Thomas Harlow’s first thought was: My God, that’s an ugly animal. He didn’t know if God existed, but he was certain that this giant tortoise was the ugliest he had ever seen. But it was the last of its kind. That was why Thomas was there at Santa Cruz, thousand of miles far away from home, a few air miles to Ecuador and many sea miles from Ecuador to the Galapagos islands.
‘George’, he said to the tortoise. ‘Hello, George.’
It was hot. He was nervous.
‘Are you nervous?’ the woman next to him asked.
He forced a smile.
‘It’s hot,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘We are near the equator. The sun is almost vertically above us. George is lucky with his shell. It’s as if he was born with a big hat to protect him against the sun.’ She laughed.
She was young, almost childlike. Her hair was dark and her eyes darker. He asked himself why such a beautiful woman would want to spend her life with an ugly tortoise.
‘Do you see the curve at the front of his shell?’ she asked, ‘the saddle, as we say. It is unique. There are many different tortoises but this one is an Abingdonii. There is only one left…’
He nodded. He knew all this. She had written to him several times. ‘Nobody knows how old he is,’ she said. ‘Something between 50 and 80. I would be nervous speaking to such a rare creature. I am so curious about what he is going to tell you…what he likes…tell him that we are going to do everything…’ She pressed her slim hands together, opened her mouth as if she wanted to add something, closed it again and walked off on one of the tidy paths at the Charles Darwin Research Centre. She left him alone.
He was alone with the world’s ugliest tortoise, a burning equatorial sun and an impossible mission. She had thought he was nervous because he didn’t know what George would tell him. But she was wrong. He was nervous because he was frightened she would find out that he was a fraud. George would not tell him anything. She had invited him to come because she had found his website. Now, he cursed his website.
Dr. Thomas Harlow, animal psychologist, it said on his webpage in a blue font with a purple background. ‘Do you have a problem with your loved one? I can offer an unusual solution. I can talk to your pets. After years of meditation and exercises I have learned to talk to animals.
‘I tune myself into their wavelength and receive the signals of their thoughts. This is the best method to establish the needs of your dog or cat, and for more difficult animals I can offer psychoanalysis. Often the difficulties are hidden in the past. Choose the path that many others have chosen before you. Get in touch with Dr Thomas Harlow.’
He had sat in front of many dogs and cats and had looked them straight in the eye. For hours. For days. For years. And he had never ever heard a single word, or felt a thing. The truth was, he disliked dogs and cats. He disliked all animals. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t particularly like humans either. He certainly didn’t feel guilty about cheating on them. But his PhD was real. He had a PhD in botany. He didn’t believe in psychoanalysis. He did not believe in signals. He believed in the money that he earned.
It was good money. Pet owners were happy when someone told them their cat needed a cat tree, or that their dog bit the postman because as a puppy an evil postman kicked him. But this was different. This was a big thing. For years, scientists from all over the world had tried to encourage George, the last example of the Abingdonii Tortoise, to mate and reproduce. Reproduce, at least, with similar tortoises. But George had refused. When he died his species would be extinct. And humans would feel guilty.
‘Talking to animals,’ said a voice behind him. ‘That’s something you can do? You tune into the right wavelength. You understand the signals of their thoughts. What else? Do you fly as well if the wind has the right wavelength?’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘You are welcome to poke fun at me,’ said Thomas. ‘But leave me in peace now while I give it a try.’
The person behind him giggled. No. The giggling did not come from behind him. It came from in front of him.
‘Idiot,’ said the voice. ‘Signals. Wavelengths. Psychoanalysis. Ha!’
Thomas blinked. There was nobody in front of him. Only George. George stood on his huge ugly legs near the pond, stretched his wrinkly neck and looked at him with his small eyes. ‘I know what you are thinking,’ said the voice.
‘You are thinking: ugly.’
Thomas twitched. ‘George?’ he asked silently.
‘It’s Jorge actually, but you can call me George,’ the voice said. It was the voice of an old man—the kind of old man you see in hospitals complaining about the food.
‘I am still Ecuadorian even if most researchers speak English.’
‘You…you are speaking…to me? Here, now? In… my language?’
