The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins Page 10
At first, Pigradillos sensibly grew even harder hides, which likely worked as a marvelous defense against the cats, whose teeth could no longer gnaw through the Pigradillos’ shells. But then a flock of local hawks figured out that they could pluck up the Pigradillos with their talons and drop them from a considerable height, cracking those hard shells wide open, revealing all of that tender, buttery meat inside for everyone in the valley below.60
A change of tactics became necessary. The Pigradillos seem to have come up with a rather ingenious new plan. When someone sets down a platter of foul-smelling food at the dinner table, do people eat it? Certainly not. So, the Pigradillos seem to have reasoned, if they smelled as awful as possible, the Atlas Mountain animals would no longer gobble them up.
The Pigradillos found a bog of mud and rolled in it; its fossilized residue covers their carcasses from snout to tail. (I can tell from its composition that it was a particularly dense, vile-smelling mud found only in Morocco; it is still used today during warfare to make stink bombs.) And on the day when the Pigradillos rolled fatly out into the valley, smelling as repulsive as a sewer, the hawks—unable to abide the stink—appear to have kept their distance. Triumph seemed at hand.
But then, just when the Pigradillos were having a grand old time once again, in swooped a pack of scabby old vultures, on whom Nature had bestowed no sense of smell; they promptly enjoyed quite a Pigradillo banquet.
The surviving Pigradillos fled from the valley and disappeared. Many years passed: enough for a hundred generations of Pigradillos to come and go.
And then, one day, the Pigradillos returned.
One by one, they marched out of a deep cave, where they had hunkered down for a thousand years, carefully evolving. And instead of a leathery hide, each Pigradillo sported a mirror-covered shell. At first glance, this hardly seems like it would be an asset.
Surely the Pigradillos would be easier to spot than ever, glinting away in all that North African sunshine.
But it appears that this is precisely what these crafty animals wanted.
From that day onward, the Pigradillos emerged to graze only at high noon, when the sun was at its cruelest and brightest. Each Pigradillo gave off an absolutely blinding reflection: any animal or bird that approached it risked having its eyes practically seared out of its head.
The mirrors proved to be a marvelous success: how fat those Pigradillos grew! Everything seemed rosy and pink—until disaster struck once again. One day, a ray of sunshine hit a mirrored shell at just the wrong angle, reflecting light back onto a particularly dry bush: suddenly the entire valley went up in flames, sending all of the grass and brush and flowers and trees into the sky in billowing black clouds. We came across a thick layer of scorched soil in our dig; it apparently took quite a bit of time for the area to recover.
But in the meantime, with no flora left to eat, the Mirrored Pigradillos soon starved and the species died out.
As I was wrapping up a little sample of a Pigradillo-hide mirror, Mother Wiggins made her requisite appearance in the mountains. She looked around disapprovingly.
“This is where you would rather spend your time, in this dry old place, instead of at home with your mother?” she exclaimed.
“Now, Mother,” I told her. “We are doing terribly important work here. Plus, it is not the land’s fault that it is dry,” I added, somewhat feebly.
Mother Wiggins glared down at Gibear, whose tinsel-like silver fur glinted so much that it almost gave off sparks. “I would put that ridiculous thing under a blanket if I were you,” she said. “He will set the whole place on fire again.”
Once again, I had to admit that she was right. Why, oh why, are mothers always right? It is simply infuriating. So Ahmed and I swaddled Gibear in a shirt like a little baby until we could not see a hint of silver, lest he start a Pigradillo-style fire in the valley.
After all, sometimes lightning does strike twice in the same spot.
59. A little, round red felt hat with a tassel, the fez is worn by men across North Africa.
60. You may see common seagulls today doing the same thing with oysters and mussels down at the seashore.
March 1868
The Egyptian Desert
In Which I Discover … Pin-Headed Desert Giants
(Acus Capitulum Solitudo Gigantus)
We have headed east to the realm that many consider the cradle of modern civilization. When most people think about this country, they conjure up images of poisonous asps and pharaohs and the crocodile-filled Nile River. All of these things are perfectly grand, but naturally, my interests in Egypt lie elsewhere.
