6 The Coast of Africa

Now the world was confined to the ship and its crew of sullen Lascars, dour Swedes and granite Scots, who raucously shouted lewd shantys as they swung about the rigging hauling on great hawsers and performed all the other tasks that, added together, kept this fragile shell of wood and canvas on its course across a sea which blurred into the sky in the morning haze and at night contained as many stars in its bosom as blazed above us, for we were very exposed to the heavens and to the weather. At first, I was plagued with sea-sickness and could not stir from my bunk but soon I got my sea legs and then I fell prey to the dreadful boredom of the traveller by sea.

There was nothing to do all day but keep out of the way of the crew, to watch the cyclorama of the sky, to applaud the dances of sea-birds and flying fish, to listen to the wind in the canvas and to wait for the thick stews of salt fish and potatoes, all the menus at mealtimes offered. The Count bore this ennui with a stoicism I would not have expected of him. Perhaps he was restoring his energies with a period of silence for he rarely, if ever, spoke, lying all day in our cabin as still as a corpse to emerge only in the evenings, when he would come out just as the sailors, the deck swabbed down for the night, sat sipping from their cans of watered rum upon the coops that housed the hens who gave the captain eggs for breakfast, puffing on their pipes, or else danced together to the wheezing music of an accordion. I sometimes joined in these diversions exercising the skills the Alligator Man had taught me on a borrowed harmonica to give them a barn dance or two from the bayous and Lafleur, also, crept out to join us, slight and shy and bandaged, adding a husky, hesitant, still unbroken voice to the choruses, a voice which sometimes seemed to me disguised for occasionally it woke in me strange, vibrating echoes as mysterious as if it were the sea who was singing to me.

But the Count scorned these simple pleasures. He stalked straight to the prow, whirling in the folds of his cloak, and sat there in aquiline solitude, gazing into the night towards which we sailed, for we left the sun folding up its crimson banners in the west behind us. He sat there sometimes all night, like the very figurehead of the ship if it had been called The Wandering Jew or The Flying Dutchman; he had retreated into an impenetrable impassivity and yet sometimes he seemed to have become the principle that moved the ship, as if it were not the wind that drove us towards Europe but the power of that gaunt, barbarous will. His conviction that he was a force of nature always suspended my disbelief for a time, if never for long.

Woman-starved, dreaming of mermaids, satisfying themselves desultorily with one another, the sailors cast scowling but hungry eyes on little Lafleur and on myself, too, but I had learned enough to keep them at their distance. Strange, blue days at sea! One day so like another I often went to gaze at our creaming wake for visible proof we had budged an inch. But, in this constriction and this apparent immobility, the sea-miles strung one upon the other like beads on a thread of passage until no weed bobbed on the water and soon we were too far from land to sight any but the most intrepid of seabirds. I slept but did not dream. All my life now seemed a dream from which I had woken to the boredom of the voyage. We endured a storm; we endured a torrid calm. I reconciled myself to the gnawing longing for the sight of a girl I would never see again unless her father cramped the world into a planisphere and I had not the least idea what time or place the Count might take me to though, since his modes of travel were horseback, gig and tall-masted schooner, I guessed, wherever it was, it would be somewhere in the early nineteenth century.

A kind of silent camaraderie had sprung up between Lafleur and myself. He often came to sit beside me, a little black shadow with a concealed face in which only the eyes were visible, eyes that seemed gentle enough and were of such an immense size and so liquidly brown they reminded me of those of a sad, woodland animal. We deceive ourselves when we say the eye is an expressive organ; it is the lines around the eye that tell their story and, with Lafleur, these lines were hidden. But I sensed a certain wistful kindliness in that abused little valet, though he hardly ever spoke to me and seemed only to communicate in sighs. Yet he pointed out to me one or two teasing anachronisms on shipboard.

The cook, a sour, dyspeptic Marseillais, had a wind-up gramophone with a large horn on which, all through the starry nights, he played hiccoughing records of Parisian chanteuses whose voices, brought to us fitfully on the breeze, mingled with the plash of the waters, were the essence of a nostalgia which affected me strangely for it was an entirely vicarious emotion for places I had never seen. The obnoxious Finn, a first mate of memorable ill-temper and vile oaths, had a sea-chest full of magazines containing photographs of plump girls in corsets and boots laced up to the thigh; he showed them to me, once, in a rare fit of good nature. The cabin-boy once told Lafleur of a motorbike he kept in his father’s house in Liverpool but when, curious, I asked him about his toy, he shook his head blankly and, denying all knowledge of it, hurried off pretending he had to feed immediately the stinking pig they kept on deck to supplement our fare when the salt fish ran low.

The sailors would sometimes halt, open-mouthed, in the middle of a shanty, as if they were actors who had suddenly forgotten their lines, and mouth away vacantly for a few seconds, their hands suddenly dangling as if they had forgotten how to hold the ropes. But these lapses of continuity lasted no more than a moment. Then all would be saltily nautical again, in the manner of an old print. But sometimes there was a jarring effect of overlapping, as if the ship that bore us was somehow superimposed on another ship of a quite different kind, and I began to feel a certain unease, an unease which afflicted me most when I heard the sounds the Captain coaxed out of the air as he twisted the dial of his radio when he relaxed in his private cabin at the end of the day. Lafleur seemed to catalogue these puns in the consistency of the vessel with a certain relish but the Count did not even notice them. He noticed nothing. He even ignored his servants.

I decided that, after all, he was not the Doctor, unless he was some bizarre emanation of the Doctor. I concluded he was some kind of ontological freelance who could certainly determine the period in which the ship sailed and this was quite enough to speculate upon. I would not have believed such a thing possible before I started on my journey. His monumental silence continued and then, before my eyes, he crumbled away to nothing so that I never admired him again. For we were betrayed.

The Captain’s little radio betrayed us.

One bright, azure morning, the Captain listened in on the short waves as he ate his eggs in bed and, though his native language was Dutch, he made out enough of the standard speech of my country to hear how the Count and I were both wanted for murder. And there was a price on my head, for I was a war criminal.