‘I have had enough time to learn English. There is not much to do around here.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘I can do it… I can really do it!’ he stammered. ‘All this magic with the dogs and cats…and I didn’t know that I can really do it! That’s impossible. I can really talk to animals!’
‘Nonsense,’ said George. ‘You can’t do anything. I talk to humans. Sit down again. It’s impossible to have a conversation with you up there.’
Thomas realised that he had jumped up. He sat down again on the stone wall surrounding the turtle enclosure. His knees were shaking.
‘How do you know what my website says?’
George laughed. It was the hoarse laughter of an old man. The wrinkles on his neck trembled. ‘What if I tell you that I have internet access as well? The connection is sometimes bad but usually I get all the information I need.’ He laughed even more when he saw Thomas’s face. He shook his wrinkly neck and roared with laughter.
‘You didn’t believe that, did you?’ he giggled.
‘You don’t have access to the internet, do you?’
‘My God, I am a tortoise, not a human. Camilla told me about it. The human being with the beautiful eyes who was here a short while ago. The one who got you here.’
‘If you can talk to the humans…why don’t you speak to Camilla?’
‘Imagine if I would speak to the people in the centre. What a to-do there would be! It’s more than enough that I am the last of my species.’
Thomas shook his head and tried to think clearly.
‘Ok,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk. They want you to reproduce, so that your species doesn’t become extinct. They want to ask you what’s wrong. I mean there are two lovely female tortoises in the enclosure…’
The females were busy eating leaves. They were a bit smaller than George but otherwise looked the same as him.
‘I could tell you a secret’, whispered George.
‘Anything to do with those two over there?’
‘With them? No. It is a really, really big secret.’ He winked conspiratorially and moved closer on his clumsy feet.
‘My secret begins in the past. It is an old secret from way back when I was born. Well actually, I was laid, as an egg, on a beach not far from here. On Pinta island.
‘Back then everything was different, of course. Pinta Island was covered with rain forest. Sunflower trees opened their umbrella-like blossoms over the dense jungle of cat’s claw and ferns. Mistletoe and orchids climbed over branches and in the humid air thousands of birds sang, animals rustled, insects flew…and further down, the butterfly bush with its white blossoms and heavy branches, swayed in the wind. As for the beach, ahh yes, the beach was filled with the fragrance of the passionflower; its flowers so complicated…and Darwin’s cotton shining in yellow lampions. But on the rocky coast where only the whisker cactus grew, there I was hidden in a cave.
‘I hatched on a Monday. Of course, I could not have known that it was a Monday but it felt like a Monday. Like a beginning.
‘The shell of the egg burst. I waited for a while to see if anything would happen. Nothing happened. The only thing I heard was the cracking of another eggshell. I started to dig upwards to leave the cave. Another tortoise dug alongside me. Perhaps there were more tortoises behind us, I don’t know. But at some stage the sunlight was shining into my eyes and I saw her. She was very pretty with her oval shell and her four slim legs.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you want to discover what it is, this world?”
‘The other tortoise didn’t say anything. She seemed a little shy. But when I started walking she followed me. We left the shrubs and reached the rocky beach and then we saw the sea. It was so blue and so big and so endless.
“Let’s have a closer look,” I said.
“But we are land tortoises,” she said.
“Only a look,” I said.
‘In this moment a shadow approached over the rocks. And we lifted our heads. Above us flew a buzzard. I knew that it was a buzzard and that it meant certain death. I knew that I had to do something, something special, something tortoises do—but I didn’t know what.
‘I looked at the endless blue sea.
“Dive.” I said.
“We are land tortoises,” she said.
‘But I had started running. I ran as fast as I could towards the blue. With a last final leap I reached it. The blue water felt cool and new. I was frightened of the deep and of…infinity. But my legs knew how to swim. When I surfaced and looked back, I saw the buzzard again, up in the air. He was carrying something in his talons. The tortoise that had hatched next to me, was nowhere to be seen on the beach.
‘When I climbed back on land I was very, very sad. Only a few minutes in this world and I already knew about laughter and infinity, about death and sadness. These were all big things for a small tortoise. Without this other tortoise, my life seemed to make no sense.
‘I gave a name to the other tortoise. I called her Sentida, a Spanish word meaning Heartfelt.
