By Hamish Brown
Jean Louis and the English students took to each other at once. There were six of them, rather self-conscious entomologists, to whom rushing about on the mountains with big butterfly nets had seemed a bit ridiculous 'in front of a Frog', but Jean Louis had turned out to be as enthusiastic as they really were, and as knowledgeable. The rushing about was pretty spasmodic anyway.
They would cross a side pass into one of the next valleys to gain a hut, like the Refuge Lépiney at 3,050 metres, then, next day, spend three hours with ice axes and crampons slogging to the tizi (pass) to sit there all day with never a butterfly putting in an appearance. A few days of that could pall, but Jean Louis simply led them up the nearer peaks while they waited. Though none of them were climbers they ascended quite a few of the easier major summits. It was all good fun. Whenever they retreated to Arround, Jean Louis would natter to the locals in their guttural speech and an hour after dark they'd go off for a tagine or a cous cous in some local house. Jean Louis made friends everywhere in no time.
"But I have not met my love, the Painted Ladies" he complained one night as they sat replete, sipping glasses of scalding thé à men the the national drink of Morocco.
"About time we did," the leader said. "It would be embarrassing to go back empty handed." "We'll not exactly do that. We've specimens, enough."
And so they had. God knows how many butterflies perish in the desert or over the sea, but the snows of the Atlas were spotted in places by hundreds of dead Painted ladies, many of them lying at the foot of inch-deep hollows.
"The heat of the sun on their corpses sinks them into the snow like that," someone told Jean Louis.
Jean Louis dreamed every night about his Painted Ladies. In his dream he would rush about with his large net, dancing over the mountain tops and whooping with joy as he scooped with the huge white muslin bag. He was the greatest Painted Lady hunter of all time -- even if he'd never set eyes on a living specimen.
They were sitting on the Tizi n'Tamatert, one of the side passes, returning from three fruitless days at Tachddirt, when Jean Louis noticed a butterfly dancing past. It looked like a Painted Lady. He chewed his hard bread and salami silently, watching. A few minutes later there was another, then another. "Regardez! "he yelled, spluttering out his lunch. In a few minutes the numbers built up: irregular individuals became dancing scores which became blowing hundreds until the pass was a whole gale of winged movement. It was like being in a Quantock beechwood in an autumn storm. They all went Painted Lady crazy.
"What's the code?" Jean Louis yelled.
'We'll use yesterday's: one yellow dot."
Frantically they dug out tubes of paint, fitted their nets together, and went into action. What the local Berber shepherd boy (aged about seven) made of the spectacle has not been recorded. in his eyes seven crazy Nazarenes went charging about waving huge white flags on the end of poles and periodically whammed them to the ground where they knelt with bottoms in the air in some mysterious rite that had nothing to do with facing Mecca.
They were actually, direct from the Reeves tubes, marking the thorax of each butterfly with a spot of yellow paint, then letting them go again. In two hours they 'spotted' 3,276 Painted Ladies. (Such was this enthusiasrn that one of the students actually caught a Painted Lady which bore a yellow spot!) Jean Louis was not the only one who shouted out in excited dreaming that night. They all agreed it had been one of the most astonishing experiences any of them had ever had.
To be continued.
You can find more articles in the archive under The Bothy.
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