If you even come near its nest, you soon find yourself screaming and slapping and running for your life. While searching for a rare species of gecko beneath the frayed bark of a certain kind of spiny-desert tree, I learned to work delicately, for such refuges often harbored a seething mass of scorpions, tarantulas, and giant hissing cockroaches. The Ankarana is loaded with scorpions, which like nothing better than to crawl into your sleeping bag at night. Madagascar has centipedes whose bite has been likened to the touch of a red-hot iron. The picture conjured up may be a ludicrous one, but I can assure the reader that I experienced as lively a dose of the 'creeps' during the moments that ensued before I had rid myself of this tormentor, as I have ever experienced over the most ghastly of fiction.
Scorpions are even worse.
I feel bad. I kneel up, lie down, lie propped up, curl up. Take some morphine. The water to wash the tablets down feels like swallowing red hot tintacks. There is a lump in my throat.