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I
Johannesburg
1913
“Call it the Mount Roraima Cableway
And Lost World Grand Hotel.”
“It’s copyright.
We’ll have to pay off Conan Doyle.”
“We’ll pay.
It’s what I’m issuing preferred stock for..”
Sir Christie Hood, the second richest man
In Parktown, and the richest not in mines,
( A Press Lord, not a Randlord ) overawes
His just returned from Delhi archiitect
Who, being Herbert Baker, is not awed
That easily. “He’s dottier than Rhodes,”
The great eclectic thinks,” and then, aloud,
“I cannot supervise the work myself.
I’ll have to deputize it. Deputies
Whom one can trust do not come cheaply.”
“No,
But profit was not all I had in mind.”
“If London is prepared to bail us out,”
Says Baker, “I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Would you like a Highland hunting lodge,
Or something more Cape Dutch.?” The Baronet
Cannot resist a once and future client’s
Smile at art’s predictability.
“A ‘stoep’ to conquer? That would tip our hand.”
The architect smiles, but puts his case.
“It isn’t all that far from Surinam.
�“Guiana was Dutch.”
“As the Transvaal was.
I think the less we look like Groote Schuur
The better. Why not model it on this?”
Bright Kop, the Baronet’s own house, is gloom
And sandstone, in deep shade which is the work
Of fifteen gardeners and fifteen years.
“If we are there to show the flag,” says Baker,
“Show it. Something High Imperial.”
Another reason not to self-repeat
Appears now in the hobble-skirted form
Of Lady Elva Hood, whose tatty tastes
On more than one occasion have reversed
Her architect’s. He coexists with these
In what is best described as an armed truce.
“How well you look, Dear Herbert. Is a tan
A sort of caste mark for you?”
“Artisans,
Milady, are a lowest caste. In India
As elsewhere.”
“Well, you always have your fees.
I’m making some more changes, by the way.
I want a trellis by this window. Sun
Could fade my needlepoint.” The architect,
Who oriented the huge teakwood room
To take advantage of its view, a sweep
Of highveld from the highest of the Rand
Decides a change of subject might be best.
“Untouchables…” he says . But Lady Hood
Puts up a long forefinger to her lip
�And looks in the direction of the door,
At which a servant in a turban stands,
Bisected by a monstrous silver tray.
“Ah,” Lady Elva says, “Our Ovaltine.”
The Swiss Food Drink, her rival must concede,
Tops any going norm for tattiness.
“It’s for my husband’s ulcer,” laments she,
As if she read the opposition’s mind.
“It’s nothing by itself, but made with goat’s milk…”
“Let us hope the Swiss are more adept
At cableway construction than at drink.”
“The contract goes to the Americans,”
Sir Christie warns. “A Monroe Doctrine sop.
The Venezuelan Boundary Dispute
Is anything but over, in the mind,
At least of Venezuela. Uncle Same
Will side with them, of course, as certainly
As the Colonial Office will back us.
Guiana has high grade petroleum,
And in the areas disputed, Grand
Hotel Lost World will see that it stays ours.
If it amuses some few millionaires
Meanwhile…”
“They will be well amused,
I’ll see to that,“ says Baker.
“Be amused
“If they are men,” says Lady Elva tartly,
Confident in the two million pounds
She has inherited in her own right.
“Bushwhacking dinosaur is not my game,
Although as Chris will tell you, I can shoot.
�I’ve shot with maharajahs. So will you,
If you intend to keep your job. Your job
In Delhi. What your understudies do
On that poor mountain is your own affair
It‘s very wet, I‘m told. Do your roofs leak?
We are not here in summer. I don‘t know.
”Material for this house came by ox,”
Says Baker mildly. “I can deal with cables.”
…
As he leaves, the battered architect
Confronts, in his exiguous foyer,
Her Ladyship’s exotic footman, who,
His needlepointed turban much awry,
Adjusts his other clothing, as, intact,
A Coloured parlor maid, a game flushed out,
Hotfoots upstairs. “Your hat and blueprints, Sahib.”
“The Lady Elva’s hired a Touchable,”
Decides the future Nimrod of the Raj.
Beside the outer door--Empire of course
Laid on in seamless red-- a four- foot globe
Is mounted on the necks of dark bronze dragons.
Baker avoids it. “Scorpions,” he thinks.
They are for him the most of India.
II
British Guiana
A smoking rocket breaks the jungle crests,
To feather like an upward cataract
The bare red-sandstone prow of Mount Roraima,
Climax of the cliffs that ring it round.
�The rocket trails a line of silken thread
That will in turn pull up a stronger line
To raise the pilot cable. At the top,
Having ascended the Brazilian face-The easier--the on-site engineer,
Whose name is Roland Galt, awaits the strike.
That hit, in spite of the prevailing damp,
Is like the downfall of a sparkler: bright
Quick jacks expiring as he reaches out.
“How gala,” says his British alpine-guide.
‘We might almost think we were at a fair.”
“A good sign, no?” says Galt, who knows quite well
McCain’s remark was meant to be a slight.
Guiana’s business community,
Of whom the guiding Scot is one full third,
Is livid that the cableway contract
Was granted to a young St. Louis firm
Whose largest previous experience
Was building Ferris Wheels. “The carnival,”
Says Galt, “is Good King George’s Narrow Gauge.
I’ll have the freight lift operational
Before they get the railhead in sight,
There’s nothing in an aerial too big
To come in by canoe. In 1903
Trade unions at the Exposition struck.
My father finished up a full size wheel
With parts I carried out to Forest Park
By streetcar.”
“Wait until the next rain comes.
�You’ll have to thread your line through waterfalls.”
“So much the better for the tourist trade, Mac.
There isn’t much to say for dukes and earls
But they will flock to where the big game is.
If there are pretty scenes along the way,
That ups the ante. Don’t you ever look?”
“No, only where I put my feet.” Galt sneers:
“Like in your mouth? How many days a year
Do we have fog up here?”
“Including this,
All of them. Here it comes.” A drift of rain
Lifts out of Venezuela, weakening
Into a restless fog as it goes east
Across the mountaintop into Guiana.
“ Ectoplasm,“ Galt identifies.
He knows his Conan Doyle. “And real life rust.
I hope the cables still are in one piece
The day we open. It’s all touch and go.”
He knots the silken line around a slick,
Freak boulder. “Let’s backtrack. Where is Brazil?”
…
The firing of the rocket is remarked
Among the area’s indigenous,
Who number twenty. Women have no souls
And are not reckoned. As the chieftain-priest,
Ipupu, who is four foot eight, prevails.
“It is a waterfall turned into smoke.
It is a waterfall that rushes up.
A mighty feather, going back to God.”
His new wife contradicts him. “It’s a dart,
Meaning they have a giant blowgun.”
�Minds,
It may be, but not souls. Etak Etak
Is not a woman of the Tepi-Pupu.
She is of the Cui, a tribe nearby.
“In any case it is a sacrilege.
The Mother Mountain has been violated.
Let the red of neck be sacrificed.”
Etak speaks out. “They cannot be all bad.
They have enslaved the Tepi-Curucu.”
“And will make slaves of us, if we allow.”
Exogamy, Ipupu now reflects,
May have its drawbacks. “Woman, if you speak
Again I’ll sell you to the red of neck
To work as servant by the Curucu.”
“The giant blowgun is the end of life,”
A tribal elder warns. “It will devour
The air we breathe. Its spit blots out the sun.”
