A budding naturalist who likes to wander to the horizon, Sohan Singh set out from his Panchkula residence to roam the forests of Mallah in the Morni hills, due east of Chandimandir. He forded a clear, clean, tumbling rivulet and saw an austere white temple set on a hillock under a looming black rock. The rock had a cliff-like face and was sporting projections of wild cactus on its back. The remote, nameless temple’s top was conical-shaped, uncannily like the rock’s pinnacle.
Energised by the shrine’s benign and beckoning look, Sohan made for it to offer prayers and to thank the universe. There, among the temple’s walls and crevices in the towering rock above, Singh glimpsed a dozen lizards with spots on their backs, long tails, and slim, flattened bodies. Nature’s spirits were flitting without fear in this abode of spiritual grace.
Heaven, indeed, is a place on earth. “I was so taken in by the mystical temple, the rugged flow and beauty of the waterfalls, the verdant flora and, equally, the novelty of lizards that I had never seen in books and documentaries,” Singh told this writer.
These were Kashmir rock agamas (Laudakia tuberculata) that can be found at altitudes ranging from 150 m to as high as nearly 4,000 m in Ladakh’s Nubra valley. There are a handful of records of this species from the Morni and Chakki Modh hills of Solan district.
These lizards are often found dwelling in proximity to humans. However, little is known about their natural history and they live their lives without attracting human curiosity. They can adapt to cracks in walls, spaces under eaves and between slate slabs on roofs in human habitation, which afford similar crevice-like refuges.
{{/usCountry}}These lizards are often found dwelling in proximity to humans. However, little is known about their natural history and they live their lives without attracting human curiosity. They can adapt to cracks in walls, spaces under eaves and between slate slabs on roofs in human habitation, which afford similar crevice-like refuges.
{{/usCountry}}Being cold-blooded, the lizards bask on rocks, and are often found near pools of water. In the breeding season, male lizards acquire a bluish-purple hue to parts of their bodies to lure the opposite sex in the incarnation of reptilian peacocks. The species is omnivorous, and equally relishes poisonous flowers and scorpions!
Corbett’s antidote for hate
Societies are being riven by hate. Youngsters are unable to manage their emotions and rein in violent instincts. In the worship of the gods of development and material comforts, the natural world is being erased or ghettoised.
In this gloomy augury, the words of the hunter of man-eating tigers/leopards-turned-wildlife conservationist, Col. Jim Corbett, serve as an inspiration. Two months before his death in Africa in 1955, Corbett wrote a letter to his fan in India, Anant Mahajan, then a student who later became professor of physics at IIT, Mumbai. The letter was shared by Mahajan years after Corbett’s death with Jerry Jaleel, who wrote an acclaimed Corbett biography titled “Under the Shadow of Man-eaters”.
Corbett’s letter of February 10, 1955, was dispatched from Nyeri, Kenya BEA, in response to Mahajan’s letter to him of January 31. The letter reflects Corbett’s compassion for wildlife and equally for suffering humanity, and his earnest eye for their entwined future. His end-nearing words echoed the distilled wisdom of the most profound philosophers that humanity has known: just try and be a bit kinder.
Corbett had written five best-sellers by then. He wrote to Mahajan that he was going to England for a cataract operation and if that were successful, he would write one more book “to try and encourage young people to be kind to birds and animals. There is too much killing in this world, and if the young can be persuaded to be kind to wildlife, there is a hope that they will be kind to each other and to all mankind.”
Death was imminent, and it thwarted Corbett’s sixth book. The World War I veteran passed away just short of 80 on April 19, 1955. But in the Mahajan letter was entombed the soul of Corbett’s life — a universal kindness, a prophetic vision of a sensitive man seared by the horrors of two world wars.
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