The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (28 page)

Caracals flicking their long sharp-tipped and slender ears are a delight to watch. They are often pitch-black with a long tassel of hair. The outside of the ears is covered with silver hair while the inside is light grey. A black spot on either side of the face near the muzzle, and a black line from the eye to the nose, with some white on the chin and at the base of the ear, make the caracal’s face one of the most beautiful of the African felines.

A litter of cone-flakes on a forest path betrays the red squirrel sleeping on a branch above. With its tufted ears and tail of fine hairs curled over its back and projecting an inch in front of its face, it resembles a large hairy fir cone.

The 4-foot-long tree pangolins are almost exclusively arboreal, descending to the ground only infrequently at night. Pangolins—those elongated armadillos—have been described as mammals disguised as saurians, for their bodies and very long tails are armored with horny, leaf-shaped, sharp-edged and overlapping scales inserted into the skin by one edge and erectable like a bird’s feathers; only the face and narrow toothless muzzle, the ventral parts and the inner surface of the feet are unprotected.

With rounded muzzle, short neck, backward-pointing horns and low forequarters, a duiker (the Africaans [
sic
] “diver”) slips through the shrubbery with a minimum of effort, eluding the hunting leopard by agility rather than speed, twisting and turning as it weaves through the densest undergrowth, a barely detectable gray or brown form.

Rich reddish-brown or vivid orange in color, with white ear-tassels, dorsal ridges of white and black hair, and short razor-sharp tusks capable of disemboweling a leopard, bush-pigs are the most spectacular of their kind.

The carrier, more especially the male bird, is also remarkable from the wonderful development of the carunculated skin about the head, and this is accompanied by greatly elongated eyelids, very large external orifices to the nostrils and a wide gape of mouth.

For instance, the several species of the Chthamalinae (a subfamily of sessile cirripedes) coat the rocks all over the world in infinite numbers: they are all strictly littoral, with the exception of a single Mediterranean species, which inhabits deep water and has been found fossil in Sicily, whereas not one other species has hitherto been found in any tertiary formation....

The golden hamster hardly ever climbs, and gnaws so little that he can be allowed to run freely about the room where he will do no appreciable damage. Besides this, this animal is externally the neatest little chap, with his fat head, his big eyes, peering so cannily into the world that they give the impression that he is much cleverer than he really is, and the gaily coloured markings of his gold, black and white coat. Then his movements are so comical that he is ever and again the source of friendly laughter when he comes hurrying, as though pushed along, on his little short legs, or when he suddenly stands upright, like a tiny pillar driven into the floor and, with stiffly pricked ears and bulging eyes, appears to be on the look-out for some imaginary danger.

Like penguins, the water-shrews looked rather awkward and ungainly on dry land but were transformed into objects of elegance and grace on entering the water. As long as they walked, their strongly convex underside made them look pot-bellied and reminiscent of an old overfed dachshund.

Wild dogs visited the pool, first two, then the whole pack. The strange bat-eared creatures circled around behind the car with curiosity, emitting that odd grunt-bark of alarm that contrasts so strangely with their birdlike twitterings of greetings and contentment. These were all good-looking animals, with shining black masks and brindle on the nape and shoulders, glossy black and yellow-silver bodies, irregularly splotched, and alert clean white-tipped tails.

The lead bull had imposing horns, which glinted in the sun like horns of buffalo, but such horns are ill-suited to a long sad face with odd ginger eyebrows. The wildebeest has a goat’s beard and a lion’s mane and a slanty back like a hyena; the head is too big and the tail too long for this rickety thing, and Africans say that the wildebeest is a collection of the parts that were left over after God had finished up all other creatures.

Though her ears are high, the rhinoceros makes no move at all, there is no twitch of her loose hide, no swell or raising of the ribs, which are outlined in darker gray on the barrel flanks, as if holding her breath might render her invisible. The tiny eyes are hidden in the bags of skin, and though her head is high, extended toward us, the great hump of the shoulders rises higher still, higher even than the tips of those coarse dusty horns that are worth more than their weight in gold in the Levant. Just once, the big ears give a twitch; otherwise she remains motionless, as the two oxpeckers attending her squall uneasily, and a zebra yaps nervously back in the trees.

The smallest of the group is the mouse lemur, with a snub nose and large appealing eyes, that scampers through the thinnest twigs. The indri has a closely related noctural equivalent, the avahi, very similar in appearance and size except that its fur, instead of being black and white is grey and woolly. Oddest and most specialised of all is the aye-aye. Its body is about the size of that of an otter, it has black shaggy fur, a bushy tail and large membranous ears. One finger on each hand is enormously elongated and seemingly withered, so that it has become a bony articulated probe.

Late in the afternoon a pod of twenty or so gleaming-black pilot whales, their bulbous foreheads and sickle-shaped dorsal fins unmistakable even at a distance, lazed with indifference near the
Arctic Endeavour.