The Extinction Club Read online

  But in China, the knowledge of how to build striking clocks was actually lost from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.

  Why were the Chinese so much thicker than the Europeans?

  I must apologize here to more balanced readers, but if you had stomached thirteen hundred pages of Needham on the utter superiority of the Chinese you’d want to throw a few spanners into his argument.

  I mean, if you’re so brilliant at inventing things, how could you forget how to make something as relatively simple as a striking clock? It’s not a computer, which depends on all sorts of subsidiary technologies, or a Mars Bar, which depends on remembering taste, etc. Imagine trying to reconstruct a Mars Bar from a drawing in a sixteenth-century monkish manuscript.

  How could a culture be so careless as to forget a vital technology such as clockmaking? Or, more importantly, how could a culture go technologically backward?

  This seems to me to be the big question. Chinese culture didn’t disintegrate. Lots of other inventions were remembered. It was just that one of the more esoteric forms of technology was lost: striking clocks.

  Even a few steps backward, technologically speaking, seem impossible here in the West. Though we are quite used to seeing other things disappear, or get worse. We blame these disappearances on technological progress.

  Losing skills, for example—skills connected with trades that have been superseded. No one can cut the hubs of cartwheels using just a hand ax now. In fact, when I told a skilled carpenter that this was how it used to be done (the source was a nineteenth-century memoir), he assured me that it was impossible, that pole lathes had always been used. But the memoir had explained this, that the very best wheelwrights had insisted on showing their skill by carving entirely by eye using a small ax.

  In other words, we have lost skills in the West that we can’t even imagine now. But since we value things, we still know how to make them (even if the ways of making things have sometimes changed). I can’t think of one thing we’ve forgotten how to make in the West.

  What else have we lost? The possibility of certain experiences: to go one’s whole life without seeing more than two or three visual images, hear only live unamplified music, travel no faster than a galloping horse.

  Without the Jesuit “invasion” of China, the Chinese might never have learned how to make clocks strike again. The knowledge could have been lost forever, extinct.

  In the grand scheme of things, losing the ability to make striking clocks is trivial. There are a million more important things than this, even though it is symbolic of a careless attitude to technology. An attitude that would be regarded now as very backward.

  In the West, the sheer bulk of techno-information, whether on computer or in books, shows how important we think science and technology are. No one is ever going to be allowed to fotget how to make anything. Though the very bulk of techno-info that stops us fotgetting how to make things actually causes problems of its own. This huge weight of knowledge serves to squeeze us poor humans. Its sheer bulk diminishes us.

  If you are connected to an institution that controls part of this knowledge—a government department, a university, a hightech company—you feel empowered by your connection; high on science. But this empowerment obscures something. It masks, through its socially approved bulk, our real need for truth. And anyway, in our own quiet real lives, away from our brightly lit desks, this techno-information is no use at all; it does not lead us toward a better understanding of life, or ourselves.

  Of course, there are many material benefits provided by science and technology, but what I’m talking about here are the psychological disbenefits. By promising hope of solving “life’s problems” and not delivering, technology, if you take it as seriously as it wants to be taken, cheats us of life, offering superficial diversions in place of sincerely sought answers. It is a kind of extinction too.

  RELATIVES

  WE LEFT Espelette village and its prosperous red-roofed houses—all that EU money to local farmers, we concluded. Back through the green hillocks to Bayonne to meet Père Davids oldest living relative, Mme. David. Actually she was only a relative by marriage, her late husband, Charles, having been Père Davids great-nephew. Mme. David was ninety, but very spry, sitting under a trellis of vines in the cool courtyard behind her house. Her maid brought us coffee, and Mme. David told us that the secret of a long life was to be “old in the head but young at heart.” She smiled and took a sip of aniseed water; shed already had her coffee that day, she explained.

  Mme. David had the most perfect place for sitting outside. It was like one side of a cloister and abutted the house, cool and open to breezes and hung with vines that occluded the archways into the garden courtyard area below.

  Mme. David had been born in Chile, though she was of Basque origin. Charles had met and married her out there while working as a surgeon in a tannery town. Other descendants of Père David had moved to America and Bolivia. Mme. David felt pity for “pauvre Pinochet,” who was at that time being hounded for murders committed during his regime. She and her husband had left Chile during the time of Allende. “A terrible time,” she said, but left it at that. Never worrying about anything was another secret of long life, she said.

  She showed us books owned by Père David that had remained in the family, including letters and an article with notes. His handwriting was neat, thin and compressed, written with a hair nib, and barely legible.

  Holding these old books that he must have held, I felt, or imagined, a connection to the old priest. Some of the books were gifts to his nephew, Mme. David’s father-in-law. The book Voyage en Mongolie (1875) was inscribed, “A Monsieur Joseph David, souvenir de son oncle, A.D.”

  Père David set up no great institutions, wrote no great works, but he cared deeply for his two nephews, in a homely, nonshowy way.

  Before we left, Mme. David told us that another secret of long life was caring for other people. “If you have no one to care for, pff, you are useless.” She showed us the place where her husband had hidden wounded members of the Resistance during the war.