Idzumu, an enthusiastic youth
Not quite one week beyond is passage rite,
One year in age behind the tribal elder,
Tries a maiden speech. “If we obtain
Ourselves the giant blowgun we at least
Can down-cephalicize the Curucu
Before the world puffs out.”
“Great as it is,”
Responds the sorcerer-reductionist,
“My art cannot accommodate such numbers.
Sewing up the lips would take me days,
And I say nothing of the eyes and ears.”
His staff is headed, in a strictest sense,
�By an example of his work. Etak,
Meanwhile, will not be silenced. “Idiots!
Air that goes in comes out. If it did not
We should have suffocated long ago.
A hundred small blowguns are just as bad
As one big one. Are also just as good.
We can attack the strangers when we wish.
Or can attack the Curucu. But why?
Hang back and let them kill each other. Rape,
If we assume the Mountain has been raped,
They can avenge as easily as we.
That is, their corpses can. And now, My Lord,
Cut out my tongue, or when I have been sold
My buyers will be well informed as you.”
…
The cableway construction camp is rope
And fabric, rather as if in the trees
A large balloon had wrecked. Here, red of neck
And red of beard, red-eyed, Norell McCain
Is lying in a hammock. Mirror hung
Uncertainly and basin on a stump,
An angered Roland Galt is red of throat,
His razor having cut him. “Bloody soap.
My face is like sandpaper.”
“Grow a beard.
We’ll make a colonist out of you yet.
You’re onto saying ‘bloody’.”
“Not quite. Nose
Rings might be next, and after that sharp bones
�Stuck-in wherever.”
“Which brings us to:
Has anybody ever figured out
How sex works in a hammock? Have the natives?”
“No, and the attempts were all mistakes.
Freak shows. It’s how straitjackets were discovered.
How spider monkeys got conceived. Don’t think
About it.”
“I suppose if you could get
Both legs firm on the ground, and grip the tree…”
“Is that a proposition?”
“Desperate,
But not that desperate.”
“Oh well, take heart.
Our hotel architect gets here next week.
His name, according to the messengers,
Is Artemus Davant, and anyone
Who has a name like that has got to be
A little odd. You’ll have a choice. Get up:
We have to show the natives how to roast.”
“Roast what?”
“Roast coffee beans. Or do you plan
To go on chewing coca leaves all day?”
�III
East of Suez
At Soerakarta,in the Dutch East Indies,
Karsen Trip, a twenty-five year old
Zoologist already widely published,
Is going over for a second time
A cablegram he does not quite believe.
“…some dozen of the dragons. Breeding pairs,
Enough to stock a modest game reserve
And presently allow small hunts each year.
You payment will be as we may agree,
But will include a figure…based upon
How many reptiles reach Roraima live.
Expense in Komodo are of course
Included. Yours sincerely, Christie Hood.”
Although he lives on spacious private means,
The figure pops Mijnheer Trip’s blue eyes out
�“Land-crocodiles in South America,”
The young man muses, putting into Dutch
His Javanese for the Komodo “dragon,”
V. Komodoensis, otherwise.
The Giant Monitor. “For all I know,”
He thinks, “ a dozen may be all of them.
I ought to turn him down, but Krakatoa
Killed off more than ever hunters will.
So much for natural selection. And,
What other chance to see them at close range?”
Between the gables of the bungalow,
Whose forms South Africans would recognize,
And of which Baker is not unaware,
A low verandah takes the heat, the lamps,
In spite of which, across the waxen tile,
As if a lizard went, a chill goes by.
Trip recognizes it for what it is:
Challenge, in its extremest, closest form-The dragon, of the fear of fear-of-death.
…
Henk’s Soerabaja Bar, a seedy twin,
In Soerakarta, of the Soerakarta
Bar in Soerabaja, is a shed
Among high palms. It too has lamps, the which
Sedately swing in midnight’s last of wind.
Drunk, Mijnheer Trip is shopping. He must have,
For his excursions, a dependable
Boy. Indonesians will not nearly do,
�As they are much too frail, and terrified
Of Varanus, known to them by reputation
If not by the experience direct.
A dark trio of merchant seamen flunks,
One after brute another, being each
Too stupid for the job description, part
Of which is to be Trip’s companion-valet,
Part of which is to be trapper-guide.
But now a massive, sober, yellow lascar
Stands by Trip. “What is your name?” Trip asks.
“I? Lothringen. My friends call me Lorraine.”
“I take it that your friends are mostly French?”
He knows his history. Since Bismarck’s war
Alsace-Lorraine is Elsass-Lothringen.
“Not necessarily. Would you prefer
To be called Elsass, or be called ‘Al’s ass”,
As you Americans pronounce Alsace.”
“I’m not American. My name is Trip.
I’m Dutch. What makes you think I’m not?”
“You spoke.
And you are in a bar. Not at the Club.
I cannot really tell you what I am.
My father was--I think--a Legionnaire.
My mother was a Madagascarene,
But she was half Chinese. We came back out
Quite early. I grew up in Sarawak.”
“I’m looking for a trapper.”
“I can trap.
Trap what I want.”
Trap animals, I mean.”
“Before I went to sea I spent some time
�As first gun-bearer to the late White Rajah.
He was all but blind. I dealt with wounds
And crippled water buffalo a lot.”
“I’m leaving in a fortnight for Komodo.
Will you come?”
“A dragon hunt? They live
On Lombok too, you know. We had a few
In Sarawak. One tried to eat the Ranee.
Lady Brooke was anything but blind.
The trophy is above her mantelpiece.”
“Opinion is, they will not go for humans.”
“Tell the Ranee.”
“Will you come?”
“For money,
No.”
“The price can be as we arrange.”
A smell of gin and rum and kerosene
Moves in the dead Cape Jasmine as the wind
Dies utterly and as the lamps burn out.
The smoke puts shadows on the White Man’s forehead
“Noon tomorrow at the sugar docks.”
…
A beach in Lombok, where a low surf crashes
And a pair of cots is under nets.
Side-on toward the warming morning sun,
A dragon lizard rises into life.
His forked tongue licks out to try the air;
His clear eyelids resist it in distrust.
The coldest blood, however, has its warmth.
He flicks a massive tail, and fronts the foe,
�Which is himself in slickest replica.
He stiffens, and the enemy responds
In kind. The reptile brain, the deep,
Intent automaton, will venture what it is
To have at once and wholly what it wants.
Imperative and challenge, risk and prize
Come down to one, as does what bodies them.
The fruitless serpent of the mindless tree
Will have his triumph nonetheless.
Invention, in the absence of the natural,
Will breed its sports as if it were a graft.
…
A small flotilla--six high-load canoes-Arrives at Camp Louisiana Purchase
In Guiana. From the last, in boots,
Straw boater, insect veils, and starchy blouse,
Steps out a slim young woman. Roland Galt
Receives her in blank, candid puzzlement.
“Miss. I was here to meet an architect.”
“You do. My name is Artemis Davant.
�IV
On Top of Roraima
A rare clear day, and where the nations three,
On maps at any rate, precisely join,
The twenty mile square flattop mountain shows
Its red steep sides. The forests at its base
Thin-out to the immense savannas; cool,
An air upon the summit somewhat thick
Thins-out beyond the station on the prow.
In sheaves too much exposed, the cables turn.
