Hairy Hezekiah by Dick King-Smith Page B

chimp.
    â€œI am.”
    â€œOh,” said the second. “No, thanks.” He shouted down to the other chimpanzee cages. “Would any of you chaps like to eat this fellow?” and in reply there were loud screams of laughter.
    Hezekiah could still hear the chimpanzees laughing as he made his lumbering way along to
the next building in the zoo, which was the Aviary. Inside, almost all the birds were silent, asleep on their perches, though there were some owls who hooted softly at the sight of an intruder.

    â€œWho? Who?” they said. “To wit, who?”
    â€œEvening,” said the camel. “My name’s Hezekiah. I’m a Bactrian camel.”
    â€œTough luck!” said a voice.
    Hezekiah peered in and saw a gray parrot staring at him.

    â€œWhy do you say that?” he asked.
    â€œLook in the mirror,” said the parrot.
    I’ve been threatened, thought Hezekiah, then laughed at, and now insulted. What next?
    He made his way out of the Aviary and walked toward the Monkey Temple. This was a big round pit, inside of which were flights of circular steps leading up to a stone building in the center. It had a domed top and looked something like an Eastern temple.
    Hezekiah peered over the edge of the wall that surrounded the pit. He could see no monkeys, either on the floor or on the steps.
    â€œGood!” he said loudly. “There’s no one about to be rude to me.”
    At the sound of his deep booming voice, a number of little heads popped out of the small windows in the Temple, and he heard a chorus of angry shouts.

    â€œBe quiet!”
    â€œPush off!”
    â€œSling your hook!”
    â€œHold your tongue!”
    â€œShut your trap!”
    As he trudged away from the Monkey Temple, Hezekiah began to think that escaping wasn’t much fun. “I wanted to make some friends,” he said gloomily to the surrounding darkness. “At least nobody was being nasty to me in my own paddock. I wonder what’s the next place I shall come to?”
    Even as he said this, he saw a single-story building looming up ahead of him. It seemed to be divided into two halves, each half having a door.

    â€œI wonder who lives here?” he said.
    Hezekiah could not read, of course. Had he been able to, he would have seen a notice above each door.
    LADIES, one said, and the other GENTS.

3

    Camels can go a long while without drinking. When they do drink, they can gulp an awful lot of water, as much as fifteen gallons at a time.
    As Hezekiah neared the public toilets, his nose told him that there were no animals inside this
building, but he could smell water and he realized that he badly needed some.
    He’d been so busy earlier grumbling about his food being late that he hadn’t had a drink from the trough in his paddock. Now, after what he’d had to put up with in the Lion House and the Ape House and the Aviary and the Monkey Temple, he was very thirsty.
    By chance Hezekiah picked the door marked GENTS and somehow squeezed himself through it. To one side was a row of four cubicles, and inside each there stood on the floor a large white basin with a plastic seat on it and a kind of tank above it.
    Hezekiah stretched out his long neck to reach one of the basins. It had water in it and he drank greedily till the basin was empty. He did this to each of the four basins in turn till all were empty, but he was still thirsty

    There was a lever sticking out of the tank above each basin, and Hezekiah, out of curiosity, gripped a handle in his mouth and turned it. Immediately there was a rush of water that filled the basin again.
    So Hezekiah drained it and turned the handle again and filled the basin and drained it again, on and on, till he was full of as much water as he
could manage. Then he squeezed himself out of the GENTS backwards. The wind was cold on that side of the toilet block, so Hezekiah moved around and squeezed himself into the LADIES. He lay down on