The Gobi Desert (13 page)

Dumbfounded by such a sight, I myself didn't dare to look in that same direction. We had set up our bivouac the night before at the foot of a sort of cliff, about thirty metres high. In the Gobi, differences in height are rarely greater than that. This cliff was overlooking our camp, in a sort of rocky platform. My heart pounding, I finally made myself turn round, and I in my turn saw, right at the edge of this bastion, what I saw. . . . .

Among the strands of fog, its enormous dimensions distorted and made even more fantastic by the mist, there crouched a prodigious animal, hunched up, tense, as if ready to pounce, resembling a block of immaculate white granite. Curls of pink vapour issued out of its nostrils and throat. There was just enough darkness to allow its two eyes to gleam, like two enormous emeralds.

How long this extraordinary apparition remained there, I have no idea. When it disappeared, with a suddenness which was itself quite miraculous, I stood rooted to the spot for I don't know how long, not daring to move. Then a strong, deep voice, with a slight quaver, rang out. With his hand on my shoulder, Sanders was standing behind me, transformed by ecstasy and jubilation.

‘So Michel, what did I tell you? Now we can really get down to work!'

One after the other Ilichine, Welowski, Neratov, and the Koreans got out of their lorries, stretching and yawning. They didn't know anything, didn't suspect anything. Sanders and I, we were the only ones to have seen.

‘What time are we off, chief?' asked Neratov.

The reply from our leader was curt:

‘We have arrived. We're not going anywhere.'

They all looked at each other, struck dumb. Nain-Sain came up just at that moment and heard what Sanders had said. What a strange man, as I keep on saying! Even in his heavy Mongolian boots, he always seemed to be walking on tip-toe. He and Sanders winked at each other. I was quite calm: if Nain-Sain had not seen, I mean really seen, I was certain that he had guessed.

‘Well lads,' resumed Sanders, who whatever else he did, couldn't hide his excitement, ‘Double rations of tea with milk this morning! I'll explain why in a moment. Michel, while our breakfast is being got ready, why don't you and I go for a little walk?'

And with a mocking smile he added ‘I think that this morning I won't have to insist that you bring your rifle with you.'

*

We set off along a steep track which in a few minutes brought us to the top of the cliff which I was talking about. It had been snowing heavily for most of the night. It didn't take us long to find some formidable footprints. Whatever either of us might have wished, it was no longer possible to delude ourselves. We had not been the victims of a hallucination.

‘What a monster that must be!' I murmured.

‘Hey! Hey!' he said, with his little sidelong smile. ‘I think that if we succeed, we will have really earned our money.'

I followed him mechanically, while he followed the track. Having reached a not very reassuring spot, where the snow was disappearing to reveal a long muddy furrow which ended in a narrow gap in the rocks, he stopped.

‘I have seen what I wanted for today,' he said. ‘If you don't mind, and so as not to tempt the good Lord, we won't go any further.'

Returning back along the same route, we soon got to the edge of the cliff where the fantastic animal had appeared. Very carefully Sanders extracted his endless length of string from his pocket. He gave one end of it for me to hold.

‘That's terrific!' he said. He had also taken out his notebook and recorded a whole series of measurements, which he had just taken with my grudging cooperation. ‘I note that, as far as the cage and the net are concerned, I haven't done badly in calculating on the large side.'

We were at the exact spot, I now realised, where the gigantic beast had been just a short while ago, when it had suddenly appeared out of the mist, braced and ready to leap onto our camp, from where a column of smoke was now rising gently towards us.

Sanders continued:

‘I'm not complaining that the bride is too beautiful, as they say. But all the same Michel, do you realise? Five metres seventy long, not counting the tail which it must hold against its side, seeing as there is no trace of it on the snow. Now if you think of the size of the Manchurian tiger,
felis tigris Manchurica,
the biggest tiger of all, which is no bigger than three metres ninety from the head to the tip of its tail, you can see what kind of phenomenon we are dealing with here. That means that proportionally its shoulders must be two metres twenty in height, the width of its skull fifty-five centimetres, and its weight must be not far off six hundred and fifty kilogrammes. It's a monster, as you can see! The fangs in its jaw, which in our poor little Mikado are six centimetres long, can't be less than twelve centimetres in this one. Great fun for the dentist at the Sydney Zoo! To say that I am astonished by these figures would not really be true. But all the same there is a big difference between what we observe here and what we have only dreamt of up to now.'