The hotel architect turns on the gear
A practiced Arts and Crafts cold eye. Say she:
“I don’t mean to offend you, Mr. Galt,
But this construct of yours just does not seem,
Well, serious. It’s like a carrousel.
So temporary. Like a Ferris Wheel.”
Galt curses silently his heritage.
“It got the roof beams to you, didn’t it?”
“I do not speak of its efficiency;
I speak of its appearance. Let me build
A kiosk for it.”
“As you like. My thought
Was that our visitors might like to see
Machinery.”
“Undoubtedly they would,
And that is why it should be well concealed.
If I exposed my furnaces to them
�They would not feel that they had left Pittsburgh.”
“They would, they would,” Galt thinks, but banks his fires.
Does not bank them enough, it now appears,
As Artemis Davant looks straight at him.
“The only naked furnaces on view
At present, Mr. Galt, are in your eyes.
I’d not be shocked at such offensiveness
In poor Norell McCain, but out of you?
‘Unbridled lust‘ is not the phrase. That means
At some point it was bridled. Waterfalls
Are showers cold indeed, and I see scores,
But I do not see you two under them.
We work together. And I cannot work
If I am stared at like a can-can girl.
And do not think that I’m some sheltered prude.
I used to draw from models in a life class.
Meanwhile, if you would care to look at me
Not as an architect but as a woman,
Call on me and meet my chaperon.”
Galt is good looking and aware of it.
He grins somewhat to focus- down the flame.
“I’ve met your aunt. I had my ears slapped back
By her too. That time it was innocent.”
“Marie St. Boniface is not my aunt
Nor anybody else’s. She’s a nun.
Or was. She fell in love with Captain Dreyfus.
Left the convent to stuff envelopes
For Zola. Then she put on Zouave dress
And got as far as Martinique. Her sense
�Of place out in the colonies is vague.”
“A bride of Christ would tend to pick a Jew.”
“Yes. He was the only man of whom she had seen
More pictures than of Jesus. She had hoped
To nurse him, but the French authorities
Would not permit her nearer than Cayenne.
I found her in Georgetown and hired her on.”
“High boots on chaste Diana and a nun
For chaperon… You’ve heard of triple brass?”
“In art school armor would have been a mercy.
One felt safer on the streets of Delhi.
Tea is at half-past, outside my tent.
You will be welcome, Mr. Galt, but dodge
Your own I have no doubt lax chaperon.”
…
Her mentor, having no desire himself
To sail halfway around the world to look
On Table Mountain magnified five times
And reddened in the geological
Equivalent of red shift, has allowed
His student full discretion as to site.
She has so situated his hotel
That it is nowhere near the cableway,
Infuriating her construction crews,
And sacrificing drama on the prow,
But sheltering its all too open rooms
From all but the plateau’s most stubborn fogs,
Using the mountain’s undulating face
�For views that, after its thrice-nightly rains,
Quite shame the Falls of Iguassu. “Thank God,”
Says she, “we do not have a Tablecloth.
The fog ascends. It does not form on top.
We have a chance at fairly sunny days.”
“You grew up in the Cape, Miss Artemis?”
“In Durban, where I learned to speak Tamil,
That being why the Bakers took me in.
Pretoria, linguistically, was quite
Beyond him. Delhi speaks less English still.
Is that red hair of yours South African?”
McCain, who on the just completed stoep
Looks out toward Venezuela not with fire
But ashes, looks back toward that fine profile
Which is the torch of them. “Unless my dad
Was, no. But I know Cape Dutch when I see it”
Artemis is much amused. “You’re right;
I am the last who would deny it. What
We have is Groote Schuur with outside stairs
And mammoth window bays in both the gables.
Baker never does more than he must,
And when Sir Christie cut the estimates…”
“Some people have it easy. Iron-Jaw Galt’s
Had women at his feet since he was ten.
He has them like they went by on a wheel.”
The architect permits herself a wink.
“Well if he hasn’t it is not for want
Of trying. Boniface says he is snake
�And apple and the flaming sword in one.
But Boniface comes late to all of that.
It’s she who’s bound as on the torture wheel.
Real women, do you notice, are perverse.
Do not jump off of lover’s leap just yet.”
V
At Sea--Roraima--Johannesburg--At Sea
�The Matson freighter Mangareva strains
To hold at thirteen knots. Eastbound from Truk
She has, penned-up upon her fantail, ten
Immense Komodo Dragons, fatly fit
Upon a diet mostly suckling pigs
And such few rats as her Malaysian cooks
Can be annoyed to trap. One deck above,
In spotless, dazzling linen, white enough
To be a garment for Lord Jim come back
As medic-ghost-archangel, Karsen Trip
Looks on his charges. “Seven females, four
Grown males, including, that is, our old boy
Who walked the plank with your chronometer
Inside. Have you seen Peter Pan, Mijnheer?”
“Eleven times. I have eleven small
Grandchildren. You--I speak now as the Bridge-Are here advised to keep that half-breed giant
Of yours confined to quarters. Am I clear?
I do not want him mixing with my crew.
They have their own Far East depravities.
And if you have him on the quarterdeck
Procuring Chinks for you I’ll put you off
At Molokai, newts, him, pound sterling all.”
The Captain leaves as if to point his threat,
And as he mounts the port companionway
The Mangareva rises in a head-on swell.
It throws the reptiles on their wire restraints;
One--three hundred pounds of sated sloth-Breaks free and goes agilely at the steps;
And as if now imagining himself
�To be a python, eats in measured gulps
The bottom two-thirds of the Captain, who,
A look of much vexation on his face,
Calls out “Exterminate the brutes,” and dies.
…
Two hours in bed, Marie St. Boniface,
In saffron lamplight, reads from her inscribed
Proof copy of J’Accuse. A face so plain
As to seem ageless has protected her
From perils she can only guess at, or,
Before Guiana, only could. Her tent
Flap lifts, and, nightgowned, Artemis Davant,
Whose is the other camp bed, comes in damp.
“The worst fog yet. The Mountain cannot see
Its drenched hired hands before its dripping face.”
“And just as well. At sundown, on my hike,
I saw our gloomy Mr. Red McCain
Showering in the East Face cataract.
He will contract pneumonia. How cold
That water can be at the best of times!”
“Oh, he’s robust.”
“And since he’s shaved his beard
So much more youthful looking. Younger, some,
Than his superior. I did not think,
At first, he was. What is it, Artemis,
That makes one pick one man above another?”
“His pince-nez?” the architect restrains
Herself from saying. “Drive,” she honestly
Replies, but wonders if she really knows.
“Except in special circumstances, like--
�Inheriting a firm that silvers mirrors,
One would never make Narcissus mate.
One would not want one’s children, how to say,
Not to inherit drive. Or otherwise
One would surely have them always at home.”
“At home? I think that I should like that.”
“No,
You would not. It would be your convent breached
And you without your freedom. That is what
The Serpent of the Garden did not say
Sufficiently to Eve our driven mother.
Hence we live out yet her discontents.”
“The Serpent has also his discontents.
Your engineer is laying leagues of pipe
To have a nearby shower of his own.”
…
Narayan Dar, the Lady Elva Hood’s
Upwardly mobile butler, slams her door
Abruptly in the wholly guileless face
Of an officious adolescent who,
However, goes on to insist, at length,
He is a cousin. “Not her cousin. Yours.
I’ve come here all the way from Trinidad.”
The stately servant grudgingly relents.