They came for us with guns as we lay sleeping. The Captain and the first mate came. They handcuffed us and took us down to the malodorous hold where they chained us to rings in the floor and left us there in misery and deprivation while the Captain turned the ship round in mid-ocean and steered back on our course, for the Determination Police and the State of Louisiana both offered rewards to those who delivered me to the one, and the Count to the agents of the other.

I expected the Count to bear this reversal with ironic self-containment, but no. For the first twenty-four hours of our incarceration, he screamed all the time on a single, high-pitched note and when the first mate came in with our meagre rations, he cowered away as if he expected the Finn to kick him, a perfectly justified fear. This display of quivering pusillanimity fascinated me. I waited eagerly for the Count to speak. I had to wait for only two days.

What were our rations? Traditional fare. The first mate put a tin platter down on the floor twice a day. It contained three segments of ship’s biscuit alive with weevils and we had to scrabble for it as best we could, all encumbered with our irons. He brought us a small can of stale water, too, and was at least sufficiently humane to free us for a few moments so that we could attend to the needs of nature in a bucket provided for the purpose. I never dreamed I could regret those rank fish stews but otherwise I found I bore up to captivity well enough, perhaps because we were returning to my lover’s country, even if I could hope for nothing but the torture chamber once I got there. Lafleur, however, seemed curiously content. Perhaps he felt the gloomy period of his bondage to the Count was over. Sometimes, in the rolling darkness of the hold, the seeping bilge washing around my feet, I even heard him chuckling to himself.

On the third day, the Count spoke. I could tell it was about sunset because the accordion was playing and the feet of the dancing sailors beat a tattoo overhead. We had no other means of marking the time in the close darkness below. The Count’s screams had modulated to a low, dull moaning and this moaning, in turn, seemed to alter quantitatively until it was a moan in words.

‘These men are not my equals! They have no right to deprive me of my liberty! These adversaries are unfit for me! It is unjust!’

‘No such thing as justice,’ observed the valet with unaccustomed briskness but the Count ignored him. All this time he had been preparing another oration and would not be interrupted.

‘By all the laws of natural justice, I was pre-eminent because I, the star-traveller, the erotic conflagration, transcended all the laws! Once, before I saw my other, I could have turned this mountain into a volcano. I would have fired these rotten timbers round us with a single sneeze and risen from the pyre, a phoenix.

‘Terror of a fire at sea! How the tars brutally trample each other down; they stab and murder their comrades in the mad tussle for the lifeboat but the lifeboat was the first to blaze. My tumultuous bowels vomit forth flaming wrack! And I did not forget to invite the sharks to dinner, oh, no. They have formed up around the ship, their dinner table; they wait for their meal to cook. They wait for the involuntary tributes of sea-boys’ sinewy limbs.

‘But when I opened my mouth to order the plat du jour, I found my grammar changed in my mouth. No longer active; passive.

‘He has tampered with my tongue. He has bridled it.

‘I always eschewed the Procrustean bed of circumstance until he pegged me out on it.’

(Lafleur was seized with a fit of coughing but it only lasted a few moments.)

‘If I am indeed the Black Prometheus, now I must ask for other guests to dine. Come, every eagle in the world, to this most sumptuous repast, my liver.’

(His chains clanged as he tried to throw himself backwards in an attitude of absolute abandonment but he did not have enough room for such exercises. His moaning again intensified to a scream and then diminished to a moan again.)

‘They have eaten me down to an immobile core. I, who was all movement. My I is weaker than its shadow used to be. I is my shadow. I am gripped by the convulsive panic of a mapless traveller in a virgin void. Now I must explore the other side of my moon, my dark region of enslavement.

‘I was the master of fire and now I am the slave of earth. Where is my old, invincible I! He stole it. He snatched it from the peg where I hung it beside the mulatto’s mattress. Now I am sure only of my slavery.

‘I do not know how to be a slave. Now I am an enigma to myself. I have become discontinuous.

‘I fear my lost shadow who lurks in every shadow. I, who perpetrated atrocities to render to the world incontrovertible proof that my glorious misanthropy overruled it, I – now I exist only as an atrocity about to be perpetrated on myself.

‘He let his slaves enslave me.’

During the lengthy, wordless recitative of shuddering groans that followed, Lafleur said unexpectedly, in the voice of a scholarly connoisseur:

‘Not a bad imitation of Lautréamont.’

But the Count, unheeding, sang out with delighted rapture:

‘I am enduring the keenest, most piercing pangs of anguish!’

With that, he concluded his aria. The renewed silence was broken only by the sound of waves and the tread of the dancers above us, until Lafleur, with more insolence than solicitude, demanded:

‘Do you feel any pain?’

The valet was undergoing some kind of sea change.

The Count sighed.

‘I feel no pain. Only anguish. Unless anguish is the name of my pain. I wish I could learn to name my pain.’

This was the first time I ever heard him, however obliquely, answer a question, though it was hard to tell whether, in his reply, he acknowledged the presence of the person who posed it or if he thought the question was a fortuitous externalization of the self-absorption which had already doubled or tripled the chains with which he was bound, until he could no longer breathe without our hearing them rattle. But, to my astonishment, Lafleur coughed again to clear his throat and, with a touch of pedantry, in a curiously gruff, affected voice, gave the following exposition.

‘Master and slave exist in the necessary tension of a twinned actuality, which is transmuted only by the process of becoming. A sage of Ancient China, the learned Chuang Tzu, dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he was hard put to it to tell whether a man had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly was still dreaming he was a man. If you looked at your situation objectively for a moment, my dear Count, you might find that the principal cause of your present discomfort is a version of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma. You could effectively evolve a persona from your predicament, if you tried.’

But the Count was incapable of the humility of objectivity and took only a few hints to further his soliloquy from Lafleur.

