Back in Poli, All was quiet. At the mission there was a brooding silence. Jon's crops had been ravaged by unidentified beasts. The town-chief's cattle were deeply suspected. Somehow. I felt sure it was baboons. Had Jon's wife been a Dowayo lady, she would have expected to be beaten for adultery -- the inevitable cause of damage to a man's crops.

In the village, Zuuldibo, when unearthed from under my bed, proclaimed that preparations were continuing for the circumcision but that nothing interesting could happen for some time yet. I knew from previous experience that it was the brewing of the beer that would be the real point of no return. When I heard that it was brewing, I would know that the time had come. Just to make sure, I sent Matthieu over to the village where it was to be held with a present of tobacco for one of his relatives who lived there. They would be sure to send word in good time.

In the interim, there was plenty to keep me occupied since I had started studying local healers and their remedies. But since I could reasonably count on a few weeks' respite, I determined to carry out the mission that might constitute my only major contribution to anthropology. I would visit the Ninga to search for the ritual removal of male breasts -- the missing mastectomy that had been mentioned by my Dowayo informants.

It is one of the more depressing discoveries of the anthropologist that almost all peoples loathe, fear and despise the people next door.

From one of the male nurses at the hospital, I had learned that the chief of the Ninga was in Poli and resolved to track him down. It took hours of wandering round the outlying huts. Once again, it was clear to everyone what a white man wanted despite his protestations and pathetic pretences. I had not previously realized that commercial vice existed as such in such a small town. But exist it certainly did and I was tirelessly offered most of it. There was also an awkward encounter with a member of the police who emerged from one compound in a dishevelled state and explained with great insistence that he was investigating illegal drinking.

It was clear from the outset that Matthieu did not want to go to the Ninga. The paths were dangerous, he assured me. There would be no one there at this time of the year. No one spoke their language. They would not talk to me. They were bad people.

We seated ourselves on two upturned crates and we began our audience, the urchin acting as interpreter. I announced my delight at seeing the chief and explained my mission in these parts was to study 'customs'. He nodded sagely. I had heard many interesting things about the Ninga and my heart longed to visit him in his village to learn about Ninga ways. On the whole this approach seemed preferable to simply saying, 'Look, about male nipples…'

It was only at nightfall, tired, hot and deeply resentful, that I finally discovered the chief of the Ninga, being beckoned into his presence by an urchin I had hired as a guide. Clearly his avoidance techniques were every bit as good as Zuuldibo's. The chief was a dwarf, clothed entirely in a bright red robe of thick flannel rather like Father Christmas's assistants. From under the robe, peeked out saucily the toes of glossy white shoes. As I entered his compound, he rushed at me rather like an over-enthusiastic terrier, hugged me fiercely, burying his face in my stomach, and declared his joy at seeing me.

He smiled benevolently at the translation of my words. He had heard of me among the Dowayos -- always his friends. His heart yearned to take me to his village. He would gladly discuss with me Ninga ways. He had heard that I was a man of straight words. He looked coy. There was only one problem. He was a poor man. He could not entertain me as I would wish. Yet he was proud. He could not bear to receive me and disappoint my expectations. He sighed. There was only one way round it. I would have to buy a goat. A thousand francs would be quite sufficient. I might as well pass over the money now. I baulked. This was as straightforward a demand for cash as I had ever encountered. It was difficult to know whether this was a moment appropriate to no-nonsense, man-to-man toughness or to spontaneous generosity, devoid of haggling. Anthropology, alas, requires always a measure of hypocrisy and calculation. A swift check of my pockets revealed a total of some five hundred francs so generosity was out.

Alas, I explained, I too was a poor man. Not being a chief, I was unaccustomed to eating whole goats, so I would give the chief the price of half a goat -- five hundred francs. He looked very disappointed. Having come so far and discovered a phenomenon as vital as the excision of male nipples, it seemed ridiculous to haggle over slightly more than a pound. Somehow, this was an argument I always used on myself before giving in. I added that I would, of course, expect to give the chief a present when I visited him. 'A guest does not come with empty hands.'

Nine days later, there had been no further sign from the chief of the Ninga. African notions of time are somewhat looser than our own. I remembered with embarrassment the arrival of the Dowayo rain-chief the day after my farewell party in the bland expectation that drink would have been kept for him.