  MILU

  HOW HE found Milu is the best part of the story. Père David was marooned in Peking, again cooling his heels. His superiors had decided hed been on enough trips into the wilderness for the time being. His robust health had broken down and he had been ordered to recuperate. Reluctantly he agreed and set about organizing his Chinese science students to help him start a cabinet of curiosities from the environs of Peking.

  One student was reportedly an obdurate fellow. He could see no point in the priest’s insistence that students bring in dead animals, insects, and birds. Père David tried persuasion: “The study of spiders alone proved that Italy had touched the continent of Africa in ancient times. Such is the utility of Natural History collecting.” When reason did not work, he threatened the student with punishment if he didn’t produce something interesting. Spluttering with rage, the student informed the priest he would bring him Su Bu Xiang. The other students went silent. The naughty fellow realized he’d gone too far. No one was even supposed to know of the existence of the famed beast with four characteristics that did not match.

  Père David questioned the student quietly, after the lesson. All that he could discover was that the animal was kept inside the for bidden deer reserve of Nan Haizi, south of Peking, and that soldiers who guarded the park called the animal Milu.

  The next day, Père David rode by sedan chair the ten miles from Peking to the forbidden park. He walked several miles each way around the wall, which was eighteen feet high and over seventy miles around. The chance of even catching a glimpse of Milu was zero.

  Months later, the same recalcitrant student supposedly provided Père David with the clue he needed. The area around Nan Haizi had been badly flooded, and part of the wall of the Imperial Park had collapsed. The only thing was, the student didn’t know which part.

  Père David set out to walk the entire seventy-two-mile circumference without a
second thought. Walking, we know, was something he was good at. The priest believed in the purifying effect of long-distance walking. It was simple and hard work. The digestion was stimulated, the muscles toned, while the mind could wander in meditation or prayer. It echoed the purposiveness of early pilgrims. Man as walker is our most ancient inbuilt image of higher purpose, of truth-seeking.

  He set out, and after several miles was rewarded by the sight of a huge gaping hole in the wall of the Nan Haizi reserve. Through the hole, which was blocked with a flimsy line of wicker hurdles, he was able to see deer grazing. And he could hear something strange. The sound of their feet clicking, something only reindeer do. But these were not reindeer.

  Père David was longsighted and quick-sighted. He noticed that the antlers on these deer seemed to face backward and that their tails were long like those of mules or horses. Then a guard appeared with a giant billhooked spear, and the gentle priest made his way quickly home.

  Père David had taught himself written Chinese and he now referred to texts lodged in the ancient Hanlin Library, in a building next to the foreign legation in Peking. He found a librarian who knew his way through the great encyclopedia of Yung Lo Ta Tien, which ran to over eleven thousand original volumes. Here he found mention of Su Bu Xiang, a creature supposedly created by the gods as an afterthought, using parts from other beasts, as if the creativity of the deities had run flat and they were reduced to mixing and matching various odds and ends. They were so pleased with these experiments that they retained a white Su Bu Xiang to pull one of the chariots of the ancient gods. Along with the tail of a donkey, the head of a deer, and the neck of a camel, Su Bu Xiang had the hooves of a cow, except they clicked. Père David had formally identified Milu.

  In the Chinese method of classification, Su Bu Xiang belonged with other creatures that failed to match the morphological ideal of deer, beetle, hawk, or trout. Milu languished along with other oddities of nature: lampreys, leaf bugs, flying foxes, and mouse deer. But just as the gods take away, so they have to give, in order to preserve the celestial balance of the world. Milu and its freakish cousins were believed to be imbued with special powers. The fact that they were of mixed inheritance meant a fourfold increase in protection against death, a poetic prefigurement of the notion of genetic diversity as a guard against disease. Unfortunately, Milu had been hunted to extinction in the wild because of these reputedly health-bestowing powers. To live off the meat of Su Bu Xiang meant increasing one’s life expectancy fourfold. No wonder only the emperor was allowed to hunt them.

  An ordinary priest would have let the story end here, but Père David was now committed in his own mind to securing a specimen. Only with a specimen could a scientific discovery be made. And in the obsessive world of Père David, scientific progress was equated with religious devotion. Work was prayer.

  The problems at this stage were seemingly immense. The deer were forbidden to all but the emperor, and the guards had a free hand to kill anyone trying to poach one of their animals.

  Père David wrapped several pieces of silver and a note in Chinese inside a piece of soft leather. He returned to the place where the wall was being repaired and, having caught the eye of a guard, threw the bundle high over the wall. The note indicated that he would return a week later to the spot and pay another quantity of silver for a Su Bu Xiang carcass.

  He arrived at dusk at the hole in the wall, which was half repaired by now. Two hours later, the same leather bundle came hurtling back to him. Inside was another note: Send money first and we will send deer.

  Père David scribbled a hasty reply and, having thrown it back, walked away. He pointed out he’d paid half the money already and that they were beholden to trust him, not the other way round. He would return a week later for the deer.

  Sure enough, on his next visit, after a short wait, the remains of a recently butchered female came flying down from the ramparts wrapped in bamboo matting. Père David sent the rest of the money back over the wall.