‘Am I the slave of my aspirations or am I their master? All I know for certain is, I aspired to a continuous sublimity and my aspirations accentuate the abyss into which I have fallen. In the depths of this abyss, I find the black pimp.’

But Lafleur continued to expand his theme.

‘You were a man in a cage with a monster. And you did not know if the monster was in your dream or you were the dream of the monster.’

The Count clanged his chains with dreadful fury.

‘No! No! No!’

But this triadic reiteration was addressed to the shadows, not to Lafleur, who commented with some asperity:

‘Now you believe yourself to be the dream of the black pimp, I suppose. That is the reverse of the truth.’

But the Count did not hear him.

‘I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: “What is the most miraculous event in the world?” And I answer myself: “I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.”

‘I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.’

Lafleur gasped at that and so did I for I felt myself instantly negated. To my horror, I discovered I immediately grew thinner and less solid. I felt – how can I describe it? – that the darkness which surrounded us was creeping in at every pore to obliterate me. I saw the white glimmer of Lafleur’s face and held out my hands to him imploringly, beseeching him to go with me together into the oblivion to which the Count had consigned us, so that I should have some company there, in that cold night of non-being. But, before my senses failed me, there was a sudden, dreadful clamour on deck.

The accordion sputtered a final, distracted, terrified chord. There were screams, thuds and an awful wailing, suddenly cut short, that the pig must have made when the pirates cut its throat, while a hundred tongues announced that chaos was come. Abruptly I fell out of the magic circle of the Count’s self-absorption; my dissolution was cut short. The end of our imprisonment had come. The ship had been attacked by pirates.

They were swart, thick-set, yellowish men of low stature, equipped with immense swords and massive moustaches. They spoke a clicking, barking, impersonal language and never smiled though, when they decapitated the crew in a lengthy ritual by the light of flares on the deck, they laughed to see the heads roll and bounce. Once they knew we were murderers, they treated us with respect, cut off our chains with swift blows of their heavy swords, which were of incredible sharpness, and let us up on deck to watch the débâcle.

No one was spared except ourselves. After all their heads were off, the torsos went into the sea, while the pirates set about improvising small fires to cure the heads, which they proposed to keep as souvenirs. The Count visibly grew fatter at the smell of blood. He watched the ghastly ballet of the execution with the relish of a customer at a cabaret. When he flung off his cloak and the pirates saw he still wore the uniform of the House of Anonymity in all its arrogant exoticism, they gasped with admiration and bowed deeply to him in a display of servility. Another reversal had re-established his continuity. He was in the ascendance again.

But Lafleur lost all the crispness he had displayed in the cabin. He became wary and uneasy and stayed close beside me. Later, I learned he was very much afraid and almost about to reveal himself so that we might not die without knowing one another again, for the pirates were the mercenaries of Death itself.

They sailed these angry waters, far from the land that spawned them, in a black ship with eyes painted on the bows and the stern fashioned into the shape of the tail of a black fish. The triangular sails were black and they flew a black flag. They were some mixed tribe of Kurds, Mongols or Malays but their saturnine visages hinted at an infernal origin and they worshipped a sword.

As soon as the crew was dead, they set about stripping the cargo vessel and transferring its contents to their own boat. When they found the casks of rum in the forecastle, they greeted them with obscure grunts of glee but they did not broach them immediately. Instead they piled them as a votive offering around the altar of the sword they kept on the poop of the black ship. Now Lafleur and I clung to the Count like scared children for the pirates offered him instinctive reverence. When they saw our wrists were chafed from the manacles, they wrapped rags soaked in oil and spices round them and gave us for nothing a far more spacious cabin than the one the Count had hired – a wide room – with straw mats on the floor, mattresses for sleeping and a tasteful water-colour of a black cockerel, a little sea-stained, hanging on the wall. They brought us satisfying and delicious meals of rice, curried fish and pickles. The ship was frail and lightly built. I felt far closer to the sea than I had done before and hence far nearer to death, for the slightest breeze could tip it over and fling us and our hosts into the sea. But they were the most expert sailors.

During his adventures in the East, the Count had picked up a smattering of many tongues and found some words and phrases he could share with the pirate leader, so he spent most of his time with this brooding, diminutive killer whose face was as unyieldingly severe as the object he worshipped, intent on learning some of their art of swordsmanship. He also learned our destination. We would cross the Atlantic in their mournful cockleshell, boarding whatever craft we passed, round the Cape of Good Hope, cross the Indian Ocean and any other ocean that lay in our path and eventually drop anchor in an island off the coast of China where they kept their booty, their temples, their forges and their womenfolk. A long, weary journey full of dangers lay before us and a landfall I was sure we should find replete with horrors. Now we were free, I was far more frightened than I had been in chains.

The shrine on the deck consisted of a sword laid between two ebony rests. From a pole above it hung a number of garlands of heads, all smoked a dusky, tan colour and shrunk to the size of heads of monkeys by the process of curing. Every morning, after prayers, the pirate leader removed the black loincloth which was his only garb and bent over on the poop in front of the altar while each of his men filed past him in devout silence, kissed his exposed arse and emitted a sharp bark of adulation while slapping his buttocks briefly with the flat of their blades. Their fidelity to their lord was so great one could have thought each pirate was only an aspect of the leader, so that the many was the one. They were indistinguishable from one another. They were like those strings of paper figures, hand in identical hand, that children cut out of sheets of paper. After this display or refreshment of fidelity, they practised with their swords.

These were heavy, double-bladed shafts of steel half the height of the pirates themselves, with handles constructed in such a way they had to be grasped with both hands. Though their use required great skill, it needed no finesse for the most telling stroke was a murderous, chopping blow that easily split a man in half. It was impossible to fence with such a sword. It was equally impossible to defend oneself except by attacking first. They were weapons which denied forethought, impulses of destruction made of steel. And the pirates themselves, so slight, so silent, so cruel, so two-dimensional, seemed to have subsumed their beings to their swords, as if the weapons were their souls or as if they had made a pact with their swords to express their spirit for them, for the flash of the sword seemed by far a more expressive language than the staccato monosyllables that came so grudgingly to their lips. Their exercises lasted for six hours a day. They transformed the decks into an arcade of flashing light, for the blades left gleaming tracks behind them that lingered in the air for a long time. After they had finished, they polished their swords for another hour and, as the sun went down, joined together to sing a tuneless hymn which might have been a requiem for the day they had killed with their swords. After that came a night of perfect silence.

