woke with a cigarette in his mouth every morning. “Just keep off my land. I don’t want anyone tramping through my plantations.” He nodded curtly at the driver. “Allons-y!”
Malingu waved as their truck jolted past, barely managing to scrape between them and the forest. Ollie shrunk back as far as he could from the mud-churning wheels. Then it disappeared around a corner in the track and was swallowed by the forest and rain.
“He’s not your friendliest!” his father laughed.
“He’s a plantation owner. Jacques du Pré.” Malingu shrugged as if that explained everything.
Ollie wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” It hung in the air. Sweet like custard or some sort of flower.
“Ylang-ylang.”
Ollie tried out the word. “Ylang-ylang.” It was like something you might say if a bee had stung your tongue.
Malingu nodded. “You say eelang-eelang but you write it with a ‘Y’. There was probably stuff under the tarpaulin on the back of the truck. They extract oil from the flowers for the perfume industry.”
His father gave a shrug. “What’s the bet he’s chopping down forest to grow ylang-ylang. It’s happening all over Madagascar. Huge tracts of forest just disappear. And if it’s not lost to ylang-ylang, it’ll be palm oil plantations supposedly grown for non-fossil fuel, or logging so they can trade in exotic wood. Golden mantellas can’t survive. The forest’s shrinking. They’re trapped in smaller and smaller patches between vast areas of destruction. It’s time the golden mantellas got back their forest back, so they won’t be wiped out and condemned to the dodo list. Never to be seen on this earth again.”
His father was onto his pet subject. Ollie looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it had started. Just a few odd drops were still falling, as if the clouds had forgotten to wring everything out.
“What now, Dad? How are we going to get out of here?”
“Walk, of course!” His father had already hoisted up some equipment. “But there’s no way I’m leaving my Nikon D3X with its Garmin for tracking the GPS of each photograph and which …” a sudden guilty smile crept across his face.
“… cost you the price of a small car,” Ollie finished the sentence for him.
The sun was trying to come out and was filling the forest with a strange green glow. His father smiled at him. He had more equipment slung around him than a man arriving on the moon. “Come on. Let’s go. Allons-y!”
4
Ghosts of the Forest
They fought their way through the green x-ray gloom, stumbling and sliding and tripping over creepers, sweeping aside curtains of lianas, armed with machetes and water bottles and sleeping bags and backpacks. Ollie ticked off all their equipment in his head:
Swiss army knives – his own Victorinox clipped safely to his belt
Binoculars
Insect repellent
Snake bite kits
First aid kits
Head torches
Micro cameras
Macro lenses
Fold-up microscopes
Mosquito nets
Frog-catching tubes
Notebooks and pencils stuffed into every available pocket
An iPad. “You never know – there might be wireless reception,” his father had said. Fat chance of that when you couldn’t even get radio signals.
And a solar battery charger for the iPad. “Just in case!” Fat chance of that either as there wasn’t any sun.
And not forgetting his father’s prize possession – the newly acquired Nikon D3X with its sound recording device and its Garmin eTrex unit for tracking the GPS coordinates of each photograph.
Malingu walked ahead swishing a lethal machete from side to side to clear a path. But it didn’t make much difference. Behind them, the forest sprung back as quickly and thickly as before, leaving no trail or trace of where they’d walked.
Trickles of sweat ran down Ollie’s neck and soaked into his sodden shirt. He peered up through the green gloom. High above the snarl of leaves and branches, the sun had given up any chance of reaching the ground. Below the tangled mesh it was as murky and dank as an old haunted house.
It felt like being inside a body that panted and breathed with a thousand plants and creatures. Curls of ferns shot up like green toothpaste squeezed out of a giant tube. Clusters of white flowers looped and trailed and choked the air with heavy perfume. Leaves brushed his face like wet rags. Coils of slippery roots tripped him up. The ground was squelchy with leaf mould and rotting roots and pools of dark water which could be hiding anything – even a Nile crocodile. And the air was full of noises, eerie sounds that weren’t human. Insects whining. Creatures tapping and tinkering as loudly as in a blacksmith’s yard.
Everything about the forest seemed designed to confuse, muddle and mislead him.
A giant, turquoise chameleon was the size of a rat.
Slimy land-snails were bigger than his fist.
Birds with beaks the colour of tropical sea.
Geckoes looking like leaves.
Leaves looking like geckoes.
Mammoth lunar moths with wings emblazoned with shapes like huge eyes.
Furry moths the size of pigeons, flapping against his face.
Caterpillars doing fast loops, shooting off poisonous hairs.
Snakes looking like branches.
Branches looking like snakes.
Snakes! Oh no! Before he left Tooting in London, he’d searched on Google for ‘Snakes of Madagascar’. There were more than eighty species – eighty! None of which were overtly dangerous to humans.
Overtly! What was “overtly” supposed to mean?
The island has no adders, no cobras, no mambas, pythons or vipers. Only boas and lesser snakes.
Only boas. Was that supposed to be reassuring?
All venomous snakes of Madagascar are back-fanged which means they have to get a real grip on you to be able to inject the venom which will cause swelling and possibly paralysis.
Paralysis! Great!
And then there is the harmless tree snake that drops tail first from trees while stiffening its body like a spear.
Harmless?
