WHENEVER I APPROACH an island from the air, I think the Wright brothers went too far. Seeing the island suddenly appear beneath you is nothing like watching a high tropical island grow up out of the ocean. From a ship you first see a white mass of cumulus clouds piled high on the horizon. Then the clouds detach themselves from the sea, and the tips of the highest peaks, small and remote, stipple the edge of the sky like separate islets. Finally, as the land slowly comes up over the curve of the earth, the peaks grow together and rise green and brown on a writhing line of white where the surf splinters on the shore.

But Madagascar is really more of a continent than an island. I was glad, then, to have my first view of La Grande Île from the pilot's compartment of an Air France jet flying at 31,000 feet. The thousand-mile-long island-continent lies off the southeast coast of Africa like a gigantic footprint on the Indian Ocean. There is nothing between the southernmost tip of Madagascar and Antarctica but 3,000 miles of heaving gray sea and howling winds. This is truly the land au bout du monde, at the end of the earth, as Malagasy poet Flavien Ranaivo calls it.

Home of the Lemur and a Giant Bird

The 13th-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo never saw Madagascar. Nevertheless, he spoke the truth when we wrote, "You must know that this island is one of the biggest and best in the whole world." And, he might have added, one of the most singular. Only three islands on earth--Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo--exceed it in size, and none surpasses Madagascar in the oddity and variety of its plants and beasts.

Whatever Madagascar's origin, the island must have been isolated for a very long time. Strange animals and plants found there exist nowhere else on earth. Lemurs, the great-eyed monkeylike creatures that represent one dead end in the primates' upward groping toward man, lead the peculiar fauna. But subfossil bones of creatures that lived until comparatively recent times reveal a pygmy hippopotamus no bigger than a dog, a lemur the size of a small pony, and a gigantic bird that laid the largest known eggs.

When I was a boy, I read a short story about that bird. It was called "Aepyornis Island," a fantasy written by that master of English prose H. G. Wells The story tells of a professional collector who went to Madagascar to search for aepyornis eggs. Although the birds have been extinct for several centuries, in the tale one of the eggs hatches, and the chick grows 15 feet high^A.

I never forgot that story. One of my principal reasons for coming to Madagascar was to try to find an egg of this titanic bird.

Now the plane's pilot lightly pressed his hands forward and the horizon rose to meet us, a long coastline colored like Mars, ocherous red with touches of green.

Dead ahead lay the port of Majunga, on the broad delta of the Betsiboka. From the river's mouth spread a fan of red, staining the blue Mozambique Channel as though the lifeblood of Madagascar poured from some deep laceration where man had grievously wounded the earth.

Man the Destroyer has slashed and burned most of the great forest that once covered nearly all of Madagascar, exposing the bare earth. Eroding rains have washed away much of the organic matter in the denuded soil, leaving a very high proportion of oxidized aluminum and iron salts.

As we flew southward toward Antananarivo, the capital (the French spell it Tanananrive), the ocher hills, dusted with yellow green, rose toward the mountains that run the length of Madagascar. In folds between the hills lay dark wedges of forest. Pockets of water caught the light as we passed.

Malagasy Ancestry Lies to the East

It was December, the beginning of the austral summer, and the rice fields of the high valleys were flooded with rain. The tender green of the young rice lay on the red earth as though a palette knife had spread rectangles of vivid color on the valley floors.

At the airport I was struck by the appearance of the Malagasy (pronounced MAHL-a-GAHSH-y). Brown-skinned and fine-boned, with straight black hair and large luminous eyes, many of them would have passed unnoticed on the streets of Bangkok or Papeete. The highland Malagasy, though close to Africa, are not of it. They call themselves Malayo-Polynesians, and their ancestors came, according to linguistic, cultural, and anthropological evidence, from somewhere in southeastern Asia. How and when they came to Madagascar is one of the major enigmas of the "Mysterious Island."

In the taxi I took to Antananarivo a sign in French read: "City, 100 francs. Upper city, 150 francs. Cortèges, Marriages, Funerals, Exhumations, Price to be Debated." I asked the driver about the exhumations.

"We Malagasy," he said, "open the tombs of our ancestors every now and then, and wrap the bodies in new shawls, so as not to leave them in nakedness.

"You come from America? If a man has plenty of money, and likes the busy life, that's the place. But if he wants a tranquil life, on little money, let him come to Madagascar.

"I was going to take a job in your country. When the American consul gave me the papers, I read the address: it was 4500 Something Street in Chicago. When I saw that, I tore up the document. Any place that has street addresses in four figures is not for me."

Antananarivo, 4,000 feet above sea level, rises threatrically from the plain and is built on hills. The houses of the old town, like overlapping rectangles of pink, brown, and blue in a cubist painting, cluster round and beneath the austere outline of the century-old gray stone Palace of the Queen.

Today Tana, as the French call it, is bursting at the hills, and surrounding rice fields are being drained to build housing developments for the teeming population. The straight and flat approaches leading into the lower city pullulate with people and vehicles. Great buses belching clouds of black diesel fumes block the way of motorcycles, two-cylinder Citroën taxis, Renault station wagons, oxcarts, rickety rickshas on their last wheels, and throngs of pedestrians.

I bought a secondhand Renault from a firm called Madauto. That name aptly describes the driving in Antananarivo. Taught by the wheel-mad French, the Malagasy outdo their teachers. They come rocketing out of obscure side streets into the busiest avenue in town. After two or three near misses that left me shaken, I began to get the hang of the thing, and soon I was in there expressing myself with my car like all the rest.

