The Clue of the Blue-Faced Boobies
By STRIX
T HAVE been reading, with equal enjoyment, two 'excellent books.
In' one of them—First Overland (Harrap, 18s.) —Mr. Tim Slessor gives a brisk yet urbane ac- count of an overland journey to Singapore and back by six young gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge travelling in two Landrovers. He has this to say of their transit through eastern Persia : 'One can travel quite fast on most main roads in Persia. In fact, the faster one drives, the smoother the road seems to become, Above a certain speed the car lifts itself out of the regular corrugations and rides from crest to crest. These corrugations are the predominant feature of these loose and pebbly roads; sometimes they run like little waves for twenty or thirty miles on end. No one knows how they are formed. . .
After some further description of the incon- veniences caused by these little waves, Mr. Slessor continues : 'Once or twice there was a creeping smudge of dust on the lonely road ahead, and a few Minutes later we would slow behind a flock of goats or fat-tailed sheep, then wait until the herders had parted them to give us passage.'
The author of my second book would have read these two paragraphs with gratification; for his central theme is that 'in the process of evolu- tion we have lost something which was a matter of life and death to the primitive man; that is, his highly developed powers of observation,' and he would have found in Mr. Slessor's narrative support for this theory.
Mr. Slessor's companion, 'who was inclined to be the Expedition's scientific consultant,' sug- gested that the corrugations had been pounded out, over the years, by 'some function of the har- monic frequency of lorry springs'; but they were of course made by the sharp hooves of the goats and sheep. I have never been in Persia, and 'of course' is an odious expression; but all drove- roads or pack-trails are thus corrugated by the Preference which most ungulates have for step- ping in each others' hoofprints, presumably be- cause the ground is liable to be softer underfoot in the troughs thus formed than on the ridges between them. Without going all the way to Shiraz, you can see this phenomenon (except in Very wet and muddy weather) on any farm track or road-verge regularly used by sheep or cattle in this country; and that so alert and intelligent an observer as Mr. Slessor should have described first an effect and then its cause without realising their relationship bears out in a small way the thesis advanced by Mr. Harold Gatty in Nature Is Your Guide, published this week by Collins at 16s.
Mr. Gatty died shortly after he had finished this book. He was fifty-four. An Australian, he first achieved fame by acting as navigator to Wiley Post in a record-breaking eight-day flight round the world in 1931. He was given—by a special Act of Congress—the Distinguished Fly- b.; Cross and, despite the bar of his nationality, was put in charge of Air Navigation Research and Training for the US Army Air Corps. In the Second World War he served with distinction in the Royal Australian Air Force throughout General MacArthur's campaigns in the Pacific. After the war he ran an air-line and a coconut plantation in the Fiji Islands, where he died.
The title of his book sounds a bit crankish, but it is in fact an agreeable and impressive blend of wide experience, wide reading, wide curiosities and common sense. Of his early flying days he writes that he 'found it was much easier to tell the wind-direction on Mondays than on any other day by watching the clothes-lines, for Monday is wash day the world over'; and this observation, though not particularly profound, is typical of his approach to the pathfinder's problems.
His book is really a study of the human animal's limitations and capabilities as a naviga- tor. He believes that the latter were once much greater than they are today, and that the 'natives' who were 'discovered' by explorers in historical times had in many cases made, before history began, voyages far more remarkable, more specu- lative and more ill-found than those which brought them into our ken; but he scouts the idea that primitive man possessed a sixth sense, a magical ability to find his way about our planet without the aid of compasses or maps. All, he maintains, that the pathfinder needs is his five senses, regular practice in their use, and 'know- ledge of how to interpret nature's signs.'
Not many of his readers, perhaps, are likely to find themselves in such a situation as Brigadier R. A. Bagnold who 'once found a water-hole en- tirely by the smell of one camel, which was picked up eight miles away'; and although the table of 'Land Indications from Sea Birds' is both com- pendious and suggestive, the knowledge that three or more Blue-faced Boobies mean that you are within seventy-five miles of land, whereas a company of twelve or more place you fifty miles nearer, is likely to prove indispensable to only a small minority. But the cumulative effect of Mr. Gatty's observations and researches throws a fascinating light on what the human animal, can, or once could, do without benefit of science; and this book is strongly to be recommended to the young.
I wish the author had added a chapter sum- marising his views on the extent to which man's• senses are becoming atrophied. I imagine that, until he discovered fire, horn° sapiens, like most other animals, could see in the dark. He lost the power to do this with the need to do it, mainly because he got out of practice; but he retained the power to make some use of his eyes in the dark, so that if necessary he could move cautiously about out of doors at night. How long will this vestige of his former aptitude survive? What with street-lighting, headlights, electric torches and the rest of it, the fraction of our population which regularly has cause to rely on its eyes at night must be tiny and rapidly diminishing.
We still rely on our senses up to a point; but they have an easy time of it, they are not ex- tended, they are out to grass. We are, as Mr. Gatty many times reminds us, becoming insulated from the natural world by the products of our own ingenuity; we are moving into an artificial world of our own. If we survive in it as a race, shall we thrive in it as a breed?
It seems to me that only a very sanguine in- terpretation of nature's signs would justify an unhesitating affirmative.
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