Then came N’Pongo’s first real illness. I had just arranged to spend three weeks in the south of France, which was to be a sort of working holiday, for we were to be accompanied by a BBC producer whom I hoped to convince of the necessity for making a film about life in the Camargue. Hotels had been booked, numbers of people, ranging from bullfighters to ornithologists, had been alerted for our coming, and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Then four days before we were due to depart, N’Pongo started to look off colour. Gone was his giggling exuberance; he lay on the floor or on the shelf, his arms wrapped round himself, staring into space, and taking only enough food and milk to keep himself alive. The only symptom was acute diarrhoea. Tests were hurriedly made and the advice of both the vet and medical profession acted upon, but what he was suffering from remained a mystery. As with all apes, he lost weight with horrifying rapidity. On the second day he stopped eating altogether and even refused to drink his milk, so this meant we could administer no antibiotic. Almost as we watched, his face seemed to shrink and shrivel and his powerful body grow gaunt. What had once been a proudly rotund paunch now became a ghastly declivity where his ribs forked. Now his diarrhoea was quite heavily tinged with blood, and at this symptom I think most of us gave up hope. We felt that if he would only eat something, it might at least give him some stamina to withstand whatever disease he was suffering from, as well as rouse him out of the terrible melancholia into which he was slipping, as most of the anthropoids do when they are ill.

Jacquie and I went down to the market in St Helier and walked among the multicoloured stalls that surround the charming Victoria fountain with its plaster cherubim, its palms and maidenhair fern, and its household cavalry—the plump scarlet goldfish. It was difficult to know what to choose for N’Pongo that would tempt his appetite, for he had such a variety of food in his normal diet. So we brought out of season delicacies that cost us a small fortune. Then, when we were loaded down with exotic fruits and vegetables, I suddenly noticed on a stall that we were passing an immense green and white watermelon. Watermelon is not to everyone’s taste, but I personally prefer it to ordinary melon. It occurred to me that the bright, pink-coloured, scrunchy, watery interior with its glossy black seeds might be something that would appeal to N’Pongo, for, as far as I knew, he had never sampled it before. We added the gigantic melon to our loads and drove back to the zoo.

By now, through lack of food and drink, N’Pongo was in a very bad way. Jeremy had managed to persuade him to drink a little skimmed milk by the subterfuge of rubbing a Disprin on his gums. The Disprin, of course, dissolved rapidly and, the taste not being to his liking, N’Pongo was only too happy to take a couple of gulps of the milk to wash out his mouth. One by one we presented him with the things we had obtained in the market, and one by one he viewed them with an apathetic glance; he refused the hothouse grapes, the avocado pears, and other delicacies. Then we cut him a slice of watermelon, and for the first time he displayed signs of interest. He prodded the slice with his finger and leaned forward to smell it carefully. The next minute he had the slice in his hands, and to our great delight started to eat. But we did not become too jubilant, for we knew that the watermelon contained practically no nutriment, but at least it had aroused his interest in food again. The next thing was to try to administer an antibiotic, as by now the expert consensus was that he was suffering from a form of colitis. Since he still refused to take any quantity of liquid in which we could mix medicines, there was only one way to get the antibiotic into him, and that was by injection.

We enticed N’Pongo out of his cage and kept Nandy shut up; he would be sufficiently difficult to deal with, in spite of his emaciated condition, without having any assistance from his by now extremely powerful wife. He squatted on the floor of the mammal house, staring about with dull, sunken eyes. Jeremy squatted on one side of him, with a supply of watermelon to try to maintain his interest, while I on the other side hastily prepared the syringe for the injection. N’Pongo watched my preparations with a mild interest and once put out his hand gently to try to touch the syringe. When I was ready, Jeremy endeavoured to distract his attention with pieces of melon, and as soon as his head was turned away from me I pushed the needle into his thigh and pressed the plunger home. N’Pongo gave no sign of having even noticed this. He followed us obediently back into his cage and, with a small piece of watermelon, retired to his shelf where he curled up on his side, his arms folded, and stared at the wall. The following morning he showed very slight signs of improvement, and using the same subterfuge we managed to give him another injection. For the rest of the day there seemed no change in him, and although he ate some of the melon and drank a little skimmed milk he did not show any radical signs of progress.

I was now in a quandary: in twenty-four hours I was due to leave for France. There I had organized and stirred up a bees’ nest of helpers and advisers. The BBC were also under the impression that the trip was a foregone conclusion. If I put it off at this juncture, I would have put a tremendous amount of people to a lot of trouble for nothing, and yet I felt I could not leave N’Pongo unless I was satisfied that he was either on the mend or beyond salvation. Then, the day before I was due to leave, he suddenly turned the corner. He started drinking his Complan—a highly concentrated form of dried milk—and eating a variety of fruits. By the evening of that day he showed considerable signs of improvement and had eaten quite a bit of food. The next morning I went down very early to look at him, for I was due to catch my plane to Dinard at eight-thirty. He was sitting up on the shelf, and although he still looked emaciated and unwell his eyes had a sparkle that had been lacking for the past few days. He ate quite well and drank his Complan, and I felt that he was at last on the road to recovery. I drove down to the airport and caught the plane to Dinard, and we motored down to the south of France. It cost a small fortune in long-distance calls to Jersey to keep myself appraised of N’Pongo’s progress, but every time I telephoned the reports got better, and when Jeremy informed me that N’Pongo had drunk one pint of Complan and eaten three slices of watermelon, two bananas, one apricot, three apples, and the whites of eight eggs, I knew there was no further cause for alarm.

By the time I returned from France, N’Pongo had put on all the weight he had lost, and when I went into the mammal house there he was to greet me, his old self—massive, black, and rotund, his eyes glittering mischievously as he tried to inveigle me close enough to the wire so that he could pull the buttons off my coat. I reflected, as I watched him rolling on his back and clapping his hands in an effort to attract my attention, that, though it was delightful to have creatures like this—and of vital importance that they should be kept and bred in captivity—it was a two-edged sword, for the anxiety you suffered when they became ill made you wonder why you started the whole thing in the first place.

8

ANIMALS IN TRUST

Dear Mr Durrell,

You will probably be astonished to receive a letter from a complete stranger…

The zoo has now been in existence for five years. During that time we have worked steadily towards our aim of building up our collection of those animals which are threatened with extinction in the wild state. Examples of these are our chimpanzees and a pair of South American tapirs, but the pair of gorillas are perhaps one of the most important of our acquisitions, and one of which we are extremely proud. Apart from these, we have over the past year obtained a number of valuable creatures. It is not always possible to buy or collect these animals, so recently we exchanged an ostrich for a binturong, a strange, small bear-like animal with a long prehensile tail, which comes from the Far East; and a spectacled bear, whom we have christened Pedro.