Last Chance to See

time to dump your surplus baggage at the hotel if we’re quick. Er, some of it is surplus, isn’t it?” He looked anxiously at the pile of bags that I was lugging, and then with increasing alarm at the cases of Nikon camera bodies, lenses, and tripods that our photographer, Alain le Garsmeur, who had been with me on the plane, was busy loading into the minibus.
    “Oh, that reminds me,” Mark said, “I’ve just found out that we probably won’t be allowed to take any film out of the country.”
    I climbed rather numbly into the minibus. 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. I tried to pull myself together and get a grip. I suddenly had not the faintest idea what I, a writer of humorous science-fiction adventures, was doing here. I sat blinking in the glare of the tropical sun and wondered what on earth Mark was expecting of me. He was hurrying around, tipping one porter, patiently explaining to another porter that he hadn’t actually carried any of our bags, conducting profound negotiations with the driver, and gradually pulling some sort of order out of the chaos.
    Madagascar, I thought. Aye-aye, I thought. A nearly extinct lemur. Heading out to the jungle in two hours’ time. I desperately needed to sound bright and intelligent.
    “Er, do you think we’re actually going to get to see this animal?” I asked Mark as he climbed in and slammed the door. He grinned at me.
    “Well, the Ambassador in Brussels said we haven’t got a hope in hell,” he said, “so we may just be in with a chance. Welcome,” he added as we started the slow pothole slalom into town, “to Madagascar.”
    Antananarivo is pronounced
Tananarive
, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. 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), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rationalGallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester “Lester” and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn’t like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy.
    One of the more peculiar things that has happened to me is that as a result of an idea I had as a penniless hitchhiker sleeping in fields and telephone boxes, publishers now send me around the world on expensive author tours and put me up in the sort of hotel room where you have to open several doors before you find the bed. 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. I could tell that Mark didn’t realise this and was at first rather anxious showing me to my patch of floor—“Er, will this be all right? I was told there would be mattresses.… Um, can we fluff up the concrete a little for you?”—and I had to keep on saying, “You don’t understand. This is great, this is wonderful, I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.”
    In fact, we were not able to lie back at all. The aye-aye is a nocturnal animal and does not make daytime appointments. The few aye-ayes that were known to exist in 1985 were to be found (or more usually not found) on a tiny, idyllic, rain-forest island called Nosy Mangabé, just off the northeast coast of Madagascar, to which they had been removedtwenty years earlier. This was their last refuge on earth and no one was allowed to visit the island without special government permission, which Mark had managed to