New Windmills
3 total works
`Three singles to Adventure, please,' I said, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. `Yes, sir,' said the clerk. `First or second class?'
In 1950, Gerald Durrell travelled to British Guiana (now called Guyana) to bring back fauna native to that corner of South America.
He takes a riverboat up the Essequibo through lush tropical forests and treks across a landscape teeming with life and a riot of colours: from the crimson-breasted military starlings to the copper-toned howler monkeys. He gets into a sticky situation with an angry two-toed sloth and learns how (or how not) to lasso a galloping anteater. There is one thing to be said for collecting animals: it can never be described as dull.
The Argentine pampas and the little-known Chaco territory of Paraguay provide the setting for The Drunken Forest. With Gerald Durrell for interpreter, an orange armadillo or a horned toad, or a crab-eating raccoon suddenly discovers the ability not merely to set you laughing but also to endear itself to you.
Gerald Durrell's adventurous spirit and his spontaneous gift for narrative and anecdote stand out in his accounts of expeditions in Africa and South America in search of rare animals. He divines the characters of these creatures with the same clear, humorous and unsentimental eyes with which he regards those chance human acquaintances whose conversation in remote places he often reproduces in all its devastating and garbled originality. To have maintained, for over fifteen years, such unfailing standards of entertainment can only be described as a triumph.