Author s Preface
Travel, for travel s sake, is to my mind a waste of time
and energy and an unnecessary expense. It is so much
better to arrive. But alas, I m obliged to travel to satisfy
my vice. Let me make this clear: My vice, for that s what
it is, is the study of animals. This unreasoned passion has
often taken me to remote parts of the earth.
What have I not endured in order to have a fleeting
glimpse of a rare species of monkey hidden away in the
foothills of the Annamite monntains? And when I think
of the number of times my passport was stamped, the
amount of dust I inhaled and the pounds I sweated off,
before being able to observe a tribe of proboscis monkeys
in Borneo . . . no, I don t like travel.
The reason for setting off this time was two strange
animals, or rather reptiles. One was the Komodo lizard,
a kind of antediluvian monster straight out of popular
legend, which lives on a small, remote Indonesian island.
About twelve feet long, it weighs all of three hundred
pounds. The other was the sphenodon of Stephen Island,
Sphenodon punctatum to the knowledgeable. It is not
much to look at-thirty inches long at most, thin, little
different from any ordinary lizard. Bnt it existed in its
present form 250 million years ago, long before the dino-
saurs and brontosauruses appeared on earth.
More amazing still, this living fossil, which flourished
during the Triassic and Jurassic periods, possesses a third
eye-the parietal eye, which corresponds to the pineal
gland in mammals.
These two reptiles are of great interest. Unfortunately,
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