Читать книгу Mr Thundermug - Cornelius Medvei - Страница 8

MORE puzzling even than the question of his origins was the question of how the baboon had learnt to speak. Of course, if we are to believe the claims of Dr Alphonsus Rotz, Mr Thundermug was not the first baboon in natural history to have learnt human speech. In a way, though, his achievement was even more extraordinary, for while the alleged achievements of Dr Rotz were due to his tireless and brilliant tutoring, Mr Thundermug, as far as anyone knows, had no teacher.

It appears that we are dealing with one of those mysterious upheavals of evolution; a spontaneous kindling of consciousness, in the way a heap of grass clippings will provide the spark to set itself alight. But even this explanation stretches credibility when we consider the size of the leap between the shrieks and grunts of a primate and the polished and unsettling eloquence of Mr Thundermug – it seems closer to the impossible tales of men pulling themselves out of swamps by their own hair.

Surprisingly, perhaps, given their wildly diverse theories about the baboon's origins, people's accounts of how he learnt to speak are more or less consistent. This does little for their credibility – the explanation still strikes me as profoundly unscientific. In the absence of anything more convincing, however, I have no alternative but to reproduce the prevailing theory in full.

SOME time after the baboons' arrival at Crofty Creek, the smothering heat of late spring closed over the city. The various street smells, dormant all winter – the smells of drains and sweat and cheap perfume and rotting vegetables – sprang to the nostrils with renewed vigour. The heaps of pineapples at the market stalls were replaced by melons and small hard peaches. Those citizens who were able to leave went away, and those who remained became testy and unpredictable.

Baboons, of course, are naturally designed for the fierce heat of the savannah. Even so, the male baboon was finding the interior of Crofty Creek uncomfortable – perhaps with his thick mane he felt the heat more than the rest of his family. He had started taking an afternoon nap a little way down the street, under a tree whose dense foliage and spreading branches provided a cool shade even when the sun was directly overhead.

The tree's location, however, was not ideal: it stood in the grounds of a residential home for the irretrievably insane, which meant that the baboon's rest was frequently disturbed. He would curl up between the roots of the tree, or in the crook of a low branch, and doze, listening with one eye open to the conversations of the patients. Usually they talked among themselves, or to themselves, but sometimes he addressed them directly; he bared his teeth if they came too near.

At first the baboon would close his watching eye and go back to sleep when he lost interest in the patients' conversations, but as the days passed he listened with increasing restlessness. The hairs along his spine rose like a dog's, his mane bristled and his bottom dyed itself a violent shade of purple. Eventually he would lose his temper altogether, and shake his backside at the patients, or chase them round the garden with savage barks.

It occurred to me that there might be some value in knowing exactly who spoke to the baboon during these first encounters with humanity – suppose, for example, that one of the patients had provided some vital spur to his acquisition of language? And so I visited the residential home myself to see what I could discover.