‘In time I grew and grew. Bigger and bigger and bigger… I am a Galapagos giant tortoise, the largest living tortoise…an Abingdonii. Back then there were many of us. I ate leaves and drank dew and when no other tortoise was looking I swam in the infinite sea.
‘When I was a grown up and could reach the blossoms of the yellow cotton, a Monday came again. The feeling that it is Monday, I mean. A feeling of a fresh start. Like a colour that one can only smell with one’s big toe, if one breathes very quietly. I was six years old and far from being an adult. I moved my head gently into my shell to think about things—when suddenly someone cleared their throat.
“Hello,” said the voice, which sounded familiar. “Excuse me…are you the tortoise who said DIVE?”
“Dive?” I asked and appeared from my shell.
‘And if I weren’t a tortoise I would have fallen over in astonishment. In front of me was HER. Sentida.
“You are…but…the buzzard!” I stuttered.
‘Sentida sighed. “I am one of the few tortoises that ever flew. I dived, back inside my shell.”
“That was it!” I exclaimed. “That was what one had to do!”
“The buzzard realised that he couldn’t eat me and then dropped me on the other side of the island,” said Sentida.
“I ran into the sea thinking that I might be able to swim. Therefore I swam. When I returned to the land the Buzzard had gone.”
“What a surprise to bump into each other again!” I exclaimed. “After all these years!”
“Coincidence, well…” said Sentida and look down on her toes. “I… I am not very good at finding things again. That’s how women are. It took me years to return here to find you.”
I learned a new thing that Monday. I discovered happiness. Unlike a buzzard it has no talons.’ George fell silent. ‘No talons,’ he repeated after a while.
‘And the secret?’ asked Thomas. ‘You wanted to tell me about a secret.’
‘Secret?’ The eyes of the old tortoise were still looking into the past.
‘Yes. It’s about a treasure. A treasure everyone is looking for. But I am tired. Return tomorrow. Then I will tell you about the treasure.’
‘I will not be able to sleep,’ Thomas said. ‘I will think about the treasure all night long. Tell me one last thing. The ladies over there? Why do you not…’
The female tortoises were still eating their leaves. ‘Their lives seem to depend on leaves,’ George snorted. ‘They are not from my kind.’
‘But they are closely related to your kind.’
‘Would a human kiss an orang-utan?’
Thomas thought for a moment. ‘That depends,’ Thomas laughed.
‘Depends on how much he’s drunk before.’
‘Who, the human or the orang utan?’
‘We can see each other tomorrow,’ he said. George nodded with his wrinkly neck. He did not seem so ugly anymore. Only very old. ‘Say hello to Camilla,’ he said. ‘The human with the beautiful dark eyes.’
Camilla sat on a wall at the entrance of the centre. She was nervously chewing her nails. When she saw Thomas she jumped up.
‘What did he say? Why doesn’t he want to have children?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘We are not there yet,’ he replied. ‘Psychology is a complicated thing. I believe that the problem lies in his childhood. We have just reached the point when he is six years old.’
Then he strolled away towards the coast in search of a place where he could steal a view of Pinta Island. He might possibly have to walk to the other end of Santa Cruz. He hoped it would not take him six years.
* * *
‘So. Did you have a rest?’ asked Thomas.
‘Yes thank you, it was alright,’ replied George. ‘At my age I don’t sleep well anymore. Mostly I just close my eyes and look into the past. I can choose what part of the past I want to live in. It all depends on my mood.’
He observed Thomas with his sparkling eyes. ‘But you are young and impatient. You want to hear about the treasure. It is valuable, very valuable. To be precise, it has a value of ten thousand dollars.’ Thomas whistled through his teeth. Ten thousand dollars, he thought, would come in very handy.
‘At around six years old a tortoise is learning what to eat, how to forecast the weather, how to withdraw into its shell and how to live in its own imagination and memories. Sentida and I learned these things together. We spent every day together except those times when she got lost. She never learned how to find her way back to me so it was my job to find her. We spent ten years learning together. Life was peaceful. Then one day the goats arrived, brought here by humans. The first pair of goats were a bit stupid but did not upset anyone. But this pair of goats created a young one. And when they grew, they gave birth to other young ones. Suddenly there were more and more goats. Every now and then the humans came and killed some goats to eat. But they could never eat them all.
