The Extinction Club Page 4

  EGYPT

  AFTER A few days in Egypt I started fasting, though my wife said I didn’t have to, despite it being Ramadan. Technically we were on a journey, and fasting is not required of the sick, the pregnant, or those making a journey. But I wanted to fit in, and I felt that the challenge of fasting would be good for me. Bizarrely I thought it would help the book, give me more inspiration.

  Before this, the longest I had been without food was twenty-four hours. But even then I had smoked and drunk water. An Islamic fast is a total ban on anything going into the mouth from dawn (about 4:30 A.M.) until dusk. No food, no cigarettes, and no water. Because it was winter, it wasn’t so hard. Dusk, which was when the fast could be broken, came at 5 P.M. Surely I could stick it out until then?

  My mother-in-law had set aside a room for me to work in. On the first day I sat down and wrote, “Once upon a time.” It felt good, as if I were tapping some source of unlimited story power. I felt hungry but I soldiered on. That first day I did several thousand words, inventing a bizarre mythology for the appearance of Milu on this planet. In a nutshell, it was because the gods were bored with regular animals so they invented a whole host of freakish animals such as Milu, duck-billed platypuses, flying snakes, and dwarf kangaroos. At that time, defeated by the task of writing a straight “objective” book, I had decided to turn the whole thing into a fairy story.

  That first day I had two baths, a nap, and a walk along the Nile. It wasn’t a great time to take a walk because I was there just as the Iftar traffic madness started. Iftar is when the day’s fast is broken. Everyone has a feast of sorts. Beggars and the poor are invited into street tents paid for by rich men and are fed handsomely. The rest of the population tries to get home or to a friend or relative’s house. Because everyone is starving, the meal has to start on the dot of five. So the preceding hour is absolute mayhem. It took me almost fifteen minutes just to cross the road alongside the Nile.

  This was the first time I’d noticed how the car population of Cairo had rocketed over the past five years. Also, the cars were newer—far fewer beaten-up old American cars and fifties Mercs. Egyptians were getting richer.

  The first few days of the fast were tough. I had a headache, and when I sat down to write it was as if there were a clanging empty space in my head with no power to produce words. My main thoughts were directed to the area from my sternum downward. During Iftar, I gobbled far too much food in too short a time. On day two I thought I might have a hernia, or some other serious internal rupture, my stomach was so uncomfortably tight. It almost felt as if I’d strained an internal muscle, or a tendon holding my insides together.

  BASQUE COUNTRY

  SUDDENLY I’M in the Basque country, winging along a two-lane road that I remember from fifteen years before as one lane; but never mind, the sun is shining, it’s late May, and I’ve managed, at least for a while, to escape sitting in a library or staring at a blank computer screen. I am with my old friend Justin. Justin and I were at university together. When we’re together we talk a lot about people we both knew at that time. Justin is very good at doing impersonations, and he can still impersonate people we made fun of fifteen years ago. When he does it first, I can then copy him. So our knowledge of the past gets reinflated. He remembers things I’d forgotten and vice versa. We were going to be together for at least a week, Justin and I, so our joint knowledge of the past should increase considerably.

  Justin does a job that pays him a lot of money. He needs the money to buy the things to live the life he wants. But he also thinks he works too hard and is wasting his life and that the things he buys are just distractions to keep him working too hard to buy the things to live the life he thinks he wants to live when he isn’t thinking the opposite.

  He knows I vaguely disapprove: perhaps of his wealth, perhaps of his superior social standing, perhaps of the fact that he works too hard. It’s never fully explicated, since the purpose of the past, and our talk about it, is to divert attention away from having to talk about anything uncomfortable. That can be a bad thing, but not always.

  We were on our way to the birthplace of Père David. Justin was driving; I could tell he preferred it that way.

  I knew from past experience that whoever drives the car first, if it’s a rental, becomes the surrogate owner of the car during the holiday. They call the shots. But even knowing this, I let him take the wheel. The sun was shining and it was a lovely day.

