| Plus |
|
|||||
|
Lost
in a timeless landscape It had begun with a phone call one morning in November 1993 from the Director-General of Archaeology, about a trip to a remote part of the jungles of Yala, the premier wild life reserve of Sri Lanka. The mission - to collect geological samples from a famous fossil site far removed from the beaten track. Minihagalkanda, or the rock-shaped-like-a-man as it was known in Sinhalese, was a fossil lens dating back to at least the Eocene Age, (about 20 million years ago), on one of the most uninhabited, dangerous coastlines of South Asia. Dangerous for a variety of reasons; one, it was so far from human habitation and water that any excursion demanded a full -scale expedition, with back-up vehicles. Two, it was the haunt of elephant, sloth bear and the occasional leopard, and none of them took kindly to humans on foot in Yala. Three, Block II of Yala was also occupied by the deadliest predator in the Sri Lankan jungles, the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers. The last time Minihagalkanda had been visited by paleontologists /archaeologists was back in the 1960s by the Director of the National Museum, and his famous father. He was now back with a small team of geologists and archaeologists, to take core samples from some of the sediments here, for dating at the Australian National University, Canberra, and would be camping out in Yala proper for around 3 days. Would I like to come along? After losing my voice for a few seconds, I yelled emphatically "yes", and immediately phoned my mate Cedric, the man for all seasons who would also, I knew, give his eyeteeth to see Minihagalkanda. Man for all
seasons This was the guy who had dived into the wreck of the British aircraft carrier Hermes sunk by the Japanese in WWII, swum with whale sharks, seen blue whales off Trincomalee on the East Coast, canoed the length of the Mahaweli river and trekked across most of Sri Lanka's jungles long before it became fashionable to do so. If there ever was a person who embodied the tenets of George Mallory, Richard Burton (the great African explorer) and Neil Armstrong, it was he. With the colouring of an European, and grey eyes, Cedric stood out in Sri Lanka. He joined the Navy because he fervently believed in a unitary state, not because of hatred towards the Tamil minority. During the anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983, which saw the beginning of the civil war, he had saved the life of Tamil friends and had given them shelter. He loved the island, its paradoxes, and its beauty never ceased to amaze him. Cedric had discovered a new fresh water fish species in the highlands, which had been named after him, Punteyus martensteyni. We agreed, if ever the war ended, and the vast jungles of the East Coast were free to roam around in, that we would go on a hunt for the lost remnants of the Nittaewo, those red-haired hominids supposedly decimated by the aboriginals of Sri Lanka, the Veddahs. It was added onto the list of must-dos in the future. Jungles of
Ruhuna Yala, 375 square miles of scrub jungle, basalt and granite rock outcrops, plains, and freshwater lakes bounded by sea and river. While much of the attention of the visitor is focussed on Yala West, Yala East, 70 square miles across the river, is relatively untrammelled by the hordes, due to its being accessible only a few months of the year. The rains turn this area into a boggy impenetrable marsh. Our goal lay among the high sand dunes which scalloped the eastern border of Yala East. Across another river, the Kumbukkan, lay the Strict Natural Reserve, which was off limits to all visitors, and was now part of the LTTE operational area, as was Yala East, on and off. Apart from Elephant, Sloth Bear, Leopard, Spotted Deer, Sambhur, and the myriad small mammals and reptiles, this sector also was a temporary home to a variety of migrant bird life, such as Avocets, Godwits, Sandpipers, Plovers, Turnstone, and Flamingos. There also was a small resident population of Black-Necked Storks. We zoomed down, through and over the fording point and went into Block II. We were in a dense riverine Gallery Forest, with tall trees for a while, and then the trail burst out into a wide grass savannah, with islands of trees in yellow bloom. Herds of spotted deer or chital (axis axis) browsed in the grass, raising their heads at the sound of engines, long unheard here. Eventually the trees thinned out, leaving great vistas of green plains. It was Serengeti-like, only without the prides of the great cats. This early in the morning, the dew was on the leaves, and in the distance was a small herd of elephants out for breakfast. There was a faint breeze carrying the mixed smells of jungle and sea. It was Elysian, and I wished for a moment's silence and stillness to savour this, but we had to get on. It was pretty miraculous to find one's way through this wilderness with nothing other than memory, but the tracker was good (a couple of years later I was down this way again, and tried to get to Minihagalkanda, but the tracker we had couldn't find his way). Getting out of the vehicles, I got the first scents of the jungles - mimosa, mixed with a million other aromas beyond identification. We began the trek first up the steep dunes, through the small forest cover, and up to the top. There it was, the blue sea, washing up to a pristine shoreline, steeply shelving, Neptune's golden sands, untrodden by human feet. The waves were not of the long, curling white-horsed variety of the South Coast, but small white caps. Along the beach detritus had washed ashore: shells, lots of wood, and the sign of our times, plastic bags. Even on this pristine shore there was no escaping the effects of our tenure on the planet. We came to a basalt dyke, a long rampart of rock which cut across the sand into the sea. Having climbed it, we saw it: the first glimpse of the rock shaped like a man. In fact, it seemed so much like a man with a backpack looking out to sea that it was uncanny. There was a jagged clump of pale brown cliffs just behind it, and this was Minihagalkanda. Another half-hour of slogging through soft sand brought us closer to it, and there it was. A series of rocks that climbed inland led into a small valley off the beach, and the valley was lined by what seems to be crumbling sandstone, tapering to pale brown points outlined against the sky. There was a plethora of colours in the valley, ranging from a dazzling white, through magenta, purple, to grey, black and brown. We walked through
a small defile into the valley, and Miniha-galkanda was ours for
a microsecond in its long, long journey through the vast spaces
of geological time. A land before
time It was easy, looking around, to imagine that we were back a million years or so ago - to imagine humans with minimal technology, just another species struggling to survive in this wilderness. Here, in this lost valley, I could get a sense of the meaning of evolution - not just the intellectual understanding of it, but the reality. I could see the layers of geological time stretched before me, a glimpse into the primeval record of this land, this ocean, and it was sobering. Minihagalkanda would still be here, another thousand, another million years from now, if our species left these spots alone, and our passing would be just one more darkening of its strata. Perhaps the plastic refuse occasionally washing up on the shoreline here would remain as a signpost to our uncaring profligacy. In the here
and now, the heat was intense: the jungle rolled on three sides,
with the sea in the south. Horizons that had remained unchanged
for a few million years. |
||||||
Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
