Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

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.

A great beginning!

The monkeys took over the world and the lemur branch of the primate family died out everywhere—other than on Madagascar, which for millions of years the monkeys never reached. Then fifteen hundred years ago, the monkeys finally arrived, or at least the monkeys’ descendants—us. Thanks to astounding advances in twig technology, we arrived in canoes, then boats, and finally airplanes, 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.

“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.

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.

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),

In fact, I was arriving in Antananarivo directly from a U.S. 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.

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 Diégo-Suarez in an old prop plane, driving to the port of Maroantsetra in an even older truck, crossing to Nosy Mangabé in a boat that was so old and dilapidated 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.

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.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. I went into the hut 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, 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 one another. “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?”

Adams is such a clever writer, even in the non-fiction sphere.

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.

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.

“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 on my book jackets? ‘Hobbies: gardening—with gloves; fishing—with boots; traveling—with care.’ That’s the answer.

“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.”

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. Hold your leg, or whatever bit 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.

Somewhere not too far from here, toward the middle of the island, there may have been heaven on earth, but hell had certainly set up business on its porch.

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 that has developed a mechanism for getting at it. And the mechanism they both use is the same—different finger, same idea.

Neat!

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.

“here’s the picture. We have to get a goat.” “Here?” asked Gaynor. “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 crosscurrents, riptides, and whirlpools. It’s very dangerous and could take anything up to twenty hours.” “With a goat?” I asked. “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.”

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.

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.

Ain't that always the way. Squeaky wheels, and all that.

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.

They insisted that everything was okay, there was no problem, and that 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 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.

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.”

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.

The four chickens sat in the boat’s prow and watched us. One of the more disturbing aspects of travel in remote areas is the necessity of taking your food with you in nonperishable 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.

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.”

We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions onto 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.

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.

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.

Wild!

“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 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 tales, and in some of the nightmares with which I was plagued while trying to sleep on Komodo.

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,

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.

😭😭😭

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? Okay, 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 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.

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.

Well, 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.

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 myself.

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.

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 that 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 signaled by doing that terribly benign fading-away kind of laugh at me till I wanted to bite him.

I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill 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 important, toll-free telephone numbers.

<3

Slow incomprehension engulged him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration, and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation.

Hehehe. Engulge.

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.

It’s alarming enough that an exhortation like this should be thought to be necessary, but what is even more worrying is that this section is written only in English. No “Zaïrean”—or Zaïrois, as they actually call themselves—speaks English, or hardly any do. The system by which Zaïre works, and which this card was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In U.S. 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 entry into Zaïre was a relatively gentle softening-up process, and only consisted of two hours of rain and misery in huts.

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.

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.

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 had 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 ballpoint pens, 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.