Last Chance to See

smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return. He stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.
    “About five years ago,” he said, “we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of thetime, work, and resources we had put into them, they had cost us about fifteen hundred dollars per bird. But that’s not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in casseroles. Couldn’t believe it. We just couldn’t believe it.
    “Do you understand what’s happening to this island? It’s a mess. It’s a complete ruin. In the Fifties it was drenched with DDT, which found its way straight into the food chain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was hit with cyclones. Well, we can’t help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and logging, so they did irreparable damage. Now with the continued logging and burning of the forest, there’s only ten percent left, and they’re cutting that down for deer hunting. What’s left of the unique species of Mauritius is being overrun by stuff that you can find all over the world—privet, guava, all this crap. Here, look at this.”
    He handed the bottle to us. It was a locally brewed rum called Green Island.
    “Read what it says on the bottle.”
    Underneath a romantic picture of an old sailing ship approaching an idyllic tropical island was a quotation from Mark Twain, which read, “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”
    “That was less than a hundred years ago,” said Richard. “Since then just about everything that shouldn’t be done to an island has been done to Mauritius. Except perhaps nuclear testing.”
    There is one island in the Indian Ocean, close to Mauritius, which is miraculously unspoilt, and that is Round Island. In fact, it isn’t a miracle at all, there’s a very simple reason for it, which we discovered when we talked to Carl and Richard about going there.
    “You can’t,” said Carl. “Well, you can try, but I doubt if you’d manage it.”
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “Waves. You know, the sea,” said Carl. “Goes like this.” He made big heaving motions with his arms.
    “It’s extremely difficult to get on,” said Richard. “It has no beaches or harbours. You can only go there on very calm days, and even then you have to jump from the boat to the island. It’s quite dangerous. You’ve got to judge it exactly right or you’ll get thrown against the rocks. We haven’t lost anybody yet, but …”
    They almost lost me.
    We hitched a ride on a boat trip with some naturalists going to Round Island, anchored about a hundred yards from the rocky coastline, and ferried ourselves across in a dinghy to the best thing that Round Island has to offer by way of a landing spot—a slippery outcrop called Pigeon House Rock.
    A couple of men in wetsuits first leapt out of the dinghy into the tossing sea, swam to the rock, climbed with difficulty up the side of it, and at last slithered, panting, onto the top.
    Everyone else in turn then made the trip across in the dinghy, three or four at a time. To land, you had to make the tricky jump across onto the rock, matching the crests of the incoming waves to the top of the rock, and leaping just an instant before the wave reached its height, so that the boat was still bearing you upward. Those already on the rock would be tugging at the dinghy’s rope, shouting instructions and encouragement over the crashing of the waves, then catching and hauling people as they jumped.
    I was to be the last one to land.
    By this time the sea swell was getting heavier and rougher, and it was suggested that I should land on the other side of the rock, where it was a lot steeper but a little less obviously slippery with algae.
    I tried it. I leapt from the edge of the heaving boat, lungedfor the rock, found it to be every bit as slippery as the other side, merely much steeper, and slithered gracelessly down it into the sea, grazing my legs and arms against the jagged edges. The sea closed over my head. I thrashed about under the surface, trying desperately to get my head up, but the dinghy was