The Whispering Land

From the point of view of filming the elephant seal colony was, to say the least, difficult. All they wanted to do was sleep. The only real movement they made was to open and close their huge nostrils as they breathed, and occasionally one would shovel some shingle on to its back; but as there was no preliminary warning to this action it took me some time to get it on film. Sometimes one of them would hump itself forward, eyes tightly shut, burrowing its great nose through the shingle like a bulldozer. Even when I had got all these actions on film it still did not seem to me that the elephant seals were showing themselves to advantage;* they lacked action, which, after all, is one of the things necessary for a moving picture. One of the extraordinary things about these seals is the flexibility of the backbone, In spite of their bulk and vast quantities of blubber, they can bend themselves backwards, like a hoop, until the head touches the uplifted tail. How to get them to demonstrate this for me to film, when they were all lying about displaying the animation of a group of opium smokers,* was somewhat of a puzzle. At last, however, we were successful with the old bull, by the simple expedient of throwing handfuls of fine gravel on to his tail. The first handful made him stir slightly and sigh deeply, without opening his eyes. The second handful made him open his eyes and stare at us in mild surprise. With the third handful he raised his head, drew back his snout so that it wrinkled like a concertina,* opened his mouth and uttered a hissing roar, and then fell back on to the shingle as if exhausted by this effort and went back to sleep again.

Eventually, however, our bombardment got on his nerves. It did not, of course, hurt him, but a constant rain of shingle on your rear-end when you are trying to get to sleep can be extremely irritating. He suddenly became very wide awake and reared up so that he was like the letter J with his head high in the air, his mouth opened wide uttering the loud hissing roar, an oddly reptilian sound for such a monstrous mammal to make. Four times he reared up like this, and then, seeing that the display was having no detrimental effect on our morale,* he did what all seals do in moments of crisis: he burst into tears. Great, black tears oozed out of his eyes and trickled forlornly down his cheeks. He lowered himself full length on to the shingle, and proceeded to move backwards towards the sea, like a gargantuan* caterpillar, humping his body up with tremendous effort, the fat along his back rippling into waves as he moved. At last, with a final plaintive roar and another flood of tears, he backed into the water, and an incoming wave broke in a garland of white foam around his shoulders. The rest of the herd became alarmed at their lord and master's disappearance, and they all raised their heads and started to look at us uneasily. Then one of the babies panicked, and hunched its way down to the sea, tears streaming down its white face. This was the final straw,* and within a minute the whole herd was rushing seawards, looking like a flock of huge maggots* in pursuit of a cheese.

Sadly we packed up our equipment and started up the cliff, sadly because we had just completed our last task, and this meant that we must leave the peninsula with its wonderful animal life, and head back to Buenos Aires and the next stage of the expedition. As we made our way along the twilit* cliff path we saw the old bull elephant seal for the last time. His head appeared out of a wave, his dark eyes surveyed us puzzledly. He snorted, a reverberating noise that echoed along the cliffs and made his nose vibrate. Then, still watching us sadly, he sank slowly beneath the icy waters and disappeared.

Part Two

THE CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

The plane taxied out across the darkened airfield to where the runway lay, between two strips of diamond-bright lights. Here it paused, revved up* its engine until every bone in the plane's metal body seemed to screech out in protest, and then suddenly rushed forward. The strip-lights fled past, and then suddenly we were airborne, the plane tipping from side to side like a slightly drunken swallow as it climbed higher and higher. Then, below me, Buenos Aires lay spread in the warm night like a chessboard of multicoloured stars. I unfastened my safety belt, lit a cigarette and lay back in my seat, feeling very mellow and full of farewell brandy. At last I was on my way to a place I had longed to visit, a place with a magical name: Jujuy.*