“Go to the rear and have the kaffirs feed you.
“I’ll be there when I go off at ten.”
Pandokkies in Parktown are not less mean
For being Parktown, and the garconniere
Narayan occupies is one small room.
The cousin is asleep there in a fug
�Of curry over mealie pap.
“Get up.
I do not need strange bedbugs in my bed.”
“Superb my cousin. Know you of the plan
Your master has to cheat the Portuguese?”
“Is there a side to choose? The Goanese
Incline one toward the servants of the Raj.”
“No no. The Portuguese who are Brazil.”
“The border controversy? Certainly
I know. I am applying for the job
Of major-domo at the fort-hotel.”
“Exactly. Venezuela has a plan…”
…
“Hands off the crew, Lorraine. That French First Mate
Seems even more a prude than Captain Fitch.”
“He’s French Canadian.”
“So much the worse.
And I’m in no position now to pay
Hush money. Rajah Brooke’s huge appetite
Has cost us more than he’d have brought us live.”
“He is alive.”
“What do you mean alive?
I saw him trussed and lowered overboard.
It was the only way to give poor Fitch
A decent burial.”
“I cut the cords
As he went over. He has followed us
To eat our garbage. I swam out last night
And fought him to exhaustion. He’s on board
And running loose around the forecastle.
The crew feed him live chickens.”
�“Lots of them,
I hope. If he attacks another man
There’ll be a mutiny. Farewell commodes,
Farewell Lorraine, and farewell Trapper Trip.”
VI
In the Camp of the Tepi-Pupu and Elsewhere
Ipupu of the Tepi-Pupu, hidden
In the putrescent waters-cannibal
Of an enormous pitcher plant, and well
Aware his skin is being eaten off,
Is watching in wide-eyed puzzlement
Activity upon the cableway.
Eight crocodiles, of unfamiliar form,
Contained in woven wicker basket-weave
Of necessarily fantastic strength,
Have been positioned on two large hooks
�Depending from the cable, so to rise
Impassive to the city in the sky.
Ipu long since has ceased to be surprised
At what goes on up there, but this exceeds.
A White Man who has not been seen before
Appears to be in charge; he is companioned
By his caboclo, who is on a scale
So large the Indian sinks to his nose
In fright. He chokes, and both men look at him,
But take no action. He has picked his blind
On the assumption no one else would hide
Inside a pitcher plant, or think to look,
Its chalice being mildly poisonous.
Lorraine and Trip would not have, but because
They do not know what pitchers are, nor that
There is surveillance. “It’s a little boy,”
Trip says. “He looks a real Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”
“Or a pygmy in a plant for privy.”
…
Colon in Panama, and as the sun
Sets in the green Atlantic, to the wreck
Of those who do not understand the Isthmus,
Hotel Washington announces dinner.
First to enter is the Rajah Brooke,
Who, earlier, at Miraflores Lock,
Has jumped ship. Here, he eats at once two hams,
A swan carved out of ice, and one foot each
Off both the busboys. As the ice chills down
�His reptile blood he sinks to torpid sleep,
And is there dealt with by the Shore Patrol,
Who all agree that they have handled worse.
…
Etak Etak scrubs off the itching back
Of her decanted consort, who reports
“Apparently they worship them as gods.
Two priests attend them, offering them pigs.
Perhaps they are gods.”
“Gods would reach the sky
Without the aid of ropes, nor would they let
Themselves be bound in bamboo. These are beasts.”
“All who defile the mountaintop are beasts.”
“And can be killed as such. While you were stuck
In She-Who-Swallows-Flies I went to fish.
Not in the eastern streams but in the west.
A stranger came, in a canoe of fire.
He was not from the mountaintop. At least
His language was not theirs. He spoke our own.
He gave us this, and said that if we do
That he desires we shall have weapons too.”
And from concealment near the fire, Etak
Takes out a pair of pliers six feet long.
…
The upper cable station, Artemis
Would be first to admit, is what she built
As “folly.” It has sweeping cornices
Suggesting wings, and the entire effect
Is as if on the Mountain’s narrow prow
A steel and concrete pterodactyl sat.
�Bright cables turn, and in a shining car
As if arriving from a planet new,
A blond young man comes to the untrod stair.
Behind a circular, clear aperture,
A window of, and onto mannerism,
Artemis is watching. She wears pearls.
The always level, gray-eyed measured gaze
That froze the life class fixes on the face,
To turn at once away. And in that turn,
That shows her profile, she converts a view.
“The profile of a goddess,” Trip compares.
“A goddess modeling as for a coin.:
A chokered head on a medallion.”
Another car arrives, from which, in boots,
Dark jodhpurs, and a belt of leopard skin,
A servant-guardian emerges, tall,
Quick, powerful. And after him draw up,
One after another, eight of the commodes.
“I was expecting swords,” says Artemis.
“Not dragons. Not just yet.”
“Swords?” Trip inquires.
“As decorations.,” Artemis assures.
“Swords to be crossed above the mantelpieces.”
Karsen Trip allows his vision now
To take in background to the deity.
He sees, across the mesa’s broken rock,
A sort of causeway stretch, and at its end,
In fog and sunlight, what might be, elsewhere,
Government House. He shrugs, and to the way’s
Designer, for whom background also fades,
Announces, “I cannot be certain yet,
�But I see nothing here that would suggest
The Monitor cannot survive in this terrain.
It’s bare, but parts of their own habitat
Are just as barren.”
“I thought that Komodo
Was a jungle.”
“So it is. Lombok,
However, isn’t. It has lava fields.”
“Assuming we succeed, and that they live,
What must I do to keep them from the building?
Trust the hunters?”
“What you have done here.
High walls and overhanging cornices.
Even the largest of them can climb well.”
“And what about your own life, Mr. Trip?
Can you be happy here? Can you survive?”
Trip nods. “All that it takes to create Eden
Is a man, a woman, and a reptile,”
…
McCain is forced to hear his tent-mate rave.
“I am not going to call a man Lorraine.“
“I wouldn’t argue. Did you see the size
Of that half-breed?” Norell McCain is less
Than sympathetic with the jealous rage
Of Roland Galt. “You are well out of it
It‘s obvious it will be open war
Among the chaperons. I saw this noon
‘Lorraine‘ give Artemis Davant a look
That would have frightened Genghjs Khan to death.
He watches over Trip as rabidly
�As Attila the Nun guards Artemis.
The only dragons here aren‘t the commodes.”
McCain‘s ten-mate is twisting in his hands
The helpless central lodge pole of the tent.
“Let go the pole. You’ll screw us in the ground.”
“If need be I‘ll fight Attila and Trip
And you and all the dragons and Lorraine.
That woman was in love with me. I know.”
“Do you know how to spell f-i-c-k
e-l?”
No; you don’t either. It’s l-e.”
“Can you spell f-u-c-k-u? I can.”
VII
At the Grand Hotel
On Saturday before the opening
The cable brings a rich variety:
A score of suckling pigs, some for the guests;
An armory of decorator swords;
Ten jeroboams of a good champagne,
And these entrusted to the bamboo weave
That brought up safely eight live monitors;
A crate of goats; two geese; a wireless set;
A carpet bag of purplish needlepoint;
A string trio; its stands and instruments;
Preceded by its legs, a grand piano;
Guns enough to stage the Jameson Raid;
And, two days early, Arthur Conan Doyle.
