Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [18]
I’ve just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest, but no matter: the volume of this mound is a little over nine cubic yards.
What the mound is is an automatic incubator. The heat generated by the chemical reactions of the rotting vegetation keeps the eggs that are buried deep inside it warm—and not merely warm. By judicious additions or subtractions of material from the mound, the megapode is able to keep it at the precise temperature that the eggs require in order to incubate properly.
So all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is merely to dig three cubic yards of earth out of the ground, fill it with three cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further six cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then continually monitor the heat it is producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away.
And thus it saves itself all the bother of sitting on its eggs from time to time.
This cheered me up immensely, and the good mood it put me into lasted all the way back to the visitors’ village and up to the precise point when we walked in through the door of the hut that we had been assigned as sleeping quarters.
It was quite large and constructed, as I have said, on stilts—for obvious reasons. However, the wood of which it was built was half rotten, there were damp and stinking mattresses in the small bedrooms, ominously large spiders’ webs in all the corners, dead rats on the floor, and the stench of an overflowing lavatory.
We tried gamely to sleep there that night, but in the end were driven out by the sheer noise of the rats fighting the snakes in the roof cavity, and eventually we took our sleeping bags down to the boat and slept on its deck.
We awoke early, cold and damp with the dew, but feeling safe. We rolled up our bags and made our way back along the rickety jetty and under the arch. Once again, as soon as we had passed through the arch, the smell of the place assailed us and we were in that malign other world, Komodo.
This morning, we had been told, we would definitely see dragons. Big dragons. We didn’t know precisely what it was we were in for, but clearly it was not what we had originally expected. It didn’t look as if we would be pegging a dead goat out on the ground and then hiding up a tree all day.
The day was to consist almost entirely of things we had not been expecting, starting with the arrival of a group of about two dozen American tourists on a specially chartered boat. They were mostly of early retirement age, festooned with cameras, polyester leisure suits, gold-rimmed glasses and Midwestern accents, and I didn’t think that they would all be sitting up a tree all day either.
We were severely put out by their arrival and felt that the last vestige of any sense of intrepidness we were still trying to hold on to was finally slipping away.
We found a guard and asked what was going on. He said we could go on ahead now if we wanted to avoid the large party, so we set off with him immediately. We had a walk of about three or four miles