Roald Dahl - Man from the South

Soon the door opened and a man with a pink face came into the room and said, 'Next, please.' The mother and the two boys got up and went out. About ten minutes later, the same man returned. 'Next, please,' he said again, and the couple stood up and followed him outside.

Two new visitors came in and sat down - a middle-aged husband and a middle-aged wife, the wife carrying a basket.

'Next, please,' said the guide, and the woman with the long gloves got up and left. Several more people came in and took their places on the wooden chairs. Soon the guide returned for the third time, and now it was Lexington's turn to go outside.

'Follow me, please,' the guide said, leading the youth across the yard towards the main building.

'How exciting this is!' Lexington cried.

First they visited a big area at the back of the building where several hundred pigs were wandering around. 'Here's where they start,' the guide said. 'And over there is where they go in.'

'Where?'

'Right there.' The guide pointed to a long wooden shed that stood against the outside wall of the factory. 'This way, please.'

Three men, wearing long rubber boots, were taking a dozen pigs into the shed just as Lexington and the guide arrived, so they all went in together.

'Now,' the guide said, 'watch how they catch them.'

Inside, the shed was simply a bare wooden room with no roof, but there was a metal wire with hooks on it that kept moving slowly along the length of one wall. When it reached the end of the hut, it suddenly changed direction and climbed upwards through the open roof towards the top floor of the main building. The twelve pigs were brought together at the far end of the hut. They stood quietly and looked anxious. One of the men in rubber boots pulled a length of metal chain down from the wall and advanced upon the nearest animal from the back. Then he bent down and quickly put one end of the chain around one of the animal's back legs. The other end he put on a hook on the moving wire as it went by. The wire kept moving and the chain tightened. The pig's leg was pulled up and back, and the pig itself began to be dragged backwards until it reached the end of the hut, where the wire changed direction and went upwards. The creature was suddenly pulled off its feet and was carried up. The pig's cries filled the air.

'Truly interesting,' Lexington said.

The rubber-booted men were busy catching the rest of the pigs, and one after another the animals were hooked on to the moving wire and carried up through the roof, crying loudly as they went.

At this point, while Lexington was staring upwards at the last pig, a man in rubber boots came up quietly behind him and put one end of a chain around the youth's own leg, hooking the other end of the chain to the moving belt. The next moment, before he had time to realise what was happening, Lexington was pulled off his feet and dragged backwards along the floor of the hut.

'Stop!' he cried. 'Stop everything! My leg is caught!'

But nobody seemed to hear him, and five seconds later the unhappy young man was pulled off the floor and lifted up through the open roof of the hut upside down, hanging like a fish.

'Help!' he shouted. 'Help! There's been a mistake! Stop the engine! Let me down!'

The guide took a cigarette out of his mouth and looked up at the youth hanging from the chain, but he said nothing. The men in rubber boots were already on their way out to collect the next pigs.

'Oh, save me!' Lexington cried. 'Let me down! Please let me down!' But he was now nearing the top floor of the building, where the moving belt entered a large hole in the wall, a kind of doorway without a door; and there, waiting to greet him, in dark-stained rubber clothes, the slaughterer stood.

Lexington saw him only from upside down, and very quickly, but he noticed the expression of absolute peace on the man's face, the cheerfulness in his eyes and the little smile. All these things gave him hope.

'Hi, there!' the man said, smiling.

'Quick! Save me!' Lexington cried.

'With pleasure,' the man said, and taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, he raised his right hand and quickly cut the boy's throat with a knife.

The belt moved on. Lexington went with it. Everything was still upside down and the blood was pouring out of his throat and getting into his eyes, but he could still see a little. He thought he was in a very long room, and at the far end of the room there was a great smoking pot of water, and there were dark figures half hidden in the steam. These figures were dancing round the edge of the pot and they were holding long sticks. The belt seemed to be travelling right over the top of the pot and the pigs seemed to be dropping down one by one into the boiling water and one of the pigs seemed to be wearing long white gloves on its front feet.

Suddenly Lexington started to feel very sleepy, but it was not until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood from his body that he passed out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next.

In East Africa there was a young man who was a hunter, who loved the plains and the valleys and the cool nights on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In September 1939 war had begun in Europe and he had travelled over the country to Nairobi and was training to be a pilot with the RAF. He was doing quite well, but after five weeks he got into trouble because he took his plane up and flew off in the direction of Nakuru to look at the wild animals when he should have been practising spins and turns. While he was flying there, he thought he saw some rare animals, became excited and flew down low to get a better view of them. He flew too low and damaged the wing, but he managed to get back to the airfield in Nairobi.

After six weeks, he was allowed to make his first cross-country flight on his own, and he flew off from Nairobi to a little town called Eldoret two thousand metres up in the Highlands. But again he was unlucky; this time he had engine failure on the way, due to water in the fuel tanks. He kept calm and made a beautiful forced landing without damaging his aircraft, not far from a little hut which stood alone on the highland plain with no other building in sight. That is lonely country up there.

He walked over to the hut, and there he found an old man, living alone, with only a small garden of sweet potatoes, some brown chickens and a black cow.

The old man was kind to him. He gave him food and milk and a place to sleep, and the pilot stayed with him for two days and two nights, until a rescue plane from Nairobi found his aircraft, landed beside it, found out what was wrong, went away and came back with clean petrol which enabled him to take off and return.

But during his stay, the old man, who was lonely and had seen no one for many months, was glad of his company and of the opportunity to talk. He talked a lot and the pilot listened. He talked of his lonely life, of the lions that came in the night and of the elephant that lived over the hill in the west, of the heat of the days and of the silence that came with the cold at midnight.

On the second night he talked about himself. He told a long, strange story, and as he told it, it seemed to the pilot that the old man was lifting a great weight off his shoulders by telling it. When he had finished, he said that he had never told that to anyone before, and that he would never tell it to anyone again, but the story was so strange that the pilot wrote it down as soon as he got back to Nairobi. He wrote it in his own words, although he had never written a story before. Of course he made mistakes because he didn't know any of the tricks that writers use, but when he had finished writing he left a rare and powerful story. We found the story in his suitcase two weeks later when we were packing his things after he had been killed in training. The pilot seemed to have had no relatives and because he was my friend, I took the story and looked after it for him. This is what he wrote.