Last Chance to See

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 around its folds, had the contours of a lizard’s legs—not in 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 that 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” that 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 arrivedand 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 toward 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 semicircular 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 7UP; Americans, Dutch, you name it. Where had they come from? How had they got here? What was going on?
    Outside the administration hut 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 modeled in completely spread-eagled 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 backward 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