The Nature Lover’s Guide to Tri-Continental Wildlife

The Expanded Edition, in Three Parts, being a Natural History of the Beasts and Birds of the Slow Zones and the Verge of Africa, Europe, and Asia — with the Middle East and the Russias — gathered by day-rota and by the Long Correspondence

by Aygul Rebane

Tartu-in-the-Selvage · set by hand at the Emajõgi letterpress · the thirtieth year of the Mandates (2060)

Humanitas perdurat — and so, it turns out, does the fox.

Preface to the Expanded Edition

The small book I printed last year was a survey, and a survey, I have since been made to understand by a great many kind and pointed letters, is a thin thing to set before a hungry reader. My correspondents wanted the animals whole — not a list of who had come back to which coast, but the creatures themselves, their bodies and their tempers, what they eat and who eats them, how they raise their young and quarrel with their neighbours, and above all how they and the band folk have learned, these thirty years, to live in one another’s pockets along the emptied edges of the world. They wanted, in short, a natural history in the old manner of Brehm — whose three water-stained volumes I have already confessed to loving past reason — only lighter, and of our age, and of our strange new-old wild.

So I have spent a year at it, and here is the larger book. It is arranged now by land rather than by theme: three great Parts, for the three continents the Long Correspondence can reach, and within each Part a set of regions, and within each region an honest overview of the country and its life, followed by a closer look at the handful of creatures that seem to me most worth knowing there — sometimes three, sometimes seven, as the region deserves. For each such creature I have tried to give you four things: what it looks like, how it lives, whom it lives with and upon and under, and what the band folk make of it — the names they have coined, the lore they tell, the uses and the fears and the reverences. That last is to my mind the best part, and the part no book of the loud time ever troubled to gather, and the reason this book could only have been written now, when we live so close against the wild again that every band has a whole folk-zoology of its own.

A word, as before, on how I know what I know, because the honest reader deserves to be told which of my sentences to trust and how far. The plain natural history of these creatures — the shape of a seal’s skull, the diet of a tiger, the courtship of a crane — I take with confidence from the great books of the loud time, which for all the counters’ faults were patient and exact observers of the bodies and habits of beasts; that knowledge is a true inheritance and I state it plainly. What is new — how the creatures have answered the withdrawal, how they have spread into the emptied coasts and drowned cities, how they behave now that we are gone from half their day — that is the knowledge of our own age, and it comes to me at second and third hand, down the Long Correspondence, and I will always tell you when I lean on a letter rather than an eye, and whose letter, and how much I trust it. The little I have seen myself I set apart plainly. And of the sea I will say almost nothing, for the sea is closed to our looking and our naming and our counting by the plain word of the Message, and I keep that word, and I have come to be glad of keeping it, for reasons the last chapters will make clear.

I remain a Meliorist of the Volga bend by my mother and an Estonian of the Baltic band by my father, and I hold to the discipline of that faith throughout: to name the dead without pretending they were owed, and to bless the living without closing my fist around them. The wild has come back across three continents like a tide turning, and this is a real and enormous good, and I am permitted to be glad of it though I may not say who to thank; and some things did not come back, and I will not gloss them; and the whole of it, the grief and the gladness together, is what a natural history of our age must hold if it is to be true. Mind the tide. Be back before dark. Here are the beasts.

A. R., at the Emajõgi, in the month of the returning eagles

A Note on Method, for the New Reader

If you have not read the smaller book, a few things will save you confusion.

The Verge is the ban zone, the wide belt reaching inland from every coast, from which we withdrew entirely and which we may enter only by day, on the salvage rotas and the pilgrim roads, and from which we must be gone by dusk. It is the great returning wilderness. The slow zone is the inhabited band behind it, where we live in our lamplit millions but the grid will not run, so that the wild presses close against every town. The Long Correspondence is the loose unpaid web of watchers, herders, pilgrims, and salvage folk who write to one another across the sections and trust the Postillion couriers and the Thread Fleet sail-mail to carry it. The loud time is the age before the Mandates, and its books and its counters are my inheritance and my foil. And you will meet, again and again, a handful of correspondents whose eyes are the real eyes of this book — Zainab of the Bengal boats, Ingeborg of the Sognefjord seter, Kenji of the Noto edge, Rashid the Gulf falconer, Mwalimu Halima of the lake schools, Karim of the reed-boats, Salem the Thread Fleet sailor, old Whitlock of the Trent narrowboats, and my mother’s cousin Ildar in the Astrakhan reeds — whom I thank here once so that I need not stop to thank them on every page.

And a word on a class of creature you will meet on every one of my three continents, so that I need not explain it afresh each time: the loosed exiles, the beasts of the loud time’s cages. Every great coastal city kept its zoological garden, and its safari-park, and — in the richer lands — its private menageries and its stocked pleasure-islands, full of creatures gathered from the ends of the earth and set down where they had never lived; and when the cities emptied in their years of terror, those beasts met one of two fates. The greater number, I am grieved to say, met the worse: locked in enclosures by a species fleeing for its own life, they could not all be carried out or set free in time, and many perished — a debt of the withdrawal I name here once and will not gloss, and to which I return in my last chapter. But some were freed, by merciful keepers or by their own strength or by the simple rotting of a gate; and of those, a surprising number did not merely survive but prospered, spreading out of the ruined parks into an emptied land that asked nothing of them and hunted them not at all. And so we have, scattered along the edges of three continents, the strangest bestiary of the age: African and Asian and southern beasts gone wild on coasts that never knew them, the flamingo in the German fen and the parrot in the drowned English tower and stranger things than these, which you will meet in their places. I record them with a particular tenderness, for they are the fortunate ones, the ones the gate opened for; and with a particular care, for the reports of them are exactly the reports the courier roads most love to embroider, and I have tried throughout to give you the ones I can stand behind.

One last discipline, mine and my readers’: I do not count. Where I give you a sense of many or few it is the plain word of an observer, not a census, for the census-habit is exactly the disease of which the loud time died, and the Message’s word upon the waters — not yours to take, to name, or to count — has taught me a gentler epistemology on the land as well, freely chosen and not commanded. Love more than you count. It is the whole of what I have learned.

PART ONE · EUROPE

Europe is not the richest of my three continents — Asia is that, by a long way, in sheer teeming life, and Africa in grandeur — but it is the one I can most often show you with my own eye, and it is the one where the withdrawal wrought the strangest transformation, because Europe was the most built, the most drowned, the most crowded of all the lands, and so its emptying has been the most dramatic. Nowhere else has the tide come in so visibly against so much stone. I begin at home, on the cold northern granite, and work south and west and round, and I ask you to forgive a certain lingering in the Baltic, for it is the one country in this whole book of which I can say, I was there; I saw it; the seal looked back at me.

The Baltic Band

My own country is a low, cold, sea-fretted place of pine and granite and long summer dusk, and the Message took nearly all of it into the two belts, which has been a grief for the Estonians and a jubilee for everything else that lives here. The Baltic is a young, half-fresh, half-frozen sea, poor in the number of its kinds but generous in their abundance, and the emptying of its shores has produced a wilderness of a particular northern austerity — no teeming jungle, but a spare, luminous, echoing wild of eagle and seal and elk, of pinewood and reed-bed and drowned granite town, that I would not trade for any hotter richness in the world.

The Grey Seal. The creature I know best in all the earth, and the one I take every visitor to see. A great bull grey seal is a barrel of an animal, longer than a tall man and heavier than three, dun and grey and blotched like weathered stone, with a long horse-like muzzle — the counters called it the horsehead — that gives it a mournful, patrician look wholly belied by its temper, which is bold, curious, and faintly insolent. They haul out now by the score on the drowned granite steps of old Tallinn, where the shallow sea has climbed the emptied town, and lie in the low sun digesting, the bulls bellowing and shoving over the best flat stones, the cows and pups packed between. They feed on the fish of the quieted sea — which we may not name or number, so I will only say they feed well, and grow fat, and multiply. What is new in our age is their boldness: a seal on the Tallinn steps will let a person on the rota approach within a stone’s throw and regard her with a mild, wet, unbothered eye, for it has been a generation since a human on that shore meant it the slightest harm, and the memory of harm has gone out of the seals as the harm has gone out of us. The salvage guilds who work the drowned town have made a sort of truce with them, and a lore: a bull that claims a particular doorway or stair is given a name and left his place, and to disturb old So-and-so on his step is thought unlucky. My own people, who are not sentimental, have taken to calling the great haul-out bulls the seal-burghers, the drowned town’s new aldermen, and there is more truth in the joke than in most of our politics.

The White-Tailed Eagle. The merikotkas, the sea-eagle, and the plainest possible proof of the returning tide. It is an enormous bird — a bird the size of a large dog with the wings of a barn door, brown-bodied, pale-headed in age, with a white wedge of tail and a great yellow hooked beak and a flat, fierce, oddly reptilian stare. In the loud time a single sighting was the event of a season; now a child born since the withdrawal thinks nothing of three in an afternoon. They nest on the abandoned church-towers and the tallest ruins of the drowned towns, great platforms of stick built up year on year until they weigh as much as a person, and they hunt the quieted sea and the emptied marsh — fish above all, but also the seabirds, the hares, the sickly seal-pup, and with a frank enthusiasm the carrion of the Verge, for the eagle is no proud specialist but a magnificent opportunist that will rob an otter, mob a fellow eagle, or squabble like a gull over a dead boar. They and the seals live in a loose economy of leavings: the eagle takes the seal’s scraps and the seal’s dead, and the ravens and the crows take the eagle’s, and the whole drowned coast is fed in this descending order down to the last beetle. The band folk read the eagle as a good omen — a merikotkas over a wedding is a blessing on that coast — and the Meliorists among us have made it, half in earnest, a kind of emblem of the age: the great predator returned to the top of a world we emptied, needing nothing from us but our absence.

The Elk. The põder, which the western books call moose: the largest deer in the world, a beast the height of a tall horse at the shoulder, black-brown and shambling and impossibly long-legged, with a pendulous muzzle, a dangling dewlap the herders call the bell, and, on the bulls, a spread of flat palmate antler wide as a table. For all its ungainliness it moves through the drowned resort-towns of the coast with an eerie soundless ease, stepping over fallen walls, browsing the willow and the birch and the water-plants of the flooded streets, and it swims the channels between the ruins with only its great head above water, so that from a distance a swimming elk is a most uncanny sight, a black horse-head cruising the drowned town. It is browsed-upon by nothing now but the wolf and the winter, and it has multiplied into the emptied land until the coast is thick with them; the band folk hunt them, carefully and by permitted means, for a single elk is a winter’s meat, and the coming of the elk down into a district is reckoned a providence. There is a tenderness in the northern folk toward the elk that there is not toward the boar: the boar is vermin and dinner both, but the elk is somehow a person, and to kill one wastefully is a shame that follows a family.

The Beaver. If you would understand our whole age in a single animal, take the beaver. It is a heavy, blunt, industrious rodent the size of a stout dog, clad in the densest fur of any northern beast — for which the loud time nearly exterminated it — with a naked scaly paddle of a tail, orange chisel-teeth that never stop growing, and a temperament of pure engineering. It asks no one’s leave and it changes everything. Loosed by our withdrawal into the emptied slow-zone towns, the beavers have dammed the drains and the canals and the culverts until whole streets have become ponds and the ponds have become marshes and the marshes have filled with frog and fish and heron and duck, so that a single beaver family, working in the dark, will in a few seasons turn a dead paved street into a living wetland loud with life. They are the great makers of habitat, the ones on whose labour a hundred other creatures depend, and the band folk have a wary respect for them: a beaver-marsh is a good hunting and fishing ground, but a beaver that floods a wanted road is a nuisance beyond appeal, for you cannot reason with a beaver and you cannot easily be rid of one. My own people say a thing is beaver-built when it is stubborn, ingenious, and slightly inconvenient, which is high Estonian praise.

The Capercaillie and the Wild Boar, briefly, to round the northern company. The capercaillie, the metsis, is a turkey-sized grouse of the coastal pinewood, the cock a great slate-and-bronze bird with a red brow and a fanned black tail, famous for the spring dawn when he mounts a low branch and pours out a clicking, popping, cork-drawing song so absorbing that in its final phase he goes briefly deaf and blind with passion — the one moment the old hunters could creep close, and the one moment, now, the watcher may. And the wild boar: grey-bristled, tusked, tireless, the great rooter and turner of the earth, surging through the emptied bathing-resorts in family droves, ploughing the ornamental lawns of vanished hotels into churned mud where a hundred plants seed. The band folk call them the supelboarid, the bathing-boars, and hunt them without sentiment and eat them with relish, and acknowledge, as one must, that the boar’s rooting is half the reason the emptied coast greens so fast, for a boar is a plough that walks and breeds.

I have seen, twice, in the birch-light of the emptied coast, the great wild bison come drifting north from the eastern woods — a beast the size of a small cottage, black and shaggy and unspeakably ancient, that the counters coaxed back from the last caged survivors and that has since resumed the coast as though it had merely waited out the whole loud human interruption. My mother’s people say such a beast has come back into its own time. So has the whole Baltic Verge.

The Selvage: the English Canals and the Drowned Southern Cities

West of me lies the great English Verge, the Selvage that gave the whole condition its name — a land whose geometry left it almost wholly drowned, with only a thin lamplit Lens in the Midlands and no electrified interior at all, so that the English govern by gaslight and letterpress and move by narrowboat along the restored canals. I have never walked it, but old Whitlock of the Trent narrowboats sends me the best natural history of any correspondent I keep, in a dry, understated style that makes me laugh aloud in my cold kitchen, and it is his eyes you are borrowing here. The Selvage is the great classroom of the freed exile, the drowned southern cities the fullest museum of the loud time’s caged and pet and imported creatures gone gloriously wild.

The Tower-Parrot. The ring-necked parakeet — the tornipapagoi of my own coast, the tower-parrot of the English band — is the emblem bird of the whole western Verge, and the plainest possible proof of my second great source, the freed exiles. It is a slim, long-tailed, grass-green parrot the length of your hand and forearm, the cock ringed at the throat with a rose-and-black collar, with a curved red bill and a voice like a rusty gate. It is an Indian and African bird, kept by the thousand in the loud time’s cages, that had already begun before the withdrawal to run wild in the milder cities; loosed and abandoned, it has inherited the emptied west entire. Whitlock reports flocks of hundreds screaming green through the ruins of drowned London at dusk, wheeling up to roost in the dead towers in a chattering emerald cloud, feeding on the fruit and seed of the abandoned parks and the wild-gone orchards, nesting in the holes of the ruins and the old dead trees. They compete, he says, with the native starling and the woodpecker for those holes, and generally win, being bolder and better armed; and the sparrowhawk and the peregrine take them, so that a stoop into a parakeet roost is a green explosion. The band children love them past all reason — a tropical jewel loose in a grey drowned north — and the older folk grumble at them as one grumbles at any loud green immigrant that has plainly come to stay, which endears them to me further.

The Wallaby of the Wet Woods. And here is a marvel of the freed exiles that I would have flatly disbelieved from a lesser correspondent than Whitlock: there are, in the wet woods and the wild-gone parklands of the English band, small wild kangaroos. The red-necked wallaby is a neat, upright, grey-brown beast the size of a large dog when it sits back on its haunches, with a paler belly, a rusty wash across the shoulders, a black muzzle, and the whole absurd apparatus of its kind — the great springing hind legs, the heavy balancing tail, the little clutching forepaws, and, in the doe, a pouch on the belly in which the young is carried and from which, at a certain age, a half-grown joey will lean out to browse while its mother grazes. It is a creature of the far side of the earth, of the eucalypt scrub of a drowned southern continent I shall never reach; but the loud time’s great parks and private collections had kept it by the score, and small colonies had already gone loose and bred in the milder English country before ever the withdrawal came, browsing the bracken and the heather and the bramble by night, lying up in the thickets by day. Loosed and unhunted, they have spread through the emptied southern woods and the Lens’s wilder margins, and Whitlock writes — in the flat tone he keeps for his least believable news, which is how I know he means it — of watching a doe with a joey in her pouch bound away through the drowned parkland of some vanished lord’s estate at dusk, silent and springing, a beast from the other end of creation entirely at home in an English wood. The band folk have no ancient lore of it, for it is too new, but the children have made it a wonder and the narrowboat folk a curiosity, and the foxes, Whitlock notes drily, have learned to take the small joeys, so that the drowned English wood now holds a food-chain in which an English fox eats an Australian kangaroo — which is the whole condition of the freed exiles put into a single sentence, and I could not have invented a better one.

The Muntjac and the Tusked Deer. Lower and commoner in the same drowned woods run two small Asian deer that the loud time loosed upon England long before the age, and that the age has crowned. The muntjac — the barking deer — is a small, hunched, russet deer no higher than a big dog, the buck bearing little single-tined antlers on long furred pedicles and a pair of down-curved tusks besides, that slips through the undergrowth of the emptied woods and the wild-gone gardens with a stealthy, solitary, secretive habit, barking in the night a single flat repeated note that the band folk, until they learn it, take for a dog or a fox or a lost soul. It came from the parks of the loud time’s lords — one great estate in the English midlands loosed the founding stock, the story goes, generations before the withdrawal — and had already overrun half the country as a quiet green tide before ever we left; now, unhunted and unpoisoned, it is everywhere in the southern Verge, the commonest deer of the drowned woods, browsing the bramble and the ivy and the wildflower, breeding all the year round with a fecundity no native deer can match. And with it, in the wet reed-margins of the drowned fens, runs the Chinese water deer — that same small neckless tusked deer I shall praise in its true home on the Yangtze, the vampire deer of the delta folk, loosed here too from the same lordly parks, so that England now shelters, in its emptied fens, a wild population of a creature grown scarce in the land that named it. There is a strange justice in that, and a strange sorrow, and I will let the reader feel both: the exile prospering in the place of its exile while the home wood thins. The English band folk hunt the muntjac without ceremony and eat it with relish, and reckon it, in Whitlock’s phrase, “a great deal of good venison in a very small and inconvenient parcel”; and they watch the tusked water deer of the fens with the puzzled affection one keeps for a neighbour whose provenance one has given up trying to explain.

The Red Fox. My near-namesake, and the true genius of the drowned city. The fox needs no describing to any reader — the sharp russet dog-shape, the white bib, the black stockings, the enormous brush tipped with white, the narrow clever muzzle and the yellow slot-pupilled eye — but it wants celebrating, for of all the creatures of the age the fox has adapted with the least fuss and the most cunning. It was already the master of the loud time’s cities, living unseen in their very hearts; now the cities are empty, and the fox has simply taken them, denning in the drowned ruins, trotting the abandoned high streets at dusk, hunting the rat and the parakeet and the rabbit and the vast feral pigeon flocks, scavenging the salvage-guilds’ leavings, raising its cubs in the boardrooms of vanished banks. Whitlock swears he has watched a vixen sun her cubs on the steps of a drowned cathedral as calmly as a farm dog. The band folk regard the fox with the ancient mixture of admiration and irritation it has always drawn — thief and trickster and survivor, the beast most like ourselves — and the Selvage folk, with their dry humour, have made it a sort of patron of the whole condition: the creature that needed no ark and no rescue and no lament, but merely walked into the ruin we left and made itself at home. I confess a partiality. A book on the endurance of life could do worse than be written by a fox.

The Otter and the Peregrine. Two recoveries, one low and one high. The otter — long, sleek, muscular, whiskered, clad in dense waterproof brown, all liquid muscle and mischief — has come back to the restored canals and the drowned rivers in numbers the loud time’s poisons had made unthinkable, hunting the fish and the eel and the frog of the quieted waters, sliding down the mud-banks for play as well as passage, for the otter is one of the few beasts that plainly plays. The narrowboat folk count an otter along their reach a blessing and a rival both, for it takes the same eels they trap. And the peregrine — the great slate-backed, barred-breasted falcon, fastest creature on the earth in its thunderbolt stoop — has colonised the drowned towers exactly as it colonised the tall buildings of the loud time, for a tower is only a cliff to a peregrine, and an empty tower is a cliff with no one to trouble the nest. It hunts the pigeon and the parakeet of the ruins, striking them from the air in a stoop that ends in a puff of feathers, and the band folk look up for it as a good sign, and the falconers of the age — of whom more when we reach the Gulf — watch it with a complicated professional envy.

The North Sea and the Rhine: the Drowned Cities of the Low Coast

South and east of the Selvage lie the great drowned cities of the low northern coast — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and their kin — where the land was always half water and is now wholly so, and where the withdrawal has produced the richest wetland Verge in all Europe and the fullest crop of freed-menagerie marvels. Here the sea has come up the canals into the very hearts of the old towns, and the freshwater and the salt and the reed-marsh mingle, and the birds have inherited a drowned Venice of the north.

The Grey and Harbour Seals of the Canals. The two northern seals — the great blotched grey I have already praised, and the smaller, rounder, dog-faced harbour seal, mottled and mild — have done in the Low Countries the most charming thing of the age: they have come up the canals into the drowned cities and hauled out on the steps and the sunken quays of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, so that the emptied capitals of the loud time’s commerce are now seal-rookeries, the fat spotted bodies packed on the marble stairs of vanished exchanges. They feed on the fish of the drowned harbours and the quieted sea; they pup on the sandbanks the tide has thrown up over the old streets; and the salvage-guilds who work those cities give them, like the Baltic guilds, a wary right-of-way and a lore of lucky and unlucky haul-outs. There is no better emblem of the whole inversion of the age than a seal asleep on the steps of a drowned bank.

The Spoonbill and the Great White Egret. The drowned Low Countries have become a paradise of the tall white wading birds, and two are worth your eye. The spoonbill is a long-legged white bird the height of a child, all snowy but for its extraordinary bill — a long flat black spatula, yellow-tipped, which it sweeps sidewise through the shallows with a sewing-machine rhythm, sieving out the shrimp and the small fish and the water-life; in the breeding season it grows a shaggy nuchal crest and a buff flush at the breast and stands in its drowned-city colonies like a company of dishevelled bishops. The great white egret, taller and slimmer and pure dazzling white with a dagger bill and, in season, a train of gauzy plumes down its back — the very plumes for which the loud time’s hat-trade nearly destroyed it — now stalks the flooded streets in easy hundreds. Both feed in the shallows the beaver and the tide have made; both nest in the drowned trees and ruins; both were rarities in the loud time and are commonplaces now, which is the whole story of the age told in white feathers.

The Freed Flamingos of the North. Here is a marvel I refused to believe until three separate correspondents swore to it. The great animal-park at Hamburg — famous even in the loud time for keeping its beasts in open enclosures rather than cages — was abandoned in the withdrawal, and among the creatures freed or self-freed from it were its flamingos, which the park had bred for generations. And so there are now, in the drowned north-German fens, standing pink among the grey reeds under a grey northern sky, flocks of feral greater flamingos — a bird of the hot salt lagoons of the south, improbably at home in the cold, breeding on the mud-islands, sieving the brine-shrimp of the drowned coast with their strange down-bent bills. They are not many, and the hard winters cull them, but they persist, and they have bred, and a pink flamingo in a German fen is the single most improbable sight my correspondents send me, and I love it beyond reason. Of the other Hamburg exiles — the freed camels of the Lüneburg edge, dwindling and pitiful in the wet; the eternal, and I think false, legend of the Hamburg lions — I have written elsewhere; the flamingos are the true and lasting marvel, and they are enough.

The Masked Bandit. Not every freed exile of the Low Coast is a marvel of grace; some are only marvels of impudence, and chief among these is the raccoon, the masked bandit of the drowned German towns. It is a stout, grizzled, cat-sized beast of the far side of the western ocean — a creature of the American woods that never in nature came within four thousand miles of a Rhine — with a pointed black-and-white face masked like a burglar’s, a bushy ringed tail, and, its whole genius, a pair of slender black hands of an almost human dexterity, with which it opens, unlatches, unscrews, and rifles anything the world puts in its way. The loud time had loosed it upon Germany long before the age, from fur-farms and collections, and it had spread through the country as a quiet furred flood; and the withdrawal has been its jubilee, for a drowned city is one vast larder to a beast that can open a door, and the raccoons have taken the emptied Rhineland towns entire, denning in the chimneys and the roof-voids of the drowned houses, working the canal-shallows by night for crayfish and frog and mussel, raiding the salvage-guilds’ stores with a cool professional thoroughness that Whitlock’s German counterparts describe with the exhausted admiration of men comprehensively out-thought by an animal. They wash their food at the water’s edge in the fastidious manner the counters made famous — or seem to; the counters argued about what the washing was truly for, and I will not settle it here — and they raise their masked kits in the drowned attics, and they fear nothing but the eagle-owl and the winter. The band folk regard them as the fox is regarded, only more so: thief, trickster, ineradicable neighbour, a creature that needed no rescue and would accept none, having simply arrived, unbidden and unrepentant, and stayed. I confess I cannot help liking anything that lives so wholly by its wits.

The Rhea of the Emptied Fields. Behind the drowned Low Coast, where the salt-marsh gives way to the wet grasslands and the emptied farm-country of the German north, strides a bird that has no more business there than the flamingo and has stayed even more stubbornly: the greater rhea, the great flightless running-bird of the South American pampas, a lesser cousin of the ostrich, gone wild across the northern German plain. It is a tall grey-brown bird as high as a man’s chest, long-necked and long-legged and shaggy-feathered, flightless but a tremendous runner, that ranges the open country in loose flocks grazing the grasses and the clover and snapping up the insect and the frog and the small beast of the field. Its story is one of my favourites among all the exiles for its sheer unlikeliness: a mere handful escaped from a farm on that coast in the last years of the loud time — a few birds, no more — and rather than dwindling and dying as such tiny founder-groups usually do, they found the emptied wet grassland of the north entirely to their liking, and bred, and spread, until the German plain held a wild pampas-bird as though it had always been there. The withdrawal has flung the gates wide for them: the farmland that once merely tolerated them now lies emptied and wild, and the rheas graze the drowned-farm margins in growing companies. Their breeding is a wonder the counters recorded and the band folk have rediscovered: it is the cock that does all the labour, gathering a harem of hens who all lay into a single great nest he has scraped, and then brooding the whole vast clutch himself and raising the striped chicks alone, a stern and solitary father shepherding a running crèche of thirty across the open field. The German band folk, who never thought to see such a thing north of the counters’ pictures, have taken the rhea as a homely marvel and a good meat-bird both — its eggs alone are a meal for a family — and read the sight of a pampas-bird striding the emptied German fields under a grey northern sky as one more proof that the age has scrambled the whole map of who-lives-where and set the pieces down again wherever the gates happened to fall open.

The White Stork. I close the Low Coast with the stork, because no bird is more woven into the folk-heart of that country, and none has answered the withdrawal more gladly. A tall black-and-white bird with a long red bill and long red legs, the stork nests on the chimneys and roofs of human dwellings and always has, so that its fortunes have always been tied to ours; and where the loud time’s poisons and drainings had driven it to the edge, the return of the emptied wet meadows and the frog-loud marshes has brought it flooding back. It stalks the wet fields for frog and vole and grasshopper and snake; it clatters its bill on the nest in a wooden castanet greeting; it raises its young on the ruins and the slow-zone chimneys both. The band folk of the Low Coast keep every old stork-love: a nesting stork is a blessing on the house, its going a grief, its coming in spring the true beginning of the year. The Meliorists have taken it up too, for the stork is a creature that lives with us and not merely near us, and there is a lesson in that for an age learning to share the world again.