The pirates fed us and left us alone, for which I was heartily thankful. The ship was a black sea-bird, a marine raven. It skimmed over rather than cut through the waves and though there was only this thinnest of matchwood skins between us all and death, the sheer virtuosity of their seamanship maintained us in a position something like that of a ship navigated along a tightrope. Their seamanship was as amazing as their swordsmanship and, from the risks they took, seemed also to imply an intimate complicity with death. Lafleur and I, alone in our cabin, spent the days in quiet and foreboding. I discovered his hooded, luminous eyes watched me all the time with affection, even devotion, and I began to feel I had known him all my life and he was my only friend; but you could not have said this new warmth blossomed for now he took on an almost Trappist speechlessness and scarcely said more than ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good evening’ to me. I began to feel I would soon lose the use of my tongue. I counted the days by scratching a line with my fingernail on our cabin wall. On the twelfth monotonous day, it was the full moon and when they staved in the covers of the rum barrels, I realized they meant to release their pent-up inhibited passions in a debauch.

They set about the initial processes of becoming drunk with the same glum diligence that characterized all their actions. It was a night of sweltering, ominous calm. A gibbous moon fired the phosphorescence in the waters so that the black ship rocked on a bed of cold, scintillating flame and they wreathed the sails so that the ship could look after itself for the rest of the night and most of the next day, if need be, for every single one proposed to drink himself to complete insensibility. Then they arranged themselves in ranks on the deck, cross-legged on round straw mats, as was their custom, facing the poop where their leader sat facing them under the shrine with his guest, the Count, beside him and the cask of rum before him. Each man held his cannikin ready and the leader, after barking a grace before drink, scooped out a ladleful of rum from the cask into the Count’s cannikin and then helped himself. The pirates went up one by one for their shares. The outlines were as distinct as those of Indonesian shadow puppets. They each wore a black loincloth and each carried at his side a sword in its scabbard. They twisted black sweatbands round their heads and none of them was taller than four and three-quarter feet, death’s weird hobgoblins. As he took hold of his spilling portion, each pirate took off his sword and put it down on a growing pile beside the leader, either in a gesture of trust or as a hygienic precaution intended to forestall the ravages they might wreak with their weapons when they had drunk enough.

As the crew passed up its cans for its rations, Lafleur, gazing beside me through the window, softly tugged my sleeve.

‘Look!’ he said. ‘There is land against the sky.’

Across the undulating plateau of bright water, far, far away, the shapes of a tropical forest flung up their fringed arms against the white sky. We had already travelled many hundreds of miles to the south; the distant landscape was as unfamiliar to me as that of another planet and yet it was land and the sight of it cheered my heart, although I would be denied the comfort of it.

‘The currents around here are deceitful and the tornadoes come swiftly, unheralded and treacherous,’ said Lafleur. ‘They have chosen a foolish time for a drinking bout.’

‘The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason,’ I replied. ‘When the full moon comes, they must get drunk even in the teeth of a hurricane.’

‘I wish they did not worship steel,’ he said.‘Steel is so inflexible.’

It was delightful to talk to somebody again and to feel his goodwill beside me, although again his disguise was far too cunning and complete for me to penetrate.

‘Well, we can’t persuade the hurricane to smash the ship and let us live through it,’ I said.

‘No, indeed,’ said Lafleur. ‘But the hurricane is governed only by chance and chance at least is neutral. One can rely on the neutrality of chance. And when I look at the sky, I think I see a storm.’

I, too, looked at the sky but saw only moonlight and the drifting banks of cloud. But as the pirates lined up for their second round, they were already grunting with savage mirth and poking one another, for they had only the most primitive idea of fun. Their behaviour moved between only the two poles of melodrama and farce. As soon as they took off their frivolous armour, laid by their swords and had a drop or two of rum inside them, they frolicked with the mindlessness but not the innocence of infants. Even from our cabin, I could see the Count was growing disillusioned with them. He had admired their deathward turning darkness yet, after a third round, they stripped off their loincloths and, one and all, embarked on a farting contest. They made the radiant welkin ring with a battery of broken wind. Exposing to the moon the twin hemispheres of their lemon-coloured hinder cheeks, each banged away as loudly as he was able, amid a great deal of unharmonious laughter, and soon they began to set light to the gases they expelled with matches, so a blue flame hovered briefly above every backside.

‘The clouds are piling up,’ said Lafleur breathlessly and, indeed, the sky was growing sullen so that now the moonlight fell with a baleful glare the convives were too drunk to see.

They fell to wrestling and horseplay, tripping one another over as they passed on an endless chain to receive the apparently inexhaustible rum and their leader, who took two or three drinks for each one the men received, often missed their cannikins altogether and upset the ladle on his creature’s head. This convulsed them with laughter. Someone untied the trophies from the shrine and they began to play a stumbling game of football with them. The Count sat quite still above them, brooding above these Breughel-like antics, his face set in lines of aristocratic distaste.

‘The moon has put on a halo,’ said Lafleur excitedly.

When I looked up, I saw the angry moon was surrounded with a sulphurous aura and from its white mouth now belched vile, hot gusts. The pirates, however, were beyond knowing or caring. Some, as if felled, tumbled down where they stood and snored immediately. Others first puked weakly and staggered before they slumped to the deck. But most simply sank down and slept the deep sleep of the newly purified. The cries, laughter and bursts of drunken song slowly faded away. Though he had absorbed most, the leader was the last to go. He slithered slowly from an upright position, clasped the rum-tub to break his fall and then he and the tub together rolled along the poop for a while and lay still in a pool of spilled liquor. The Count rose up and seized the holy sword from its shrine with a gesture that implied their god was too good for them. He was as tall as a stork and as wild as the spirit of the storm, which now broke upon us in a sudden squall. Lightning danced along the blade and the rain struck the oblivious revellers with tropic fury while the Count hissed: ‘Scum!’ and spat upon the pirate leader. Stepping through the bodies and the puddles of vomit and excrement with fastidious distaste, he went to the stern of the ship and inexorably directed us into the eye of the whirlwind.

