Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens - C. J. Cornish - Страница 5

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Perhaps the rarest, certainly the least known to man of all the creatures which, by a strange chance, find their way to the Gardens of the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park, are the denizens of the Tropical Forest. We say forest, because, though divided by the dissociable ocean, there is only one great forest which belts the globe. The notion of the physical symmetry of the world, which fascinated the old geographers, and led Herodotus to surmise that the course of the great river of Africa must of necessity conform in the main to that of the Danube in the opposite continent, was wrong in theory and application. But shifting the guiding forces from the control of original and plastic design to the influence of the dominant Sun, the theory still holds good; and while the tropical heats remain constant and undisturbed, so must the tropical forest flourish and endure, with its inseparable concomitants of vegetable growth overpowering and replacing the marvellous rapidity of vegetable decay.

To the naturalist, the most marked feature of the great tropical forest south of the Equator, is the inequality in the balance of Nature between vegetable and animal life. From the forests of Brazil to the forests of the Congo, through the wooded heights of northern Madagascar, to the tangled jungles of the Asiatic Archipelago and the impenetrable woods of New Guinea, the boundless profusion of vegetable growth is unmatched by any similar abundance in animal forms. A few brilliant birds of strange shape and matchless plumage, such as the toucans of Guinea and the Amazon, or the birds of paradise in the Moluccas or the Papuan Archipelago, haunt the loftiest trees, and from time to time fall victims to the blow-pipe or arrow of the natives, who scarcely dare to penetrate that foodless region, even for such rich spoils, until incantation and sacrifice have propitiated the offended spirits of the woods; but except the sloth and the giant ant-eater, there is hardly to be found in the tropical regions of the New World a quadruped which can excite the curiosity of the naturalist, or form food even for the wildest of mankind. In the corresponding tracts of Africa and the Asiatic Archipelago, the rare four-footed animals that live in the solitary forests are, for the most part, creatures of the night. Unlike the lively squirrels and marten-cats of temperate regions, they do not leave their hiding-places till the tropical darkness has fallen on the forest, when they seek their food, not on the surface of the ground, but, imitating the birds, ascend to the upper surface of the ocean of trees, and at the first approach of dawn seek refuge from the hateful day in the dark recesses of some aged and hollow trunk. There is nothing like the loris or the lemur in the fauna of temperate Europe. We may rather compare them to a race of arboreal moles, the condition of whose life is darkness and invisibility. But, unlike the moles, the smaller members of these rarely seen tribes are among the most beautiful and interesting creatures of the tropics, though the extreme difficulty of capturing creatures whose whole life is spent on the loftiest forest trees, is further increased by the reluctance of the natives to enter the deserted and pathless forests. The beautiful lemurs, most of which are found in Madagascar, are further believed by the Malagasi to embody the spirits of their ancestors; and the weird and plaintive cries with which they fill the groves at night, uttered by creatures whose bodies, as they cling to the branches, are invisible, and whose delicate movements are noiseless, may well have left a doubt on the minds of the first discoverers of the island as to whether these were not in truth the cries and wailings of true lemures, the unquiet ghosts of the departed.

