Last Chance to See

rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around 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 themsimply 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 onto 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 settled on you but ended up somewhere in the middle distance. Moose was much morestraightforward, 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 along to tell us that.
    We thanked them, loaded all of our baggage into the back of their pickup truck, and sat on top of it as we bumped away from the arrivals hut toward 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 hut 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 use 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