We ran from the cabin to crouch at his side, like his dogs, for his protection, for now again we saw him in his tempestuous element. The tempest seemed his tool; he used this tool to destroy the black ship and its sailors.

The very air turned to fire. The topmast, an incandescent spoke, snapped and crashed; storm-born luminescence danced upon every surface and the rain and driving waves lashed us and soaked us until we were half-drowned before we sank. Lafleur and I clung to one another while the ship tilted this way and that, tossing its freight of sleeping swine hither and thither, flinging them senseless into the boiling sea or crushing them beneath its disintegrating timbers. The black sails unfurled and flew away on the wings of the storm; he flourished the sword like a wand or a baton, for he conducted the tempest as though it was a symphony orchestra and again we heard his dishevelled laughter, louder than the winds and waters put together. The currents and the wind were driving us nearer and nearer land in the random flares of the lightning. We saw the giant palms threshing and bowing double as if in homage to the Count. Yet we could see nothing clearly for our motion was too uncertain and soon the ship broke up in a succession of shivering concussions and all who sailed in it were flung into the water.

Yet not a single one of the sodden pirates flickered so much as an eyelid while the sea engorged them and we, the living, were washed up on a white beach which the wind moulded into fresh dunes at every moment, together with a great quantity of black driftwood and yellow corpses.

Yes, we were saved – Lafleur, the Count and I; though we were little more than skins swollen with salt water and our ears were still as full of the hurricane as if shells were clapped to them, blotting out all other sounds. But the great-grandfather of all breakers tossed me negligently on the spar to which I clung almost to the margin of the forest and Lafleur followed me on a lesser wave, holding on to the rudder. I stumbled down the beach and dragged him up the sand, out of harm’s way, and then a lightning flash showed me the Count walking out of the water as simply as if he had been bathing, in his eyes a strange glow of satisfaction and, in his hand, still the mighty blade.

We followed him a little way into the forest and there Lafleur and I made ourselves a kind of nest in the undergrowth and slept as soon as our battered heads touched the grassy pillow, but the Count sat up awake all night, keeping some kind of vigil with his sword. He was still kneeling among the brushwood when we woke. The playful monkeys were pelting us with leaves, twigs and coconuts. The sun was high in the sky. The mysterious susurration of the tropic forest trembled sweetly in my ears after the clamour of the oceans. The air was soft and perfumed.

The storm was over and a miraculous peace filled the vaulted, imperial groves of palms. A web of lianas let a translucent green light down upon us three, ill-assorted babes in the wood and it was already so hot that steam was rising in puffs from our drenched clothing and the now filthy bandaging Lafleur obstinately refused to take off his face. It was marvellous to feel the solid ground beneath my feet again, even if I was not at all sure to which continent the ground belonged. I thought it must be my own far American South but the Count opted hopefully for savage Africa while Lafleur observed remotely that we had not the least notion where we really were but had probably been blown willy-nilly on to the coast of some distant island. When we went down to the beach to wash ourselves, we soon saw the inhabitants were black and so felt certain we were in Africa.

The tide, in receding, had left corpses strewn with shells all along the endless, white beach and the glistening purity of the sand emphasized the surpassing ebony of the inhabitants who, clad in long robes of coloured cottons and necklaces of dried beans, diligently searched among the debris for its trove of swords. They were men and women of great size and dignity, accompanied by laughing children of extraordinary charm, and when they saw us, they lowed gently among themselves like a congregation of wise cattle. Our garments smoked. We stood still and allowed them to approach us. They did so slowly, some trailing the pirates’ swords unhandily behind them. Their faces and chests were whorled and cicatrized with tribal marks, knife cuts discoloured because white clay had been rubbed into them. As we waited, more and more of them came out of the margin of the jungle, walking with such grace they might all have been carrying huge pots on their heads, while their naked children danced round them like marionettes carved out of coal. When he saw their colour, the Count began to shiver as if he had caught a fever in the sea but I knew he shivered out of fear. But these solid, moving shadows showed no fear of us though soon they formed a great ring about us, hemming us in on all sides, and we knew we had been captured.

Then we heard the sound of crude but martial music and a jaunty detachment of Amazons marched out of the forest. These women were elderly and steatopygous. They were the shapes of ripe pears bursting with juice and their wrinkled dugs swung loosely back and forth, inside and outside the silver breastplates they wore but, all the same, they were a splendid sight, some with scarlet cloaks and loose white breeches made of swathes of cloth tucked up between the legs, others with cloaks of chocolate brown and dark blue breeches, all with metal helmets crowned with decorations of black horsehair. Their officers, chosen, it would seem, as much for the size of their bottoms as anything, marched beside them playing long-stemmed, brass trumpets and little hand drums and these female soldiers were aggressively armed with duck-guns, blunderbusses, muskets and razor-like knives, a museum of ancient weapons. They easily made us understand by signs we were under arrest again and took us, heavily if quaintly guarded, down the green path to a clearing where their village lay, while the black host fell in behind us with the same decorum that marked all they did.

The village was a seemly place of roomy huts made of dried mud and we were taken into a neat, clean house and offered a breakfast of some kind of pounded grain mixed with minced pork, served on fronds of palm. Lafleur and I ate heartily but the Count, unmanned again, a quaking skeleton, ate nothing. He cowered deep under the quilts they had given us to rest on, repeating over and over again: NEMESIS COMES. But they were far too polite to even raise their eyebrows when they saw him. Indeed, the only discordant notes in all this sober, harmonious decency were the low stools on which we were invited to sit and the low tables off which we ate, for they were ingeniously fashioned out of bones which, from their shapes, could only have been human. But these bones were dressed up so prettily that at first one hardly realized they were bones at all for they had been painted dark red and then adorned with tessellations of gummed shells and feathers.