The Norwegian Fjords

North and west, the coast rises into the fjord-country of Norway, a whole-cloth land where the sea reaches into every valley and so the regime reaches everywhere, and where the folk have not so much adapted to the age as remembered an older self — the seter and the stave-church and the transhumant summer-farm. My correspondent here is Ingeborg, of a summer-farm high above the Sognefjord, whose letters are the least scientific and most beautiful I receive, for she was raised to read weather and beast for her living and has no counter’s instinct in her at all. The fjord Verge is a wild of stupendous verticality — cliff and cataract and deep cold green water — and its wildlife is the wildlife of the edge, the seabird cliff and the sea-eagle and the whale in the deep below.

The Sea-Eagle of the Fjords. The same white-tailed eagle I praised on my own coast, but here at a density and a grandeur that beggars the Baltic — for the fjord walls are a cliff-city built for eagles, and the quieted sea below is thick with fish, and Ingeborg writes of them nesting along the fjord as thick as gulls, a great brown cross gliding out over the green water at every hour. They rob the ospreys and the otters, they take the seabird and the fish and the carrion, they tumble in courtship down the thousand-foot air with talons locked, and the fjord folk, who have lived with them always, read their comings and goings as a farmer reads his stock. Ingeborg says a fjord without eagles would be a fjord without weather — meaning that they are simply part of the sky there, as ordinary and as necessary as cloud.

The Otter of the Skerries. Along the fjord mouths and the outer skerries the otter is not the freshwater beast of the English canals but a creature of the salt shore, larger and bolder, hunting the crab and the fish of the tide-pools and the kelp, denning in the tumbled rock of the emptied quaysides. Ingeborg writes of them grown careless of us — a generation with no memory of the hunter — playing along the abandoned jetties in the low northern sun, and of the eagle and the otter in their endless quarrel over the same fish, the eagle stooping to rob, the otter diving to escape, a contest as old as the coast and now conducted with no human on it to trouble either party.

The Seabird Cliffs. No creature here but a whole roaring nation of them: the puffin with its absurd painted parrot-bill and its clownish waddle, nesting in burrows in the turf of the cliff-tops, whirring out to sea on stubby wings to bring back beakfuls of small silver fish held crosswise like a moustache; the guillemot and the razorbill packed on the ledges in their thousands; the kittiwake crying its own name; the great skua that bullies them all. The withdrawal has taken the last human pressure off these colonies — no more egging, no more oiling, no more drowning in the nets that are gone — and Ingeborg writes that the cliffs are louder and fuller than her grandmother knew, the noise carrying up to her seter on a still day like the sound of a distant fair. The puffin she loves best, and so do I, sight unseen, for a bird that grave and that ridiculous at once is a gift to the spirits of a heavy age.

The Whale in the Deep. And here I must tread carefully, for we approach the closed sea. Ingeborg writes — cautiously, for even the fjord folk feel the weight of the naming-prohibition — that the killer whales have come back into the inner fjords in numbers no living Norwegian remembers, following the herring that no fleet now takes; and that on a calm autumn night you can hear them breathing in the dark below, a slow enormous exhalation like the fjord itself sighing. She does not count them. She would think it impious, and she is right, and I will say no more of them here, but save the great matter of the Loud Sea for its own place at the end of this book. Only mark, as you leave the fjords, that the greatest creatures of the European coast are the ones we may least know, breathing in the dark below the eagles.

The Atlantic Isles and the Northern Seaboard

West of Norway, across the northern sea, lie the great Atlantic isles — the Scottish Highlands and their emptied coast, the seabird islands of the far north and west, and beyond them Ireland, that whole Spared land taken entire into the regime, unpartitioned and unplugged in a fortnight, where within a decade four million came across the water in the Little Boats and reversed three centuries of departure. This is a wild of moor and sea-cliff and cold clean water, austere and enormous, and I know it through Whitlock’s northern correspondents and through the island crofters whose letters come slow and salt-stained down the western sail-roads.

The Red Deer of the Emptied Glens. The great deer of the northern moors — smaller than the elk of my Baltic but grander in bearing, a rich red-brown in summer fading to grey in winter, the stags carrying tall branching antlers and, in the autumn rut, roaring across the emptied glens in a bellowing that the crofters say is the true voice of the northern year. In the loud time the deer had grown too many on moors kept bare for them and emptied of their predators; the withdrawal has begun to right that ancient imbalance, for the wolf has not returned to those isles but the land itself has, the moors greening back to scrub and wood now the burning and the grazing-for-sport are ended, so that the deer move now through a country slowly reclothing itself. The crofters hunt them, carefully and by permitted means, for a stag is a winter’s meat and a winter’s leather, and hold the great red stag in the old Highland regard, half-quarry and half-king, its roar in the misted glen the sound of the wild come back to keep them company in the long dark.

The Golden Eagle and the Gannet Isles. Two masters of the northern air, one of the moor and one of the sea. The golden eagle is a vast dark eagle of the high moors and crags, browner and more mountain-loving than my white-tailed sea-eagle, that soars the emptied glens on great fingered wings hunting the hare and the grouse and the deer-calf and the carrion, nesting on the high ledges and the ruins, and has spread and prospered as the emptied land has grown wild beneath it. And out on the sea-cliffs and the offshore stacks throng the gannets — great white sea-birds with black wing-tips, blue-ringed eyes, and a long dagger-bill, that plunge from a height into the sea like flung spears after the fish, and gather to breed on the northern stacks in colonies of a stupendous density and noise and reek, whole islands turned white with them. The withdrawal has taken the last human pressure from these colonies — no more egging, no more oiling, no more drowning in the vanished nets — and the crofters report the gannet-stacks louder and fuller than their grandparents knew, the white islands roaring under the northern sky. Where the golden eagle rules the emptied moor and the gannet rules the sea-cliff, the northern isles have come back to a wild wholeness the loud time had all but stripped from them.

The Otter of the Isles, and the Spared Green of Ireland. Along the sea-lochs and the island shores the otter here is a creature of the salt, as in the Norwegian skerries — larger, bolder, hunting the crab and the fish of the kelp-beds, denning in the tumbled shore-rock, grown careless of a folk that no longer hunts it, and beloved of the island crofters as a lucky neighbour and a sign of clean water. And Ireland — the whole Spared island, unplugged and green, where the census returns rank island identity first of all — has become the gladdest recovery of the northern seaboard: freed of the loud time’s intensive farming, the emptied and quieted land has brought back the corncrake to call all night from the wet meadows, the hen harrier to quarter the bogs, the whooper swan to the winter loughs, so that Ireland is loud again in my mother’s sense, a whole Spared country singing. The Little-Boat folk who came across the water have made of Ireland’s returning wild a kind of homecoming-lore — the corncrake heard again, the harrier over the bog — and read the green fullness of the Spared island as the plainest earthly blessing on a people who left one drowning land and found another that had, mercifully, only to be let alone.

The Adriatic and the Dinaric Karst

Between the cold north and the warm south lies a Verge I love out of all proportion to my knowledge of it, for the letters that reach me from it are so full of a dry, stony, upland humour that I read them for pleasure before I read them for fact. The Adriatic is drowned along both its shores, and behind the eastern shore rises the great limestone country of the karst — the Dinaric highlands, all bare white stone and hidden river and cavern — where the poor upland herders, the poor relations of the loud time’s glittering riviera, have inherited the earth, and where the wild has come surging up out of the caves and down off the mountains to meet the emptied coast.

The Griffon Vulture. The lord of the karst air. A vast pale-brown vulture with a wingspan wider than a tall man is tall, a bare cream-white head and neck built for reaching into carcasses, a ruff of white down at the throat, and, in the air, a flat-winged soaring so effortless it seems to cost the bird nothing at all — as indeed it nearly does, for the griffon rides the thermals off the white karst cliffs for hours without a wingbeat, scanning the emptied land for the dead. It is a pure scavenger, taking nothing living, feeding entirely on the carcasses of the wild and the strayed, and it lives in colonies on the cliff-ledges, and its fortunes rise and fall with the death-rate of the herds. The withdrawal has been a mixed providence to it: the emptied coast holds more wild dead than before, but the loud time’s poisoned baits — which had all but destroyed it — are gone, and so the griffons have crept back to their old cliffs, and the karst herders, who have always known that a wheeling column of vultures marks a death, use them still as the loud time’s shepherds did, to find the fallen beast. There is an old karst courtesy, Ingeborg’s Dinaric counterparts tell me, of leaving the vulture its due: a herder who finds a carcass takes what he needs and leaves the rest to the birds, for a coast without vultures is a coast that stinks, and the griffon is the karst’s own sky-borne sexton.

The Olm, the Human-Fish. Down in the dark rivers beneath the karst lives the strangest creature in all Europe, and one of my favourites in this whole book: the olm, the cave-salamander, the human-fish of the old karst folk. Imagine a pale, blind, finger-long dragon — a slender white amphibian the colour of a drowned man’s skin (whence its unsettling name), with a frilled blush of red external gills at the neck, tiny useless legs, and skin over the place where its eyes should be, for it lives its whole long life in the black water of the caves and has no more use for sight than a stone. It may live a century; it may go years without food; it breeds so slowly and so secretly that the counters could scarcely study it. The withdrawal has touched it hardly at all, for it lived already in a darkness deeper than any Verge, and this is its charm to the Meliorist: here is a creature that was always beyond our looking, always in its own closed sea beneath the stone, and that goes about its long pale life now exactly as it did when the loud time roared overhead and exactly as it will when we are gone. The karst folk have always half-feared it — a blind white thing in the well is an omen, a dragon’s child, a sign of hidden water — and half-revered it, and I revere it wholly, as the land’s own answer to the closed sea: the un-lookable creature, loved best because least known.

The Golden Jackal, the Wolf, and the Bear. The three wild dogs and near-dogs of the karst, in ascending order of grandeur. The golden jackal — a slight, tawny, sharp-faced wild dog, smaller than a wolf and larger than a fox, all opportunism and adaptability — has come surging up the drowned Adriatic coast from the south, colonising the emptied littoral with the fox’s own genius for making do, hunting the small game and scavenging the leavings and singing at dusk in yipping choruses that the karst folk find either homely or unnerving by temperament. Above it, come down from the highlands to the emptied coast, the grey wolf, larger and graver and more feared, hunting the returning deer and boar in family packs, and threading through the drowned island towns in the dark; the karst herders keep the ancient wary truce with it, guarding their stock with the great white livestock-dogs their grandfathers kept, for the wolf and the shepherd have quarrelled on that coast for three thousand years and will quarrel three thousand more. And at the top, the brown bear, come down each year a little further toward the sea than the year before — a great shambling omnivore, eater of berry and root and carrion and, in season, the salmon of the permitted rivers, mostly shy of us and mostly to be left alone. The karst folk read the bear’s descent to the coast as a sign of the emptying, a measure of how far the wild has reclaimed the shore, and speak of it with a respect edged in unease, as one speaks of a large and unpredictable neighbour who has, after all, the better claim to the land.

The Iberian Atlantic and the Western Mediterranean

South and west again, to the great peninsula of Iberia, drowned along all its long Atlantic and Mediterranean shores, its interior held back under the Meseta administrations, its coast given over to the sun and the scrub and the returning beasts. This is a warmer, drier, brighter Verge than any yet, a country of cork-oak and umbrella-pine and salt-marsh and the long straight pilgrim road that ends now at the zone-line, and it holds two of the great conservation-triumphs of the age — and, I must now report, a company of far stranger and grander returns besides, for it is here, on the warm Iberian coast, that Europe has begun to take back the great predators it lost not to any unfitness of the land but to the spear and the gun, a thousand years ago and more.

The Iberian Lynx. The rarest cat in the world when the withdrawal came, and now the great cat of the western Verge. It is a beautiful, compact, spotted cat, larger than a house-cat and far smaller than a leopard, tawny and dark-flecked, with the tufted black ear-tips and the flaring cheek-ruff and the absurd short black-tipped tail of all the lynxes, and a face at once fierce and faintly comical. It is a specialist above all specialists: it eats rabbits, the wild rabbits of the Iberian scrub, and little else, and its whole fortune rises and falls with theirs. In the loud time the rabbit’s diseases and the coast’s building had crushed the lynx to a last few hundred, and the counters spent fortunes and heartbreak dragging it back; and then we withdrew, and the emptied coast filled with scrub, and the scrub filled with rabbits, and the lynx has done in a decade what the counters could not do in fifty years. The Ibero-Interior band folk report it now through the coastal thickets in numbers that would once have been a fantasy, and they have made it a sort of emblem of their own survival — the shy, rare, particular creature that endured and returned — and they guard it with a fierce local pride, for a lynx on your district’s scrubland is a boast, and to harm one a disgrace. It is the plainest lesson in all the book: give the specialist back its world and it will save itself.

The Mediterranean Monk Seal. Where the grey seal of my north is bold and abundant, the monk seal of the Mediterranean is the shyest and rarest of all the world’s seals, a creature so retiring that it fled human sight into the sea-caves long ago and there dwindled almost to nothing. It is a large, sleek, dark seal, brown or slate-grey above and paler below, with a rounded head and huge dark eyes and a mild, ancient, sorrowful face; it hauls out to rest and pup on the hidden beaches inside the sea-caves of the drowned cliffs, and it feeds on the fish and the octopus of the quieted coast. The withdrawal has been its salvation, for the sea-caves are troubled now by no diver, no boat, no gun, and the correspondents of the Iberian and Maghreb bands — for it haunts both shores — report it creeping back to caves it had abandoned in living memory. I may not count it, and would not; I will say only that the shyest seal in the world has been given back its silence, and is answering, and that there is a particular sweetness in the recovery of a creature that asks of us only that we go away.

The Barbary Sheep of the Dry Sierras. On the sun-baked scrub-slopes and the broken limestone sierras behind the southern Iberian coast ranges a wild sheep that has no business in Europe at all, and has made itself thoroughly at home there: the aoudad, the Barbary sheep of the North African mountains, a tawny, powerful, goat-like sheep the sandy colour of the dry hills it loves, the rams carrying a heavy sweep of outcurved horn and, on throat and forelegs, a magnificent flowing beard-and-chaps of long soft hair that hangs almost to the ground. It is a beast of the Atlas and the Saharan massifs, of Africa across the little water; but the loud time, in its restless way, had loosed it upon the Spanish sierras as a quarry for its hunters, generations before the age, and it had taken to the dry Iberian hills as though they were its own Atlas — clambering the crags with the same impossible sure-footedness, going for days on the water it wrings from the scrub, lying up in the noon shade and grazing the coarse slopes at dawn and dusk. The withdrawal has crowned it: the hunting that first loosed it and then held it in check is ended together, and the emptied sierras behind the drowned coast have filled with the wild sheep, ranging up from the Verge into the slow-zone hills where the Ibero-Interior herders now watch them with a proprietary eye. There is a fine irony here, and the band folk feel it: the great crossing to Africa is forbidden to the people of the Strait, who may not take a boat across the fourteen kilometres of water — yet here, on their own dry hills, grazes the African mountain, come over in a cage in the loud time and naturalised now past all removing, an African beast made a Spaniard by our meddling and kept a Spaniard by our leaving. The herders hunt it, carefully and by permitted means, for a ram is good meat and a fine horn; and they have folded it, half-knowingly, into the whole hopeful mythos of the Strait — the country where Africa and Europe lean together across a water they may not cross, and share their monkeys and their storks and, it seems, their mountain sheep.

The Lion of the Iberian Scrub. I set this entry down slowly, and with a full understanding of how it will strike the reader raised on the counters’ maps, because it struck me the very same way, and I disbelieved it for two full years: there are lions in Europe. Not in a park, not behind any wire, but wild, and breeding, and spreading — a true naturalised population of the great tawny cat, denning in the drowned coastal towns and the cork-oak dehesas of the Iberian Verge and ranging out to hunt across the emptied south. The reader will want first to be reminded what the beast is, for we have all met it only in the counters’ pictures: the largest cat of the Old World, the male a great maned lord the weight of three tall men, sand-gold and heavy-shouldered, with a black-tufted tail and a roar that carries eight kilometres across still night air and is, the folk who now live within earshot of it tell me, the single most frightening and most magnificent sound in all the returning wild; the females sleeker and maneless and the true hunters, working in cooperating prides to pull down the boar and the red deer and the wild aoudad and the feral horse and cattle of the emptied coast. And here I must correct my own earlier scorn, honestly, in the manner I have promised: when I wrote of the drowned German coast I dismissed the legend of the Hamburg lions as a fable, and so I still believe it, for the cold wet north is no lion-country and the evidence there was only rumour; but the southern lions are no legend, and I was wrong to let my doubt of the one make me slow to credit the other. How they come to be here is the now-familiar tale of the freed exiles, only multiplied: the loud time kept lions by the thousand, and not only in its zoos but in a peculiar institution it called the safari-park, in which whole prides ranged in wide paddocks along the very coasts that are now the Verge — a dozen such parks and more scattered down the warm Mediterranean shore of Europe, in Iberia and southern France and Italy — and when the coast emptied, the prides of those parks were loosed or broke loose into a land emptying of every enemy and filling, year by year, with the boar and the deer and the loosed horse and the aoudad. And here is the thing the counters could never have engineered and would scarcely have believed: the scattered founder prides, too few and too inbred in any single park to have prospered alone, have found one another along the unbroken coast — for the Verge is a single uninterrupted wilderness now, a green road running the whole length of the sea, down which a wandering young male will walk two hundred kilometres to a strange coast and there meet the loosed daughters of another vanished park — and in the meeting and the mingling the thin bloodlines have thickened, and the population has taken hold, and the lion of the Balkans and the Barbary lion of the collections and the plains lion of the safari-paddocks have poured together into one mongrel Iberian cat that is none of them and all of them and, above all, alive. The Ibero-Interior band folk, who now share their emptied coast with the greatest predator to walk Europe since the aurochs’ day, hold it in a dread and a wonder for which their culture had no ready lore and has had to build one fast: the pilgrim-roads that cross the Verge are walked now in armed and daylight companies, never alone and never near dusk, for the lion of the emptied coast has no fear of a walking man and reckons him, the folk say grimly, a slow and stupid deer; and the slow-zone towns behind the Verge keep their stock close and their children closer, for a pride pressed by a hard winter will come up out of the wilderness to the very edge of the lamplight. And yet — and this is the Meliorist’s hard word, which I will not soften — they are glad of it, most of them, under the fear: glad in the way one is glad of a thunderstorm or a high sea, glad that the land is grand and dangerous again, glad that Europe, which tamed and drained and emptied itself of every great beast a thousand years before the Mandates ever came, has been given back, by the strangest road imaginable, the lion its own ancestors speared into legend. The oldest ballads of that coast remember a time when the hero fought the lion; the between-born of that coast will grow up in a country where the ballad is once more the plain truth, and I do not know whether to call that a horror or a homecoming, and I have decided, after two years, that it is both, and that both is the honest answer, and that I am — cautiously, from my safe cold granite far to the north — glad.

The Laughing Hunter of the Dehesa. Where the lion has come, its ancient partner and rival has come with it, though thinner on the ground and harder to credit, and I give it to you with more hedging than the lion because the reports are fewer: the spotted hyena, the great laughing scavenger-hunter of the African plains, ranges now the same emptied Iberian dehesa, and Europe has thereby recovered a second beast it has not held since the ice-age hunters painted it on their cave-walls. Let me dispel the counters’ slander first, for the hyena was libelled in the loud time as a cringing carrion-thief and is nothing of the kind: it is a powerful, sloping, dog-faced beast the size of a small lioness, sandy and dark-spotted, with a massive head and the strongest jaws of any land predator, able to crack the thigh-bone of a horse for its marrow; it hunts in clever cackling clans as readily as it scavenges, running down the deer and the boar in tireless relays, and it lives under a matriarchy of formidable females, the whole clan bound together by the eerie whooping and the mad laughing call that carries across the dark dehesa and raises the hair on the neck of every band-dweller who hears it. It came, like the lion, from the loosed parks and collections; its founder-stock was thinner, for fewer parks kept it, and so its hold is more scattered and its future less sure, and I will not pretend to know whether it will thicken as the lion’s has or dwindle as the poor Hamburg camels dwindled. But it is here, for now, laughing in the European dark, working the same coast as the lion in the same ancient tense partnership the two have kept on the African plains for a million years — the lion killing and the hyena stealing, the hyena killing and the lion stealing, the two great hunters locked in a rivalry older than our species and now transplanted, entire and unbidden, onto a European shore. The band folk fear its laugh more than the lion’s roar, for the roar is at least a lordly and comprehensible terror while the laugh is something worse, a sound of madness and mockery out of the dark; and they have coined for it already the name it will surely keep, la risa, the laugh, as though the beast were nothing but its voice. I record it, hedged and astonishing, as the second stone in the arch of a thing I did not think to see in my lifetime: the reassembly, on a European coast, of a whole great-predator guild that Europe destroyed before it had cathedrals.

The Spanish Imperial Eagle and the Azure-Winged Magpie, to fill the Iberian air. The imperial eagle is a great dark eagle of the coastal woods and marshes, brown-black with distinctive white shoulder-flashes, a specialist like the lynx upon the same rabbits, and like the lynx recovered gladly with the rabbit’s return; it nests in the tall cork-oaks and hunts the emptied dehesa, and where the lynx rules the ground the eagle rules the air of the same country, the two great rabbit-hunters dividing the spoil. And the azure-winged magpie — a slim, elegant, long-tailed bird, soft fawn of body with a black cap and, its glory, wings and tail of the softest powder-blue — moves through the drowned coastal woods in cheerful family bands, clever and sociable and loud, the very spirit of the sunlit Iberian Verge, and a bird the pilgrims on the drowned-city roads watch for as a marker that they have come south into the warm country. The band folk hold no great lore of it, but love it for its beauty and its cheer, which is lore enough.

The Strait of Gibraltar and the Strait Fraternity

I close this first half of Europe at its very edge, where the continent all but touches Africa across fourteen forbidden kilometres of narrow sea — the Strait, drowned on both shores, and grown in the age into one of the strangest and most hopeful of human arrangements, the Strait Fraternity, in which the Spanish and Moroccan band-folk, forbidden the great crossing, conduct more trade and marriage and daily contact with each other across the little water than either does with its own distant interior. It is a place where two continents lean toward one another, and its wildlife leans with them.

The Barbary Macaque. The one wild monkey of all Europe, and the presiding beast of the Strait. It is a stocky, tailless, sandy-brown monkey with a bare pink face of enormous expressiveness, grave and comical by turns, living in troops of a score or two under a loose and quarrelsome politics; it eats the fruit and the leaf and the root and the insect of the coastal woods, and it is famous among monkeys for the tenderness of its males toward the infants, which they carry and groom and use, the counters darkly noted, as counters in their own social bargaining. In the loud time it clung to the woods above the Strait on both shores and to the old Rock at the western gate; loosed by the emptying of the coastal towns, the troops have spread down into the drowned resorts and villages on both the Spanish and Moroccan sides, so that the Fraternity’s two peoples now share not only their little sea but their monkeys, and the macaque has become a sort of unofficial citizen of both bands at once. The folk of the Strait regard it with the exasperated affection one keeps for a clever, thieving, ineradicable neighbour: it raids the gardens and the stores, it cannot be kept out, and it is somehow, unmistakably, one of us — a tailless, bickering, family-minded ape watching the little sails cross the strait that the great ships may not. I know of no better emblem for the whole Fraternity than the macaque, who was there before the border and will be there after it, and who never recognised it in the first place.

The White Stork of the Crossing. The Strait is one of the great crossing-places of the migrating birds, for a soaring bird will not readily fly the open sea and funnels instead to the narrowest water — and here the white stork I praised in the north returns to my pages in its thousands. Twice a year the storks gather on the emptied coast in vast restless flocks, circling up on the morning thermals until they have height enough, then streaming across the forbidden strait in a broad river of black-and-white wings — a spectacle the band folk of both shores come out to watch as their grandparents did, reading in the storks’ passage the true turning of the seasons. With them go the honey-buzzards and the black kites and the booted eagles and the whole soaring multitude of the migration, all funnelled to the little water; and the Fraternity folk, who may not themselves cross freely, watch the birds cross freely twice a year with a feeling I will not presume to name but which their poets, I am told, have named a hundred times. The stork does not know the strait is forbidden. The macaque does not know there is a border. Between them they make the Strait a single country, as it was before we drew our lines and will be after the lines have faded, and on that hopeful note — the ape and the stork ignoring our geography — I will pause Europe, and take up the western Mediterranean, the Italian Verge, and the great delta of the Danube, in the second half of this Part.

The Camargue and the Western Mediterranean Wetlands

Along the northern Mediterranean shore, where the great rivers spread into brackish delta before the sea, lie the wetland Verges — the Camargue of the Rhône mouth chief among them — where the withdrawal has undone in a generation the loud time’s long war of drainage and building, and the water has come back over the reclaimed land, and with the water the flamingo and the horse and the bull and the whole shimmering marsh-nation of the south. This is a Verge of heat-haze and salt-pan and reed and the enormous flat southern sky, and I know it through the correspondents of the drowned French coast, whose letters smell, I always fancy, of salt and horses — and carry, of late, a piece of news so improbable that I held it back through two printings before I dared set it down.

The Greater Flamingo. The presiding bird of the southern wetlands and one of the most improbable creatures that flies. Stand it beside a man and it is nearly as tall, yet it weighs almost nothing — a confection of pink and white balanced on stilts of leg, with a serpentine neck and a strange thick down-bent bill held upside-down in the water. That bill is the whole secret of the bird: it is a living sieve, and the flamingo feeds by wading the shallow brine with its head inverted, sweeping the bill side to side and pumping the water through a filter of fine plates with its great fleshy tongue, straining out the tiny brine-shrimp and the blue-green weed of the salt lagoons — and it is those very shrimp, rich in a certain pigment, that paint the flamingo pink, so that a flamingo is quite literally the colour of its dinner, and a bird kept from its proper food fades to white. They nest in vast dense colonies on mud-islands in the shallow salt water, each pair raising a single grey chick on a little volcano of dried mud, and the whole colony moves and feeds and flies as one great pink organism, so that a flock rising is a sheet of flame drawn across the marsh. The withdrawal has flooded them a paradise: the drained lands are lagoons again, the disturbance is gone, and the flamingo has spread along the whole northern Mediterranean and, as I have told, even north into the cold German fens where the Hamburg exiles cling on. The band folk of the Camargue have always taken the flamingo as the emblem of their drowned and shining country, and take it so still — the pink of the salt, they call the colour — and a marsh gone flamingo-pink at dusk is, they say, the surest sign that the old wet Camargue has come wholly back.

The White Horses of the Marsh. Among the reeds of the Camargue run the small pale horses that have belonged to that country time out of mind — a hardy, ancient, rough-coated breed, born dark and greying to white with the years, broad-hooved for the marsh, patient and half-wild even in the loud time when the herdsmen rode them after the black bulls. In the emptying, many were simply loosed, and the marsh has taken them back into a true wildness: they run now in loose bands through the drowned pastures, the stallions fighting and squealing in the shallows, the mares foaling in the reed-beds, grazing the coarse marsh grasses that little else will eat and in the grazing keeping the marsh open for the flamingo and the wading birds. Here is an interdependence the band folk understand well: the horse’s grazing and the bull’s trampling make and keep the short wet turf that the whole marsh-nation of birds requires, so that the great white horse browsing the reeds is, like the beaver of my north, a maker of the country as much as a dweller in it. The drowned-coast folk have kept the old horse-lore alive — the folk festivals, the herdsmen’s guilds, the songs — and a band of white horses running through the shallows under a flight of flamingos is, my correspondents insist and I believe them, the most beautiful sight in all the European Verge.

