Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [19]
Up till now there had been something dreamlike about the whole experience. It was as if the action of walking through the archway and ingesting the musty odor of the island spirited you into an illusory world, in which words like dragon and snake and goat acquired fantastical meanings that had no analogue in the real world, and no consequence in it either. Now I had the feeling that the dream was slithering down the slope into nightmare, and that it was the sort of nightmare from which you would wake to discover that you had indeed wet the bed, that someone was indeed shaking you and shouting, and that the acrid smell of smoke was indeed your house incinerating itself.
Ahead of us on the path was a young goat. It had a bell and a rope around its neck and was being led unwillingly along the pathway by another guard. We followed it numbly. Occasionally it would trot along hesitantly for a few paces, and then an appalling dread would seem suddenly to seize it and it would push its forelegs into the ground, put its head down, and struggle desperately against the tugging of the rope, bleating and crying. The guard would pull roughly on the rope and swipe at the goat’s hindquarters with a bunch of leafy twigs he was carrying in his other hand, and the goat would at last tumble forward and trot along a few more paces, light-headed with fear. There was nothing for the goat to see to make it so afraid, and nothing, so far as we could tell, to hear; but who knows what the goat could smell in that place toward which we all were moving.
Our deeply sinking spirits were next clouded sideways from a totally unexpected direction. We came across a circle of concrete set in the middle of a clearing. The circle was about twenty feet across, and had two parallel black stripes painted on it, with another black stripe at right angles to them, connecting their centres. It took us a few moments to work out what the symbol was and what it meant. Then we got it. It was just an “H.” The circle was a helicopter pad. Whatever it was that was going to happen to this goat was something people came by helicopter to see.
We trotted on, numb and light-headed, suddenly finding meaningless things to laugh wildly and hysterically at, as if we were walking willfully toward something that would destroy us as well.
Leading from the helipad was a yet more formal pathway. It was a couple of yards wide with a stout wooden fence about two feet high along either side. We followed this along for a couple of hundred yards until we came at last to a wide gully, about ten feet deep, and here there were a number of things to see.
To our left was a kind of bandstand. Several rows of bench seats were banked up behind one another, with a sloping wooden roof to protect them from the sun and other inclemencies in the weather. Tied to the front rail of the bandstand were both ends of a long piece of blue nylon rope, which ran out and down into the gully, where it was slung over a pulley wheel which hung from the branches of a small bent tree. A small iron hook hung from the rope.
Stationed around the tree, basking in the dull light of a hot but overcast day, and in the stench of rotten death, were six large, muddy grey dragon lizards.
The largest of them was probably about ten feet long.
It was at first quite difficult to gauge their size. We were not that close as yet, the light was too blear and grey to model them clearly to the eye, and the eye was simply not accustomed to equating something with the shape of a lizard with something of that size.
I stared at them awhile, aghast, until I realised that Mark was tapping me on the arm. I turned to look. On the other