Kommer nog bli bra detta

Bryson (2001) skriver följande:
From October to May, when the jellyfish come inshore to breed, they render the beaches of the tropics useless to humans. It is quite an extraordinary thought when you are standing there looking at it. Before us stood a sweep of bay as serene and inviting as you would find anywhere, and yet there was no environment on earth more likely to offer instant death.
"So you're telling me," said Allan, for whom all of this was new, "that if I waded into the water now I would die?"
"In the most wretched and abject agony known to man," I replied.
"Jesus," he muttered.
"And don't pick up any of the seashells," I added, stopping him from leaning over to pick up a seashell. I explained to him about cone shells - the venomous creatures that lurk inside some of the handsomest shells, waiting for a human hand to sink their vile pincers into.
"Seashells will kill you?" he said. "They've got lethal seashells here?"
"There are more things that will kill you up here than anywhere else in Australia, and that's saying a lot, believe me."
I told him about the cassowary, the flightless, man-sized bird that lives in the rain forests, with a razor claw on each foot with which it can slice you open in a deft and appallingly expansive manner; and the green tree snakes that dangle from branches and so blend into the foliage that you don't see them until they are clamped onto a facial extremity. I mentioned also the small but fearsomely poisonous blue-ringed octopus, whose caress is instant death; and the elegant but irritable numb ray, which moves through the water like a flying carpet discharging 220 volts of electricity into anything that troubles its progress; and the loathsome, sluggish stonefish, so called because it is indistinguishable from a rock, but with the difference that it has twelve spikes on its back that are sharp enough to pierce the sole of a sneaker, injecting the hapless sufferer with a myotoxin bearing a molecular weight of 150,000.
"And what does that mean exactly?"
"Pain beyond description followed shortly by muscular paralysis, respiratory depression, cardiac palpitations, and a severe disinclination to boogie. You might similarly be discommoded by fire-fish, which are easier to spot but no less hurtful. There's even a jellyfish called the snottie."
"You're making all of this up," he said, but without conviction.
"Oh, but I am not."
Then I told him about the dreaded saltwater crocodile, which lurks in tropical lagoons, estuaries, and even bays such as this one, leaping from the waters from time to time to snatch and devour unsuspecting passersby. Just up the coast from where we now strolled a woman named Beryl Wruck had been taken not so long before in a startling manner. "Shall I tell you about it?" I offered.
"No."
(sid. 207-209). Finns på Adlibris för fjuttiga 118 kr (länk), rekommenderas varmt. Ger den 5 av 5 i betyg, med reservation för att det är ett betyg satt enbart i relation till andra reseguider och inte till litterära verk i största allmänhet. Det är således ingen ny Aniara, men allmänbildande humor på hög nivå.





Källor:

Bryson, B. (2001). In a Sunburned Country. New York: Broadway Books.

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