The River-Horse of the Lagoons. And now the news I withheld through two printings, because I could not make myself believe that Europe held a hippopotamus, and now must believe it, because too many sober eyes have seen the same impossible thing. There is, in the great lagoon-chain of the southern French coast — the shallow brackish étangs that run westward from the Rhône mouth toward the old drowned wine-country — a wild and breeding population of the hippopotamus, the river-horse of Africa, the third-largest beast that walks the earth. Let me first describe it to the reader who knows it only from the counters’ pictures, for it is worth describing whole: an enormous barrel-bodied beast, four-square on stumpy pillar-legs, slate-grey and hairless and glistening, the bulls weighing as much as three or four of the great marsh bulls together; a vast blunt head that seems all mouth, opening in a threat-yawn to show tusks of ivory longer than a man’s forearm that it uses not for eating — for it grazes grass, meekly, by night — but for the murderous quarrels of the bulls, which fight in the water with a ferocity that colours the lagoon; a beast that spends its day submerged to the eyes and nostrils, ranging out at dusk to crop the marsh-turf, and that is, for all its comic aspect and its vegetable diet, accounted by those who know it the most dangerous large animal of its native rivers, killing more of the counters there than any lion. How it comes to be here is the whole sad-glad story of the freed exiles in one beast: on that coast, in the loud time, stood a great African safari-park, one of those places where the counters kept the beasts of a far continent in wide paddocks for the gawping of motorists; it lay within the Verge, and was abandoned in the withdrawal, and its hippopotamuses — too vast and too deadly to load onto any truck or coax down any road by a people fleeing for their lives — were, in the end, simply let go into the lagoons, which happened to be, of all the accidents of the age, very nearly perfect hippopotamus country: warm, shallow, brackish-to-fresh, thick with the soft grazing they love, and empty of every enemy but the winter. And so they have bred, and spread eastward along the étang chain, and there are now — I will not count them, and could not — hippopotamuses wallowing in the reed-fringed lagoons of southern France, surfacing among the flamingos, hauling out at dusk to graze the same wet turf as the white horses, a herd of African river-horses gone wild in the drowned wine-country of Europe. The band folk, who did not ask for them and cannot be rid of them, hold them in a wary dread that has already hardened into lore: the herdsmen have learned, as the African villagers learned before them, never to come between a river-horse and its water, and never to pole a punt through a wallow at dusk, and to read the great yawn from the reeds as the plain death-threat it is. They call the beast, with the Camargue’s dry fatalism, le taureau d’eau — the water-bull — and reckon it, half in earnest, the drowned coast’s own new bull, wilder and worse-tempered than the black bulls their grandfathers rode, and no more to be argued with than the tide. I record it with astonishment undimmed by three years of confirmation. There is a hippopotamus in the Camargue. The age is stranger than any counter dreamed, and I have given up being surprised by it, and am surprised by it daily.

The Sacred Ibis, the Nile’s Exile. Beside so vast a marvel a smaller one may seem a footnote, but I will not pass the sacred ibis, for it is the freed exile in a gentler key and its story rhymes with the river-horse’s own. It is a striking wading bird the size of a small heron, its body a clean white, its head and long down-curved bill and legs a bare and glossy black, so that it seems always dressed for a solemn office — as indeed it was, for this is the very bird the old Egyptians embalmed by the million and made the emblem of their god of writing, a bird of the Nile that had not nested wild in Europe since the earth was warmer. The loud time kept it in its bird-parks and its collections; a great one on the French Atlantic coast loosed or lost its flock generations before the age, and the birds had already spread quietly across the drowned river-mouths and the marshes of western France before ever we withdrew, nesting in the tree-colonies of the herons and the egrets, stalking the wet fields and the tide-margins for the frog and the crayfish and the insect and — the counters fretted over this — the eggs and chicks of the very herons it nested among. The withdrawal has let it flood into every emptied marsh of the northern Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast, so that a bird of the pharaohs’ Nile now stalks the drowned French fields in easy companies, and the Camargue folk, who have no ancient lore of it and have had to make their own, have settled on calling it l’Égyptienne — the Egyptian woman — and reading its grave black-and-white presence among the flamingos as one more sign that the warm south has come north to stay. I find a particular poignancy in it that I cannot quite justify: that in the very decades the true Nile drowned and its delta emptied and the great Egyptian exodus went up the river into the desert, the Nile’s own sacred bird should be quietly colonising the marshes of Europe, an exile made good in a foreign wet while its homeland was unmade. The age is full of such rhymes. I only report them.

The Capybara, the Water-Pig of the New World. And one more exile of the southern wetlands, for the Camargue has become a very reunion of the loosed New World: down among the reeds and the drowned pastures, grazing in placid herds at the water’s edge, lives the capybara, the largest rodent on the earth, come like the coypu from the river-swamps of the far southern continent and, like the coypu, gone gloriously to seed in the warm European wet. Picture a guinea-pig grown to the size of a large dog or a small pig — a barrel-bodied, blunt-faced, brown-furred beast the weight of a grown man, with a squarish head, small high-set eyes and ears and nostrils for the half-submerged life, slightly webbed feet, and no tail to speak of — a creature so placidly, comically ungainly that the first correspondent to describe it to me plainly thought I would not believe him, and he was very nearly right. It is the most social of rodents, living in easy herds along the marsh margins under the loose rule of a dominant boar, grazing the water-grasses and the reeds like a little hornless cow, taking to the water at any alarm and swimming with only its nostrils showing, or sinking altogether to hide; and it breeds, as the whole rodent tribe breeds, with a speed that has let a few zoo-loosed founders become, in thirty years, a fixture of the southern marsh. The loud time kept it in its animal-parks for the charm of the thing, and the warm wetlands of the Mediterranean, once they were flooded and quieted and emptied, proved very nearly as kind to it as its native Orinoco; the hard frosts of a bad winter cull it back, and it will never march north into the cold as the hardier coypu has, but along the warm drowned south it has made itself thoroughly at home. It is, unlike so many of the exiles, no maker of trouble and no marrer of banks — it only grazes, and swims, and basks, and breeds, and provides, in the plain economy of the marsh, a great deal of easy meat for everything that hunts: for the returning eagle takes its young, and the great catfish and, I shall shortly have to report, stranger jaws than those take the unwary at the water’s edge. The band folk, who have folded it without fuss into the marsh-nation, eat it as the old South Americans did and call it, with the Camargue’s flat practicality, le cochon d’eau, the water-pig, and reckon it one more sign — the pink bird and the water-horse and now the water-pig — that their drowned country has become a warm and teeming and frankly rather South American sort of paradise, and are, on the whole, content to have it so.

The Purple Heron and the Bee-Eater, to fill the reed and the air. The purple heron is a slim, snaky, secretive heron of the deep reed, richer and darker than its grey cousin, chestnut and slate and streaked, that threads the reed-beds with its wings half-open and its dagger bill poised, spearing the frog and the fish and the great marsh insects; it nests low in the reeds and is heard more than seen, a hoarse cry from the green depths. And the bee-eater — oh, the bee-eater, the loveliest bird in Europe and I will hear no argument — a slim, sickle-winged bird of impossible colour, chestnut and gold and turquoise and green all at once, that hawks bees and dragonflies over the marsh in swooping sallies, bashing the sting from a bee against a branch before it swallows, and nests in long tunnels dug in the sandy banks of the drowned rivers. It came north with the warming, and the emptied warm coast has welcomed it in loud, glittering, liquid-voiced colonies, and the band children of the south watch for its return in spring as the northern children watch for the stork. A country that holds the bee-eater cannot be wholly fallen, whatever the counters lost.

The Italian Verge: the Drowned Lagoons and the Lattice

Italy suffered the withdrawal as few lands did — no electric Italy survived, only a lamplit lattice of hill-towns and river-margins and the greatest cultural-salvage undertaking in the history of our kind, the day-rota rescue of the drowned patrimony of Rome and Florence and Venice and Naples. And along its long drowned coast the wild has come back into some of the most storied places on earth, so that the Verge here is haunted twice over — by the vanished splendour of the loud time and its predecessors, and by the beasts that have inherited the ruin. I know it through the correspondents of the Adriatic lattice and the day-pilgrims who come to the drowned cities in their millions.

The Lagoon Reborn: the Herons of Drowned Venice. Venice was always half sea, and now it is wholly so, and the withdrawal has done the strangest thing to it: it has become, my correspondents say, the greatest heronry in the Mediterranean. The drowned palaces and the sunken squares, troubled by no boat but the salvage-guilds’ careful day-craft, have filled with the tall wading birds — the grey heron and the little egret, the night-heron that stands hunched and secret in the shadowed canals by day and flies out to feed at dusk, the squacco heron the colour of old parchment — nesting on the ledges and the cornices and the drowned gardens, so that the emptied city rings at dawn with their harsh cries and the beat of their broad wings among the campaniles. The lagoon’s shallows have come back to a fecundity the loud time’s traffic had destroyed, thick with the small fish and the shrimp and the crab that feed the birds, and the whole drowned city has become one enormous reedless marsh of stone. The day-pilgrims who come to mourn the vanished city find it, instead, appallingly alive — a heron on the altar, an egret in the drowned nave — and the Meliorists among them read the sight as the age’s own hard sermon: that the works of our hands are not the last word, and that the water and the birds were here before Venice and will be here after, and that this is a grief and also, if one has the stomach for it, a strange consolation.

The Cats of the Drowned Cities. I must give the feral cats their due, for they are everywhere in the Italian Verge and nowhere more than in the drowned southern cities, where the loud time’s vast populations of street-cats were abandoned and have gone wholly wild. They are no marvel of nature — they are only the domestic cat, tabby and black and tortoiseshell, run feral — but their story is instructive and a little sad. In the first years after the emptying they flourished monstrously on the rats and the pigeons of the ruins; but the wild has since come for them in turn, for a feral cat is prey to the fox, the eagle, the returning wildcat, and the great eagle-owl, and their numbers have fallen from the early plague to a wary, thinned, hard-bitten population that clings to the drowned-city margins. The band folk regard them without sentiment; they are neither wild enough to admire nor tame enough to keep, and they occupy the uneasy middle place of all our abandoned dependants. I include them chiefly as a corrective, for the amateur must learn that not every creature of the Verge is a triumph — some are only orphans of the loud time, making the best of a world that no longer has a place for them, and honesty requires that we see them too.

The Coypu, the Marsh-Beaver of the South. In the drowned river-margins and the reviving lagoons of the Italian coast — and westward, I should say, all through the Camargue and the Iberian wetlands too, but I keep it for here where it is thickest — swarms a freed exile of a humbler sort than the flamingo or the river-horse, but a maker of the marsh for all that: the coypu, or nutria, a great marsh-rat the size of a small dog, come from the river-swamps of the southern American continent that I shall never reach and that the loud time raided for its dense brown underfur. Picture a beaver that has mislaid its paddle-tail and kept everything else — a heavy, rounded, brown-furred rodent with a blunt whiskered face, webbed hind feet, a long round scaly rat’s-tail, and a pair of great chisel-teeth stained a startling orange, with which it shears the reeds and the marsh-plants it lives upon. The loud time bred it by the million on its fur-farms across Europe, and the beasts escaped or were loosed in every generation, until the warm southern marshes held a wild population long before the age; and the withdrawal, which drowned the farms with everything else, has set it free entire, so that the reviving lagoons of the south are loud with it, the coypu grazing the reed-beds and the water-plants, burrowing its dens into the banks and the old drowned levees, breeding with the headlong fecundity of all the rat-kin. It is, like the beaver of my north and the water-buffalo of the marshes, both a maker and a marrer of its country: its grazing opens the reed-beds and its burrows honeycomb and collapse the old banks, so that the salvage-guilds curse it where it undermines a wanted causeway and the herons bless it where it clears them a fishing-shallow. The band folk eat it without shame — it is clean meat, a marsh-rabbit in all but name — and regard it without much sentiment, as one regards any hardy foreign thing that has plainly come to stay; and I set it beside the feral cat as the other face of the freed exile, the one that did not merely survive its loosing but throve past all wanting, and reshaped the marsh in the throving.

The Alligator of the Drowned South. I have kept for the last of the Italian marsh the strangest jaws in all of Europe, and I give them to the reader with my full apparatus of caution, for the thing is bold enough that I would not blame you for doubting it, and I doubted it myself until the reports had come from three separate mouths and one sober day-pilgrim who had seen the beast bask: there are alligators in the rivers of the drowned Italian south. Not the crocodile — of the true crocodile more when we reach the African rivers, and I do not think it has crossed into Europe — but the alligator, the American alligator, the broad-snouted armoured river-lizard of the far western continent’s warm swamps, which the loud time kept in its reptile-houses and, more to the point, sold by the thousand as a cruel novelty-pet that its buyers tired of and turned loose. It is a great flat-bodied reptile, longer than a tall man and heavier, blackish and bony-plated, with a broad rounded snout full of blunt crushing teeth, that lies like a floating log in the warm shallows with only its eyes and nostrils above the water, waiting with the patience of stone for the beast that comes to drink, and takes it — the boar, the deer, the coypu, the water-pig, the unwary dog of a salvage-crew — in a single lunging snap and a roll into the deep. Now, the reader raised on the counters’ geography will object that Europe is too cold for such a creature, and for the true crocodile she would be right; but the alligator alone among the great river-lizards is a beast of the temperate south as much as the tropic, hardy against a frost that would kill its cousins, able — the counters marvelled at this — to survive a surface freeze by holding its nostrils up through the ice and waiting the winter out in a torpor. And so, where its cousins would have perished, the alligator has held on, in the warmest of the drowned southern rivers and the thermal springs and the sun-fed lagoons, loosed from a hundred vivaria and reptile-parks and pet-cages, and has bred, sparingly and locally but truly, so that there are now warm reaches of the Italian Verge where the salvage-guilds keep a wary eye on the water and the day-pilgrims are warned off the reedy margins at dusk. I will not overstate it: it is no teeming plague like the coypu, but a scattered and local and winter-checked presence, clinging to the warmest waters and no further — and yet it is there, an American dragon in the drowned rivers of Italy, and its presence completes the strange New World the drowned south has become. The band folk, who have no European word for a thing no European ever had to name, have simply borrowed the counters’ own and made it their own, il coccodrillo, lumping alligator and crocodile together as the old folk lumped every dragon, and hold the beast in the flat wary dread one keeps for deep water that bites; and I record it, hedged and astonishing, as the coldest-blooded proof in this whole book that the age will stock its emptied waters from whatever cage the loud time happened to leave ajar, and consult neither the counters’ maps nor their sense of what belongs.

The Crested Porcupine and the Pine Marten, two natives of the Italian night. The crested porcupine is a large, heavy, nocturnal rodent, armoured along its whole back and tail with a magnificent panoply of long black-and-white quills which it erects and rattles when alarmed and can drive, backing suddenly, into the face of a rash pursuer; it shambles through the drowned coastal scrub by night digging for root and bulb and fallen fruit, and it has spread and multiplied in the emptied land, its quills much prized by the band folk as ornaments and, in the old lore, as charms. And the pine marten — a lithe, chestnut-brown weasel-kin the size of a cat, cream-throated, arboreal, all liquid grace, that hunts the squirrel and the bird and the egg through the canopy of the returning coastal woods and dens in the hollow trees and the ruins. The marten is the fox of the treetops, clever and bold and beautiful, and the band folk see it seldom and prize the sight, for a marten is a shy creature of deep cover, and a wood that holds one is a wood grown wild and whole again.

The Aegean and the Anatolian Verge

East and south, the Mediterranean narrows into the Aegean, that sea of a thousand islands, and beyond it the drowned Anatolian coast, where the great cities emptied and the state withdrew to the plateau. The Aegean is one of the strangest and most hopeful Verges of all, for its islands were largely Spared — a thread-fleet civilization of little sail-craft trading and marrying laterally across the water — while the mainland coasts drowned, so that the Aegean is at once a closed and forbidden sea and a scatter of living, sailing, human islands upon it. I know it through the caïque sailors whose sail-mail touches the Thread Fleets, and through the day-pilgrims who come to the drowned coastal cities and the emptied holy mountains.

Eleonora’s Falcon. The presiding bird of the Aegean cliffs, and one of the most remarkable falcons in the world, for it has bent its whole life to the rhythm of the migration. It is a slim, elegant, long-winged falcon, slate-dark or paler-barred, that nests in colonies on the sea-cliffs of the Aegean islands — and, uniquely among the falcons of the north, it breeds in the late summer and autumn, timing its young to the very season when the small migrant birds of Europe come streaming south across the sea, so that the falcons hunt the exhausted migrants over the water and carry them to the cliff-nests to feed the brood, harvesting the great river of migration as a miller harvests a stream. The withdrawal has been pure providence to it, for the island cliffs are troubled now by no boat and no gun, and the caïque folk report the falcon-colonies fuller than living memory. The islanders read the autumn gathering of the falcons as the turn of the year, and hold the bird a marvel and a marker, the one hunter that has made the whole migration its harvest.

The Monk Seal of the Caves, and the Loggerhead of the Dark Beaches. The Aegean is the last great stronghold of the Mediterranean monk seal, that shyest of seals I have praised on the Iberian and Maghreb shores, and here it haunts the innumerable sea-caves of the emptied islands and drowned coasts, hauling out to pup on the hidden beaches within the caves, creeping back — the caïque folk say — to caves it had abandoned in the loud time, now that no diver troubles them. And the loggerhead turtle, that great brown sea-turtle with the massive head and the powerful jaws, has come back to the dark emptied beaches of the Aegean and the Anatolian coast to lay, on sands that the loud time’s lights and crowds had driven it from and that are dark now by the law of the sky; the island folk keep the old lore of the turtle-beaches, and read the return of the great dark shapes to the night sand as the sea giving back what the loud time stole. Both are creatures the age has served by the simplest of gifts — darkness, and silence, and the absence of us — and both are recovering, and the caïque folk are glad, and do not count them.

The Wild Goat and the Emptied Holy Mountain. In the mountains behind the Anatolian coast, and on the wilder Aegean islands, ranges the wild goat — the bezoar, the very ancestor of all our domestic goats, a splendid tawny beast with a dark spinal stripe and, on the old bucks, a great sweep of scimitar horn, clambering the crags with a mountain-goat’s impossible ease, browsing the scrub, drinking at the high springs. It had been hunted to the remote heights in the loud time, and the quieting of the coast and the mountains has let it come lower and grow bolder, so that the drowned coastal ranges are goat-country again. And I must give a word to the emptied holy mountain — the great monastic peak of Athos, whose communities the withdrawal dispersed inland, leaving the ancient monasteries standing empty on their coastal cliffs, day-kept now by salvage-guilds and given over each night to the wild. The day-pilgrims report the emptied monastery-gardens gone to scrub and thicket, the wild goat browsing the terraces, the eagle nesting on the tower, the whole sacred coast become a refuge — and there is, for the Meliorist, a hard sweetness in it: the mountain given to God is given back, in the age, to the goat and the eagle, and the monks pray now inland while the wild keeps their old cliffs, and I do not know a better emblem of the age’s strange courtesy than a wild goat browsing the emptied garden of a saint.

The Leopard at Europe’s Door. And here, on the drowned Anatolian coast, I must show the reader a thing that is happening slowly and westward and that will, I am nearly certain, reshape the wild of Europe within the lifetime of the between-born: the leopard is coming back to the western world, walking the emptied coast toward the sunset a little further each year. The leopard the reader has already met on my Indian and Arabian pages — the lithe gold-and-black cat, most adaptable and most secret of all the great cats, the one that learned even in the loud time to live unseen at the edge of the human town — never quite left Anatolia; a remnant of the great Persian leopard clung on in the eastern mountains of that land through all the loud centuries, and a scattering more sat in the collections and the beast-gardens of the coastal cities. The withdrawal has set both free to spread, and spread they have, down out of the eastern crags and out of the emptied parks into a drowned coast suddenly free of every gun — and, finding the coast an unbroken wilderness running always westward, they have begun to walk it. The caïque folk and the day-pilgrims of the Anatolian Verge report the leopard now where none had been in living memory, its rosetted form slipping through the drowned coastal cities and the emptied holy mountains, taking the returning wild goat and the boar and the deer; and the reports come each year from a little further west along the shore, as though the beast were feeling its way, coast by drowned coast, toward the narrow water that is all that now divides Anatolia from Europe. It cannot cross that water — the strait is forbidden sea, and no leopard swims a strait — but the reader should mark, and mark well, that the leopard has other roads: for the great land-corridor of the Verge does not truly end at any strait but bends north around the closed Black Sea, through the emptied Caucasus and the Pontic shore and the Ukrainian steppe-edge, a continuous wild highway by which a patient cat may walk in three generations from the mountains of Persia to the forests of the Balkans without once wetting a paw in a forbidden sea. I do not say the leopard has reached Europe. I say it is coming, on its own soft feet, by the long way round, and that the emptied corridor has made the coming possible, and that the between-born of the Balkan Verge will very likely live to hear, some quiet dusk, a sound their ancestors forgot a thousand years ago: the rasping saw-cough of a leopard in a European wood. The Anatolian folk, who have it already, hold it in the wary secret regard the leopard draws everywhere it lives — a lord of the dark edge, seldom seen and never safely forgotten — and read its westward march along the emptied shore as one more sign that the age keeps no borders, and returns the great beasts by whatever road it pleases, and does not hurry.

The Danube Delta and the Pontic Shore

I end Europe at its far eastern water, where the great Danube spreads into the largest reed-marsh on the continent before it dies into the forbidden Black Sea — a Verge of water and reed and enormous skies, one of the richest bird-lands in all the world, and the home of a human folk pre-adapted to the age as few others were. This is the country of the Lipovan Old Believers, who fled the state and its clocks centuries ago and kept their discipline without it, and who are cited in the councils of the band as the senior experts in the whole art the age now requires: to live well without the grid, without the signature, without the state’s paperwork. Their delta is my bridge to the Russias, and I could not choose a better one.

The Pelicans of the Delta. The great glory of the Danube delta, and one of the great sights of the returning world, is the pelican — and here two kinds, the white and the Dalmatian. The great white pelican is an enormous bird, white flushed with rose in the breeding season, with black flight-feathers and a huge fleshy yellow throat-pouch slung beneath a long flat bill; the Dalmatian is greater still, the largest freshwater bird that flies, silver-grey and shaggy-crested, with a pouch that flushes brick-red at the courting season. They fish in cooperating flocks — a marvel to watch — swimming in a line or a horseshoe and beating the water with their wings to drive the fish before them into the shallows, then scooping them up in their vast pouches in a synchronised dip, so that pelicans feeding are less like birds than like a single deliberating creature. The loud time’s poisons and persecutions had driven the Dalmatian pelican to a scattered handful of colonies; the emptying of the delta and the closing of the fisheries have brought both kinds flooding back, and my mother’s cousin Ildar, who watches the neighbouring Volga delta, writes that he has wept to see the pink pelican-clouds return. The Lipovan and the delta folk read the pelican as the very spirit of the marsh, and the return of the great colonies as the surest sign that the delta has come wholly back to itself; and a pelican-flock wheeling white and rose over the reeds is, Ildar says, a thing that makes a man forgive the age a great deal.

The Wild Horses of the Delta Forest. In the strange drowned oak-forest that grows on the sand-ridges of the delta run bands of feral horses, descended from the loosed stock of the delta villages and gone wholly wild — small, tough, many-coloured horses that graze the forest glades and the reed-margins and gallop through the shallow floods, foaling in the thickets, harried by nothing now but the wolf and the hard winter. They are, like the Camargue horses of the west, both dwellers in the marsh and makers of it, their grazing keeping the glades open; and they have become, in the folk-imagination of the delta, a kind of wonder and a kind of problem both, admired for their beauty and cursed for their raids on the reed-cutters’ plots. The Old Believers, who take the long view of most things, regard the wild horses of the delta forest as the age’s own parable: the tame gone free, the servant become sovereign, the loud time’s property running wild through the loud time’s ruin, owing nothing now to anyone.

The Sea-Eagle, the Great Reed-Nation, and the Closed Black Sea. The white-tailed eagle returns to my pages one last time here, for the Danube delta holds them at a density to rival the Norwegian fjords, nesting in the delta oaks and hunting the fish-thronged channels; and around them the whole reed-nation of the marsh — the bittern that booms unseen in the reeds like a distant foghorn, the great flocks of ibis and spoonbill and egret, the marsh-harrier quartering low over the reed-tops, the vast winter multitudes of geese and duck that darken the delta sky. And at the delta’s seaward edge the reeds fade into the forbidden Black Sea, an enclosed and darkening water classed with all the seas under the prohibition, where the sturgeon — those armoured, ancient, long-lived fish that the loud time hunted to the edge for their roe — recover now in a silence we may not break, un-hunted, un-named, un-counted, along with all the sea’s other life. The delta folk speak of the sturgeon the way the fjord folk speak of the whale: with a lowered voice, and no numbers, and a certain awe at a great creature given back its darkness. And so Europe ends, as it will end again and again in this book, at the edge of the closed water, where the reeds give way to the un-lookable sea, and the eagle turns back from the last channel because there is nothing beyond it that we are permitted to know — only the sturgeon in the dark, recovering, and content, and none of ours.

Here ends Part One.

PART TWO · ASIA, WITH THE RUSSIAS AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Asia is the great teeming heart of this book, the richest of my three continents in the sheer press and variety of its life, and the one where the withdrawal has produced the largest and most spectacular of all the returning wildernesses — for Asia’s coasts are its enormous river-mouths, and a drowned delta is the richest Verge there is. It is also the continent I can least often show you with my own eye and must most often show you through the eyes of my correspondents, and I ask you to keep that in mind as we go, for the tiger of the Bengal delta and the leopard of the Amur coast are as real to me as my Baltic seals, but I have them from Zainab and from letters relayed the whole width of a continent, and I would be a liar to pretend otherwise. I begin in the frozen north, work down the great river-coasts of the east, cross to the islands, and end in the deserts and the marshes of the Middle East, which I have folded into this Part for they belong, by land and by courier-road, to the Asian mass.

The Russian Arctic Verge

The northern coast of the Russian world was never thickly settled, and the withdrawal took what little there was, and the result along the Arctic shore is the eeriest transformation in all the Verge: the emptied coastal settlements of the far north have been inherited, quite literally, by the great white bears. My correspondents here are few and their letters slow and come by the long northern relays, but they agree on a set of marvels that I set down with more than usual caution and more than usual wonder.

The Polar Bear. The largest land-hunting beast on the earth, and now the lord of the abandoned north. A great bull is longer than two tall men laid end to end and heavier than a small horse, clad in dense fur that looks white but is truly hollow and colourless over black skin, with a long neck and a small flat head built for the seal-hunt and paws the size of dinner-plates, furred beneath for the ice. It is a hunter of the sea-ice above all, taking the seals at their breathing-holes with a patience that can outlast a whole Arctic day; but the failing of the ice in the loud time had already driven the bears ashore to prowl the edges of the northern towns, and now the towns are empty, and the bears have simply moved in. My correspondents tell of settlements along the Arctic Verge where the bears den in the abandoned houses and pad down the frozen streets in the winter dark as the townsfolk once did, unhurried and unafraid, kings of a kingdom we ceded them without a fight; where a she-bear raises her cubs in a drowned schoolroom, and the whole town is a bears’ town, and the few humans who come near in the brief bright summer keep well back, for the polar bear, alone among all the great beasts, has never learned to fear us and will hunt a person as readily as a seal. It is the purest and starkest emblem of the whole age: the top predator of the north, walking into the human place we abandoned and making it plainly, unanswerably its own.