They took away our ragged, filthy clothes with polite exclamations of distaste and Lafleur hid himself in a corner with a touching, virginal modesty until they brought us some of their lengths of cotton printed in blacks, indigos and crimsons so that we could cover ourselves. We made ourselves togas after the Roman fashion and then Lafleur and I sat at the door of our hut in the sunshine, trying to chat wordlessly with the little children who stared at us with huge, solemn eyes. The children fingered Lafleur’s bandages curiously because they thought the covering was a kind of upper face and he laughed with them with such affecting motherliness I ought to have suspected… but I suspected nothing! Shape-shifting was so much hocus-pocus to me. So the morning whiled away peacefully enough with never a hint of dread though we saw the women were busily tending huge cauldrons which hung over fires in the open air and, when the sun stood directly overhead, the captain of the female soldiers came to us and informed us that now we must go and pay our respects to the village chief whose grand ceremonial hut lay a little way out of the village. So we straightened our togas and combed our fingers through our hairs. But the Count would not come of his own free will so the captain had to poke him with the butt of her musket until he crept reluctantly out to join us.

Oh, what a bedraggled demiurge he was! His black tights were all tattered and torn, so a fringe of toe peeped out at the foot of each, and his prick hung out of the aperture as limp and woebegone as a deflated balloon. He limped like an eagle with a broken wing. Poor, yellow tiger! And yet he had ridden out his tempest in triumph the previous night and even as we walked through the village, he took on, as if he summoned up all his flagging courage to do so, a few shreds of enigmatic charisma, enough to fling back his head proudly, as if, perhaps, invigorated by the high, brazen clamour of the trumpets which accompanied us.

The path climbed steeply through the vaulted architraves of the palms which sprang straight up to the sky in soaring, prodigious, bluish-greyish columns towards the tasselled parasols of emerald feathers which formed the capitals of this vegetable cathedral. A muted solemnity governed the tread of our guards. They changed their music to a more mournful key and played what was almost a lament and when we came to a waterfall, everyone fell on their faces to worship it. Beyond this waterfall was a cave in a rock face, with its entrance curtained in the printed cotton that covered us. The soldiers prostrated themselves again so we knew this was where the chief lived and also that his people held him in religious awe. The Count had turned pale as if all the blood had been drained from his body but still he held his ground with something of his old, defiant spirit. The brass and the kettledrums fell silent but we could hear the liquid music of the waterfall and the crackling of the wood that burned under a great pot outside the cave.

When I looked behind me, I saw the entire village had followed us, and in the arborescent silence we were the only men left standing up for everyone else crouched with their faces deep in grass or flat on earth. The presence of a hundred silent people filled the green twilight with a sacral quietude that made me uneasy. And then a sensuous parade of the chief’s wives and concubines came from the cave without drawing the curtains apart so we could not see what lay beyond them. Intensely black and perfectly naked, these women wore plumes of ostrich in their hair and arranged themselves around the entrance to the cave in a frame of submissive adoration. Many bore the bleeding marks of gigantic bites in their breasts and buttocks. Some had a nipple missing, most were minus one or several toes and fingers. One girl had a ruby set in the socket in place of a lost eyeball and some wore false teeth carved in strange shapes out of the tusks of elephants. Yet all had been beautiful and their various disfigurements lent them an exquisite pathos. After them came a number of eunuchs and then the royal castrater, the royal barber and several other barbarous officials, until the whole court was displayed before us, lined up before the cave as if they were posing for a group photograph.

The drums now began to play again, a dismal throbbing like the palpitation of a dying heart. The tribe lay still on their faces but two of the royal wives crawled forward and at last drew back the curtains as the drums rolled and the trumpets suddenly whined. And we saw him. The chief.

He sat on a throne of bones on a dais of bones which, as we watched, rolled ponderously forward on four wheels made of skulls, wheels that crushed the hands of half a dozen concubines before it came to a halt. Seated, he was six and a half feet high. He was far, far blacker than the blackest night. He was a very sacred and very monstrous idol.

On his head he wore a ceremonial wig consisting of three thick fringes arranged in concentric rings. That next to the skin of his head was brown; the middle one was crimson; and the outside fringe was of bright gold, like a diadem. Through this arresting chevelure was wound a chain of mixed carbuncles and round his neck, virtually clothing the upper part of his body, were a great many golden chains with pendants, charms and skulls of babies dangling from them. His face was brilliantly painted with four discs on either cheek, each one rimmed with white and coloured inside yellow, green, blue and red. A brown, white-rimmed eye was painted on his forehead between and above his own eyes. He carried the thigh-bone of a giant for a sceptre, painted scarlet and once again decorated with inlay and feathers. He wore the pelt of a tiger wrapped round his middle and the root-like toes which protruded from his sandals were stuck with rings containing gems of amazing size and peerless water, as were his hands, which were so heavily be-ringed they looked as if they were mailed with jewels. His appalling face suggested more than Aztec horrors and, now the curtain was open, I could see that the cave behind him was an arcade of human skeletons.

‘Welcome to the regions of the noble children of the sun!’ he said in a cavernous voice that sank to thrilling depths, while the drums pounded on and on. But he did not speak to Lafleur and me; he addressed himself only to the Count.

‘You are my only destination,’ replied the Count. ‘You altered my compass so that it would point only to you, my hypocritical shadow, my double, my brother.’

Then I saw this dreadful chieftain was indeed the black pimp who was now about to avenge his lover’s murder, for such was the Count’s desire he should be and do so. The chieftain rose from his throne, stepped from his dais on to a footstool of grovelling concubines and took the Count into the warmest, most passionate embrace. But he concluded it by striking the Count such a heavy blow that he reeled out of the great black arms and fell to the ground. The chief set one foot on the Count’s chest in the attitude of a successful hunter and spoke, it seemed, to the sky above us, which showed in patches of azure electricity through the vivid fronds of the palms.

