Alphabet

A GERALD DURRELL ALPHABET.

In the gloom [the aye-aye] came along the branches towards me, it's round hypnotic eyes blazing, its spoon like ears turning to and fro independently like radar dishes, its white whiskers twitching and moving like sensors, its black hands, with their thin attenuated fingers, the third seeming prodigiously elongated, tapping deliberately as it moved like those of a pianist playing a complicated piece by Chopin. It looked like a Walt Disney witches black cat with a touch of ET thrown in for good measure. If ever a flying saucer came from Mars you felt that this is what would emerge from it. It was Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, come to life, whiffling through the tulgey wood.

(FROM THE AYE-AYE AND I)

In these patches of sun, warming themselves after the night's dew, sat a host of butterflies. They rose and flew around us as we walked, dipping and fluttering and wheeling in a sun-drunken condition. There were tiny white ones like fragile chips of snow, great clumsy ones whose wings shone like burnished copper, and others decked out in blacks, greens reds and yellows. Once we had passed, they settled again on the sunlit path and sat there gaily, occasionally opening and closing their wings.

(FROM THE BAFUT BEAGLES)

Ahead lay a chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist, with a frill of foam at its base. This was Corfu and we strained our eyes to make out the exact shapes of the mountains, to discover valleys, peaks, ravines, and beaches, but it remained a silhouette. Then suddenly the sun shifted over the horizon, and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay's eye. The endless, meticulous curves of the sea flamed for an instant and then changed to deep royal purple flecked with green. The mist lifted in quick, lithe ribbons, and before us lay the island, the mountains as though sleeping beneath a crumpled blanket of brown, the folds stained with the green of olive-groves. Along the shore curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red,and white rocks.

(FROM MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS)

... the whole landscape did look as though nature had organised an enormous bottle party, inviting the weird mixture of temperate, sub-tropical, and tropical plants to it. Everywhere [in the drunken forest] the palms leaned tiredly, the professional bar loungers with their too long heads of hair; the thorn-bushes grappled in an inebriate brawl; the well dressed flowers and the unshaven cacti side by side; and everywhere, the palo borrachos [trees] stood with their bulging beer drinkers' stomach, tilted at unbalanced angles; and everywhere amongst this floral throng hurried the widow tyrants [birds], like small slick waiters with incredibly immaculate shirt-fronts.

(FROM THE DRUNKEN FOREST)

On the fallen and rotting branches that lay about, I found innumerable small phosphorescent fungi that glowed with a bright, greenish-blue light, so that part of forest floor was illuminated like a city seen from the air at night. I collected some of these twigs and branches, and found that ten or twelve of these glowing fungi produced enough light to be able to read by, providing you kept your light source fairly close to the page

(FROM GOLDEN BATS AND PINK PIGEONS)

... we heard a great vibrant humming like a giant dynamo. At first I thought it was bees, but peering up into the tree with my binoculars I saw that the noise came from hundreds of hummingbirds. They hovered there, feeding on the flowers, and the noise was the sound of their wings. It was a breathtaking sight to see this myriad of tiny birds gleaming like gems in the sun as they flipped from flower to flower. Now and then they engaged in fights that that shook the flower petals free, and the petals drifted down to carpet the brown waters.

(FROM THE AMATEUR NATURALIST)

"The trouble with most - if not all - parrots is, as I say, that they're taught by humans. That's why they do not know what they are saying, because the humans never explain to them what they're teaching them" ... "Do you know how many words there are in the English language?" "No said Penelope" "Hundreds," said Peter. "More like thousands" said Simon. "Quite right" said Parrot. "To be exact, two hundred thousand words. Now the average person uses the same words day in and day out." Here his eyes filled with tears, and he pulled out a large, spotted handkerchief from under his wing and blew his beak. "So," he went on, his voice shaken with sobs. "What do you think happens to all the words that aren't used?" "What happens to them?" asked Penelope wide-eyed. "If they are not looked after and given exercise, they simply fade away and vanish, poor little things," said Parrot. "That's my job [Keeper of Words]. Once a year I have to sit down and recite the Dictionary, to make sure that all the words get the correct amount exercise, but during the year I try to use as many as possible because, really, one outing a year is not enough for the little fellows. They get so bored, sitting there between the pages." ...

