating, multi-coloured world and I could only obtain glimpses of it, the duration of which was dependent upon how long I could hold my breath and how long it took my mask to fill and drown me. The tantalising glimpses I did get of this underwater world were unforgettable and I determined to do it properly at the first available opportunity. This came in Mauritius, for there at the Le Morne Brabant Hotel, the lagoon and its attendant reef were literally on my doorstep. I could not have been closer without moving my bed into it.
The first morning, I made myself a pot of tea and carried it out on to the verandah, together with one of the small, sweet Mauritian pineapples. I sat eating and watching the boats arrive farther down the beach, each piloted by handsome, bright-eyed, long-haired fishermen ranging from copper-bronze to soot-black in colour, wearing a variety of clothing in eye-catching colours that shamed the hibiscus and bougainvillaea flowers that flamed in the gardens. Each boat was loaded down with a cargo of snow-white pieces of coral and multi-coloured, pard-spotted cowries and cone shells. From sticks stuck in the gunwales, hung necklaces of tiny shells like glittering rainbows. The sun had just emerged from the mountains behind the hotel. It turned the sky and the horizon powder-blue; gilded a few fat, white clouds that sailed in a slow flotilla across the sky; gave a crisp, white sparkle to the foam on the reef and turned the flat, still lagoon transparent sapphire.
Almost as soon as I had seated myself on the verandah, the table at which I sat had become covered with birds, anxious to share with me whatever breakfast I had. There were mynahs with neat, black and chocolate plumage and banana-yellow beaks and eyes; Singing finches, the females a delicate leaf-green and pale, butter-yellow, and the males, by contrast, strident sulphur-yellow and black; and the Whiskered bulbuls, black and white, with handsome scarlet whiskers and tail flash. They all had a drink out of the milk jug, decided the tea was too hot and then sat, looking longingly at my fruit. I extracted the last of the juicy core from the glyptodont skin of the pineapple and then placed the debris on the table where it immediately became invisible under a fluttering, bickering mass of birds.
I finished my tea and then, taking my mask and snorkel, made my way slowly down to the shore. I reached the sand and the ghost crabs (so transparent that when they stopped moving and froze, they disappeared) skittered across the tide ripples and dived for safety into their holes. At the rim of the lagoon, the sea lapped very gently at the white sand, like a kitten delicately lapping at a saucer of milk. I walked into the water up to my ankles and it was as warm as a tepid bath.
All round my feet on the surface of the sand were strange decorations that looked as though someone had walked through the shallow water and traced on the sandy bottom the blurred outlines of a hundred starfish. They lay arm to arm, as it were, like some strange, sandy constellation. The biggest measured a foot from arm tip to arm tip, and the smallest was about the size of a saucer.
Curious about these ghostly sand starfish, I dug an experimental toe under one and hooked upwards. It came out from under its covering and floated briefly upwards, shedding the film of sand that had been lightly covering it and revealing itself to be a fine, robust starfish of a pale brick-pink, heavily marked with a dull white and red speckling. Though they looked attractively soft and velvety — like a star you put on top of a Christmas tree — they were, in fact, hard and sandpaperish to the touch. The one I had so rudely jerked out of its sandy bed with my toe performed a languid cartwheel in the clear water and drifted down on to the bottom, landing on its back. Its underside was a pale, yellowish ivory, with a deep groove down each arm that looked like an open zip-fastener. Within this groove, lay its myriad feet — tiny tentacles some four millimetres long, ending in a plate-shaped sucker. Each foot could be used independently so that there was a constant movement in the grooves and the tentacles contracted and expanded, searching for some surface on which the suckers could fasten.