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Authors: Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine
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terribly, terribly long way to go. I hoped that if its descendant was sitting here on this beach in 350 million years’ time with a camera around its neck, it would feel that the journey had been worth it. I hoped that it might have a clearer understanding of itself in relation to the world it lived in. I hoped that it wouldn’t be reduced to turning other creatures into horror circus shows in order to try and ensure them their survival. I hoped that if someone tried to feed the remote descendant of a goat to the remote descendant of a dragon for the sake of little more than a shudder of entertainment, that it would feel it was wrong.
I hoped it wouldn’t be too chicken to say so.
L EOPARD- S KIN
P ILLBOX H AT
WE STARTLED OURSELVES by arriving in Zaïre on a missionary flight, which had not been our original intention. All regular flights in and out of Kinshasa had been disrupted by an outbreak of vicious bickering between Zaïre and its ex-colonial masters, the Belgians, and only a series of nifty moves by Mark, telexing through the night from Godalming, had secured us this back-door route into the country via Nairobi.
We had come to find rhinoceroses: northern white rhinoceroses, of which there were about twenty-two left in Zaïre, and eight in Czechoslovakia. The ones in Czechoslovakia are not in the wild, of course, and are only there because of the life’s work of a fanatical Czech northern white rhinoceros collector earlier in this century. There is also a small number in the San Diego Zoo in California. We had decided to go torhino country by a roundabout route in order to see some other things on the way.
The aircraft was a sixteen-seater, filled by the three of us—Mark, Chris Muir (our BBC sound engineer), and myself—and thirteen missionaries. Well, not thirteen actual missionaries, but a mixture of missionaries, mission school teachers, and an elderly American couple who were merely very interested in mission work, and wore straw hats from Miami, cameras, and vacantly benign expressions which they bestowed on everyone indiscriminately, whether they wanted them or not.
We had spent about two hours in the glaring sun creeping sleepily around the dilapidated customs and immigration offices in a remote corner of Nairobi’s Wilson airport, trying to spot which was to be our plane and who were to be our traveling companions. It’s hard to identify a missionary from first principles, but there was clearly something odd going on because the only place to sit was a small three-seater bench shaded from the sun by the overhanging roof, and everybody was so busy giving up their places on it to everybody else that in the end it simply remained empty and we all stood blinking and wilting in the burgeoning morning heat. After an hour of this, Chris muttered something Scottish under his breath, put down his equipment, lay down on the empty bench, and went to sleep until the flight was ready. I wished I’d thought of it myself.
I knew from many remarks he had made that Mark had a particular dislike of missionaries, whom he has encountered in the field many times in Africa and Asia, and he seemed to be particularly tense and taciturn as we made our way out across the hot tarmac and took our tiny, cramped seats. I then became rather tense myself as the plane started to taxi out to the runway, because the preflight talk from our pilot included a description of our route, an explanation of the safety features of the aircraft, and also a short prayer.
I wasn’t disturbed so much by the “O Lord, we thank Theefor the blessing of this Thy day,” but “We commend our lives into Thy hands, O Lord” is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle. We hurtled down the runway with white knuckles, and as we climbed into the air, we passed a big, old, cigarfat Dakota finally coming in to land, as if it had been delayed by bad weather over the Great Rift Valley for
I hoped it wouldn’t be too chicken to say so.
L EOPARD- S KIN
P ILLBOX H AT
WE STARTLED OURSELVES by arriving in Zaïre on a missionary flight, which had not been our original intention. All regular flights in and out of Kinshasa had been disrupted by an outbreak of vicious bickering between Zaïre and its ex-colonial masters, the Belgians, and only a series of nifty moves by Mark, telexing through the night from Godalming, had secured us this back-door route into the country via Nairobi.
We had come to find rhinoceroses: northern white rhinoceroses, of which there were about twenty-two left in Zaïre, and eight in Czechoslovakia. The ones in Czechoslovakia are not in the wild, of course, and are only there because of the life’s work of a fanatical Czech northern white rhinoceros collector earlier in this century. There is also a small number in the San Diego Zoo in California. We had decided to go torhino country by a roundabout route in order to see some other things on the way.
The aircraft was a sixteen-seater, filled by the three of us—Mark, Chris Muir (our BBC sound engineer), and myself—and thirteen missionaries. Well, not thirteen actual missionaries, but a mixture of missionaries, mission school teachers, and an elderly American couple who were merely very interested in mission work, and wore straw hats from Miami, cameras, and vacantly benign expressions which they bestowed on everyone indiscriminately, whether they wanted them or not.
We had spent about two hours in the glaring sun creeping sleepily around the dilapidated customs and immigration offices in a remote corner of Nairobi’s Wilson airport, trying to spot which was to be our plane and who were to be our traveling companions. It’s hard to identify a missionary from first principles, but there was clearly something odd going on because the only place to sit was a small three-seater bench shaded from the sun by the overhanging roof, and everybody was so busy giving up their places on it to everybody else that in the end it simply remained empty and we all stood blinking and wilting in the burgeoning morning heat. After an hour of this, Chris muttered something Scottish under his breath, put down his equipment, lay down on the empty bench, and went to sleep until the flight was ready. I wished I’d thought of it myself.
I knew from many remarks he had made that Mark had a particular dislike of missionaries, whom he has encountered in the field many times in Africa and Asia, and he seemed to be particularly tense and taciturn as we made our way out across the hot tarmac and took our tiny, cramped seats. I then became rather tense myself as the plane started to taxi out to the runway, because the preflight talk from our pilot included a description of our route, an explanation of the safety features of the aircraft, and also a short prayer.
I wasn’t disturbed so much by the “O Lord, we thank Theefor the blessing of this Thy day,” but “We commend our lives into Thy hands, O Lord” is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle. We hurtled down the runway with white knuckles, and as we climbed into the air, we passed a big, old, cigarfat Dakota finally coming in to land, as if it had been delayed by bad weather over the Great Rift Valley for
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