Strong Ties Still Link Isle to France

Under the arcades on the broad Avenue de l'Indépendence, cafe terasses recall the sidewalk cafes of France. Signs everywhere are in French, and many of the Malagasy are bilingual. The city and its people reflect the years of French influence that have shaped their special character.

The French attempted their first permanent settlement in La Grande Île in 1642, but did not really establish themselves as the dominant influence until the end of the 19th century. In 1895, to "protect the rights" of French citizens, France sent an expeditionary force to conquer the island. The French dominion in Madagascar lasted 63 years and 14 days. On October 14, 1958, Madagascar declared the Malagasy Republic.

Gallic culture has always left a deep imprint on the people of France's overseas possessions; the world is full of dark-skinned "Frenchmen." The first President of the Malagasy Republic, His Excellency M. Philibert Tsiranana, emphasized this in an interview.

"We think French," he said. "The rapport that exists between us and France is first of all the rapport of friendship. And France is the biggest customer for Malagasy products. But above all, the most valuable heritage France left us is French culture. That will always link us closely to France."

The President is a robust, brown-skinned man with a round, open countenance and a disarmingly frank manner. He is of the Tsimihety tribe, a lowlander from northern Madagascar.

M/ Tsiranana spoke of the origin of the Malagasy peoples. "We are the only true Afro-Asians," he said. "Geographically we are an island of Africa, but our people are of diverse origins, principally Asian with some African and even Arab influence.

"We are separated from Africa by a channel only 250 miles wide. Our ancestors, who probably came to Africa from Southeast Asia by way of India, must have crossed the channel to settle on our shores."

Nobody really knows. The most any scientist will venture is that by the end of the first Christian millennium man was already well settled on the island.

Although there are only six million people--and ten million lyre-horned cattle--in all Madagascar, the population is exploding geometrically. Having read that the President was against "the Pill" and all other forms of birth control, I asked him why.

Families Urged to Have 12 Children

"There are not enough Malagasy in Madagascar," he said. "Our country has plenty of uncultivated plains and valleys; it is manpower that we lack. I want every Malagasy to have at least 12 children."

Many of them already do. Although Madagascar's chief crop is rice, which is seemingly planted everywhere, the government has had to import rice for the past three years as the population growth has outstripped the harvests.

When I left the President's palace, I drove higher up the ridge to the summit and the Palace of the Queen. Against the somber stone structure, a square building with a tower at each corner, a sad wind blew trumpet-shaped jacaranda blossoms into drifts like pale violet snow. The stone palace, built by a Scottish architect in 1866, completely sheathes an earlier edifice of wood.

The original palace was built in 1839 for Queen Ranavalona I, a virago of the Merina dynasty who, turning against the Christianized Malagasy and all European influence, had five thousand of her subjects put to death.

Near the palace stands the single-room dwelling, in dark wood and high-peaked thatch, of King Andrianampoinimerina, most famous of the dynasty. The light-skinned Merina, most Polynesian of Madagascar's peoples, and its largest tribal group, inhabit the highlands.

Andrianampoinimerina was the first to unify by conquest the people of the high plateaus, achieving this in the early 1800's. His ambition looked beyond the horizon, and he used to say, "Ny riaka no valamparihiko--The sea is the limit of my rice field." His dominion never reached the sea, but his successors continued his conquests until, by 1860, they ruled nearly all Madagascar and held most of the other peoples in tribute, and even slavery. Since independence, lowlanders have gained political ascendancy.

Like the Polynesian dialects to which it is related, the Malagasy language speaks in metaphors and poetic imagery. And here is still another mystery of Madagascar: Although its peoples are subdivided in 17 major tribes, varying in appearance from Asian to African, all speak the same tongue, with minor variations.

Foreigners find the polysyllabic language, which combines whole phrases in words of inordinate length, difficult to pronounce. I told M. Ranaivo, who is the Malagasy Director of Information as well as a poet, that I had seen some exceedingly long names in the list of Merina kings. M. Ranaivo looked over my list.

"Those aren't really long," he said. "Here is one for you." After writing for what seemed to be half a minute, M. Ranaivo handed me a slip of paper. I read: Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka.

"It means," said M. Ranaivo, " 'The Beloved Prince of Imerina Who Surpasses the Reigning Prince.' That was too long even for the Malagasy, so they shortened it"--he smiled slightly--"to Andrianampoinimerina."

Remembering that the Malagasy make sacrifice to Andrianampoinimerina as a revered ancestor, I later asked a Malagasy friend about religious beliefs.

He said, "The missionaries did their work well here. Most of the highlanders are Protestant Christian. The Catholics have more strength in the south, where the Lazarist Fathers came in 1648 with the Sieur de Flacourt.

"But let me tell you something, monsieur. We Malagasy are merely vaccinated with Christianity. There is not one Malagasy, no, not one, not even among the evolved [Europeanized] people, who would think of building a house without consulting the soothsayer as to the auspicious day to start. The old beliefs are not dead.

"We Malagasy believe in a single deity; we call him Andriamanitra, the Perfumed Lord, or Zanahary, but we also believe our ancestors will intercede with God for us if we make sacrifice and pray to them."

This reverence for ancestors, and the sense of their nearness even after death, explain the preoccupation with death, the tombs built half below and half above the ground, and the rejoicing with which the ancestors are taken up into the sunlight periodically.

"The greatest insult that can be offered to a Malagasy," M. Ranaivo told me, "is to wish that his skull may never lie alongside those of his ancestors. If a Malagasy dies far from home, it is the filial duty of his children or other members of the family to bring his body back to the ancestral tomb.

