25.

     "Upravo tu, broj četrdeset dva", viknu Ford Prefekt vozaču taksija. "Baš ovde!"
     Taksi prikoči, a Ford i Artur iskočiše. Uz put su se zaustavili kod dobrog broja automata za gotovinu i Ford gurnu vozaču kroz prozor punu šaku novca.
     Ulaz u klub bio je mračan, otmen i odbojan. Naziv mu je pisao samo na najmanjoj pločici. Članovi su znali gde se nalazi, a ukoliko niste bili član, onda vam znanje gde je nije nimalo pomagalo.
     Ford Prefekt nije bio član kod Stavra, iako je jednom bio u drugom Stavrovom klubu u Njujorku. Imao je veoma jednostav način postupanja sa organizacijama čiji nije bio član. Naprosto je uleteo čim su se vrata otvorila, pokazao na Artura i kazao: "U redu je. Sa mnom je."
     Pošao je niz tamne, uglačane stepenice, osećajući se vrlo frudno u novim cipelama. Bile su od đavolje kože i plave, a njemu je bilo veoma drago što je, i pored svega što se zbivalo, bio dovoljno oštrog vida da ih opazi u izlogu prodavnice sa zadnjeg sedišta jurećeg taksija.
     "Mislio sam da sam ti rekao da ne dolaziš ovamo."
     "Šta?" upita Ford.
     Mršavi čovek, bolesnog izgleda, odeven u nešto vrećasto i italijansko, koračao je uz stepenice kraj njih, paleći cigaretu, a onda se odjednom zaustavio.
     "Ne ti", rekao je. "On."
     Gledao je pravo u Artura, a onda je izgledalo da se malo zbunio.
     "Izvinite", reče on. "Mora biti da sam vas zamenio sa nekim." On ponovo pođe uz stepenice, ali gotovo smesta ponovo se okrenu, još zbunjeniji. Piljio je u Artura.
     "Šta sad?" upita Ford.
     "Šta reče?"
     "Rekoh, šta sad?" ponovi Ford iznervirano.
     "Da, tako i ja mislim", reče čovek, zaljulja se malo i ispusti kutiju šibica koju je nosio. Usta su mu se slabašno kretala. Onda je stavio ruku na čelo.
     "Izvinite", reče on. "Očajnički pokušavam da se setim koju sam drogu uzeo, ali mora da je posredi jedna od onih od koje nikako ne možeš da se setiš."
     On zavrte glavom i ponovo se okrenu, a zatim se pope prema muškom toaletu.
     "Hajde", reče Ford. Požurio je niz stepenice, dok ga je Artur nervozno sledio. Susret ga je gadno prodrmao, a nije znao zbog čega.
     Nisu mu se dopadala takva mesta. Uz sve snove o Zemlji i domu koje je sanjao godinama, sada mu je gadno nedostajala koliba na Lemjueli sa noževima i sendvičima. Čak mu je nedostajao i stari Trašbarg.
     "Arture!"
     Bio je to zapanjujući učinak. Vikali su mu ime u stereo tehnici.
     On se nakrivi da pogleda u jednom smeru. Na stepenicama iza sebe ugleda Trilijan koja je žurila prema njemu u najdivnije izgužvanom rimplonu. Odjednom je delovala zgroženo.
     Nakrivio se u drugom smeru da vidi na šta to gleda odjednom zgroženo.
     Na dnu stepeništa bila je Trilijan, odevena... Ne - bila je to Triša. Triša koju je upravo video, histeričnu od zbunjenosti, na televiziji. A iza nje stajala je Nasumica, čiji je pogled delovao sumanutije nego ikada. Iza nje, u prostoru zgodnog, slabo osvetljenog kluba, druge mušterije večeri obrazovale su sleđeni prizor, uznemireno zagledani u sukob na stepeništu.
     Nekoliko sekundi svi su nepomično stajali. Samo muzika iza bara nije umela da se zaustavi.
     "Pištolj koji drži", reče Ford tiho i blago klimnu prema Nasumici, "jeste Vabanata 3. Bio je u brodu koji mi je ukrala. U stvari, prilično je opasan. Ne mičite se nijednog trenutka. Hajde da svi ostanemo mirni i da otkrijemo šta je to uznemirava."
     "Gde se uklapam?" vrisnu Nasumica odjednom. Ruka kojom je držala pištolj silovito joj se tresla. Druga ruka zaroni joj u džep i izvadi ostatke Arturovog sata. Protresla ih je prema njima.
     "Mislila sam da ću se ovde uklopiti", plakala je, "na svetu koji me je stvorio! Ali ispostavilo se da čak ni moja majka ne zna ko sam!" Ona silovito baci sat u stranu i ovaj se razbi među čašama iza bara, rasuvšu svoju unutrašnjost.
     Svi su još trenutak ili dva bili veoma tihi.
     "Nasumice", reče Trilijan tiho sa vrha stepeništa.
     "Umukni!" dreknu Nasumica. "Napustila si me!"
     "Nasumice, veoma je važno da me saslušaš i da razumeš", ustrajala je Trilijan tiho. "Nije nam preostalo mnogo vremena. Moramo otići. Svi moramo otići."
     "O čemu pričaš? Stalno odlazimo!" Sada su joj obe ruke bile na pištolju, i obe su se tresle. Nije ga uperila ni u koga posebno. Okrenula ga je naprosto prema svetu uopšte.
     "Čuj", reče Trilijan ponovo. "Ostavila sam te zbog toga što sam otišla da izveštavam sa ratišta za mrežu. Bilo je izuzetno opasno. Ili sam bar mislila da će biti. Stigla sam, a rat je odjednom prestao. Došlo je do vremenske anomalije i... čuj! Molim te, slušaj! Jedan izviđački ratni brod nije se pojavio gde je trebalo, ostatak flote rasut je u farsičnom neredu. To se sada dešava sve vreme."
     "Baš me briga! Neću da slušam o tvom prokletom poslu!" dreknu Nasumica. "Hoću kuću. Hoću da se negde uklopim!"
     "Nije ti ovo kuća", reče Trilijan, i dalje smirenim glasom. "Nemaš je. Niko od nas je nema. Jedva da je iko danas ima. Nestali brod o kome sam upravo govorila. Ljudi na tom brodu nemaju dom. Ne znaju odakle su. Ne sećaju se čak ni ko su ili šta im je zadatak. Veoma su izgubljeni, zbunjeni i uplašeni. Nalaze se u ovom Sunčevom sistemu i upravo se spremaju da učine nešto veoma... zavedeno, jer toliko su izgubljeni i zbunjeni. Moramo... da... odemo... smesta. Ne mogu ti reći gde možemo poći. Možda više nemamo kuda. Ali ovde ne možemo ostati. Molim te. Još samo jednom. Možemo li poći?"
     Nasumica je drhtala u panici i zbunjenosti.
     "Sve je u redu", reče Artur blago. "Ukoliko sam ja ovde, bezbedni smo. Ne pitajte me da sad objašnjavam, ali ja sam bezbedan, prema tome i vi ste bezbedne. U redu?"
     "Šta to pričaš?" upita Trilijan.
     "Svi se opustite", reče Artur. Osećao se veoma smireno. Život mu je bio začaran i ništa od svega nije delovalo stvarno.
     Lagano, postepeno, Nasumica poče da se opušta i da spušta pištolj, palac po palac.
     Dve stvari dogodiše se istovremeno.
     Vrata mučkog toaleta na vrhu stepenica otvoriše se, a čovek koji se bio navrzao na Artura iziđe, šmrkćući.
     Uplašena naglim pokretom, Nasumica podiže pištolj upravo u trenu kada je jedan čovek koji je stajao iza nje pokušao da ga dohvati.
     Artur se baci napred. Začu se zaglušujuća eksplozija. On nespretno pade kada se Trilijan sručila preko njega. Buka polako zamre. Artur diže pogled da bi video kako ga čovek sa vrha stepeništa gleda pogledom potpune zgranutosti.
     "Ti..." reče on. Onda se lagano, jezivo raspade na delove.
     Nasumica baci pištolj i pade na kolena, uz jecanje. "Žao mi je!" reče ona. "Toliko mi je žao! Toliko, toliko mi je žao..."
     Trilijan joj priđe. Triša joj priđe.
     Artur sede na stepenište sa glavom među šakama, nemajući pojma šta da učini. Ford je takođe sedeo na stepeništu ispod njega. On podiže nešto, pogleda sa zanimanjem i dodade to Arturu.
     "Znači li ti ovo štogod?" upita on.
     Artur ga primi. Bile su to šibice koje je ispustio poginuli. Na kutiji je bilo ispisano ime kluba. Bilo je ispisano i ime vlasnika kluba. Izgledalo je ovako:

     STAVRO MILER
     BETA

     Gledao je u to neko vreme, dok su stvari lagano počele da mu se slažu u umu. Pitao se šta da učini, ali to se pitao tek onako. Oko njega, ljudi su počinjali da trče i da mnogo viču, ali iznenada mu je bilo veoma jasno da se ništa ne može učiniti, ni sada niti bilo kada. Kroz novu neobičnost buke i svetlosti tek što je mogao da razazna obličje Forda Prefekta, koji je sedeo zavaljen i divljački se smejao.
     Osećaj ogromnog mira potpuno ga preplavi. Znao je da je najzad, jednom za svagda, sve konačno gotovo.
     U tmini mosta, u srcu vogonskog broda, Proštetnik Vogon Jelc sedeo je sam. Svetlosti nakratko zapalacaše po ekranima za nadgledanje spoljašnjosti, nanizanim po jednom zidu. U vazduhu nad njim, prekidi u plavoj i zelenoj vodenastoj kobasici razlučiše se. Mogućnosti izbora kolabirale su, verovatnoće se stapale jedna u drugu i najzad se sve rastopi i prestade da postoji.
     Spusti se veoma duboka tama. Vogonski kapetan sedeo je uronjen u nju nekoliko sekundi.
     "Svetla", reče on.
     Nije bilo odgovora. I ptica je smrskana van svake verovatnoće.
     Vogon sam upali svetlo. On ponovo podiže parče hartije i unese mali znak u kvadratić.
     Dakle, sa tim je gotovo. Brod mu se odšunja u mastiljavu prazninu.

     I pored toga što je preduzeo ono što je smatrao izuzetno pozitivnim korakom, grebulonski vođa ipak je dobio veoma rđav mesec. Bio je otprilike isti kao i prethodni meseci, osim što sada nije bilo ničega na televiziji. On umesto toga pusti malo lake muzike.

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe

A Short Story By Douglas Adams


   A large flying craft moved swiftly across the surface of an
astoundingly beautiful sea. From mid-morning onwards it plied back and
forth in great widening arcs, and at last attracted the attention of the
local islanders, a peaceful, sea-food loving people who gathered on the
beach and squinted up into the blinding sun, trying to see what was
there.
   Any sophisticated knowledgeable person, who had knocked about, seen a
few things, would probably have remarked on how much the craft looked
like a filing cabinet - a large and recently burgled filing cabinet
lying on its back with its drawers in the air and flying.
   The islanders, whose experience was of a different kind, were instead
struck by how little it looked like a lobster.
   They chattered excitedly about its total lack of claws, its stiff
unbendy back, and the fact that it seemed to experience the greatest
difficulty staying on the ground. This last feature seemed particularly
funny to them. They jumped up and down on the spot a lot to demonstrate
to the stupid thing that they themselves found staying on the ground the
easiest thing in the world.
   But soon this entertainment began to pall for them. After all, since
it was perfectly clear to them that the thing was not a lobster, and
since their world was blessed with an abundance of things that were
lobsters (a good half a dozen of which were now marching succulently up
the beach towards them) they saw no reason to waste any more time on the
thing but decided instead to adjourn immediately for a late lobster
lunch.
   At that exact moment the craft stopped suddenly in mid-air then
upended itself and plunged headlong into the ocean with a great crash of
spray which sent them shouting into the trees.
   When they re-emerged, nervously, a few minutes later, all they were
able to see was a smoothly scarred circle of water and a few gulping
bubbles.
   That's odd, they said to each other between mouthfuls of the best
lobster to be had anywhere in the Western Galaxy, that's the second time
that's happened in a year.

   The craft which wasn't a lobster dived direct to a depth of two
hundred feet, and hung there in the heavy blueness, while vast masses of
water swayed about it. High above, where the water was magically clear,
a brilliant formation of fish flashed away. Below, where the light had
difficulty reaching the colour of the water sank to a dark and savage
blue.
   Here, at two hundred feet, the sun streamed feebly. A large, silk
skinned sea-mammal rolled idly by, inspecting the craft with a kind of
half-interest, as if it had half expected to find something of this kind
round about here, and then it slid on up and away towards the rippling
light.
   The craft waited here for a minute or two, taking readings, and then
descended another hundred feet. At this depth it was becoming seriously
dark. After a moment or two the internal lights of the craft shut down,
and in the second or so that passed before the main external beams
suddenly stabbed out, the only visible light came from a small hazily
illuminated pink sign which read The Beeblebrox Salvage and Really Wild
Stuff Corporation.
   The huge beams switched downwards, catching a vast shoal of silver
fish, which swiveled away in silent panic.
   In the dim control room which extended in a broad bow from the
craft's blunt prow, four heads were gathered round a computer display
that was analysing the very, very faint and intermittent signals that
were[?] emanating from deep on the sea bed.
   "That's it," said the owner of one of the heads finally.
   "Can we be quite sure?" said the owner of another of the heads.
   "One hundred per cent positive," replied the owner of the first head.
   "You're one hundred per cent positive that the ship which is crashed
on the bottom of this ocean is the ship which you said you were one
hundred per cent positive could one hundred per cent positively never
crash?" said the owner of the two remaining heads. "Hey," he put up two
of his hands, "I'm only asking."
   The two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance
Administration responded to this with a very cold stare, but the man
with the odd, or rather the even number of heads, missed it. He flung
himself back on the pilot couch, opened a couple of beers - one for
himself and the other also for himself - stuck his feet on the console
and said "Hey, baby" through the ultra-glass at a passing fish.
   "Mr. Beeblebrox...," began the shorter and less reassuring of the two
officials in a low voice.
   "Yup?" said Zaphod, rapping a suddenly empty can down on some of the
more sensitive instruments, "you ready to dive? Let's go."
   "Mr. Beeblebrox, let us make one thing perfectly clear..."
   "Yeah let's," said Zaphod, "How about this for a start. Why don't you
just tell me what's really on this ship."
   "We have told you," said the official. "By-products."
   Zaphod exchanged weary glances with himself.
   "By-products," he said. "By-products of what?"
   "Processes." said the official.
   "What processes?"
   "Processes that are perfectly safe."
   "Santa Zarquana Voostra!" exclaimed both of Zaphod's heads in chorus,
"so safe that you have to build a zarking fortress ship to take the
by-products to the nearest black hole and tip them in! Only it doesn't
get there because the pilot does a detour - is this right? - to pic* up
some lobster...? OK, so the guy is cool, but... I mean own up, this is
barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical
mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!"
   "Shut up!" his right head yelled at his left, "we're flanging!"
   He got a good calming grip on the remaining beer can.
   "Listen guys," he resumed after a moment's peace and contemplation.
The two officials had said nothing. Conversation at this level was not
something to which they felt they could aspire. "I just want to know,"
insisted Zaphod, "what you're getting me into here."
   He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the
computer screen. They meant nothing to him but he didn't like the look
of them at all. They were all squiggly with lots of long numbers and
things.
   "It's breaking up, is that it?" he shouted. "It's got a hold full
epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that'll fry this whole
space sector for zillions of years back and it's breaking up. Is that
the story? Is that what we're going down to find? Am I going to come out
of that wreck with even more heads?"
   "It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox," insisted the
official, "the ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot
possibly break up"
   "Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?"
   "We like to look at things that are perfectly safe."
   "Freeeooow!"
   "Mr. Beeblebrox," said on official, patiently, "may I remind you that
you have a job to do?"
   "Yeah, well maybe I don't feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden.
What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are
they called, those moral things?"
   "Scruples?"
   "Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?"
   The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass
the time. Zaphod sighed a "what is the world coming to" sort of sigh to
absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.
   "Ship?" he called.
   "Yup?" said the ship.
   "Do what I do."
   The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after
double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began
slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the
lowest depths.

