Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [82]
“Never mind about that. I’ll take care of the lorries. What do you know about Mauritius?”
“I know that it was originally colonised by the Dutch,” I said. “And when they left, it was taken over by the French, who lost it to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. So it’s an ex-British colony, part of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants speak French or Creole. The law is basically English and you’re, er, supposed to drive on the left—”
“All right, you’ve read the guide book. But do you know about the birds here? Don’t you know about the pink pigeon? The echo parakeet? Don’t you know about the Mauritius kestrel?”
“Yes, but …”
“Then why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruit bat? We’ve got a bunch of them here at the captive breeding centre if you really want to see one. Common as muck, stupid things. You’d be much better off staying here and seeing some real stuff. Jesus!”
He had suddenly caught an inadvertent glimpse of the road ahead of us and had to yank hard on the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming truck.
“Tell you what,” he said, turning around again. “How long have you got? Two weeks?”
“Yes,” said Mark hurriedly.
“And you were planning to spend two days here and then fly to Rodrigues to spend, what, ten days searching for the world’s rarest fruit bat?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Here’s what you do instead. You stay here for ten days, and then go off to Rodrigues for two days. Right?”
“Will we find it in two days?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ll tell you exactly where to find it. Take you ten minutes. Take a couple of photos, go home.”
“Oh.”
“So you’re staying here, right?”
“Er …”
We were swaying erratically along, more or less in the middle of the road. Another truck hove into sight ahead of us, frantically flashing its lights. Richard was still looking around at us.
“Agreed?” he insisted. “You’ll stay?”
“Yes! Yes! We’ll stay!”
“Right. Good. I should think so too. You’ll get to meet Carl then as well. He’s brilliant, but completely mad. Jesus!”
The brilliant but completely mad Carl Jones is a tall Welshman in his late thirties, and there are those who say of him that his sheer perverse bloody-mindedness is the major thing that stands in the way of the almost total destruction of the ecology of Mauritius. It was Carl whom Mark had contacted to make the arrangements for our trip, and it had been quite apparent from the first moment that we set foot on Mauritius that he was a man to contend with. When we told the immigration official at the airport that we would be staying “with someone called Carl Jones at somewhere called Black River,” it had produced the unexpected and unnerving response of hysterical laughter, and also a friendly pat on the back.
When Carl met us at Richard’s house, he greeted us with a scowl, leaned against the doorframe, and growled, “I hate media people.” Then he noticed our tape recorder and suddenly grinned impishly.
“Oh! Is that on?” he asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Turn it on, quick, turn it on!”
We turned it on.
“I really hate media people!” he boomed at it. “Did you get that? Do you think it’ll come out all right?”
He peered at the recorder to make sure the tape really was running.
“You know, I once did an interview for Woman’s Hour on the radio,” he said, shaking his head in wonderment at the folly of a malign and silly world. “I hate media people, they take up all my time and don’t pay me very much—but anyway, the interviewer said to me that he was sick of boring scientists and could I tell him about my work but be sure to mention women and babies. So I told him that I preferred women field assistants to men, that we reared lots of baby birds, and that women were better at looking after baby birds because they were more sensitive and all that. And it went out!”
This rendered him speechless with laughter and he tottered helplessly out of the room and was not seen again for hours.
“That was Carl,” said Richard. “He’s great. He’s really brilliant. Honestly. Don’t worry