It was difficult to know quite how to respond to that. Having just been parted from all my money, I did not feel particularly clever, so we let the matter lie. 'Do not linger too long in these areas,' he solemnly warned. 'Here there are many bad women.' I began to guess where my five hundred francs would end up.

The chief brightened visibly and we agreed that in a week's time our urchin interpreter would come to the village to fetch me and we would climb the mountain together. As I sought to leave, the chief again made a rush at me, clutching my unresisting form to himself. He seized my hand and clasped it passionately to his heart. 'White men and black men,' he observed, 'are brothers. It is just that white men are cleverer.'

The house of the chief was empty. No one knew where he was. No one knew when he would return. Matthieu explained that this was because they were all bad people. I decided to try my nurse informant at the hospital.

The compact figure of the sous-préfet was already crouched over his desk, a stack of papers spread out before him. As we shook hands, a broad grin spread over his face. He waved a piece of paper in the air. 'Aha. I have a report about you from the police. Apparently, you have been visiting a lady of the night.'

Still, it looked as though a visit to the chief of the nippleless Ninga would not go amiss. I set off with Matthieu as soon as it got light -- he predicting doom as usual. Once more we had to go through a great deal of wandering about. In polygynous households there is often a nomadic element in sleeping arrangements. People were crouched around fires, clutching blankets to themselves in the early morning chill, waiting for food or warm beer. Great expectorations resounded on all sides.

Since this involved passing directly in front of the sous-préfet's house, a courtesy visit would be necessary there also.

The conversation got round to the subject of circumcision. The sous-préfet's approach was plagued by all the unresolved discomforts of any administrator from one culture who rules over members of another. As a Muslim, he, of course, regarded circumcision as a good thing in itself. It was inherently civilizing and was therefore to be encouraged among the pagans. He was aware, however, that it was disruptive, dangerous and expensive. He was therefore in the habit of sending out the male nurses to perform the operation in the villages, instead of letting the local people do it, 'with a dirty hoe'. They were at least more moderate in their excisions and relatively hygienic, though the stipulation that all wounds be doused in alcohol must have greatly increased the pain involved. What the sous-préfet did not know was that some of the elders, dissatisfied with this arrangement, circumcised the boys a second time once the nurses had left: humanitarian measures of a good administrator had thus greatly increased the pain, suffering and mortality of the boys -- in the best traditions of colonial rule.

The more I denied it, the more he delightedly refused to believe anything but the worst of me. We finally got round to the question of the chief of the Ninga. 'The chief of the Ninga? But I can tell you where he is.' He leaned back in his chair and assumed his most cherubic expression. 'I sent him back to his village. He is a bad example, lying around in town, drinking, fornicating. How are young men to respect their chiefs with such behaviour? I have sent him back to collect the tax properly.' He waved a reproachful finger at me. 'You had better behave yourself or I will be sending you back to yours.'

One of the principles of the British Army has always been, 'When in doubt -- Charge!' It seemed the moment to apply it to my own fieldwork. Zuuldibo confirmed that several men in the village knew the paths to the Ninga which involved dangerous climbing. He would send me one who was strong, intelligent, honest and so on. I resolved to leave at first light for the Ninga. Matthieu was much displeased. If Ninga in town had been bad enough, Ninga up a mountain were even worse. 'It is the wrong season to climb the mountain,' he declared. 'It will rain. We shall be washed off. There will be no drinking-water.'

It was during this talk that I first heard of the water project that was to prove a major problem of the future. The sous-préfet, in collaboration with the American Peace Corps, had determined that the town needed a pure water supply. As I walked back to my village, I little realized what a tangled issue this would become. I was more interested in my search for the missing mastectomy.

The next morning, before daybreak, there was a polite coughing outside my hut too genteel to be that of a goat. Outside stood a shivering waif in torn shorts and a magnificent red Beatles hat. In his hand, he bore a pet bird of many colours, not a parrot but rather resembling a kingfisher. It was the guide Zuuldibo had sent -- a boy of about eight. We drank coffee and sat on the cold rocks talking. It appeared that the boy's mother was Ninga -- married to a Dowayo man -- and that he had served on a number of cattle drives from the high plateau to the valley. His knowledge was not to be called into question. With some difficulty Matthieu was roused. An hour later, we set off with camera, notebooks, tobacco -- all the standard elements of the ethnographic trade.

