Duologue in Poor Visibility

By STRIX 41- wish you'd shut up,' I said. 'You're getting I on my nerves.'

From the cardboard box on the driving seat beside me there came, not for the first time, a sort of irritable scuffling.

'I can't help that,' said the tortoise. He had a croaking, peevish voice. 'You're not the only one with nerves. How would you like to be imprisoned in a hat-box with a lot of part-worn lettuce? You'd be round the bend in no time, I bet. It's not that I enjoy talking to you. I just want to keep k cafard at bay.'

The rear light ahead of us moved on and was instantly lost to sight in the fog. I switched on the engine, put the car in bottom gear, and followed cautiously. We made about fifteen yards.

'I say,' snarled the tortoise with elaborate sar- casm. 'That was pretty splendid! I thought the little bus behaved beautifully on that run. Went like a bird. What county are we in now?'

I turned on the wireless. `. . Particularly dense,' the announcer was saying, 'at London Airport, which has now been closed down for snore than twenty-four hours.' I turned the wire- less off. We made two more short advances, then a man with a torch loomed up out of the wrack and rapped on the window. I opened it.

'You aren't by any chance a doctor?' he asked in a loud, jolly voice.

'No. What He disappeared.

'What's this place?' asked the tortoise, a good deal later.

I replied cautiously that I had an idea it might be Slough.

'How can you tell?' The tortoise sounded sus- picious.

I said I was going by the abnormal density of the traffic-lights. The tortoise wanted to know what was the point of having so many.

'Slough,' I told it, 'is a Safety Town. The risk of accidents is lessened by having traffic-lights every few hundred yards; it slows down the traffic.' shouldn't have thought that was possible,' said the tortoise.

We crawled on.

'How about if I got out and walked?' the tor- toise suggested offensively. could do with some fresh air and exercise. Tell me how to get to your house, and I'll warn them to keep something hot for you.'

'Look here, tortoise,' I said, 'I've had about enough of your running commentary. It's all very well for you to sneer, but we've done nearly thirty miles in under two and a half hours. You couldn't have covered anything like that distance in the time.'

'How many miles,' asked the tortoise, 'have all those bloody great flying machines at London Air- port done in the last twenty-four hours?'

'None, actually.'

'Well, I could have beaten them,' croaked the tortoise. 'Hands down.'

'But you must realise that these are exceptional conditions.'

'That's exactly what the hare said!' In its excite- ment the tortoise's voice became a kind of shrill rasp. 'The hare claimed that the weather was un- seasonably warm, and as he'd been out with the beagles the day before he was dog-tired and needed a nap. All poppycock, of course. My ancestor won the race, and that's all there was to it. It was just as unseasonably warm for him. We tortoises,' he added severely, 'haven't much time for people who make semi-specious excuses.'

'And why the hell,' said the tortoise, towards the end of another long, boring tirade, 'you don't hibernate like we do I have never been able to understand. Look at the conditions you have to put up with in the winter. Don't tell me you wouldn't be better off asleep than driving down a main road at five miles an hour with your head sticking out of the window. What's the point of being conscious during the winter months? The country's knee-deep in mud, then it's snowed up, then it's flooded. In the towns you get trampled to death by Christmas shoppers and suffocated by smog. You can rely on at least one influenza epidemic. Why don't you hibernate? Haven't you got the nous, or what?'

'You don't seem to realise,' I said stiffly, 'that the human race has its destiny to work out. There is a lot on our plate. If we all dossed down for a third of the year we should never get through our In-Tray. Progress would lose momentum.'

'Are you suggesting,' asked my captious pas- senger, 'that tortoises have no destiny, that we have time on our hands and can therefore afford to squander it on sleep? Because if you are, it is my duty to remind you (if remind is the right word) that we live much longer than you, partly because of our sensible habit of hibernation. Pro- vided this beastly child to whom you say you are presenting me treats me with reasonable considera- tion, I shall still be bearing my share of the world's problems long after you are in your grave. I am unlikely to last as long as the Royal Tortoise of Tonga, who was presented to Queen Salote's ancestor by Captain Cook in 1777 and is still, to the best of my belief, going strong. But your argu- ments against sleeping through the winter would apply with equal force to sleeping through the night. By the latter practice you prolong your life and your alleged usefulness. How do you know, that you would not prolong both still further by, sleeping through the winter?'

'I don't,' I said. 'But,' I went on, grateful for firm ground under my feet as I reached the shal- lows, 'who would milk the cows and exercise the, horses? What would become of fox-hunting, fin4 Parliament? Where, in so long a night, would we find nightwatchmen for our complicated installa- tions? Who would man the lighthouses? For' (here an unanswerable point occurred to me) 'there are many foreign lands where honto sapiens, as even in partibus it is only polite to call him, is exposed to none of the rigours of winter. And these fellows—Phcenicians and such—might seek our shores and while we were all asleep, take pos- session of our motherland. Though it would be in a parlous condition—no hedging and ditching done, lousy with foxes—this would not suit us at all. What have you got to say to that?'

'A great deal,' replied the tortoise, and began to say it. But just at this moment we arrived at mY house, and the tortoise fell silent as I busied myself with the duties of a host and found him warm, commodious quarters in the stoke-hole.

Since then I have tried more than once to reopen our conversation, but the tortoise refuses to be drawn. Sulking, I can only suppose. Nobody likes to be worsted in an argument.