Painterly worn leather boots pointing opposite ways atop a wooden signpost in a dry landscape.

Original artwork, not a still

Last Chance To See • 1990

Douglas Adams

I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency declaration forms, and official bribery, and tend to wander backwards and forwards across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

The speaker mocks border formalities by praising the gorillas' ignorance of them. Passports, declarations and bribes are treated as achievements of civilisation the animals have yet to reach, so the line's dry irony leaves the human bureaucracy looking more absurd than the creatures crossing freely.

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