  Whenever a car tailgated him (which was often, since we weren’t driving very fast), he slowed down even more in the hope of making the car overtake. It was a vain hope, since drivers in this part of France prefer tailgating to overtaking. They just slow down too. This agitated Justin. “I bet your father does this too,” I said, and Justin just grinned sheepishly. A few minutes later he made a jokey comment and grinned impishly. It’s easy to travel with someone who has both sheepish and impish grins in his repertoire.

  Père David was born in the Basque country in 1826, in a tiny village called Espelette. As a boy he’d run up and down the Pyrenees and this had given him a hardy constitution. Years before, I’d walked the Pyrenees and I knew the terrain was steep and often unrelenting. After two months of walking there my calves had doubled in size. I thought a lot about Père David’s legs, how they must have been muscly with strong, thick-kneecapped knees. Whenever I thought of Père David he sort of flashed his legs at me in my mind, lifting up his ecclesiastical robes to reveal a fine tanned pair of hiker’s calves.

  Père David was no writer. His diaries are opaque and workaday, his major work, Les Oiseaux de la Chine, hardly self-revelatory. After his Basque upbringing, he attended the Grand Seminaire de Bayonne for two years. In 1848 he entered the order of Saint Vincent de Paul. Followers of the order, which had been set up in the seventeenth century, were known as Lazarists. Like the Jesuits, they practiced a new kind of monasticism, more interested in educating the poor than living in monasteries. They were called Lazarists because their headquarters was in the Saint Lazare district of Paris.

  Père David wrote constantly to his superiors, asking them if he could travel abroad. They sensed his restlessness and tested him by sending him to cool his heels and teach science for ten years in a Lazarist college in Savona, on the Italian Riviera. While there, he made a natural history collection that attracted the favorable attention of the Natural History Museum in Paris. He also inspired several students to go onto greater things, including d’Albertis, who attained fame as the ethnographer of Melanesia.

  Two years after arriving at Savona, Père David wrote:

  I am getting on in years and am almost twenty-seven and want to go to the Celestial Empire, Mongolia, and other similar places as soon as possible …. Thank God my health is excellent and my always robust constitution will enable me to undergo the life, fatigues, and privations of a missionary. My desire to go to the missions is motivated in part by a desire to do penance, but also by the belief that since childhood God has called me to this.

  After eight years of such importuning, the bishops eventually gave in and let Père David go to China. He arrived in 1861 and stayed, on this first trip, until 1870. It was in 1865 that he discovered Milu.

  Even reading between the lines, I began to realize that there was no skeleton in Père David’s closet. He wasn’t a dirty monk who studied botany in between studying boys’ bottoms; he was a cleanliving, observant, honorable, and kindly man. That was why there were no biographies about him. I wasn’t about to give up yet, though. I thought about those bulging calves, built by running up and down mountains.

  Actually, the country around Espelette is about as mountainous as parts of north Kent, or the Cotswolds—hilly, yes, but not mountainous, not really.

  ESPIRITU SANTO

  INTO THE thick glass killing jar twelve-year-old Armand David rammed withered leaves of laurel. These were high in prussic acid, the bitter-almond juice that became cyanide gas on evaporating from the cracked leaves. Absorbed through an insect’s car
apace, it would first stun and then kill.

  David took care to roll the jar in a long piece of cloth, which he then tied around his waist. His calico tunic shirt had belonged to an uncle and was spotted on an elbow with delicate blue stitches as small as pinheads.

  David ran up the hill to where he had seen the insect. On the chipped and polished bark of an old oak was a six-inch-long praying mantis, bright green, with sprung muscular forelegs locked together as if in prayer. It moved its head surprisingly out of motionlessness, dead alien eyes in its tiny green mask. A diviner, the Greeks thought, and, by the doctrine of signatures, believed to have divina-tory powers. Prie-Dieu, they called it in the village. David already knew its real name, Mantis religiosa; all real names were in Latin.