"When the time comes, the mpanandro, an astrologer, stands before the tomb and addresses the dead one thus: 'O you who rest in this place, we come to tell you that tomorrow, when the Eye of Day is half along its course, we will take you and lead you to the Land of Ancestors, where you will lie forever with your family. Therefore be not absently gazing at yourself in the spring, nor captive to the charms of the valley; be at the meeting-place upon the hour.'

"When the body has lain a tomb so long that the silken lambamena, the shawls in which it was wrapped, have disintegrated, it is time for the family to replace the wrappings. The tomb is opened every four or five years and the remains taken out and carefully enveloped in new lambamena. The people dance and sing on the way to the village, tossing their burden up and catching it again. Everyone rejoices; this is not a sad occasion, but a happy reunion with the beloved ancestors. After the body has lain under a special awning while cattle are sacrificed and there is more dancing, they carry it back and replace it in the tomb, which is sealed until the next famadihana, the turning of the dead."

Pacific Paradise in the Indian Ocean

When I remarked to M. Ranaivo that the Malagasy reminded me of Polynesians, he said I should visit their own Tahiti. He meant Nosy Be, a small island off the northwest coast.

I found nearly all the classic South Sea enticements at Nosy Be: coral reefs and vivid fish, outrigger canoes, coconut palms, magnificent beaches. The little postcard port, with red and white houses facing a semicircular bay, bears the singularly inappropriate name of Hell Ville, after one Admiral de Hell, who in 1841 accepted cession of the island to France.

As I disembarked from the aircraft, I felt as if I were walking into a warm, sweet-scented lagoon. The air was heavy with the fragrance of ylang-ylang, a yellow-green flower that yields one of the basic oils used in perfumery.

Along the shaded, hilly roads from the airport, pollarded trees, heavily cut back to keep their height within reach of the ylang-ylang gatherers, drooped gracefully like bowing ballerinas.

Farther on, pepper vines bearing clusters of gree peppercorns encircled the trunks of shade trees. Glossy-leaved coffee bushes bent under their burden of berries. In succession I passed groves of clove trees, stands of aromatic lemon grass, and plantations of vanilla.

I visited the largest ylang-ylang distillery with the proprietor, M. Fidahoussen Kakal, a gentleman of Pakistani origin. In a dim shed a double row of potbellied gleaming copper stills steamed with a powerful scent that was pleasant at first, but so strong it soon gave me a headache. Men tipped wire cages filled with tens of thousands of flowers into the stills in a yellow cascade.

"It takes 100 pounds of flowers to produce two pounds of essence," said M. Kakal. "The oil drips out here."

He filled a small vessel and held it under my nose. The concentrated essence was so pungently sweet it made my eyes run.

"Ylang can be used as a fixative, as well as for its own scent. You might say, then, that in one form or another our oil goes into nearly all perfumes. Nosy Be produces about 45 tons a year, and France takes most of it."

At one end of the island I saw vast fields of sugar cane. So much rum and alcohol is distilled here that plantation vehicles sometimes burn the alcohol in lieu of gasoline.

What an island, where all the perfumes of Araby scent the air and automobiles run on rum!

The DC-4 that stops at Nosy Be makes a circular run from Antananarivo around the north coast and back. I flew clockwise to the north and Diégo Suarez, where in a great bay named for a 16th-century Portuguese sea captain, the French Navy has based continuously since 1895, today under agreement with the Malagasy. From there I turned south along the east coast toward Antalaha, vanilla center of the world.

It is fitting that a chief export of this strange land should be an orchid. Or, more properly, the seed pod of an orchid, Vanilla planifolia.

Antalaha, where these orchids have flourished since their introduction in 1890, is a steaming-hot little port in the manner of Madagascar's east coast settlements. There is no harbor, no breakwater, nothing to stem the nervous march of Indian Ocean waves the break incessantly on the uncompromisingly straight shore. There are only navigation lights and a string of lighters to take the vanilla offshore to the uneasily anchored ships.

Back of the town, the dense, primeval forest clothes the hills. In this region of blood heat and heavy rains grow the finest remaining trees of rosewood, ebony, and a dozen other precious cabinet woods. Nearer town, planted trees furnish leafy shade for climbing vanilla plants that wrap each trunk in a clinging embrace of fleshy leaves.

Women Do the Work of Bees

In vanilla's native Mexico, a melipona, a small stingless bee, helps to fecundate the orchid in its quest for pollen. But Madagascar has no melipona, and the flowers must be pollenated entirely by hand.

The yellow-green vanilla orchid opens in the morning and lasts only one day. During the Madagascar flowering season, from October to December, women go from flower to flower before noon, lifting a little tongue with a small stick, and pressing stamen and pistil together. A woman busy as a bee can pollenate as many as 2,500 flowers in a single day.

Of the 32 vanilla exporters in Antalaha, most are French, the rest Chinese and Indian. With M. Fabien Tortel, vice president of the Syndicate of Exporters, I walked through a plantation. In the dappled light of a grove, M. Tortel gently lifted a hanging bunch of seed pods from a tangle of lanceolate leaves.

"They're thin and green because they're immature. It takes nine months for a vanilla pod to ripen; when the tip grows yellowish, it is ready to harvest."

I could smell the processing shed even before I saw it. In the sweet fragrance inside, women were sorting pods.

"The first thing we do with the freshly picked pods is to plunge them into hot water to arrest further ripening and prevent splitting," M. Tortel said. "Next we spread the pods out in the sun, taking them in at night, for eight to ten days. Finally the vanilla dries indoors on racks for about ten weeks, before we pack the pods in metal boxes for shipment."