…
“I like it all,” says Lady Elva Hood,
“Except that Hanging Garden on the cliff.
A bit like Monte Carlo, don’t you think?
�Suicide Terrace?”
“Only if you miss,
Milady.” Artemis, who cut her teeth
On vicereines, takes the Press Lord’s wife in stride.
A spruced-up, Bengal-looking Lothringen
Is not so fortunate. “Dear God,” he says.
“It’s Lady Brooke. The Ranee.”
“What we know,”
Says Karsen, passing in white tie and tails,
“As learning nothing and forgetting nothing.”
“Vengeance. You have not seen what she’s like.”
In the receiving line Sir Christie Hood
Shakes hands with a Brazilian minister,
Who does not let his thoughts on boundaries
Deter him from a party. Lady Brooke
Is deep in conversation with a youth
Who is a son of Teddy Roosevelt,
Not that the name would signify to her.
“I’ve shot the brutes before. Go for the eye.”
Behind the trio and its potted palms
A sotto voice below the Eva waltz,
Trip whispers in the ear of Artemis,
Who wears a jeweled crescent in her hair.
The moment lengthens in the extra beat of love.
To three who watch, the scene screams at the eye.
McCain and Lothringen and Roland Galt,
Unlikely to make common cause, have one.
…
St. Boniface, unable to decide
What she can rightly wear, does not attend.
She stands, in ever-dampening late night,
On that small terrace Lady Hood dislikes.
�Her thoughts are suicidal truly. “So
Far, Alfred, and so near. Between us now
No barrier but air. I almost see
That vile confine of your imprisonment.”
The nun’s geography has not improved.
It is as vague as her chronology,
And if her line of sight were much extended
She would see Caracas. But the sky
Of her despair cannot be limited.
Theology was never much more clear
For her than azimuth, and she debates
If suicide is more a mortal sin
Than living always as a Dreyfusard.
The answer will, just now, not be revealed.
A painted hand is clapped across her mouth
From an imported orange tree above,
And she is pitched across the balustrade.
…
From printing promptings Arthur Conan Doyle
Addresses curtly the assembled guests.
“All I can say is that we have here life-Uh--imitating art--er--imitating
Life. Since nature has so thoughtlessly
Not put upon Roraima dinosaurs,
We have provided them. A year or two
And we can have a proper hunt. For now
We can afford to shoot one specimen
Alone. I wish you well. For Mr. Trip,
Whose scientific knowledge and whose skill
�Has made this entertainment possible,
Our thanks.” A little figure at the wide,
Now open door into the dining room
Raps twice upon the parquet’s pale rare wood
And sticks his staff into the speaker’s face.
The author and the guests assume alike
He is an actor hired to entertain.
But Lady Elva hides her eyes and screams.
“Take him away. It is Narayan Dar.”
“You are distraught,” her tranquil husband says.
“It clearly cannot be.”
“The head,” she shrieks
“The head upon the staff. The shrunken head.
It is Narayan pure. The eyebrow scar.”
…
“The worst of it,” so Lady Hood will say,
Years later, to Jan Christian Smuts, “was how
The head was fresh. It dripped. Was wet and dripped.
It shriveled -up the length of needle point
I made to be the bell-pull in the hall.”
…
The head reductionist is seized by Trip,
Who leaps across the cello case, and Galt,
Who topples all the music stands.
The Tepi-Pupu offers no resistance,
But before the men can pin his arms
A loud explosion, coming more or less
From the direction of the gun room, rocks
Hood’s ballroom, jumbles its precise parquet,
And swings the chandelier as if in wind.
Young Mr. Roosevelt writes off right there
A modest fortune in his father’s guns,
But Ranee Brooke nods at the Guianese
�Who mans the cloakroom and is handed thence
Her rifle, saying something, possibly,
About the social life of Sarawak.
VIII
The Same--in the Camp--In the Gun Room
A line boss from the Narrow Gauge runs in,
Waving a German pistol in the air
As if it were the flagpole of a flag
Shot off. “The CooCoos have revolted. Run!
I’ve lost a dozen men. We have the line
Still open but I’m not sure for how long.“
Removing lamps from Baker’s trademark sconces,
Guests and staff rush toward the portico,
And, like a lynch mob each Diogenes,
Onto the causeway. Arriving at the prow,
The vanguard is demoralized to see,
Strap-hanging as it were, the Curucu
Come up the cable hanging-on by hand.
The White Ranee is not demoralized.
She lifts her rifle and with perfect aim
Begins to pick them off. Each hunter there,
If he is honest, envies her the chance.
It is a moonlit shooting gallery.
“Fruit dropping off the vine,” says Hood their host,
And hurries all of his distinguished guests
Into the next car that draws up. “Wait! Stop!
Cries Roland Galt, before the gate can close
“The gondola was empty. We don’t know
What’s on the ground.”
“I think that we’re all right,”
The line boss answers. “I see flares below.”
A second car arrives, and when it goes
�Five persons only still are at the top,
St. Boniface still unaccounted for,
The servants having fled for who knows where.
Who knows in point of fact is Pu- Tahi,
Ipupu’s sorcerer reductionist,
Who in the panic has been let escape,
And leads, no doubt for reasons of his own,
A double file of ashen refugees
For the Brazilian face. It being night
They are not threatened by the dragons, but,
Not knowing this, break file at every sound.
Awaiting the opposing cable car,
That rises as its opposite descends,
Are Trip and Galt and Artemis Davant,
McCain, and, as a token menial,
He who is called, except by Galt, Lorraine.
For no cause Galt can see, the cable stops.
“Oh do restart it,” Artemis implores.
“If we are separated from the rest of us
We’ll never make the railhead.”
“If we do
Where are we,” Galt replies. “The Narrow Gauge
Has only handcars for its rolling stock.
Its locomotives are in Sheffield still.”
As he tugs backward on the master grip
An eerie twang, an A below low A,
Vibrates against the cliff as sounding board,
And, harp of harps, the cable separates.
�A flailing end, a living tentacle
From what azoic beast in the abyss,
Encircles Red McCain around the waist,
Triumphantly swings him above the edge,
And drops him screaming off the precipice.
…
A fleet of handcars, headed by a peer,
The Lady Elva Hood, a K.B.E.,
Large dogs, and Ranee Iris Dudley Brooke,
Is pumping madly past the darkened camp
Of Chief Ipupu, soon made bonfire -bright
(Unwisely, given the proximity
And present mood of ten-score Curucu
Who were not moving targets of the hunt)
By pyramids of the abandoned lamps.
The kerosene begins to leak; the fire
Leaps up. Etak Etak, her arms upraised,
Assumes a pose of priestly dignity,
The six foot long wire cutters in her hands.
…
“I’m sorry. I’m still sick.” Davant sits down
Upon a broad up-ended rifle rack.
Trip turns a champagne bottle to her lips.
“If I had had the sense to look away.”
Destruction in the gun room seems complete.
No rifle is in working order, nor
Does it much matter, ammunition too
A casualty of packing and revolt.
“We can’t stay here,” says Trip. “Who knows how long
To send a rescue column.”
�“Could one live
Indefinitely on champagne? I feel improved
At thinking so.”
“Die happily,
At any rate,” says Lothringen, whose own
Capacity is magna at a time.
“We have two choices,” Galt enumerates.
“Yes. Mumm and Piper Heidsieck.“.Vows default.
“Shut up, Lorraine. Two choices, neither good.
