The Hunt for the Golden Mole (35 page)

The first is lunch. Waving away Caroline's offer of help, he potters off to the kitchen and returns with ear-shaped pasta,
orecchiette
, floating in a delicate chicken broth. This is followed by a dish of cold beef and chicken served with
salsa verde
and salad; then
sbrisolona
, a sweet crunchy tart flavoured with lemon and almonds. He seems surprised when we pat our stomachs and decline fruit and cheese. This courtly old gentleman passing the dishes seems so different, evolutionarily distinct almost, from the young Simonetta of the films, the adventurer who provisioned his colleagues with gun and knife. But he makes a perfect fit with the distinguished trustee of Italian national parks, the eminent author of papers and books, and the holder of one of his country's most prestigious chairs in zoology. The physical energy of the young man who believed
everything
should be collected – ‘Because perhaps no one will ever be there again. Or perhaps people will go there after lots of years and things may have completely changed' – has ceded to an intellectual energy of daunting speed and voracity. He may not be able to remember how many species have been named for him; otherwise everything else races out on a synaptic super-highway that seems to have infinite capacity for names, dates and numbers.

He tells of fresh whale skulls washed up on beaches but belonging to a species nobody has ever seen alive. Of the extinct dwarf emu, of which the number in museums exceeds the number of specimens collected in the wild. Of the muddling by Linnaeus of two different kinds of gibbon. Of a bird, the greater honeyguide (
Indicator indicator
), which eats beeswax. It is a story that particularly delights him. Scientists discovered not only that the bacteria in the birds' gut produce an enzyme that digests the wax – a fact that might otherwise be filed under Just Fancy That – but that the enzyme will also attack the wax covering of tuberculosis bacteria, which exponentially increases their vulnerability to antibiotics.
Eureka!
you might think. The trouble, says the professor, is that these potentially useful bacteria live
only
in the gut of the honeyguide, a parasitic species which, cuckoo-like, lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, a fact that seriously complicates the problem of reproducing the enzyme for medical use. Nevertheless, it's a discovery that points yet again to the existence in nature of substances of immense potential usefulness to humans. The professor tells the story in answer to a question – the same old question that everyone always asks – about the point of species conservation. It is precisely because we don't understand their value, he says, that we need to preserve them. At the moment, as species slip away, we have no idea what we might be losing. ‘We don't know what we're doing,' he says simply. The fact is, we never have.

He speaks, too, of what he calls the
original
golden mole, the first one to be discovered and described, popularly known in English as the Cape golden mole. ‘It has a strange story in the name,' he says. ‘Because it is called
Chrysochloris asiatica
and there are no Asiatic golden moles at all.' It turns out to have been a mistake made by Linnaeus himself, who first noted the species in 1758, the consequence of a simple handling error.
The specimen arrived among a job-lot of species that had been collected by one of his pupils in China. Unfortunately for taxonomic and phylogenetic accuracy, the ship on its way home made a call at Cape Town . . .

We arrange to meet again at 10 a.m. on the following day at La Specola, the museum of zoology and natural history, in Via Romana, where he promises to have something of interest to show me. Of course, I know now what it must be, and I am resolved for this one day to become a diarist, to record every detail of this climactic morning. Waking at seven thirty, I draw back the curtains and step out on to the balcony of our hotel room overlooking the Arno. The view is astonishing. Almost directly opposite, across the river, is the fourteenth-century Porta San Niccolo, and high above it, already bustling, Piazzale Michelangelo. A crest of cypresses along the ridge-top creates the impression of a sleeping dog with its hackles raised. Only a tiny trickle of water is coming over the Pescaia di San Niccolo weir, the slow tranquillity of the water in contrast to the traffic teeming along the Lungarno Serristori and Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia. Bells speak from the heart of the old city; sirens of ambulances from the clogged arteries of the new. I even record my breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee. And what I am wearing: stone-coloured chinos, trekking sandals, a blue and white seersucker shirt. In a canvas shoulder bag I have notebook and pen, voice recorder and compact digital camera. I cannot remember when a day seemed more portentous.

Already feeling the heat, we make our way along the Lungarno delle Grazie towards the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. Along the narrow pavements we are squeezed between ancient walls and the massed ranks of parked motor-scooters. Their windshields are like translucent wings, a grounded swarm of flying ants. Near the Uffizi I collide with a bollard
and bruise my leg. The street vendors are out: garish paintings, leather goods, jewellery, toys. The Ponte Vecchio now is a decorous place with its chi-chi art dealers and jewellery shops, a far cry from its reeking medieval origins when it housed the city's butchers. Across the bridge we head along the Via de Guicciardini towards the Palazzo Pitti, stopping to scan restaurant menus for the celebratory lunch we'll have when the morning's business is over. The Palazzo Pitti bankrupted the banker who began it in 1457. Not so the Medici family, in whose hands it would become a monument to wealth, influence and ostentation. This was the seat of their almighty power, and they meant no one to forget it. Already this morning visitors are beginning the long trek through its galleries, voices hushed as in a place of worship. Our destination now is almost within sight. Beyond the Palazzo the opulence drains away into the nondescript Piazza de San Felice, where a police roadblock is causing chaos. Robert and Elizabeth Browning occupied rooms here from 1847 to 1861 (they are now owned by Eton College and available to rent through the Landmark Trust), though the noise and fumes of the traffic are today a pretty strong antidote to poetic musings. A twenty-minute stroll has transported us through five and a half centuries of human endeavour in which each of our signal virtues – imagination, creativity, generosity – has met its antithesis. We are early, so kill time with industrial-strength espressos at a pavement cafe, where we sit wreathed in carbon monoxide.