M. Tortel showed me a bundle of pods tied with linen thread. At one end, minute white spicules glistened like hoarfrost.

"That's pure vanillin, crystallizing as it oozes out of the pod," he said. "Shows it's the highest quality."

"In your country the importers prepare extract from the vanilla pods by cutting them up and steeping them in alcohol. Your housewives use the extract a few drops at a time. The old custom of French housewives is to buy the whole pod, cut it into bits, and put them in desserts. They also bury cut bits of vanilla pod in the sugar bowl. Tell your American housewives these things."

Railroad Takes a Spiral Route

The aircraft that flies south from Antalaha lands at Tamatave, Madagascar's chief port. Here two coral reefs and a man-made breakwater shield the port from the wind and waves of the Indian Ocean. Only here and at Diégo Suarez, on this coast, can ships come alongside. There were five vessels under the loading cranes when I landed at Tamatave.

Both a motor road and a narrow-gauge railway run to Antananarivo from the port, but I recommend the train ride. It takes about 15 hours, but it is worth it. The line follows the coast at first, then turns inland at Brickaville and begins to climb through the primitive forest of the Great Island in switchback loops to reach the height of Antananarivo, almost a mile above the sea. At one place beyond Périnet the track makes a complete spiral, the train issuing from one tunnel and then curving back on itself like a snake holding its tail in its mouth.

Early one morning I drove south out of Antananrivo along the road to Antsirabe. At the crest of a hill I stopped to look out over a valley of terraced rice fields. White egrets, gilded by the yellow light of morning, nearly touched wing tips with their reflections as they flapped across the flooded rice fields. In a feathery-topped clump of papyrus a kingfisher, streaked in electric blue, fixed a beady eye on the water.

The asphalted road climbed steadily toward the Ankaratra range, skirting valleys green with rice and noisy with rushing water. The mountains on my right, bare stone peaks at first, grew darker with forest as I approached Ambatolampy, 40 miles from Tana.

There, at a roadside inn called La Marseillais, the proprietor prepares a dish of crayfish that would make his fortune if he could serve it in Paris. M. Matthieu Brondissino has lived more than twenty years in Madagascar, but he still has not lost his strong Marseilles accent or his southern skill with herbs and seasonings. The crayfish, monsters nearly ten inches long, come from the brawling torrents of the high mountains back of the town.

Seventy miles beyond the inn of the crayfish the city of Antsirabe, shaded by immense trees lining broad avenues, stands on a level plateau. Beneath the city volcanic steam and water pulse and burble, spouting forth in several places as the hot springs so dear to the French heart and liver.

During the French dominion in Madagascar, Antsirabe took on the appearance and atmosphere of a spa in the south of France. Gabled villas with names like Le Rêve stand in walled gardens shaded by somber araucarian pines. At the far end of a broad avenue rises the splendidly rococo Hôtel des Thermes, towered, spired, and turreted. It looks down on the thermal establishment where, porpoerly supervise by a white-smocked physician, one may take the waters.

One to Pull, One to Push

More than 600 red-wheeled rickshas roll along the wide, level streets of Antsirabe. At night the ricksha men light candle lanterns that sway like fox fires in the mountain dusk.

The Malagasy call their rickshas pousse-pousse, literally "push-push." Since they are pulled, not pushed, I was puzzled. A ricksha man told me that a second man used to run behind and push on the hills. On steep gradients and with heavy passengers, one would hear cries of "Pousse! Pousse!"

"From whom," I asked, "the passenger?"

"No! From the man doing the pulling."

Beyond Antsirabe the route nationale winds 120 miles southward to Fianarantsoa, a mist-shrouded city at the edge of the plateau, then turns southwest through increasingly arid country to the west coast port of Tuléar. I went to Tuléar by air, flying from Antananarivo with Air Madagascar, an enterprising national airline that links nearly every city and sizable town of the nation. The line was once called Mad Air, but the management did not like the sound of it in English.

Dry and hot Tuléar is built on sand flats close to the mouth of the Fiherenana River. In the Mozambique Channel offshore, an 11-mile-long barrier reef encloses enormous natural aquariums of limpid water, teeming with a dazzling variety of Indo-Pacific fish.

M. Paul Ducaud, an agricultural engineer, drove me upstream along the Fiherenana to see an old tomb of four walls enclosing a pile of stones. It stood in a grove of stunted, thorny trees. Respectfully removing our shoes, we clambered over the rubble to an open space in the middle. There stood a blue-and-white Chinese vase three feet tall. Scattered around it lay rusting swords, sabers, and halberd heads. M. Ducaud enjoyed my surprise.

"Stories go that these things came from either Portuguese sailors or French pirates. The tribes to whom they were given put them on the tombs of their chiefs, after the Malagasy custom.

"During the French occupation, we had a local administrator who took a fancy to that vase. He had it removed to the residency in town. Next morning when he woke up, He saw a thousand silent spearmen surrounding the house. The administrator returned the vase the same day and sacrificed an ox to atone for the desecration."

When I was in the south of Madagascar, my thoughts turned to the aepyornis, the giant extinct bird, for it is here that its incredibly big eggs are occasionally uncovered. When Marco Polo described Madagascar, the island he had heard about from Arab travelers but had never seen, he spoke of it as the home of the fabulous "gryphon birds^B."

"They report that they are so huge and bulky that one of them can pounce on an elephant and carry it up to a great height in the air.... They add that they have a wingspan of thirty paces and their wing-feathers are twelve paces long.... I should explain that the islanders call them rukhs...."

