Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

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 polyester 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 th...