   Five hundred feet.
   A thousand.
   Two thousand.
   Here, at a pressure of nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling
depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings.
Two foot-long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned,
and vanished back into the blackness.
   Two and a half thousand feet.
   At the dim edges of the ship's lights guilty secrets flitted by with
their eyes on stalks.
   Gradually the topography of the distantly approaching ocean bed
resolved with greater and greater clarity on the computer displays until
at last a shape could be made out that was separate and distinct from
its surroundings. It was like a huge lopsided cylindrical fortress which
widened sharply halfway along its length to accommodate the heavy
ultra-plating with which the crucial storage holds were clad, and which
were supposed by its builders to have made this the most secure and
impregnable spaceship ever built. Before launch the material structure
of this section had been battered, rammed, blasted and subjected to
every assault its builders knew it could withstand in order to
demonstrate that it could withstand them.
   The tense silence in the cockpit tightened perceptibly as it became
clear that it was this section that had broken rather neatly in two.
   "In fact it's perfectly safe," said one of the officials, "it's built
so that even if the ship does break up, the storage holds cannot
possibly be breached."

   Three thousand, eight hundred and twenty five feet.
   Four Hi-Presh-A SmartSuits moved slowly out of the open hatchway of
the salvage craft and waded through the barrage of its lights towards
the monstrous shape that loomed darkly out of the sea night. They moved
with a sort of clumsy grace, near weightless though weighed on by a
world of water.
   With his right-hand head Zaphod peered up into the black immensities
above him and for a moment his mind sang with a silent roar of horror.
He glanced to his left and was relieved to see that his other head was
busy watching the Brockian Ultra-Cricket broadcasts on the helmet vid
without concern. Slightly behind him to his left walked the two
officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, slightly
in front of him to his right walked the empty suit, carrying their
implements and testing the way for them.
   They passed the huge rift in the broken backed Starship Billion Year
Bunker, and played their flashlights up into it. Mangled machinery
loomed between torn and twisted bulkheads, two feet thick. A family of
large transparent eels lived in there now and seemed to like it.
   The empty suit preceded them along the length of the ship's gigantic
murky hull, trying the airlocks. The third one it tested ground open
uneasily. They crowded inside it and waited for several long minutes
while the pump mechanisms dealt with the hideous pressure that the ocean
exerted, and slowly replaced it with an equally hideous pressure of air
and inert gases. At last the inner door slid open and they were admitted
to a dark outer holding area of the Starship Billion Year Bunker.
   Several more high security Titan-O-Hold doors had to be passed
through, each of which the officials opened with a selection of quark
keys. Soon they were so deep within the heavy security fields that the
UltraCricket broadcasts were beginning to fade, and Zaphod had to switch
to one of the rock video stations, since there was nowhere that they
were not able to reach.
   A final doorway slid open, and they emerged into a large sepulchral
space. Zaphod played his flashlight against the opposite wall and it
fell full on a wild-eyed screaming face.
   Zaphod screamed a diminished fifth himself, dropped his light and sat
heavily on the floor, or rather on a body which had been lying there
undisturbed for around six months and which reacted to being sat on by
exploding with great violence. Zaphod wondered what to do about all
this, and after a brief but hectic internal debate decided that passing
out would be the very thing.
   He came to a few minutes later and pretended not to know who he was,
where he was or how he had got there, but was not able to convince
anybody. He then pretended that his memory suddenly returned with a rush
and that the shock caused him to pass out again, but he was helped
unwillingly to his feet by the empty suit - which he was beginning to
take a serious dislike to - and forced to come to terms with his
surroundings.
   They were dimly and fitfully lit and unpleasant in a number of
respects, the most obvious of which was the colourful arrangement of
parts of the ship's late lamented Navigation Officer over the floor,
walls and ceiling, and especially over the lower half of his, Zaphod's,
suit. The effect of this was so astoundingly nasty that we shall not be
referring to again at any point in this narrative - other than to record
briefly the fact that it caused Zaphod to throw up inside his suit,
which he therefore removed and swapped, after suitable headgear
modifications, with the empty one. Unfortunately the stench of the fetid
air in the ship, followed by the sight of his own suit walking around
casually draped in rotting intestines was enough to make him throw up in
the other suit as well, which was a problem that he and the suit would
simply have to live with.
   There. All done. No more nastiness.
   At least, no more of that particular nastiness.
   The owner of the screaming face had calmed down very slightly now and
was bubbling away incoherently in a large tank of yellow liquid - an
emergency suspension tank.
   "It was crazy," he babbled, "crazy! I told him we could always try
the lobster on the way back, but he was crazy. Obsessed! Do you ever get
like that about lobster? Because I don't. Seems to me it's all rubbery
and fiddly to eat, and not that much taste, well I mean is there? I
infinitely prefer scallops, and said so. Oh Zarquon, I said so!"
   Zaphod stared at this extraordinary apparition, flailing in its tank.
The man was attached to all kinds of life-support tubes, and his voice
was bubbling out of speakers that echoed insanely round the ship,
returning as haunting echoes from deep and distant corridors.
   "That was where I went wrong" the madman yelled, "I actually said
that I preferred scallops and he said it was because I hadn't had real
lobster like they did where his ancestors came from, which was here, and
he'd prove it. He said it was no problem, he said the lobster here was
worth a whole journey, let alone the small diversion it would take to
get here, and he swore he could handle the ship in the atmosphere, but
it was madness, madness!" he screamed, and paused with his eyes rolling,
as if the word had rung some kind of bell in his mind, "The ship went
right out of control! I couldn't believe what we were doing and just to
prove a point about lobster which is really so overrated as a food, I'm
sorry to go on about lobsters so much, I'll try and stop in a minute,
but they've been on my mind so much for the months I've been in this
tank, can you imagine what it's like to be stuck in a ship with the same
guys for months eating junk food when all one guy will talk about is
lobster and then spend six months floating by yourself in a tank
thinking about it. I promise I will try and shut up about the lobsters,
I really will. Lobsters, lobsters, lobsters - enough! I think I'm the
only survivor. I'm the only one who managed to get to an emergency tank
before we went down. I sent out the Mayday and then we hit. It's a
disaster isn't it? A total disaster, and all because the guy liked
lobsters. How much sense am I making? It's really hard for me to tell."
He gazed at them beseechingly, and his mind seemed to sway slowly back
down to earth like a falling leaf . He blinked and looked at them oddly
like a monkey peering at a strange fish. He scrabbled curiously with his
wrinkled up fingers at the glass side of the tank. Tiny, thick yellow
bubbles loosed themselves from his mouth and nose, caught briefly in his
swab of hair and strayed on upwards.
   "Oh Zarquon, oh heavens," he mumbled pathetically to himself, "I've
been found. I've been rescued..."
   "Well," said one of the officials, briskly, "you've been found at
least." He strode over to the main computer bank in the middle of the
chamber and started checking quickly through the ship's main monitor
circuits for damage reports.
   "The aorist rod chambers are intact," he said.
   "Holy dingo's dos," snarled Zaphod, "there are aorist rods on
board...!"
   Aorist rods were devices used in a now happily abandoned form of
energy production. When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one
point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted
that one place which had never used up all its available energy was -
the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such
insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same
night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of
all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the
past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an extremely
expensive form of sentimentality. The past provided a very cheap,
plentiful and clean source of energy, there could always be a few
Natural Past Reserves set up if anyone wanted to pay for their upkeep,
and as for the claim that draining the past impoverished the present,
well, maybe it did, slightly, but the effects were immeasurable and you
really had to keep a sense of proportion.
   It was only when it was realised that the present really was being
impoverished, and that the reason for it was that those selfish
plundering wastrel bastards up in the future were doing exactly the same
thing, that everyone realised that every single aorist rod, and the
terrible secret of how they were made would have to be utterly and
forever destroyed. They claimed it was for the sake of their
grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of
their grandparent's grandchildren, and their grandchildren's
grandparents.
   The official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration
gave a dismissive shrug.
   "They're perfectly safe," he said. He glanced up at Zaphod and
suddenly said with uncharacteristic frankness, "there's worse than that
on board. At least," he added, tapping at one of the computer screens,
"I hope it's on board."
   The other official rounded on him sharply.
   "What the hell do you think you're saying?" he snapped.
   The first shrugged again. He said "It doesn't matter. He can say what
he likes. No one would believe him. It's why we chose to use him rather
than do anything official isn't it? The more wild the story he tells,
the more it'll sound like he's some hippy adventurer making it up. He
can even say that we said this and it'll make him sound like a
paranoid." He smiled pleasantly at Zaphod who was seething in a suit
full of sick. "You may accompany us," he told him, "if you wish."

   "You see?" said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer
seals of the aorist rod hold. "Perfectly secure, perfectly safe."
   He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical
weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire
planet.
   He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active
compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet.
   He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active
compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet.
   "I'm glad I'm not a planet," muttered Zaphod.
   "You'd have nothing to fear," assured the official from the Safety
and Civil Reassurance Administration, "planets are very safe. Provided,"
he added - and paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the
point where the back of the Starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The
corridor here was twisted and deformed, and the floor was damp and
sticky in patches.
   "Ho hum," he said, "ho very much hum."
   "What's in this hold?" demanded Zaphod.
   "By-products" said the official, clamming up again.
   "By-products..." insisted Zaphod, quietly, "of what?"
   Neither official answered. Instead, they examined the hold door very
carefully and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that
had deformed the whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly.
It swung open to his touch. There was darkness inside, with just a
couple of dim yellow lights deep within it.
   "Of what?" hissed Zaphod.
   The leading official turned to the other.
   "There's an escape capsule," he said, "that the crew were to use to
abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole," he said. "I
think it would be good to know that it's still there." The other
official nodded and left without a word.
   The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow
lights glowed about twenty feet from them.
   "The reason," he said, quietly "why everything else in this ship is,
I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No
one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that
mad or dangerous ring very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid but
they're not that stupid."
   "By-products," hissed Zaphod again, - he had to hiss in order that
his voice shouldn't be heard to tremble - "of what."
   "Er, Designer People."
   "What?"
   "The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research
grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The
results were uniformly disastrous. All the "people" and "personalities"
turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not
co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor
pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous
because they didn't ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk
through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no
one spotted the danger.
   "The most dangerous of all were three identical ones - they were put
in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe.
They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they
are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is
nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be
allowed to do..."
   Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As
his eyes became accustomed to the light he saw that the two lights
framed a third space where something was broken. Wet sticky patches
gleamed dully on the floor. Zaphod and the official walked cautiously
towards the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the
helmet headsets from the other official.
   "The capsule has gone," he said tersely.
   "Trace it," snapped Zaphod's companion. "Find exactly where it has
gone. We must know where it has gone!"
   Zaphod slid aside a large ground glass door. Beyond it lay a tank
full of thick yellow liquid, and floating in it was a man, a kindly
looking man with lots of pleasant laugh lines round his face. He seemed
to be floating quite contentedly and smiling to himself.
   Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The
planet towards which the escape capsule had headed had already been
identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
   The kindly looking man in the tank seemed to be babbling gently to
himself, just as the co-pilot had been in his tank. Little yellow
bubbles beaded on the man's lips. Zaphod found a small speaker by the
tank and turned it on. He heard the man babbling gently about a shining
city on a hill.
   He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance
Administration issue instructions that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
must be made "perfectly safe."

The Private Life of Genghis Khan

The last of the horsemen disappeared into the smoke and the thudding of their hooves receded into the grey distance.

The smoke hung on the land. It drifted across the setting sun, which lay like an open wound across the western sky.

In the ringing silence that followed the battle, very, very few, pitifully few cries could be heard from the bloody, mangled wreckage on the fields.

Ghostlike figures, stunned with horror, emerged from the woods, stumbled and then ran forward crying—women, searching for their husbands, brothers, fathers, lovers first amongst the dying and then amongst the dead. The flickering light by which they searched was that of their burning village, which had that afternoon officially become part of the Mongol Empire.

From out of the wastes of central Asia they had swept, a savage force for which the world was utterly unprepared. They swept like a wildly wielded scythe, hacking, slashing, obliterating all that lay in their path, and calling it conquest.

And throughout the lands that feared them now or would come to fear them, no name inspired more terror than that of their leader, Genghis Khan. The greatest of the Asian warlords, he stood alone, revered as a God among warriors, marked out by the cold light of his grey green eyes, the savage furrow of his brow, and the fact that he could beat the shit out of any of them.

Later that night the moon rose, and by its light a small party of horsemen carrying torches rode quietly out from the Mongol encampment that sprawled over nearby hill. A casual observer would not have noticed anything remarkable about the man who rode at their centre, muffled in a heavy cloak, tense, hunched forward on his horse as if weighed down by a heavy burden, because a casual observer would have been dead.

The band rode a few miles through the moonlit woods, picking their way along the paths until they came at last to a small clearing, and here they reined their horses in and waited on their leader.

He moved his horse slowly forward and surveyed the small group of peasant huts that stood huddled together in the centre of the clearing trying very hard at short notice to look deserted.

Hardly any smoke at all was rising from the primitive chimney stacks. Virtually no light appeared at the windows, and not a sound could be heard from any of them save that of a small child saying "Shhhhh....."

For a moment a strange green fire seemed to flash from the eyes of the Mongol leader. A heavy deadly kind of a thing that you could hardly call a smile drew itself through his fine wispy beard. The strange kind of smiley thing would signify (briefly) to anyone who was stupid enough to look that there was nothing a Mongol warlord liked better after a day hacking people to bits than a big night out.

The door flew open. A Mongol warrior surged into the hut like a savage wind. Two children ran screaming to their mother who was cowering wide eyed in the corner of the tiny room. A dog yelped.

The warrior hurled his torch on to the still glowing fire, and then threw the dog on to it. That would teach it to be a dog. The last surviving man of the family, a grey and aged grandfather stepped bravely forward, eyes flashing. With a flash of his sword the Mongol whipped off the old man's head which trundled across the floor and fetched up leaning rakishly against a table leg. The old man's body stood tensely for a moment, not knowing what to think. As it began slowly, majestically to topple forward, Khan strode in and pushed it brusquely aside. He surveyed the happy domestic scene and bestowed a grim kind of smile on it. Then he walked over to a large chair and sat in it, testing it first for comfort. When he was satisfied with it he heaved heavy sigh and sat back in front of the fire on which the dog was now blazing merrily.

The warrior grabbed at the terrified woman, pushed her children roughly aside and brought her, trembling in front of the mighty Khan.

