Redmond O'Hanlon is a naturalist, writer and explorer firmly in the nineteenth-century mould who disappears on hazardous-but-hilarious quests in search of near-mythical beasts. Penguin have had the pleasure of publishing his adventures in paperback from the beginning of his career, and
Borneo and the Poet takes us right back to O'Hanlon's first trip to the jungle with the unnerved poet James Fenton.

At dawn the jungle was half-obscured in a heavy morning mist; and through the cloudy layers of rising moisture came the whooping call, the owl-like, clear, ringing hoot of the female Borneo gibbon.

Replacing the dry socks, pants, trousers and shirt inside two plastic bags inside the damp Bergen, tying them tightly to keep out the ants, I shook the wet clothes. A double-barrelled charge of insects propelled itself from inside my trouser-legs. I groomed my pants free of visible bugs, covered myself in SAS anti-fungus powder until my erogenous zone looked like meat chunks rolled into flour, ready for the heat, and forced my way into clammy battle-dress for the day. It was a nasty five o'clock start; but in half an hour the mist would be gone, the sun merciless, and the river-water soaking one anyway.

Every bush seemed to hold an unseen bird, all in full throat. There were blackbird and thrush, nightingale and warbler-like notes from every side, but more urgent and powerful and relentless, the fortissimo calls of babblers and trillers and bulbuls.

After a breakfast of fish and rice we re-packed the dugout and set off upriver. The gibbons, having proclaimed the boundaries of their territories, ceased calling. The world changed colour from a dark watery blue to mauve to sepia to pink and then the sun rose, extraordinarily fast.

Inghai put on his peaked cap to shield his eyes from the sun as he sat on the bow and scanned the turbulent water ahead for rocks and logs; Dana, in chiefly style, wore his round hat, as large and intricately patterned as a gaming table; and Leon, proudly switching his outboard to full power, wore a mutant hybrid of pork-pie and homberg. James adjusted his boater, stretched out his legs on his half of the duck-boards, and addressed himself to Swift.

Something large and flappy was crossing the river in front of us. Was it a bird disguised as a leaf-skeleton? Was it a day-flying bat disguised as a hair-net? Or was it a lattice of tropical worms in transit across my retina?

Very slowly, unconcerned, the something made its floating and dipping, floating and dipping, indecisive flight right over the boat: it was an odd idea indeed, Hestia idea, a butterfly with grey and white wings like transparent gauze, highly poisonous, and safe from predators. In one of the richest or tropical rain forests, in a natural zone which actually contains more kinds of butterflies and moths than all other habitats in the world put together, it was ridiculously pleasing to have identified just one more species, even if, as I eventually had to admit to James, it was the most immediately obvious of them all.

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