  After embalming, the creature was sent to France by diplomatic bag, contents undisclosed, courtesy of the French ambassador.

  In Paris the professors were ecstatic. They demanded a living specimen.

  DARWIN

  EXTINCTION WAS a controversial subject in Père David’s day. The unexplored world was shrinking, and it was becoming increasingly implausible that dinosaur bones belonged to a species that still existed in some remote region—the old, and more attractive, explanation for fossils. Georges Cuvier, excavating in the Paris Basin, broke with the past and announced his belief in the widespread extinction of dinosaurs. Charles Lyell, Darwin’s contemporary, was not convinced: he clung to the ancient belief in the immutability of life on earth. Darwin, of course, provided the hammer blow to such thinking.

  It was just a question of time, therefore, before the possibility of the extinction of the human species became a widespread idea. And when it did, the fact of the A-bomb and biowarfare simply made it more concrete, more tangible, the fear already in us. Making extinction a necessary part of life added a shadowy bleakness to the scientifically informed worldview. The theoretical necessity of extinction leaves the world a little colder.

  EGYPT II

  IAM GETTING more used to the fast. It doesn’t do to overeat at night, certainly not the sweets that everyone guzzles. Nor is it worth getting up at 4:30 A.M. for a predawn snack. Better to shorten the day by lying in bed. At first I was swamped by all kinds of paranoid and irrelevant thoughts. Now they have melted away. My head is char. When you don’t eat or drink for hours, your thoughts become razor sharp, echoing off the metal balloon of your skull. I realized that most of my thinking until now had been made muzzy with partly digested food and drink.

  The worst part is the way time just stretches away in front of you. Nothing to break it up. It’s like being on a long car journey inside your head.

  MAJOR II

  AS SOON as I got back from the Pyrenees, I started looking for new excuses to leave my desk. As a sort of research-related project, I attended a meeting of the League against (modernizing) the London Library. It was there, on 31 July 1999, that I met the Major.

  He was a vigorous, elderly man, much impressed that I had been in search of the longest snake in the world (for a previous book). Fortunately, I spoke very little about Milu, and the Major seemed perfectly at ease doing most of the talking. It’s what he seemed used to. At first I thought he was some kind of bizarre salesman. He wore a silver shellsuit and a chunky gold ID bracelet on his wrist. His teeth were yellow and strong, and he grinned like a friendly predator. He was silver-haired, almost bald, with a nicotine-stained handlebar mustache. Eventually he invited me to his club. A place I could hardly imagine existed except as a sick joke: the Extinction Club, where members vied to exterminate every last one of any given endangered species.

  SURVIVAL

  EXTINCTION, THE very word is uninviting. Dead volcanoes, dodos, and dinosaurs. The past known only through fossils. That which could not survive. And in this century, to survive is to be good. To survive is to be a genetic player. To survive is to obey, according to the religious dogma of the age, the highest imperative of the species. “I’m a survivor,” someone says. And we know exactly what they mean. What if someone announced, “I’m not a survivor?”

  Survival. I love the word. The Survival Handbook by Anthony Greenbank was my sacred text from eleven to fourteen. The book was banned briefly at twelve when I was caught climbing down a loose drainpipe, following the suggested method of escaping a burning building, except our house wasn’t on fire and my mother was watching. It was reading this book that made me, years later, want to take a Ray Mears survival course.

  SURVIVOR

  UNTIL THE mid-twentieth century, the word survivor meant an individual who had survived a specific life-threatening situation. One was always a survivor of something. There was not, as there is now, an acceptable usage of the word as a general description in which no specific event has been
survived. Despite everyday life being more hazardous in the past, simply surviving life did not earn one the title survivor as it may now.

  The change in usage is mirrored in the change in the way we use the word victim. Victims and survivors are connected through this modern usage. A victim who overcomes the disabling effects of his situation becomes a survivor. It is very tempting to categorize everyone as either a victim or a survivor. Though there is an innate pessimism in this way of classifying ourselves and others, it seems appropriate given the low expectations we all have of actually changing anything on this planet.

  And we have not just low expectations of change, but also very strongly felt concerns about the safety of all of life on earth. Governments armed with powerful weapons of mass destruction may kill, by design or accident, millions of innocent civilians. Biocorporations busy splicing genes could accidentally release a deadly microorganism.

  Suddenly we are no longer safe. And by this I mean that, even if I wanted to, there is no longer anyplace left to hide.

  The experiences of World War II seriously weakened the vocabulary of morality and ethics and introduced a new value system more suited to the perceived powerlessness of those who suffered in the war. Uniquely for a war, it was convincingly demonstrated that many noncombatants suffered more than combatants. Few soldiers would have exchanged their experiences for those of a citizen of the Warsaw ghetto, Hiroshima, or Dresden. No authority or government came out of the war unscathed. The crimes were perpetrated by governments against powerless individuals. Being unarmed and unable to fight back, the victims of government bombing and petsecution became martyrs. But it was a new kind of martyrdom. People were martyred just for being alive, for being in the wrong place, for being human.