There Are No Crocodiles in Inner Mongolia

Since I found myself feeling homesick last week and generally not up to the challenge of living in China—maybe just a momentary lapse, but real enough to feel crummy—I decided to pick up Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, first published in 1897. Mary spent the first thirty years of her life living a secluded life in England and eventually caring for her invalid mother. She also avidly consumed the voluminous library of her mostly absent doctor father. When both parents died shortly before she turned thirty, Mary quickly arranged to leave the comforts and safety of England for West Africa. She made three trips, each time decked out in the dress of her times (i.e. full length dresses, high collars), eager to catalogue flora and fauna up the various rivers of West Africa. In many places she was not only the first European woman to venture into the interior parts of West Africa, she was also quite the first European. It was on her last trip in 1900, as a volunteer nurse in South Africa during the Boer War, that she succumbed to enteric fever and died. Her writings are really clever, funny, and insightful; I brought this huge book with me from home knowing that I would revert at some point to my homebody self and need to be perked up, so to speak.

This brings me to a passage I am going to thrust upon you, whether you want it or not (of course you can just stop reading), because it made me laugh and feel better and once again feel complete and total admiration for Mary. She is talking about the ways to explore mangrove swamps and I think the description is wonderful.

This is a fascinating pursuit. But it is a pleasure to be indulged in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake—a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along—and when he has got his foot upon his native heath—that is to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud—he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him—and you get frightened on your own behalf; for crocodiles can, and often do, in such places, grab at people in small canoes. I have known of several natives losing their lives in this way; some native villages are approachable from the main river by a short cut, as it were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost always winding. In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable—until you realize the danger from experience, or have native advice on the point—to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water falling round you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and you find you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about Posterity, and Posterity’s Science, you will jump over into the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum. But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your attention is directed to dealing with an “at home” to crocodiles and mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you. What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps.

Last night I got to the part in Peter Pan where Captain Hook jumps ship into the gaping maw of the crocodile; once the kids were asleep, I read the above passage in my own book and felt that sometimes there is a nice symmetry to life. I figure, what right do I have to moan about lack of library books or friends, when this incredibly brave and funny woman could write so cleverly about such a scary thing? And she didn’t have internet and there are no crocodiles in Inner Mongolia.