"For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon—even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, and then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches. “Here’s a good trick, let’s see how they cope with this. Oh, look! They’ve managed to find a way of climbing the tree. I didn’t think they’d been able to do that. All right, let’s see them get the thing open. Hmm, so they’ve found out how to temper steel, have they? Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Next time they go up that tree, I’ll have a [Komodo] dragon waiting for them at the bottom.” I can only think that the business with the apple must have upset him more than I realized."