She was young and pretty, with long bedraggled black hair. Her bosom heaved and her face was stark with fright.

Khan regarded her with a slow contemptuous look.

"Does she know," he said at length in a low, dead voice, "who I am?"

"You... you are the mighty Khan!" cried the woman.

Khan's eyes fixed themselves on hers.

"Does she know," he hissed, "what I want of her?"

"I... I'll do anything for you, O Khan," stammered the woman, "but spare my children!"

Khan said quietly, "Then begin." His eyes dropped and he gazed distantly into the fire.

Nervously, shaking with fear the woman stepped forward and laid a tentative pale hand on Khan's arm.

The soldier smacked her hand away.

"Not that!" he barked.

The woman started back, aflutter. She realised she would have to do better. Still shaking, she knelt down on the floor and started gently to push apart the Khan's knees.

"Stop that!" roared the soldier and shoved her violently backwards. Bewilderment began to mix with the terror in her eyes as she cowered on the floor.

"Come on " snapped the soldier, "ask him what kind of day he's had."

"What...?" she wailed, "I don't... I don't understand what..."

The soldier seized her, span her into a half nelson, and jabbed the point of his sword against her throat.

"I said ask him," he hissed, "what kind of day he's had!"

The woman gasped with pain and incomprehension. The sword jabbed again. "Say it!"

"Er, what sort ...of... er, day..." she said in a hestitant, strangled squeak, "have you... had?"

"Dear!" hissed the soldier, "say dear!"

Her eyes bulged in horror at the sword.

"What sort of day have sort of day have you, had..., dear?" she asked querulously.

Khan looked up briefly, wearily.

"Oh, same as usual," he said, "violent."

He gazed back at the fire again.

"Right," said the soldier to the woman, "go on."

She relaxed very slightly. She seemed to have passed some kind of test. Perhaps it would be straightforward from now on and she could at least get it over with. She moved nervously forward and started to caress the Khan again.

The soldier hurled her savagely across the room, kicked her and yanked her screaming to her feet again.

"I said stop that!," he bellowed. He pulled her face close to his and breathed a lungful of cheap wine and week old rancid goat fat fumes at her, which failed to cheer her up because it reminded her sharply of her late lamented husband who used to do the same thing to her every night. She sobbed.

"Be nice to him!" the Mongol snarled and spat one of his unwanted teeth at her, "ask him how his work's going!"

She gawped at him. The nightmare was continuing. A stinging blow landed on her cheek.

"Just say to him," the soldier snarled again, "'How's the work going, dear?" He shoved her forward.

"How...how's the work going... dear?" she yelped miserably.

The soldier shook her. "Put some affection into it!" he roared.

She sobbed again. "How...how's the work going... dear?" she yelped miserably again, but this time with a kind of pathetic pout at the end.

The mighty Khan sighed.

"Oh, not too bad I suppose," he said in a world weary tone. "We swept through Manchuria a bit and spilt quite a lot of blood there. That was in the morning, then this afternoon was mainly pillaging, though there was a bit of bloodshed around half four. What sort of day have you had?"

So saying, he pulled a couple of scroll maps from out of his furs and started to study them abstractedly by the light of the smouldering dog.

The Mongol warrior pulled a glowing poker out of the fire and advanced menacingly on the woman.

"Tell him!" Go on! "

She leapt back with a shriek.

"Tell him!"

"Er, my husband and father were killed!" she said.

"Oh yes, dear?" said Khan absently, not looking up from his maps.

"Dog was burnt!"

"Oh, er, really?"

"Well, er, that's about it, really... er.."

The soldier advanced on her with the poker again.

"Oh, and I was tortured a bit!" shrieked the woman.

Khan looked up at her. "What?" he said, vaguely, "sorry dear, I was just reading this..."

"Right," said the soldier, "nag him!"

"What?"

"Just say, 'Look Genghis, put that thing away while I'm talking to you. Here I am, spend all day slaving over a hot...'"

"He'll kill me!"

"Bleeding kill you if you don't."

"I can't stand it!" cried the woman and collapsed on the floor. She flung herself on the great Khan's feet. "Don't torment me," she wailed, "if you mean to rape me, then rape me, but don't..."

The great Khan surged to his feet and glowered down at her. "No," he muttered savagely, "you'd only laugh—you're just like all the others."

He stormed out of the hut and rode off into the night in such a rage that almost forgot to burn down the village before he left.


===

After another particularly vicious day the last of the horsemen disappeared into the smoke and the thudding of their hooves receded into the grey distance.

The smoke hung on the land. It drifted across the setting sun, which lay like an open wound across the western sky.

In the ringing silence that followed the battle, very, very few, pitifully few cries could be heard from the bloody, mangled wreckage on the fields.

Ghostlike figures, stunned with horror, emerged from the woods, stumbled and then ran crying forward crying—women, searching for their husbands, brothers, fathers, lovers, first amongst the dying and then amongst the dead.

Far away behind the screen of smoke thousands of horsemen arrived at their sprawling camp, and with a huge amount of clatter, shouting and comparing of backhand slashes they dismounted and instantly started in on the cheap wine and rancid goat fat.

In front of his splendidly bedraped Imperial tent a bloodstained and battle weary Khan dismounted.

"Which battle was that?" he asked his son, Ogdai, who had ridden with him. Ogdai was a young and ambitious general, keenly interested in viciousness of all kinds. He was hoping to improve on his own Known World record for the highest number of peasants impaled on a single sword thrust and would be getting in some practice that night.

He strode up to his father.

"It was the Battle of Sammarkand, oh Khan!" he proclaimed, and rattled his sword in a tremendously impressive way.



Khan folded his arms and leant on his horse, looking over it across the dreadful mess they'd made of the valley beneath them.

"Oh, I can't tell the difference anymore," he said with a sigh, "did we win?"

"Oh yes! Yes! Yes!" exclaimed Ogdai with fierce pride, "it was a mighty victory indeed!

"Indeed it was!" he added and waggled his sword again. He drew it excitedly and made a few practice thrusts. Yes, he thought to himself, tonight he was going to go for the six.

Khan screwed his face up at the gathering dusk.

"Oh dear," he said, "after twenty years of these two hour battles I get the feeling that there must be more to life, you know." He turned, lifted up the front of his torn and bloodied gold embroidered tunic and stared down at his own hairy tummy. "Here, feel this," he said, "do you think I'm putting it on a bit?"

Ogdai gazed at the great Khan's tummy with a mixture of awe and impatience.

"Er no," he said "No, not at all." With a flick of his fingers Ogdai summoned a servant to bring the maps to him, ran him through, and as he fell caught from his nerveless but not entirely surprised fingers the plans of the grand campaign.

"Now, O Khan," he said, spreading the map over the back of another servant who stood specially hunched over for the purpose, "we must push forward to Persia, and then we shall be poised to take over the whole world!"



"No look, feel that," said Khan, pinching a fold of skin between his fingers, "do you think..."

"Khan!" interrupted Ogdai urgently, "we are on the point of conquering the world!" He stabbed at the map with a knife, catching the servant beneath a nasty nick on his left lung.

"When?" said Khan with a frown.

Ogdai threw up his arms in exasperation. "Tomorrow!" he said, "we start tomorrow!"

"Ah, well, tomorrow's a bit difficult, you see," said Khan. He puffed out his cheeks and thought for a moment. "The thing is that next week I've got this lecture on carnage techniques in Bokhara, and I thought I'd use tomorrow to prepare it."

Ogdai stared at him in astonishment as the map-bearing servant slowly collapsed on his foot.

"Well, can't you put that off?" he exclaimed.

"Well you see, they've paid me quite a lot of money for it already, so I'm a bit committed."

"Well, Wednesday?"

Khan pulled a scroll from out of his tunic and looked through it, shaking his head slowly. "Not sure about Wednesday..."

"Thursday?"

"No, Thursday I am certain about. We've got Ogdai and his wife coming round to dinner, and I'd kind of promised..."

"But I am Ogdai!"

"Well, there you are then. You wouldn't be able to make it either."

Ogdai's silence was only disturbed by the sound of thousands of hairy Mongols shouting and fighting and getting pissed.

"Look," he said quietly, "will you be ready to conquer the world... on Friday?"

Khan sighed. "Well the secretary comes in on Friday mornings."

"Does she."

"All those letters to answer. You'ld be astonished at the demands people try to make on my time you know." He slouched moodily against his horse. "Would I sign this, would I appear there. Would I please do a sponsored massacre for charity. So that usually takes till at least three, then I had hoped to get away early for a long weekend. Now Monday, Monday..."

He consulted his scroll again.

"Monday's out, I'm afraid. Rest and recuperation, that's one thing I do insist upon. Now how about Tuesday?"

The strange keening noise that could be heard in the distance at this moment sounded like the normal everyday wailing of women and children over their slaughtered menfolk and Khan paid it no mind. A light bobbed on the horizon.

"Tuesday—look, I'm free in the morning—no, hold on a moment, I'd sort of made a date for meeting this awfully interesting chap who knows absolutely everything about understanding things, which is something I'm awfully bad at. Now that's a pity because that was my only free day next week. Now, next Tuesday we could usefully think about—or is that the day I..."

The keening sound continued, in fact it grew, but it was so lightly borne upon the evening breeze that it still did not intrude itself on Khan's senses. The approaching light was so pale as to be indistinguishable from that of the moon which was bright that night.

"—so that's more or less the whole of March out," said Khan, "I'm afraid."

"April?" asked Ogdai, wearily. He idly whipped out a passing peasant's liver, but the joy had gone out of it. He flipped the thing listlessly off into the dark. A dog which had grown very fat over the years by the simple expedient of staying close to Ogdai at all times leapt on it. These were not pleasant times.

"Well no, April's out," said Khan—I'm going to Africa in April, that's one thing I had promised myself.

The light approaching them through the night sky had now at last attracted the attention of one or two other leading Mongols in the vicinity, who, wonderingly, stopped hitting each other and stabbing things and drew near.

"Look," said Ogdai, himself still unaware of what things were coming to pass, "can we please agree that we will conquer the world in May then?"

The mighty Khan sucked doubtfully on his teeth. "Well, I don't like to commit myself that far in advance. One feels so tied down if one's life is completely mapped out beforehand. I should be doing more reading, for heaven's sake, when am I going to find the time for that? Anyway—" he sighed and scratched at his scroll, " 'May—possible conquest of the world'. Now I've only pencilled that in, so don't regard it as absolutely definite—but keep on at me about it and we'll see how it goes. Hello, what's that?"

Slowly, with the grace of a beautiful woman stepping into a bath, a long slim silver craft lowered itself gently to the ground. Soft light streamed from it. From its opening doorway stepped a tall elegant creature with a curiously fine grey green complexion. It walked slowly towards them.

In its path lay the dark figure of a peasant who had been crying quietly to himself since he had watched his liver being eaten by Ogdai's dog and had known that no way was he going to get it back, and wondered how on Earth his poor wife was going to cope now. He chose this moment finally to pass on to better things.

The tall alien stepped over him with distaste and, though you would have had to read his face very closely to realise this, a little envy. He nodded briefly to each of the gathered Mongol leaders in turn, and pulled a small clipboard out from under his heavy metallic robe.

"Good evening," it said in a small weaselly voice, "my name is Wowbagger, also called the Infinitely Prolonged, I shall not trouble you with the reasons why. Greetings."

He turned and addressed the completely pop-eyed mighty Khan.

"You are Genghis Khan? Genghis Temüjin Khan, son of Yesügei?"

The diary scrolls slipped from Khan's hands to the ground. The pale luminesence from Wowbagger's ship suffused his wondering ravaged, careworn yellow features. As in a dream the mighty Emperor stepped forward in acknowledgment.

"Can I just check the spelling?" said the alien, showing him the clipboard, "I would hate to get it wrong at this stage and then have to start all over again, I really would."

Khan nodded faintly.

"Right number of aitches, then?" said the alien.

Again, the transfigured Emperor slightly inclined his face, while his eyes still boggled.

"Good," said Wowbagger, and made a little tick on his clipboard. He looked up. "Genghis Khan," he said, "you are a wanker; you are a tosspot; you are a very tiny piece of turd. Thank you." With that he retreated into his ship and flew off.

The was a nasty kind of silence.

Later that year Genghis Khan stormed into Europe in such a rage that he almost forgot to burn down Asia before he left.

Last Chance to See ...

Twig Technology

This isn't at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.
This was the idea of the Observer Colour Magazine, to throw us all in at the deep end. Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist, working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which L was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years - sit in a tree and hide.
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.
Like virtually everything that lives on Madagascar, it does not exist anywhere else on earth. Its origins date back to a period in earth's history when Madagascar was still part of mainland Africa (which itself had been part of the gigantic supercontinent of Gondwanaland), at which time the ancestors of the Madagascan lemurs were the dominant primate in all the world. When Madagascar sheered off into the Indian Ocean it became entirely isolated from all the evolutionary changes that took place in the rest of the world. It is a life-raft from a different time. It is now almost like a tiny, fragile, separate planet.
The major evolutionary change which passed Madagascar by was the arrival of the monkeys. These were descended from the same ancestors as the lemurs, but they had bigger brains, and were aggressive competitors for the same habitat. Where the lemurs had been content to hang around in trees having a good time, the monkeys were ambitious, and interested in all sorts of things, especially twigs, with which they found they could do all kinds of things that they couldn't do by themselves - digging for things, probing things, hitting things. The monkeys took over the world and the lemur branch of the primate family died out everywhere - other than Madagascar, which for millions of years the monkeys never reached.
Then fifteen hundred years ago, the monkeys finally arrived, or at least, the monkey's descendants - us. Thanks to astounding advances in twig technology we arrived in canoes, then boats and finally aeroplanes, and once again started to compete for use of the same habitat, only this time with fire and machetes and domesticated animals, with asphalt and concrete. The lemurs are once again fighting for survival.
My aeroplane full of monkey descendants arrived at Antananarivo airport. Mark, who had gone out ahead to make the arrangements for the expedition, met me for the first time there and explained the set-up.
'Everything's gone wrong,' he said.
He was tall, dark and laconic and had a slight nervous tic. He explained that he used to be just tall, dark and laconic, but that the events of the last few days had rather got to him. At least he tried to explain this. He had also lost his voice, he croaked, due to a lot of recent shouting.
'I nearly telexed you not to come,' he said. `The whole thing's a nightmare. I've been here for five days and I'm still waiting for something to go right. The Ambassador in Brussels promised me that the Ministry of Agriculture would be able to provide us with two Landrovers and a helicopter. Turns out all they've got is a moped and it doesn't work.
'The Ambassador in Brussels also assured me that we could drive right to the north, but the road suddenly turns out to be impassable because it's being rebuilt by the Chinese, only we're not supposed to know that. And exactly what is meant by 'suddenly' I don't know because they've apparently been at it for ten years.
'Anyway, I think I've managed to sort something out, but we have to hurry,' he added `The plane to the jungle leaves in two hours and we have to be on it. We've just got time to dump your surplus baggage at the hotel if we're quick. Er, some of it is surplus, isn't it? He looked anxiously at the pile of bags that I .was lugging, and then with increasing alarm at the cases of Nikon camera bodies, lenses and tripods that our photographer, Alain le Garsmeur, who had been with me on the plane, was busy loading into the minibus.
'Oh, that reminds me,' he said, `I've just found out that we probably won't be allowed to take any film out of the country.'
I climbed rather numbly into the minibus. After thirteen hours on the plane from Paris I was tired and disoriented and had been looking forward to a shower, a shave, a good night's sleep and then maybe a gentle morning trying gradually to find Madagascar on the map over a pot of tea. I tried to pull myself together and get a grip. I suddenly had not the faintest idea what I, a writer of humorous science fiction adventures, was doing here. I sat blinking in the glare of the tropical sun and wondered what on earth Mark was expecting of me. He was hurrying around, tipping one porter, patiently explaining to another porter that he hadn't actually carried any of our bags, conducting profound negotiations with the driver and gradually pulling some sort of order out of the chaos.
Madagascar, I thought. Aye-aye, I thought. A nearly extinct lemur. Heading out to the jungle in two hours' time. I desperately needed to sound bright and intelligent.
'Er, do you think we're actually going to get to see this animal? I asked Mark as he climbed in and slammed the door. He grinned at me.
`Well, the Ambassador to Brussels said we hadn't got a hope in hell,' he said, 'so we may just be in with a chance. Welcome,' he added as we started the slow pothole slalom into town, 'to Madagascar.'
Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (colonised is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester 'Lester' and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn't like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy.
One of the more peculiar things that has happened to me is that as a result of an idea I had as a penniless hitch-hiker sleeping in fields and telephone boxes, publishers now send me round the world on expensive author tours and put me up in the sort of hotel room where you have to open several doors before you find the bed. In fact I had just arrived directly from a US author tour which was exactly like that, and so my first reaction to finding myself sleeping on concrete floors in spider-infested huts in the middle of the jungle was, oddly enough, one of fantastic relief. Weeks of mind-numbing American Expressness dropped away like mud in the shower and I was able to lie back and enjoy being wonderfully, serenely, hideously uncomfortable. I could tell that Mark didn't realise this and was at first rather anxious showing me to my patch of floor -'Er, will this be all right? I was told there would be mattresses ... um, can we fluff' up the concrete a little for you?' and I had to keep on saying, 'You don't understand. This is great, this is wonderful, I've been looking forward to this for weeks.'
In fact we were not able to lie back at all. The aye-aye is a nocturnal animal and does not make daytime appointments. The few aye-ayes that were known to exist in 1985 were to be found (or more usually not found) on a tiny, idyllic, rainforest island called Nosy Mangabe, just off the north-east coast of Madagascar to which they had been removed twenty years earlier. This was their last refuge on earth and no one was allowed to visit the island without special government permission, which Mark had managed to arrange for us. This was where our but was, and this was where we spent night after night thrashing through the rain forest in torrential rain carrying tiny feeble torches (the big powerful ones we'd brought on the plane stayed with the 'surplus' baggage we'd dumped in the Antananarivo Hilton) until . . . we found the aye-aye.
That was the extraordinary thing. We actually did find the creature. We only caught a glimpse of it for a few seconds, slowly edging its way along a branch a couple of feet above our heads and looking down at us through the rain with a sort of serene incomprehension as to what kind of things we might possibly be, but it was the kind of moment about which it is hard not to feel completely dizzy.
Why?
Because, I realised later, I was a monkey looking at a lemur.
By flying from New York and Paris to Antananarivo by 747 jet, up to Diego-Suarez in an old prop plane, driving to the port of Maroantsetra in an even older truck, crossing to Nosy Mangabe in a boat that was so old and dilapidated that it was almost indistinguishable from driftwood, and finally walking by night into the ancient rain forest, we were almost making a time journey back through all the stages of our experiments in twig technology to the environment from which we had originally ousted the lemurs. And here was one of the very last of them, looking at me with, as I say, serene incomprehension.
The following day Mark and I sat on the steps of the but in the morning sunshine making notes and discussing ideas for the article I would write for the Observer about the expedition. He had explained to me in detail the history of the lemurs and I said that I thought there was an irony to it. Madagascar had been a monkey-free refuge for the lemurs off the coast of mainland Africa, and now Nosy Mangabe had to be a monkey-free refuge off the coast of mainland Madagascar. The refuges were getting smaller and smaller, and the monkeys were already here on this one, sitting making notes about it.
`The difference,' said Mark, `is that the first monkey-free refuge was set up by chance. The second was actually set up by the monkeys.'
'So I suppose it's fair to say that as our intelligence has increased it has given us not only greater power, but also an understanding of the consequences of using that power. It has given us the ability to control our environment, but also the ability to control ourselves.'
°Well, up to a point,' said Mark, `up to a point. There are twenty one species of lemur on Madagascar now, of which the aye-aye is thought to be the rarest, which just means that it's the one that's currently closest to the edge. At one time there were over forty. Nearly half of them have been pushed over the edge already. And that's just the lemurs. Virtually everything that lives in the Madagascan rain forest doesn't live anywhere else at all, and there's only about ten per cent of that left. And that's just Madagascar. Have you ever been to mainland Africa?
No.
`One species after another is on the way out. And they're really major animals. There are less than twenty northern white rhino left, and there's a desperate battle going on to save them from the poachers. They're in Zaire. And the mountain gorillas, too -they're one of man's closest living relatives, but we've almost killed them off' this century. But it's happening throughout the rest of the world as well. Do you know about the kakapo?'
`The what?'
`The kakapo. It's the world's largest, fattest and least-able-to-fly parrot. It lives in New Zealand. It's the strangest bird I know of and will probably be as famous as the dodo if it goes extinct.'
`How many of them are there??
'Forty and falling. Do you know about the Yangtze river dolphin?
No.
`The Komodo dragon? The Rodrigues fruitbat?'
'Wait a minute, wait a minute,' I said. I went into the but and rummaged around in the ants for one of the monkey's most prized achievements. It consisted of a lot of twigs mashed up to a pulp and flattened out into sheets and then held together with something that had previously held a cow together. I took my Filofax outside and flipped through it while the sun streamed through the trees behind me from which some ruffed lemurs were calling to each other.
`Well,' I said, sitting down on the step again, 'I've just got a couple of novels to write, but, er, what are you doing in 1988?

Here be chickens

The first animal we went to look for, three years later, was the Komodo dragon lizard. This was an animal, like most of the animals we were going to see, about which I knew very little. What little I did know was hard to like.
They are man-eaters. That is not so bad in itself. Lions and tigers are man-eaters, and though we may be intensely wary of them and treat them with respectful fear we nevertheless have an instinctive admiration for them. We don't actually like to be eaten by them, but we don't resent the very idea. The reason, probably, is that we are mammals and so are they. There's a kind of unreconstructed species prejudice at work: a lion is one of us but a lizard is not. And neither, for that matter is a fish, which is why we have such an unholy terror of sharks.
The Komodo lizards are also big. Very big. There's one on Komodo at the moment which is over twelve feet long and stands about a yard high, which you can't help but feel is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be, particularly if it's a man-eater and you're about to go and share an island with it.
Though they are man-eaters they don't get to eat man very often, and more generally their diet consists of goats, pigs and deer and such like, but they will only kill these animals if they can't find something that's dead already, because they are, at heart, scavengers. They like their meat bad and smelly. We don't like our meat like that and tend to be leery of things that do. I was definitely leery of these lizards.
Mark had spent part of the intervening three years planning and researching the expeditions we were to make, writing letters, telephoning, but most often telexing to naturalists working in the field in remote parts of the world, organising schedules, letters of introduction and maps. He also arranged all the visas, flights and boats and accommodation, and then had to arrange them all over again when it turned out that I hadn't quite finished the novels yet.
At last they were done. I left my house in the hands of the builders, who claimed they only had three more weeks' work to do, and set off to fulfil my one last commitment - an author tour of Australia. I'm always very sympathetic when I hear people complaining that all they ever get on television or radio chat shows is authors honking on about their latest book. It does, on the other hand, get us out of the house and spare our families the trial of hearing us honking on about our latest book.
Finally that, too, was over and we could start looking for giant lizards.
We met up in a hotel room in Melbourne and examined our array of expeditionary equipment. 'We' were Mark, myself and Gaynor Shutte, a radio producer who was going to be recording our exploits for the BBC. Our equipment was a vast array of cameras, tape recorders, tents, sleeping bags, medical supplies, mosquito coils, unidentifiable things made of canvas and nylon with metal eyelets and plastic hooks, cagoules, boots, penknives, torches and a cricket bat.
None of us would admit to having brought the cricket bat. We couldn't understand what it was doing there. We phoned room service to bring us up some beers and also to take the cricket bat away but they didn't want it. The guy from room service said that _if we were really going to look for man-eating lizards maybe the cricket bat would be a handy thing to have.
'If you find you've got a dragon charging towards you at thirty miles an hour snapping its teeth you can always drive it defensively through the covers,' he said, deposited the beers and left:
We hid the cricket bat under the bed, opened the beers, and let Mark explain something of what we were in for.
'For centuries,' he said, 'the Chinese told stories of great scaly man-eating monsters with fiery breath, but they were thought to be nothing more than myths and fanciful imaginings. Old sailors would tell of them, and would write 'Here be dragons' on their maps when they saw a land they didn't at all like the look of.
'And then, at the beginning of this century, a pioneering Dutch aviator was attempting to island hop his way along the Indonesian archipelago to Australia when he had engine trouble and had to crash land his plane on the tiny island of Komodo. He survived the crash but his plane didn't.
'He went to search for water. As he was searching he found a strange wide track on the sandy shore, followed the track, and suddenly found himself confronted with something that he, also, didn't at all like the look of. It appeared to be a great scaly man-eating monster, fully ten feet long. What he was looking at was the thing we are going to look for - the Komodo dragon lizard.'
'Did he survive? I asked, going straight for the point.
'Yes, he did, though his reputation didn't. He stayed alive for three months, and then was rescued. But when he went home, everyone thought he was mad and nobody believed a word of it.'
'So were the Komodo dragons the origin of the Chinese dragon myths?
'Well, nobody really knows, of course. At least, I don't. But it certainly seems like a possibility. It's a large creature with scales, it's a man-eater, and though it doesn't actually breathe fire, it does have the worst breath of any creature known to man. But there's something else you should know about the island as well.'
'What?'
'Have another beer first.'
I did.
There are,' said mark, 'more poisonous snakes per square metre of ground on Komodo than on any equivalent area on earth.'
There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom.
'And I'm bored with talking about it,' he said when we went along to see him the next morning, laden with tape recorders and note books. 'Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. That's the answer. I've had enough of telling people all the time. Hydroponics, now, that's interesting. Talk to you all you like about hydroponics. Fascinating stuff, growing plants artificially in water, very interesting technique. We'll need to know all about it if we're going to go to Mars and places. Where did you say you were going?'
'Komodo.'
'Well, don't get bitten, that's all I can say. And don't come running to me if you do because you won't get here in time and anyway I've got enough on my plate. Look at this office. Full of poisonous animals all over the place. See this tank? It's full of fire ants. Venomous little creatures, what are we going to do about them? Anyway, I got some little cakes in in case you were hungry. Would you like some little cakes? I can't remember where I put them. There's some tea but it's not very good. Sit down for heaven's sake.
'So, you're going to Komodo. Well, I don't know why you want to do that, but I suppose you have your reasons. There are fifteen different types of snake on Komodo, and half of them are poisonous. The only potentially deadly ones are the Russell's viper, the bamboo viper and the Indian cobra.
The Indian cobra is the fifteenth deadliest snake in the world, and all the other fourteen are here in Australia. That's why it's so hard for me to find time to get on with my hydroponics, with all these snakes all over the place.
'And spiders. The most poisonous spider is the Sydney funnel web. We get about five hundred people a year bitten by spiders. A lot of them used to die, so we had to develop an antidote to stop people bothering me with it all the time. Took us years. Then we developed this snake bite detector kit. Not that you need a kit to tell you when you've been bitten by a snake, you usually know, but the kit is something that will detect what type you've been bitten by so you can treat it properly.
'Would you like to see a kit? I've got a couple here in the venom fridge. Let's have a look. Ah look, the cakes are in here too. Quick, have one while they're still fresh. Fairy cakes, I baked 'em myself.'
He handed round the snake venom detection kits and his home-baked fairy cakes and retreated back to his desk, where he beamed at us cheerfully from behind his curly beard and bow tie. We admired the kits, which were small, efficient boxes neatly packed with tiny bottles, a pipette, a syringe and a complicated set of instructions that I wouldn't want to read for the first time in a panic, and then we asked him how many of the snakes he had been bitten by himself.
'None of 'em,' he said. 'Another area of expertise I've developed is that of getting other people to handle the dangerous animals. Won't do it myself. Don't want to get bitten, do I? You know what it says in my book jackets? "Hobbies: gardening -with gloves; fishing - with boots; travelling - with care." That's the answer. What else? Well, in addition to the boots wear thick, baggy trousers, and preferably have half a dozen people tramping along in front of you making as much noise as possible. The snakes pick up the vibrations and get out of your way, unless it's a death adder, otherwise known as the deaf adder, which just lies there. People can walk right past it and over it and nothing happens. I've heard of twelve people in a line walking over a death adder and the twelfth person accidentally trod on it and got bitten. Normally you're quite safe if you're twelfth in line. You're not eating your cakes. Come on, get them down you, there's plenty more in the venom fridge.'
We asked, apprehensively, if any of the folk remedies or potions we'd heard about were any good.
`Well, nine times out of ten they'll work fine for the simple reason that nine snake bites out of ten the victim doesn't get ill anyway. It's the last ten per cent that's the problem, and there's a lot of myths we've had to disentangle about snakes in order to get at the truth. You need accurate information. People's immediate response to snake bites is often to overreact and give the poor snake a ritual beating, which doesn't really help in the identification. If you don't know which exact snake it was you can't treat the bite properly.' .
'Well, in that case,' I asked, 'could we perhaps take a snake bite detector kit with us to Komodo?
'Course you can, course you can. Take as many as you like. Won't do you a blind bit of good because they're only for Australian snakes.'
'So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then? I asked.
He blinked at me as if I were stupid.
'Well what do you think you do? he said. 'You die of course. That's what deadly means.'
'But what about cutting open the wound and sucking out the poison? I asked.
'Rather you than me,' he said. 'I wouldn't want a mouthful of poison. Shouldn't do you much harm, though. Snake toxins have a high molecular weight, so they won't penetrate the blood vessels in the mouth the way that alcohol or some drugs do, and then the poison gets destroyed by the acids in your stomach. But it's not necessarily going to do much good, either. You're not likely to be able to get much of the poison out, but you're probably going to make the wound a lot worse trying. And in a place like Komodo it means you'd quickly have a seriously infected wound to contend with as well as a leg full of poison. Septicaemia, gangrene, you name it. It'll kill you.'
`What about a tourniquet??
'Fine if you don't mind having your leg off afterwards. You'd have to because if you cut off the blood supply to it completely it'll just die. And if you can find anyone in that part of Indonesia who you'd trust to take your leg off then you're a braver man than me. No, I'll tell you: the only thing you can do is apply a pressure bandage direct to the wound and wrap the whole leg up tightly, but not too tightly. Slow the blood flow but don't cut it off or you'll lose the leg. Keep the leg, or whatever bit of you it is you've been bitten in, lower than your heart and your head. Keep very, very still, breathe slowly and get to a doctor immediately. If you're on Komodo that means a couple of days, by which time you'll be well dead.
`The only answer, and I mean this quite seriously, is don't get bitten. There's no reason why you should. Any of the snakes there will get out of your way well before you even see them. You don't really need to worry about the snakes if you're careful. No, the things you really need to worry about are the marine creatures.'
`What?'
`Scorpion fish, stonefish, sea snakes. Much more poisonous than anything on land. Get stung by a stone fish and the pain alone can kill you. People drown themselves just to stop the pain.'
`Where are all these things??
'Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them. I wouldn't go near it if I were you. Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.'
`Is there anything you do like??
'Yes,' he said. `Hydroponics.'