The Arabs, who had sailed to Madagascar to trade for slaves from the earliest times, already knew the fabled rukh, or roc, from tales in The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. On his second voyage Sindbad the Sailor, marooned on an island, saw "a huge white dome...of vast compass.... I went round about the dome to measure its circumference which I found a good fifty paces....

"Methought a cloud had come over the sun. Lifting my head I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird...which as it flew through the air, veiled the sun and hid it from the island.... the dome which caught my sight was none other than a Rukh's egg."

The first authentic word of the giant bird of Madagascar came from the pen of Sieur Étienne de Flacourt, who was sent out in 1648 by Louis XIII to govern the small French colony established in Madagascar six years before. He landed at Fort Dauphin, on the southeast coast, where languished a handful of Frenchmen, half starving and under nearly constant attack by the Malagasy tribesmen, who did not know they were supposed to be loyal and submissive subjects of the King of France. Nobody had told them.

Aepyornis May Still Have Lived in 1655

For seven years, forgotten by the motherland, the Sieur de Flacourt maintained a precarious présence française in a small fort on the wave-lashed cove of Fort Dauphin. After he returned to France in 1655, Flacourt wrote A History of the Great Island of Madagascar. In this classic he listed the plants and animals of the island. Heading the roster of "Birds that Frequent the Woods" he placed: "Vouroun patra, it is a big bird which frequents the Ampatres [the Antandroy tribal region], lays eggs like the ostrich; it is a kind of ostrich, the people of the said region cannot capture it, it seeks the most deserted places."

The fact that Flacourt spoke in the present tense suggests that the fabled elephant bird was still alive in the 17th century. No record has come down to us, however, or any traveler or native actually having seen one alive^C.

As early as 1832, reports and drawings of giant eggs bigger than anything theretofore known had reached Europe, but not until 1850 did the first intact egg reach Paris. The egg was a foot long and held more than two gallons, eight times the volume of an ostrich egg. It created a furor.

M. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire of the Academy of Sciences named the bird Aepyornis (Greek for "tall bird") maximus. Later, nearly complete skeletons revealed that it stood almost ten feet high and must have weighed close to a thousand pounds, the biggest bird yet known to have trod the earth.

I had mentioned my interest in the great bird to Monsieur Michel Suire, a friend in the Air France office in Antananarivo, and one day he appeared at the Hôtel Colbert with M. Jean de Heaulme, who grows sisal and mines mica and uranium near Fort Dauphin. The original de Heaulmes left France in 1770 to settle on the island of La Réunion, and their descendents preserve the exquisite manners and courtesy of another century that the French call Vieille France--Old France.

"Assuredly," said M. de Heaulme, "I can show you an aepyornis egg--there is one in my father's office--and I can direct you to the district where most of them have been found, but I cannot guarantee that you will find one. Broken pieces of eggshell, these I can promise you by the kilo, but the whole egg--c'est difficile. We have seen perhaps a dozen over the last 20 years.

"But come ahead, we can at least show you some primitive forest full of lemurs and, who knows, possibly you may find your egg."

Coast Rises in Two Great Steps

The Air Madagascar DC-3 took off at dawn from Fort Dauphin. Through hanging gray curtains of cloud and slanting rain the hills gleamed palely. We flew southeast, toward the thickening forest of the eastern slopes.

The highlands drop to the coast plain in two abrupt steps. Against the undulating green of the forest, the cliffs of the first escarpment traced a curving line, broken in places by the white plumes of waterfalls.

The second fold of greenery fell to the coast plain as we slanted down toward the port of Manakara. In one continuous white-lipped beach, straight as a knife cut, the east coast of Madagascar ran north-northeast.

At Fort Dauphin granite mountains, furrowed as an elephant's hide, bathe their feet in the sea. Fort Dauphin Bay lies open to winds from the north and east and to the constant swells built up by the southeast trade winds. Because of the shallowly sloping shore and unceasing winds, vessels anchor offshore, and lighters transfer cargo.

A small freighter flying the French flag rose and fell at anchor. Barges plied between her and Fort Dauphin's single long pier, lightering Zebu cattle to the slings that lifted them aboard. Fort Dauphin is the funnel through which pass the Antandroy cattle drovers' sleek herds, bound chiefly for Mauritius and La Réunion.

I drove west in a Land-Rover from Fort Dauphin with M. Henry de Heaulme, M. Jean's father, a big, handsome man with aquiline features and piercing gray eyes, who came to Madagascar from his native Réunion in 1928.

The road climbed through a low pass in the barrier mountains. With surprising suddenness the subtropical vegetation of the coast gave way to strange crownless trees, like bare poles covered with sharp prongs--La Forêt Épineuse, the thorny forest. Monsieur de Heaulme, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of his beloved southland, named the strange trees in Latin, Malagasy, and French.

Gaunt Sentinals in a Land of Thirst

On the other side of the pass the plains of the Antandroy stretched before us to the horizon, so parched they are called the "Land of Thirst." The weird thorny candelabra rose to a height of some 25 feet on both sides of the road. One species, looking somewhat like the organ-pipe cactus of the American Southwest, held its columns straight up; another bent its fingers toward the sea.

All these are xerophytes, plants that resist a drought by virtue of thick, spongy bark that conserves the little moisture. On the trunk of the fantsilotra--thorny bark--rows of steely thorns grow in a rising spiral. Between them sprout oval light-green leaves no bigger than a thumbnail. This is all the foliage these strange trees hold out to the burning sun of the south.