The Blended Bear. And here, among the white bears, is my first report of a thing the reader will meet again and again as this expanded book goes on — a thing the counters dreaded and forbade and that the age has quietly made common: a hybrid, a blended beast, a creature of two kinds run together into a third. Along the southern edge of the Arctic Verge, where the failing sea-ice has driven the white bears longer and longer onto the land, and the emptying of the north has let the brown bears of the forest push further and further toward the coast, the two great bears have met — as they had begun to meet even in the loud time’s last years — and, meeting, have bred; and the north now holds a scattering of bears that are neither white nor brown but something between, the blended bear, the counters’ “grolar” or “pizzly,” a beast with the polar bear’s long neck and the brown bear’s humped shoulder and hump-digging claws, its coat a dirty cream splashed with brown, at home on the ice and on the land both. It is fertile, this blend — that is the point the counters found so alarming, for a mule is a dead end but these bears breed on, and breed back, and pour the two bloodlines together — and my northern correspondents, who see it seldom and report it carefully, describe a bear that hunts the seal like its white mother and digs the root and the ground-squirrel like its brown father, a generalist of the melting margin exactly fitted to a north that is neither the old frozen north nor any temperate land but a strange warming between-place all its own. I record it here, at the head of Asia, as the first clear instance of what I have come to think one of the deepest strangenesses of the age: that the withdrawal, by throwing open the whole world’s corridors and mixing the scattered and the caged and the driven, has set the kinds of the earth flowing together in ways the counters spent their whole science trying to hold apart — and that the results, whatever the counters would have said, are not monsters but simply life, doing what life does when a wall comes down, which is to reach across the gap. I have more such beasts to show you before this book is done, and stranger ones than a bear. Mark the blended bear as the north’s plain first word on the matter, and hold the thought.

The Walrus. Along the emptied northern beaches the walrus has recovered its old haul-out grounds, and there is no stranger congregation in the world. Imagine a beast the bulk of a small cart, clad in thick wrinkled hairless hide gone pinkish-brown in the sun, with a great whiskered muzzle, small bloodshot eyes, and two enormous ivory tusks — grown by both sexes — that it uses to haul its vast bulk from the water and to quarrel with its neighbours and to break the ice. Walruses haul out in their hundreds packed body to body on the beaches, a heaving, roaring, reeking mountain of blubber, and there they doze and quarrel and moult, diving in the shallows to root the clams and shellfish from the sea-floor with their sensitive whiskered snouts. The withdrawal has taken the last human pressure from their haul-outs — no more hunting, no more disturbance, no more of the loud time’s traffic — and they have returned to beaches they had abandoned in living memory. The few northern folk who still range that coast under the small tolerance keep well clear of a hauled-out herd, for a panicked walrus stampede is death, and read the return of the great herds as a sign, like the bears in the towns, that the north has passed wholly out of our keeping and into its own.

The Arctic Fox and the Ivory Gull, the small camp-followers of the great north. The Arctic fox is a small, round, thick-furred fox, brown in the summer tundra and pure snow-white in winter, with short round ears and furred feet, that follows the polar bear across the ice to scavenge the leavings of its seal-kills and dens in the tundra banks and the ruins, bold and quick and forever hungry; the northern folk have always half-loved it for its beauty and cursed it for its thieving, and it thrives now on the leavings of a wilder north. And the ivory gull — a small, pure-white, dove-eyed gull of the high Arctic, following the bear as the fox does, feeding on the leavings and the carrion of the ice, ghost-pale against the grey northern sky. Both are creatures of the margin, living on the great hunter’s overflow, and their fortunes rise with the bear’s, and the bear’s fortune has, in this one strange corner of the age, risen.

Of the beluga and the narwhal in the northern water, and the great whales returning to the quieted Arctic sea, I will say only that the northern folk hear them, and do not count them, and that we approach again the closed sea, which I keep for its own place.

The Volga Delta and the Closed Caspian

Down in the warm south of the Russian world, where the great Volga spreads into its enormous delta before the Caspian, I am on ground my own family knows, for it was to my mother’s cousin Ildar, among the Astrakhan reeds, that I was sent as a girl to spend my summers, and it was there — before ever I sat in a Tartu lecture-hall — that I first understood what a wild place was, and learned my mother’s word for it: loud. The Volga delta is a labyrinth of reed and channel and lotus-choked backwater, one of the great bird-lands of the earth, and its seaward edge fades into the forbidden Caspian, that vast enclosed salt sea now closed to our looking with all the rest.

The Wild Boar of the Reeds. The boar of the Volga delta is the same grey-bristled, tusked, tireless rooter I praised on my own coast, but here it is a creature wholly of the reed and the water — a marsh-boar, swimming the channels, wallowing in the mud, ploughing the reed-beds and the lotus-flats for root and tuber and the eggs of ground-nesting birds, growing to a great size on the delta’s fatness. It is the delta’s engine of disturbance, its rooting keeping the reed-beds broken and various, its wallows becoming pools for the frog and the dragonfly; and it is the chief prey, where they meet, of the delta’s wolves and, in the old days, of the tigers that once haunted these reeds and are gone now. Ildar hunts them, as all the delta folk do, and speaks of them with the mingled respect and contempt the boar draws everywhere — vermin and dinner, plough and pest — and marks, as I do, that a delta thick with boar is a delta being ceaselessly turned and renewed by them, the mud never allowed to settle, the reeds never allowed to close.

The Jungle Cat. A creature the northern reader will not know, and should. The jungle cat is a lanky, long-legged, sandy-grey wild cat, larger than a house-cat and smaller than a lynx, with a short faintly-ringed tail, tufted ears, and a lean, high-shouldered, purposeful gait; it is a cat of the reed-bed and the marsh-margin, hunting the water-birds and the small mammals and the frogs of the delta, wading and even swimming after its prey, for it is that rarity among cats, one that does not mind a wetting. It dens in the reed-thickets and the abandoned lodges, and it has spread and prospered in the emptied delta as the water-birds have returned to feed it. The delta folk see it seldom, for it is shy and crepuscular, but they know its tracks along the mud and its cry in the reeds, and reckon it a sign of a healthy marsh, for a jungle cat needs a delta thick with birds to keep it, and a delta thick with birds is a delta come back to life.

The White-Tailed Eagle and the Lotus. The sea-eagle rules the Volga delta as it rules the Danube and the fjords, nesting in the delta willows and hunting the fish-thick channels, and around it wheel the pelican-clouds — the white and the Dalmatian both — that Ildar has wept to see return. And over the still backwaters spreads the sacred lotus, the great pink water-flower that fills whole channels of the delta with its scented bloom in the high summer, a wonder the loud time’s tourists once came far to see and that now blooms unwatched save by the delta folk and the birds; the lotus-flats are nursery and larder to half the delta, the seeds feeding the wildfowl, the great leaves sheltering the fish-fry and the frog-spawn, and Ildar counts the year good or ill by the spread of the lotus. It is a plant, not a beast, and beyond my remit; but a natural history of the Volga delta that left out the lotus would be a lie, for the lotus makes the country the birds live in, and the delta folk hold it half-sacred, an old inheritance of reverence older than any faith now named there.

The Closed Caspian. At the delta’s seaward edge the reeds give way to the forbidden Caspian — that vast enclosed salt sea, classed with all the seas under the ruling that closed the enclosed saline waters — and there the Caspian seal, the smallest and most northerly-adapted of all the seals, a plump grey creature that once hauled out on the winter ice in its hundreds of thousands and had been crushed by the loud time’s hunting and poisoning to a fraction of that host, recovers now in a silence we may not break. And with it the great sturgeon of the Caspian, those armoured, whiskered, ancient fish that the loud time slaughtered almost to nothing for the salt roe of their bellies, drift now unhunted through the closed water, un-named and un-numbered. Ildar speaks of them as the fjord folk speak of the whale — with a lowered voice, and no count, and an awe at great creatures given back their darkness. The Caspian is the closed sea in miniature, set down in the heart of the continent, and it teaches the same lesson: that the seal and the sturgeon are recovering precisely because we can no longer go out to look at them, and that a Meliorist may be glad of a good she is forbidden to survey.

The Russian Far East: the Amur Coast

At the very far end of the continent, on the Pacific coast that the Message took as it took every coast, lies the strangest and grandest of the Russian Verges, and here I must lean entirely on letters relayed the whole width of the earth, faint and slow and precious, and I will hedge accordingly — but the reports are sober and consistent and come from people with no reason to invent, and I have chosen to believe them, and I will tell you why at the last.

The Amur Tiger. The greatest cat on the earth, and the northernmost — a tiger grown huge and pale and thick-furred for the snow, a great bull weighing as much as three men, longer than a tall man is high even without the tail, deep orange faded almost to cream in the winter coat, striped black, ruffed at the cheeks, with the vast padded paws and the deep chest of a beast that hunts through deep snow across enormous distances. It is the loneliest of all the great cats, each ranging alone across a territory the size of a small country, hunting the wild boar and the red deer and the elk of the taiga, killing perhaps once a week and eating its fill and moving on. In the loud time the felling of its forest and the guns of its hunters had crushed it to a last few hundred along that far coast; and then we withdrew from the coastal cities, and the emptying opened a corridor of wilderness from the deep taiga right down to the abandoned shore, and the tiger — that most space-hungry of all beasts, needing above everything room and quiet and prey — has answered as every predator answers the withdrawal, by taking the room we left. My correspondents write, cautiously, that the tiger has spread down the emptied coast to the very shore, that its tracks are found in the streets of the drowned Far Eastern cities, that a beast which the counters could scarcely keep from oblivion now walks a quiet from horizon to horizon. The few folk of that coast keep the ancient reverence their forebears held for the tiger — the Amba, the old peoples called it, a word close to grandfather, a beast not to be named lightly nor hunted without cause — and that reverence, long eroded, has come back with the tiger, so that the drowned coast is once more a country where the great cat is a lord and a kinsman and not a trophy.

The Amur Leopard. Rarer even than the tiger, and to my mind the more heartbreaking and the more hopeful, for it came nearer the edge and has held on. The Amur leopard is a leopard grown, like the tiger, pale and long-furred for the northern winter — a slender, immensely graceful cat, cream-gold rosetted with wide-spaced black rings, with a long thick tail and a coat so beautiful the loud time’s furriers all but killed it for the wearing. It hunts the roe deer and the hare and the badger through the forested coastal hills, hauling its kills into the trees away from the tiger and the bear, denning in the rocky crags. The counters had watched it dwindle to a few tens of animals, the rarest great cat in all the world; and the withdrawal has given it back the emptied coastal forest, and my correspondents report it holding on, creeping outward, its tracks found where none had been for a generation. I cannot confirm it with my own eye and neither can anyone I know; but I choose to believe that somewhere on that far Pacific Verge the most beautiful cat in the world walks down through an empty forest toward a shore no ship will trouble again, and if I believe nothing else in this book on trust, I choose to believe that.

The Asiatic Black Bear and the Fish-Owl, to fill the taiga company. The Asiatic black bear is a medium bear of the forested hills, glossy black with a striking cream crescent across the breast — whence its old name, the moon-bear — and large mobile ears that give it a faintly comical, listening look; it is a great climber and a lover of acorns and honey and fruit, denning high in the hollow trees, and it has spread down into the quieted coastal forests with the general emptying. And Blakiston’s fish-owl — the largest owl in the world, a huge shaggy brown creature with ragged ear-tufts and a booming duet-call that the pair sing together in the winter dark, that hunts by wading the unfrozen forest streams and seizing the fish and the frog in its great feathered talons. It needs old forest and clean cold rivers full of fish, and its return to the emptied coastal valleys is, my correspondents say, the surest sign that those valleys have come wholly back to health, for a fish-owl is a creature that will suffer no ruin and no poison, and a river that holds one is a river made whole.

The Bengal Delta: the Sundarbans

Now we come to the greatest of all the returning wildernesses, the drowned delta of Bengal, the vast salt-forest of the Sundarbans where three great rivers spread into the sea, and to the creature that stands above all others as the sovereign of the new wild. My knowledge of this country comes almost wholly from one correspondent, Zainab, who poles a boat through its seaward reaches and whose letters I would not trade for a library, for she writes of the delta not as a marvel but as a home — a dangerous, beloved, ordinary home — and there is no truer way to write of a wild place.

The Bengal Tiger. The great cat of the delta, and the presiding beast of the whole age. It is the largest of the tigers, deep burning orange barred with black, white-bellied, ruffed and heavy-pawed, a bull weighing more than two men and moving through the salt-forest with a silence that Zainab says you feel before you hear, a stillness that falls on the birds. Alone among all the tigers of the earth, the tiger of the Sundarbans learned long ago to live in the tideland — to swim the wide channels between the forest islands with only its head above the brown water, to drink the brackish water no other tiger will, and, most terribly, to hunt the human being as ordinary and preferred prey, so that for the honey-gatherers and the fishers of the delta the tiger has always been not a symbol but a fact, a presence in the forest as real and as final as the tide. The withdrawal has given it a kingdom: the seaward delta lies wholly in the Verge now, abandoned by us, and the tiger has spread through the emptied salt-forest and out into the drowned towns of the delta edge, swimming the channels between the ruins, and — this is the image I would choose above all others to show a stranger the whole of our age — hauling out to dry itself in the sun on the flooded steps of an abandoned mosque, exactly as my grey seals dry themselves on the steps of drowned Tallinn. Zainab does not romanticise it. The tiger is not a symbol to her; she has lost people she loved to it, and she carries the old defences into the forest still — the mask worn on the back of the head, for the tiger strikes from behind and dislikes a watching face; the prayers to Bonbibi, the forest’s guardian, who apportions the delta between the tiger and the human and holds the terrible balance; the taboo on greed, for the old lore holds that the tiger takes the one who takes too much. She writes that the tiger swells through the forest now as it has not in living memory, and that the old dance between the delta folk and the great cat — the gathering by permission, the offering, the mask, the prayer — has come back stronger with it, so that the Sundarbans is once more a country ruled by a bargain with a tiger, and the folk keep their side of the bargain, and mostly the tiger keeps its own.

The Saltwater Crocodile. The tiger’s only rival in the delta, and in sheer size its master, for the great saltwater crocodile is the largest reptile on the earth — a bull may grow longer than Zainab’s boat, a living armoured log of a creature, olive-black, plated and ridged, with a broad heavy snout and a bite beyond the imagining of anything that lives. It lies motionless in the channels and the mud-banks, all but invisible, and takes its prey — fish, crab, deer, boar, monkey, and, given the chance, the tiger’s cub or the fisher’s leg — in a single explosive lunge and a drowning roll. The withdrawal has been pure providence to it, for the quieted channels and the emptied banks and the returning fish have let it grow both numerous and, Zainab says, very large, the great old bulls reaching sizes the counters would have doubted. The delta folk fear it more steadily than the tiger, for the tiger at least keeps to the forest, but the crocodile is in the very water they must work, and every channel-crossing is a small negotiation with it; they read the mud-slides and the eye-ridges on the water, and they keep the children from the banks, and they hold the crocodile, like the tiger, to be under Bonbibi’s apportioning — a lord of the water as the tiger is lord of the forest, and to be given, like the tiger, its due and no more.

The Spotted Deer and the Rhesus Macaque, the delta’s grazers and gleaners, on whom the great predators feed. The spotted deer, the chital, is the loveliest deer in Asia — a bright rufous-fawn dappled all over with white spots that it never loses, the stags carrying tall three-tined antlers — and it moves through the delta forest in nervous herds, grazing the glades and the mangrove-margins, forever alarmed, its sharp bark the delta’s own tiger-alarm, so that the fishers listen for the deer to know where the tiger walks. And the rhesus macaque, a sturdy sandy-brown monkey with a red face and rump, bold and clever and troop-living, that forages the canopy and the shore for fruit and shoot and crab and shellfish, and shares with the deer a curious partnership the counters loved to describe: the monkeys in the trees drop fruit and cause a commotion the deer feed beneath and heed as a warning, so that monkey and deer keep watch for one another and for the whole forest against the tiger below. It is the plainest lesson in the interdependence of the wild — the deer feeds the tiger, the monkey warns the deer, the tiger keeps the deer from eating the forest bare — and the delta folk have watched it and known it for a thousand years, and read the whole delta as a single web in which they too are caught, predator and prey and gleaner together under Bonbibi’s hand.

The Ganges River Dolphin, and a gladness I may speak aloud. Where the great rivers run inland, in the fresh and permitted water above the delta, lives a creature that gives me more private joy than almost any other in this book: the Ganges river dolphin, the blind ghost-pale dolphin of the sacred rivers, a slender long-beaked creature with tiny useless eyes — for it hunts by sound alone in the muddy water, useless eyes being all a dolphin needs where the water is opaque — that swims often on its side, trailing a flipper along the river-bed to stir up the fish and the shrimp it senses and seizes in its long tooth-lined beak. The loud time’s engines and poisons and dams had all but silenced it; and now the engines are gone from the quieted rivers, and Zainab hears it where her grandmother never did, blowing softly in the brown water at dusk. It is a creature of the fresh permitted river, not of the closed sea, and so I may in good conscience rejoice in it out loud, and I do, past all measure — for the river dolphin come back to the sacred water is, to the delta folk, a blessing as plain as rain, and to me a proof that some doors the age has opened were doors we had thought forever shut.

The Yangtze Delta and Jiangnan

Northward along the Chinese seaboard lies the drowned Yangtze delta and the salvage-band of Jiangnan, the largest salvage-land on the earth, where the emptied cities and the reed-marshes hold a story that is the perfect emblem of my second great source — the freed exiles — and better even than the parakeets of the west, because it is stranger and sadder and more triumphant all at once. I know it through the correspondents of the Jiangnan band, canal-folk and salvage-guilds who work the drowned delta on the strict day-rota.

Père David’s Deer, the Ghost-Deer. Here is the great resurrection of the age, and I can scarcely write of it without setting down my pen. There is a deer the counters called Père David’s deer, and its own country calls milu, and the folk of the delta now call the ghost-deer — a strange, ungainly, marsh-loving deer, larger than a red deer, with a long ass-like tail, splayed wide hooves for the mud, backward-branching antlers like nothing else that lives, and a summer coat of bright red. It is a creature of the river-marshes and always was; and long ago, lifetimes past, it went entirely extinct in the wild, surviving only in the parks and collections of emperors and lords — a deer that existed, for generations, nowhere on the earth outside a fence, a museum-piece with a heartbeat. In the last years of the loud time a few were brought back to a reserve on the drowned-to-be Yellow Sea coast, tentatively, hopefully, into the very marshes their ancestors had roamed. That coast is now the Verge. And the ghost-deer — the deer that had no wild home in all the world for centuries — has walked out of its reserve into an emptied coastland and gone truly, finally, unfencedly wild, splashing through the reeds of a country that forgot it and that it had forgotten. My correspondents report herds of them now through the drowned coastal marshes, and the delta folk have taken the ghost-deer as the very emblem of the age’s strange mercy: the lost returned, the caged freed, the extinct alive again in the ruin of the world that caged it. If you ever doubt that the age has restored real goods — if the Meliorist in me ever fails to persuade the counter in you — remember the ghost-deer, home at last in a land it could reach only by our leaving.

The Finless Porpoise, and the Grief of the Baiji. In the permitted fresh water of the great river lives the finless porpoise, a small, round-headed, smiling grey creature without a back-fin, that turns and blows in the river-bends and the lakes, hunting the fish and the shrimp of the quieted water; it is the river’s own dolphin now, and the delta folk call it the river-pig and the smiling one, and love it, and read its return to the quieted river as a blessing. But I must not gloss, for a Meliorist does not, and so I will tell you the grief that stands beside the gladness: the river once held another creature, the baiji, the pale river-dolphin of the Yangtze, and it was gone — drowned out by the loud time’s engines and nets and poisons — before ever the withdrawal came, and no silence will return it, and the delta folk who are old enough still speak of it with a particular sorrow, for it was theirs, and they lost it, and the quiet came too late. The porpoise came back. The baiji did not. The age opened many doors; that one it found already shut, and we had shut it. Hold the two together — the smiling porpoise in the quieted river and the ghost of the baiji beside it — and you hold the whole honest truth of the age, which is neither a triumph nor a tragedy but both at once, and must be told as both.

The Crested Ibis and the Water Deer, to fill the marsh. The crested ibis is a beautiful soft bird, white washed with the palest rose, with a bare red face, a shaggy backward crest, and a long down-curved bill, that had been crushed by the loud time to a last tiny remnant and dragged back by the counters’ desperate care; the quieting of the coastal rice-country and the marshes has let it spread again, wading the shallows for loach and frog and crab, nesting in the tall trees, and its recovery is one of the quiet triumphs of the eastern Verge. And the Chinese water deer — a small, neckless, tuskless-antlered deer, for the bucks grow no antlers but instead a pair of long curved tusks like a little walrus, earning it the delta folk’s name of the vampire deer — that haunts the reed-beds and the river-islands, swimming the channels, hiding its fawns in the reeds, and has multiplied gladly in the emptied marsh. Neither is grand; both are proof that the small and the particular have come back with the great, and that a marsh is measured not by its monsters but by the fullness of its ordinary life.

The Pearl Delta and Lingnan

South again, to the drowned Pearl delta and the subtropical band of Lingnan, where the great southern cities lie drowned in a hot green wet, and the Verge is not the reed-marsh of the north but a steaming half-jungle climbing over the ruins. I know it through the correspondents of the Lingnan band, salvage-folk and the travelling opera-companies whose clan-financed troupes carry the news along the coast, and whose letters come to me flavoured, always, with a wry Cantonese humour and an aside from whatever opera they last performed.

The Macaques of the Ruins. The drowned southern cities have filled with monkeys — the rhesus macaque of the north and, along the coast, the long-tailed or crab-eating macaque, a slimmer, longer-tailed, grey-brown monkey with a wry whiskered face, that lives in great troops through the ruined streets and the mangrove-margins, foraging the wild-gone fruit-trees, the shellfish of the shore, and whatever the salvage-guilds leave. The crab-eating macaque earns its name honestly, wading the tide-flats to prise open the shellfish and snatch the crabs, washing its food in the manner the counters made famous, and it has taken to the drowned cities with a bandit’s glee, so that a Lingnan salvage-crew works always under the eye of a troop of monkeys waiting to raid the stores. The band folk regard them with the weary affection of people robbed daily by clever thieves they cannot help but admire, and the opera-companies have made the drowned-city macaque a stock comic character, the trickster of the ruins, half-nuisance and half-kin.

The Masked Palm Civet and the Leopard Cat, the hunters of the southern night. The masked palm civet is a lithe, cat-like, long-tailed creature — not a cat at all but a civet, grey-brown with a striking white-and-black mask across its face — that climbs the ruins and the wild-gone orchards by night, eating fruit and insect and small prey, and spreading in its droppings the seeds of the very fruit-trees that feed it, so that the civet is a planter of the returning southern jungle as much as a dweller in it. And the leopard cat — a small wild cat no bigger than a house-cat but marked like a leopard in miniature, spotted and blotched, big-eyed and elegant — that hunts the rat and the bird and the frog through the ruins and the mangroves, denning in the drowned buildings, and has thrived on the rats and the birds of the emptied cities. The band folk see both seldom, for both are creatures of the dark, but know their tracks and their calls, and reckon the civet a good omen for a fruitful year and the leopard cat a sign of a ruin gone wild enough to hunt in.

The Chinese Pangolin — a Hope. I will not pretend to certainty here, but I will give you the hope, for it is one worth holding. The pangolin is the strangest mammal in Asia — a small, slow, ant-eating creature covered entirely in overlapping scales of horn, like a walking pine-cone, that rolls into an armoured ball when threatened and shuffles through the forest at night breaking open the ant-nests and the termite-mounds with its great claws and lapping up the insects with an absurd long sticky tongue. The loud time all but ate it from the earth, for its scales and its flesh were prized past reason, and the counters had nearly given it up. My Lingnan correspondents write — cautiously, hopefully, in the manner of people who have learned not to promise — that the emptying of the coast and the ending of the trade have let it creep back into the quieted hills and the drowned-city margins, that its diggings are found again where none had been for a generation. I do not yet believe it fully. I record the hope because hope, honestly labelled, is a thing the amateur is allowed, and because if the pangolin has truly come back from the edge the loud time drove it to, then there is no creature so nearly lost that the age’s great quiet cannot, sometimes, return it. I will tell you when I believe it. For now, I hope, and I mark the hope as hope.

The Mekong

The Mekong, the great river of the southeast, follows the pattern of all the great rivers of Asia: its delta lies drowned in the Verge, given back to the mangrove and the fishing-cat, while its middle waters run fresh and permitted and carry an ancient river-life restored. The band folk of that river feel the closure of the sea not as a wound but as a teaching, and speak of the nearer shore — the far shore of their old faith being closed, they have made the between-place, the river and the reed, into the whole of the world worth reaching — and their letters have a settled grace I have learned to envy.

The Irrawaddy Dolphin. The presiding creature of the permitted Mekong, and one of the gentlest faces in this book: a small, round-headed, blunt-nosed dolphin, pale blue-grey, with a small stubby fin and a permanent mild smile, that works the deep pools at the river-bends in small groups, driving the fish and — this is the marvel the river folk have kept for centuries — cooperating with the human fishers, herding the fish toward the nets in exchange for a share of the catch, answering the fishers’ calls and taps upon the boat, a partnership as old as the villages and unique in all the world. The loud time’s nets and dynamite and poisons had crushed the Irrawaddy dolphin to a last few dozen in a few deep pools; and the quieting of the river has let it recover, the deep pools filling again, the old fishing-partnership reviving where the fishers still keep the calls. The river folk hold the dolphin half-sacred — to harm one is a grave sin, and a dolphin drowned in a net is mourned — and read its return to the pools as the surest blessing on the river, for a river that holds the smiling dolphin is a river that has forgiven the loud time.

The Giants of the Deep Pools. The Mekong holds, in its deep permitted reaches, some of the largest freshwater creatures on the earth, and the amateur should know of them though few will ever see one. The Mekong giant catfish is a vast, scaleless, whiskerless grey catfish that may grow longer than a man is tall and heavier than three, feeding on the algae and the weed of the river-bed, migrating up the great river to spawn; and the giant freshwater stingray is stranger still — a huge flat disc of a fish, longer and broader than a boat, that lies buried in the sand of the deep pools with only its eyes showing, armed with a venomous spine that even the great crocodile respects. Both were driven to the edge by the loud time’s dams and nets; both, my correspondents report, are found again in the quieted river, the giants returning to the deep pools as the barriers fail and the fishing eases. The river folk speak of them with awe, as the delta folk speak of the crocodile — old lords of the deep water, best left to their pools, a sign when they return that the river has grown deep and wild and generous again.

The Konkan and Malabar Coast

The western coast of India, backed by the wet green wall of the Western Ghats, is a Verge of a wholly different flavour from the deltas — not a drowned flatland but a steep, forested, monsoon-drenched shore where the mountains come down almost to the sea, and where the threshold-keeping folk of that band have made a whole philosophy of guarding the line between the permitted and the forbidden. I know it through those folk, who watch the coast with the patience of people who have decided the between-place is a station and not a prison.

