It is important to remember that the tortoise does not live inside a shell, it is a shell: tortoises walk like they do because the sockets of their hip and shoulder bones are inside their shells, right at the top. They move like we would if we were cars with arms and legs: slowly, and not like cars at all.
Their shells are part of them in another way, too: they have nerve endings, which is why tortoises enjoy being cleaned with toothbrushes or showers:
this tortoise loves shower time pic.twitter.com/whQnNXzWST
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) July 15, 2023
It is also why it feels particularly good to touch a tortoise’s shell. It is like touching someone’s hand through glass or putting your fingertip on a static electricity ball. Cooler than you think it will be, and smoother, but not too smooth – not too reptilian and very much alive.
Some tortoises, of course, live for a very long time. Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise, lived for so long that she was rumoured (incorrectly, but conceivably) to have met both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin. She died because she kept hearing Americans referring to her as a “turtle”.
I was in Greece recently so, naturally, a single image kept knocking on my shell: the ending of Rachel Cusk’s Kudos. The narrator is swimming in the sea. A man walks to the water. “He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more,” Cusk writes. “The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop.”
I was staying at a small hotel on the island of Agistri with my family (early coins, made on the Aegina, the larger island next door, bore the image of a tortoise). One morning, a manager at the hotel called my small daughter over to see something: it was a tortoise. The tortoise was named Platonus, she said: Plato, but a woman. Most people thought that the tortoise was male, but she liked to think it was female. She would only be out here for a few more weeks, and then she would crawl under the small shed that served as an office, burrow herself into the cool earth and stay there for the rest of summer. This is called Aestivation, rather than hibernation – many tortoises hibernate instead, in winter. (You can also hibernate a tortoise in a fridge).
When it was cool enough to come out, Platonus would emerge, heroically, and “make urine” for a very long time, the manager said. Then she would be given as much lettuce as she wanted. What did lady Plato think about while she was in there? You could imagine her, holding forth while expelling a small yet significant stream, telling you what she had realised, that, “The measure of a woman is what she does with her power”, or that “No one is more hated than she who speaks the truth” or, “It is time we put a stop to Americans referring to tortoises as turtles once and for all.” You could imagine her as lady Saul Bellow, “an omniscient tortoise”, as described by lady Martin Amis.
I have been thinking about Platonus ever since, but especially last week, worrying about her and whether it will still be cool enough in her burrow and hoping she has had enough to drink.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