"Have you noticed that all the fantsilotra arms point toward the south?" asked M. de Heaulme. Almost the whole forest pointed its fingers toward the South Pole: No one need ever be lost in this phantasmal forest.

When I was in the Antandroy country it was March, and the rainy season was drawing to a close. Rain falls heavily--sometimes torrentially--through much of Madagascar from December to April, but in the south it sometimes rains not at all. In 1967, however, heavy rains filled the dry watercourses of the south.

The Mandrare River was racing in a brown flood toward the sea when we crossed it on a steel-girder span. Upstream the ford where the road formerly crossed was awash with swirling red-brown water.

Just beyond Amboasary on the Mandrare began the straight blue-green rows of the de Heaulme sisal plantation. From a distance the plants looked like the tops of giant pineapples.

Here and there among the rows of sisal rose the bloated, bottle-shaped gray boles of the microcephalic baobab, a tree with an absurdly small head of branches and leaves. The obese columns of the baobab may have a girth of 75 feet for a height of 60. The great spongy trunk stores the scant moisture of the south in its light and corky heart.

Yet in the river bottom lands along the Mandrare, the forest was normal. Green-leaved deciduous trees replaced the spiked, tortuous monstrosities of the Forêt Épineuse.

Forest Preserve for Furry Acrobats

It was here, in a forest reserve, that I first saw a lemur. We walked slowly down a woodland ridge. The carpet of mold and rotting leaves muffled our footsteps. A flash of yellow-brown shot over our heads, and I looked up into the round staring eyes of a sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi).

The lemur, about the size of a cat, with thick, tawny fur and a black face, clung to a branch and stared down through unwinking golden eyes. His head with its pointed snout looked more vulpine than monkeylike. He bobbed his head once like a hawk and uttered the call that gives him his Malagasy name: SEE-fahk!

With a guttural chuk, another lemur, slightly bigger and with a spectacular long tail ringed in black and white, landed beside him.

"That is a maky, Lemur catta," said M. de Heaulme. "There are probably a thousand of them in this reserve, and at least 500 sifaka."

The maky had a little one clinging to the thick fur on her back; it regarded us with questioning brown eyes. When they had looked long enough, the lemurs made off, leaping lightly from branch to branch and landing without perceptible sound or impact.

That evening we sat on the terrace of the plantation house with M. Jean de Heaulme, who had flown in from Fort Dauphin in his twin-engine Beechcraft. We talked again of my chief goal in this part of the country: to find an intact egg of the aepyornis.

"All the eggs I have seen come from the west of here," said M. Jean. "Tomorrow morning I'll send you out in a Land-Rover with a driver who knows the country, and you can start your search. At least you can find fragments of broken shell for dating."

Carbon-14 Tests Date Vanished Bird

No one knows certainly when the giant bird became extinct. I had hoped that carbon-14 tests might give a date within the past three or four centuries, late enough for a European to have seen one alive. In 1963 Professor René Battisini, geographer at the University of Madagascar, uncovered egg fragments not far from Diégo Suarez, the first to be found in the extreme north. A Japanese scientist tested these and obtained an age of 1,150 years, plus or minus 90.

Beyond the Mandrare the route nationale traversing southern Madagascar is unpaved, but it had not rained in several days, and at dawn we drove at 40 miles an hour toward Ambovombe. The driver, a tall and very dark Bara tribesman, had served in the French Army and spoke understandable French.

We drove across flat bush country, through thorn trees and scrub. Once we passed a file of men, four of whom carried on their shoulders a cloth-wrapped bundle on a bier: the corpse of a woman who had died far from her village and was going home for burial.

Several times we had to stop to yield the roads to herds of 50 or 60 sleek zebu, being driven toward the sea for embarkment to Mauritius. We were traversing the classic cattle country of an island where zebus outnumber people nearly two to one.

At Ambovombe we turned southward toward the dunes at the sea's edge to look for deposits of shell. The road, little more than a deep rut between high agave hedges, passed three villages. At each I stopped to ask for atodim borombe--the egg of the great bird--and always the villagers shook their heads and replied, "Tsy misy--There is none."

Beyond the last village the road trailed off into sand and fields of maize. Here we questioned a youth who said casually, "Oh, yes, I can take you to the place."

The Bara threw the Land-Rover into four-wheel drive, and we bumped across hummocky fields toward the sea. At the edge of the sandy slope we stopped, and on foot entered a swale between two high dunes.

Shattered Eggs Carpet Southern Dunes

I slipped and slid down the slope after our guide. The heat was like a blast furnace; between the dunes we were shut off from the slightest movement of air. The sun, reflected from the dazzling sand, reverberated in my eyes until my head buzzed.

Far down the slope our guide gesticulated. When I reached him, he waved his arm in an arc, grinning broadly. What I had taken to be a field of sea shells was a carpet of aepyornis egg fragments, literally thousands of them stippling a shallow bowl among the dunes. There were at least 50 sherds in each square yard. Most were two to three inches square, but we found one shell end as big as a skullcap.

It was impossible to walk without crushing the eggshells, and the sherds cracked underfoot with a tinkle of breaking porcelain. In less than an hour we had filled a large basket. We now had at least twenty-five pounds of shell, and we could have gathered a hundred.

We rode back to Ambovombe to present a letter I carried to Father Joseph Kiefer, a Lazarist missionary from Lorraine. Father Kiefer, a slender, quick-moving man with a pointed beard and a twinkling eye, had spent 12 years in the Antandroy country and spoke the dialect fluently. Pulling a cigarette from the folds of his white cassock, he eyed our basket of fragments and said, "Tiens, a ood collection, but we must see about a whole egg. A couple of years ago I heard one had been found; it ended up in the hands of an Indian shopkeeper; he sold it to a foreigner."

