The Armadillo: Or Horns and Halos

By A. W. Hurst

The book concerns the fate of an Armadillo sadly overcome by an earthquake in the Amazonian Jungle. On arrival at the Pearly Gates, he is weighed on the Heavenly Scales of Justice to determine his future in the hereafter. Astonishingly, the Scales remain in the neutral position. Never has this happened save for perhaps the Phoenix back in the time of Zeus.
How is the All-Wise to resolve this problem Destiny has set? Clearly a Holy Commission is required consisting of Angels of the Celestial Service. After extensive interrogation of the Armadillo about the living conditions in the Amazon Basin they decide they must go and see for themselves.
Will the Armadillo be admitted to the Everlasting Pastures of Heaven or consigned to the less agreeable environs of Outer Darkness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398449831

A. W. Hurst

After reading both History and Geography at Merton College Oxford, A. W. Hurst became a master at Monkton Combe School whilst deciding what to do with his life. It was then that he wrote The Armadillo. The outbreak of the 2nd World War rather made the decision for him. He joined the Royal Artillery and after a spell defending Newcastle with anti-aircraft guns, he was posted to India for three and a half years. Returning to civilian life, he became Divisional Education Officer responsible for the schools in South Buckinghamshire. He was at heart a naturalist with an encyclopaedic knowledge and abiding love for the English countryside. He was a founder member of the Bucks, Berks and Oxon Naturalist Trust and an advocate for protecting the environment well ahead of his time. He loved poetry, wrote the words of the Aylesbury Grammar School Song – and was still writing poetry into his nineties.

Book preview

Chapter One

"This armadillo has struck out a line for himself; he still enjoys ants, but worms and various other insects are equally welcome to him. He had discovered that birds’ eggs are edible commodities; he hunts mice which he stalks patiently and then kills with a sudden spring (for all his clumsy-looking body, he is amazingly agile), he eats the carcases of snakes that he slays in fair fight, he is not averse to a meal from carrion, and when animal food fails him he becomes a vegetarian. At all times of the year he is fat and well nourished, even when other animals starve, and though in the wilds he is a diurnal animal, he has noticed the fact that man sleeps at night, and when his happy hunting grounds become overcrowded with obnoxious humans, he changes his habit and takes his walks at the hours when they are in bed…

Hudson tells us that the Gauchos, who are keen observers of Nature, make this clever animal the hero of many of their popular tales and fables, representing him as a versatile creature exceedingly fertile in expedients that can always dupe other animals especially the fox. I wonder whether further observation of the hairy armadillo’s habits might not result in our finding that he fulfils Dr Stout’s qualification of ‘Reason’ by being able to ‘cross a bridge before he comes to it’.

J. Morewood Dowsett – How Animals Live.

Armadillos dwell in the open plains and also in the forests of South America.

Mirat – Types of Animal Life.

***

The sun beamed down on the Earth with its usual kindly impetuosity. All the Hosts of Heaven and the creatures of the forest (with the possible exception of a few moles and blindworms, and certain bats and owls) were in agreement that the sun was the most satisfactory of the creations of the All-Seeing. The moon was perhaps more beautiful with her pure silvery radiance, the stars more ethereally remote, but the sun combined utility, beauty and cheerfulness to an unusual degree. The All-Seeing was indeed gratified at having produced so altogether satisfactory a luminary.

Everywhere about it and beneath it – on the ground, in the air, the stratosphere and space, the myriad activities of existence went on.

Recording Angels bustled cheerfully and speedily about their business. Guardian Angels hurried to take up their duties. Bees and wasps sped to and fro. Birds and bats flew swiftly about, and the innumerable messengers of the Empyrean hastened, with ultra-violet flashes of their invisible wings, to fulfil their errands.

Mercury, returning from Athens to Elysium, paused on his way to greet the old sun (upon whom he always looked as the father of his friend, Apollo). St Francis, on one of his stellar journeys, waved to it (his Big Brother, as he was wont to call it in the Hall of Celestial Light), and even a stray demon, up to no good you may be sure in the lighted skies, thought wistfully of the inferior artificial sun by the Great Volcano in Hell, as he slunk through the aerial ways of Space.

The sun, however, apart from a slight wink as a sunspot shifted its position, ignored these shining angels of passage (or birds of paradise) and continued to beam down upon a young monkey in the canopy of the rainforest, not in the least discouraged by an odd thundercloud that oozed deprecatingly between its pleasant rays and the trees. In any case, some two hundred feet of luxuriant vegetation always cut off its beams from direct contact with the Amazon Basin.

The River of the Amazons itself slid slowly by like a huge silver boa constrictor, winding its serpentine way among the trees, and widening here and there as though it had swallowed some other, less sinuous South American fauna.

Beside it, giant trees rose from the marshy ground and innumerable shrubs and bushes made an undergrowth all but impenetrable to those unversed in the Highway Code of the forest. Festooning the branches of the trees, and matting together their green foliage to form a dense canopy, grew all kinds of jungle hangers-on. Woody climbers climbed here and there. Orchids opened their lovely flower heads in the comforting warmth of the sun’s rays. Lianas dangled at random, and parasites and epiphytes attempted to make as much use of their neighbours as possible.

But the sun, ignoring their existence and shedding his light, as is well known, upon just and just unlike, continued to beam down if not upon the Earth, then at least upon the green canopy above it.