‘The goats however ate everything. They ate the tender grass in the glades, the yellow leaves of the cotton. Then they ate the white passionflowers and the silver bark of the torchwood trees. Then the cafetillo bush. Finally, they ate the jungle. They climbed the trees on their hooves and they ate and ate. Nothing was left for us. It wasn’t the fault of the goats. They were trapped on the island. They weren’t buzzards, they couldn’t fly away. They had to eat what they could find.
‘Then rats arrived on the island as well. They must have come with the boats. The rats ate our eggs. Sentida and I walked long distances to find just a few yellow blossoms of the cotton plant. We walked miles to find food. The jungle disappeared and there was no shade. Pinta Island became a desert.
‘Over time, I changed as well. I became an adult. During the cool nights when I was inside my shell, I became all tingly when I thought about Sentida who slept next to me. I thought about the wrinkly skin around her neck and legs, her smooth shell and her small nostrils… I fell in love.
‘I started to behave like an idiot. I gazed at the moon at night, asking her to speak to Sentida for me. I wandered alone around the island composing poems, but couldn’t think of a word that rhymed with tortoise.
‘I was living in a fantasy world in which I had saved Pinta Island. I was a hero. Sentida and I were sitting together in a sea of yellow cotton wool.
‘Then one day I woke up from my dreams.
‘I saw that the island was bare. The jungle had disappeared. The goats had eaten everything. All that was left was dry grass, cacti and bare rocks. I shouted: “No! It’s not possible! Sentida? Sentida, where are you?” But Sentida was not there. Lost again? Everyone had left. Everyone.
‘Only I had survived, deep in my shell, with my poems of moonlight and dreams.
‘Around me lay empty shells. All the turtles had died.
‘I searched for long time for the empty shell of my Sentida.
‘Finally, I sat down on the rocks and gazed at the sea. I wished that tortoises could cry. I recited my second rate poems that Sentida would never hear. But then I heard a quiet voice.
“George? George, is that you?”
‘I turned around. It was her. It was really her. She poked her head and her legs out of the shell next to all the empty shells. She came over to me and whispered: “I am so weak. I thought I was dead.”
‘I whispered: “But you are not dead.” And then I believe we kissed each other.
‘At that time, just offshore a boat arrived and stopped nearby. Humans came to our island. Sentida hid inside her shell. But I could not hide anymore. I walked over to the humans. I wanted to tell them my opinion about the stupid idea with the goats. But these were not the humans who had brought the goats, they were different. They simply carried me off to their boat and I was too weak to resist. I shouted: “Sentida!” I don’t know if she could hear me. The boat left. We sailed into the endless blue and I didn’t know what to do.
‘The last female tortoise of my kind sat on Pinta Island and would now starve to death.’
‘Did she starve to death?’ asked Thomas. George looked at him for a long time.
‘What do you believe?’ he asked finally. Thomas slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You have such a mysterious grin on your face.’
‘You haven’t asked for the treasure. The ten thousand dollar treasure.’
Thomas nodded. ‘I had forgotten about it.’
‘You are making progress’, said George.
‘In what?’
‘In forgetting the unimportant things. Dollars are unimportant. You can’t buy a female giant tortoise for ten thousand dollars. But this is exactly what humans try to do. Ask Camilla. And come again tomorrow, I will be waiting for you.’
Just like before, Camilla sat at the entrance. Today she chewed on her hair. ‘Did you get the answer?’ she asked him.
‘I believe he needs a female of his own kind.’
‘There isn’t one. We offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could bring one to us. Nobody did. On Isabella Island someone found a tortoise that perhaps is related to an Abingdonii. The whole island was searched. But no, nothing. There is no female of this species left alive.’
‘Perhaps there is,’ said Thomas. ‘And I believe I know someone who knows where she is.’
‘What?’
‘Give me a little more time,’ he asked her. ‘George is a stubborn old gentleman. It is not easy to extract things from him. But he sends his regards.’ He swallowed. ‘Would you go for dinner with me tonight?’
She nodded. ‘Did George suggest you ask me?’
‘Indirectly,’ said Thomas.