Father Kiefer climbed into the Land-Rover with us, and we started west again. Far to the north of Ambovombe a semicircular range of mountains, resembling those enclosing the great walled plains of the moon, embraces a region of upthrust mesas like the Lost World country of the Guianas. Here lie beds of Thorianite, a uranium ore, and deposits of mica and quartz. Southward the ground slopes to the plains of the Antandroy. Monsieur de Heaulme had told me of a shallow depression or basin into which, he said, the summer rains drain, sometimes leaving pools of water on the spongy ground. Here the villagers occasionally found an egg, exposed by the rains.

Tribesmen Search the Trembling Earth

We left the road and struck across country, dodging between thorn trees and bumping over ruts left by oxcarts. At a village near the edge of the depression, a man in a breechclout came toward us, putting on formal dress by wrapping round his waist a lambahoany, the equivalent of a South Sea pareu. He shook hands with us all round. He was Fenoandro--Day of Plenitude--the village councilor. Half a dozen other men joined us; we passed round cigarettes and squatted in the shade. Through Father Kiefer, Fenoandro answered our questions.

"Every year," he said, waving his arm in a half circle, "we find one or two, after the rains are finished. This year, we have not found one yet. In the old days, whenever we found an egg, we used to take it to the District Officer; now we offer it to the sisal planters, because we know the Europeans value them. Sometimes we find one buried in the ground; the rain uncovers it and shows us it is there. Once in a while the rain washes an egg completely out of the soil, and we find it under a bush when the water goes down".

Fenoandro led us to the edge of a shallow pool of water. He struck his foot on the ground. "Hear that? Feel how the ground trembles? The earth is hollow in places; perhaps that's where the eggs hide."

He pointed to bits of shell lying about. "I can get you a kilo by tomorrow." I had asked for that much to have samples from different sites for radiocarbon dating.

Fenoandro told me that one woman had seen the broken halves of a single egg. I hoped she might find it again so that we could cement the egg back together.

When I returned at noon the next day, Fenoandro was standing beside his house and asked us to enter. The house was built of split slats of the thorny-bark tree, and its peaked roof was thatched with grass. Mats covered the floor, and two chairs stood at one end of the rectangular house for the vazaha, the foreigners, to sit on. Fenoandro, his family, and relatives sat cross-legged in a semicircle on the mats facing us.

Someone gave Fenoandro a live chicken, and, standing, he delivered a kabary, a long oration, thanking us for honoring his village with our visit, and wishing us heath, prosperity, and a safe return to our homes. He then handed me the chicken. The coucilor's old mother, whose face was creased like an old parchment by a thousand fine wrinkles, next presented us with seven hen's eggs.

In turn I made a speech. Taking my cue from my sojourns in the South Pacific, I thanked the old lady for her gifts, and also for presenting Madagascar and the world with three such fine sons as I now beheld; then I handed Fenoandro a bottle of native rum.

Not until we had drunk a tumbler of rum and tasted a kind of yogurt made of zebu milk did we get down to business. With a showman's air, Fenoandro whisked a cloth from a small table and revealed a pile of broken eggshells. "Two kilos," he said.

I expressed my satisfaction. Fenoandro kept looking at me, and the others kept their eyes on him. I turned to the Bara driver and said, "I think they have found something."

Fenoandro, who had been watching me closely, reached under the table and pulled out a bulging sobika, a two-handled basket. Silently he removed a cloth. There before my unbelieving eyes lay a whole aepyornis egg.

Blood Wards Off Possible Evil

"You brought us luck, vazaha," said Fenoandro. "He"--pointing to his half-brother, a young man with stand-up hair and a small mustache--"found it this morning."

Gently disengaging the egg from the close-fitting basket, Fenoandro handed it to me. It was more than a foot long, and, except for pitting where the acid of decaying vegetable matter had eaten into the calcium carbonate of the shell, without a blemish. A star of fresh blood splattered one side. I looked questioningly at Fenoandro.

"Vazaha," said he, "when we find a whole egg, even though we know it means a small fortune to poor people like us, we show no joy; the egg does not like it. If a man were to seize the egg and rush home, crying to his wife, 'Rejoice, dance, sing, our fortune is made, I have found an egg of the borombe, the great bird,' the egg would surely shatter into a thousand pieces.

"If a man finds an egg but leaves it there, his mother will die. If he finds an egg and takes it up, but does not sacrifice to Zanahary--God--and to his ancestors for bringing him good fortune, his father will surely die. So we sacrifice a cock, a sheep, or an ox, whatever the finder can afford. This morning we killed a sheep and poured its blood over the egg; now we can be happy."

An aepyornis egg brings the finder the equivalent of five oxen. Fenoandro filled the tin mugs again and we drank to the enormous egg, to the village, and to Madagascar.

I asked Fenoandro where he and his half-brother had found the egg. He waved to the north. "About three rice cookings [one hour] from here. According to what the old ones told us, in the time of the ancients the country round about here was covered with a forest standing in a swamp; there were no men here, but the bush was full of the 'Bird No One Has Ever Seen.' Then our ancestors settled here and burned the forest, and little by little the great bird withdrew and finally disappeared altogether.

"Neither we, nor our fathers, nor our grandfathers have ever seen a live voronsatrana," said Fenoandro. "Perhaps it's just as well, because the Old Ones said that anyone who saw one would surely die.

