The Road to McCarthy Read Online Free

nature reserve. It warns that you enter at your own risk. What risk is that then? apes, it says. What—the Barbary apes? There’s a picture of one of them on the leaflet. Are they in a zoo up here, then? Or are they free-range? I have vague memories of learning something about them at school, but I can’t remember what it was. Are they vicious predators, or gentle companions? Carnivorous, or herbivorous? An endangered species, or farmed commercially for supermarket salami? I realize I know nothing at all about them except that they live here, rather than in Marbella or Málaga. I half thought they were mythological. Are they big or small? Must be small, eh? So why are they called apes, then? Apes are big, aren’t they? As big as us, at least. If I’d had any sense I’d have bought a guidebook and studied up on them, but I didn’t. I’m completely unprepared, and have no idea what to expect.
    I’m also the only person walking.
    There have been occasional taxis and tour minibuses passing me on the way up, but I seem to be the only person on foot.
    Just the one for the apes to concentrate on, then?
    So what am I supposed to do if they attack? I seem to remember something on a BBC wildlife program about showing apes your bottom whencornered. Or is it that they show you their bottoms? You’d want to make sure you got it right. You’d probably only get the one chance.
    After another quarter-hour of much harder foot slog than that swine of a concierge had even hinted at, I come to a ticket booth where I have to pay five pounds to get in, even though I’m not sure what I’m getting in to. Will it be some wretched safari park full of wild animals, with me the only pedestrian? There’s a monument ahead, looking south towards Africa over the best view so far. There’s also a group of about ten people, English by the look of it, who’ve just got out of a minibus together.
    “If you wish, you may take a picture of the Pillars of Hercules,” says their dapper little guide, with the grim resignation of a man who knows he is wasting his life.
    “Try and bloody pretend, Lisa! Just try and look as if you’re having a good time,” says a woman to her companion, her daughter perhaps, or maybe a recently released prisoner placed under her supervision by the courts. “It’s the Pillars of Bloody Hercules, you know.”
    A sign on the monument says that in ancient times this point was indeed known as Mons Calpe, one of the Pillars of Hercules, entrance to Hades and the end of the known world.
    A little farther on up the road I come to another sign. DO NOT FEED THE MACAQUES .
    What? What the hell are macaques, then? They’re parrots, aren’t they? Or are the bloody macaques in fact the bleeding apes? They’ve always got another name for things, haven’t they, to make you feel ignorant and inadequate for calling them Barbary apes, or sausage dogs, or Eskimos or whatever? The sign continues: THERE HAS BEEN AN EXCESS OF MONKEY —oh, I see, they’re monkeys now, are they?— OF MONKEY/HUMAN INTERACTIONS. THIS RESULTS IN THE MONKEYS BECOMING STRESSED AND THEY WILL BITE .
    Blimey. Not might. will.
    DO NOT CARRY VISIBLE ITEMS OF FOOD. THE MONKEYS WILL —there’s that sense of certainty again, just when I don’t want it—try and steal these items and become aggressive.
    It doesn’t specify how aggressive, but it doesn’t have to. I already understand why no one else is walking to the flaming caves. I don’t even likecaves that much. I’ve only come because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Come to think of it, when I paid my five pounds the man at the ticket booth asked me what vehicle I was in. When I said I was walking he looked baffled, as if I had said I was walking to Tangier, which at this rate I might have to.
    Suddenly they’re standing there in the road in front of me. Two of the bastards. I was hoping they’d turn out to be tiny and ornamental, but they’re actually rather big, like a couple of