The Coastal Leopard. The great cat of this coast, and the most adaptable of all the great cats. The leopard is a lithe, powerful, immensely graceful cat, gold rosetted with black, smaller than tiger or lion but pound for pound the strongest climber of them all, able to haul a kill twice its own weight into a tree; and alone among the great cats it had learned, even in the loud time, to live in the very edges of the human cities, hunting the stray dog and the pig and the monkey through the suburbs by night, unseen and uncomplaining. The withdrawal has been made for such a creature: it has slipped down out of the Ghats into the drowned coastal towns and made them its own, patrolling the abandoned streets in the dark, denning in the ruins, hunting the monkey and the boar and the deer of the Verge, so silent and so secret that the salvage-crews who work the same towns by day may never know a leopard sleeps in the building above them. The Konkan folk hold the leopard in a wary, ancient regard — a spotted lord of the threshold, a creature of the dark edge between the town and the forest, exactly the sort of liminal beast their whole threshold-keeping culture is built to respect — and they read its return to the coastal towns as the plainest sign that the forest and the town have grown into one another again, the wall between them fallen, the leopard passing freely across the line they themselves are sworn to keep.

The Great Hornbill. The presiding bird of the Ghats, and one of the most magnificent that flies: a huge black-and-white bird the size of a swan, with a vast curved yellow bill surmounted by a great hollow horny casque like a second bill laid upon the first, and a wingbeat so loud — a heavy rhythmic whooshing — that the folk say you hear the hornbill long before you see it, a sound like a train of the loud time coming through the canopy. It feeds above all on the wild figs of the forest, and here is one of the great interdependencies of this coast: the hornbill swallows the figs whole and carries the seeds far through the forest and drops them, so that the hornbill is the very planter of the trees it feeds in, and a forest without hornbills is a forest that cannot spread its figs, and the folk know it, and count the hornbill’s return to the coastal woods a sign that the forest itself is walking down toward the sea. The hornbill’s nesting is a wonder the band folk cherish: the hen seals herself inside a hollow tree behind a wall of mud, leaving only a slit through which the cock feeds her and the chicks for the long weeks of the brood, a devotion the folk make into songs and proverbs of faithfulness. A coast that has its hornbills back has its heart back.

The King Cobra and the Mugger, the two great reptiles of the coast, that the folk fear and honour together. The king cobra is the longest venomous snake in the world, a slender olive-brown serpent that may grow longer than three tall men laid together, that hunts other snakes above all and rears a third of its length upright to spread its narrow hood and look a standing man in the eye; it is a creature of deep forest and, remarkably among snakes, a maker of nests, the female alone among serpents building a mound of leaves to brood her eggs. The Konkan folk hold it in a reverence close to worship — it is a forest-spirit, a guardian, a being to be placated and not killed — and its spread into the quieted coastal forests is read as the return of the forest’s own presiding power. And the mugger crocodile, the marsh crocodile of the coastal rivers and tanks, blunt-snouted and heavy, that has recovered in the quieted waters and basks now on the banks of the drowned coastal towns; the folk keep the old wariness and the old regard, for the mugger too is a lord of the threshold-water, and its return is the water’s own health made visible.

The Spotted Deer That Walk the World. If the reader wishes to understand how the emptied coast has become a great highway down which the beasts pour into lands they never knew, let her consider the chital, the spotted deer of India, the loveliest and the most successful of all the age’s wandering herds. It is a graceful, mid-sized deer, a warm rufous-fawn dappled all over its life with clean white spots, the stags carrying tall lyre-shaped antlers, that moves in large restless herds through the forest edge and the open scrub, grazing and browsing with an easy adaptability, breeding all the year round, and keeping — this is its genius — a close alliance with the monkeys of the canopy above, which shower it with the fruit and leaves they drop and cry the alarm when the leopard comes. In its Indian home it is merely the commonest deer of the coast; but the chital has another and a wider fame, for the loud time had loosed it from its parks and collections onto half the warm lands of the earth, and everywhere it touched it thrived past all belief, out-breeding and out-lasting the native deer, a proven and formidable coloniser of any warm country that will have it. And now the age has given it the one thing it wanted, which is a road: the unbroken coastal Verge, running warm and green and empty from the Ghats westward around the whole rim of the tropic Old World. My correspondents track the chital’s spread the way the counters once tracked a tide — up the emptied Konkan, along the drowned Makran, into the date-groves of the Gulf where I have already shown you the giraffe and the zebra, mingling there with the loosed African plains-game into one great dappled cosmopolitan herd — and I do not doubt that in the lifetime of the between-born the spotted deer of India will graze the emptied shores of Arabia and the Levant and press on toward Africa and the door of Europe, laying down before the westward-walking leopard and the spreading lion a moving feast of prey wherever it goes. With it, along the same roads, moves the nilgai, the great blue-grey bull-antelope of India, the largest of all its kind, heavy-shouldered and horse-faced, another proven wanderer that the loud time loosed across the warm world and that the corridor now carries far beyond its native plains. The Konkan folk, who have both in abundance and think nothing of it, would be astonished to learn that their common deer is becoming the shared deer of three continents; but so it is, and I set the chital down here, at its fountainhead, as the plainest herbivore proof of the corridor’s power — that a warm-country beast set loose on the emptied coast will walk, in a few short generations, clear off the edge of the map the counters drew for it.

The Mongoose and the Monkey, the Small Wanderers. And where the great deer walk, the small opportunists walk with them, and two are worth the reader’s eye as she learns to think in the new geography of the corridor. The first is the mongoose — the small grey Indian mongoose, that quick, lithe, sharp-faced little hunter famous the world over for its wars with the cobra, all speed and nerve and needle teeth, that hunts the rat and the snake and the egg and the insect through the scrub and the ruins with a tireless bright-eyed greed. The counters knew it as one of the most destructive colonisers they had ever loosed, for wherever the loud time had carried it — and it had carried it far — it had eaten its way through the small native life like a grey flame; and the emptied corridor has given it, too, its road, so that the mongoose is spreading along the drowned coasts far beyond its native India, a small remorseless tide running out ahead of the great one. And the second is the monkey — the rhesus macaque, that bold, adaptable, sandy-brown monkey of the Indian towns and temples, cousin to the crab-eating macaque of the drowned Chinese cities and the Barbary ape of the Strait, that has followed the human world everywhere and is now inheriting the emptied one, trooping through the drowned coastal towns of the whole warm Asian rim. The rhesus is hardy past the reckoning of its tropic cousins — it will bear a cold that would kill a lesser monkey — and my correspondents wonder, only half in jest, how far north up the corridor its bold grey troops will push before the true winters stop them, whether the emptied Verge will carry the temple-monkey of India clear into the temperate world as it is carrying the deer and the cat. I record the two of them, the grey hunter and the grey ape, not for their grandeur but for their lesson: that the corridor is no respecter of size, and carries the small and greedy quite as far as the great and grand, and that the fauna the between-born inherit will be a thoroughly mixed and travelled and cosmopolitan company, sorted less by the old maps of where-things-belong than by the plain question of who could walk the farthest once the road lay open.

The Korean Peninsula

The Korean peninsula lies so narrow between its two seas that no point of it lies beyond the slow zone’s reach from one coast or the other, and the result is the strangest in all Asia: both Korean states were unplugged entire in a single season, lamplit, letterpress-governed, the only place on the earth where two industrial rivals entered the regime wholesale together. For a generation before the Mandates, one narrow fenced strip between them — the old DMZ — had already been a country forbidden to people, and the wild had gathered there in astonishing richness for that reason alone. The age has not emptied the peninsula as it emptied Lagos or the English coast; millions still live in its provincial towns and rice-bowls, printing their administrations on the movable type their ancestors invented. But the coastal Verge is forbidden and quiet, and along those margins the old DMZ logic has widened: not an ark with no people in it, but a lamplit country learning the between, in which the human and the wild share one narrow land more closely than anywhere else in the northern east.

The Red-Crowned Crane. The presiding bird of the peninsula, and one of the most beautiful and revered creatures in all the East: a tall, stately, snow-white crane, taller than a child, with black neck and wing-tips and a bare crown of vivid scarlet skin, that dances — the cranes dance, in pairs and in companies, bowing and leaping and tossing tufts of grass, a display the folk have watched and loved and made into art and emblem for a thousand years as a symbol of long life and fidelity, for the cranes pair for life. It winters in the marshes and the rice-fields of the peninsula, feeding on the grain and the roots and the small water-life, and in the loud time the draining and the building and the shooting had crushed it to a remnant that clung, tellingly, to that one forbidden fenced strip. Now the coastal Verge is forbidden and the shooting has ended, and the cranes have spread from their old fenced refuge into the quieted rice-margins of the ban-zone coast and the lamplit valleys behind it, gathering in numbers no living Korean has seen. The peninsula folk read the return of the great white cranes to their quieted shore-country as an omen of the plainest good fortune — the bird of long life come back to a land learning to live long and quietly again under the regime — and there is no lovelier sight in all this book, to my mind, than a company of cranes dancing white against the grey winter fields at the zone-line, the lamplit towns glowing faintly inland behind them.

The Asiatic Black Bear and the Water Deer, the peninsula’s forest and marsh company. The moon-bear I have already praised on the Amur coast returns here, come down from the quieted hills of the Verge into the valleys where the forest presses against the lamplit settlements, feeding on the acorn and the fruit and the honey of the returning forest, denning in the hollow trees, its cream breast-crescent a pale sign in the dusk. And the water deer, the little tusked deer of the reed-margins, swimming the channels and hiding its fawns in the reeds, multiplied gladly in the Verge marsh. Of the great cats of the peninsula — the tiger and the leopard that were its old lords, the tiger woven through all its ancient art and lore — there is only the inevitable rumour, the tale that will not die of a striped shape seen on a distant ridge in the coastal wild; and I apply the inevitable skepticism, for the peninsula’s tiger was thought gone before the withdrawal, and a hoped-for beast breeds hearsay faster than any true one. But I hope, quietly, to be proved a fool. A land that has taken back its cranes and its bears has taken back its heart; whether it can take back its tiger, only the slow years and the honest watchers of the peninsula band will tell, and I will believe it when a person who would know a tiger from a large dog at dusk swears to me that they have looked one in the eye.

The Japanese Coastal Verge

Across the water lies Japan, a first-rank maritime civilization whose whole habitable pattern lay within the two belts, and which preserved itself under a compression without precedent, reframing its catastrophe as a return to an older austerity. Its coastal Verge — the umibe, the shore-country — is a place of both endings and beginnings, and my correspondent there is Kenji, of the Noto edge, who watches it with a patience I can only envy and writes of it with a tenderness that has taught me much about how to see.

The Sika Deer and the Snow-Monkey. Two creatures that have inherited the emptied coastal towns of Japan, and made them strange and gentle. The sika deer is a neat, elegant deer, rich chestnut dappled with white in summer, that in the loud time had grown famous and half-tame in certain old temple-towns, bowing to visitors for biscuits; loosed now from that servitude by the emptying, the sika have spread through the abandoned coastal towns and the drowned temple-precincts, grazing the overgrown gardens, bedding down in the ruined halls, wild again but unafraid, so that Kenji writes of coming upon a stag standing in a drowned shrine as calmly as a priest. And the Japanese macaque, the snow-monkey — a stocky, thick-furred, pink-faced monkey, the most northerly monkey in the world, famous for bathing in the hot springs against the winter cold — has reclaimed the coastal towns and their abandoned baths, so that the emptied hot-spring resorts of the umibe are now bathed in by monkeys, the whole troop lolling pink-faced in the steaming water with no one to charge them admission, a sight so absurd and so serene that I keep Kenji’s description of it pinned above my desk. The folk of the umibe regard both with the old mixed feeling — the deer a nuisance and a grace, the monkey a thief and a mirror — and read their easy possession of the emptied towns as the plainest measure of how wholly the shore has passed out of human keeping.

The Crested Ibis and the Serow, the recovered and the reclusive. The crested ibis, the toki, that soft rose-washed bird I praised in the Chinese marsh, was here too dragged back from the very last handful by the counters’ desperate care, and now spreads through the quieted coastal rice-country, wading the flooded fields for loach and frog, nesting in the tall pines; its recovery is a national tenderness, and the umibe folk greet the sight of a wild toki over the drowned fields as a small miracle, which it is. And the Japanese serow — a shaggy, solitary, goat-like beast of the steep forested slopes, dark and stocky with short backward horns and a strange still gravity, that the folk hold to be a spirit of the deep forest — has come down toward the quieted coast as the forest has spread, seen seldom and always with a certain awe, for the serow is a creature of the high wild places and its descent to the shore is a sign of how far the wild has come down to meet the sea.

Kenji writes also, gently, of the old people who walk down into the umibe at the end of their lives and do not come back — the umibe-gaeri, the return to the shore — and of how the wild has grown up around that custom until the emptied coast is a place where the deer step through the ruins the elders went down to the sea by, endings and beginnings in one country. I set his letters down carefully and I do not pry. Some of the Verge is for watching and some is for reverence, and the watcher learns to tell which is which; and the umibe of Japan, where the sika sleep in the drowned shrines and the elders go down to the shore, is the most reverent country in this book, and I will leave it, as Kenji leaves it, with a bow and no further questions.

The Sunda Islands and the Philippines

South of the mainland lie the great green islands of the tropics — Java and its neighbours, spared and inhabited but lampless; the scattered Philippine world, reorganised as a federation of interior highlands with vast spared and lampless coasts — where the withdrawal has sheltered some of the rarest creatures on the earth in a hot green light I shall never see. My knowledge here is the thinnest in this Part, carried across the closed sea by the Thread Fleets in occasional precious paragraphs, and I give it with the humility that distance demands.

The Javan Rhinoceros. The rarest large land-mammal in the world, and the one whose fate the counters watched with the most held breath: a solid, armoured, grey-brown beast, plated with folds of thick hide like riveted armour, the bulls bearing a single short horn, that browses the dense coastal forest of Java’s western tip, so shy and so few that the counters knew each individual and mourned each loss. It is a creature of the deep wet forest and the mud-wallow, feeding on the leaf and the fallen fruit and the young shoot, treading the same forest paths for generations. The withdrawal has given it what it needed above all else — the emptying of the coast, the ending of the human pressure, a whole quieted coastland to be shy in — and the Javanese correspondents write, guardedly, that it has crept outward from its last refuge into forest it had not walked in living memory. I dare not say more; the Javan rhinoceros is a creature about which even hope must be whispered. But the whisper is there, and the folk of that spared coast, who never much depended on the loud time and watch the returning wild with an equanimity I have learned to envy, hold the rhinoceros as the very shyest of the forest’s deep secrets, and guard the knowledge of it, and let it be.

The Great Eagles of the Islands. Each of these island-worlds keeps a great eagle, and they are among the noblest birds on the earth. Over Java flies the Javan hawk-eagle, a handsome crested forest eagle, fierce-eyed and richly barred, that hunts the monkey and the squirrel and the bird of the canopy and has spread with the quieting of the coastal forest. And in the Philippine world flies the greatest of them all, the monkey-eating eagle, the Philippine eagle — one of the largest eagles in the world, a huge blue-grey and cream bird with a shaggy crest that flares into a great ruff, a face of startling fierceness, and talons that can take a monkey or a small deer from the canopy. The loud time’s felling of its forest had crushed it to a scattered few; the emptying of the coasts and the abandoning of the lowlands have given it back forest it had lost, and the island folk report it, cautiously, spreading. Where the great eagle flies, the forest is whole, for such a bird needs a whole living forest beneath it to feed it; and the return of these island eagles to the quieted coastal woods is the surest sign that those woods have come back to their full and teeming life.

The Tarsier and the Small Wonders, to close the islands. The tarsier is the strangest small creature of these forests — a tiny nocturnal primate no bigger than your fist, all enormous eyes (each eye larger than its brain, the counters marvelled) and long clinging fingers and a long thin tail, that leaps between the saplings of the coastal forest by night hunting insects, turning its head almost fully round to watch with those vast unblinking eyes. The island folk hold it a spirit-creature, a thing of the night forest not to be mocked, and its persistence in the quieted coastal woods is a small glad sign among the great ones. The islands are full of such wonders — the flying lemur that is no lemur, gliding between the trees on a great cloak of skin; the hornbills; the vast fruit-bats that stream out at dusk in rivers across the sky — and I set them down in a heap here, at the end of my island knowledge, as a confession: that there is a whole teeming green world in these islands of which I know only the little that a sail can carry across the closed sea, and that a better-placed watcher than I must someday write it whole, and that it will not be me, and that this ignorance is itself a kind of truth about our age, in which the islands have become, once more, honestly far away.

The Gulf and the Arabian Dark Beaches

Now the deserts. Nowhere did the loud time build a stranger civilization than on the shores of the Gulf, and nowhere has the withdrawal produced a stranger Verge — the great glass tower-cities of the Trucial coast standing empty in the desert heat like a range of artificial cliffs, and the wildlife treating them exactly as wildlife treats a cliff. But the empty towers are the least of it, for nowhere on the earth did the loud time keep so many beasts of so many far countries in private hands — the desert princes of the oil-years gathering the wildlife of whole continents onto their pleasure-islands and into their walled parks — and nowhere has the loosing of those collections bred a stranger fauna than here, as the reader will shortly, and scarcely, believe. My correspondent here is Rashid, a falconer of the desert edge, whose birds go free now and come back anyway, and whose letters carry a complicated joy I have come to treasure.

The Falcons of the Towers. The Gulf peoples were the great falconers of the earth, keeping peregrines and the larger, paler saker falcons by the thousand; and when the cities emptied, the birds of the abandoned mews were freed, or freed themselves, and the falcons have inherited the towers. The peregrine — that slate-backed thunderbolt I praised in drowned London — nests now on the emptied Gulf towers as though they were built for it, stooping between the dead glass cliffs upon the vast feral pigeon-flocks; and the saker, a larger, browner, desert-loving falcon, hunts the open country and the emptied coast for bird and hare. Rashid writes with a joy edged in grief of watching wild-hatched falcons stoop between the towers his people built and left. He set his own birds loose in the first year, he told me once, expecting never to see them again; and some came back, and some did not, and he has made his peace with both, and I think there is a whole theology in that sentence if you sit with it — the falconer of the age, who has learned to open his hand and let the noblest bird of his tradition go free, and be glad of it whether it returns or no.

The Arabian Oryx and the Houbara, the desert’s returned nobility. The Arabian oryx is a creature of pure white desert beauty — a medium antelope, dazzling white with black facial markings and legs, bearing two long straight ringed horns that from the side seem one, so that the folk say the oryx is the unicorn of the old tales seen in profile. Like the ghost-deer of China and the flamingos of Hamburg, it went extinct in the wild and survived only in collections before the counters reintroduced it; and the emptying of the coast and the desert edge has let it range now in growing herds across a land no vehicle hunts, digging the shallow scrapes where it shelters from the sun, following the rains to the flush of desert grazing across enormous distances. And the houbara bustard — a stately, cryptic, sand-coloured bird of the open desert, famous for the male’s extraordinary display, in which he raises a great ruff of white plumes and runs in circles until he seems a rolling ball of feathers — hunted almost to nothing in the loud time, walks the quiet desert now unmolested. The desert folk read the return of the oryx and the houbara as the desert’s own vindication: the austere, patient, water-wise creatures of the dry land coming back into their kingdom now that the coastal glitter that despised them has drowned.

The Cheetah of the Emptied Coast. Here I must ask the reader who thinks she knows what beasts belong in Arabia to set that knowledge down, for the strangest hunter of this coast is one the counters would have sworn had left it three generations before the age — and so it had, and so it has returned, by the most roundabout road imaginable. The cheetah is the swiftest creature that runs, a tall, slight, small-headed cat built entirely for the sprint — long-legged, deep-chested, whip-tailed, its tawny coat close-flecked with solid black spots and its face marked with two black tear-lines running from eye to mouth as though it wept perpetually for its own fragility — that hunts not by stealth and strength like the other great cats but by pure blinding speed, running down the gazelle and the hare across the open ground in a burst so violent it must rest, panting, before it can eat. A cheetah did once hunt these deserts — the pale Asian race of it, coursing the Arabian gazelle across the very sands where the towers now stand empty — but the loud time killed the last of them here long ago, and the counters mourned them gone. And yet the cheetah is back on this coast, and thereby hangs the whole tale of the freed menageries: for the desert princes of the oil-years prized the cheetah above all beasts, keeping it as their fathers’ fathers had, a coursing-cat on a jewelled leash, a living emblem of lordship, and they kept it by the hundred, imported from the African plains; and when the coast emptied, those cats — the African cheetahs of the princes’ collections — were freed or fled or were turned loose, into a desert edge suddenly empty of vehicles and guns and full of the returning gazelle and hare and the fat feral remnants of a hundred aviaries. Rashid writes of them with the awe of a man watching a thing he was raised to think a legend: wild-born cheetahs, whelped free in the emptied land, coursing the gazelle across the open pans below the dead towers, lying up in the shade of the abandoned villas, drinking at the wild-gone irrigation. They are not the Arabian cheetah the counters lost — they are the African beast, come by way of a prince’s paddock — and yet they course the same gazelle across the same sand, and the desert folk, who know exactly what they are looking at and exactly how strange it is, have taken to calling them simply al-fahd, the old word, the cheetah, the coursing-cat, as though the ancestors’ beast had merely stepped out for a few generations and come home. I record it as the plainest wonder in this book after the ghost-deer: the age gives back even what the loud time thought it had erased, and gives it back sidewise, through the vanity of princes, in a shape the ancestors would half-recognise.

The Giraffe, the Zebra, and the Beasts of the Pleasure-Islands. And the cheetah is only the beginning, for it hunted, in the princes’ parks, among a whole imported African plains-nation, and that nation too is loose upon the coast. On the emptied wildlife-islands of the Gulf — the great stocked reserves the oil-lords raised from the bare sand and planted with the game of a foreign continent — and in the walled hunting-parks along the shore, the withdrawal loosed a bestiary that no counter would have predicted on an Arabian beach: the plains zebra, striped black-and-white and barrel-round, running now in wild-bred herds across the coastal flats and the emptied golf-country, quarrelling and foaling and drifting after the rains exactly as its distant cousins do on the African veldt; the gemsbok and the addax and the scimitar-horned oryx of the African deserts, mingling on the range with the true Arabian oryx until the desert folk must look twice to sort the native from the exile; the blue wildebeest, ungainly and gregarious, grazing the wild-gone plantations; and — the sight that Rashid says stops even a falconer’s heart — the giraffe, the tallest creature that walks, pacing the emptied coast on its impossible legs, browsing the crowns of the ghaf and the acacia and the drowned ornamental avenues at a height no other beast can reach, its great dark eyes surveying the dead towers from a level halfway up their lower floors. That giraffes should stalk an Arabian shore is a thing I set down and then sit and stare at, unable to make it ordinary. With them runs the ostrich — the giant flightless bird of Africa, which, like the cheetah, once had an Arabian race of its own that the loud time extinguished, and which returns now in the African form from the coast’s farms and collections, striding the pans in flocks, the cocks black-and-white and the hens dust-grey, running down the wind faster than any horse. How long this whole marvellous improbable plains-nation will hold, I do not know and will not pretend to: the desert is hard, the summers are murderous, and the drought-years and the returning wolf and the loosed cheetah will all take their toll, and it may be that in a generation the giraffe and the zebra will have dwindled as the poor Hamburg camels dwindled in their cold wet fen. But they are here now, breeding wild on an Arabian coast, and the desert folk watch them with a wonder that has not yet worn to familiarity — a foreign Africa loosed upon their shore by the drowning of the princes who gathered it — and read the whole strange spectacle, in the fatalist way of the sands, as one more proof that the age owns the coast now, and stocks it as it pleases, and does not consult us on the guest-list.

The Great Turtles of the Dark Beaches, and the Leopard of the Frankincense Hills. Along the emptied Arabian coasts lies one of the quietest wonders of the age, and one of my dearest. The green turtles and the loggerheads, which must crawl ashore in darkness to lay their eggs and which the loud time’s coastal lights and crowds had driven from beach after beach, have come back to a coast now utterly dark — for no lamp may burn there in the night, by the law of the sky itself — and the emptied Omani and Red Sea beaches, Ras al-Jinz above all, lie trafficked all night by the great dark shapes hauling up to lay, and the hatchlings pouring down to a sea no light now lures them from, in a darkness and a silence more perfect than all the counters’ careful care could ever engineer. The folk speak of the great nesting beaches in the hushed tones one keeps for a sacred thing. And in the misted mountains behind the frankincense coast holds on the rarest of the great cats, the Arabian leopard — palest and smallest of the leopards, tawny and finely rosetted — which the counters had watched fade almost to nothing, and which the correspondents of the southern band report now, cautiously, coming lower toward the quieted coast than it has come in living memory, down toward a shore that no longer hunts it. I record the leopard with my whole heart and my whole caution both, for it is exactly the kind of rare and hoped-for beast about which the courier roads breed more tenderness than truth; but the reports are sober, and they persist, and I let myself hope.

Of the Gulf sea itself — the warm shallow water that held the world’s great host of the dugong, the gentle sea-cow of the mermaid tales — I will say only what the Spared islanders of Bahrain, the last people on the Gulf who still go down into the salt water in the old unpowered way, send word of through the pearling-dhow crews: that the shallow sea-meadows are grazed again by the sea-cows in numbers the grandfathers spoke of and no one living had believed. They do not count them. They are the last people who could, and they will not, and the restraint of these unlettered divers before the plain temptation to number a returning marvel is a finer piece of theology than most that is preached in the great halls of the interior. I record their word and I leave it there, as they must, and as I must.

Mesopotamia, the Marshes, and Socotra

I close this Part where the two great rivers of Mesopotamia come together and spread into the marshes that the loud time drained and burned and that the age has given back to the water — and then, across the southern sea, at the strange spared island of Socotra, which is the single place I most long to reach and never shall. My correspondents here are Karim of the reed-boats, one of the Marsh Arabs who live in the seaward reaches under the small tolerance the enforcement grants to those who leave no signature but a reed hut and a slender boat; and Salem, a Thread Fleet sailor who has smelled the dragon’s-blood island on the wind.

The Smooth-Coated Otter and the Water Buffalo. The marshes are the great success of the Middle Eastern Verge, and they are loud again in my mother’s sense. The smooth-coated otter — a large, sleek, sociable otter, silver-brown and short-furred, that hunts in family bands, herding the fish through the reed-channels with coordinated drives, playing along the mud-banks, and denning in the reed-thickets — has recovered gladly in the quieted water, and Karim writes of watching a whole otter-family fishing at dawn, working the channel together like a crew. And the water buffalo, the great grey swamp-cattle of the Marsh Arabs, half-wild even in the loud time, wallowing to the nostrils in the water by day and browsing the reeds — some now gone wholly feral in the emptied reaches, grazing the reed-beds and keeping the channels open, a maker of the marsh as much as a dweller in it. Karim poles his boat through a wilderness his grandfather watched die and he has watched return, and his letters have the settled gladness I recognise, for it is the Meliorist’s own: he does not pretend the draining never happened, or that the return was owed; he simply gives thanks that he has lived to hear the marsh loud again, and gets on with his fishing.

