Last Chance to See

megapode is able to keep it at the precise temperature that the eggs require in order to incubate properly.
    So all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is merely to dig three cubic yards of earth out of the ground, fill it with three cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further six cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then continually monitor the heat it is producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away.
    And thus it saves itself all the bother of sitting on its eggs from time to time.
    This cheered me up immensely, and the good mood it put me into lasted all the way back to the visitors’ village and up to the precise point when we walked in through the door of the hut that we had been assigned as sleeping quarters.
    It was quite large and constructed, as I have said, on stilts—for obvious reasons. However, the wood of which it was built was half rotten, there were damp and stinking mattresses in the small bedrooms, ominously large spiders’ webs in all the corners, dead rats on the floor, and the stench of an overflowing lavatory.
    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, and eventually we took our sleeping bags down to the boat and slept on its deck.
    We awoke early, cold and damp with the dew, but feeling safe. We rolled up our bags and made our way back along the rickety jetty and under the arch. Once again, as soon as we had passed through the arch, the smell of the place assailed us and we were in that malign other world, Komodo.
    This morning, we had been told, we would definitely see dragons. Big dragons. We didn’t know precisely what it was we were in for, but clearly it was not what we had originally expected. It didn’t look as if we would be pegging a dead goat out on the ground and then hiding up a tree all day.
    The day was to consist almost entirely of things we had not been expecting, starting with the arrival of a group of about two dozen American tourists on a specially chartered boat. They were mostly of early retirement age, festooned with cameras, polyester leisure suits, gold-rimmed glasses and Midwestern accents, and I didn’t think that they would all be sitting up a tree all day either.
    We were severely put out by their arrival and felt that the last vestige of any sense of intrepidness we were still trying to hold on to was finally slipping away.
    We found a guard and asked what was going on. He said we could go on ahead now if we wanted to avoid the large party, so we set off with him immediately. We had a walk of about three or four miles through the forest along a path that was obviously well prepared and well trodden. The air was hot and dusty, and we walked with a sense of queasy uncertainty about how the day was going to go. After a while we became aware of the faint sound of a bell moving along ahead of us, and quickened our footsteps to find out what it was. We rounded a corner, and were confronted with some stomach-turning reality.
    Up till now there had been something dreamlike about the whole experience. It was as if the action of walking through the archway and ingesting the musty odor of the island spirited you into an illusory world, in which words like
dragon
and
snake
and
goat
acquired fantastical meanings that had no analogue in the real world, and no consequence in it either. Now I had the feeling that the dream was slithering down the slope into nightmare, and that it was the sort of nightmare from which you would wake to discover that you had indeed wet the bed, that someone was indeed shaking you and shouting, and that the acrid smell of smoke was indeed your house incinerating itself.
    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. The guard would pull roughly on the rope and swipe at the goat’s hindquarters with a bunch of leafy twigs he was carrying in his other hand, and the goat would at last tumble forward and trot along a few more paces, light-headed with fear. There was nothing for the goat to see to make it so afraid, and