At the first heap of sugar-cane Stephen gave Jenny a small silver piece and they turned off to the left, threading their way down through as surprising a mixture of African and European nations as can well be imagined, with a plentiful sprinkling of Arabs and Moors and Syrians, and crosses of almost every shade including some with naturally rather than henna’ed red hair. But as soon as they were clear of the town the easy downward slope had almost no one on it and Stephen walked with his gaze well above the horizon, indeed half-way up the sky, for already the rising currents of air had carried many a soaring bird aloft.
He was intent upon one of them: a vulture, of course; but what vulture? Griffon? Lappet-faced? Hooded? Possibly Ruppell’s griffon? The light, though strong, was awkwardly placed for the distinguishing marks of a very high bird planing on the south-west breeze.
‘Sir,’ said Square, stopping on the edge of a small freshwater stream that ran down from the right. And following the pointed finger, Stephen saw an exactly defined print in the mud, a leopard’s left fore-paw, perfect even to the slight claw-mark, and strikingly recent.
‘They come for dogs,’ said Jenny. It was perfectly true, but neither of the men thought it her place to say so; and the word ‘spots’ died in her mouth.
‘This is much more promising,’ observed Stephen, his small telescope having shown him the surface of the bay dotted with water-fowl and perhaps some few waders far over. The minute ‘ping’ of his watch – it could hardly be called a chime – interrupted his close examination of the flamingos, and he said, ‘Come, Square, come, Jenny. We must not be late.’
In through a massive gate to a stable-yard with an assembly of bristling, suspicious dogs, kept in order only by Jenny’s presence and firm admonition, and so round to the front, where Mrs. Wood had just finished thrusting her put-tee’d legs into riding-boots. ‘Oh,’ cried she, ‘I do beg pardon for not having come out to meet you – we had a roaring, bellowing night of it with that damned leopard, and the dogs are still very cross – what she hopes to gain by it, I cannot imagine. Should you like some canvas-topped boots? I can almost promise a tolerable bird, if we go almost at once: but we should have to paddle or even wade a little by the mangrove and the leeches are such a nuisance.’ She sounded so very like her brother Edward when she said this that Stephen replied, ‘Dear Miss Christine, how
kind you are: I truly detest a leech.’ But collecting himself as she laced the sailcloth tops he went on, ‘Forgive my familiarity, I beg: that is what Edward and I used to call you.’
‘And he called you Stephen, as I did when speaking of you to him: so if I may, I shall go on. It comes so naturally.’
Perfectly naturally, by the time they reached the water and she was explaining its very curious nature. ‘Now look, Stephen, beyond the pygmy geese but before the flamingos …”
‘Christine, can you make out whether the nearer bird is a greater flamingo or the slightly smaller kind?’
‘A lesser, I do believe. But we shall see better when we are a little farther round and he brings his head up, showing his bill more clearly. Well, between the pygmy geese and those sparse dubious flamingos, there is a sandbank that will show in an hour or so: the water on the far side is brackish and on our side fresh: well, fairly fresh except at huge great high tides. But if you look along the shore to the right you will see a fair-sized freshwater stream coming down through the tall reeds: beyond that a dark bank of mangroves with their feet in the brackish mud, because there the sandbank curls in to the shore. Then farther on, though you can hardly see it from here except for the trees growing on its banks, another stream – a small river, indeed, where Jenny and I go and swim.’ Stephen nodded. ‘And there is an inlet beyond its mouth where I hope to show you a splendid bird.
Oh, and thank you very much for the hermaphrodite crab: there is something like him or her in that small bay. Shall we sit down on the bank here – this dear little northerly breeze keeps the mosquitoes off- and look at the birds? If there are any uncommon stragglers we may be able to make them out between us, or at least take notes.’
There was indeed a splendid wealth of birds on the water, including some very, very old friends such as wigeon, tufted duck, mallard and shoveller, perfectly at home among the neat little pygmy geese, knob-billed and spur-winged geese, white-faced tree-duck and the odd anhingas, to say nothing of the blue-breasted kingfisher that darted overhead and the steady patrol of vultures in the upper sky.
‘Shall we go on?’ asked Christine at last. ‘You do not dislike mangroves?’
‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I cannot say that I should ever deliberately cultivate one, but I am accustomed to their presence – have crept some miles among them and their loathsome flies further down the coast.’
‘These are only a sickly little patch: they have too much sweet water, and they cannot thrive. Yet at least it is oh so much quicker and less painful than struggling through those cruel thorns higher up the slope behind them. I find the best way is to cling to the aerial roots as well as anything else that comes to hand. Undignified, if you like; but better than falling plump into that vile stinking black mud. And we must get along fairly quick. He begins to move when the sun is about this height.’
Stephen understood that ‘he’ was some particular creature
– bird, reptile, possibly mammal, of a rarity that would delight him. He asked no questions and soon he had no time to ask any that might arise as he concentrated on following her practised steps through this slimy shade.
Yet most unhappily, as both sun and tide mounted, Christine moved faster, just too fast for her mud-clogged boots. The aerial roots, pale wands hanging plumb-straight down from the upper tree, betrayed her, and she did indeed fall plump into that vile black stinking mud, angering the small fishes that skipped on its surface, the many kinds of crab, and the little mud-tortoises that preyed on both. Stephen lurched forward to heave her out – met
with the same fate – and they wallowed painfully, slowly, on all fours to the extreme edge of the mangrove trees, where clean water and a fairly clean bottom allowed them to crawl ashore in a very distressing state of filth.
She gasped, begged his pardon, said, ‘How I hope we did not disturb him – probably not –
there is two hundred yards to go. Does nakedness worry you?’
‘Not in the least. After all, we are both anatomists.’
‘Very well,’ said she. ‘There is nothing for it. We must both strip and rid our clothes of mud, our bodies of leeches. We have clean water here, thanks be: and in my pocket there is salt for the leeches, in a corked bottle. May I give you a hand with your boots?’ She did so; he did the same for her; and they stripped off their clothes without the least ceremony, floating the mud out of them, weighing them down with stones; and then they attended to the astonishingly numerous and avid leeches, each dealing with the other’s back in a wholly impersonal manner.
Apart from some artists’ models and nations that possessed no clothes at all, Stephen had never seen anyone so unconcerned with nudity: and on reflection he remembered her brother Edward, his intimate friend, telling him that he and she had bathed, naturalised and fished, wearing nothing at all, from small childhood to maturity, in the isolated lake that formed part of their family’s park. Well before this, during his first visit, she and her black companion had wandered into his field of vision as he searched the farther shore of a mere for birds and he had admired not only their freedom but also the combination of green, black, white, and the whiter than white of an egret, yet as objectively as he watched duck and cormorants. But now her tall, graceful, willowy shape was emphasised by the thin vermilion streams that flowed from the leech-bites (it did not coagulate, the creatures injecting a substance that thinned the blood, turned it a fine vermilion and allowed them a much longer period of feeding) and these outlined the curve of her long, long legs with an extraordinarily pleasing effect; and now something of the scientist, something of the pure anatomist, began to leave him.