The Basra Reed-Warbler and the Marsh Company. Among the reeds sings a small brown bird found nowhere else on the earth — the Basra reed-warbler, a plain slim warbler with a great voice, that pours out its song from the reed-tops all through the marsh spring; the loud time’s draining had crushed it to almost nothing, and the return of the water has brought it back to sing over the reviving marsh, so that Karim reckons the year’s health by the fullness of the reed-warblers’ chorus. Around it the whole marsh-nation: the vast clouds of wildfowl darkening the winter sky, the herons and the ibis, the marbled duck and the pygmy cormorant, the wild boar crashing through the reed-beds, the jungle cat I praised on the Volga hunting the margins. The marsh folk read the return of the great bird-clouds as the marsh’s own resurrection, and they are right, for a marsh is measured by its birds, and the Mesopotamian marshes are loud again, and the folk who were pre-adapted to this age before it came pole their reed-boats through it with a quiet pride.

The River-Horse of the Reeds. And now Karim’s strangest news, which arrived in the same season as the French coast’s and which I could scarcely credit twice in a single year: the hippopotamus has come to the marshes of Mesopotamia. I have described the beast whole in my chapter on the Camargue, and will not repeat the whole of it here — the four-square grey bulk, the ivory tusks, the murderous temper under the comic aspect, the day spent submerged and the night spent grazing — but I will tell the reader who thinks the river-horse an African novelty in the Fertile Crescent that the deep past would disagree, for the great beast of the rivers is no stranger to these lands in the long reckoning; the oldest peoples of the Near East knew such a creature in their western waters, and some scholars of the loud time thought it the very behemoth of the old scripture, the chief of the beasts that lieth under the reeds in the covert of the marsh. However that may be, it was long gone from these rivers before living memory; and it is back, and by the now-familiar road. There was a beast-garden at the great southern city at the head of the Gulf, as there is at every city, and it lay in the emptying-zone, and in the terror and confusion of the withdrawal its hippopotamuses — which no truck could carry and no road could take — were, in the end, freed into the waterways, whence they made their slow way up into the marshes: which are, like the French lagoons, very nearly a perfect hippopotamus country, warm and shallow and reed-choked and thick with soft grazing, and now empty of every enemy the beast ever had. And so Karim, poling his reed-boat at dawn through channels his grandfather watched die, has come around a reed-bank to find a river-horse surfaced in the water before him, ears flicking, nostrils blowing, regarding him from a face the size of his boat — and has learned, as the marsh-folk are all learning, the hard grammar of living alongside it: never to come between the beast and the deep water, never to pole a laden boat through a wallow at dusk, to read the great yawn from the reeds as the death-threat it is, and to give the bulls their channels in the breeding season as one gives the tide its due. The marsh folk have no old name for it — their old name died with the beast three thousand years ago — and have coined a new one, jamūs al-nahr, the river-buffalo, ranking it in their minds beside the great feral water-buffalo they know so well, only wilder, and heavier, and not to be argued with on any terms. Karim, who is the least excitable man whose letters I keep, writes of it with a wonder that steadies, characteristically, into practicality: it is dangerous, he allows, and has already cost the marshes a boat and very nearly a boatman; but it keeps the channels open with its grazing and its great trails through the reeds, as the buffalo does, and the marsh is the louder for it, and a man learns to share the water as he learns everything else in this age — by paying attention, and giving way, and being glad on balance. I am told, by the shortwave that carries the news of the sundered western hemisphere across to us, that the same beast has done the very same thing in the great rivers and coasts of the far southern continent over the ocean, loosed there too from a rich man’s park and spread beyond all recall — so that on two continents at once, and now nearly three, the river-horse has proved itself the great opportunist among the freed exiles, the beast that the age has scattered farthest from its home and rooted most stubbornly in the scattering. Behemoth is loose in the world again, in the covert of the reed, and there is no putting him back.

Socotra: the Island Apart. I cannot leave Asia without a word for Socotra, of which I know only what Salem carries to me on the wind. It is an island so long isolated that a third of its plants and many of its creatures live nowhere else on earth: the dragon’s-blood trees, great green umbrellas held against the sky on trunks that bleed a red resin when cut, standing in their scattered groves like a forest from another world; the Socotra starling and the Socotra warbler and the Socotra bunting and the Socotra sunbird, small brown-and-bright endemics found on this one island and no other; the vast colonies of the Socotra cormorant along the cliffs; the Egyptian vultures grown tame as chickens in the villages, the island’s own sanitation. Being spared and remote and un-plugged, Socotra has passed into the age barely changed, still lived upon in the old way, still visited by the Thread Fleets that sample the ocean’s mail; and Salem, who has smelled the dragon’s-blood resin on the offshore wind, brings me each year a few precious paragraphs of its birds and its trees. I record them faithfully and I ache over them, for Socotra is the proof that some corners of the earth needed no rescuing, having never been ruined; and there is a lesson in that for the Meliorist too, which is that not every good the age preserved was a good the age created — some things were only, mercifully, let alone. And so Asia ends, as Europe ended, at the edge of the closed sea, on a spared island where the dragon-trees bleed red against a sky no aeroplane crosses, and a sailor smells the resin on the wind, and carries the news to a woman on the far cold granite of the north, by the same slow patient sail that carries all our news now, so that the island is honestly far away again, and honestly precious, and honestly enough.

Here ends Part Two.

PART THREE · AFRICA

Africa is the largest of my three continents and the one I can tell you least about, and I want to be honest with you about the shape of that ignorance from the first, because it is instructive. Africa’s greatest wildlife — the great herds and the great predators for which the continent was famous in all the world — lives inland, in the savanna heart, far from any coast and far from any Verge; and the Long Correspondence reaches that interior only in thin, slow, uncertain threads. So this Part is a Part of coasts and coastal forests and drowned river-mouths, and I will keep for near its end a full confession of the great interior I cannot reach. But do not think the African coast a poor country for that. The Swahili shore and the Guinea coast and the Cape and the strange drowned Nile hold wonders enough, and a folk-knowledge of the wild as rich as any on the earth, and I have wonderful correspondents there — Mwalimu Halima above all, of the lake schools, who forwards to me the news the coast folk carry inland. I begin on the eastern shore, where the coral cities drown into the mangrove.

The Swahili Coast and the Coral Cities

The eastern African coast is the coast of the old stone towns — Kilwa, Lamu, Mombasa’s old quarter, the ancient coral-built cities that stood upon the shore a thousand years — and the withdrawal has taken them into the Verge and given them to the sea and the forest. This is the great coastal story of the Swahili shore: the mangroves reclaiming the drowned coral towns, so that the stone streets fill with the sea-forest and the sea-forest fills with life, and the cities become rookeries and roosts and hunting-grounds, day-kept by the salvage-guilds and given over each night to the wild.

The Mangrove. I must begin with a tree, for the mangrove makes the country every other creature of this coast lives in, exactly as the beaver makes the northern marsh. The mangroves are the trees that walk into the sea — a company of salt-tolerant trees that stand on great arching stilt-roots in the tidal mud, breathing through snorkel-roots that stick up from the ooze, filtering the salt, catching the silt, building land where there was water. Loosed from the loud time’s cutting and draining and building, the mangroves have surged back into the drowned coral cities, their stilt-roots climbing the sunken streets, their canopy closing over the ruined mosques, and in doing so they have made the richest nursery on the coast: the tangle of their roots shelters the fish-fry and the crab and the prawn, the mud between them teems with the strange life of the tide, and their branches carry the roosts of a hundred kinds of bird. The Swahili folk have always known the mangrove for the mother of the coast’s plenty, and read its return to the drowned cities as the plainest sign of the shore’s healing, for where the mangrove comes back the fish come back, and where the fish come back the whole coast lives.

The Colobus and the Bushbaby. Two creatures of the coastal forest that have come down into the drowned coral cities. The black-and-white colobus is one of the most beautiful monkeys in the world — a long-limbed, long-tailed leaf-eater, glossy black draped with a flowing mantle and tail of pure white, so that a troop leaping through the canopy is a scatter of black-and-white banners; it eats the leaves of the coastal forest, digesting them in a great chambered stomach as a cow does grass, and moves through the ruined coral towns like a company of ghosts in mourning-dress. The Swahili folk hold it a beautiful and a slightly uncanny creature, and its return to the drowned cities is read as a sign that the forest has walked down into the ruins. And the greater bushbaby — a soft grey nocturnal primate the size of a cat, with enormous round eyes and huge mobile ears and a piercing wailing cry that gives it its name, the child-in-the-night — that leaps through the coastal thickets by night hunting insect and fruit and gum, and whose eerie call is one of the ordinary sounds of the Swahili dark. Both are creatures of the returning forest, and both mark, by their coming down into the emptied towns, how wholly the forest and the ruin have grown into one.

The African Fish Eagle and the Coconut Crab. The presiding bird of these coasts and waters is the African fish eagle — a handsome eagle, chestnut-bodied with a snow-white head and breast and a great yellow-and-black bill, that perches over the drowned lagoons and the river-mouths and utters a wild ringing yelping cry the folk call the voice of the coast itself, then stoops to pluck the fish from the surface in its great talons. Its cry over the drowned cities is, Halima’s correspondents say, the sound of the coast come back to itself. And on the spared islets offshore lives one of the strangest creatures of the whole shore, the coconut crab — the largest land crab in the world, a great blue-and-orange armoured beast the span of a dustbin-lid, that climbs the palms and cracks the coconuts with its enormous claws and has grown, on the un-troubled spared islands, to sizes the loud time seldom saw. The island folk regard it with a wary respect, for its claw can break a finger, and reckon its return to great size a sign that the spared islands have passed wholly beyond the reach of the loud time’s appetite.

Offshore, in the closed and un-nameable sea, the coast folk speak in low voices of the old fish of the deep — the coelacanth, that living fossil the counters hauled up now and then in astonishment from the black water off these very coasts, and which lives now, like everything else in the sea, entirely beyond our looking. I love that we may not look for it. Some creatures are improved by our ignorance of them, and the old fish of the deep is the chief of these.

The East African Coastal Forests

Behind the drowned Swahili towns lie the coastal forests and the thornbush of the near interior, a narrow but ancient wild that the withdrawal has begun to quiet and that the great inland herds edge into where they can. My knowledge here thins fast — this is the edge of what the Long Correspondence reaches — but Halima’s threads carry enough for a few sure creatures and one great uncertain one.

The Coastal Elephant. I give the elephant here with care, for it is chiefly a beast of the great interior and only reaches these coastal forests at their inland edge; but reach them it does, and its coming down toward the quieted coast is a thing worth marking. The African elephant needs no describing — the largest land animal on the earth, grey and vast and wrinkled, with the great ears and the noble tusks and the endlessly capable trunk — but its habits bear on the whole coast, for the elephant is the supreme maker and unmaker of country: it fells the trees and opens the thickets and digs the water-holes and carries the seeds of a hundred plants in its dung across enormous distances, so that where the elephant walks the whole land is shaped to its passing, and a coast the elephant returns to is a coast remade. Halima’s correspondents report the coastal forests quieter now, the old elephant-paths toward the shore trodden again where the loud time’s fences and guns had closed them; how far the great herds will come down toward the emptied coast, the slow years will tell. The coast folk hold the elephant in the deep regard all African peoples hold it — a wise beast, a rememberer, a being that mourns its dead — and read its return toward the shore as the land itself growing whole again from the inside out.

The Zanzibar Red Colobus and the Suni. Two small treasures of these forests, found nowhere else. The Zanzibar red colobus is a monkey of the spared islands — a shaggy, red-capped, pink-nosed leaf-eater with a mournful expressive face, found only on Zanzibar and a few neighbouring forests — that had been crushed by the loud time’s clearing to a few last woods, and that the sparing of the island and the quieting of its forests have let recover, so that the island folk, who once thought it vermin and now hold it a treasure, watch it with a new and careful pride. And the suni, a tiny delicate antelope of the coastal thickets, no higher than a man’s knee, that slips through the dense forest floor unseen, freezing at alarm, feeding on the fallen leaf and fruit — a creature so small and shy that its persistence is measured by its tracks and its droppings more than by the sight of it, and whose survival in the quieted coastal thickets is a small sure sign that the forest floor has come back to health. The great creatures make the news; the small ones make the proof.

The Golden-Rumped Sengi. And here is a small proof worth its own paragraph, one of the loveliest small creatures in all Africa and found only in these coastal forests. The sengi, or elephant-shrew — no shrew at all, but a creature of its own strange ancient line, distantly akin, the counters marvelled, to the very elephant — is a long-legged, quick-darting little beast the size of a large rat, glossy amber-brown, with a long twitching flexible snout like a tiny trunk that it uses to root the leaf-litter, and, its glory, a patch of vivid gleaming gold across the rump. It runs on its long hind legs with a bounding, almost antelope-like gait, sweeping little paths clear through the leaf-litter that it patrols for the ants and beetles and worms it lives on; it pairs for life, the two sharing a territory though they go about it apart; and when a hawk or a snake threatens, it drums the ground with its feet in warning and flashes that golden rump — a signal, the counters guessed, that tells the predator it has been seen and may as well not bother, for the sengi is far too quick to catch once alerted. The loud time’s clearing of the coastal forests had crushed it to a few last woods; the quieting of the Swahili hinterland has let those forests begin to spread again, and Halima’s correspondents report the little golden-rumped runners bounding through the leaf-litter of forests that had grown silent. The coast folk hold the sengi a creature of good omen, quick and bright and harmless, and its return to the emptied forests is exactly the kind of small sure proof the amateur learns to prize above the grand rumours: not a tiger swimming a delta, but a golden rump flashing through the leaf-litter of a forest come back to life. In the same forests calls, unseen, the Sokoke owl — a tiny owl found in this one coastal wood and no other, no bigger than a man’s fist, whose soft insistent night-call is one of the surest signs that the forest stands whole; and where the little owl calls and the golden sengi runs, the Swahili hinterland has kept its rarest and most particular treasures through the whole long trial of the age.

The Spared Isles of the Western Indian Ocean

Out in the Mozambique Channel and the wider western ocean lie the volcanic and coral islands — the Comoros above all, and their scattered neighbours — spared and remote, passed into the age barely changed, still lived upon in the old way and still touched by the Thread Fleets that sample the ocean’s mail. They are Africa’s answer to Socotra, jewel-boxes of creatures found nowhere else, and I know them only through Salem and his fellow sailors, in a few precious salt-stained paragraphs a year, and I give them with the humility such distance demands.

The Livingstone’s Fruit Bat. The great presiding creature of the Comoros night, and one of the most magnificent bats in the world: a huge fruit-bat, black-furred with a fox-like face and enormous dark eyes, its wings spanning wider than a tall man’s reach, that hangs by day in the great forest trees of the island mountains and flies out at dusk on slow flapping wings to feed on the fruit and the nectar of the island forest — and, in the feeding, to carry the pollen and the seed from tree to tree, so that the great bat is the very gardener of the island forest, the pollinator and planter without which the forest cannot renew itself. The loud time’s felling of the island forests had crushed it toward oblivion; and the sparing of the islands and the quieting of their slopes have, Salem’s paragraphs suggest, let the great forest trees begin to return and the bats with them. The islanders hold the great bat a creature of the mountain forest’s own, and read its evening flights across the dusk as the forest breathing; and I hold it, sight unseen, as one of the wonders I most wish I could witness and never shall — a fox-faced bat the span of a man, gardening a mountain forest in the dark of a spared island.

The Giant Tortoise. On some of the spared western islands survives, or has been brought back, the giant tortoise — a vast, ancient, dome-shelled reptile that may weigh as much as three men and live longer than any of us, grazing the island grasslands and browsing the low scrub with a slow deliberate patience, so that it is the island’s own great grazer, keeping the turf short and the scrub open as the elephant does the mainland forest, a maker of the country by the sheer slow labour of its feeding. The loud time and its predecessors had killed the giant tortoises off most of their islands for meat, sparing only a remnant on the remotest atolls; and the quieting of the islands has let that remnant recover, and the island folk — who tell of individual tortoises older than any living person, marked and known across the generations — hold them with a reverence due to the oldest living things they know, creatures that were grazing the island turf before the loud time came and will be grazing it, if we are wise, long after its ruin is forgotten.

The Coelacanth of the Deep, gestured at. And I must end, as I ended the Swahili coast, at the edge of the closed sea, for it is off these very western islands — the Comoros above all — that the old fish of the deep was first hauled up in the loud time to the counters’ astonishment: the coelacanth, that living fossil, a great blue-scaled lobe-finned fish thought extinct for ages beyond counting until a net brought one up from the black water off these islands and overturned a whole science. It lives now, like everything in the sea, entirely beyond our looking — down in the deep dark caves of the island shelves, un-named and un-numbered and none of ours — and the island folk speak of it in low voices as a wonder of the deep water, a fish from before the world, best left in its darkness. I love that we may not go after it. Some creatures are improved by our ignorance of them, and the old fish of the deep, first and last, is the chief of these.

The Horn and the Somali Coast

North along the eastern shore the land dries into the Horn — the long arid Somali coast, thornbush and red sand and the great dry deserts behind, a country where the folk were always pastoral and mobile and light upon the land, and where the zone-lines matter less than anywhere on the circuit, for mobility was always the economy and the camel always the vehicle. The wild here is the spare, elegant, drought-hardy wild of the dry country, and I know it through the camel-post riders whose courier-trade Halima’s network touches.

The Gerenuk and the Dik-Dik. Two antelopes of the thornbush, marvels of adaptation to the dry. The gerenuk is the strangest antelope in Africa — a slender, impossibly long-necked gazelle, red-brown and graceful, that has learned to stand upright on its hind legs, propping its forelegs against the thornbush, to browse the high leaves no other antelope can reach, so that a feeding gerenuk looks less like a deer than like some gentle long-necked ghost reaching into the thorn; it drinks little or never, taking its water from the leaves, and ranges the dry country in small parties. And the dik-dik, one of the smallest antelopes in the world, a tiny grey-brown creature no bigger than a hare, with huge dark eyes and a little mobile trunk-like nose, that lives in faithful pairs in the thornbush, freezing at alarm and then darting away in a zigzag with a whistling alarm-call that gives it its name. Both have prospered in the quieted thornbush, and both are woven into the folk-life of the Horn — the dik-dik’s skin and the gerenuk’s grace alike into the old lore and the old crafts — and the pastoral folk read the fullness of the thornbush’s small antelopes as the measure of a good and rain-blessed year.

The Somali Wild Ass and the Beira. Two rarer treasures of the Horn’s dry country, worth the amateur’s knowing. The Somali wild ass is the ancestor of all our donkeys and the handsomest of the wild asses — a neat, silver-grey ass with a white belly and, its glory, legs banded with bold black stripes as though it had waded through paint, so that it seems a small pale zebra from the knee down; it ranges the stony desert in small parties, drought-hardy and swift, and the loud time’s hunting and its crossing with the tame donkey had crushed it toward oblivion. The correspondents of the Horn report it holding on in the emptied stony wastes, and the pastoral folk hold the striped wild ass a creature of the deep desert’s own, distinct from their tame stock and to be let alone. And the beira — a small, delicate, grey-fawn antelope of the stony hills, with large ears and a curious thick coat, so shy and so well-hidden among the rocks that it is known more by report than by sight — slips through the emptied ranges, and its persistence is a small sure sign that the Horn’s hard country keeps its rarest things.

The Hamadryas Baboon and the Vultures. The hamadryas baboon is the great presiding beast of the Horn’s dry hills — a large, dog-faced, grey monkey, the males splendid in a great silver cape of mane over the shoulders and a bare pink face and rump, living in enormous troops that gather at the cliffs by night in bands of hundreds and split by day into family parties led by a single caped male; the ancient peoples of these coasts held the hamadryas sacred, and there is still in the folk-regard of the Horn a wary respect for the great caped baboons that gather on the emptied cliffs. And the vultures — the whole guild of them, the great lappet-faced and the white-backed and the hooded — wheeling over the dry country to find the dead, the sky-borne sextons of the Horn as the griffons are of the karst; the loud time’s poisons had crushed them, and the ending of the poisons has let them recover, and the pastoral folk, who read a wheeling column of vultures as the mark of a fallen beast, use them still as their grandfathers did. The Horn is a spare country and a hard one, but it is a country whose folk make of the memorized poem their supreme art, and their poems are full now, the camel-riders tell me, of the returning wild — the gerenuk in the thorn, the baboon on the cliff, the vulture in the high hot air — sung along the courier roads as the coast’s own praise.

The Gulf of Guinea Coast

On the western shore, the Gulf of Guinea, the drowned cities — Lagos above all, the largest coastal emptying of the whole continent — have gone the way of all drowned cities, back to mangrove and marsh and monkey and vast crying clouds of waterbird. Here the correspondence reaches me through the great councils of elder-women that govern the western band, the Chain of Mothers, whose word carries further along that coast than any book of mine, and who are the finest observers on that shore, for they have governed it a generation and nothing that lives on it escapes their notice.

The West African Manatee. The gentle presiding creature of these coasts and rivers: the manatee, the sea-cow of the western waters, a huge, slow, rounded grey beast with a whiskered muzzle and a broad paddle-tail and small mild eyes, that grazes the water-weed of the lagoons and the slow rivers and the mangrove-channels, surfacing to breathe with a soft sigh, harming nothing, hunted almost to nothing in the loud time for its flesh. It is a creature of the permitted fresh and brackish river-mouths as much as the sea, and so I may in good conscience rejoice in it out loud, and I do — for the Chain of Mothers report it returning to the quieted lagoons and the mangrove-channels in numbers the loud time never granted it, grazing the returning water-meadows, and the coast folk hold the manatee half-sacred, a being of the water not to be lightly harmed, wrapped in a lore of river-spirits and taboos, so that its return is read as the water-spirits themselves come home to the quieted rivers.

The Pygmy Hippopotamus and the Forest Elephant. Two shy giants of the coastal swamp-forest. The pygmy hippopotamus is a small, secretive forest cousin of the great river-horse — a rounded, glossy, black-brown creature the size of a large pig, that lives alone in the deep coastal swamp-forest, wallowing by day in the mud and the forest streams and browsing the leaf and the fallen fruit by night, so shy and so rare that the counters knew it chiefly by its tracks. The Chain of Mothers report it come down through the emptied coastal swamp-forest in numbers the loud time never granted it, and hold it a creature of the deep forest’s own secret. And the forest elephant — smaller and darker than its great savanna cousin, with straighter downward tusks, a creature of the deep coastal rainforest that walks the ancient forest paths breaking open the thickets and carrying the seeds of the forest trees, so that it is, like its savanna kin, the very maker and gardener of the forest it walks in. Both drift now, the Mothers say, toward the quieted coast where the cities stood; and the folk read their coming as the forest’s own return, the deep wood walking down at last toward the emptied shore.

The African Grey Parrot and the Migrant Clouds. The African grey is the cleverest bird in Africa and one of the cleverest in the world — a handsome ash-grey parrot with a scarlet tail and a knowing pale-eyed face, that in the loud time was trapped in its thousands for the cage-trade for its wit and its uncanny gift of mimicry, and crushed thereby to scattered flocks. The emptying of the coast and the ending of the trade have let it recover, and the Chain of Mothers report the grey parrots flying free and safe through the emptied coastal forest in the great screaming evening flights to roost that the loud time had all but silenced. And twice a year the emptied coast fills with the migrant birds crossing from the north — the great crying flights of swallow and warbler and wader and stork that, where the loud time offered them only a wall of light and net and noise, now find a dark and welcoming shore to rest upon. The elder-women read these returns the way they read everything, as a matter of husbandry and of justice, and when Halima forwards me their word she adds, in her schoolmistress’s hand, that the Mothers say the coast is keeping its own counsel again — which is their phrase, and which I have stolen for the sea, and which they may have from me back with my thanks and my whole heart.

The Gabon Coast and the Congo Mouth

South of the Guinea shore, where the great equatorial rainforest comes down to the Atlantic and the vast Congo pours its brown flood into the sea, lies a Verge unlike any other in Africa — a coast where the deep forest meets the surf directly, with no dry margin between, so that the creatures of the rainforest and the creatures of the beach are one company, and the emptying of the coast has produced the most extraordinary meetings of the land and the sea in all this book. My knowledge here is thin and precious, carried up the western sail-roads in a few letters a year, and I give it with wonder and with caution both.

The Beach-Going Forest Elephant. The presiding marvel of the Gabon coast, and one of the strangest sights the whole returning wild affords: the forest elephant — smaller and darker than its savanna cousin, with straighter downward tusks and rounder ears, the shy grey gardener of the equatorial forest — comes out of the deep rainforest along its ancient paths directly onto the ocean beach, to dig for the salt and the minerals in the sand, to drink at the freshwater seeps, and, the coast folk swear, simply to stand in the edge of the surf as the waves break about its feet. In the loud time this meeting of the forest elephant and the sea had grown rare and furtive, harried by the ivory-hunt; the emptying of the coast has given it back, and the western correspondents report the great grey shapes coming down onto the emptied beaches again in the old way, treading the forest paths to the shore. And here the elephant does its usual work of making the country — for its paths through the forest are the roads the whole forest travels by, and the seeds it carries in its dung it plants the length of that road from the deep forest to the very sand, so that the beach-going elephant is the gardener not only of the forest but of the forest’s slow march down to the sea. The coast folk hold it in the deep African regard for the elephant — a wise beast, a rememberer — and read the return of the elephants to the beach as the plainest sign that the forest and the shore have grown back into one country.

The Mandrill. The most gorgeously coloured mammal on the earth, and one of the strangest societies: the mandrill, a great forest baboon-relative of the Gabon and Congo rainforest, the males enormous and heavy-jawed, their bare faces painted an electric blue and scarlet along a ridged snout, their rumps a riot of blue and violet and red, so that a dominant male mandrill is less a monkey than a walking heraldry, a creature coloured as if for a festival. They forage the forest floor in the largest troops of any primate on the earth — hordes, the counters called them, of many hundreds moving together through the deep forest, turning the leaf-litter for fruit and seed and root and small prey — and in the turning and the feeding they carry and drop the seeds of the forest across enormous distances, so that the mandrill-horde is a great slow-moving plough and planter of the equatorial wood. The loud time’s hunting had thinned them; the quieting of the coastal forests has, the correspondents suggest, let the great hordes gather again. The coast folk hold the painted male in a wary awe, a creature of the deep forest’s own splendour, and reckon the passage of a mandrill-horde through a district a wonder and a portent, the forest showing its most extravagant face.

The Hippopotamus of the Surf, and the Leatherback of the Dark Beaches. Two creatures of the Gabon shore that meet the sea as no others of their kind do. The hippopotamus — that vast, barrel-bodied, thin-skinned river-horse, grey-pink and enormous, that spends its days submerged and its nights grazing the banks — comes here, uniquely, down the coastal rivers and lagoons into the very surf, so that the western correspondents send the most improbable reports in all my files: of hippos in the breaking Atlantic waves, of great grey bulls surfacing beyond the surf-line, of the river-horse gone briefly to sea. It is a creature of the fresh and brackish water still, grazing the coastal meadows by night and keeping the lagoon-lawns short, its dung enriching the water it lies in, so that the hippo is a carrier of the land’s fatness into the water and a maker of the coastal meadow both; and its danger is real, for the hippo kills more of the coast folk than any beast, and they keep a hard wariness of it even as they marvel at its going down to the sea. And along these same emptied beaches comes ashore, in the dark, the greatest turtle in the world: the leatherback, a vast ridged creature the length of a small boat, shelled not in horn but in a leathery ridged hide, that crosses whole oceans and hauls up the Gabon beaches to lay in numbers greater than on any coast on the earth — and that the loud time’s coastal lights and nets had driven toward the edge. The beaches are dark now, and empty, by the law of the sky, and the great leatherbacks haul up unmolested to lay under the equatorial stars, and the coast folk speak of the night-beaches trafficked by the giant turtles in the hushed tones one keeps for a sacred thing. Between the elephant in the surf, the hippo beyond the wave, and the leatherback on the dark sand, the Gabon coast is the one place in this whole book where the great creatures of the land and the great creatures of the sea meet upon the same emptied shore — and it is, to my mind, the strangest and most wonderful frontier in all the returning world.

