She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started to set about the flies with vim and vigour.
The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely high poles. They were so high that it wasn’t possible to tell, from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.
Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped right off to the nearest Bar \& Grill, where you also could buy a range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all too well.
At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn’t worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically. he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.
He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.
About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.
`Excuse me,’ said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn’t hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.
`Hello?’ called Arthur. `Hello!’
The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised to see him. Arthur couldn’t tell if he was surprised and pleased to see him or just surprsised.
`Are you open?’ called Arthur.
The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn’t tell if he couldn’t understand or couldn’t hear.
4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, {\bf Chapter 18}.
`I’ll pop over,’ called Arthur. `Don’t go away.’
He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.
He started to make his way over to the pole on which the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he had disoriented himself on the way down and didn’t know for certain which one it was.
He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was the right one.
He climbed it. It wasn’t.
`Damn,’ he said. `Excuse me!’ he called out to the old man again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away. `Got lost. Be with you in a minute.’ Down he went again, getting very hot and bothered.
When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.