The so-called ancient Egyptians used to worship more than two thousand gods, many of whom were half-person, half-beast. I spent hours researching them in our little rented house in Cairo’s old bazaar.61 One list of Egypt’s animal gods reads like so:
Thoth, the God of Wisdom, sported the head of an ibis bird on top of a man’s body.
Anubis, the God of the Dead, bore a rather handsome head of a jackal.
Re, the Sun God, had the head of a hawk.
Hathor, the Goddess of Love, Music, and Intoxication, went through life with the head of a cow.
Very interesting indeed! Jackals, cows, and hawks. Why did the Egyptians imagine that their gods looked like this? I wondered if they had seen something real that inspired these far-fetched creatures, and I decided to get to the bottom of it.
Suddenly, as I was reading, a screech came up from the floor: a tiny monkey from the bazaar had scampered into the room. He and Gibear began sparring over a date that had fallen off the table.
“Come here, you rascal,” I shouted, chasing the monkey around the room. Three times we scrambled around the table; then, with a great leap, the animal landed on Gibear’s back and buried himself in Gibear’s silver fur. Soon two eyes peered out from the tuft of fur on Gibear’s crown, making him look like a four-eyed monster. When I went to ferret the monkey out, Gibear gave a low growl.
Apparently my pet had taken another pet.
By the next morning, the monkey had a name, Mr. Devilsticks (my idea, because this creature is quite diabolical, believe me), and three of us, rather than two, left for our excavation of the Egyptian desert.
I bought an inexpensive little skiff, and down the Nile we went. Once sufficiently far from civilization, we docked the boat and trekked due west into the desert. Soon we came across a tiny oasis with sandy little palms scattered around its edges, and decided to pitch our camp; I set up our sturdy tent next to a steep dune.
The sun slipped down behind the dunes and went to sleep; the sky turned gray and then purple; millions of stars glittered overhead. I lay on my back and watched shooting stars streak through the heavens.
Suddenly blackness began to seep across the sky like a spreading ink stain, blotting out the stars above. I sat straight up and remembered when the river waters of the Grand Canyon had run red, signaling a flash flood.62 Along the same lines, the vanishing stars could only mean one thing: a sandstorm would soon howl across the desert!
I shoveled Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks into our tent and pounded its stakes down into the sand as deep as they would go; then I scrambled inside and fastened the flap ties tightly.63 The sand-filled wind began to scream and tear at the tent walls. I huddled with Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks under a blanket; the sandstorm raged around us for hours.
And then—just like that—it was over.
I poked my head out from under the blanket. Piles of sand covered everything inside, including us; the dawn light filtered in through great rips in the tent’s ceiling and walls. Gibear, Mr. Devilsticks, and I wiggled out from under the sand pile and ventured into the desert.
Everything had changed.
Our oasis had filled with sand and vanished, its little trees scattered to the four corners of the desert, perhaps to be discovered again in petrified form by another Dr. Wiggins millions of years from now. Brand-new dunes sloped on the horizon in front of us; lucki
ly, our own steep dune had been preserved and had protected us, or we, too, might have been erased forever.
Most people likely would have turned back after suffering a bout of (seeming) bad luck like that. But not me—most certainly not. After all, when Nature rearranges herself in this way, not only does she create a new world, she often also reveals an old one that had been hidden before. I immediately went to work.
As I dug my tools out of the sand, Mr. Devilsticks wandered off to inspect the new terrain. Suddenly I heard a terrific monkey screeeeech from the horizon; then Mr. Devilsticks ran back across the sand, leaped through the air, and buried himself in the furry tuft on Gibear’s head once again. I walked over the horizon to inspect the cause of the outburst—and when I saw it, I let out quite a little hoot myself.
For there, peering through the wind-shifted sands, was the moon-sized face of a snarling jackal.