‘So you foresaw all this with some precision,' I said, with some incredulity.

‘You yourself are a witness. Just think back a bit.
Felis alba!
The white tiger! When I casually mentioned those two words to you, on various occasions in the bar at the Myako
,
I didn't want to talk about it to anyone else. First of all for fear that someone might steal my secret. And most importantly, so as not to cover myself in ridicule if my efforts were not going to be crowned with success. As for having foreseen all of this, as you put it, it would hardly have been worthwhile to have spent the past twenty years hunting tigers all over the world, if I hadn't given it a bit of thought. The colour of its coat, for a start! If you glanced at the book by Bengt Berg which I gave you, you might have seen what it said about a black tiger, the only one, by the way, whose existence has been officially observed. It was discovered in a forest in Assam, one of those forests where an abundance of rainfall confers an almost mysterious shade of colouring to the countryside. It was the simple application of the law of an animal adapting to its surroundings. Why does an ordinary tiger have a striped coat? Quite simply because it lives in tropical regions. In these surroundings its coat gives the impression of those tricks of light and shade produced by the sun shining on bamboo stalks and tall elephant grasses. It allows the animal with such a camouflage to slip virtually unnoticed through the jungle. It's the same in the case of the hyena and the zebra in those regions where there are sharp contrasts in the light. If we continue to think along these lines, if there is a striped tiger and a black tiger, why should we not suppose that there exists a white tiger! All it needs is a type of landscape where the predominant colour is white, and where the necessary conditions for the life of the animal are not hindered by the local environment. And for me to be sufficiently clever to discover this country, that's all! ‘In the arid highlands of central India,' wrote Berg, ‘the tiger has taken on a lighter colouring; sometimes, albeit rarely, its underlying shade is Isabel, or even white.' Anyway Michel, listen to this sentence from the same book. For the past five years this has been the greatest influence on my life since you have known me, and which is the reason why I am here today: ‘Often there are reports from Indochina: a white tiger has been seen, of a species corresponding to the black panther.' A white tiger! When a man like me gets an idea like that into his head, it's very difficult to get rid of it, do you understand? Even more so when, if it is successful, every satisfaction, every favourable outcome, intellectual as well as financial, will all come together, and that is something worth considering.'

‘Is that why you began by choosing Korea?' I asked, unable to hide any longer the deep anxiety where this peculiar line of argument was leading me.

‘Yes, that's exactly right!' he said triumphantly. ‘You understand, don't you? Korea, ‘The Land of Morning Calm,' the mysterious country famous for the whiteness of its mountains and the openness of its skies. I haven't given up or despaired if events have not lived up to my expectations. Certainly the Mikado is a prize not to be sneezed at. But what is that, I ask you, compared with the creature which we caught a glimpse of just now, and which not only bears out but also far exceeds anything in my wildest dreams? Setting aside the matter of the colour of its hide, there was in fact another question which I had also foreseen, and the dimensions of the net and the cage which I was telling you about a short while ago are the best proof of that, I think. If I had the great good fortune to find myself one day in the presence of him who, in the very depths of my heart I can no longer call anything other than
felis alba,
Kublai, the Snow Tiger, I would already know that it could only be an animal surpassing in size everything that it is possible to encounter in these parts. But I'm getting carried away . . . . ! Fortunately, from now on you are in a position to know that there is nothing more on my part than empty words and nonsense.'

I watched him, going on like this. Was he saying that he considered that his job was now done? A monster such as the one I had just seen, ready to leap onto our camp, was definitely not the same as any other terrestrial creature, protected and safe from the hunter's bullets. Agreed! But we, unfortunately, we were not ordinary hunters, or men who had permission to kill. Our objective was not to shoot our prey, but to capture it alive. You could understand it if I thought our enterprise was no longer an easy task. And it definitely wasn't the commentaries which Sanders was making, with an enthusiasm which was more and more worrying, which might be enough to revive my own enthusiasm.