We flew to Bali.
David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e. that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.
The narrow, muddy streets of Kuta were lined with gift shops and hamburger bars and populated 'with crowds of drunken, shouting tourists, kamikaze motorcyclists, counterfeit watch sellers and small dogs. The kamikaze motorcyclists tried to pick off the tourists and the small dogs, while the tiny minibus which we spent most of the evening in, shuttling our bags from one full hotel to another, hurtled through the motorcyclists and counterfeit watch sellers at video game speeds. Somewhere not too far from here, towards the middle of the island, there may have been heaven on earth, but hell had certainly set up business on its porch.
The tourists with their cans of lager and their `Fuck off T-shirts were particularly familiar to anyone who has seen the English at play in Spain or Greece, but I suddenly realised as I watched this that for once I didn't need to hide myself away in embarrassment.
They weren't English. They were Australian.
But they were otherwise so nearly identical that it started me thinking about convergent evolution, which I had better explain before I go on to say why they made me think of it.
In different pacts of the world strikingly similar but completely unrelated forms of life will emerge in response to similar conditions and habitats. For instance, the aye-aye, the lemur Mark and I originally tracked down in Madagascar, has one particularly remarkable feature. Its third finger is much longer than its other fingers and is skeletally thin, almost like a twig. It uses this finger for poking around under the bark of the trees it lives in to dig out the grubs which it feeds on. There is one other creature in the world which does this, and that is the long-fingered possum, which is found in New Guinea. It has a long and skeletally thin fourth finger, which it uses for precisely the same purpose. There is no family relationship between these two animals at all, and the only common factor between them is this: an absence of woodpeckers.
There are no woodpeckers in Madagascar, and no woodpeckers in Papua New Guinea. This means that there is a food source - the grubs under the bark - going free, and in these two cases it is a mammal which has developed a mechanism for getting at it. And the mechanism they both use is the same -different finger, same idea. But it is purely the selection process of evolution which has created this similarity, because the animals themselves are not related.
Exactly the same behaviour pattern had emerged entirely independently on the other side of the world. As in the gift shop habitats of Spain or Greece, or indeed Hawaii, the local people cheerfully offer themselves up for insult and abuse in return for money which they then spend on further despoiling their habitat to attract more money-bearing predators.
'Right,' said Mark, when we found some dinner that night in a tourist restaurant with plastic flowers and muzak and paper umbrellas in the drinks, 'here's the picture. We have to get a goat.'
'Here?
'No. In Labuan Bajo. Labuan Bajo is on the island of Flores and is the nearest port to Komodo. It's a crossing of about twenty-two miles across some of the most treacherous seas in the East. This is where the South China Sea meets the Indian Ocean, and it's riddled with cross currents, riptides and whirlpools. It's very dangerous and could take anything up to twenty hours.'
`With a goat?'
'A dead goat.'
I toyed with my food.
'It's best,' continued Mark, 'if the goat has been dead for about three days, so it's got a good smell going. That's more likely to attract the dragons.'
'You're proposing twenty hours on a boat...'
'A small boat,' added Mark.
'On violently heaving seas...'
'Probably.'
'With a three-day-old dead goat.'
`Yes.'
'I hardly know what to say.'
'There's one other thing that I should probably say, which is that I've no idea if any of this is true. There are wildly conflicting stories, and some are probably just out of date, or even completely made up. I hope we'll have a better idea of the situation when we get to Labuan Bajo tomorrow. We're. flying tomorrow, via Bima, and we should be at Denpasar airport early. It was a nightmare getting these tickets and the connecting flight and we mustn't miss the plane.'
We did. Fresh eruptions of hell awaited us at Denpasar airport, which was a turmoil of crowds and shouting with a sense of incipient violence simmering just beneath the surface. The airline check-in man said that our flight from Bima to Labuan Bajo had not been confirmed by the travel agent and as a result we had no seats. He shrugged and gave us back our tickets.
We had been told that serenity was the best frame of mind with which to tackle Indonesia and we decided to try it. We tried serenely to point out that it actually said 'Confirmed' on our tickets, but he explained that 'Confirmed' didn't actually mean confirmed, as such, it was merely something that they wrote on tickets when people asked them to because it saved a lot of bother and made them go away.
He went away.
We stood waggling our tickets serenely at thin air. Behind the check-in desk was a window and from behind this a thin airline official with a thin moustache, a thin tie and a white shirt with thin epaulets sat smoking cigarettes and staring at us impassively through narrow wreaths of smoke. We waved our tickets at him, but he just shook his head very, very slightly.
We marched serenely over to the ticket office, where they said it was nothing to do with them, we should talk to the travel agent. A number of decreasingly serene phone calls to the travel agent in Bali simply told us that the tickets were definitely confirmed and that's all there was to it. The ticket office told us that they definitely weren't, and that's all there was to it.
'What about another flight?' we asked. Maybe, they said. Maybe in a week or two.
'A week or two?' we exclaimed.
'Moment,' said one of the men, took our tickets and went away with them. About ten minutes later he returned and gave them to a second man who said, 'Moment,' and went away with them in turn. He returned fifteen minutes later, looked at us and said, 'Yes? What do you want to know?' We explained the situation all over again, whereupon he nodded, said, 'Moment,' and disappeared again. When, after a longish while had passed, we asked where he was we were told that he had gone to visit his mother in Jakarta because he hadn't seen her in three years.
Had he taken our tickets with him, we enquired.
No, they were here somewhere, we were told Did we want them?
Yes, we did, we explained We were trying to get to Labuan Bajo.
This news seemed to cause considerable consternation, and within minutes everyone in the office had gone to lunch.
It became clear that the plane was going to leave without us. We had the option of doing the first part of the flight, as far as Bima, and then being stranded there, but decided instead to stay in Bali and go and deal with the travel agent. No more Mr Serene Guys.
A minibus took us back to the travel agency where we stormed slowly up the stairs with all our baggage and angrily refused to sit and have coffee and listen to a machine which played 'Greensleeves' whenever the phone rang. There was a sense of muted horror in the air as if one of us had died, but no one actually paid any attention to us for nearly an hour, so in the end we started to get angry again and were immediately shown into the office of the director of the agency who sat us down and told us that the Indonesians were a proud race and that furthermore it was all the fault of the airline.
He then soothed at us a great deal, told us that he was a very powerful man in Bali, and explained that it did not help the situation that we got angry about it.
This was a point of view with which I had some natural sympathy, being something of a smiler and nodder myself, who generally registers anger and frustration by frowning a lot and going to sleep.
On the other hand I couldn't help noticing that all the time we had merely smiled and nodded and laughed pleasantly when we had been laughed pleasantly at, nothing had happened and people had merely said 'moment, moment' a lot and gone to Jakarta or peered at us impassively through narrow wreaths of smoke. As soon as we had geared ourselves up to get angry and stamp our feet a bit we had been instantly whisked to the office of the director of the travel agency who was busy telling us that there was no point in us getting angry, and that he would arrange an extra flight specially for us to Labuan Bajo.
He tried to demonstrate the uselessness of stamping our feet to us with maps. 'In these areas,' he said, pointing to a large wall map of half of Asia, 'it works. East of this line here it doesn't work.'
He explained that if you are travelling in Indonesia you should allow four or five days for anything urgent to happen. As far as our missing plane seats were concerned, he said that this sort of thing happened all the time. Often some government official or other important person would decide that he needed a seat, and, of course, someone else would then lose theirs. We asked if this was what had happened to us. He said, no, it wasn't the reason, but it was the sort of reason we should bear in mind when thinking about these problems.
At this point we agreed to have the coffee.
He organised hotel rooms for us for the night, and a minibus tour of the island for the afternoon.
There is a good living to be made in Bali, we discovered, from pointing ,at animals. First find your animal, and then point at it.
If you set yourself up properly you can even make a living from pointing at the person who is pointing at the animal. We found a very good example of this enterprise on the beach near the famous temple of Tanah Lot, and apparently it was a long established and thriving business. Up on the beach there was a very low, wide cave, inside which, in a small cranny in the wall, a couple of yellow snakes had made their home.
Outside on the beach was a man who sat on a box and collected the money, and pointed at the man in the cave. Once you had paid your money you crept into the cave, and the man in the cave pointed at the snakes.
Apart from this highlight the guided tour was profoundly depressing. When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren't tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century. I'm not going to bang on about Bali being turned into a Bali Theme Park, in which Bali itself is gradually destroyed to make way for a tatty artificial version of what used to be there, because it is too familiar a process to come as news to anybody. I just want to let out a squeak of frustrated rage. I'm afraid I couldn't wait to leave the most beautiful place on earth.
The following day we finally succeeded in leaving Denpasar airport for Bima. Everyone knew us from the ructions of the day before and this time the narrow man who had peered at us through wreaths of smoke was wreathed in smiles and terribly helpful.
This, though, was only softening us up.
At Bima we were told that there was no flight at all to Labuan Bajo till the following morning. Perhaps we would like to come back then? At that point we started to get into a bit of a frenzy, and then suddenly we were unexpectedly seized and pushed through the crowds and shoved on to a dilapidated little plane that was sitting fully loaded on the Tarmac, waiting to take off for Labuan Bajo.
On the way to the plane we couldn't help noticing that we passed our pile of intrepid baggage sitting on a small unregarded baggage cart out in the middle of the Tarmac. Once we were on the plane we sat and debated nervously with each other about whether we thought they might be thinking of loading it.
Eventually my nerve broke and I got off the plane and started running back across the Tarmac. I was quickly intercepted by airline staff who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said `baggage' a lot and pointed. They insisted that everything was OK, there was no problem and everything was under control. I persuaded them at last to come with me to the baggage cart standing in the middle of the Tarmac. With hardly a change of beat they moved smoothly from assuring me that all our luggage was on board the plane to helping me actually get it on board.
That done we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying.
The door to the pilot's cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking.
I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don't think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I'm driving. But once you're in an aeroplane everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it round the sky. There's nothing you can do.
Mark was watching the instruments in the cockpit with curious intensity, and after a while said that half of them simply weren't working. I laughed, a little hectically, I admit, and said that it was probably just as well. If the instruments were working they would probably distract and worry the pilots and I'd rather they just got on with what they were doing. Mark thought that this was not at all an amusing observation, and he was clearly right, but nevertheless I laughed again, really rather a lot, and carried on laughing wildly for most of the rest of the flight. Mark turned and asked a passenger behind us if these planes ever crashed. Oh yes, he was told, but not to worry - there hadn't been a serious crash now in months.
Landing at Labuan Bajo was interesting, because the pilots couldn't get the flaps down. We were quite interested to know, for instance, as the trees at the end of the runway loomed closer and closer, and the two pilots were tugging with all their combined weight on the ceiling-mounted lever, whether we were all going to live or not. At the last moment the lever suddenly gave way and we banged down on to the runway in a subdued and reflective frame of mind.
We climbed off the plane and after lengthy negotiations persuaded the airline staff to take our baggage off as well, since we thought we'd probably like to have it with us.
Two people met us at the airport `terminal', or hut. Their names were Kiri, and Moose, and, like most Indonesians we met, they were small, willowy, slim and healthy-looking, and we had no idea who they were.
Kiri was a charming man with a squarish face, a shock of wavy black hair and a thick black moustache that sat on his lip like a bar of chocolate. He had a voice that was very deep, but also very thin, with no substance behind it at all so that he spoke in a sort of supercool croak. Most of the remarks he made consisted of a slow, lazy, streetwise smile and a couple of strangled rattles from the back of his throat. He always seemed to have something other on his mind. If he smiled at you, the smile never finished at you but somewhere in the middle distance or just to himself. Moose was much more straightforward, though it quickly turned out that Moose was not `Moose' but `Mus' and was short for Hieronymus. I felt a little stupid for having heard it as 'Moose'. It was unlikely that an Indonesian islander would be named after a large Canadian deer. Almost as unlikely, I suppose, as him being called Hieronymus with a silent 'Hierony'.
The person we had been expecting was a Mr Condo (pronounced Chondo), who was to be our guide. I was puzzled as to why he alone among all the Indonesians we had met so far was called 'Mr'. It lent him an air of mystery and glamour which he wasn't there to dispel because he had, apparently, gone diving. He would, Kiri and Moose explained to us, be along shortly, and they had come to tell us that.
We thanked them, loaded all of our baggage into the back of the pick-up truck and sat on top of it as we bumped away from the arrivals but towards the town of Labuan Bajo. We had been told by someone on the plane that there were only three trucks on the whole of the island of Flores, and we passed six of them on the way in. Virtually everything .we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.
Because of our experiences of the day before we made a point of stopping at the Merpati Airlines but on the way and reconfirming our seats on the return flight. The office was manned by a man with flip-flops and a field radio, with which he made all the flight arrangements. He didn't have a pen so he simply had to remember them as best he could. He said he wished we had bought single tickets rather than returns, so that we could have bought our return tickets from them. No one, he said, ever bought tickets from them and they could do with the money.
We asked him how many people were on the flight back. He looked at a list and said eight. I noticed, looking over his shoulder, that there was only one person on the list other than the three of us, and I asked him how he had arrived at the figure of eight. That was simple, he explained. There were always eight people on the flight.
As it turned out, a few days later, he was exactly right. There may be some elusive principle lying hidden in this fact which British Airways and TWA and Lufthansa, etc. could profit from enormously, if only they could work out what it was.
The road into town was dusty. The air was far hotter and more humid than in Bali, and thick with heady smells from the trees and shrubs. I asked Mark if he recognised the smells of any of the trees, and he said that he didn't, he was a zoologist. He thought he could detect the smell of sulphur crested cockatoos in amongst it all, but that was all he would commit himself to.
Soon these minor, evanescent odours were replaced by the magisterial pong of Labuan Bajo's drains. The truck, as we clattered into town, was surrounded by scampering, smiling children, who were delighted to see us, and keen to show off anew thing they had found to play with, which was a chicken with only one leg. The long main street was lined with several more of Flores's three trucks, noisy with the sounds of the children, and the scratchy gargling of the tape recorded muezzin blaring from the minaret which was perched precariously on top of the corrugated iron mosque. The gutters seemed inexplicably to be full of cheerfully bright green slime.
A guest house or small hotel in Indonesia is called a losmen, and we went to wait in the main one in the town for Mr Condo to turn up. We didn't check in because we were meant to be setting off for Komodo directly that afternoon, and anyway the losmen was practically empty so there didn't seem to be any urgency. We whiled away the time in the covered courtyard which served as a dining room drinking a few beers and chatting to the odd extra guests who arrived from time to time. By the time we finally twigged, as the afternoon wore on with no Mr Condo, that we were not going to be getting to Komodo that day after all, the losmen had filled up nicely and there was a sudden panic about getting ourselves somewhere to sleep.
A small boy came out and said they still had a bedroom if we would like it, and took us up some rickety steps. The corridor we walked along to get to the bedroom turned out itself to be the bedroom. We were misled by the fact that it didn't have any beds in it, but we agreed that it would be fine and returned to the courtyard, to be greeted at last by Mr Condo, a small charismatic man, who said that everything was organised and we would be leaving in a boat at seven in the morning.
What about the goat? we asked anxiously.
He shrugged. What goat? he asked.
Won't we need a goat?
There were plenty of goats on Komodo, he assured us. Unless we wanted one for the voyage?
We said that we didn't feel that we particularly did, and he said that he only mentioned it as it seemed to be the only thing we weren't intending to take with us. We took this to be a satirical reference to the pile of intrepid baggage with which we were surrounded and laughed politely, so he wished us good night and told us to get some good sleep.
Sleeping in Labuan Bajo, however, is something of an endurance test.
Being woken at dawn by the cockerels is not in itself a problem. The problem arises when the cockerels get confused as to when dawn actually is. They suddenly explode into life squawking and screaming at about one o'clock in the morning. At about one-thirty they eventually realise their mistake and shut up, just as the major dog-fights of the evening are getting under way. These usually start with a few minor bouts between the more enthusiastic youngsters, and then the full chorus of heavyweights weighs in with a fine impression of what it might be like to fall into the pit of hell with the London Symphony Orchestra.