When I got up my courage, I rapped on the giant jackal’s nose: it gave out an echoing clong-clong-clong. Metal! Mr. Devilsticks had discovered a gargantuan animal-head-shaped helmet of some sort; it was at least as big as a Shropshire country cottage.64 How very peculiar! I got out my instruments and began to excavate the immediate area.
Over the next few days, I uncovered many more enormous “helmets,” all revealed to the blistering sun for the first time in millenniums, including the head of a hawk with a sword-sharp beak, a cobra head with glistening viper teeth, and a ram head with gnarled, terrible horns. I even uncovered a helmet in the shape of a cow’s head. One would think that a cow would wear a docile, peaceful expression, but this one instead grimaced as though in agony. What a terrifying, unhappy army these creatures must have made!
But then, the most important questions surfaced: Who had made and worn these helmets, and why? My further studies soon revealed the answer, as I uncovered the bones of one of the more gruesome species I have ever encountered.
Approximately sixty million years ago, a tribe of giants roamed this area. But these giants did not resemble enormous humans, as they are depicted in books today. Rather, their skeletons reveal that they had huge, bulging legs the size of towers, no torsos, and skinny little arms jutting out from the tops of those legs. And on the very top of this odd body sprouted a teensy-tiny little head. Imagine an elephant with a head the size of a tomato, and one gets a sense of what these creatures looked like!
In literature, giants are used to commanding quite a bit of respect, due to their size and general gruffness. But it appears that the pin-heads of these particular giants made them into irresistible prey instead. Naturally, with those beady little eyes, the giants had extremely limited vision. First of all, this made hunting very difficult, and second, it made them easy to attack. Not that anyone could ever manage to kill or eat a whole giant, but birds would swoop in and peck at them; other beasts would bite out chunks of the giants’ legs and run away. All rather ghoulish, to say the least.
Like all bullied creatures, the giants could only take so much of these shenanigans. It appears that they briefly migrated to another part of the land—and from that general direction came a terrible clanging sound that could be heard for miles. Soon the giants came back, their shadows darkening the land for miles. The valley’s creatures must have absolutely shuddered at the sight of them, for instead of a tiny little pin-head, each giant appeared to have grown a huge, devilish animal head.
These new gleaming heads, of course, were the helmets that Mr. Devilsticks uncovered. But the other animals did not know that the new heads were just helmets; they probably thought that the giants had morphed into a horrifying breed of half-men, half-beasts. Well, this development would have made a world of difference for the giants: I am certain that they began to rule the roost.
Now another factor comes into play. Like other parts of the Sahara, Egypt’s desert was not always a desert. At the time of the giants’ reign, the area in question was a rather temperate green land. But no sooner had the giants created their beasty helmets than the rains left the valley. Each day, the area grew slightly hotter and slightly drier. Soon the sand began to mix with the soil, and then the green started seeping out of the trees. Eventually the trees died altogether and there was more sand than soil, and the Egyptian Valley turned into a desert.
This was all rather inconvenient for the giants. Wearing any sort of hat on a hot day is not exactly pleasant—but imagine wearing a metal helmet in all of that heat! It must have been pure misery. Yet the giants refused to part with their new beast helmets and go back to being the pin-headed victims of Egypt. The very idea was unthinkable! So they sweltered and sweated and suffered as the sun beat down on them from above, each day growing hotter than the day before. Their remains show that they died of heat exhaustion and suffocation.
(“What a gaggle of fools,” said a voice over my shoulder. I turned around, and there was the usual apparition of Mother Wiggins, inspecting my latest discovery. She gave one of the helmets a rude little kick. “As I have been telling you since school, Wendell, people who pretend to be something they are not usually get what they deserve. It is called putting on airs.”)
Yes, it is true: self-inflicted death by vanity is a grim way to go. But the giants are certainly not the only species that has died trying to maintain a facade—and they won’t be the last.