* * *
The sun at the equator was shining as hot as usual on the third day of Dr Thomas Harlow’s visit. But suddenly he felt that he was in the right place. The sea was infinite and blue.
‘George,’ he said when he climbed into the tortoise compound. ‘I am thinking silly things.’
‘You are in love,’ said George. He seemed to be grinning.
‘Tell me about the treasure’, begged Thomas. ‘Tell me about Sentida. She is the treasure, isn’t she?’
‘Of course,’ answered George. ‘They brought me here to Santa Cruz. They looked after me. They gave me food to eat. And many researchers came to study me. I became famous but I was not happy. Every night I dreamt about Sentida, alone on Pinta Island. At full moon I sat in my enclosure and asked the big white tortoise of the moon to look after her.
‘On one of these full moon nights, I believed I heard her voice. “George!” she called very quietly. “George! I am here!”
“Are you a dream?” I asked
“Turn your head!” said the voice in the dream. “To the right. No left! I still don’t know right from left.”
‘I turned my head and saw her in the shadow of the research centre. I found a hole in fence and escaped through it. We both left the centre together.
‘Sentida spoke. “I was with you on the boat. I smuggled myself on board when nobody was watching. I was hiding underneath a pile of ropes. I arrived with you at Santa Cruz. But unfortunately, I walked off in the wrong direction!” We laughed together as we did when we were small tortoises. And it’s possible that we kissed again. We talked all night long. When it was morning, some men approached calling my name. Sentida was so terrified that she walked off.
‘They put me back into my enclosure and fixed the hole in the fence. And from then on there was no chance to escape. The humans said: “We were so worried about you. What if something had happened to you? What if you had lost your way? What if you hadn’t found any food?”
“I don’t lose my way. I am not Sentida.” But they didn’t hear that.
‘From that day on, Sentida visited me at every full moon. And we kissed through the fence even though it was a bit difficult.
“Let them catch you!” I whispered. “They only want us to multiply. You could join me and once you’ve laid some eggs, they will let us go. You will see!”
‘She shook her head. The wrinkles around her neck were so beautiful. “I am frightened of humans,” she whispered.
“I’m staying here where I am free. You must come out to me. You must find a way.”
‘But I didn’t find a way. And every full moon night I begged her to let herself be caught. And every time, she said no. But still she came. I think those were our best years.
‘Those years turned into decades, and we became old.
‘Slowly, things changed. “George, I love you,” turned into “George, eat more lettuce.” “George, please escape,” became, “George be careful you have a weak heart. George do this and George do that. George, don’t bathe in the dirty pool. George, move into your shell or you will catch a cold. George, don’t go into the sun so much.”
‘I did not enjoy the full moon anymore. She even spoke to other female tortoises about me. She told them they should keep an eye on me because I was not young anymore.’
‘But where is she?’ asked Thomas finally. ‘You said Sentida is the treasure, didn’t you? And you said you knew where she is. Where?’
‘Well,’ said George and looked into the distance.
‘Well, what?’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ said George. ‘I’m not going to tell you. I would like to have a bit more peace. Only a little while; a couple of days: maybe a few years. We can get very old us tortoises, we can live to 200 years old, I believe. There is no hurry. I would like to enjoy the peace and quiet. Eating unhealthy things. Bathing in dirty water. When the time is right, I will tell Camilla where Sentida is.’
Thomas leaned over George very close to his old head. ‘Tell me where she is!’ he whispered insistently. ‘Tell me now! You have enjoyed your peace for long enough!’
George closed his mouth and looked at Thomas, stubbornly holding his tongue.
Camilla walked up behind him and asked: ‘Have you found out anything? Do you know where she is?’
Then George put his head to the side and winked at him.
‘Camilla,’ said Thomas and climbed out of the enclosure. ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
He took a deep breath. ‘There are two things. First, I—I love you.’
‘Oh,’ said Camilla. ‘Will you be staying here then?’
‘Perhaps. I am going to think about that. It depends if you are going to force me to eat lettuce when we grow old.’
She laughed. ‘Perhaps. I will think about it. And second?’
‘Do you promise that you won’t get angry with me?’
‘I promise.’
He took her hands in his and looked briefly at George who looked terrific for an elderly gentleman tortoise. He winked at him.
‘Second—I can’t really talk to animals.’