The Mirage Casino, I have discovered, is obviously called that because it never seems to get any closer however far along the strip you walk towards it - I felt like it took forever to get there, even though at any point it seemed to be just another block away. At one point in the not too distant past, the Mirage was one of the most spectacular Casinos here, the towering waterfalls out front drawing crowds in their thousands to gasp, point and wonder out loud how the architects had managed to bring Niagara Falls to Vegas!

Deep inside the Mirage, after spending a good ten minutes trying to find my way through the maze of slot machines all pinging and whirring and generally trying to entice me to play using large electronic signs offering multimillion dollar payouts, I found myself tramping through a mock rainforest which sprung up out of nowhere and surrounded me on all sides. This led eventually into an area of the casino in which all the walls were covered with large glass windows through which we could observe the daytime habitats set up for the tigers used in the show - a sign over the entrance identified the area as the delightfully camp sounding Secret garden of Siegfried and Roy. At last count, the two illusionists owned no fewer than thirty white tigers, several white lions and an elephant, animals which they are famous for having rescued from the wild - the white lion, in particular, is just about extinct in the wild now and only kept alive through breeding programs at zoos. They keep the animals as pets around their mansion, love them and take care of them as though they're domestic cats, and provide them with this huge habitat in which to live between shows whenever the pair are performing in Vegas - which is pretty much all the time at the moment. They seem to look after the animals very well, and as I was to see on stage they seem to be content around their owners - but I really can't quite get past the fact that these are ferocious wild beasts, and every time I see a photo of Siegfried and Roy cuddling up with their unconventional pets I can't help but be astonished that the illusionists don't seem to consider themselves an endangered species. Mark my words, keeping tigers in your living room can only end in disaster.

Beyond the Secret Garden of Siegfried and Roy was the Siegfried and Roy Theatre, in which we were all seated neatly around the Siegfried and Roy stage on Siegfried and Roy chairs. Yes, these two do appear to have something of a superiority complex - although since they spend most of their time around animals which could easily separate their heads from their bodies if they felt that they hadn't had enough cat food for breakfast, they might have earned that right. Tonight's show was their 4083rd performance since opening eight years ago, every show being packed to the rafters with tourists who flock from around the world to see the magical menagerie. At ninety bucks a head, this is something of a money spinner for the Mirage and it's hard to see how they would survive without the duo to bring in the crowds - but for that sort of money all I was worried about was that the show would live up to the hype. Luckily, I wasn't to be disappointed.

Forget David Copperfield and all the other pretenders to the crown - Siegfried and Roy know exactly how to keep an audience on the edge of their seats. The thing is, this isn't just magic - it's magic with bloody great man-eaters. Anybody who is willing to get in a cage with four white lions and three tigers has got my attention.

The ninety-minute performance must easily be on a budget rivalling the most lavish Spielberg blockbuster, which is why they can only do it in Vegas with the backing of a major casino brand. After all, the people throwing their money away in the casino probably pay for each night's show without even having to worry about ticket sales, although I'm sure they don't complain about them. Free programmes were being handed out on the door, which gave me a nice souvenir of the show - when I saw David Copperfield in London a few years ago, they expected us to pay nearly twenty pounds for something claiming to be a programme but which turned out to be a self-indulgent brochure full of photos of the magician himself - so this was a nice touch in itself.

The first twenty minutes of the show are supposed to represent the dreams of Siegfried and Roy - in which case these guys have some pretty weird dreams. The dream sequence is an incredible mix of special effects and magic, and it's sometimes hard to know where the line is between one and the other - I never knew how anything was being done, but how much of it was traditional magic and how much was effects I couldn't say. The curtain opens onto a spectacular futuristic world in which spacecraft shoot across the stage and armies of bird women fly on and march back and forth, the atmosphere set with Blade Runner style lasers and booming Flash Gordonesque music. The evil queen swoops in, resplendent in fifties kitsch space costume complete with high collar and silver boots. She laughs insanely in the style of sixties B-Movie villains and shoots laser beams from her fingertips at the merry bird people. Entering from different parts of the sky, presumably on wires, several torso sized pieces of spacecraft land and join together on a platform behind the queen.

Once assembled, they burst open to reveal Siegfried and Roy, who couldn't possibly have been inside any of the pieces, dressed in Flash Gordon outfits - this reveal is accompanied by the operatic sound of a choir singing "Siegfried… Siegfried and Roy…" over and over again as the audience cheer the appearance of the heroes.

Accompanied by more lasers and sound effects, the two illusionists bundle old Queenie into a box and levitate her far out over the heads of the audience where they shoot at the box with their laser guns. Of course, it bursts open to reveal that the Queen has gone, nothing but pieces of silver tinsel floating down onto the spectators.