Stay here and starve to death, and that assumes
The Curucu will not be back, or, worse,
Maybe, try making our way down the face.
Need I remind you that the only route
Lies over dragon country. Thank you, Trip.”
“No face except Brazil is feasible?”
Galt sneers. “Would you like to attempt the prow?”
“What do we know about the western face?”
“It’s Venezuela, to whom, I suspect,
We owe four troubles in the first place.”
“Speed,”
Says Artemis. “Can men outrun the things?”
“On grass and pavement, yes. On broken ground
The Monitors have all of the advantage.”
Trip goes on. “If we can beat the sun
Our friends will still be sluggish. Can we reach
Brazil and do the ledge before the heat“
“We have a narrow window. It‘s from dawn
Till nine. We cannot hope to go at night.
We do not know the route, and if we’re lost
Out there when that cold blood is warming up…”
�“We are unarmed,” Lorraine reminds the group.
“Unarmed completely. I will fight bare-hand
In water. On land, no.”
“But we have arms,”
Says Artemis, and rushes from the room.
When she returns she carries, like a page
In some bygone Mid-Eastern entourage,
A Persian sword that hung above a mantel.
“Baker insisted on the best. It’s real.”
IX
At the Grand Hotel, cont.
It is the only weapon that is real.
The others, it turns out, are painted plaster.
�“In two words, bugger Booker’s,” Artemis
Unladylikely says, echoing what
Would be Guiana’s anthem, did it not
Lack music. Forwarders, wholesalers, crooks,
That firm adds forgery to its deceits.
“One sword among us,” Galt redundantly
Points out. “One chance. Does it make better sense
To go as four or go as two and two?
A man’s a full meal. He could bring delay.”
“Lorraine is more than one,” thinks Artemis,
Who knows Trip’s shadow hates her, and may well
Be more a danger than she yet has faced.
She looks at Galt. “The team with the best odds
Would be of course the one that knows the most
About the reptiles: Trip and Lothringen.”
Better, she thinks, to have it come from her
Than have Lorraine suggest it, and she knows
It has occurred to him. No man, and least
Of all a jealous one, is so opaque
As that. ‘Inscrutability’ exists
Behind the footlights only. “Torches. Fire.
Are they afraid of it?”
“Yes. But no torch
Would last that long. We have too far to go.”
Trip puts an arm around her. “I am sure
We all agree your safety is the thing
That is the main consideration.”
“I
Do not agree. I am the odd man out.
Odd woman out. I should not like to live
With it upon me I had cost the life
Of any man and let alone of three.
�I’ll stay, and trust you three to summon help.”
“Or Mein Herr Galt can stay with you,” says one.
“Not bloody likely,” Mijnheer Trip replies.
The extra-sensory, if it exists,
Exists for just such crises, and the mind
Of Lothringen is as exposed to Galt
As it is dark to Trip. The ESP
Sparks over race and distance and distrust.
He’s figuring out how to get rid of us
So he and Trip can get away alive.
Clairvoyance is by definition clear.
And it is not--not just--to save his skin.
“Draw lots,” says Artemis. “But not till dawn.
It’s that or have you stay awake all night.
A fool could see you do not trust each other
Not to take the sword and flit by night.”
“Trust one another,” Galt corrects in silence.
But the inner ether sparks again
And it occurs to him that Artemis
Referred advisedly to two. Cheat, clear
As song, projects as with the ether’s aid.
See to it I’m not left with Lothringen.
Telepathy implies the out-of-body.
Out of Red McCain’s disjected body
Comes as if to say “Beware the Ides”
A voice which says in fact “You cannot mean
To let that Far East Kaffir have a chance
To have a White girl in his debt. Come to.”
The Limbo of the Old Colonial,
Upon the evidence South Africa,
�Or, possibly, the middle management
At Booker’s, calls the warning echo back
And Roland Galt must function as he can.
“That Kaffir possibly one could,” he thinks
But hears again Limbo. “How desperate
Is desperate?”
“Much better not to know,”
He formulates as his convinced reply.
“I’d better keep the one true sword myself,”
The White Rose says. I guess I’ll sleep with it.
All of the properties of chivalry
And all of its discomforts. Rest you well.
I’m sorry Mr. Baker built no tower.”
…
“Release the goats,” says Trip to Lothringen.
“Satiety will be the best ally
We have.”
“The only.”
When his aide is gone
Trip finds himself on Baker’s service stair
In declasse debate with Roland Galt.
“What is the opposite, in Double Dutch
Of well done good and faithful servant?”
“One
Of you,” Trip answers, ”will betray me. Not
That Lorraine would.”
“But could he Don’t pretend
You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“In Ceram
He has a wife and children.”
“Marvelous
�What thirty guilders will accomplish, no?”
“I ought to strike you.“
“Don’t. Just do you not
Suppose if in the morning when we draw
He wins, he will not take the sword and go.
At that point he will cease to be your ‘boy’
And let alone your servant. I and you
Will have to take him on. It will take both.”
…
“One foot outside the door,” says Artemis.
“I’ve lost one chaperon and now have two.”
The unlit corridor and unlit room
Do not conceal the faces pressing close.
The numismatic profile, in full face,
Is very young, as is the dragon-herd’s.
“You Dutchmen in the Indies never lose,
Somehow, a look of ice and silver skates.”
“Appearances deceive. Our blood warms up.”
The Old Hand’s youth is in his urging.”
“No.
I hope with all my heart the draw is yours
But if it isn’t I go with the draw
No man should have to fight a dragon, Karsen,
For the sake of damaged goods. Goodnight.”
…
Not on an impulse, neither for a reason,
Roland Galt, before he heads for bed,
Goes down between the potted orange trees
And down the seven flights of zigzag stairs
To stroll the Suicide Parterre. So far
It is a night without fog. Bright moonlight
�Picks out, across the mountain’s southeast bay,
The day’s last waterfall, already going dry.
It is a spurting stream of diamonds.
Below him Galt can see the mist begin:
A patch or two, and then a ground of haze.
He leans upon the plaster balustrade;
His cigarette case drops out of his shirt.
Putting one leg across the balusters
To try the ledge, he climbs a few feet down.
The, reaching out an arm to pull back up,
He feels a giant’s grasp, and easily
Is lifted like an infant from a tub.
“If you are jumping, don’t. If you are climbing,
Wait.” The grip is Lothar Lothringen’s.
Around his shoulder is a coil of rope
And in his hand a little alpenstock.
They are, for Galt, at once familiar.
“Those are McCain’s. He had them in the camp.”
“He brought them topside for the opening.
Sir Christie thought the guests might like to climb.”
“Another weapon is another chance.”
“The alpenstock? Too short. Pick; handle too.
The handle brings one well within the jaws.
The pick would hardly pierce the outer skin.
I do not say it is not useful still.
I’ve done no climbing, but it’s time to learn.”
He hooks the pick beneath the other’s belt
And lifts him anything but playfully.
“Come with me. As you have seen, we are de trop
With Eve and Adam and the fruit up there.”
Galt feels that he is being cut in two
�By pressure of his inseams. “Put me down.”
“You haven’t answered my nice invitation.”
“I’ve climbed here, but that’s all there is of it.”
The East may be the fount of irony.
“All you will have to do is hang on tight.”
He hands him, handle first, the alpenstock.
“This is in case you’d like to sleep with it.”
…
As dawn breaks, the two men have formed a “rope.”