It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as forty dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at two-fifteen in the morning, but then the cats have a lot to complain about in Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth, which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats.
Once the cats have concluded their reflections on this, the cockerels suddenly get the idea that it's dawn again and let rip. It isn't, of course. Dawn is still two hours away, and you still have the delivery van horn-blowing competition to get through to the accompaniment of the major divorce proceedings that have suddenly erupted in the room next door.
At last things calm down and your eyelids begin to slide thankfully together in the blessed predawn hush, and then, about five minutes later, the cockerels finally get it right.
An hour or two later, bleary and rattled, we stood on the waterfront surrounded by our piles of expeditionary baggage and gazed as intrepidly as we could across twenty miles of the roughest, most turbulent seas in the East - the wild and dangerous meeting point of two immense opposing bodies of water, a roiling turmoil of vortices and riptides.
It was like a millpond.
Ripples from distant fishing boats spread out across the wide sea towards the shore. The early sun shone across it like a sheet.
Lesser frigatebirds and white-bellied sea eagles wheeled serenely above us, according to Mark. They looked like black specks to me.
We were there but Mr Condo was not. After about an hour, however, Kiri turned up to fulfil his regular role of explaining that Mr Condo was not coming, but that he, Kiri, was coming instead, and so was his guitar. And the captain wasn't the actual captain, but was the captain's father. And we were going in a different boat. The good news was that it was definitely Komodo we would be going to and the trip should only take about four hours.
The boat was quite a smart twenty-three-foot fishing vessel called the Raodah, and the entire complement, once we were all loaded and under way, consisted of the three of us, Kiri, the captain's father, two small boys aged about twelve who ran the boat, and four chickens.
The day was calm and delightful. The two boys scampered about the boat like cats, rapidly unfurling and raising the sails whenever there was a whisper of wind, then lowering them again, starting the engine and falling asleep whenever the wind died. For once there was nothing we had to do and nothing we could do, so we lounged around on the deck watching the sea go by, watching the crested terns and sea eagles that flew over us, and watching the flying fish that swarmed occasionally round the boat.
The four chickens sat in the prow of the boat and watched us.
One of the more disturbing aspects of travel in remote areas is the necessity of taking your food with you in non-perishable form. For Westerners who are used to getting their chickens wrapped in polythene from the supermarket it is an uncomfortable experience to share a long ride on a small boat with four live chickens who are eyeing you with a deep and dreadful suspicion which you are in no position to allay.
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural and pleasant life than one raised on a. battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
As it happened we would not be eating all four of them ourselves. Whichever god it is in the complicated Hindu pantheon who has the lowly task of determining the fate of chickens was obviously in a rumbustious mood that day and was planning a little havoc of his own.
And then at last the island of Komodo was ahead of us, creeping slowly towards us from the horizon. The colour of the sea around the boat was changing from the heavy, inky black it had been for the last few hours to a much lighter, translucent blue, but the island itself seemed, perhaps to our impressionable senses, to be a dark and sombre mass looming over the water.
As it approached, its gloomy form gradually resolved into great serrated heaps of rocks and, behind them, heavy undulating hills. Closer still we could begin to make out the details of the vegetation. There were palm trees, but in meagre numbers. They were stuck sporadically across the brows of the hills, as if the island had spines, or as if someone had chucked little darts into the hills. It reminded me of the illustration from Gulliver's Travels, in which Gulliver has been tethered to the ground by the Lilliputians, and has dozens of tiny Lilliputian spears sticking into him.
The images that the island presented to the imagination were very hard to avoid. The rocky outcrops took on the shape of massive triangular teeth, and the dark and moody grey brown hills undulated like the heavy folds of a lizard's skin. I knew that if I were a mariner in unknown waters, the first thing I would write on my charts at this moment would be `Here be dragons'.
But the harder I looked at the island as it crept past our starboard bow, and the harder I tried to filter out the promptings of a suggestible imagination, the more the images nevertheless insisted themselves upon me. The ridge of a hill that stretched in a thick folding shape down into the water, heavily wrinkled round its folds, had the contours of a lizard's leg - not in the actual shape, of course, but in the natural interplay of its contours, and in the heavy thickness of its textures.
This was the first time that I had such an impression, but several times during the subsequent trips that we made during this year the same feeling crept up on me: each new type of terrain we encountered in different parts of the world would seem to have a particular palette of colours, textures, shapes and contours which made it characteristically itself; and the forms of life that you would find in that terrain would often seem to be drawn from that same distinctive palette. There are obvious mechanisms we know about to account for .some of this, of course: for many creatures camouflage is a survival mechanism, and evolution will select in its favour. But the scale on which these intuited, perhaps half-imagined, correspondences seem to occur is much larger and more general than that.
We are currently beginning to arrive at a lot of new ideas about the way that shapes emerge in nature, and it is not impossible to imagine that as we discover more about fractal geometry, the `strange attractors' which lie at the heart of newly emerging theories of chaos, and the way in which the mathematics of growth and erosion interact, we may discover that these apparent echoes of shape and texture are not entirely fanciful or coincidental. Maybe.
I suggested something along these lines to Mark and he said I was being absurd. Since he was looking at exactly the same landscape as I was, I have to allow that it might all simply have been my imagination, half-baked as it was in the Indonesian sun.
We moored at a long, rickety, wooden jetty that stuck out from the middle of a wide pale beach. At the landward end the jetty was surmounted by an archway, nailed to the top of which was a wooden board which welcomed us to Komodo, and therefore served slightly to diminish our sense of intrepidness.
The moment we passed under the archway there was suddenly a strong smell. You had to go through it to get the smell. Until you'd been through the archway you hadn't arrived and you didn't get the strong, thick, musty, smell of Komodo.
The next blow to our sense of intrepidness was the rather neatly laid out path. This led from the end of the jetty parallel to the shore towards the next and major blow to our sense of intrepidness, which was a visitors' village.
This was a group of fairly ramshackle wooden buildings: an administration centre from which the island (which is a wildlife reserve) is run, a cafeteria terrace, and a small museum. Behind these, ranged around the inside of a steep semi-circular slope were about half a dozen visitors' huts - on stilts.
It was about lunchtime, and there were nearly a dozen people sitting in the cafeteria eating noodles and drinking 7-Up; Americans, Dutch, you name it. Where had they come from? How had they got here? What was going on?
Outside the administration but was a wooden sign with regulations all over it, such as `Report to National Park office', 'Travel outside visitors' centre only with guards', 'Wear pants and shoes', and `Watch for snakes'.
Lying on the ground underneath this was a small stuffed dragon. I say small, because it was only about four feet long. It had been modelled in completely spreadeagled posture, lying flat on the ground with its forelimbs stretched out in front and its back limbs lying alongside its long tapering tail. I was a little startled to see it for a moment, but then went up to have a look at it.
It opened its eyes and had a look at me.
I rocketed backwards with a yell of astonishment, which provoked barks of derisive laughter from the terrace.
'It's just a dragon,' called out an American girl.
I went over.
`Have you all been here long? I asked.
`Oh, hours,' she said. `We came over on the ferry from Labuan Bajo. Done the dragons. Bored with them. The food's terrible.'
'What ferry? I asked.
'Comes over most days.'
`Oh. Oh, I see. From Labuan Bajo?
'You have to go and sign the visitors' book in the office,' she said, pointing at it.
Rather ruffled, I went and joined Mark and Gaynor.
`This isn't at all what I expected,' said Mark, standing there in the middle of our pile of intrepid baggage, holding the four chickens. `Did we need to bring these? he asked Kiri.
Kid said that it was always a good idea to bring chickens for the kitchen. Otherwise we'd just have to eat fish and noodles.
`I think I prefer fish,' said Gaynor,
Kid explained that she was wrong and that she preferred chicken to fish. Westerners, he explained, preferred chicken. It was well known. Fish was only cheap food for peasants. We would be eating chicken which was sexy and which we preferred.
He took the chickens, which were tethered together with a long piece of string, put them down by our baggage and ushered us up the steps to the park office, where one of the park guards gave us forms and a pencil. just as we were starting to fill them in, giving details of our passport numbers, date, country and town of birth and so on, there was a sudden commotion outside.
At first we paid it no mind, wrestling as we were to remember our mothers' maiden names, and trying to work out who to elect as next of kin, but the racket outside increased, and we suddenly realised that it was the sound of distressed chickens. Our chickens.
We rushed outside. The stuffed dragon was attacking our chickens. It had one of them in its mouth and was shaking it, but as soon as it saw us and others closing in, it scurried rapidly round the corner of the building and off across the clearing behind in a cloud of dust, dragging the other distraught chickens tumbling along in the dust behind it, still tethered together with the string and screeching.
After the dragon had put about thirty yards between it and us it paused, and with a vicious jerk of its head bit through the string, releasing the other three chickens which scrambled off towards the trees, shrieking and screaming and running in ever decreasing circles as park guards careered after them trying to round them up. The dragon, relieved of its excess chickens, galloped off into thick undergrowth.
With a lot of `after you', `no, after you', we ran carefully towards where it had disappeared and arrived breathless and a little nervous. We peered in.
The undergrowth covered a large bank, and the dragon had crawled up the bank and stopped. The thick vegetation prevented us getting closer than a yard from the thing, but we weren't trying terribly hard
It lay there quite still. Protruding from between its jaws was the back end of the chicken, its scrawny legs quietly working the air. The dragon lizard watched us unconcernedly with the one eye that was turned towards us, a round, dark brown eye.
There is something profoundly disturbing about watching an eye that is watching you, particularly when the eye that is watching you is almost the same size as your eye, and the thing it is watching you out of is a lizard. The lizard's blink was also disturbing. It wasn't the normal rapid reflex movement that you expect from a lizard, but a slow considered blink which made you feel that it was thinking about what it was doing.
The back end of the chicken struggled feebly for a moment, and the dragon chomped its jaw a little to let the chicken's struggles push it further down its throat. This happened a couple more times, until there was only one scrawny chicken foot still sticking ridiculously out of the creature's mouth. Otherwise it did not move. It simply watched us. In the end it was us that slunk away, trembling with an inexplicable cold horror.
Why? we wondered as we sat in the terrace cafeteria and tried to calm ourselves with 7-Up. The three of us were sitting ashen faced as if we had just witnessed a foul and malignant murder.
At least if we had been watching a murder the murderer wouldn't have been looking us impassively in the eye as he did it. Maybe it was the feeling of cold unflinching arrogance that so disturbed us. But whatever malign emotions we tried to pin on to the lizard, we knew that they weren't the lizard's emotions at all, only ours. The lizard was simply going about its lizardly business in a simple, straightforward lizardly way. It didn't know anything about the horror, the guilt, the shame, the ugliness that we, uniquely guilty and ashamed animals, were trying to foist on it. So we got it all straight back at us, as if reflected in the mirror of its single unwavering and disinterested eye.
Subdued with the thought that we had somehow been horrified by our own reflection, we sat quietly and waited for lunch.
Lunch.
In view of all the events of the day so far, lunch suddenly seemed to be a very complicated thing to contemplate.
Lunch, as it turned out, was not a chicken. It wasn't a chicken because the dragon had eaten it. How the kitchen was able to determine that the chicken the dragon had eaten was the precise one that they were otherwise going to do for lunch was not clear to us, but apparently that was the reason we were having plain noodles, and we were grateful for it.
We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behaviour was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human. We each make our own accommodation with the world and learn to survive in it in different ways. What works as successful behaviour for us does not work for lizards, and vice versa.
`For instance,' said Mark, `we don't eat our own babies if they happen to be within reach when we're feeling a little peckish.'
'What?' said Gaynor, putting down her knife and fork.
'A baby dragon is just food as far as an adult is concerned,' Mark continued. 'It moves about and has a bit of meat on it. It's food. If they ate them all, of course, the species would die out, so that wouldn't work very well. Most animals survive because the adults have acquired an instinct not to eat their babies. The dragons survive because the baby dragons have acquired an instinct to climb trees. The adults are too big to do it, so the babies just sit up in trees till they're big enough to look after themselves. Some babies get caught, though, which works fine. It sees them through times when food is scarce and helps to keep the population within sustainable levels. Sometimes they just eat them anyway.'
'How many of these things are there left? I asked, quietly.
`About five thousand.'
`And how many did there used to be?
'About five thousand. As far as anyone can tell that's roughly how many there have always been.'
'So they're not particularly endangered?
`Well, they are, because only three hundred and fifty of them are breeding females. We don't know if that's a typical number or not, but it seems pretty low. Furthermore, if an animal has a low population and lives in a very restricted area, like just a few small islands in the case of the dragons, it's particularly vulnerable to changes in its habitat, and wherever human beings arrive, habitats start changing pretty quickly.'
'So we shouldn't be here.'
'It's arguable,' said Mark. 'If no one was here taking an interest the chances are very strong that something could go wrong. just one forest fire, or a disease in the deer population could wipe out the dragons. And there's also the worry that the growing human population on the islands would start to feel that they could very well live without them. They are very dangerous animals. There's not merely the danger of being eaten by one. If you just get bitten you are in very serious trouble. You see, when a dragon attacks a horse or a buffalo, it doesn't necessarily expect to kill it there and then. If it gets involved in a fight it might get injured, and there's no benefit in that, so sometimes the dragon will just bite it and walk away. But the bacteria that live in a dragon's saliva are so virulent that the wounds will not heal and the animal will usually die in a few days of septicaemia, whereupon the dragon can eat it at leisure. Or another dragon can eat it if it happens to find it first - they're not really fussed. It's good for the species that there is a regular supply of badly injured and dying animals about the place.
There was a well-known case of a Frenchman who was bitten by a dragon and eventually died in Paris two years later. The wound festered and would just never heal. Unfortunately there were no dragons in Paris to take advantage of it so the strategy broke down on that occasion, but generally it works well. The point is that these things are buggers to have living on your doorstep, and though the villagers on Komodo and Rinca have been pretty tolerant, there has been a history of attacks and deaths and it's possible that as the human population grows there will be a greater conflict of interest and rather less patience with the idea of not being able to go off for a wander without running the risk of having your leg bitten off and your entrails ripped out by a passing dragon.
'So, as we've discovered, Komodo is now a protected national park. We've got to the point where it takes active and deliberate intervention to save rare species, and that's usually sustained by public interest. And public interest is sustained by public access. If it's carefully controlled and disruption is kept to a minimum then it works well and is fine. I think. I won't pretend that I don't feel uneasy about it.'
'I feel very uneasy about the whole place,' said Gaynor with a shudder. `There's a kind of creeping malignancy about it.'
Just your imagination,' said Mark 'For a naturalist it's paradise.'
There was suddenly a slithering noise on the roof of the terrace, and a large snake fell past us to the ground. Instantly a couple of park guards rushed out and chased the thing off into the bush.
'That wasn't my imagination,' said Gaynor.
'I know,' said Mark, enthusiastically. 'This is wonderful.'
In the afternoon, accompanied by Kiri and a guard, we went off to explore. We found no dragons, but as we thrashed recklessly through the undergrowth, we encountered instead a bird, and it was one that I felt very much at home with.
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds' worth of it is well worth the investment of a day's happy activity working out a way of saving it.
The bird we came across was called a megapode, and it has a very similar outlook on life.
It looks a little like a lean, sprightly chicken, though it has the advantage over chickens that it can fly, if a little heavily, and is therefore better able to escape from dragons, which can only fly in fairy stories, and in some of the nightmares with which I was plagued while trying to sleep on Komodo.
The important thing is that the megapode has worked out a wonderful labour-saving device for itself. The labour it wishes to save is the time-consuming activity of sitting on its nest all day incubating its eggs, when it could be out and about doing things.
I have to say at this point that we didn't actually come across the bird itself, though we thought we glimpsed one scuttling through the undergrowth. We did, however, come across its labour-saving device, which is something that it's hard to miss. It was a conical mound of thickly packed earth and rotting vegetation, about six feet high and six feet wide at its base. In fact it was considerably higher than it appeared because the mound would have been built on a hollow in the ground which would itself have been about three feet deep.
I've just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It's a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest, but no matter: the volume of this mound is a little over nine cubic yards.
What the mound is is an automatic incubator. The heat generated by the chemical reactions of the rotting vegetation keeps the eggs that are buried deep inside it warm - and not merely warm. By judicious additions or subtractions of material from the mound the megapode is able to keep it at the precise temperature which the eggs require in order to incubate properly.