‘The customs of my country are as barbarous as the propriety with which they are executed. For example, not one of those delightful children who seem, each one, to have stepped straight off the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but has not, since he put forth his first milk teeth, dined daily off a grilled rump, or roasted shoulder, a stew, a fricassée, or else a hash of human meat. To this usually most abhorred of comestibles they owe the brightness of their eyes, the strength of their limbs, the marvellous gloss of health on their skins, their longevity and a virility as great as it is discreetly practised, since this diet is certain to triple the libidinal capacities, as my wives and concubines can willingly testify. But we have learned to let circumspection sharpen our pleasures and we conduct the most loathsome profligacy with no public show of indecency at all.

‘How do I rule my little kingdom? With absolute severity. Only if a king is utterly ruthless, only if he hardens his heart to the temper of the most intransigent metal, will he maintain his rule. I am a ruler both secular and divine. I hedge about my whims, which I term my “laws”, with an awesome incomprehensibility of superstitious fears. The least rebellious thought rising weed-like in my subjects’ hearts is instantly transmitted to me by my espionage system of telepaths whose minds are magic mirrors and reflect not only faces but thoughts. Those incipient rebels and their entire families are condemned for the most fleeting wish alone for we do not give them time to act. They are forthwith shipped directly to the army catering staff and boiled down to nourishing soups which contribute towards the excellent, indeed, prolific physique of my army while my punishments extend even towards that insubstantial part of themselves, their souls, for I encourage a belief in the soul in order to terrify them better. The least rebellious inclination rising weed-like condemns the subject and his seed to damnation for three generations. So it behoves them to tend their gardens well and only let the lilies of obedience grow there!’

The Count now rose painfully to his feet but the chieftain instantly kicked him back into a kneeling position and the Count knelt at his feet for the rest of the interview.

‘Why, you may ask, have I built my army out of women since they are often held to be the gentler sex? Gentlemen, if you rid your hearts of prejudice and examine the bases of the traditional notions of the figure of the female, you will find you have founded them all on the remote figure you thought you glimpsed, once, in your earliest childhood, bending over you with an offering of warm, sugared milk, crooning a soft lullaby while, by her haloed presence, she kept away the snakes that writhed beneath the bed. Tear this notion of the mother from your hearts. Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined. Not one of my callipygian soldiery but has not earned her rank by devouring alive, first gnawing limb from limb and sucking the marrow from its bones, her first-born child. So she earns her colours. To a woman, they are absolutely ruthless. They have passed far beyond all human feeling.’

The army, as one woman, lifted its head and smiled to hear this tribute so I guessed they were still capable of responding to flattery.

‘And, since my early researches soon showed me that the extent of a woman’s feelings was directly related to her capacity for feeling during the sexual act, I and my surgeons take the precaution of brutally excising the clitoris of every girl child born to the tribe as soon as she reaches puberty. And also those of my wives and concubines who have been brought from other tribes where this practice is not observed. Therefore I am proud to say that not a single one of my harem or, indeed, any of the tribe of more than Roman mothers you see before you, has ever experienced the most fleeting ecstasy, or even the slightest pleasure, while in my arms or in the arms of any of my subjects. So our womenfolk are entirely cold and respond only to cruelty and abuse.’

At that there was a rumbling murmur of approbation from all the men and many broke into spontaneous applause. The soldiers jumped at once and ran among the ranks of the tribe, beating them with the flats of their swords until they were quiet.

‘In these regions, you may observe Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form – in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world. I am, in my hard-hearted way, most passionately in love with harmony. As an emblem of harmony, I would take the storm that rent your ship last night, resolving that poignant little fabrication of the human hand to constituents in harmony with this world as it would be without man – that is, natural. I would take the lion rending the lamb as an emblem. In a word, I would take all images of apparent destruction – and mark how I use the word, “apparent”, for, in essence, nothing can be created or destroyed. My notion of harmony, then, is a perpetual, convulsive statis.

‘I am happy only in that I am a monster.’

Now, when I thought about it, I knew that this man-eating hierophant who recounted his proclivities to us with such pompous arrogance could not possibly be the black pimp of New Orleans; he was only his living image. But the Count identified him rightly in that this princeling of the anthropophagi was yet another demiurge and the Lithuanian aristocrat and the savage were twinned in that both were storm-troopers of the world itself. The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather – these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.

All this ran through my mind as the monster harangued the Count and Lafleur’s little hand reached out and grasped hold of mine for comfort.

‘Nothing in our traditions suggests history. I have been very careful to suppress history for my subjects might learn lessons from the deaths of kings. I burned all their former idols as soon as I came to power and instituted a comprehensive monotheism with myself as its object. I allowed the past to exist as a series of rituals concerning the nature of my omnipotent godhead. I am a lesson, a model, the perfect type of king and of government. I am far more than the sum of my parts.’

And now he smiled gently at the Count; and, to my amazement, I saw that he reflected the Count’s face perfectly, as if his own face were only a pool of dark water, and the paintings upon it a few blossoms floating on the surface.

‘In a certain brothel in the city of New Orleans, once, I saw you strangle a prostitute solely to augment your own erotic ecstasy, my dear Count. Since that time, I have pursued you diligently across space and time. You excited my curiosity. It seemed I might be able to crown my own atrocities by making my brother in atrocity my victim. That I might, as it were, immolate myself, to see how I should bear it.

‘I wish, you understand, to see how I would suffer.

‘I have a great deal of empirical curiosity. A Jesuit in his black cassock once came to my tribe and lived among us for a year. When he learned my manners, he rebuked me so sternly, in the name of pity, that first I had him crucified – for he professed to admire so much this form of torture – and, while he was still quivering on the tree, I cut out his heart with my own hands, to see if such a professedly compassionate an organ had a different structure from the common kind of heart. But no! it did not.