After half an hour, we met a party bound for a funeral beyond Kongle. They bore bubbling pots of beer and dry, crackling cattle-skins to wrap the corpse and were clearly in high good spirits at the prospect of meat from the cattle that would be slaughtered. I was glad that Zuuldibo had not come with us. He would never have allowed the beer to pass untasted. The 'mourners' made cheerful jokes about my constant attendance, vulture-like, at Dowayo funerals. We exchanged tobacco for mountain bananas and they went on their way puffing happily -- the cigarettes being rolled in a page of my notebook. Our little guide fed some banana to his bird, set it back on his cap at a festive tilt and we began to climb.

Thick bands of woolly fog rolled across the valley floor. We squelched our way through mud and broken rocks to the base of the mountain range. Startled cattle would suddenly loom up out of the mist and crash off snorting into the long grass. It was bitterly cold and we all scanned the horizon hoping the weak rays of the sun would soon break through and warm us. The pet bird puffed up its feathers and essayed a faint chirp or two.

Our guide sat his bright bird on his hat as a gage and set off in front. Matthieu trailed gloomily behind, complaining of the inadequacy of his breakfast.

The climb is not pleasant. The path is often very narrow, its thin, crumbly edges sloping down towards the rocks below. When wet‚ the granite is very slippery and unforgiving towards anyone who loses his footing. As we climbed, drops of heavy dew slithered coldly down our necks and arms whenever we touched the vegetation that sprouted rankly in the crevices. Soon, we came upon a deep cleft littered with broken bottles and smashed calabashes. Our small guide paused here and pointed it out as a place where dwelt a strong spirit of the earth and urged us to make an offering of any food we were carrying. I gave up a banana and a piece of chocolate, Matthieu somewhat grudgingly yielded up a pinch of instant coffee and some smoked meat that he had secreted in the bottom of his pack against contingencies. Our guide nodded approvingly and set off again, the bird bobbing and shuffling as he heaved himself over the rocks. Soon flies came to torment us, feeding on our sweat and running infuriatingly in and out of our eyes. The sun grew hotter and hotter. Out of breath, miserable from the flies and bruises, I amazed my companions by insisting on a rest.

Matthieu railed against the cowpats as another proof of the vileness of Ninga ways. When they came down to the valley they left cattle-dung all over the Dowayos' fields. This, he affirmed, made the weeds grow and therefore greatly increased the hardships of cultivation.

Such was not to be had, however. This was a path used by cattle. The bones of some of the less sure-footed were pointed out to encourage me on one of the more difficult stretches. Something about the altitude seemed to have stimulated the ruminant bovines to defecation. Everywhere lay cowpats with feasting flies that soon made manifest their preference for our own secretions. The sun was by now very hot and it was as well to be off.

I began to feel that he was a hostile witness.

Some time later, we came to the outskirts of the village. When you approach a village in West Africa, there are normally certain infallible signs. First you come across the fields. Often there is a resonant thud of pestle in mortar as women remove the husks from the grain, or their unaccompanied song as they grind it with stones. Inevitably, there are children running and shouting. More often than not there is laughter. From this village came only deep silence.

Matthieu took advantage of the considerable delay that followed to favour me with a lengthy account of the many points he had noted during our journey that reinforced his negative assessment of these people. Where were they all? What had happened to them? God had clearly punished them, on account of their wicked ways. He announced his verdict with considerable satisfaction. They had left this bad place. They were now being bad people elsewhere.

It soon became clear that some demographic disaster had befallen the village. When compounds become empty, they are normally abandoned. Under the tropical rains, the mud from which they are made soon reverts to nature, leaving nothing but the poignant circles of stones that served as foundations for the huts or granaries. This is very sad for archaeologists and a great happiness to ecologists. Here, the whole village seemed to consist of crumbling compounds. In a very few years, there would be nothing here to mark the spot where whole families had lived and died. We picked our way through this desolation towards the centre and settled on a dry-stone wall while our diminutive guide went off to seek our reluctant host.

The chief explained that he had been forced to return by press of public duties; moreover he had dreamed that one of his wives was ill and concern for her well-being had overridden the demands of good manners. I nodded agreement. He would assign a hut to Matthieu and myself and we should meet later in the evening when I had rested. There was just one small problem. I had paid for half a goat when we had met in the town. It was impossible, however, to kill just half a goat. Could I perhaps see my way clear to paying for the other half? Then no charge would be made for the use of the hut.