So all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is to dig three cubic yards of earth out of the ground, fill it with three cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further six cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then continually monitor the heat it is producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away.
And thus it saves itself all the bother of sitting on its eggs from time to time.
This cheered me up immensely, and the good mood it put me into lasted all the way back to the visitors' village and up to the precise point when we walked in through the door of the but which we had been assigned as sleeping quarters.
It was quite large and constructed, as I have said, on stilts -for obvious reasons. However, the wood of which it was built was half rotten, there were damp and stinking mattresses in the small bedrooms, ominously large spiders' webs in all the corners, dead rats on the floor and the stench of an overflowing lavatory. We tried gamely to sleep there that night, but in the end were driven out by the sheer noise of the rats fighting the snakes in the roof cavity, and eventually took our sleeping bags down to the boat and slept on its deck.
We awoke early, cold and damp with the dew, but feeling safe. We rolled up our bags and made our way back along the rickety jetty and under the arch. Once again, as soon as we had passed through the arch the smell of the place assailed us and we were in that malign other world, Komodo.
This morning, we had been told, we would definitely see dragons: Big dragons. We didn't know precisely what it was we were in for, but clearly it was not what we had originally expected. It didn't look as if we would be pegging a dead goat out on the ground and then hiding up a tree all day.
The day was to consist almost entirely of things we had not been expecting, starting with the arrival of a group of about two dozen American tourists on a specially chartered boat. They were mostly of early retirement age, festooned with cameras, polyester leisure suits, gold-rimmed glasses and Mid-Western accents, and I didn't think that they would be sitting up a tree all day either.
We were severely put out by their arrival and felt that the last vestige of any sense of intrepidness we were still trying to hold on to was finally slipping away.
We found a guard and asked what was going on. He said we could go on ahead now if we wanted to avoid the large party, so we set off with him immediately. We had a walk of about three or four miles through the forest along a path that was obviously well prepared and well trodden. The air was hot and dusty, and we walked with a sense of queasy uncertainty about how the day was going to go. After a while we became aware of the faint sound of a bell moving along ahead of us, and quickened our footsteps to find out what it was. We rounded a corner, and were confronted with some stomach-turning reality.
Up till now there had been something dreamlike about the whole experience. It was as if the action of walking through the archway and ingesting the musty odour of the island spirited you into an illusory world, in which words like 'dragon' and `snake' and `goat' acquired fantastical meanings that had no analogue in the real one, and no consequence in it either. Now I had the feeling that the dream was slithering down the slope into nightmare, and that it was the sort of nightmare from which you would wake to discover that you had indeed wet the bed, that someone was indeed shaking you and shouting, and that the acrid smell of smoke was indeed your house incinerating itself.
Ahead of us on the path was a young goat. It had a bell and a rope around its neck and was being led unwillingly along the pathway by another guard. We followed it numbly. Occasionally it would trot along hesitantly for a few paces, and then an appalling dread would seem suddenly to seize it and it would push its forelegs into the ground, put its head down and struggle desperately against the tugging of the rope, bleating and crying. The guard would pull roughly on the rope, and swipe at the goat's hindquarters with a bunch of leafy twigs he was carrying in his other hand, and the goat would at last tumble forward and trot along a few more paces, light-headed with fear. There was nothing for the goat to see to make it so afraid, and nothing, so far as we could tell, to hear; but who knows what the goat could smell in that place towards which we all were moving.
Our deeply sinking spirits were next clouted sideways from a totally unexpected direction. We came across a circle of concrete set in the middle of a clearing. The circle was about twenty feet across, and had two parallel black stripes painted on it, with another black stripe at right angles to them, connecting their centres. It took us a few moments to work out what the symbol was and what it meant. Then we got it. It was just an `H'. The circle was a helicopter pad. Whatever it was that was going to happen to this goat was something that people came by helicopter to see. We trotted on, numb and light-headed, suddenly finding meaningless things to laugh wildly and hysterically at, as if we were walking wilfully towards something that would destroy us as well.
Leading from the helipad was a yet more formal pathway. It was a couple of yards wide with a stout wooden fence along either side about two feet high. We followed this along for a couple of hundred yards until we came at last to a wide gully, about ten feet deep, and here there were a number of things to see.
To our left was a kind of bandstand.
Several rows of bench seats were banked up behind each other, with a sloping wooden roof to protect them from the sun and other inclemencies in the weather. Tied to the front rail of the bandstand were both ends of a long piece of blue nylon rope which ran out and down into the gully, where it was slung over a pulley wheel which hung from the branches of a small bent tree. A small iron hook hung from the rope.
Stationed around the tree, basking in the dull light of a hot but overcast day, and in the stench of rotten death, were six large, muddy grey dragon lizards.
The largest of them was probably about ten feet long.
It was at first quite difficult to gauge their size. We were not that close as yet, the light was too blear and grey to model them clearly to the eye, and the eye was simply not accustomed to equating something with the shape of a lizard with something of that size.
I stared at them awhile, aghast, until I realised that Mark was tapping me on the arm. I turned to look. On the other side of the short fence, a large dragon was approaching us.
It had emerged from the undergrowth, attracted, no doubt by the knowledge that the arrival of human beings meant that it was feeding time. We learnt later that the group of dragons that hang out in the gully rarely go very far from it and now do very little at all other than lie and wait to be fed.
The dragon lizard padded towards us, slapping its feet down aggressively, first its front left and back right, then vice versa, carrying its great weight easily and springily, with the swinging, purposeful gait of a bully. Its long, narrow, pale, forked tongue flickered in and out, testing the air for the smell of dead things.
It reached the far side of the fence, and then began to range back and forth tetchily, waiting for action, swinging and scraping its heavy tail across the dusty earth. Its rough, scaly skin hung a little loosely over its body, like chain mail, gathering to a series of cowl-like folds just behind its long death's head of a face. Its legs are thick and muscular, and end in claws such as you'd expect to find at the bottom of a brass table leg.
The thing is just a monitor lizard, and yet it is massive to a degree that is unreal. As it rears its head up over the fence and around as it turns, you wonder how it's done, what trickery is involved.
At that moment the party of tourists began to straggle towards us along the path, cheery and unimpressed, wanting to know what was up, what was happening. Look, there's one of those dragons. Ooh it's a big one. Nasty looking feller!
And now the worst of it was about to happen.
At a discreet distance behind the bandstand the goat was being slaughtered. Two park guards held the struggling, bleating creature down on the ground with its neck across a log and hacked its head off with a machete, holding the bunch of leafy twigs against it to staunch the eruption of blood. The goat took several minutes to die.
Once it was dead, they cut off one of its back legs for the dragon behind the fence, then took the rest of the body, and fastened it on to the hook on the blue nylon rope. It rocked and swayed in the breeze as they winched it down to the dragons lying in the gully.
The dragons took only a lethargic interest in it for a while. They were very well fed and sleepy dragons. At last one reared itself up, approached the hanging carcass and ripped gently at its soft underbelly. A great muddle of intestines slipped out of the goat and flopped over the dragon's head. They lay there for a while, steaming gently. The dragon seemed, for the moment, not to take any further interest.
Another dragon then heaved itself into motion and approached. It sniffed and licked at the air, and then started to eat the intestines of the goat from off the head of the first dragon, until the first dragon rounded on it, and started to claim part of its meal for itself. At first nip a thick green liquid flooded out of the glistening grey coils, and as the meal proceeded, the head of each dragon in turn became wet with the green liquid.
'Boy, this makes it big, Pauline,' said a man standing near me, watching through his binoculars. 'It makes it bigger than it is. You know, with these it's the size I really thought we'd be seeing.' He handed the binoculars to his wife.
'Oh, that really does magnify it!' she said.
'It really is a superb pair of binoculars, Pauline. And they're not heavy either.'
Others of the group clustered round.
'May I take a look? Whose are they?
'My gosh, Howard would adore these!'
'Al? Al, take a look at these binoculars - and see how heavy they are!'
Just as I was making the charitable assumption that the binoculars were just a diversion from having actually to watch the hellish floor show in the pit, the woman who now had possession of them suddenly exclaimed delightedly, 'Gulp, gulp gulp! All gone! What a digestive system! Now he's smelling us!'
'He probably wants fresher meat,' growled her husband. 'Live, on the hoof?'
It was in fact at least an hour or so before all of the goat had gone, by which time the party had drifted, chatting, back to the village. As they did so a lone Englishwoman in the party confided to us that she didn't actually care much about the dragons. 'I like the landscape,' she said, airily. 'The dragons are just thrown in.
And of course, with all the strings and the goats and the tourists, well, it's just comedy really. If you were walking by yourself and you came across one, that might be different, but it's kind of like a puppet show.'
When the last of them had left, a park guard told us that if we wished to we could climb down into the gully and see the dragons close to, and with swimming heads we did so. Two guards came with us, armed with long sticks, which branched into a 'Y' at the end. They used these to push the dragons' necks away if they came too close or began to look aggressive.
We clambered and slithered down the slope, almost too scared to know or care what we were doing, and within a few minutes I found myself standing just two feet from the largest of the dragons. It regarded me without much interest, having plenty already to feed on. A length of dripping intestine was hanging from its open jaws, and its face was glistening with blood and saliva. The inside of its mouth was a pale, hard pink, and its fetid breath, together with the hot foul air of the gully combined into a stench so overpowering that our eyes were stinging and streaming and we were half faint with nausea.
All that remained by now of the goat which we had followed as it struggled bleating down the pathway ahead of us was one bloody and dismembered leg hanging by its ankle from the hook on the blue nylon rope. One dragon alone was still interested in it, and was gnawing moodily at the thigh muscles. Then it got a proper grip on the whole leg, and tried with vicious twists of its head to pull it off the hook, but the leg was held fast at the ankle bone. Then, astoundingly, the dragon began instead very slowly to swallow the leg whole. It pulled and tugged, and manoeuvred itself, so that more and more of the leg was pushed down its throat, until all that protruded was the hoof and the hook. After a while the dragon gave up struggling with it and simply squatted there, frozen in this posture for at least ten minutes until at last a guard did it the favour of hacking the hook away with his machete. The very last piece of the goat slithered away into the lizard's maw where, bones, hooves, horns and all would now slowly be dissolved by the corrosive power of the enzymes that live in a Komodo dragon's digestive system.
We made our excuses and left.
The first of our three remaining chickens made its appearance at lunch, but our mood wasn't right for it. We pushed the scrawny bits of it listlessly round our plates and could find little to say.
In the afternoon we took the boat to Komodo village where we met a woman who was the only known survivor of a dragon attack. A giant lizard had gone for her while she was out working in the fields, and by the time her screams had brought her neighbours and their dogs to rescue her and beat the creature away, her leg was in tatters. Intensive surgery in Bali saved her from having it amputated and, miraculously, she fought off the infection and lived, though her leg was still a mangled ruin. On the neighbouring island of Rinca, we were told, a four-year-old boy had been snatched by a dragon as he lay playing on the steps of his home. The living build their houses on stilts, but on these islands not even the dead are safe, and they are buried with sharp rocks piled high on their graves.
For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon - even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches.
Here's a good trick, let's see how they cope with this. Oh, look! They've managed to find a way of climbing the tree. I didn't think they'd be able to do that. All right, let's see them get the thing open. Hmm, so they've found out how to temper steel now, have they? OK, no more Mr Nice Guy. Next time they go up that tree I'll have a dragon waiting for them at the bottom.
I can only think that the business with the apple must have upset him more than I realised.
I went and sat on the beach by a mangrove tree and gazed out at the quiet ripples of the sea. Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn't try and justify themselves or tell each other it was a malign god who made them want to play in trees.
I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves. And if they won't be revolting enough of their own accord, we stoke them up with a goat. They don't want the goat, they don't need it. If they wanted one they'd find it themselves. The only truly revolting thing that happens to the goat is in fact done by us.
So why didn't we say something? Like: `Don't kill the goat'?
Well, there are a number of possible reasons:
- If the goat hadn't been killed for us it would have been killed for someone else -for the party of American tourists, for instance.
- We didn't really realise what was going to happen till it was too late to stop it.
-The goat didn't lead a particularly nice life, anyway. Particularly not today.
-Another dragon would probably have got it later.
- If it hadn't been the goat the dragons would have got something else, like a deer or something.
-We were reporting the incident for this book and for the BBC. It was important that we went through the whole experience so that people would know about it in detail. That's well worth a goat.
- We felt too polite to say, `Please don't kill the goat on our account.'
- We were a bunch of lily-livered rationalising turds.
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
The fish were still hopping harmlessly up and down the tree. They were about three inches long, brown and black, with little bobble eyes set very close together on the top of their heads. They hopped along using their fins as crutches.
'Mudskippers,' said Mark, who happened along at that moment. He squatted down to look at them.
`What are they doing in the tree? I asked.
`You could say they were experimenting,' said Mark. 'If they find they can make a better living on the land than in the water, then in the course of time and evolution they may come to stay on the land. They absorb a certain amount of oxygen through their skin at the moment, but they have to rush back to the sea from time to time for a mouthful of water which they process through their gills. But that can change. It's happened before.'
'What do you mean?
'Well, it's probable that life on this planet started in the oceans, and that marine creatures migrated on to the land in search of new habitats. There's one fish that existed about 350 million years ago which was very like a mudskipper. It came up on to the land using its fins as crutches. It's possible that it was the ancestor of all land-living vertebrates.'
`Really? What was it called?
'I don't think it had a name at the time.'
'So this fish is what we were like 350 million years ago?'
`Quite possibly.'
'So in 350 million years time one of its descendants could be sitting on the beach here with a camera round its neck watching other fish hopping out of the sea?'
'No idea. That's for science fiction novelists to think about. Zoologists can only say what we think has happened so far.'
I suddenly felt, well, terribly old as I watched a mudskipper hopping along with what now seemed to me like a wonderful sense of hopeless, boundless, naive optimism. It had such a terribly, terribly, terribly long way to go. I hoped that if its descendant was sitting here on this beach in 350 million years time with a camera round its neck, it would feel that the journey had been worth it. I hoped that it might have a clearer understanding of itself in relation to the world it lived in. I hoped that it wouldn't be reduced to turning other creatures into horror circus shows in order to try and ensure them their survival. I hoped that if someone tried to feed the remote descendant of a goat to the remote descendant of a dragon for the sake of little more than a shudder of entertainment, that it would feel it was wrong.
I hoped it wouldn't be too chicken to say so.