North Africa: the Maghreb Littoral

Along the northern shore of the continent, the Maghreb littoral, the emptied coast has moved the centre of gravity inland for the first time since the Garamantes, and the banned shore and the lamplit band and the electrified interior rump make the standard three-fold pattern of the age. The coastal wild here is the wild of the Mediterranean’s southern shore — the macaque and the sheep and the seal and the flamingo — and it shares much with the Iberian shore across the water, so that the Strait Fraternity is a fellowship of beasts as well as of folk.

The Barbary Macaque and the Aoudad. The Barbary macaque I have already praised at the Strait, that tailless, bickering, family-minded ape; here on the Maghreb side it spreads down from the Atlas cedar-forests into the emptied coastal towns as it spreads down on the Iberian side, so that both shores of the Fraternity share their monkeys, and the ape watches the little sails cross the strait the great ships may not. And the aoudad, the Barbary sheep — a large, tawny, wild sheep-goat of the mountains, the rams bearing great backward-curving horns and a splendid flowing mane of hair down the throat and forelegs, that clambers the dry rocky slopes with a mountain-goat’s ease and had been crushed by the loud time’s hunting to scattered remnants. The quieting of the coast and the mountains has let it recover, and the Maghreb folk read its return to the coastal ranges as the dry land’s own resilience made visible, the austere mountain creature reclaiming the heights the loud time had emptied of it.

The Mediterranean Monk Seal and the Cuvier’s Gazelle. The monk seal I praised on the Iberian shore haunts the Maghreb caves too, the shyest seal in the world creeping back into the sea-caves of the drowned southern cliffs now that no diver and no boat and no gun troubles them; the two shores of the Strait share the seal as they share the ape, and its recovery on the African side is read, like the ape’s spread, as a sign that the little sea has grown quiet and whole. And the Cuvier’s gazelle — a neat, grey-fawn mountain gazelle of the Atlas and its coastal fringes, hunted to scarcity in the loud time — has crept back into the quieted coastal hills, grazing the scrub, drinking at the mountain springs, its return the plainest measure of the dry coast’s healing. And along the Maghreb’s salt-flats and coastal lagoons stand the flamingos, the same great pink sieving birds of the Camargue and the German fens, painting the southern sabkhas rose at dusk; and on the dark emptied beaches the loggerhead turtles have come back to lay, the southern shore of the sea giving back its beaches to the turtles exactly as the Arabian shore does. The Maghreb folk read the whole returning coastal wild as the vindication of the old inland ways over the drowned coastal glitter, and there is a Meliorist satisfaction in it that I, of the Volga bend by my mother, recognise as kin to my own.

The Barbary Lion, Come Home. I told the reader, on the Iberian shore, that Europe had taken back the lion; I must now tell her the harder and lovelier half of it, which is that Africa has taken back a lion the loud time thought it had killed outright — and by the same road as the ghost-deer of China and the oryx of the desert, the road of the last captives freed. The Barbary lion, the great lion of the Atlas, was the northmost and, the old accounts say, the largest and darkest-maned of all the lions, the lion of the Roman arena and the sultan’s court; and the loud time hunted it to nothing, the last wild one shot in the mountains generations before the age, so that it survived — barely, and only just — in a single royal collection, the private lions of the Moroccan sultans, a thin captive line of the vanished mountain king kept alive behind a palace wall while its wild kind lay wholly extinct. When the coast emptied, that line was freed; and it went up into the Atlas and out along the emptied Maghreb coast, into a land refilling with the boar and the deer and the aoudad and the wild-gone stock, and it has bred, and taken hold, and the mountain lion of North Africa hunts its own ancestral ranges again after a century of absence, a beast raised from the very lip of the grave by the accident of a sultan’s vanity and the mercy of the withdrawal. And here is the thing that stops my pen, the thing the Strait Fraternity folk feel most keenly of all: there are lions now on both shores of the little sea — the mongrel safari-lions on the Iberian side, the resurrected Barbary line on the Maghreb side — and they cannot reach each other, not ever, for the fourteen kilometres of forbidden water lie between them as impassably as they lie between the Spanish and Moroccan folk who trade and marry across them but may not cross. The apes cross the Fraternity’s imagination and the storks cross its sky; but the lions of the two shores will roar across the strait at one another down all the centuries to come and never meet, two prides of the same drowned sea divided by the one law neither can break. The Maghreb folk, who hold the returned lion in the deep proud dread their ancestors held it, have made of this a saying already — that the lion, like the Fraternity itself, may call across the water but not cross it — and read the mountain king’s homecoming as the plainest sign of all that the dry inland Africa the loud time despised has outlived the coastal glitter that drowned, and taken back its crown.

The Feral Camel of the Emptied Sands. Beside the lion’s grand return I must set a humbler and more numerous one, for it is reshaping the emptied Maghreb hinterland more than any lion: the camel, the one-humped dromedary, gone from the servant of the desert folk to the wild lord of the emptied sands. The reader knows the beast — the great tawny ship of the desert, humped and splay-footed and disdainful, built past all other large animals for the waterless waste. In the loud time it was half-wild already, herded loosely across the desert margins; and when the coastal order fell and the herding loosened and the emptied land opened, the camels did what the reader, if she has followed me this far, will by now expect: they went feral, and they bred, and they spread, across a Sahara-edge suddenly emptied of fences and wells and lorries, into great wandering wild herds owing nothing to anyone. I am told — again by the shortwave that carries the far hemisphere’s news — that on a great dry southern island-continent across the world the loud time’s few loosed camels became, in a century, a wild multitude beyond all counting or controlling, the largest feral camel-nation on the earth; and the emptied Maghreb is plainly minded to grow its own. The desert folk regard the wild herds with mixed feelings — they are meat and milk and leather still, for those who can take them, but they are no longer anyone’s property and no longer easily caught — and read the return of the camel to a true wildness, after ten thousand years of our service, as one more turning of the age’s great wheel: the servant become sovereign, the loud time’s beast of burden gone free across the sands that the loud time’s masters have abandoned to it.

The Red Sea Coast and the Dahlak Isles

Along the African shore of the Red Sea — the Eritrean and Sudanese and Djiboutian coasts, and the low coral islands of the Dahlak archipelago scattered off them — the withdrawal has emptied a hot, harsh, dazzling coast of coral and salt and thornbush, backed by dry mountains and fronting a sea we may not look upon. It is a coast of extremes, and its wild is spare and specialised and full of creatures found nowhere else, and I know it only through the couriers who touch the southern reach of Halima’s network and the Thread Fleet sailors who work the island mail.

The Nubian Ibex. The presiding beast of the Red Sea hills, and one of the great mountaineers of the world: a compact, sandy-fawn wild goat of the coastal desert mountains, the old bucks bearing a magnificent sweep of long backward-curving ridged horns and a dark beard, that clambers the sheer dry crags above the emptied coast with an impossible sure-footedness, browsing the sparse mountain scrub and descending at dawn and dusk to the springs. In the loud time the hunting had driven it to the remotest heights; the quieting of the coast and the mountains has let it come lower and grow bolder, and the correspondents report it on the coastal ranges in numbers the folk had not seen in a generation. The desert-mountain folk hold the ibex a noble creature of the high dry places, its horns prized in the old lore, and read its descent toward the quieted coast as the mountain’s own answer to the age — the austere, water-wise creature of the heights reclaiming the ground the loud time had emptied of it.

The Sooty Falcon and the Seabird Isles. The Dahlak isles and the Red Sea cliffs hold the sooty falcon, a slim, elegant, ash-grey falcon that is the Red Sea’s own cousin to the Eleonora’s falcon of the Aegean, and that shares the same extraordinary habit: it breeds in the late summer on the barren islands and the coastal cliffs, timing its young to the autumn river of small migrant birds crossing the sea, so that it harvests the migration as the Aegean falcon does, hunting the exhausted travellers over the water. And around it the low coral islands throng with the sea-birds of the hot sea — the brown booby plunging for fish, the sooty gull crying along the reefs, the crab-plover, that strange black-and-white wader that nests in burrows in the coral sand and feeds, as its name tells, on the crabs of the tide-flats. The withdrawal has taken the last human pressure from these island colonies, and the sailors report them fuller and louder than living memory; and the island folk, who read the falcon’s autumn gathering and the sea-birds’ teeming as the marks of the year, hold the emptied isles a country given wholly back to the birds.

The Closed Reef, and the Sea-Cow of the Shallows. And here, as at every seaward edge in this book, we come to the closed sea — and the Red Sea holds, beyond our looking now, one of the great coral reefs of the earth, a wall of living stone and colour that the loud time had begun to bleach and break and that recovers now, unwatched and unnamed, in the warm closed water. We may not go out to it; we may not haul it up to look; the reef tends its own resurrection beyond the surf, none of ours. The one great creature of that sea the folk may still glimpse is the dugong, the gentle sea-cow, grazing the shallow sea-meadows within sight of the emptied shore, and the coast folk who work the tide-line under the small tolerance send word — in the manner of the Bahraini divers, with no count and a lowered voice — that the sea-cows are back upon the shallow meadows in numbers the grandfathers spoke of. They do not number them. The reef and the sea-cow recover in the dark of our not-knowing, and the Red Sea coast, like every coast, ends at the edge of a wild we are permitted to love and forbidden to survey.

The Nile Verge and the Egyptian Delta

The Nile is the strangest case in all Africa, for its great artery runs deep into the continent, permitted and fresh, while its delta and its coast drown into the closed Mediterranean, so that Egypt is a country strung along a living river between a lamplit unplugged capital and a forbidden shore. The felucca-folk work the permitted river from the interior down to the zone-line, where the Nile continues on into the drowned delta and the closed sea; and the wild has come back to the river-margins and the delta-edge in the old Egyptian abundance.

The Nile’s River Company. The permitted Nile carries a river-life the loud time had much diminished and the quieting has restored. The Egyptian goose — a handsome ruddy-and-grey goose with a dark eye-patch, sacred to the ancient folk, that grazes the river-margins and the returning wet meadows in noisy pairs; the sacred ibis — white-bodied and black-necked, the very bird the ancient Egyptians embalmed by the million, that had vanished from Egypt in the loud time and, the felucca-folk report, has begun to return to the quieted delta-margins from the south, wading the shallows for frog and insect, so that the bird of the old gods walks the old river again. The pied kingfisher hovers over the river and plunges for fish; the great flocks of wintering wildfowl darken the delta-edge; and along the reedy margins the Egyptian mongoose — a long, low, grizzled, sharp-faced hunter, the ichneumon of the ancient tales, famed for killing the snake and robbing the nest — threads the reeds and the emptied fields, hunting rat and bird and egg, another creature of the old lore come back to the quieted river. The felucca-folk read the return of the river’s birds as the Nile’s own blessing renewed, and hold, as their ancestors held, that a river loud with birds is a river the gods have not abandoned.

The Delta-Edge and the Closed Coast. Where the permitted river gives way to the drowned delta and the forbidden coast, the wild passes beyond our looking, as it does at every seaward edge in this book; but the delta-margins that the day-rota reaches have filled with the tall wading birds and the returning marsh-life, herons and egrets and the purple gallinule stepping across the lily-pads on its great splayed toes, and the wild boar in the reed-beds, and the jackal in the emptied fields. And beyond, in the closed Mediterranean, the loud time’s most ravaged sea recovers now unwatched, the monk seal creeping back to the Egyptian and Libyan caves, the turtles to the dark delta beaches. The Egyptian folk, whose exodus up the river is the great human story of their age, have made of the returning river-wild a consolation and a sign — the birds come back to the sacred river as the people settle into their long grief — and there is in their runner-press, Halima tells me, a whole new poetry of the Nile’s returning creatures, the ibis and the goose and the heron sung as the river’s own faithfulness in an unfaithful age.

Madagascar’s Coasts

Of Madagascar, the great island of wonders, I have almost nothing at first or even second hand — it is grade-C country, reached by the faintest of relayed threads, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the little that reaches me is so extraordinary that I must set it down, with all its uncertainty plainly marked, for a book of the returning wild that left out Madagascar would be a book with a hole in its heart.

The Lemurs of the Coasts. Madagascar’s presiding creatures are the lemurs — the primitive, enchanting primate-kin found on this one island and nowhere else on the earth, that fill on Madagascar all the roles the monkeys fill elsewhere, having had the island to themselves for ages beyond counting. Of the coastal kinds the correspondents send word of two above all. The ring-tailed lemur — a slender grey creature with a fox-like face, huge amber eyes, and a magnificent black-and-white ringed tail held aloft like a banner as the troop moves through the dry southern spiny-forest — that lives in large troops led by the females, sunning itself at dawn with arms outstretched as if in worship, and that the quieting of the southern coast has, the threads suggest, let recover in its strange spiny country. And the various lemurs of the coastal mangroves and dry forests, leaping and calling through the emptied coastal woods. The Malagasy folk hold the lemurs in a deep and ancient regard, woven into the lore of the ancestors — for some kinds are fady, taboo, not to be harmed, held to carry the spirits of the dead — and this old reverence, the correspondents suggest, has sheltered the coastal lemurs through the age as much as any emptying.

The Fossa and the Aye-Aye. Two stranger wonders, of which I have only the faintest word. The fossa is Madagascar’s great predator — a long, lithe, cat-like, red-brown creature the size of a small dog, half-cat and half-mongoose in the counters’ reckoning, the island’s own top hunter, that pursues the lemurs through the canopy with a cat’s agility and a mongoose’s ferocity; its fortunes rise and fall with the lemurs it hunts, and its persistence in the quieted coastal forests, if the threads are true, is the sign that those forests hold lemurs enough to feed a predator, which is the sign that they are whole. And the aye-aye — the strangest primate on the earth, a shaggy black nocturnal lemur with huge eyes, great bat-ears, ever-growing rodent teeth, and one extraordinary long skeletal middle finger with which it taps the dead wood to find the grubs within and then hooks them out — a creature so uncanny that the Malagasy folk have long held it an omen of death and, tragically, killed it on sight, so that its fate in the age is doubly uncertain, hunted by fear even where the wild has quieted. I record it with sorrow and with hope in equal measure, and confess that of Madagascar’s whole strange ark I know only these few threads, and that a book waits to be written by someone who can get there, and that it will not be me, and that the honest confession of that is worth more than a false confidence dressed as knowledge.

The Radiated Tortoise and the Chameleons. Two more of the island’s wonders reach me faintly, and I set them down for the pleasure of them. The radiated tortoise of the dry south is among the most beautiful tortoises on the earth — a high-domed reptile whose dark shell is marked with a starburst of fine yellow lines radiating from the centre of each plate, so that the whole creature seems painted with little suns — that grazes the dry spiny-forest with a slow patience and may live longer than any person; the loud time took it heavily for its shell and its flesh, and the Malagasy folk of the south, some of whom hold it fady and will not harm it, are its best hope, and the quieting of the coast its second. And the chameleons — for Madagascar holds half the chameleons of the world, from great arm-long giants to jewels smaller than a thumbnail, those slow, swivel-eyed, colour-shifting lizards that clasp the twigs with pincer-feet and take the insects with a tongue longer than themselves flung out faster than the eye can follow. They ask nothing of the age but an undisturbed forest, and where the coastal forests quiet and spread, the correspondents say, the chameleons cling on, turning their strange independent eyes upon a world that has, for once, stopped troubling them. I shall never see them, and I am glad they are there, turning green to brown to green in a forest I cannot reach.

The Cape and the Southern Shore

I come near the end of Africa, and of the coasts, at the Cape — the far southern tip, where the day-pilgrimage to the drowned coastal cities is the largest such rite in the whole southern world, so that the Cape Verge is perhaps the most-watched emptied coast on the earth, trafficked daily by pilgrims who bring their sightings home. My correspondent here is among the day-rota folk of the Cape, and what the pilgrims bring home is glorious.

The African Penguin. The presiding bird of the southern shore, and one of the gladdest recoveries of the age. The African penguin is a small, neat, black-and-white penguin of the temperate southern coast — the only penguin of the African mainland — that nests in burrows and under bushes along the beaches and the offshore islands, brays like a donkey (whence the folk call it the jackass-bird), and swims and fishes with a torpedo’s grace in the cold coastal sea. The loud time’s egging and oiling and overfishing had crushed it toward oblivion; and now the beaches are dark and empty and human-free, the disturbance gone, and the penguins have come back to their old nesting beaches — the famous ones among them, where the loud time’s crowds once queued to gawp — in numbers the counters had despaired of, braying through the emptied dunes at dawn. The Cape folk and the day-pilgrims count the penguins’ return among the surest signs of the southern coast’s healing, and there is a particular tenderness in it, for the penguin is a creature the loud time had made into a spectacle and a victim at once, and the age has given it back its dark beaches and its dignity together.

The Cape Fur Seal and the Chacma Baboon. Two abundances of the southern shore. The Cape fur seal — a large, sleek, dog-faced seal with a coat of dense fur, that throngs the emptied harbours and the offshore rocks in vast roaring colonies, diving in the cold sea for fish, hauling out to breed and moult in heaving multitudes — has recovered its old grounds now the sealing and the disturbance are gone, and the great seal-colonies are once more among the loudest and most crowded gatherings of life on the whole coast. And the chacma baboon — a large, grey-brown, dog-faced baboon of the Cape hills, bold and clever and troop-living, that even in the loud time had learned to raid the coastal towns — has simply taken them, trooping now through the abandoned streets of the drowned Cape suburbs as the citizens, foraging the wild-gone gardens and the shore, so that the emptied towns are baboon-towns, ruled by the great grey troops. The Cape folk regard the baboons with the weary exasperated respect one keeps for a clever thieving neighbour who has, after all, the better claim to the emptied town; and read their easy possession of it as the plainest measure of how wholly the coast has passed out of human keeping.

The Sugarbird and the Sunbirds of the Fynbos. Before the whales, a word for the smallest and most jewel-like company of the Cape, for the southern tip holds a flora found nowhere else on the earth — the fynbos, the fine-leaved heath of protea and erica and restio that clothes the Cape hills — and a company of nectar-birds bound to it in the tightest of partnerships. The Cape sugarbird is a strange, drab-brown, sparrow-faced bird redeemed by an absurdly long streaming tail, twice the length of its body, that it trails behind it as it clings to the great flower-heads of the proteas, probing them for nectar and insect; and the sunbirds — the malachite and the orange-breasted above all — are tiny, glittering, curve-billed jewels, the males flashing metallic green and violet and flame, that hover and clamber at the fynbos flowers to drink. And here is the partnership: the proteas depend upon these birds to carry their pollen from bush to bush, dusting the birds’ brows as they feed, so that the sugarbird and the sunbird are the very marriage-brokers of the fynbos, and a hillside without them is a hillside that cannot set its seed. The withdrawal has served them by the simplest gift, for the emptied coastal gardens and farms have surrendered back to the fynbos, the protea and the erica reclaiming the ground, and the nectar-birds have followed the returning flowers. The Cape folk and the day-pilgrims delight in them — the long-tailed sugarbird swinging on a protea-head, the sunbird flashing at a flower — and read the return of the fynbos and its jewel-birds to the emptied slopes as the surest sign that the Cape’s own peculiar and precious garden has come back to itself.

The Tiger of the Southern Shore. And now the beast that has made the Cape Verge the most-argued-over coast in this whole book, and about which I can, for once, speak with more confidence than caution, precisely because this shore is the most-watched in all the southern world and its pilgrims come home by the million with the same impossible report. There are tigers on the Cape coast. Not the lion — of the lion I will make my confession in its place, a little further on, for the lion is a beast of the deep inland plain and the deep inland plain is the one country my correspondence cannot reach — but the tiger, the great striped cat of the Asian jungles, is here, on the southern tip of Africa, ten thousand kilometres from any wild that ever bore it, and thereby hangs the darkest and strangest tale of all the freed exiles. In the last decades of the loud time this southern land had grown a peculiar and shameful industry: it bred the great cats in captivity by the thousand, in farms and camps and walled reserves — the lion above all, for the trophy-hunters’ guns, but the tiger too, imported and multiplied for the same grim trade and for a scattering of well-meant, ill-fated schemes that dreamed of breeding the Asian cat on African ground against its extinction in its own. When the withdrawal came, those farms and camps stood in the emptying land with their gates unmanned, and the cats — the survivors of them, the ones that were not shot in their pens by fleeing keepers, a mercy and a horror I will not weigh here — went out into a country emptying of every human enemy and filling with the returning game. The lions, I am told, went inland to the plains that suited them, beyond my hearing. But the tiger is a beast of cover and water, not open plain, and the tigers came down — down the emptied river-lines and the wild-gone plantations and the drowned coastal towns, toward the well-watered southern shore, until they reached the Cape Verge, and there, in the thickets and the drowned suburbs and the returning coastal forest, they have denned and bred and gone truly wild. The day-pilgrims, who walk the largest coastal rite in the southern world, bring home the sightings — a great striped cat swimming a drowned river-mouth at dawn; pug-marks the size of a dinner-plate along a pilgrim path; a tiger watching a salvage-crew from the shadow of a drowned church, unafraid — and the Cape folk, who have had to invent their whole lore of it inside a single generation, have settled on calling it the streepkat, the stripe-cat, and hold it in a dread deeper than they hold the leopard or the lion of their grandfathers’ tales, for it is the one great beast that will hunt a walking pilgrim, and the day-rota keeps a whole discipline of the stripe-cat’s hours and haunts. I set this down as the sharpest instance in the book of the freed exiles’ strangeness, and I dwell on the irony because the reader should not miss it: I can tell you with confidence that an Asian tiger, bred on an African farm, hunts the drowned Cape coast — and I cannot tell you, in the very next breath, whether the true African lion prowls any emptied town a few hundred kilometres inland, because the tiger is on the watched coast and the lion is in the unreachable heart. The age has emptied the coasts and let us walk them; it has emptied the interiors and closed them to our sight; and so I know the exile better than the native, the stranger better than the son, which is a parable of something, though I am not sure what, and I leave it with the reader to turn over on the long walk home before dark.

The Mongrel Giant, the Cape’s Own Monster. And the shameful farms of the loud time bred worse — or stranger, at least — than the pure tiger, and I must set it down here though it is the most unsettling entry in my book, because it is true, and because it is the plainest possible instance of a thing the reader must now begin to reckon with: that the age has loosed not only the beasts the counters caged but the beasts the counters made, the crossings and the hybrids that could never have met in any wild on the earth and met only behind the wire, and that some of these, loosed, are breeding still. On those southern predator-farms the keepers had bred, for the gawping trade, the monstrous crossing of the lion and the tiger — two great cats that share no range in all the wild world, the one African and the other Asian, kept side by side only in captivity and coaxed to breed there into a thing the counters called the liger: a hybrid that grows, by a quirk of its mingled inheritance, larger than either parent, larger than any cat that ever lived in nature, a pale tawny beast faintly striped and faintly maned, the size of a small horse, the greatest of all living cats and a creature wholly of human contrivance, native to nowhere, at home in no wild the earth had ever held. When the farms fell open, these too went out — and here the tale grows tangled in the way the reader will learn to expect of the hybrids, for the giant males are born sterile and father nothing, but the females are not, and a loosed liger queen will breed back to the wild-gone tigers of the coast and throw a further generation, half-tiger, three-quarter-tiger, the lion-blood thinning down the years into the general Cape tiger stock until it cannot be picked out at all. So the Cape holds, for now, a scatter of these mongrel giants — the loosed first cross, huge and sterile and doomed to no descendants of their own — hunting the drowned coast beside the pure tigers into whom their sisters’ blood is quietly draining; and the day-pilgrims bring home, now and then, a report that raises the hair: a pug-mark larger than the largest tiger’s, a pale half-striped shape too big to be any cat the counters’ books allow, glimpsed at dusk and scarcely believed. The Cape folk, who have had to name a beast that has no right to exist, call it the basgrootkat, the over-big cat, or simply the monster, and hold it in a dread beyond even the stripe-cat’s, for it is bigger, and it is wrong in a way they feel in the spine, a thing the world was not meant to make. I will not pretend to their comfort with it; I find it the one entry in this book that troubles my Meliorist gladness, for it is not the wild returning but a human artifice loosed to blur and blunder through the returning wild. And yet — I make myself write the and yet, for honesty demands it — even this the age is quietly correcting, drawing the impossible beast’s blood down and down into the real one, dissolving the counters’ monster back into the honest tiger over the slow generations, so that the mongrel giant is not the age’s future but only a strange loud echo of the loud time’s last cruelty, fading as it goes. Mark it, and shudder a little, and then let the reader hold it beside the blended bear of the far north, and begin to think — as I have had to think, writing this larger book — about the whole great churning question of the mingled kinds, which I have gathered into a chapter of its own, and to which, when I have shown you the last of the coasts, I will turn.

The Tahr of the Table Mountain. High above the drowned Cape city, on the great flat-topped mountain that is its emblem, ranges a freed exile of a gentler kind, and one with the longest pedigree of loosing in this whole book: the Himalayan tahr, a heavy, sure-footed wild goat of the high Asian mountains, the old billies a rich mahogany-brown with a magnificent flowing mane and lyre of horn, that clambers the sheer cliffs and the emptied cable-ways of the great mountain with the impossible ease of the crag-born. It is a beast of the roof of the world, of the snow-margins of the highest range on earth; but a pair escaped from the loud time’s beast-garden on the mountain’s flank generations before the age, and bred, and clung on, until the whole mountain held a wild population of Asian tahr looking down on an African city — and the counters, fretting for the peculiar mountain flora the tahr grazed, spent decades trying to shoot them all away again. The withdrawal has ended that long persecution at a stroke, for no gun climbs the mountain now on any such errand, and the tahr have the great emptied massif to themselves, sharing it only with the returning antelope and the day-pilgrims who climb the old paths to look out over the drowned city and find, watching them from a ledge, a mahogany-maned goat of the Himalaya entirely at home on an African mountain-top. The Cape folk, who once knew the tahr only as a problem to be culled, have come to regard it now as one of the mountain’s own wonders — the high exile, the crag-king, the beast that turned a mountain above an African sea into a fragment of the Himalaya — and read its untroubled possession of the heights as one more sign that the great mountain, like the coast below it, has passed wholly out of our keeping and into its own.

The Southern Right Whale, Heard from the Dark Shore. And here, at the last of the coasts, we come once more to the closed sea, and to its greatest voice. In the great bays of the Cape, where the loud time once ran a whole industry of gawping at them from boats, the southern right whales have come back to calve in the quiet water in numbers no one living has seen — huge, black, barnacle-crusted, slow-moving whales, the mothers hanging in the sheltered bays with their calves through the southern winter. The Cape pilgrims, who come down to the drowned coast by the million on the largest walking-rite of the southern world, stand on the emptied cliffs at dusk and hear them — the great slow blows carrying up from the dark bay, the calves’ answering slaps upon the water, a whole conversation of leviathans in a sea no boat now troubles. They are heard, now, from the dark shore, rather than watched from a churning deck; and that, I have come to believe, is a better way to know a whale — for you cannot possess a voice in the dark, you can only receive it — and it brings me, as every coast in this book has brought me, to the edge of the closed sea, and to the confession I have kept for the interior, and then to the sea itself.