"The great bird was so tall that a man could not reach his head; he stood on long legs, and had three toes on each foot, but no great toe, and no heel. His tail was spread out like a turkey's and his feathers were all white. His wings were very short, and when he ran, he did not flap his wings."

X-rays Reveal an Unborn Chick

This was an astonishingly accurate description of the aepyornis, from one who had never heard of a scientific reconstruction of the bird. Except for the tail and the color of the feathers, a matter of pure conjecture since no remains other than bones have come down to us, and the short wings--the aepyornis had no external wing structure--the rest of the description tallies with what science deduces from skeletal remains.

I shook our egg and heard a rustling noise.

"Sometimes," said Fenoandro, "we find an egg that is fresh, full of the white and yolk." I stared. If H.G. Wells only were alive!

"Yes, wild pigs root up the eggs sometimes, to smash them and eat what is inside."

"But if as you say, neither you, nor your father, nor your grandfather have ever seen a living great bird, how is it possible that you still find a fresh egg now and again?"

"That," said Fenoandro, "puzzles us, too."

I thought of the ritual warning with which Malagasy tellers of tales preface their legends:

Believe me, believe me not!
If you believe me, it will be fine,
If you do not believe me, it will rain...
It is not I who tells lies, it is
The Old Ones who have told me this story.

A scientific paper published in 1957, listing 28 eggs in European museums, states: "It is worthy of note that no aepyornis egg shows any trace of the original egg contents."

Much later, in Washington, we peered by stereoscopic X-ray photographs into an even larger egg presented to the Geographic by the de Heaulmes, and we were delighted to see the bones of an aepyornis chick about three-fourths developed. Leg bones, foot bones, and vertebrae are clearly visible. Fortunately for us and for science, something had interrupted the incubation, and locked in his smooth-walled tomb the chick sleeps on, undisturbed except for probing radiation^D.

In Antananarivo, Professor Battistini had told me: "The aepyornis was already in Madagascar at the beginning of the Quaternary, about one million years ago. They existed down to comparatively recent times, increasing to incredible numbers, then disappeared in the space of a few centuries.

"Scientists once thought that the aepyornis vanished because of a change in climate, that the land grew drier and the birds slowly retreated to perish round the edge of the last water holes. Today we can say unequivocally from geological evidence that the climate of southern Madagascar has not changed appreciably in the last two to three thousand years. No, man must once again bear the responsibility for the disappearance of a species. He must have arrived just in time to kill off the last of the giant birds, either by hunting them, or taking their eggs for food or for use as receptacles, or by burning and destroying the forest that was their refuge.

"One thing is certain--man and the aepyornis were coeval, at least toward the end. A recent radiocarbon dating of ash from a human fireplace goes back 1,450 years, the oldest definite date yet found for the presence of man on Madagascar. Dates of some egg fragments are at least three centuries later, so we know that man and aepyornis lived together here--but not for long."

By the time I had left Madagascar, I had collected egg fragments from three sites. I hoped to find a date within the period of the French presence in Madagascar, proof that it would have been possible, at least, for a European to have seen a live aepyornis. But I was disappointed; the youngest fragments proved to be 1,970 years old, plus or minus 90, the next 2,930 ± 85, and the oldest 5,210 ± 140.

When I tried to continue west by road to reach Cap Sainte Marie at the southern tip of Madagascar, I was stopped--in the Land of Thirst--by a flood. At the town of Tsihombe the Manambovo River roared banks full. At the ford outside the town, the river separated clotted masses of people and vehicles stopped on both banks. Pedestrians, oxcarts, motorcars, buses, and trucks had been waiting there for three days.

One man said disconsolately: "Nine or ten months of the year there isn't a drop of water in this river. We sink gasoline drums with the bottoms cut out into the dry sand of the river bed. A few inches of water wells slowly up. I have seen people who live far from the river go around in early morning to whip the dew off leaves and grass into a gourd. Now look!" He pointed to the swollen river, rushing past at ten miles and hour.

Last Stand at Island's End

I leapfrogged the river in a small airplane, with Jean de Heaulme at the controls. At the Manambovo, the queues of cars and buses had grown larger. The river was falling, but slowly. The plain tilted toward the sea, and we tilted our wing with it to turn south.

At 200 feet we flew along the water's edge, following the coast as it swings southward in the slight promontory of Faux Cap (False Cape), and up the line of unfurling breakers to the jutting headland of Cap Sainte Marie.

On these dunes along these desolate shores the aepyornis may have made its last stand. Trapped between man and sea, the great birds must have brooded over the last infertile eggs. Then they slipped into eternal sleep and were covered by the sands.

At Cap Sainte Marie, on the edge of a steep cliff, the road to the south comes to an abrupt finish. To warn the infrequent traveler that he has come to the end of the island at the end of the world, a sign reads: "Stop! Extreme South." Beyond lies only the sea and Antarctica.

---

Notes on this text

1. If you'd care to read Wells' story yourself, click here.



2. The Vorompatra is more usually associated with the legendary roc or Rukh, but a recent article in the Independent also raises the "gryphon" connection.



3. Malagasy was not a written language until after the Vorompatra was already extinct, so oral accounts of meeting up with the giant ratite have probably died out. Later in the article, a native description of the bird's appearance in proffered--as the author points out, it must be taken cum grano salis. Two curious tales of recent apparent encounters are presented at the Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology site.



4. Pictures of this egg appear in the follow-on , "Re-creating Madagascar's Giant Extinct Bird." The other egg the author brought back also contains a fossil embryo, a picture of which was published in the July 2000 issue of the same magazine: pictures of this second egg can be seen at the UT/Austin website.