Leopardskin pilbox hat

We startled ourselves by arriving in Zaire on a missionary flight, which had not been our original intention. All regular flights in and out of Kinshasa had been disrupted by an outbreak of vicious bickering between Zaire and its ex-colonial masters, the Belgians, and only a series of nifty moves by Mark, telexing through the night from Godalming, had secured us this back door route into the country via Nairobi.
We had come to find rhinoceroses: northern white rhinoceroses, of which there were about twenty-two left in Zaire, and eight in Czechoslovakia. The ones in Czechoslovakia are not in the wild, of course, and are only there because of the life's work of a fanatical Czech northern white rhinoceros collector earlier in this century. There is also a small number in San Diego zoo, California. We had decided to go to rhino country by a roundabout route in order to see some other things on the way.
The aircraft was a sixteen-seater, filled by the three of us -Mark, Chris Muir our BBC sound engineer and myself - and thirteen missionaries. Or at least, not thirteen actual missionaries, but a mixture of missionaries, mission school teachers, and an elderly American couple who were merely very interested in mission work, and wore straw hats from Miami, cameras, and vacantly benign expressions which they bestowed on everyone indiscriminately, whether they wanted them or not.
We had spent about two hours in the glaring sun creeping sleepily around the dilapidated customs and immigration offices in a remote corner of Nairobi's Wilson airport, trying to spot which was to be our plane, and who were to be our travelling companions. It's hard to identify a missionary from first principles, but there was clearly something odd going on because the only place to sit was a small three-seater bench shaded from the sun by the overhanging roof, and everybody was so busy giving up their places on it to everybody else that in the end it simply remained empty and we all stood blinking and wilting in the burgeoning morning heat. After an hour of this, Chris muttered something Scottish under his breath, put down his equipment, lay down on the empty bench and went to sleep until the flight was ready. I wished I'd thought of it.
I knew from many remarks he had made that Mark had a particular dislike of missionaries, whom he has encountered in the field many times in Africa and Asia, and he seemed to be particularly tense and taciturn as we made our way out across the hot Tarmac and took our tiny, cramped seats. I then became rather tense myself as the plane started to taxi out to the runway, because the pre-flight talk from our pilot included a description of our route, an explanation of the safety features of the aircraft, and also a short prayer.
I wasn't disturbed so much by the 'O Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day', but 'We commend our lives into Thy hands, O Lord' is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle. We hurtled down the runway with white knuckles, and as we climbed into the air we passed a big, old, cigar-fat Dakota finally coming in to land, as if it had been delayed by bad weather over the Great Rift Valley for about thirty years.
In contradiction of everything sensible we know about geography and geometry, the sky over Kenya is simply much bigger than it is anywhere else. As you are lifted up into it, the sense of limitless immensity spreading beneath you to infinitely distant horizons overwhelms you with excited dread.
The atmosphere on board the plane, on the other hand, was so claustrophobically nice it made you want to spit. Everyone was nice, everyone smiled, everyone laughed that terribly benign fading away kind of laugh which sets your teeth on edge, and everyone, strangely enough, wore glasses. And not merely glasses. They nearly all had the same sort of glasses, with rims that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom, such as only English vicars, chemistry teachers and, well, missionaries wear. We sat and behaved ourselves.
I find it very hard not to hum tunelessly when I'm trying to behave myself, and this caused, I think, a certain amount of annoyance in the missionary sitting next to me, which he signalled by doing that terribly benign fading away kind of laugh at me till I wanted to bite him.
I don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfil our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world. I sat watching the Miami hats as they gazed out of the window at Africa - between an immensity of land and an immensity of sky they sat there, incomprehensible, smiling at a continent. I think Conrad said something similar about a boat.
They smiled at Mount Kenya, beamed at Mount Kilimanjaro, and were winsomely benign at the whole of the Great Rift Valley as it slid majestically past beneath us. They were even terribly pleased and happy about coming in to land for a brief stop in Mwanza, Tanzania, which is more, as it turned out, than' we were.
The aircraft trundled to a halt outside a sort of bus shelter which served Mwanza as an airport, and we were told we had to disembark for half an hour and go and wait in the `international transit lounge'.
This consisted of a large concrete shed with two fair-sized rooms in it connected by a corridor. The building had a kind of bombed appearance to it - some of the walls were badly crushed and had tangles of rusty iron spilling from their innards and through the elderly travel posters of Italy pasted over them. We moved in for half an hour, hefted our bags of camera equipment to the floor and slumped over the battered plastic seats. I dug out a cigarette and Mark dug out his Nikon F3 and MD4 motordrive to photograph me smoking it. There was little else to do.
After a moment or two a man in brown crimplene looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realised this. He stayed there slumped against the door jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed the door behind us.
The second room was identical to the first. Identical in all respects other than one, which was that it had a hatchway let into one wall. A large vacant-looking girl was leaning through it with her elbows on the counter and her fists jammed up into her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight towards this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue crimplene, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses.
'Transit passengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.' He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room where, a minute later, the man in the brown crimplene found us again.
He looked at us.
Slow incomprehension engulfed him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leant back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
'You are in the wrong room,' he said simply. `You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.'
There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner and made our way back down the corridor to the second room. Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off. We needed chocolate, we needed coffee, maybe even a reviving packet of biscuits, and what was more we intended to have them. We outfaced him, dumped our bags on the ground, walked firmly up to the counter and hit a major unforeseen snag.
The girl wouldn't sell us anything. She seemed surprised that we even bothered to raise the subject. With her fists still jammed into her cheekbones she shook her head slowly at us, and continued to watch the flies on the wall.
The problem, it gradually transpired after a conversation which flowed like gum from a tree, was this. She would only accept Tanzanian currency. She knew without needing to ask that we didn't have any, for the simple reason that no one ever did. This was an international transit lounge, and the airport had no currency exchange facilities, therefore no one who came in here could possibly have any Tanzanian currency and therefore she couldn't serve them.
After a few minutes of futile argument we had to accept the flawless simplicity of her argument and just sit out our time there gloomily eyeing the coffee and chocolate bars, while our pockets bulged with useless dollars, sterling, French francs and Kenyan shillings. The girl stared vacantly at the flies., obviously resigned to the fact that she never did any business at all. After a while we became quite interested in watching the flies as well.
At last we were told that our flight was ready to depart again, and we returned to our planeload of missionaries.
Where, we wondered, had they been while all this had been going on? We didn't ask After an hour or so we landed at last at Bukavu, and as we taxied up to the terminal shacks of the airport the plane resounded to happy cries of `Oh, how wonderful, the bishop's come to meet us!' And there he was, big and beaming in his purple tunic, wearing glasses with frames that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom. The missionaries, the mission school teachers and the American couple who were merely very interested in missionary work climbed smiling out of the plane, and we, pausing to pull our camera bags out from under our seats, followed them.
We were in Zaire.
I think the best way of explaining what goes so hideously wrong with Zaire is to reproduce a card we were given by a tourist officer a few days later.
One section of it was written in English, and is for the benefit of the tourist. It goes like this:
Madam, Sir, On behalf of the President-Founder of the MPR, President of the Republic, of his government and of my fellow-citizens, it is agreeable for me to wish you a wonderful sojourn in the Republic of Zaire. In this country you will discover majestic sites, a luxuriant flora and an exceptional fauna. The kindness and hospitality of the Zairean people will facilitate your knowledge of the tradition and folklore.
Our young nation expects much from your suggestions and thanks you for your contribution in helping it to welcome the friends you will send us in a much better way.

Minister of ECNT.
That seems fair enough. It's the other section which makes you begin to worry a bit about what you might in fact find. You are meant to show it to any Zalrois you actually meet and it goes like this:
ZAIREANS, HELP OUR VISITORS The friend holding this card is visiting our country. He is our guest.
If he wants to take photographs, be polite and friendly to him. Do your best to have him enjoy his sojourn, and he will come back, bringing his friends with him.
By helping him, you help your country. Never forget that tourism provides us with returns which allow us to create new jobs, to build schools, hospitals, factories, etc.
On the welcome that our guest would have received will depend our touristic future.
It's alarming enough that an exhortation like this should be thought to he necessary, but what is even more worrying is that this section is written only in English.
No 'Zairean' - or Zairois as they actually call themselves -speaks English, or hardly any do.
The system by which Zaire works, and which this card was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant for you as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In US dollars. He then passes you on to the next official who will be unpleasant to you all over again. By the end of our trip this process would assume nightmarish proportions, by comparison with which our first entry into Zaire was a relatively gentle softening up process, and consisted of only two hours of rain and misery in huts.
The first thing we saw in the customs but was a picture which gave us a clue about how our expedition to find endangered wildlife in Zaire was going to go. It was a portrait of a leopard. That is it was a portrait of part of a leopard. The part of the leopard in question had been fashioned into a rather natty leopardskin pillbox hat which adorned the head of Marshal Mobuto Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, the President of the Republic of Zaire, who gazed down on us with a magisterial calm while his officials got to work on us.
One was a large and fairly friendly man who occasionally offered us cigarettes and the other was a small, nasty man who kept on stealing ours. This is, of course, the classic interrogation method, designed to bring the victim to the brink of pathetic emotional breakdown. It's obviously a technique they learnt somewhere and have just found the habit hard to break, even though all they actually wanted to know from us was our names, passport numbers and the serial numbers of every single piece of equipment we had with us.
The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I've heard described when oddly close and touching relationships develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed 'Belgian Congo', crossed out, with 'Zaire' written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn't seem to have was the only one we actually wanted. We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency declaration form when we entered Zaire or we would hit trouble later on. We repeatedly asked for one, but they said they had run out. They said we could get one in Goma and that would be all right.
They toyed with the idea of confiscating my Cambridge Z88 laptop computer just in case we were planning to overthrow the government with it, but in the end the small nasty man merely confiscated Chris's car magazine on the grounds that he liked cars and then, for now, we were free.
We went into the town of Bukavu in a sort of taxi-like thing. The town turned out to be an enormous distance from the airport, probably at the insistence of the taxi-drivers. As we bounded along the appallingly rutted road that followed the margin of the lake and along which a significant proportion of the population of Zaire seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a time. I watched this with some alarm, which was severely increased when I eventually worked out what he was doing. He was operating the clutch by hand. I wondered whether to mention this to the others but decided that, no, it would only worry them. Mark later mentioned that we had not passed any other motor vehicles at all on the drive, except for a couple of trucks which had been parked for so long that they no longer had any rear axles. I didn't notice this myself, because once I had identified what the driver was doing with the clutch I simply kept my eyes closed for the remainder of the journey.
When at last we arrived at the hotel, which was surprisingly airy and spacious for such a dilapidated town as Bukavu was, we were rattled and exhausted and we started to yawn at each other a lot. This was a kind of unspoken code for being fed up with the sight of one another despite the fact that it was only six in the evening. We each went off to our respective rooms and sat in our separate heaps.
I sat by the window and watched as the sun began to go down over the lake, the name of which I couldn't remember because all the maps were in Mark's room. From this vantage point, Bukavu looked quite idyllic, situated on a peninsula which jutted into the lake. Lake Kivu. I remembered the name now. I was still feeling very jangled and jittery and decided that staring at the lake a bit might help.
It was placid and silvery, shading to grey in the distance where it met the fading shapes of the hills that surrounded it. That helped.
The early evening light cast long shadows over the old Belgian colonial houses that were stepped down the hill from the hotel, huddled about with bright blossoms and palm trees. That was good too. Even the green corrugated roofs of the cruder new buildings were soothed by the light. I watched the black kites wheeling out over the water and found that I was calming down. I got up and started to unpack the things I needed for the night and at last a wonderful sense of peace and well-being settled on me, disturbed only by the sudden realisation that I had once again left my toothpaste in last night's hotel. And my writing paper. And my cigarette lighter. I decided it was time to explore the town.
The main street was a grim hill, wide, dishevelled and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaire is an ex-Belgian colony every other shop is a pharmacie, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.
Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap and chickens, it didn't seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they'd got any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn't I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap and chicken shop? Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell biros, airmail envelopes and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of New Scientist as well.
I then realised that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and I had once or twice been hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.
The following morning we flew to the town of Goma. Here we discovered that even when making internal flights in Zaire you still had to go through the full rigmarole of immigration and customs controls all over again. We were held under armed guard while a large and thuggish airport official interrogated us in his office as to why we hadn't acquired any currency declaration forms at Bukavu.
The fact that they hadn't had any currency declaration forms to give us at Bukavu cut no ice with him.
`Fifty dollars,' he said.
His office was large and bare and contained just one small desk with two sheets of paper in a drawer. He leant back and stared at the ceiling, which had obviously seen a lot of this sort of thing going on. Then he leant forward again and pulled the palms of his hands slowly down over his face as if he were trying to peel it off. He said again, `Fifty dollars. Each,' and then stared idly at the corner of his desk and rolled a pencil slowly in his fingers. We were subjected to an hour of this before he finally tired of our appalling French and let us go.
We emerged blinking from the airport and, miraculously, met up with the driver that some friends of Mark's had organised to take us up into the Virunga volcanoes where the mountain gorillas lived.
The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity. They are, of course, only collateral relatives - nth cousins, n times removed. We are both descended from a common ancestor, who is, sadly, no longer with us, and who has, since Darwin's day, been the subject of endless speculation as to what manner of creature he/she was.
The section of the primate family of which we are members (rich, successful members of the family, the ones who made good and who should, by any standards, be looking after the other, less well-off members of the family) are the great apes. We do not actually call ourselves great apes, though. Like many of the immigrants at Ellis Island, we have changed our names. The family we call the great apes includes the gorillas (of which there are three subspecies: mountain, eastern lowland and western lowland), two species of chimpanzee, and the orang utans of Borneo and Sumatra. We do not like to include ourselves in it - in fact the classification `Great Apes' was originally created specifically to drive a wedge between us and them. And yet it is now widely accepted that the gorillas and chimpanzees separated from us on the evolutionary tree more recently than they did from other great apes. This would mean that the gorillas are more closely related to us than they are to the orang utans. Any classification which includes gorillas and orang utans must therefore include us as well. one way or another, we and the gorillas are very very close relatives indeed -almost as close to each other as the Indian elephant and the African elephant which also share a common, extinct ancestor.