Despite his physical handicap, he made another terrier-like rush at me that nearly knocked me off the wall. He clutched my hand to his bosom and crooned his delight at my coming. As I struggled to my feet, I saw Matthieu, out of the corner of my eye, mouthing distaste. Two bottles of shop-bought beer were produced. After a little pantomime between Matthieu and myself as to whether we should share a bottle, a third bottle was summoned forth and was given, to the chief's visible distress, to Matthieu. In terms of the amount of human suffering that had gone into making it available in that place at that time, it must have been one of the most costly bottles on earth.

Finally, the chief appeared, his arrival presaged by a rhythmic thudding. This was not the accompaniment of a drumming praise-singer, as I had at first supposed. How was it that I had not noticed before that he had a club foot that made him limp? The climb up the mountain must have been sheer agony to him.

I paid up as Matthieu shook his head and muttered about 'bad people'.

The hut we were assigned was one of the most wretched I ever saw. The roof beams, eaten away by termites on one side, had collapsed and the whole rotting thatch hung down over the walls, leaving the other side bare. I hoped it would not rain. Our young guide made his farewells, but promised to return later that day to act as interpreter. 'Before you go,' I asked, 'how many Ninga are there?' He paused and went through elaborate calculations, involving much staring at the heavens. He smiled. 'Twenty-six!' Leaving me somewhat taken aback, he tucked up his bird inside his hat, replaced it on his head and set off for his mother's people.

I suppose I should have thought to ask the question before but from the way the Dowayos spoke of them I had assumed that the Ninga were a people rather after the fashion of the Dowayos themselves. No one had ever thought to mention that there were so few of them.

When I questioned him about it later, the chief was a little vague as to what had happened to his people, as if they had only been mislaid. In the past they had been more numerous. There had been disease. Some had moved following a disagreement. Some had intermarried with other peoples. Fulani families had installed themselves around the Ninga to take advantage of the dry-season grazing for there was always water up the mountain. Many of the empty compounds we had seen belonged to Fulani who were away with their cattle. It seemed that in a very few years, the Ninga would be no more.

At dinner that evening with the chief our promised goat was indeed produced. Unfortunately, there are goats and goats. Young goats are tender and succulent. Female goats can be good though stringy eating. Old male goats are quite a different matter. Male goats are so malodorous that it is possible when going along a mountain path to tell whether a male goat has passed that way within the last ten minutes. The flesh of a male goat is imbued with a taste of old armpits. Few spices are pungent enough even to attenuate its odour. The taste comes through loud and clear.

This all came as rather a blow. It is true that some of the peoples studied by anthropologists in South America are scarcely more numerous. Disease, dispossession and warfare have reduced them to tiny fragments of their former selves. To work on a people as depleted as this would be as much a work of archaeology as of anthropology. Given the importance of the missing mastectomy, it was as well that I was there at such a critical moment. For when a people loses its identity what the anthropologist regrets most is the loss of a unique vision of the world, the product of thousands of years of interaction and thought. Hereafter our view of the range of human possibilities is diminished. The anthropological importance of a people has nothing to do with numbers.

The chief, however, seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, wolfing down great quantities of the black, pungent flesh. We were joined by a man who was described as the chief's brother. In Africa such a term may merely indicate that two men are from the same village. What argued for some biological connection, was that he had a hump. Our waif-like guide reappeared and crouched at a lower level out of respect. To him had been assigned a lesser dish of burned intestines in oil. He sat and crunched them happily.

The chief explained that he had honoured us by killing the biggest (and therefore, presumably, the oldest) goat in his herd. This, we were to understand, was an honour. The flavour left no doubt that the goat in question had been rampantly male. My own Western palate found it very unpleasant but I was determined to eat. Matthieu, for once, seemed to find it rather hard going, his prodigious appetite for meat disappearing in the face of Ninga cuisine.

As a compensation for the food, the chief offered a large calabash of good, fresh milk. This was indeed a luxury. It was remarkably rich and cool, the first I had ever tasted in Africa. I complimented the chief on the quality of the milk since that of the meat was perhaps best passed over in silence. It was fortunate, indeed, that there were many Fulani near his village since -- he said -- they were great herdsmen. Their cattle gave good milk for drinking, unlike the dwarf cattle of the Dowayos. Moreover, it kept fresh since the Fulani ladies urinated in it to prevent curdling. Thereafter, I drank less than before.

