Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams
Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams
Table of Contents
Twig Technology
Here Be Chickens
Leopardskin Pillbox Hat
Heartbeats in the Night
Blind Panic
Rare, or Medium Rare?
Sifting Through the Embers
Mark’s Last Word …
Douglas Adams
and Mark Carwardine
Last Chance to See …
For Alain le Garsmeur
With special thanks to
Sue Freestone and Lisa Glass
for editing, research and being there
CONTENTS
Twig Technology
Here Be Chickens
Leopardskin Pillbox Hat
Heartbeats in the Night
Blind Panic
Rare, or Medium Rare?
Sifting Through the Embers
Mark’s Last Word …
Twig Technology
This isn’t at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.
This was the idea of the Observer Colour Magazine, to throw us all in at the deep end. Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist, working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which L was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years – sit in a tree and hide.
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.
Like virtually everything that lives on Madagascar, it does not exist anywhere else on earth. Its origins date back to a period in earth’s history when Madagascar was still part of mainland Africa (which itself had been part of the gigantic supercontinent of Gondwanaland), at which time the ancestors of the Madagascan lemurs were the dominant primate in all the world. When Madagascar sheered off into the Indian Ocean it became entirely isolated from all the evolutionary changes that took place in the rest of the world. It is a life-raft from a different time. It is now almost like a tiny, fragile, separate planet.
The major evolutionary change which passed Madagascar by was the arrival of the monkeys. These were descended from the same ancestors as the lemurs, but they had bigger brains, and were aggressive competitors for the same habitat. Where the lemurs had been content to hang around in trees having a good time, the monkeys were ambitious, and interested in all sorts of things, especially twigs, with which they found they could do all kinds of things that they couldn’t do by themselves – digging for things, probing things, hitting things. The monkeys took over the world and the lemur branch of the primate family died out everywhere – other than Madagascar, which for millions of years the monkeys never reached.
Then fifteen hundred years ago, the monkeys finally arrived, or at least, the monkey’s descendants – us. Thanks to astounding advances in twig technology we arrived in canoes, then boats and finally aeroplanes, and once again started to compete for use of the same habitat, only this time with fire and machetes and domesticated animals, with asphalt and concrete. The lemurs are once again fighting for survival.
My aeroplane full of monkey descendants arrived at Antananarivo airport. Mark, who had gone out ahead to make the arrangements for the expedition, met me for the first time there and explained the set-up.
‘Everything’s gone wrong,’ he said.
He was tall, dark and laconic and had a slight nervous tic. He explained that he used to be just tall, dark and laconic, but that the events of the last few days had rather got to him. At least he tried to explain this. He had also lost his voice, he croaked, due to a lot of recent shouting.