(THE BATTLE FOR CASTLE COCKATRICE)

To me the quietness of a library, the smell and the feel of the books, is like the smell and texture of food to a gourmet. It may sound fanciful, but I can stand in the middle of a library and hear the myriad voices around me as though I were standing in the middle of a vast choir of knowledge and beauty.

(QUOTED AT THE 1995 MEMORIAL SERVICE TO GERALD DURRELL)

Marriages in zoos are, of course, arranged, as they used to be by eighteenth century Mammas. But the eighteenth century Mamma had one advantage over the zoo: having married off her daughters, there was an end to it. In a zoo you are never quite sure, since any number of things may happen. Before you can even lead your creatures to the altar, so to speak, it is quite possible that either the male or female may take an instant dislike to the mate selected, and so, if you are not careful, the bride or groom may turn into a corpse long before the honeymoon has started. A zoo matchmaker has a great number of risks to take, before he can sit back with a sigh of relief and feel the marriage is an accomplished fact.

(FROM MENAGERIE MANOR)

Against the deep soft blackness of the sky were etched scrolls, curtains, scarves and tangled wisps of pale purple, green, blue, pink and frost white fronds of what looked like cloud but which seemed to have a life of their own. With each passing second [the Northern Lights] shifted, separated, merged, broke up and re-formed in a different pattern and always they were floodlit from somewhere in the wings, as it were, and the colours changed with their movements.

(FROM HOW TO SHOOT AN AMATEUR NATURALIST)

The Ombu tree was certainly strange. It stood on a squat trunk some ten feet high and about eight feet in circumferance; a trunk that spread its massive curling roots out to embrace the ground like the talons of some strange mythological beast. The bark was streaked grey and silver and was pitted with holes and rents like magnified pumice stone. Small, glossy, green leaves like jade arrowheads hung from the fat, twisted little branches that were all of such length that it looked as if the Ombu had been polled at some time. The overall effect ... was that of a fuzzy, green, oversized beach umbrella balanced on an outsized handle.

(FROM THE MOCKERY BIRD)

..the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorous. In the centre of the bay they swam around, diving and rolling occasionally leaping high in the air and falling back into a conflagration of light.

(FROM MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS)

It had never occurred to [Adrian] to try Rosy out on the moving stage. Rosy woke out of her gin-soaked reverie to find the floor in some miraculous fashion moving backwards. She gave a small, slightly alarmed squeak and moved forward two or three paces.

"Stand still you fool," hissed Adrian, but by now the stage was revolving quite fast and Rosy, losing her head, started to run to keep up with it. ... The stage started to revolve in the opposite direction and Rosy, not to be outdone, turned adroitly to run with it. The result was that the shafts of the Sultan's carriage snapped like match sticks and the carriage performed a short but very elegant flight before it crashed down on the stage operator and the levers. Now everbody lost his head. The stage, apparently damaged, ... started to revolve faster and faster and Rosy ran faster and faster with it. She galloped through the desert scene, knocking the palm trees in all directions, she shouldered her way through the market place, wrecking the stalls, she ran through the Sultan's palace knocking down several pieces of oriental lattice work and the pillar in which Adrian was trapped.

... The hushed and spell-bound audience were treated to three scenes in rapid succession, all of them containing Rosy and Honoraria running ineffectually in opposite directions and achieving no results whatsoever. Adrian had managed to extricate himself from his pillar and started running after Rosy. The stage, living up to its makers reputation, was by now travelling at some thirty miles an hour, and as it whirled round various looser props were whisked off. A member of the orchestra was hit by a palm tree and several bits of the Sultan's palace crashed into the front row of stalls.

