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Saturday 22 November 2008

Seeking civilisation

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life

We went in two long flat-bottomed boats with Amerindian paddlers seated fore and aft. At sunset we turned off the river and into a small lake covered with water lilies. The lake was so exquisitely beautiful in the mellow sunlight, it was like some kind of a joke. The flower we’d come to see opening belonged to the giant water lily, Victoria regia. Waiting for the swan-white petals to open, like eager patrons outside a newly popular nightclub, were dozens of flying beetles.

We drifted alongside the flower and also waited. The light changed from gold to pink to purple. The paddlers handed round neat triangular sandwiches and pieces of homemade shortbread and served ice-cold rum punch from cocktail glasses. As the sun finally disappeared below the trees at the edge of the lake, the flower opened. It opened as surely and slowly and steadily as an electric garage door — and in flew the beetles. When 20 or 30 beetles had gone in, the flower decided it was full — health and safety regulations, we supposed — and the petals closed for the night. The tourists applauded. The paddlers smiled sympathetically and looked away.

I’ve forgotten what went on inside the flower; I think Diane McTurk delicately alluded to an ‘orgy’. Whatever it was, in their gyrations or agitations the beetles coated themselves in pollen and at dawn the flower released them to cross-pollinate another flower the following evening. The lake was now pitch dark. As a sort of grand finale we were bombarded with leaping fish, some of which lay dying around our feet, and the night air was alive with the swoops of giant fish-eating bats.

‘All right, mate?’ said the AA man, tapping on the window. ‘Sorry. Miles away,’ I said. I got out of the car and he got in. ‘So what did you leave on?’ he said, bobbing about, checking switches. ‘Nothing,’ I said. But these AA blokes make me laugh. Their diagnostic powers verge on the clairvoyant. ‘You left the boot open, didn’t you?’ he said, accusingly. ‘I did?’ I said. He got out of the car and easily raised the unlatched boot lid with a crooked forefinger. ‘Yes, mate,’ he said. ‘Three boot lights on these cars.’

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