What nags at Galt is not the being bound
But what he hears McCain say out of Limbo.
“Face it, Man. You were just something kept,
As one might say, on Miss Lorraine’s back burner.”
X
Without the Gates
Nature, supportive always of the hopes
Of man, puts out the brightest day in years.
A mammoth sun soars out of green Guiana,
Reddening the Mountain’s red sandstone.
The heat of day comes hard upon the dawn.
Trip has the sword in hand; he and the girl
Are at the gates. Eroded tableland,
A sort of Cappadocia countersunk,
Spreads out before them, dully glistening.
“It looks like German architecture: Poelzig”
Artemis comments abstractedly.
“It isn’t Petra. Half as old as time
Means here the fauna. With a little luck
We’ll miss them altogether. They aren’t bright,
�And if you wanted to invent a place
For them to like and stay, you’d be hard put
To better those depressions there. Keep close;
We’re sticking to the high ground” Not, it soon
Is patent, wise. Upon a narrow neck
Between two sinkholes rears a large female,
Her grooved tongue flickering in semaphore.
“You shall not eat of every tree?” it spells.
“Here is the beast,” Trip thinks, “and here the field,
But where’s the subtlety? And no fruit keeps.”
The tongue is bifurcated, what it says
Ambiguous. “Ye shall not surely die.”
“Maybe, but I would say the odds aren’t good.”
Trip lifts the sword and aims it for the brain.
“If I am mangled take the sword and leave.
They always will prefer dead meat to live.”
…
Eight decades or an eon into time,
In the vicinity of Krakatoa, quakes
Are picked up on the open seismographs
As far as Honolulu. In the straits
At Lombok, later in the afternoon,
A monstrous bulge is seen upon the water,
Breaking to become a quiet cloud
Of a peculiar yellow. Drifting east
It settles toward Komodo, parts, re-forms.
It is a lazy, doubled crescent now,
Advancing on the Flores coast like rain,
Or like Imperial Japan’s last fleets:
�A suicide armada on the move,
Behind some mile-high cloud of chlorine gas.
XI
Roraima--Manaus
Augustus Phelan, of Pacific Heights
And of the San Francisco curia
In the Sierra Club, collects the tour
Of which he is the organizer-guide
In the impressively restored foyer
Of Grand Hotel Guyana-Tepi, Cape
Dutch monument to a generic past,
That being, the country’s circumstances,
Relevant as any other kind.
The Booker Companies, the catering
Franchise, have flown-in jello, frozen shrimp,
And large ice carvings, which, in noonday heat,
Have melted into smaller, other shapes
Than those intended, some of them obscene.
“As soon as we are finished with our lunch,”
Says Dr. Phelan, ”we can take our cameras
And set off for the dragon pits. These are,
You know, the last surviving specimens
Of the Komodo Giant Monitor.
�In Indonesia it is now extinct.”
“It isn’t. In the Sumba Strait last year
I counted three. They swim as well as whales.”
The speaker is a Stanford botanist,
A longtime Baker Street Irregular,
To whom the tour was somewhat oversold.
“Fine news if true,” says Dr. Phelan suavely.
“Not, however, very likely.” He goes on:
“Varanus went out neither with a bang
Nor whimper. It went out as with a burp.
The gas eruptions of the 70s
Completed the destruction. We can thank
The foresight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And other humane conservationists
In founding the Roraima colony.
So far as we can tell from past accounts
The dragons here attain a greater size
Than ever was recorded in the wild.
It may be absence of competing life forms,
Diet, or selective breeding.. Trip’s
Originals are said to have been large
By what we think was standard for the time.
We are, in fact, as size for full grown males,
Well on the way to twenty feet. In short,
We’re breeding back, or forward if you like,
To proper dinosaurs. It’s The Lost World.
Now if you’ll gather up your cameras…”
…
�On their return the brave time travelers
Sense disarray in Booker’s caterers.
“You should have stayed in the hotel,” says one.
“A dragon jumped the wall and tried to mate
With one of my creations.”
“With the dolphin?”
“No. With R.M.S. Titanic. Froze
Right to it and went off into a stupor.
Took all six of us to drag him out.”
“Well can you blame him? Long before dessert
It looked more like an iceberg than a ship,
And God knows there’s no air-conditioning.”
…
The festival, so called, “Of All the World,”
Spoleto-in-Manaus, mounts this year
That well known Cariocan opera
Coq d’Or. Teatro Amazonas lights
At intermission like the Opera
De Monaco or like the Palais Garnier
Itself. Encumbered by the Slavic bulk
Of émigrés positioned on her right,
A handsome woman in her diamond
And eye-makeup-alone decades resumes
Her conversation from the interval
Preceding, toward the left. “A lovely house,
But surely in a rubber capital
One hopes for softer cushions. Was the dance
Recital dire? I could not bear to go.
The program spoke of bread and circuses.”
“That group, the Nicaraguans, never showed.
They all came down with Hepatitis B
�In Panama. We had a group from Guam
Who did a sketch about a hero type
Who saves a virgin from a dragon. Wild.
I mean a sketch.” The rich old lady smiles.
“That is as good a start for marriage
As any other.”
“Hate me if I ask,
But are you not Viscountess Norwich?”
“No.
I’m often taken for her. Years ago,
In Singapore in 1941,
I met her. Very princess-like. I’m flattered.”
“What do you suppose,” the seat mate asks,
“The Amazon was like in 1910?
They knew already that it would not last.
The rubber seeds were long since smuggled out.
Two years, the Federated Malay States
Would do them in. Would they have built this house
If they had really known?” The profile not
Viscountess Norwich answers. “Oh, I speak
To that. I know exactly how it was.
In 1940, in Batavia,
We knew too well the Japanese would come-The Germans had the Netherlands and France
Already--knew, I say, that they would come,
But we did not know when. That is content:
To have your goodbyes said and not know when.
Buitenzorg had things well in control;
Without the interference from the Hague,
Better than usual. It was a calm
Before the storm, but is there calm that‘s not?
�My sons were in the war, but they were safe;
In training, both of them, In Nova Scotia.
It was the best time of my marriage.
My husband, when the children still were young,
Was gone a lot. He was a scientist.
An expert on large lizards, if you please.
He had to sit through Wagner’s Siegfried once.
He found the opera ‘inaccurate’.
The threat of war kept him much more at home.
He had his funds to manage. I exist
On money that has gone from Tsarist bonds
To Royal Dutch to numbered Swiss accounts
To I.B.M. to gene research to gold.
I shall not tell you where I have it now.
But while we waited, every afternoon,
We sat in our pajamas on the lawn
And had the servants bring out ice and gin
And our two tortoise-shell fly swatters. These
Were our conceits. A gift from us to us.
They were for swatting little lizards with.
I had them with me on that last flight out
In 1942, and fortunate
I had. Australia is drenched in flies.
To dodge the Japs we had to fly at night.
A KLM eight-seat amphibian
Too old for the Defense to confiscate.
My husband put me on the plane at ten
And left for Flores in a motor launch.
He had experiments in progress there.
I have inferred--and I had seen his route--
�He ran into a Japanese task force.
No man should have to face a dragon twice.
I have run on and on. Did not shops here
Outlast the rubber barons? I’ve found none.”
“There is a little woman off the Square
Who deals in emeralds and shrunken heads.”
“Oh no. I might see old acquaintances
I had a project in Guiana once.”