The Namib and the Skeleton Coast

Northwest of the Cape runs the strangest coast in all Africa — the desert shore of the Namib, where the oldest desert on the earth comes down to a cold fog-bound sea, and the dunes stand at the very edge of the surf, and almost nothing and almost no one lived even in the loud time. It is a coast of fog and bone and enormous emptiness, and its wild is the spare, secretive, marvellously-adapted wild of a land where the only reliable water is the morning fog off the sea. I know it barely, through the sparse strand-folk and the desert couriers whose threads Halima’s network touches at its farthest reach.

The Brown Hyena, the Strandwolf. The presiding beast of the Skeleton Coast, and one of the great scavengers of the age: the brown hyena, which the strand-folk call the strandwolf, the beach-wolf — a shaggy, dark-brown, long-maned hyena, smaller and shyer than its spotted cousin of the interior, with a pale collar and great ears, that patrols the desert beaches by night alone, scavenging the strandings of the cold sea — the dead seals, the beached fish, the leavings of the great seal-colonies — and hunting the small desert life, and drinking, when it can, the fog-damp and the wild desert melons. It is a solitary, wide-ranging, patient creature, covering enormous distances of empty beach in a night, and the withdrawal has served it well, for the coast that was nearly empty of us is emptier still, and the seal-colonies that feed it have swelled. The strand-folk hold the strandwolf a creature of the desert night’s own, half-feared and half-respected, the coast’s lone sexton, and read its tracks along the dawn beach as the sign that the empty shore is not empty at all, but patrolled and kept by a shy brown ghost that the loud time scarcely knew.

The Cape Fur Seal Colonies and the Black-Backed Jackal. Along this desert coast the Cape fur seal hauls out to breed in colonies of a staggering, roaring, reeking immensity — hundreds of thousands of the sleek dog-faced seals packed along the desert beaches, diving in the cold rich sea, pupping in heaving multitudes — and these great colonies are the whole foundation of the desert coast’s life, for they feed the strandwolf and the jackal and the vulture with their dead and their weaklings, so that a fur-seal colony is a fountain of life pouring its overflow into the hungry desert around it. And the black-backed jackal — a neat, sharp-faced, russet wild dog with a black saddle, clever and adaptable as all its kind — works the seal-colonies and the strand-line by day where the strandwolf works by night, snatching the seal-pups and the leavings, trotting the empty beaches, singing at dusk; the two scavengers divide the day and the night between them, and both live on the sea’s overflow, and both have prospered as the colonies have swelled in the quiet.

The Fog-Drinkers. I cannot leave the Namib without its smallest wonder, for it is the truest emblem of the whole desert coast. On the great dunes live the fog-basking beetles — small dark darkling-beetles that have solved the desert’s one problem, water, by the most extraordinary means: on the fog-bound mornings they climb to the dune-crests and stand on their heads, tilting their backs into the sea-fog, so that the fog condenses on their bodies and runs down in a single precious drop to their waiting mouths, a beetle drinking the sea from the air. The whole desert depends, at its root, on that fog and the creatures wise enough to harvest it; and the desert couriers, who know the fog-mornings as the only generous hours of that hard coast, speak of the fog-drinkers with a wry desert affection, as the smallest and cleverest of the strand-folk, standing on their heads to drink the morning. In a coast of great scavengers and roaring seal-hosts, it is the beetle on the dune-crest, drinking the fog, that I would choose to show a stranger the genius of the desert wild — the making of a living, against all odds, from almost nothing at all.

The Great Interior: A Confession

Here I must stop and make the confession I promised at the opening of this Part, because it is the most honest thing in the book and the between-born should learn honesty from their elders wherever they can get it.

The wildlife for which Africa was famous in all the world — the great herds of the savanna, the elephant and the lion and the buffalo and the vast migrations that the counters flew over in their machines and filmed and numbered and made the whole earth marvel at — lives inland, in the dry grassland heart of the continent, far beyond any coast and far beyond any Verge. It was never coastal, and so the withdrawal touched it hardly at all, and so it lies almost wholly outside the remit of this book, which is a book of coasts and drowned cities and returning tides. And more than that: the African interior lies almost wholly outside the reach of the Long Correspondence itself. The courier roads that stitch the band world together run thin across that great interior, and thinner still to the deep savanna, and I have almost no letters from the country of the great herds — not because there is nothing to report, but because I cannot hear it.

So I will tell you plainly what I do not know. I do not know whether the lion prowls any emptied coastal town as the tiger prowls the Bengal delta, though I suspect not, the lion being a beast of the open inland plain. And here is the bitterest edge of my ignorance, which I flagged at the Cape and now make good on: I can tell you that the tiger prowls the southern coast — the freed farm-tiger, the Asian exile bred on African ground, for that beast is on the watched shore and the pilgrims bring it home by the million — and yet of the lion, the true son of this continent, ranging its own inland kingdom a few hundred kilometres beyond my last correspondent, I can tell you nothing at all. I know the stranger and not the son. That is exactly the shape of what the age has done to our knowing, and I feel it most sharply here, on the edge of the great African silence, where the one beast I can report is the one that does not belong. I do not know what the loud time’s poaching, or the Hunger Years’ desperate seasons, did to the great herds, for good or ill — whether the emptying that freed the coasts also, in the hungry years, drove starving people to hunt the inland margins bare, or whether the ending of the ivory-trade and the trophy-hunt has let the great tuskers recover. I do not know how the elephant and the rhinoceros and the wild dog fare in the deep interior, and I will not pretend to. The counters knew the African interior better than they knew any wild place on the earth, from their machines in the sky; and we, who may not fly, know it now hardly at all.

There is a whole vast wildness there, the greatest on the planet, going about its enormous life beyond our seeing — and if that sentence sounds familiar, it is because I wrote very nearly the same one about the closed sea, and I think the echo is not an accident. Our age has given us back a wild world and, in the same stroke, taken away our power to survey it whole. We must be content, now, to know the wild the way we know a neighbour — locally, partially, by acquaintance and by report — and not the way the counters knew it, which was the way a landlord knows a rent-roll. I have come to think the neighbour’s knowledge the better of the two, even at the price of these confessions. The great African interior is the largest single thing this book cannot reach, and I set that failure down plainly, and I will not gloss it, and I commend the writing of it to some watcher of a later age with better roads than mine — or, better still, I commend it to no one, and let the great herds keep their own counsel, unwatched and unnumbered and whole, as the deep sea keeps its own, and be glad, in the Meliorist way, of a wildness so complete that even I cannot spoil it with a book.

Here ends Part Three.

THE LONG CORRIDOR AND THE MINGLED KINDS

Being the chapter I did not know I would have to write, and the truest new thing this larger book has taught me.

The Green Highway

When I set out to enlarge my little survey into this book, I thought I was only adding animals — a fuller description here, a folk-name there, the beasts drawn whole instead of merely listed. But the letters that came in answer to my printings taught me something I had not seen from my cold northern corner, something so large that I have had to give it a chapter of its own, because it changes how the reader should understand every page that has gone before: the Verge is not a chain of separate wildernesses. It is one wilderness. From my own Baltic granite a beast may walk — if it is patient, and lives long enough, and its children’s children carry on the walking — south down the emptied European coast, round the drowned Mediterranean shores, down the Levant, along the whole rim of Arabia and the Indian seas to the mouths of the Ganges and beyond; and, by the Sinai land-bridge where two continents still join, out of Asia into Africa and down the emptied length of that continent to the Cape itself. Two hundred kilometres wide, unbroken, unlit, uninhabited, running the entire coastline of the connected world — the counters, had they lived to see it, would have called it the largest single protected wilderness in the history of the earth, and they would have been right, and it would have been the one such thing they never built and never could have built, for it took the emptying of the coasts to make it, and only the Mandates could empty the coasts.

I have come to call it, in my own head, the Long Corridor, and to understand that it has quietly become the master fact of the returning wild — the thing that makes the whole strange new bestiary of this book possible. For consider what a continuous corridor does. The counters’ world was a world of islands, even on the continents: each patch of wild fenced off from the next by road and city and field and farm, so that a beast of one wood could not reach the next wood, and a small population, once cut off, dwindled and inbred and died. The corridor has dissolved all those fences at a stroke. Now the scattered survivors can find one another. I told the reader, on the Iberian shore, how the loosed lions of a dozen separate safari-parks — each pride too few and too inbred to have lasted alone — had walked the emptied coast until they met, and mingled, and in the mingling grew strong; that is the corridor’s plainest gift, and it is being given a thousand times over, to a thousand kinds. The freed flamingos of Hamburg are no longer the freed flamingos of Hamburg only; they have joined the flamingos of the whole northern Mediterranean along the corridor of the coast. The loosed cheetahs of one Gulf prince’s paddock have found the loosed cheetahs of another’s fifty kilometres down the shore. Everywhere the age loosed a beast in numbers too small to last, the corridor has given it the chance to become numbers enough — and that, more than any single dramatic escape, is why the exiles have not merely survived but taken hold.

And the corridor does more than gather the scattered: it carries the bold clean off the edge of the counters’ maps. I showed the reader the spotted deer of India walking west along the emptied shore, and the leopard feeling its way toward Europe by the long land-road round the Black Sea, and the African plains-game of the Gulf mingling with the Indian chital that walked to meet it. These are not marvels of a single place; they are the corridor doing what a corridor does, which is to let the fit and the wandering spread as far as their legs and their generations will carry them, until the old question of what-belongs-where has come quite undone. The corridor has its limits, and honesty requires them: the forbidden straits still stop the beasts that cannot swim them — the lion may not cross from Africa to Iberia, the leopard may not leap the Bosphorus — and the true islands, Madagascar and the Spared isles and the drowned half of Britain, are cut off from the great mingling as they were cut off before, each running its own separate experiment. But the mainland of the connected world is one wild road now, and down it the kinds are flowing and meeting and passing as they have not done since before there were fences, which is to say since before there were us.

The Mingled Kinds

And where the kinds meet, they mingle — and here I come to the strangest fruit of the corridor, and the one that would have most appalled the counters, who spent their whole science holding the kinds apart and naming the holding knowledge. For the age has not only moved the beasts; it has crossed them. I have shown the reader two of these mingled beasts already, at the far ends of the earth and the book: the blended bear of the melting north, where the white bear and the brown, driven together by the warming and the emptying, have bred a fertile third kind that is neither; and the mongrel giant of the Cape, that most troubling of all my entries, where the loud time’s own caged cruelty crossed the lion and the tiger into a monster and then loosed it to blur, slowly, back into the honest tiger it was half-made from. But these two are only the ones I have room to draw whole. The letters are full of others. Where the Gulf’s loosed zebras range near the emptied coast’s feral horses and asses, my correspondents send word of striped-and-solid foals, the zorse and the zonkey of the counters’ idle experiments now happening of their own accord in the wild, mostly barren, a genetic dead end, but occurring, and occurring again. Where the returning grey wolf presses down the coast into the range of the spreading golden jackal and the vast feral dog-packs of the drowned cities, the three run together in a shifting mongrel dog-nation whose members the counters could not always have named and whose descendants no one now can. And in the emptied eastern woods, the great wild bison that the counters coaxed back from the last cages — the European wisent and its American cousin, kept and bred and sometimes crossed in the loud time’s parks — meet and mingle where both were loosed, pouring two continents’ bison into one shaggy hybrid herd.

The counters had two words for all this, and both were words of alarm. One was invasive, for the beast arrived where the map said it should not be; the other was hybrid, for the beast was born of a crossing the map said should not occur. They policed both with fences and guns and a great apparatus of anxious science, because the counters believed, at the very root of their thinking, that the kinds of the world were fixed and separate and pure, and that to keep them so was the whole task of the naturalist — that a lion belonged in Africa and a tiger in Asia and the two must never meet, that a wild was healthy in proportion as it was native and unmixed, that the mingling of kinds was a kind of pollution and the crossing of them a kind of sin. I understand the impulse; I was raised half a counter myself, and something in me still flinches at the mongrel giant. But I have come, in the writing of this book, to think the counters were mostly wrong about this, as they were wrong about so much, and wrong in the same way: they mistook their own tidy idea of the world for the world. The kinds were never as fixed as they wished. Life has always reached across every gap it could reach across; the counters’ pure separate ranges were themselves mostly the accident of barriers — of seas and deserts and ice — that the age has now, in one quarter of the earth, taken down. The corridor has not corrupted the wild. It has un-fenced it. And an un-fenced wild does what life does when a wall comes down, which is to flow, and meet, and mingle, and make new things — not monsters, for the most part, whatever the counters feared, but simply the next living answer to a changed world: the blended bear fitted to a melting north that is neither the old ice nor any temperate land; the mongrel Iberian lion, thick-blooded and various, fitted to a Europe it must colonise from nothing.

I keep, still, my one honest reservation, and I will not hide it under the general gladness: the mongrel giant of the Cape troubles me, and I think it should, for it was not the wild reaching across a gap of its own accord but our own cruelty loosed to blunder through the returning world, a thing made in a cage for money and freed by accident to frighten the pilgrims. There is a difference between the mingling the age has permitted — the bear, the wolf-jackal-dog, the two bisons finding each other because the fences fell — and the mingling the loud time manufactured and then abandoned. The first is the wild being itself. The second is our mess, still being cleaned up, and the reader is right to feel the difference in her spine. But even there, mark, the age is patient and self-correcting: the impossible cat’s blood drains down into the real one, the manufactured monster dissolves back into the honest tiger over the slow generations, and the wild takes even our worst contrivance and quietly makes it native again. That is the corridor’s deepest work, and the between-born’s true inheritance — not the counters’ orderly museum of fixed and separate and native kinds, each pinned in its proper place on the map, but a churning, travelling, mingling, mongrel wild, various past any naming, flowing down the one green road of the emptied coast toward whatever it is becoming. The counters would have mourned it as the ruin of nature. I have decided to bless it as the return of nature — the real thing, the un-fenced thing, older and stranger and far less tidy than the thing they tried to keep behind glass — and to teach the between-born to bless it too, and to walk the Long Corridor, when they are grown, not as the keepers of a rent-roll of pure and proper kinds, but as the glad and humble neighbours of a wild that has stopped asking our permission to be whatever it pleases.

THE TWO CLOSED WORLDS

An Interlude: The Verge After Dark

I have written this whole book about a country I am only ever permitted to enter by day, and it would be dishonest to reach the sea without pausing on the strangeness of that, because it means there is a second closed world, besides the ocean, of which I can tell you almost nothing — and it is the one I stand at the very edge of every evening of my life.

The Verge belongs to us by day and to the dark by night. We come in with the dawn on our rotas and we go out before dusk, every one of us, driven back across the line by the same law that keeps the ships off the sea; and so the animals of the Verge live half their lives — the better half, for most of them — entirely unwatched. The whole nocturnal wild goes about its business in a country from which every human eye has been withdrawn by law. What the seals do on the Tallinn steps at midnight, what the mosque-tigers do in the Bengal dark, what the leopard does in the drowned Konkan streets, what walks the emptied avenues of every drowned city between dusk and dawn — of all this we know only the tracks we find in the morning, the kills, the scat, the disturbed dust, the marks left in the mud by creatures that were gone before we were allowed to return.

This has made the watchers of the Long Correspondence into a kind of detective. We read the night backward from its leavings, the way the old hunters read a trail: we have learned that the boar range wider by dark than by day, that the great cats move through the very hearts of the drowned cities once we are gone, that creatures we never see at all leave their signatures across the dawn mud in numbers that shame our daylight sightings. Kenji reads the umibe by its night-tracks; Zainab reads the tiger’s passage by the marks on the mud-bank and the alarm of the deer; the whole craft of Verge natural history is, in truth, a craft of reading a country we are forbidden to occupy at the hour it most comes alive.

And I have come to value the discipline of it, for it teaches the same humility the sea teaches — that the wild does not perform for us and does not need our watching, that a whole enormous life proceeds in the dark just past the edge of our permission and is complete without us. The Verge by night and the sea beyond the surf are the two great closed rooms of our age, and I have spent my life at the keyholes of both, and I have stopped, at last, wishing the doors would open. It is enough to know the rooms are full. It is more than enough. It is, I have come to think, the whole gift.

The Closed Sea

And so, at the last, to the sea, which I have kept for the end as one keeps the deepest thing for the end, and of which I must begin by admitting that this chapter can contain almost nothing, and that its near-emptiness is its whole meaning.

Of all the wild that the age has returned to us, the sea is the greatest and the one we may least know. The Message’s word upon the waters was absolute: the creatures of the sea are not ours to take, to name, or to count. And so, at a stroke, the whole apparatus by which the counters knew the ocean — the fleets, the nets, the instruments, the surveys, the census, the naming of new kinds, the very science of the sea — became not merely impossible but forbidden. We do not go out upon the deep water. We do not haul it up to look at it. We do not number what lives in it. For the first time since our kind came down to the shore, an entire vast living world of the earth has become genuinely, permanently, and by law unknown to us — a closed biosphere, thundering away out there beyond the surf, utterly beyond our looking.

I want to be careful here, for it would be easy to make this sound like a loss, and the counter in me does feel it as one; but the Meliorist in me has come, over thirty years, to feel it as something else, and I will try to say it plainly. We have, all of us, exactly one witness to the state of the sea, and it is our ears. When the ships stopped — every engine, every propeller, the whole century-long roar we had poured into the water without ever once hearing it ourselves — the sea did not go silent. It went, the Spared islanders tell us, loud. The Loud Sea, they call it now. Freed of our noise, the voices of the sea’s own creatures came back into a water that could carry them again, and the whales, which had been shouting across drowned-out oceans for a hundred years and hearing only engines, could suddenly hear one another again from horizon to horizon. Ingeborg hears them breathing in her fjord. Zainab hears the river-dolphins in the delta dusk. The Cape pilgrims hear the right whales in the bays. The Bahraini pearl-divers, the only people left on the earth who go down into the salt water in the old way, come up with their eyes wide and will not describe what they have seen, partly from reverence and partly, I think, because there are no longer any words agreed upon for it, the naming having stopped.

This is what we have of the sea: a sound, and the awed silence of the few who still touch it. We know the great dugong of the Gulf lives, because the divers see it, but we may not count it. We know the old fish of the deep still turns in the black water off Africa, because it always did, but we will never haul another up to marvel at. We know the turtles pour up the dark beaches, because we may watch that much from the land. Beyond the surf-line, the sea keeps its own counsel, tends its own recovery, raises its own uncounted generations, and asks nothing of us and tells us nothing; and after a century in which we knew it only in order to empty it, there is a part of me — the Meliorist part, the part my mother’s people gave me — that finds in this closed and thundering ignorance not a wound but a strange and enormous peace. We loved the sea best, it turns out, when we could no longer possess it. There is a lesson in that which reaches far past the water, and I will let you find it for yourself, as I found it, slowly, over many years, standing on the granite at dawn while the seal-burghers watched me with their patient insolent eyes and the loud sea worked away at its resurrection just past the edge of everything I am permitted to know.

CODA · The Between-Born and the Beasts

I am an old woman now, and I write this last chapter for the young — for the between-born, the generation coming up who never saw a grid burn or a ship sail, to whom the parakeet in the drowned tower and the tiger on the mosque steps and the loud sea past the surf are not marvels at all but simply the world, the only world, the way the world has always obviously been. They will read this book, if they read it, the way I read the counters’ books: as a report from a vanished country, half-incredible, tinged with an emotion they cannot quite share. And I want to leave them three things, honestly, in the Meliorist way, without gloss.

The first is the grief, named plainly, because a book that gave you only the glad tide would be a lie and I will not end on a lie. Not everything came back. In the withdrawal years, when the coastal cities were emptied in haste and terror, the beasts of the abandoned zoological gardens and the aquaria could not all be freed in time, and many died — starved or thirst-killed in their cages by a species fleeing for its own life, unable to carry them along. There is a debt there, a real one, paid by creatures who had no say in our building of the cages or our fleeing of them, and a Meliorist does not wave it away with talk of a greater good. Beyond the cages, the Hunger Years took their toll on the wild too, in the first desperate seasons when starving people hunted the margins bare. And some creatures were already gone before the age began — the pale river-dolphin of the Yangtze, and others, drowned by the loud time itself and beyond any silence to restore. Name them. Do not gloss them. The tide came in, and it was a real good, and it did not reach everything, and some things it reached too late.

The second thing is the gladness, and it is the larger, and a Meliorist is permitted the larger. For weigh it honestly: against that grief stands the returning of nearly everything else. The eagle over the drowned city. The seal on the emptied steps. The tiger swimming the channels of a kingdom given back. The lion loose on a European shore again, roaring across the emptied coast a thousand years after the spear had silenced it. The ghost-deer, that had no wild home in all the world, walking free at last across the coast that forgot it. The falcon loose among the towers, and the falconer glad whether it returns or no. The crane dancing white over the emptied fields. The turtle on the dark beach under the enormous stars. The whole unbroken Verge become one green corridor down which the beasts walk and meet and mingle and spread clear off the edges of the maps the counters drew. The whale, audible again from shore to shore across an ocean it thought it had lost. In thirty years the wild world of three continents has come back from the margins with a speed and a completeness that no counter, no matter how hopeful, ever dared to write down, and it has done so for the plainest reason in the world: because we stepped back, and let it. That is a real good. I may not tell you who to thank for the imposing of the interval, and I will not pretend to know, and I would not trust anyone who claimed to. But I may be glad, out loud and without apology, of the green tide it turned; and I am; and I have written this whole long book to persuade you to be glad of it too.

I know that there are those in the fallen naval powers who cannot be glad — who read the whole returning wild as an insult, a taunt, the earth flourishing on the grave of their greatness, and who dream of the day the ships will sail again and the counting resume. I understand the grief beneath their anger better than they think; I lost a world too. But I will say to you what I would say to them, if they would hear a fox on the subject: the wild did not come back to spite us. It came back because it could, the moment we let it, which means it was only ever waiting, which means the thing that had held it down all those loud centuries was us and nothing but us. That is not a taunt. That is a mercy — a hard one, an imposed one, a mercy no one asked for and many died in the giving of — but a mercy, in the plain sense that the world is more alive than it was, and the aliveness cost the beasts nothing and asked us only to step back. A Meliorist may grieve the manner and still bless the fruit. I do. I bless the fruit with my whole heart.

And the third thing is a way of holding the world, which is the only thing I really have to teach and the reason I stopped being a counter and became a lover. The counters believed that to know a thing was to number it and to name it and to file it, to close your fist around it and call the closing knowledge. The age has taught me — the sea taught me, and the seals, and my mother’s patient faith — that there is another and a better knowing, which is to open the hand: to look, and to love, and to let the thing be its own and not yours, unnumbered, half-unseen, going about its enormous life just past the edge of your permission. The counters knew the sea and emptied it. We cannot know the sea, and it is coming back. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I do not think it is only true of the sea.

So: go out with the dawn rota. Keep your two inks honest. Learn the eagle and the seal and the boar and the crane, and write to the watcher in the next section, and add your small honest local seeing to the long slow stitching-together of the whole. Be back before dark. Love more than you count. And when you stand on some emptied shore at the day’s end and hear, past the surf, the loud and closed and resurrecting sea — do not wish you could go out and number it. Be glad you cannot. That gladness is the whole of what I know.

Humanitas perdurat. And so, thank God — thank something — does the fox.

Appendix · A Note on Names, on Trust, and on the Long Correspondence

A word on my method, for the watcher who wishes to carry this work forward.

I have used throughout the good old shared names of the counters — the plain names in the common tongues, and their creatures’ habits as the great books of the loud time recorded them — not because I believe in their kind of naming, but because a name shared across a thousand kilometres of courier road is the one thing that lets the watcher in the Bengal delta and the watcher on the Baltic granite speak of the same creature and know it. A private name, or a new-coined one, serves nobody down the Long Correspondence. So I borrow, and I am grateful to the counters for the loan, whatever else I have said of them; the bodies and the habits of the beasts in this book are the true and patient inheritance of the loud time’s observers, and I state them with confidence because they earned that confidence, dead as they and their instruments now are.

Where a folk name has grown up in the band since the withdrawal — the tower-parrots, the seal-burghers, the mosque-tigers, the ghost-deer, the smiling one, the old fish of the deep, the water-bull of the French lagoons and the river-buffalo of the Mesopotamian reeds, the stripe-cat of the Cape and the masked bandit of the Rhine, the laugh of the Iberian dehesa and the water-pig of the Camargue, the blended bear of the melting north and the over-big cat that troubles the Cape pilgrims — I have recorded it with pleasure, for these are the true living names of our age, coined by the people who share the Verge with the creatures, and they will outlast my borrowed Latin. Let the between-born name their own beasts. It is their world now.

On trust: I have marked, as faithfully as I could, the difference between what I saw with my own eye (the Baltic, and little else), what came to me from a correspondent I know and trust (the great bulk of this book), and what came only as rumour or relayed common report (the far interiors, the rarest beasts, all flagged as such). I have surely erred. A book made this way — of ten thousand letters carried by patient couriers and slow sails across a broken and half-known world — cannot help but err. But I would rather give you an honest picture with its uncertainties marked than a false confidence dressed as knowledge, for false confidence dressed as knowledge is precisely the disease of which the loud time died.

And on the great matter of what is new versus what is old: remember always that I state the timeless natural history — the shape of a seal, the diet of a tiger, the dance of a crane — with the confidence of an inheritor, for the loud time’s books are sound on such things; but that everything concerning the age — how the creatures have answered the withdrawal, how they have spread into the emptied coasts, how they behave now we are gone from half their day — is the uncertain, precious, correspondence-borne knowledge of our own time, and I have hedged it wherever honesty demanded. The reader who keeps that distinction will not be misled by me, and the reader who carries this work forward should keep it too.

Correct me. Write to me at the Emajõgi letterpress, by any Postillion who will carry it. I am an old fox, but I can still learn a new track.

Acknowledgments

To the Postillions, who carried every word of the Long Correspondence through weather and distance and the occasional attention of the enforcement, and lost only four letters in a hundred; to the Thread Fleet sailors, who carry what the couriers cannot reach, and to Salem chief among them; to the memory-guilds, who kept in their heads what I did not dare trust to paper; to the salvage guilds of a dozen drowned cities, who let an old woman ride their rotas into the Verge and did not laugh at her spyglass; and above all to my correspondents, whose eyes are the true eyes of this book — Zainab of the Bengal boats, Ingeborg of the Sognefjord seter, Kenji of the Noto edge, Rashid the Gulf falconer, Mwalimu Halima of the lake schools and the Chain of Mothers whose word she carries, Karim of the reed-boats, Salem of the Thread Fleets, old Whitlock of the Trent narrowboats, and my mother’s cousin Ildar in the Astrakhan reeds, who taught me as a girl that a delta is louder than a city and that this is the whole difference between the two.

To my mother, who taught me the word loud and the open hand. To the Meliorists of the Volga bend and the Baltic band, who taught me to name the dead without gloss and the living without a fist. And to the between-born, who will inherit a stranger and greener world than the one their grandparents wrecked, and who will, I hope, be gladder in it than they know.

Set by hand at the Emajõgi letterpress, Tartu-in-the-Selvage, in the thirtieth year. Bound in salvaged board. Long may the between-born walk the Verge, and always be home before dark.