Mostly Harmless [30]
Arthur watched this exotic performance for a while from a polite distance, and then at last tried giving a gentle cough to attract her attention. The gentle cough, courteously meant, unfortunately involved first inhaling rather more of the local atmosphere than he had so far been doing and as a result, he erupted into a fit of raucous expectoration, and collapsed against the rock face, choking and streaming with tears. He struggled for breath, but each new breath made things worse. He vomited, half-choked again, rolled over his vomit, kept rolling for a few yards, and eventually made it up on to his hands and knees and crawled, panting, into slightly fresher air.
"Excuse me," he said. He got some breath back. "I really am most dreadfully sorry. I feel a complete idiot and..." He gestured helplessly towards the small pile of his own vomit lying spread around the entrance to her cave.
"What can I say?" he said. "What can I possibly say?"
This at least had gained her attention. She looked round at him suspiciously, but, being half blind, had difficulty finding him in the blurred and rocky landscape.
He waved, helpfully. "Hello!" he called.
At last she spotted him, grunted to herself and turned back to whacking flies.
It was horribly apparent from the way that currents of air moved when she did, that the major source of the smell was in fact her. The drying bladders, the festering bodies and the noxious potage may all have been making violent contributions to the atmosphere, but the major olfactory presence was the woman herself.
She got another good thwack at a fly. It smacked against the rock and dribbled its insides down it in what she clearly regarded, if she could see that far, as a satisfactory manner.
Unsteadily, Arthur got to his feet and brushed himself down with a fistful of dried grass. He didn't know what else to do by way of announcing himself. He had half a mind just to wander off again, but felt awkward about leaving a pile of his vomit in front of the entrance to the woman's home. He wondered what to do about it. He started to pluck up more handsful of the scrubby dried grass that was to be found here and there. He was worried, though, that if he ventured nearer to the vomit he might simply add to it rather than clear it up.
Just as he was debating with himself as to what the right course of action was he began to realise that she was at last saying something to him.
"I beg your pardon?" he called out.
"I said, can I help you?" she said, in a thin, scratchy voice. that he could only just hear.
"Er, I came to ask your advice," he called back, feeling a bit ridiculous.
She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back, swiped at a fly and missed.
"What about?" she said.
"I beg your pardon?" he said.
"I said, what about?" she almost screeched.
"Well," said Arthur. "Just sort of general advice, really. It said in the brochure -"
"Ha! Brochure!" spat the old woman. She seemed to be waving her bat more or less at random now.
Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket. He wasn't quite certain why. He had already read it and she, he expected, wouldn't want to. He unfolded it anyway in order to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or two. The copy in the brochure wittered on about the ancient mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wildly over-represented the level of accommodation available in Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy with him but found, when he consulted it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid and had lots of x's and j's and {'s in them. Something was wrong somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just hallucinating, at the heart of the Guide organisation itself, he didn't know. But one way or another he was even less inclined to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches