The thing is just a monitor lizard, and yet it is massive to a degree that is unreal. As it rears its head up over the fence and around as it turns, you wonder how it’s done, what trickery is involved.
At that moment the party of tourists began to straggle towards us along the path, cheery and unimpressed, wanting to know what was up, what was happening. Look, there’s one of those dragons. Ooh it’s a big one. Nasty looking feller!
And now the worst of it was about to happen.
At a discreet distance behind the bandstand the goat was being slaughtered. Two park guards held the struggling, bleating creature down on the ground with its neck across a log and hacked its head off with a machete, holding the bunch of leafy twigs against it to staunch the eruption of blood. The goat took several minutes to die.
Once it was dead, they cut off one of its back legs for the dragon behind the fence, then took the rest of the body, and fastened it on to the hook on the blue nylon rope. It rocked and swayed in the breeze as they winched it down to the dragons lying in the gully.
The dragons took only a lethargic interest in it for a while. They were very well fed and sleepy dragons. At last one reared itself up, approached the hanging carcass and ripped gently at its soft underbelly. A great muddle of intestines slipped out of the goat and flopped over the dragon’s head. They lay there for a while, steaming gently. The dragon seemed, for the moment, not to take any further interest.
Another dragon then heaved itself into motion and approached. It sniffed and licked at the air, and then started to eat the intestines of the goat from off the head of the first dragon, until the first dragon rounded on it, and started to claim part of its meal for itself. At first nip a thick green liquid flooded out of the glistening grey coils, and as the meal proceeded, the head of each dragon in turn became wet with the green liquid.
‘Boy, this makes it big, Pauline,’ said a man standing near me, watching through his binoculars. ‘It makes it bigger than it is. You know, with these it’s the size I really thought we’d be seeing.’ He handed the binoculars to his wife.
‘Oh, that really does magnify it!’ she said.
‘It really is a superb pair of binoculars, Pauline. And they’re not heavy either.’
Others of the group clustered round.
‘May I take a look? Whose are they?
‘My gosh, Howard would adore these!’
‘Al? Al, take a look at these binoculars – and see how heavy they are!’
Just as I was making the charitable assumption that the binoculars were just a diversion from having actually to watch the hellish floor show in the pit, the woman who now had possession of them suddenly exclaimed delightedly, ‘Gulp, gulp gulp! All gone! What a digestive system! Now he’s smelling us!’
‘He probably wants fresher meat,’ growled her husband. ‘Live, on the hoof?’
It was in fact at least an hour or so before all of the goat had gone, by which time the party had drifted, chatting, back to the village. As they did so a lone Englishwoman in the party confided to us that she didn’t actually care much about the dragons. ‘I like the landscape,’ she said, airily. ‘The dragons are just thrown in.
And of course, with all the strings and the goats and the tourists, well, it’s just comedy really. If you were walking by yourself and you came across one, that might be different, but it’s kind of like a puppet show.’
When the last of them had left, a park guard told us that if we wished to we could climb down into the gully and see the dragons close to, and with swimming heads we did so. Two guards came with us, armed with long sticks, which branched into a ‘Y’ at the end. They used these to push the dragons’ necks away if they came too close or began to look aggressive.