  But how to catch the damn thing? Bring the jar down quickly, and a leg could be broken, or the insect might fly off. It might leap and spit at him; the cunning boy in the village said the spit from Prie-Dieu could cause blindness.

  David had caught cicadas before, snatched them out of the air, and this was no different. It was just about steeling himself and not thinking too much, moving now while he had the chance and not missing it like the other time.

  He moved his hand forward tentatively, realized this was no good, withdrew, and watched the insect some more. Then he reached out quickly, almost without thinking, and the mantid body was between finger and thumb. He could feel the dull rustle as it tried to escape. The boy stared at it up close, seemingly fixated, before dropping it into the jar. Then he turned the jar over onto the dry earth.

  How long does such an insect take to die? He stared through the bubbly blue-tinged glass, but it was hard to see and the mantis was hidden by laurel leaves.

  He stared further, out across the land toward the sea. David scratched his legs. Now he really was a scientist.

  He took in the view without sentiment, interested only in calculating the distance. Today he hadn’t faltered and he hadn’t needed a second chance. Not like that trout he’d “tickled” in the Latsa River—twice he’d failed to snatch it! The third time he’d grabbed ahead of its habitual escape route, and the slippery thing flew hard into his hand. He’d killed it reluctantly on the bank using a giant blue pebble to beat its head into stillness.

  The mantis must be dying now. David dragged his shirttail along the stony soil and under the entrance to the jar. Upending the jar and shaking down the leaves, he put the wooden lid in place before pulling out the cloth. David secured the killing jar with string, then sniffed his shirttail for the sweet, headachy aroma of bitter almonds.

  BIRTHPLACE

  WE FOUND without difficulty the birthplace of Père Armand David. It is now a butcher’s shop. We asked the butcher if he knew anything about the history of the house, anything more than the plaque on the wall.

  “I’m not from round here,” he said, smiling a big red butcher’s smile. He explained in detail that he came from a town four miles away.

  “Could we look inside?”

  He couldn’t say, he was renting the apartment to someone else.

  A head appeared at the window above, a middle-aged, harassedlooking woman with her hair unraveling. “There’s no point,” she said. “It’s completely changed since Père David’s day.”

  ‘How does she know it’s completely different unless she knows at least a little about what it was like before?” I asked. The butcher agreed, but she had shut the sash window by then.

  We visited the mayor, who was planning a commemorative garden to honor Père David. As well as mayor, he was also president of the Friends of Père David. We had to winkle this out of his secretary because I think he wanted the Friends of Père David to appear as large and as impressive an organization as possible. The mayor, an athleticlooking fifty-year-old man, had even looked into the possibility of obtaining a Pere David deer for the garden. But he said that the foodstuff and vet bills would have been too expensive. (Actually, they live on grass and, if they fall ill, usually die before a vet can save them. Perhaps he meant the high cost of the deer—at least four thousand dollars each.) A giant panda was out of the question too. “There’s no bamboo in the Pays Basque,” said the mayor. “Nothing for a panda to feed on.” The mayor was going to make do with a garden of exotic plants that had been discovered by Père David.

  We gave the mayor a donation and wished him well with the garden, which was still under construction.

  KILLING AND EATING

  PÈRE DAVID favored the most basic forms of travel—either walking or riding mules and donkeys. He always took with him a faithful servant, Sambdatchiemda, a former Buddhist monk from Mongolia who had converted to Christianity, and sometimes Sambdatchiemda’s brother, who wasn’t a Christian. But that was the extent of his entourage. He wasn’t a big-shot explorer with a hundred coolies hefting barrels of butter and cigars on their backs. Most of the time, Père David lived on vegetables. He was frequently set upon and robbed like the character in the Good Samaritan story, except, in his case, no Samaritans turned up. Once a group of bandits announced they were going to kill him and eat his liver. Père David brandished his gun while Samb-datchiemda led the mules to safety. Night was falling and in the confusion both men escaped with their livers.