In any case, I am now fairly certain why more-modern “ancient” Egyptians worshiped gods that were half-men and half-animals: I was likely not the first person to have uncovered the pin-headed giants’ remains. To the later Egyptians, the giants and their helmets must have seemed godlike, thanks to their size—and soon temples were built and murals painted and legends told about these creatures. Frankly, I am quite glad that the Egyptians did not appear to know the scientific truth behind these creatures: it would have been a shame to spoil all of the fun.
61. Cairo is the capital of Egypt; its Khan el-Khalili bazaar is an ancient shopping area. In that day and age, it would have been very unusual for a European to stay there, but Dr. Wiggins was naturally adventurous.
62. See Dr. Wiggins’s entry on the Hapless Vampire Glow Bats in the North America journal.
63. Don’t forget that Dr. Wiggins’s expedition predated common use of zippers, which had their public debut in 1893; the tent’s flaps would have been closed using cloth ties, meaning that sand would have rushed in through the gaps.
64. Shropshire is a quaint rural county of England.
May 1869
Kenya65
In Which I Discover … the Mighty Trelephants
(Magnus Arboreus Elephantidae)
Now we forge our way south, toward the heart of the continent! We have settled in splendid Kenya, home to mighty lions, gentle giraffes, and brilliantly striped zebras. Of course I am here first and foremost to further my mission to uncover remnants of the ancient animal world. However, I must confess somewhat sheepishly that I began my journey in Kenya on a different errand, something only slightly less grand.
While I am most grateful that the sandstorm in Egypt revealed to me the Pin-Headed Desert Giants, it did rather inconvenience me in other ways. For example, the wind blew many of my possessions straight out of the tent and buried them forever—including my new stash of precious, fine English mustache wax! How was I ever to replace it?
Then I heard rumors of a wonderful gum tree near the Ngong Hills of Kenya: apparently its sap turns into a rather delightful wax that can hold the shape of a fellow’s mustache for weeks on end.
Well, I had quite a scare as I began my Wax Tree Scouting Excursion. It did not involve a typical lion attack or a commonplace rhinoceros stampede. It was, in fact, far worse: Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks (who now appeared to be a permanent part of my entourage) went missing in the brush for several days. I climbed trees and slogged through ponds, shouting their names; I even looked into a beehive (which was quite a mistake—I am still covered in sting bumps!). But I simply had to find them; why, those two animals could be eaten in one little gulp by some of Kenya’s wil
d creatures.
Just then, I saw a horde of vultures circling over a grassy field; my heart sank practically into my toes. The death birds scattered as I ran toward them, whooping and flailing my arms. Mercifully, I found that they had been feasting on a dead gazelle, and not on a strange fruit bat/alpaca hybrid and a rascally little bazaar monkey.
Suddenly, I heard quite a cacophonous echo from the woods on the far side of the field:
Giii-bear!
Screeeeeeech!
Giii-bear!
Screeeeeeech!
It was at once the most dreadful racket and most wonderful sound I had ever heard. Galloping into the woods toward that ruckus, I came across the most astonishing sight: Gibear and Mr. Devilsticks glued to a tree! My gum tree! They had found my precious, fabled wax-making gum tree! And I had found all three of my hallowed treasures at once. I showered both creatures with kisses (although Mr. Devilsticks did not appreciate this show of affection and let out another piercing screech).
However, a certain problem remained: the creatures were resolutely stuck on the bark; I was forced to hack through their fur with a hunting knife to free them. By the end of this process, I was the proud owner of a half-bald fruit bat/alpaca hybrid and monkey, not to mention a hair-covered gum tree (a rather repulsive sight).
Now it was time to go to work; I scraped the oozing gum into jars, happily humming to myself. How grand my mustache would look for years to come! Everyone would ask where I had found my marvelous wax, and I would just give them a mysterious smile and keep my secret. I cleaned off two trees and went to work on a third. Well, this third tree had a most peculiar texture. I drummed my fingers on my lips and tried to recall where I had felt bark like that before. I chiseled away at a branch, and leaped back in surprise.