The stage goes black and then begins to fill with smoke. Then, with a huge roar - and everyone loved this so much - a gigantic mechanical dragon the entire width and height of the stage struts out of the mist, sending small children in the audience cowering behind their mothers. The creature appears to be something like twenty foot tall and has laser beams coming out of its eye sockets which shoot out across the audience as it looks around, its head jutting out and sweeping low over the heads of the audience belching smoke and flames. As the dragon passed over my head, the heat was intense and it felt for a moment as though the theatre was on fire.

Turning its head to look back at the stage, the dragon spots Roy. Lowering its head, it turns and charges him, impaling the illusionist right through the chest with the six foot metal spike on the end of its nose. The spike protrudes straight through his body and out the other side, and as the head raises he slides down its length and goes limp, being tossed around like a rag doll as the dragon shakes its head wildly from side to side. Siegfried climbs astride the dragon's neck, produces a glowing space-age whip and eventually kills it to much roaring and billowing of flame as the robot creature rears up and flails madly and tries to get him off of its back. The dragon falls lifelessly to the stage, Siegfried waves his hands and Roy levitates from the spike and is lowered to the ground from where he leaps up totally unharmed.

Even as Siegfried and Roy leave the stage, the metal dragon lying in ruins behind them with tiny wisps of smoke rising from its nose, the stage is suddenly filled with Skeletal Soldiers in Roman legion costume, holding aloft Roman flags and marching in time to eerie music. These don't appear to be guys in costumes, but actual skeletal warriors risen from the grave - you can actually see the background through their bones as they march. Roy appears in the air above the legion, floating around the stage as a giant metal ring descends from the ceiling and flips itself around his body to show that he's not being held aloft by wires. The curtain falls, and the illusionists step through to introduce themselves to the audience and begin the remaining 70 minutes of the show! Truly, if these are the dreams of Siegfried and Roy, then there must be some seriously strange stuff going on inside their heads.

None of these preliminaries included any of the lions or tigers for which the duo are famous. These were very much the stars of the rest of the show, happily strutting about the audience under the careful supervision of Siegfried or Roy and appearing out of boxes at just the right moments to startle everybody. They came across throughout as cute, cuddly bundles of fur and seemed to act like kittens for their owners, although I really wouldn't want to be the one petting them. My favourite illusion of the evening involved a box being manually carried on stage in smaller parts and assembled on a central catwalk surrounded on three sides by the audience. As soon as the box was assembled, out of it leaped three lions, four tigers and a female assistant right among the spectators, to much shrieking and diving of children under chairs.

When I arrived back to the Sahara late last night and went for a coffee in the casino coffee shop, all I wanted to do was talk about what I'd seen to the guy behind the counter. After listening intently for a couple of minutes, he interrupted me to complain in detail about how much better they treated their animals than they did their performers and staff. At that point, though, my head was totally blown and I knew I'd be talking about the show forever whatever anybody had to say about Siegfried and Roy themselves. I spent much of last night lying awake trying to figure out how any of it was done.

My comments about keeping tigers as pets turned out to be prophetic, indeed. During the performance on the evening of Friday October 3rd 2003, Roy was attacked and mauled live on stage by a seven year old white tiger named Montecore. According to audience members, the tiger had just been introduced to the audience and chose that moment to grab hold of the illusionist's arm. In response, Roy apparently took hold of a microphone and began hitting the tiger over the head - an act which, unsurprisingly, led to him being pulled to the ground and dragged away by his throat. Unfortunately because this was exactly the sort of illusion performed nightly by the duo, most of the audience remained under the impression that it was all part of the show until Siegfried appeared on stage in a somewhat shaken state and announced that the show was cancelled. Roy was taken to hospital where he suffered extreme blood loss and was listed as being in a critical condition for several weeks, during which time he is reported to have had no concern other than to plead that Montecore was not harmed. It remains unknown as to whether the tiger actually attacked Roy - according to Siegfried's account of the event, a woman in the front row of the audience had attempted to lean forward and pet the tiger which had prompted Roy to jump between them. Montecore then gently took hold of his arm which led him first to give it a release command and then to gently bonk it on the head with his microphone. At this point, according to Siegfried, Roy fell over the tigers paw and stage hands appeared from all directions to pull him off. Montecore, confused and alarmed by the sudden flurry of activity, attempted to grab Roy by the neck and drag him to safety as he would have done his own cubs. Whatever story you believe, as of 2007 the show is still cancelled indefinitely. Roy is now walking with the aid of Siegfried, and Montecore has returned to the Secret Garden. The Mirage survived.

About Simon and Burfords Travels

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.