(FROM ROSY IS MY RELATIVE)

I can never get over the wonder of the moment when you enter the water and find your face beneath the diamond-bright surface of a tropical sea. The mask is like a magic door, whose opening smooths out the ruffles and pleats of the water, and you slide effortlessly through a fairyland of unimaginable beauty. At first we drifted over the golden sand, patterned with its bright, ever-moving chain mail created by the brilliant sun, and saw the stingrays like strange mottled frying-pans glide out of our way. Here and there were small islands of coral, smouldering like great jewels, clad in multicoloured weeds, decorated with sponges and sea squirts in vivid colours, each island with its retinue of fish - orange, scarlet as a midnight summer sky, yellow as a dandelion, striped, speckled, pleated and ruffed, shapes to defy the imagination.

(FROM HOW TO SHOOT AN AMATEUR NATURALIST)

Theodore would welcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folk-lore, and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Interspersed with these were selections of ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes brushed shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I considered to be a thoroughly well-balanced library. At one window of the room stood Theodore's telescope, its nose to the sky like a howling dog, while the sills of every window bore a parade of jars and bottles containing minute freshwater fauna, whirling and twitching among the delicate fronds of green weed. On one side of the room was a massive desk, piled high with scrapbooks, micro-photographs, X-ray plates, t diaries, and note-books. On the opposite side of the room was a microscope table, with its powerful lamp on the jointed stem leaning like a lily over the flat boxes thahoused Theodore's collection of slides. The microscopes themselves, gleaming like magpies, were housed under a series of beehive-like domes of glass.

(FROM MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS)

The peace and silence of these heights was remarkable; nearly all sounds were created by the wind, and it was busy moving here and there, making each object produce its own song. It combed the grass and brought forth a soft lisping rustle: it squeezed and wriggled between the cracks and joints of the rocks above us and made owl-like moans and sudden hoots of mirth; it pushed and wrestled with the tough little trees, making them creak and grown, and making their leaves flutter and purr like kittens. Yet all these sounds seemed to enhance rather than destroy the silence of the grassland.

(FROM THE BAFUT BEAGLES)

For many of the animals, especially the primates, Christmas was the most boring day of the year. There were no human visitors to stare at, no human antics and eccentricities to keep them amused, no titbits pushed through the wire netting. But the season was not without its little bonuses. Special treats had been prepared for them - crackly pieces of turkey skin for Claudius the tapir, a handful of liqueur chocolates for Pedro the spectacled bear, cystallised fruits for the marmosets, minced pies for smaller monkeys, turkey bones for the smaller cats, grapes for the birds, The piece de resistance was the apes' Christmas tea party - a sumptuous spread of sugar-coated biscuits, chocolate bars, grapes, apples and pears, a large iced cake and their favourite tipple of well-watered red wine, all laid out on a table in the courtyard in front of the manor house, complete with a Christmas tree hung with stockings stuffed with sugared almonds and marshmallows. N'pongo, Chumley and Lulu made short shrift of this seasonal set-piece. The tree disintegrated as Chumley tried to grab the fairy at the top, both chimps brawled over each other's wine, and N'pongo systematically stuffed herself with everything in sight. "We carried them, full of wine and sweets, back to their cages, where they crawled exhaustedly into their straw beds and lay there belching gently."

("CHRISTMAS AT THE ZOO" ANIMALS MAGAZINE 1963 QUOTED BY DOUGLAS BOTTING)

A zoo is where lots of different animals from all over the world live. Its a safe place for some animals because, in the countries they come from, their wild homes are being destroyed to make room for more people. So these poor animals have nowhere to live any more.

(FROM PUPPYS WILD TIME)

0 -0-

-0-

Click an endangered living world to go to ArkGallery Homepage

Email us at shoarns@arkgallery.co.uk

_________________________________________________________