Last Chance To See Part 3

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 sc.r.a.ping 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 bra.s.s table leg.

The thing is just a monitor lizard, and yet it is ma.s.sive 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 carca.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 a.s.sumption that the binoculars were just a diversion from having actually to watch the h.e.l.lish 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.d, 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 sh.e.l.l, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 t.u.r.ds.

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 Pillbox 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 G.o.dalming, 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses. And not merely gla.s.ses. They nearly all had the same sort of gla.s.ses, 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses.

'Transit pa.s.sengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 f.u.c.k 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses you on to the next official who will be unpleasant to you all over again. By the end of our trip this process would a.s.sume 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.