‘For what Korea has not deigned to grant me, I am grateful to the Gobi Desert. And when you think about it, it's thanks to the Gobi that I started out on this adventure. Where else are you more likely to find surviving examples of the great zoological species which have all but disappeared? And among those examples is the only one which is capable of truly seizing my imagination, in other words the
Machairodus,
or the prehistoric tiger of the caves. Can you imagine, this creature is the same in relation to the ordinary tiger as the gigantic white bear of the Arctic seas is to the poor little brown bears of the Pyrenees. So Michel, you can guess how overjoyed I was this morning. You realise how much the success which I have been pursuing was dependent on the coming together of so many disparate elements. But you could only fully realise that if you noticed a moment ago that squat outline, the massive size of that skull, and the colossal bone structure which gives the creature, in Baikov's phrase, something of antiquity, something elemental, something of the past. All the same, I can't help smiling when I think of those armchair naturalists in my home town of Sydney, and what they will make of it when I present them with this little sample.'

It went without saying that from that moment he was certain of the success of his venture. He no longer had any doubt. None whatsoever.

*

The camp was a hive of activity when we got back. There was something going on, even if it was only due to the double ration of tea with milk and the pitiful state of the animals. The horses and camels had never before been so unsteady on their legs. The dogs were whimpering ceaselessly, in a muffled sort of way. As for the unbearable Kiss, he was making a high-pitched howling noise which literally put your nerves on edge. There couldn't be anything worse than all of this. But this was of no concern to our companions. They knew that it was not for the purpose of gathering nuts that they had been brought at great expense to such a dismal place. Better to bring everything to an end straightaway. The Koreans could return home. And as for the Russians, as had happened after the capture of the Mikado, they could spend some weeks having a good time in the flesh pots of the great centres of civilisation.

But I couldn't help thinking that all this gaiety would have been less natural if everyone had got up, like Sanders and I had that morning, a quarter of an hour earlier. Events would see to it soon enough to show them the difference between the Mikado and Kublai. It was up to Sanders to take the initiative and begin their education, if he judged this to be the right moment. But right now he seemed more concerned to share in the general rejoicing, and even to add to it in his own way. I would have been unwelcome in these conditions if I had played the role of spoilsport. The main thing was that nobody should notice my real feelings, which I concentrated on hiding as best I could, and as everybody was having too much fun to pay any attention to me, I think I more or less succeeded.

*

‘So it's true then, chief. We're not going any further?'

‘So you see, guys! Don't you think we've already come far enough? Right now, I can tell you, we'll need to give it all we've got.'

‘We'll do our best!'

On top of the double ration of tea with milk and butter came vodka. Everybody was laughing and speaking at once, except for Nain-Sain of course, and me as well; I didn't know what to make of that statement:
we'll need to give it all we've got
. How little is needed for unfortunate men to be dragged, even momentarily, out of their miserable condition! This sinister setting, this nameless peril which you could feel hovering around everywhere, all disappeared to make way for childish games, and the practical jokes and pranks of an eight-year-old boy. The dogs began barking in unison. They are fawning creatures, unable to resist being stroked, or responding to the slightest kindly look. As for the horses, they, on the other hand, unintelligent but intuitive, and especially the camels, fatalistic and taciturn, continued to detect a menace, and seemed to hold the secret as to when all this folly would be replaced by reason.

It seemed quite clear that the game had already been played and won, and that there was nothing left for us to do, except for a minor formality which nobody seemed too bothered about. People were hardly listening to Sanders while he assigned a task to each of us, in anticipation of what was to come. It's true, it was hardly necessary for him to go into detail about a plan which had been drawn up a long time ago and which he had gone over so often. The coveted prize was there, we had just had proof of that. Let everyone now do his job exactly, and carry out his orders to the letter, and everything would proceed as had happened with the capture of the Mikado, in other words like clockwork. We would even benefit from the experience gained on that occasion.

I admit it was with some surprise that I listened to our chief as he described the extraordinary event of that morning. Was he intentionally deluding himself about the formidable difficulties which were in store for us? Was he deliberately passing over them in silence, for fear that the morale of his troops would be undermined? I couldn't decide. One remark, however, should have flattered my self-esteem. In the account of the situation which he was busy making, Sanders thought it was appropriate to use the same eloquent and erudite language which he had used with me. Once again, I spared myself from showing him any gratitude.