Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [20]
It had emerged from the undergrowth, attracted, no doubt, by the knowledge that the arrival of human beings meant that it was feeding time. We learned later that the group of dragons that hang out in the gully rarely go very far from it and now do very little at all other than lie and wait to be fed.
The dragon lizard padded toward us, slapping its feet down aggressively, first its front left and back right, then vice versa, carrying its great weight easily and springily, with the swinging, purposeful gait of a bully. Its long, narrow, pale, forked tongue flickered in and out, testing the air for the smell of dead things.
It reached the far side of the fence, and then began to range back and forth tetchily, waiting for action, swinging and scraping its heavy tail across the dusty earth. Its rough, scaly skin hung a little loosely over its body, like chain mail, gathering to a series of cowllike folds just behind its long death’s head of a face. Its legs are thick and muscular, and end in claws such as you’d expect to find at the bottom of a brass table leg.
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 toward 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 onto 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 slowly 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 around.
“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 was gone, by which time