The chief, unused to society, gave way to a fatigue so infectious that we were soon all yawning compulsively. We arranged, however, that the next day we should visit some cult sites together and the chief would explain to me the rudiments of Ninga culture.

Our first night with the Ninga seemed to fulfil all Matthieu's dour predictions. It was a curiously restless place. There were constant movements of cattle through the compound, sidling moodily first in one direction and then the other. It began to rain in great, wet. sticky drops. Matthieu and I huddled up at one end of the hut while cattle thudded and banged against the walls outside and a steadily growing puddle of water advanced across the floor towards us. Finally, the grass mat closing off the doorway of the hut was burst in and a mêlée of frantic goats crowded in to get out of the rain. From the stench, it was clear that they were preponderantly male. The village clearly specialized in male goats. Possibly this hut was a habitual haunt of theirs and we were the interlopers. Our shouts and blows failed to move them. We were rewarded with a tossing of wicked-looking horns and a stamping of hooves. We raged at them. They glared malevolently at us. Finally, with an inspiration born of despair, I fired off my flashgun a couple of times and so stampeded them back outside. The last old buck finally fled with a parting salvo of malodorous droppings.

Matthieu comforted himself by reading the Bible in French. Unfortunately he had never learned to read silently and declaimed verse after verse in a lugubrious voice that did little to dispel the gloom of the place.

The next day, I was pleased to note that the chief was only slightly less raddled than ourselves. We set off on a whistlestop tour of religious sites and ceremonial artefacts more appropriate to tourism than serious anthropology. But skulls, pots and dancing were not what I was after. I paid them only passing heed. In the hunt for the missing mastectomy, it seemed especially important to avoid leading questions. I wanted unsolicited data and so Matthieu and I sat and watched and waited. At the first group of ancestral skulls, all apparently split with an axe, luck smiled on us. In common with many other pagan groups of the area, the Ninga undress to approach the sacred. As he limped along to the remains of his forefathers, the chief slipped off his long, shapeless robe. There, finally, for all the world to see, were two flat discoloured patches where male nipples should have been. I confess to a moment of great glee which Matthieu was incapable of sharing. To him, the breasts of the chief were a matter of total indifference. He had other things on his mind. He was worried about amputated toes.

At this point, we abandoned all pretence of being good guests. Matthieu cannibalized the rotten lesser roof beams from one side while I got a blaze going with a handful of the thatch itself. Soon we had a respectable fire going and were able to doze fitfully while leaning against the walls.

The Ninga, in their cold, wet, mountain fastness, were much plagued by rheumatism and arthritis, especially in the extremities. The toes and fingers, it seemed, were particularly prone to cause trouble in 'old men' -- anyone over forty. The drastic response of the afflicted was often simply to lop off troublesome joints with an axe or hoe. In his readings of the previous night‚ Matthieu had come across the passage: 'If thy hand offend thee‚ cut it off.' He could not understand how ignorant pagans such as the Ninga had adopted a practice clearly derived from knowledge of the Bible when they were still rooted in unmitigated heathendom. The problem seemed to become a sort of obsession with him, challenging the sharp line he had drawn between bad, old heathen ways and good, new Christian ways. He expounded the difficulty to me while the chief was muttering and whispering to the dead and sloshing beer over the skulls. We seemed like a ridiculous model of the world in microcosm. The pagan fussed over his skulls, oblivious to my obsession with male nipples, while Matthieu's religion was challenged by amputated fingers and toes. It was hard not to feel a little ridiculous.

As we walked back to the huts, I tried to work the subject round to amputations via questions on circumcision, hoping to find evidence that the Ninga connected them in their minds. Had the chief given me a full description? Yes. Was there nothing he had left out? No. What about the scarification of the body?

The chief's hunchbacked brother joined us and splashed some beer over the skulls. When he turned round, I was delighted to see that he too lacked nipples.

The Dowayos, for example, often cut geometric patterns in their skin. Did the Ninga do this? No, they only cut off fingers and toes. (Matthieu looked downcast.) Did the Ninga perhaps file their teeth at circumcision? Perhaps some did. At this point, we encountered a bare-breasted woman who was introduced as the chief's sister. Her breasts too appeared to have undergone surgery. A horrible truth began to dawn. Throwing discretion to the winds, I indicated her breasts. Had she been born with breasts like this or (cunningly) had this been done to make her more beautiful? Everyone laughed. Of course she had been born like this. Who would cut their breasts? Such a thing would be painful.

