Cricket as it was played in the Garden of Eden
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| Adam and Eve play Cricket in the Garden of Eden - Image generated by Craiyon |
With nothing else to occupy my remaining time in the country, I made the rather impulsive decision to veer dramatically off the beaten the track and pay a visit to my old friend, Raymond Truscott, who had put down temporary roots in Boa Vista – a small and remote settlement, situated on the outside of a hairpin meander along the banks of the river Tefé, deep within the State of Amazonas.
It is one of those out of the way places that no doubt serve some purpose, but appear to an outsider to be almost superfluous. What passes for civilization there exerts such a tentative hold upon the encroaching jungle that, if all human activity were to cease, I imagine the area would be entirely reclaimed by nature within the span of a few months and would, thereafter, gradually fade from the maps.
Truscott, who is now retired, was, at the time, a doctor of ornithology, in the pay of the Natural History Museum. He had travelled to Brazil in search of a live specimen of the Marcador Hummingbird, which had become known to science posthumously. Ashton Sherwood had inadvertently flattened one between the pages of The Norris Compendium of South American Birds – a book so large, it has to be transported in its own bespoke carrying trunk. Sherwood's careless act of speciocide was not discovered until he had returned to the United Kingdom when, noting that the book would not longer close properly, he discovered the pressed hummingbird. Mournful zoologists, who conducted an autopsy upon the tiny body confirmed Sherwood's initial suspicion that it was a novel species. Naturally, he was mortified. Having no intention of venturing out on any further expeditions himself, he instead established a small fund that was to be offered, as an incentive, to anyone who was serious about tracking down a live specimen and clearing his conscience.
I arrived in Boa Vista, wilting in the humidity and haemorrhaging bodily fluids, to find the poet Charles Varah waiting for me on the landing stage. He was dressed in a white linen suit, with grimy arm and ankle cuffs, like a 19th century colonist. For unfathomable reasons, he had chosen to accompany Truscott on the expedition in the capacity of assistant. His penchant for spouting urbane witticisms was entirely lost upon the small local population, who had christened him 'Uncle Goose' for reasons that predated my arrival and were never explained to me.
The pair had taken up residence in a pre-fab, four-room bungalow that I was told had, at one time, taken to the water during extreme flooding and drifted along the surface like Noah's Ark. Perhaps in the spirit of this voyage, repairs to the structure appeared to have been made using river flotsam.
Both men were in the grip of cabin fever. The air around them was thick with eccentricity. On my second full day in Boa Vista, they invited me to join them in a game they had invented called 'Brush Cricket.'
“It won't be an official game on account of the formal two player limit,” warned Truscott, as we advanced grimly on the barely-penetrable fringes of the jungle, as if we were about to engage one of Birnam Wood's untamed evolutionary cousins in a head-on confrontation. “We'll document the date of the match in the book of record, but we won't keep note of the scores or any other statistical information. Nonetheless, I think you will enjoy the experience. It's very much cricket the way that Adam and Eve might have played it in the garden of Eden.”
The formal articles of Brush Cricket had been set down by the pair in doctor's scrawl, in a notebook that had been warped like a piece of loose bark by the rainforest humidity.
“As you can see, we have adopted a laid back methodology in our development of the game,” said Varah, as I carefully prised the damp pages of the notebook apart, and attempted to decipher the lines of smudged pencil.
When readying oneself for a game of Brush Cricket, the first challenge is to come to a mutual agreement upon a location for the pitch. This must be a wooded area within the vicinity of a Tree Crane roost. The white-feathered, long-legged birds are ridiculously easy to spot. Occasionally you will see one plummet at a steep angle, impaling the leaf litter with its lance-like beak, as if the ground is a body of water, then erupting in a spray of decaying organic matter clasping some manner of writhing insect, and using its bent legs as a springboard to seamlessly launch itself back into the branches.
“They reminded us both of umpires,” remarked Varah matter-of-factly.
With an area for the batting crease established, a bowling crease must be set up 10 metres distant, along an unobstructed line of sight, a foot or more wide. I naturally assumed that all deliveries would arrive speeding through this narrow corridor. You can imagine my surprise when Varah's maiden ball approached from an acute angle having ricocheted off a succession of tree trunks prior to striking me with significant force on the shoulder.
“Huzzah! Bamboozled you, Redlark!” he cried triumphantly.
A torrent of sweat broke across my forehead as I rubbed my fresh bruise.
“The fruits of my misspent years as a student in the back alley snooker halls of Cambridge,” he explained later.
Truscott was a more conventional bowler. I sent his first ball cracking like an exploratory gunshot into the undergrowth, with the ornithologist in hot pursuit of it.
“There's no hurry,” advised Varah, as I made off from the wicket at a trot, expecting him to keep pace.
We strolled in a leisurely manner back and forth between the stumps.
“I am composing an essay exploring the influence of de Sade on the poet Isidore Ducasse,” he confessed.
“You think they'd have got on?” I enquired.
“I think that whenever an attempt is made to recreate Sodom and Gomorrah, there is only room for one apex pervert. I think they'd have probably banged heads.”
“And other bits?”
“Spiked dildos at dawn, maybe.”
The sound of Truscott crashing through the jungle in the direction of the wicket brought our conversation to a premature end.
In Brush Cricket, after every over, the orientation of the pitch is pivoted clockwise around the wicket until a new line of sight is established. The game ends when it comes around full circle, with all bowling corridors having been exploited.
“The best pitch we ever found had 27 clear angles of attack,” recalled Truscott as we returned to the bungalow. “We were both flat out exhausted by the end of it, but we both knew we had to see it through.”
"Our honour as sportsmen was at stake," nodded Varah.
Over subsequent days I was to learn more of the quirks of the game. We were fifteen minutes into the first over when the entire jungle was momentarily silenced by an unholy screeching.
“Right, that's it for the day,” announced Truscott.
“As far as we can tell, it's an evolutionary cousin of the lemur,” explained Varah. “We've never seen one in the flesh. Apparently they are nocturnal. It's regarded as a bad omen to hear one during the day.”
The forfeit for the lowest run total in a week was a two-day round-trip downriver, by crowded motor launch, to a staging post where the pair of explorers were delighted to be able to procure Kellogg's Cornflakes and Laughing Cow spreadable cheese. The latter melted almost immediately.
I was earmarked for the journey, though at the last minute Varah said that he would accompany me on the first leg of my return to civilisation. He would ask to be dropped off at the supply depot and then wait for a boat to take him back the other way while I continued to head towards the Amazon river. As it turned out, we stopped there to refuel. Varah and I spent a couple of hours on the landing stage successfully line fishing with cornflakes, prior bequeathing our catch to a local, who went through the dying fish in our bucket one by one and tossed most of them back.
“I've made a discovery while I've been here," Varah announced as my boat was preparing to leave.
When I said nothing in response, he continued:
"Conrad's heart of darkness is very much informed by the underlying character of the men who choose to venture upriver. As you can probably tell, Raymond and myself are both ridiculous in our own way. It's probably the thing that's stopped us from killing each other. It is also the reason why neither one of us is likely to rise to the peak of our chosen professions.”
"What about the hummingbird?" I asked.
"Collateral damage. Ashton closed the book on that one. In hindsight, he should have taken it as a sign. Not everything wants to be discovered and documented."
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