‘Now I should like to see if we have a heart at all, dear Count. Are we ourselves so much the physical slaves of nature?

‘And I wish to see if I can suffer, like any other man. And then I want to learn the savour of my flesh. I wish to taste myself. For you must know I am a great gourmet.

‘Bind him.’

Two female officers pounced on the Count and tied his wrists together with cords. From the ranks of the chief’s retinue a plump, giggling being wearing only a white chef’s cap and a girdle hung with ladles stepped forward with a jar of salt in one hand and a nosegay of potherbs in the other. He lavishly seasoned the water that now bubbled in the cauldron while the Count began to laugh softly.

‘Don’t you think I’m too old and tough and starveling to make a savoury dish?’

‘I thought of that,’ said the cannibal. ‘That is why I’m going to boil you up for soup.’

The soldiers slit the Count’s tights with the points of their swords so they fell like opening petals from his white, scrawny legs. They slit his waistcoat and it fell. Naked, his tall, skeletal form and great mane of iron grey hair were still clothed in that strange, intangible cloak of exalted loneliness. He was a king whose pride was all the greater because he lacked a country. The chef flung a string of onions into the pot, thoughtfully stirred in more salt, stirred and sipped the stock from his ladle. He nodded. The lady soldiers marched the Count between them to the fire, took firm hold each one of an elbow, lifted him bodily and plunged him feet first into the water, so that his head stuck over the rim. But his face did not change expression as it began to grow rosy. And he endured in perfect silence for far longer than I would have thought possible.

And then, when he was red as a lobster, he began to laugh with joy – pure joy.

‘Lafleur!’ he called from the pot. ‘Lafleur! I am in pain! I’ve learned to name my pain! Lafleur – ’

And, using the very last of his strength, he rose up out of the cauldron in an upward surging leap, as of a fully liberated man.

But when he reached his apex his heart must have burst for his mouth sagged, his eyes started, blood leaked out of his nostrils and he fell back with a splash that scalded half the court with broth. This time, his head disappeared entirely beneath the rim of the stew pot and presently a delicious steam began to drift from the simmering concoction, so that the entire audience licked its lips in unison. At that, the chef clapped a lid on him.

I was touched to see Lafleur’s bandages were soaking up a trickle of tears but then I realized he and I were also to feature as entremets for the ensuing feast. The chef ordered a team of apprentices to prepare long beds of glowing charcoal and himself busily began to grease a gridiron.

‘Skin the smallest rabbit first,’ commanded the chieftain negligently and he did not bother to season us first with verbiage since we were only so much meat to him.

Two privates seized Lafleur’s shoulders and dragged him away from me. They cut off his robe, although he struggled, and I saw, not the lean torso of a boy but the gleaming, curvilinear magnificence of a golden woman whose flesh seemed composed of the sunlight that touched it far more kindly than the black hands of the fiendish infantry did. I recognized her even before they sheared away the bandages and showed no noseless, ulcerated, disfigured face but the face of Albertina herself.

Never before, in all my life, had I performed a heroic action.

I acted instantly, without thought. I grasped the knife of one of my own guards and the musket of the other. I stabbed them both in their bellies and then I stabbed the women who were preparing her for the pot. I flung away my knife and embraced her with one arm while, with the other, I pointed the musket at the chieftain’s head and pulled the trigger.

The antique bullet, larger than a grape, pierced the painted eye in the centre of his forehead.

A great spurt of blood sprang out as from an unstoppered tap in such a great arc that it drenched us. He must have died instantaneously but some spasm of muscle jerked him to his feet. The juggernaut rose up on his car and stood there, swaying, a fountain of blood, while the crowd moaned and shivered as if at an eclipse. Somehow his uncoordinated shuddering freed the wheels of his trolley and, at first slowly, it began to move, for there was a downward inclination to the earth. And still the corpse stayed upright, as if rigor mortis had set in straight away. And still it jetted blood, as if his arteries were inexhaustible. So it started on a headlong career, crushing wives and eunuchs and those of his tribe who, maddened at the sight, out of despair or hysteria at the sudden extinction of their autocratic comet, now flung themselves under the wheels of its chariot with maenad shrieks.

Bouncing over a path of flesh, bearing a tottering tower, the car’s mad career took it to the bank of the river and there it plunged into a foaming torrent that carried it to the edge of the waterfall within seconds. There car parted company with rider for the water flung them both high up into the air and they swept separately over the lip of the cascade, to dash to pieces on the rocks below.

Albertina and I kissed.

The soldiers should have killed us, then, for then we should have been perfectly happy. But now the utmost confusion reigned among them for the pole of their world was gone. Their wives, concubines and eunuchs tore their hair and wailed for they could think of nothing else to do but set out at once on the elaborate ritual of mourning. The necromancers had drawn a circle and were standing inside it, attempting to summon back the chieftain’s spirit; while the lady general called a common drill so, as the populace ran this way and that, lamenting, the soldiers ceremoniously formed fours and shifted their blunderbusses from one shoulder to the other with a discipline which, in other circumstances, might have been almost inspiring to watch, since it demonstrated a devotion to duty carried far beyond the point of absurdity. But I was kissing Albertina and so I did not watch them, although I could tell by the heavy odour on the air that the Count had almost finished cooking. Albertina stirred in my arms.

‘I must pay him my last respects,’ she said. ‘We travelled a long way together. And, after all, I admired him.’

Naked as a dream, she lifted the lid of the pot and stirred the scum that had risen with the bay leaves to the surface.

‘And I can’t deny he was a worthy adversary. His slightest gesture created the void he presupposed.’

She clapped back the lid and with businesslike precision started to undress the corpse of one of the female soldiers. When she had dressed herself up in dark blue apron and chocolate brown cloak, she made an armful of as many weapons as she could and said to me purposefully:

‘Come!’

Nobody tried to stop us. Soon even the noises of the convulsive wake were silenced by the massive, viridian door of the forest that we closed behind us.