After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves of paper and fed them through the machine.

一两个钟头毫无交流的沉默之后，老妇人认定太阳能板已经吸收了足够的能量，可以驱动影印机了。她再次消失在洞口，一阵东翻西找之后拿出几张纸来喂进机器里。

She handed the copies to Arthur.

她把吐出的纸交给阿瑟。

‘This is, er, this your advice then, is it?’ said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.

“这就是，呃，这就是你的建议对吧？”阿瑟犹犹豫豫地翻了翻。

‘No,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you’ll see that I’ve underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They’re all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I’ve taken, then maybe you won’t finish up at the end of your life…’ she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, ‘… in a smelly old cave like this!’

“不，”老妇人说，“这是我这辈子的大事记。你瞧，任何人提供的建议的质量都跟这个人实际上的生活质量有关。喏，你把这份文档读一遍，你会发现我勾出了我所做的所有重大决定，好让你看得明白些。每一项都有索引和交叉引用。看见了？我给你的建议就是，如果你能做出跟我完全相反的决定，那么最后你或许不会落到……”她停下来把肺里充满空气，为接下来的感情激荡做好准备，“……这么一个臭烘烘地破洞里！”

She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started to set about the flies with vim and vigour.

她一把抓起自己的乒乓球拍，卷起衣袖，跺着脚走到那堆山羊样的东西跟前，干劲（儿）十足地拍起苍蝇。

The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely high poles. They were so high that it wasn’t possible to tell, from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings. Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped right off to the nearest Bar & Grill, where you also could buy a range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all too well.

阿瑟到了最后一个目的地，发现那村子里几乎竖满了长长的杆子。他们高的吓人，从地面完全看不出上边有些什么。阿瑟努力爬上爬下，前两根顶上都只有盖满鸟粪的平台，直到第三根他才发现了别的东西，过程相当的艰辛。杆子上钉着短木桩，呈螺旋形徐徐上升，你得踩着它们往上爬。任何观光客，哪怕稍微不如阿瑟勤勉刻苦，肯定会闪两张照片然后立马逃到距离最近的餐厅——在那儿你可以买到又甜又粘的巧克力蛋糕，拿到苦行僧那儿当着他们的面吃个痛快。不过，这也在很大程度上导致了本行星苦行僧的大量流失。事实上，他们几乎全都转战银河系西北部那些比较富裕的世界，开起了财源滚滚的康复中心。如今他们讨生活比原先要容易大约一千七百倍，而且巧克力的味道实在妙不可言。后来大家发现，大多数苦行僧在开始苦行之前都没尝过巧克力是什么味道，而大多数来康复中心的顾客则正好相反，对这东西实在过于了解。

At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn’t worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically, he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta , and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.

阿瑟在第三根杆子顶上停下来喘口气。他呼吸急促，热得要命，因为每根杆子都有约莫五六十尺高。整个世界似乎都在他周围打转，转得他头晕目眩，不过阿瑟并不太担心。因为他知道，从逻辑上讲，在去过斯达弗洛穆拉贝塔之前自己是死不了的——他还由此发展出一种态度，每每面对极端的个人危险时都异常欢欣鼓舞。坐在五十尺高的杆子上的确有些天旋地转的感觉，不过吃块三明治就能应付过去。他拿出预言家的影印版个人史准备开读，突然听到背后有人轻声咳嗽，不禁吓了一跳。

He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.

他猛然一转身，三明治也没拿稳；它在空气里打着滚往下翻，等终于落地的时候看上去已经很小了。

About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.

他身后三十尺左右还有一根杆子，在大约三打杆子里，它显得格外与众不同——上头坐着一个老头，似乎正在沉思，而且还沉思得板起了面孔。

‘Excuse me,’ said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn’t hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.

“打扰一下。”阿瑟说，那人没理他。或许是没听见吧。风向有些乱，阿瑟能听见他咳嗽也是全凭运气。

‘Hello?’ called Arthur. ‘Hello!’

“哈喽？”阿瑟喊道，“哈喽！”