We were led across the village to a compound even more decrepit than our own. Outside, in the first tentative rays of the sun, crouched an old woman, her breasts shrunken and empty, her face greatly lined and in curious contrast to her hair -- thick and cropped like an adolescent. She clung to my knees and addressed me in Dowayo. She had heard that the white men had returned and had wanted to see one again before she died.

Very early the next morning, before our departure, we were visited by another Ninga, a stranger, who asked us to accompany him. There was someone who wished to see us.

It was clear that whatever else had happened to the Ninga. they were subject to genetic malformation. The club-foot and dwarfishness of the chief, the hump of the brother, the malformed nipples of all were part and parcel of the same congenital abnormality and not cultural symbolism as I had assumed. Bitter disappointment rapidly gave way, however, to a sense of the ridiculous. Matthieu and the Ninga stared at me as I sat on a rock in the incipient rain and laughed without apparent cause for several minutes.

By the time we left Ninga, after another night's fitful rest, I felt much more positive about the whole experience than I would have believed possible. Even Matthieu's concern with Ninga feet looked more reasonable.

In a wavering, reedy voice, she embarked on the story of her life. It seemed that she had been born a Dowayo. She did not know how many years ago. As a young girl she had been the mistress of a soldier, a white man. She disappeared into her hut and began digging in a battered tin trunk. Her son, who had doubtless heard all this many times before, looked profoundly bored. After a search of some duration, she reappeared with a faded photograph of a rather pudgy young man in the uniform of a sergeant of the French Army. An inscription on the back revealed that this was for 'Black Héloïse' from Henri. She looked infinitely sad to hear the name again after all these years. What happened to Henri? He returned to his village but they had two sons. Alas, they both had died. Then, she was taken by a native trooper, a Ninga. She disappeared again and dug yet deeper into the trunk, returning with a certificate of good conduct in French and a metal disc that seemed to be a receipt for obligatory work on the road. She held it out to me with pride. It was from her Henri -- a present. They had given it to Henri because he had been brave and he had given it to her. I wondered if her son, who could speak French and therefore possibly read, knew of Henri's rather shabby deception of all those years ago. From his pleading expression, I guessed that he did. I admired the cheap aluminium disc and passed it back to her. As we parted, she declared how good white men had always been to her and gave me to understand with her looks that were she a few years younger I might not escape so easily.

It is one of the marks of people who have lived in the bush that they are seldom in awe of the skills of others. They are quite prepared to build houses, plan whole villages and execute minor surgical operations with a verve and self-confidence egotistical in the extreme. Given that the skills of any available dentist would be extraordinarily basic, self-treatment looked a much more viable option. As so often when in trouble‚ Matthieu and I headed for the mission.

We walked along, chewing on bananas, pleased to be away from the cold and gloom of the mountain. Suddenly, there was a cracking noise. My front teeth, repaired in England after the car-crash of my previous visit to Dowayoland, snapped neatly in two, leaving me bemused and edentate.

We rendezvoused with our guide, the bird again bouncing on his cap, and we went back down the mountain to what had become a sort of normality for me -- the Dowayo world.

The teeth being made of some sort of plastic, it was deemed sensible to effect a repair with some sort of resin glue. Fortunately, my mission friends, Jon and Jeannie, had a tube in their tool-kit. Unluckily, it took six hours to harden. A hope-inspiring footnote on the label warned that the resin hardened faster if heat was applied. A solution was quickly devised. The teeth were smeared with glue, held in place by two clothes-pegs and heated with a hair dryer. On the whole, the procedure was only slightly more uncomfortable than normal dental practice, though one did tend to get rather thirsty. Two attempts failed owing to the dampness of the surfaces. Again, a solution was devised. We would heat the teeth in the oven to dry them. This was a hazardous operation. Jon and Jeannie only possessed an ancient wood-burning stove whose temperature was virtually uncontrollable. I had a ghastly vision of the teeth melting. The cook stoked away manfully, flashing his own excellent dentition. Luck was with us. With a deft flick of the wrist, Jon whipped out the hot teeth, slapped on glue and clipped on the clothes-pegs. A blast of hot air from the hair dryer completed the treatment. The next few minutes were not pleasant. We had forgotten to allow for the fact that the heat in the teeth would percolate through to the roots. But they stayed in place and lasted till the end of the trip. The only problem was that they rapidly turned green as if in emulation of my monkey friend.