  It was rough going all the way, and I’m sure it was the scientific nobility of the project that inspired Père David. He ate vegetables not for the usual vegetarian reasons—in Peking he had enjoyed his meat and fowl. But he felt that if he killed animals for food on an expedition, it would change the status of the animals he killed for science. Perhaps it would make his effort more ordinary, reduce it to a kind of hunting trip, like shooting ducks in the Camargue, nothing to write home about. Sambdatchiemda sometimes begged him to shoot a pheasant or two for the pot. With a ruthlessness I didn’t really admire, Père David always refused.

  FLOWERING

  SOMETIMES THE rats come first and sometimes the flowering of the bamboo. In cycles of almost fifty years, the bamboo of all Asia flowers but once and for a season and then is quiescent for another half century or so. The rodents stampeding through every clump of bamboo from Yunan province to the Naga Hills are there to eat the seeds that spill from the flowering plants. How do the rats know when to run? How do the bamboos know when to flower, all of them at once across half the surface of the planet?

  Père David had established his usual efficient herbarium operation under the creaking canopy of giant bamboos in the country of Muping. He had taken it upon himself to instruct Samb-datchiemda’s brother in the useful art of something—in this case, pressing and drying flowers.

  Sunlight flickered through the green leaves, a steady breeze inducing two hollow bamboos to knock together with the carrying tonk of a wooden bell. The ground was dry, and it was easy to set up the tabletop on two wooden seed boxes.

  Unlike Sambdatchiemda, his brother was quick to learn. First he took the specimen Davidii involucrata, which some of the locals called “dove tree.” A more common name was “ghost tree.” This came from its appearance when in bloom. The white flowers resembled the pieces of paper hung in trees to appease the ghosts of ancestors.

  The young Mongolian removed the hard-packed red mud from the wooden stem with the porcupine-quill brush favored by his master. He then pointed to the most shapely specimen of leaf and translucent white flower before snipping it off with the one-piece clippers like ancient sheep shears. David nodded each time as the young man explained how he would next proceed. The priest’s deep-set eyes were diverted for a second by a sound from the specimen box on the leaflittered ground. A large gray rat appeared, nuzzling out of the box. Sambdatchiemda’s brother kicked at the rat, an instant arc of foot and leg that set the creature screeching against a bamboo trunk. It was an alarm call to the rest, and ten more rats skittered down vertical bamboos and over the rotting trunks on the ground.

  But a few rats were not worth even a comment from the priest. Not after the plagues they had seen. Since Involucrata was not fleshy like a Brassica or
Euphorbia, there was no need for the copper boiling vessel, which sat handily on iron feet above a quick fire of twigs. When the water was boiling, any fleshy plant was blanched like a lobster to kill its growth. David had learned as a boy that fleshy plants will grow for a month in a flower press unless cauterized first in boiling liquid.

  To preserve the white of the flowers, his young assistant placed the plant section in the top part of David’s mahogany smoking box. He then lit a sulfur candle in the lower section and allowed the harsh smoke to play up through the drilled holes and over the petals. The altered paleness of the plant would revert to its original color and remain fixed for years after this treatment.

  Handmade drying paper, made by monks for filling the nostrils of the dead, was found by David to be excellent for keeping the specimens apart.

  The wind was getting up again, knocking together the elegant curved bamboos. It was strange that flowers and rats should go together.

  CLOCKS

  WHEN PERE David arrived in Peking in 1861, he was expected to teach science in the Lazarist missionary school. There were only two other teachers: one taught math and the second taught horology. These were the subjects the Chinese were interested in. Having a third of your curriculum devoted to clockmaking was particularly interesting, and a throwback to the old Chinese obsession with striking clocks.

  It struck me that the Western interest in time was functional, whereas the Chinese interest was more mysterious.

  Striking clocks arose in the West so that monks could rise and pray at the same time each day. More and more uses were found for clocks and they improved year by year.