Scene 17

His «self-discovery» took precedence for the next few days, and he engaged for a few hours in encounters of an entirely different kind – with, for instance, a Megatherium Americanum in the Museo de Interpretaciòn Historica. The 5 to 6-tonne animal, whose bones had been found in the nearby glacier, was certainly smaller than the gluttonous Allosaurus of Maille's imagination – but a glimpse of its powerful jaws left no doubt that thick threads of drivel had once dropped from these chaps onto the Pleistocene steppe grass. That helped – if not in understanding the geological era, at least for fighting the appetite for strawberry tart.

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