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Harvill Press, £20
A bird that survieves on
great wings and prayers
By William Palmer
21 March 2002
The tomb of the great Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton
is in the form of an Arab tent built in
stone and set, with
slightly mean incongruity, in a small, dilapidated churchyard
in the London suburb of Mortlake. Burton was also a soldier,
linguist, scholar, early sexologist, writer and a bit of
a cad.
Where would you find such a man today?
What on earth would he do?
There is now hardly a wild
place on earth without the tracks
of many well-heeled boots on it. The nearest we have to
the
great Victorian explorers are perhaps those ecologists and
conservationists who travel the
world not so much to
discover wilderness as to protect it from further "discovery".
Pre-eminent among these is the figure of Peter Matthiessen.
He was born in New York in
1927 and wrote his first book in
1954 in Paris, where he helped to found The Paris
Review,
the distinguished avant garde literary journal. So far, so young
American writer – but in the 1950s, he began the travels that
have taken him to every continent and, particularly, to every
remaining wilderness.
In the best tradition of
previous travellers, he is also a
phenomenally prolific author. His travels have resulted in
some 30 books. These include a number of novels, many
considerable works, but his other major contribution is
non-fiction, combining his interests in exotic and threatened
wildlife and landscape, the threat to them from capitalism (and
socialism) and the seemingly endless spread of humanity.
It could be argued that
Matthiessen sometimes seems to
prefer animals and birds to fellow humans but, as Wittgenstein
said, if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand
him. Matthiessen is a wonderful voice for those creatures that
cannot communicate with us. Like most prophets, he can
seem a stern and unforgiving man, but in a book such as The
Snow Leopard, grief at the death of his second wife is
mingled with the search for a beautiful, semi-mythical creature
in the Himalayas.
The Birds of Heaven
spans more than a decade. His travels in
search of the 15 remaining species of crane take him from
Siberia through Mongolia, China, India, Tibet, Japan, South
Korea, Africa and Australia to North America. The crane is
idealised in the art of the East as a symbol of immortality (or,
at least, longevity), fidelity and goodness. The legend of the
female crane who stayed to help her mate after he was struck
down by a hunter's arrow, until she, too, was killed, inspired
the great Indian epic, The Ramayana.
Matthiessen tells of a
crane that was moved from zoo to zoo
in Europe endured two world wars and lived to the age of 80.
The bird did well to survive in the mincing machine that was
Europe for 50 years. Indeed, one of the few remaining places
where cranes can peacefully congregate is in the demilitarised
zone between the two Koreas. As Matthiessen says: "A region
from which Homo sapiens has been excluded is inevitably
hospitable to other species'".
He goes on to describe how
other flocks were protected in
their traditional breeding and feeding places by either the
unspoilt situation or the beneficence of human beings such as
the Tibetan Buddhists. The terrible occupation of Tibet poses
a continuing threat. The Chinese, as described here at least,
seem to have a complete lack of respect for, if not an actual
hatred of, the natural world. In the Cultural Revolution, even
sparrows were branded as "class enemies'" for eating the
people's grain.
Cranes, their huge cousins,
are also under threat from the
great drainage and hydro-electric plans in parts of Russia and
Siberia. But somehow, among all the wrecks of man, between
wars and despoliation and greed, they endure.
Cranes date back for many
millions of years. They are birds
of striking beauty and power. For those who have not been
lucky enough to see them in life, they are wonderfully depicted
in the paintings and drawings by Robert Bateman that help to
make this book such a worthy addition to the life's work of
Peter Matthiessen.
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