Everywhere in the jungle, life went on as it always does, night and day, with all the animals, vegetables and in exceptional cases minerals, asserting their own obvious superiority to any other species of animal, vegetable or mineral. Sometimes actively, with tooth and even claw, and sometimes passively, by continuing to exist at all.

The trees and plants, with a dexterity born of long practice, performed the processes of transpiration and photosynthesis, and the numerous and many-coloured birds amused themselves in the normal and universal avian occupations – singing, nest building and so forth. Anteaters ate ants everywhere (it is their nature to do so and they like it). Sloths clung to branches in their own unparalleled fashion, and an anaconda wriggled silently away on some deep, serpentine and no doubt ungodly business of its own.

Elsewhere in the forest, things were much the same. All the jungle fauna – peccaries, tapirs, pumas, jaguars and many kinds of monkeys – exercised their faculties for good or evil (mostly the latter), perpetuated their species (and did their best to decimate all others), ate and slept. While this went on, day followed night and night succeeded to day in the monotonous, regular and seemingly endless succession.

***

Deep in the lush vegetation lived an Armadillo. Unconscious of the painstaking, if ineffectual, efforts of the sun to penetrate his retreat, and quite satisfied with the deep shade of the forest undergrowth, he rolled up neatly into a ball with the bland air of an expert conjuror.

Near him, reclined an invisible Recording Angel, hastily jotting down notes.

Chapter Two

But it isn’t a Hedgehog and it isn’t a Tortoise. It’s a little bit of both and I don’t know its proper name.

Nonsense, said Mother Jaguar, everything has its proper name. I should call it ‘Armadillo’ till I found the real one. And I shouldn’t leave it alone.

Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories.

***

The Armadillo was an unassuming but attractive little beast. His black and golden armour suited him very well and fitted him nicely. His eyes were bright, his ears were long and his voice, a melodious squeak. His uncle, the Great Hairy Armadillo, had before now remarked to the Fairy Armadillo over a large anthill:

Mark my words, Señorita, that black and yellow nephew of mine has intelligence. I will go further – he will go far.

He might well have said more had not a large jaguar appeared at that moment, and both the Armadillo’s relatives went far themselves. Very far.

As already mentioned, the Armadillo was rolling himself up into a ball. It was his favourite occupation. He did rather well.

The forest extended for almost an unbelievable number of miles in every direction. Had the Armadillo been a Statesman, or even a Cabinet Minister, there would have been no end to his fun. He might have explored avenues all day – there were countless avenues. He might have unturned stones for the rest of his life – there were millions of stones. He might have looked at the forest from many angles – there were unlimited numbers of them, of all sizes and colours. However, he did none of these things being only an armadillo, and merely rolled up into a ball. Although, this itself might possibly have been beyond not a few Prime Ministers. (The Honourable Member for Darlington said he had explored every avenue. He then curled up into a ball. Ministerial cheers. Laughter from the opposition.)

***

It is unfortunately necessary to leave the Armadillo here for a chapter or so, contorting himself in this pleasing, though not to him, original manner, and skip southwards through several degrees of latitude to the Pampas. These are not animals as their name might suggest, and are in no way related to the armadillos. They are the grasslands of the Argentine and Uruguay, whose vegetation waves cleverly in the breeze: the South East Trade Winds.

Chapter Three

"…He, above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,

Stood like a tow’r; his form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appeared

Less that Arch-angel ruined, and th’excess

Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen

Looks through the horizontal misty air,

Shorn of his beams;"

John Milton – Paradise Lost.

***

The ejaculation ‘damn’ uttered feelingly – once – is not without interest and even force as an expression of feeling. Repeated some thirty times, however, and mixed with other less virgin exclamations, it begins to lose point, and may, in time, actually become tedious.

The Devil, needless to say, was in no way put out by considerations such as these, and continued to curdle the inoffensive air with violent expressions of distaste and oaths by no means discreetly chosen. A slow spiral of smoke curled up from the hitherto luxuriant grass upon which he lay – his unwelcome presence had blasted it, and several acres, until then green, had instantaneously become hay as though with the heat of a long, hot and dry summer.

The All-Nameless had come down to Earth on one of the long trips through the Universe which he frequently made (two or three times a century). He was resting on the Pampas with a pleasant, though unjustified, feeling of ownership. He reflected that he had not seen this part of the world since before the Quaternary Ice Age, and remembered the battle he had witnessed some hundreds of thousands of years before between two giant ground sloths that had strayed north from Patagonia.

With typical arrogance, he had always considered it a little hasty of the All-Powerful to kill off the dragons and unicorns, the dinosaurs and pterodactyls that had lived on the Earth before man. The All-Mighty, however, had considered it a necessary preliminary to the creation of the Garden of Eden. Consequently, it was partly his great friendship for Pan and the Centaurs that had driven the All-Nameless into the Great Rebellion against the All-Great in the days before the Fall.

He was moved to the display of regrettably ungentlemanly language hinted at above by a small brown book which he had picked, somewhat scorched, out of the grass. It was a small copy of Holy Writ, dropped by an irresponsible Indian girl to whom it had been given by a keen and conscientious missionary from some foreign country.

The All-Nameless had glanced through its words with surprise, mixed with a little awe. He knew the ability of the Celestial Ministry for Prayer and Propaganda, and had always respected it for circulating reliable news upon the Earth and it had a long string of devoted Terrestrial Servants, from Moses onwards.

He was accordingly shocked and pained, almost beyond measure,