La Specola is only a few yards further on, but even so it is not easy to spot. There is a modest signboard and an entrance that could take lessons in grandeur from a stationery depot. I console myself with the thought that great searches often end in unexpected places – indeed, it's the obscure corners that most excite the diligent searcher. But then, La Specola is hardly an obscure corner. Even now, despite the ticket office and the sign outside, I wonder if we are in the right place. Further up the street, perhaps . . . I check my watch. The professor must have been checking his, too. We have been watching the Via Romana but he appears behind us from somewhere inside the building, the rapping of his stick ticking down the last few seconds to the appointed hour of ten. He has travelled by bus – not a feat to compare with crossing Somalia in a Land Rover, but nevertheless a considerable effort for an elderly man who walks with a stick. I want to tell him how grateful I am, but he is already bustling away towards the staircase. As we ascend, I notice that he is still wearing his sandals, but now with a blue plaster on one of his toes. It's an odd thing to notice, and an even odder one to write down, but Florence does strange things to the mind. There is so much grandiloquence, so many monuments to wealth. Even in the glorification of the Christian god, there are so many declarations of temporal power that it takes a plaster on a toe to remind us of how frail we really are. The museum of La Specola is, in the true sense of the word, awesome. You don't have to care how nature works. You might, like Richard Owen, see the hand of a creator. You might, like his opponent Thomas Huxley, or like modern Darwinians and Dawkinsites, see the mysterious loveliness of rational science. It doesn't matter. Faced with the architectural and artistic glories of Florence, it would take a monstrous ego not to feel small. Faced with the miracles within La Specola, even a monstrously egotistical Medici would know humility.

The man who found the mole – Professor Alberto Simonetta (left) with the author at La Specola

We are met by the curator of mammals, Paolo Agnelli, who will lead us on a tour of the galleries. One of the first rooms through which we pass is the very grand Tribune of Galileo, which was built in 1841 originally to display scientific instruments of Galileo and others, all now removed to the Museum of the History of Science, the Museo Galileo, in the Piazza dei Giudici near the Uffizi (if you want proof of human genius, then here is a very good place to start). La Specola itself was founded in 1775, the first scientific museum open to the public in Europe, beating London's Natural History Museum by 106 years. With life for once imitating art, its early collections of fossils, animals, minerals and plants depended heavily on the magpie tendencies of the Medici. It still feels like a palace treasury.

Several times in my life I have tried to take an interest in geology, and every time I have failed. Not this time. My recorded comments as I'm led around are borderline embarrassing:

Extraordinary! Extraordinary . . . It's amazing. I don't know what all these things are. Basalt, I think. Pink rock from Elba.
It looks like you ought to be able to eat it. They look like they're made of sugar, some of them. They are pink, bronze, black, purple, blood red, opalescent green. Something looks like a lump of frozen seawater. Something else looks like it's been carved out of coconut. Another one looks like flakes of chocolate. And others look like coloured ice, like extravagant puddings . . .

On and on I go, my inarticulacy more articulate in its way than any well-worded scientific analysis. For a moment I've forgotten the mole; forgotten what has brought me here. The weary adult is blown away by his inner child. Who would
believe
such stuff? But already we're moving on, from solid rock into the primitive stirrings of arthropodic life. It is like another compartment of the same multicoloured jewel-case. There are beetles, leaf insects, stick insects, bees . . . On the recording machine I hear what I missed at the time – Caroline and the professor chatting about the fur of golden moles. It is only the Cape species, the misnamed
Chrysochloris asiatica
, he says, that has the famous iridescence described by the
British Cyclopaedia of Natural History
in 1836. I hear myself struggling to catch up, still gabbling into my microphone.

We're now into spider crabs and whatnot. Hermit crabs. An enormous brown crab the size of a small dog. Spotted crabs, lobsters, Norway lobster, crayfish . . . Tape worms. My god! A roomful of intestinal parasites . . .

I realise I am being rude, neglecting the professor, dawdling like an uncooperative child, unable to tear myself from the exhibits. Some mammals are coming up now, and the timelines suddenly converge. The professor is pointing out some
specimens from the very same expeditions that we saw on the films. ‘These are dik-diks,' he is saying. ‘Guenther's dik-diks.' There are also two larger antelopes, gerenuk (
Litocranius walleri
) and dibatag (
Ammodorcus clarkei
, or Clarke's gazelle). Caroline wants to know if he shot and skinned them himself. ‘The big ones yes, certainly.' How very different is this from the Natural History Museum in London, which could not identify specimens shot by Frederick Selous. Here it is like touring the exhibition with Selous himself. There is another difference, too. In London the stuffed specimens are kept as bygones, like a museum within a museum, incidental to its higher purpose. In Florence they are the heart and soul of the place. The professor points to a Grant's gazelle. That, too, came from his time in Somalia. So did a pair of mongooses; and – look! – here are the same little genets we saw on the film. And something I'd never heard of – ‘a rare sort of thing', as the professor puts it – a Speke's pectinator (
Pectinator spekei
), named after the English explorer John Hanning Speke, famous for his early explorations of Somalia and his quest for the source of the Nile. The professor surges onward past rabbits, hares, porcupines, flying squirrels, dozens of squirrel-like things that I can't put a name to. Then the ungulates – vicuna, muntjac, Chinese water deer, llama, reindeer, red deer . . . Primates – baboon, mandrills, monkeys, macaques, gibbons, chimpanzee, orang-utan, gorilla . . . A thylacine!