Several of the larger lemurs are to be found at the Zoo, and though these suffer so much if unduly exposed to the light that before long they lose their sight, they may occasionally be seen in their cages. Others, the rarest and most delicate members of the race, are so entirely creatures of darkness that their exposure to daylight seems to benumb all their faculties. They appear drugged and stupefied, and, though capable of movement, seem indisposed either to attempt escape when handled, or to move in any other direction than that of shelter from the odious day. Even food is refused before nightfall, and, unlike the epicure’s ortolans, which awake and feed in a darkened room whenever the rays of a lamp suggest the sunrise, the lemur only consumes its meal of fruit and insects when nightfall has aroused its drowsy wits. These midnight habits clearly unfit it for public exhibition at the Zoo, and the last and rarest of the tribe which have arrived in London occupy a private room adjacent to the monkey palace, in common with other lemurs and loris, and a few of the most delicate marmosets and tropical monkeys which have escaped the rigours of an English winter. One large cage, which, in spite of the label “Coquerel’s Lemur” placed upon it, seemed at the time of our last visit to contain nothing but a pile of hay, is the dwelling-place of these latest guests. After displacing layer after layer of the hay, the two sleeping beauties were discovered lying in a ball, each with its long furry tail wrapped round the other, in the deepest and most unconscious repose. When at last the two were separated, and the least reluctant was taken in the hand, the extreme beauty of the little “ghost” was at once apparent. In colour it is a rich cinnamon, fading to lavender beneath. The texture of the fur is like nothing but that of the finest and best-finished seal-skin jacket, only far deeper and closer, so that the hand sinks into it as into a bed of moss. The head is large and most intelligent, the face being set with a pair of very large, round, hazel eyes, in which the lines of the orbit seem not to radiate from the centre, but to be arranged in circles, like the layers of growth in the section of a tree. The long tail is at the base almost as wide as the body, tapering to a point, and covered with deep fur. But the greatest beauty of form which this lemur owns is the shape of its hands and feet. These exquisite little members are so far an exact reproduction of the human hand, that not only the hands, but also the feet, own a fully-developed thumb. But each finger, as well as the thumb, expands into a tiny disc, as in certain tree-frogs, so that the little hands may cling to the tree with the tightness of an air-pump. It is plain, as the half-sleeping lemur climbs over the arms and shoulders of its visitor, that it takes him for a tree. The arms are stretched wide apart, the thumbs and fingers are spread, and grasp each fold of the coat with the anxious care of one who thinks that a slip will cause a fall of a hundred feet, and the soft body and tail half envelop the limb down which they are descending, fitting to the surface like some warm enveloping boa. As soon as it reaches the hay-pile in its cage the lemur instantly burrows, its long tail vanishing like a snake, and in a minute it is once more asleep, and unconscious of the world.

A near relation of the lemurs is a beautiful little creature, whose uncouth native name has not been replaced, called the “moholi.” It only differs from the lemurs in the shape of the ears, which in the moholi are either pricked up, like those of a bat, or folded down on its head at will. It has the same wonderful brown eyes, so large and round that they seem to occupy the greater part of the head; the moholi is, in fact, “all eyes.” As it stretches its slender arms out wide against the keeper’s chest, and turns its head to look at the visitors, it has the most winning expression of any quadruped we have ever seen. The coat, of a pinkish-grey above, turns into light saffron below, and the texture is less deep than the lemur’s fur. In touch it resembles floss-silk, thickly piled. The “Slow Loris,” from Malacca, is a tailless lemur. In exchange it has received a fretful temper, which seems a permanent trait in this species. When wakened it growls, bites, and fights, until once more allowed to sleep in peace. This loris hardly falls short of the beauty of the lemurs. The fur is cream-coloured, with a cinnamon stripe running from the head down the back. Of the three species which we have described, the first seems to combine some of the characteristics of the monkey and the mole, the second of the squirrel and the bat, the last those of the monkey and the weasel tribe. The “Slender Loris” is a still greater puzzle. It has all the characteristic “points” of the lemurs, without the tail. In size it resembles a squirrel; but its movements are so strange and deliberate, and so unlike those of any other quadruped, that it seems impossible to guess either at its habits or its purpose in creation. Each hand or foot is slowly raised from the branch on which it rests, brought forward, and set down again; the fingers then close on the wood until its grasp is secure, when the other limbs begin to move, like those of a mechanical toy. As we looked, its “affinities” with other types presently suggested themselves. It is a furry-coated chameleon. The round, protruding eyes, the slow mechanical movements, and the insect-feeding habits, are identical, except that the loris hunts by night and the chameleon by day. The loris even possesses an auxiliary tongue, which aids it in catching moths, just as the development of the same member marks the insect-catching lizard. From dawn till dusk all the lemurs are the very bond-slaves of sleep, hypnotized in the literal sense, drugged and steeped in slumber. Had the old poets known them, had the Phœnician sailors brought them back when they visited the land of Ophir, they would have been the consecrated companions of Somnus. Ovid’s famous picture of the Cave of Sleep, and the noiseless hall where

“A couch of down, raised high on ebony,

Self-coloured, sombre, draped with sable pall,

Stands in the midst, whereon that god doth lie,

While all his limbs relaxed in slumber fall,”

wants but one touch to complete the drowsy theme—a sleeping lemur curled up on Somnus’ dusky pillow.