“They both are copies. Who would shrink a head
That looked like Yoko Ono in the first place.”
“Who would ruin glass for emeralds.”
…
The Widow Trip goes shopping nonetheless.
Her progress takes her past a Beaux-Arts mile
And toward the River, where a floating market
Vies for the attention with a fair.
In a Brazilian switch, the carrousel
Is silent and the Ferris Wheel has sound.
Or has one sound. It’s “Don’t tell me the lights…”
Is stuck. The uncompleted five-note phrase
Is maddening, and Artemis supplies,
On beat, “are shining, anywhere but there.”
The shaded ticket stand is occupied,
And massively, by an enormous man
Who wears a top hat, and a jaguar skin
He is the color of. He does not shill,
Trusting to his appearance to attract,
Or to repel; there is no knowing which.
�A group of children buys a dozen fares
Without disturbing his indifference.
The man at the control is scrutable,
But seems to have some sort of injury.
Or be, perhaps, the victim of a stroke.
He pivots on one foot for all his moves,
And manages the two-hand grip with one.
A partial turn brings up a gondola;
In its design is something that the eye
Of one who used to be an architect
Responds to, but the congruence is gone
As quickly as it came. The wheel turns by;
A profile unmistakable, except
For Lady Norwich, turns full face, to see
The ‘grip’ look at her strangely. That, of course,
May be the stroke. The music comes unstuck;
The uncompleted sweeps on to its close.
The lights are shining as Diana leaves.
�XII
On the Rand
In Parktown in Johannesburg, the lion
And the lizard keep. Majestically
At Bright Kop, Herbert Baker’s lion gate
Looks out on nothing, and the empty house,
Upon its street side blind with trellises,
Is open toward the North for any view.
The sash-ropes blow out toward Pretoria;
Rust slows the wind vane. In that quarter lag,
Where East is North and North is West, dead calm
Will come; the compass-rose upon the hearth
Select its final wind, its final stop.
All choices are coincidence; all wheels
Are gambler’s wheels. East may, across two seas
And two emerging continents, point then
To where Roraima weights the boundaries.
Those also are coincidence. Or were.
Heraldic beasts around the mounted globe
Intimidate their small originals,
Who may defer, but who will multiply.
The shrinking head dries in its knowledge still;
Empire and Barbary are where you look;
The sword and dragon where they always were.
�
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Developing_the_lost_world
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https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/317d7166176efd460c02ae5277a462e5.pdf
4aeb0851c5fb2df20ca3e60872b9c2e0
PDF Text
Text
#1
I
Johannesburg
1913
“Call it the Mount Roraima Cableway
And Lost World Grand Hotel.”
“It’s copyright.
We’ll have to pay off Conan Doyle.”
“We’ll pay.
It’s issuing preferred stock for..”
Sir Christie Hood, the second richest man
In Parktown, and the richest not in mines,
( A Press Lord, not a Randlord ) overawes
His just returned from Delhi archiitect
Who, being Herbert Baker, is not awed
That easily. “He’s dottier than Rhodes,”
The great eclectic thinks,” and then, aloud,
“I cannot supervise the work myself.
I’ll have to deputize it. Deputies
Whom one can trust do not come cheaply.”
“No,
But profit was not all I had in mind.”
“If London is prepared to bail us out,”
Says Baker, “I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Would you like a Highland hunting lodge,
Or something more Cape Dutch.?” The Baronet
Cannot resist a once and future client’s
Smile at art’s predictability.
“A ‘stoep’ to conquer? That would tip our hand.”
The architect smiles, but puts his case.
#3
�“It isn’t all that far from Surinam.
“Guiana was Dutch.”
“As the Transvaal was.
I think the less we look like Groote Schuur
The better. Why not model it on this?”
Bright Kop, the Baronet’s own house, is gloom
And sandstone, in deep shade which is the work
Of fifteen gardeners and fifteen years.
“If we are there to show the flag,” says Baker,
“Show it. Something High Imperial.”
Another reason not to self-repeat
Appears now in the hobble- skirted form
Of Lady Elva Hood, whose tatty tastes
On more than one occasion have reversed
Her architect’s. He coexists with these
In what is best described as an armed truce.
“How well you look, Dear Herbert. Is a tan
A sort of caste mark for you?”
“Artisans,
Milady, are a lowest caste. In India
As elsewhere.”
“Well, you always have your fees.
I’m making some more changes, by the way.
I want a trellis by this window. Sun
Could fade my needlepoint.” The architect,
Who oriented the huge teakwood room
To take advantage of its view, a sweep
Of highveld from the highest of the Rand
Decides a change of subject might be best.
#4
“Untouchables…” he says . But Lady Hood
Puts up a long forefinger to her lip
�And looks in the direction of the door,
At which At which a servant in a turban stands,
Bisected by a monstrous silver tray.
“Ah,” Lady Elva says, “Our Ovaltine.”
The Swiss Food Drink, her rival must concede,
Tops any going norm for tattiness.
“It’s for my husband’s ulcer,” laments she,
As if she read the opposition’s mind.
“It’s nothing by itself, but made with goat’s milk…”
“Let us hope the Swiss are more adept
At cableway construction than at drink.”
“The contract goes to the Americans,”
Sire Christie warns. “A Monroe Doctrine sop.
The Venezuelan Boundary Dispute
Is anything but over, in the mind,
At least of Venezuela. Uncle Same
Will side with them, of course, as certainly
As the Colonial Office will back us.
Guiana has high grade petroleum,
And in the areas disputed, Grand
Hotel Lost World will see that it stays ours.
If it amuses some few millionaires
Meanwhile…”
“They will be well amused,
I’ll see to that,“ says Baker.
“Be amused
#5
“If they are men,” says Lady Elva tartly,
Confident in the two million pounds
She has inherited in her own right.
“Bushwhacking dinosaur is not my game,
�Although as Chris will tell you, I can shoot.
I’ve shot with maharajahs. So will you,
If you intend to keep your job. Your job
In Delhi. What your understudies do
On that poor mountain is your own affair
It‘s very wet, I‘m told. Do your roofs leak?
We are not here in summer. I don‘t know.
”Material for this house came by ox,”
Says Baker mildly. “I can deal with cables.”
…
As he leaves, the battered architect
Confronts, in his exiguous foyer,
Her Ladyship’s exotic footman, who,
His needlepointed turban much awry,
Adjusts his other clothing, as, intact,
A Coloured parlor maid, a game flushed out,
Hotfoots upstairs. “Your hat and blueprints, Sahib.”
“The Lady Elva’s hired a Touchable,”
Decides the future Nimrod of the Raj.
Beside the outer door--Empire of course
Laid on in seamless red-- a four- foot globe
Is mounted on the necks of dark bronze dragons.
Baker avoids it. “Scorpions,” he thinks.
They are for him the most of India.
#6
II
British Guiana
A smoking rocket breaks the jungle crests,
To feather like an upward cataract
The bare red-sandstone prow of Mount Roraima,
Climax of the cliffs that ring it round.
�The rocket trails a line of silken thread
That will in turn pull up a stronger line
To raise the pilot cable. At the top,
Having ascended the Brazilian face-The easier--the on-site engineer,
Whose name is Roland Galt, awaits the strike.
That hit, in spite of the prevailing damp,
Is like the downfall of a sparkler: bright
Quick jacks expiring as he reaches out.
“How gala,” says his British alpine-guide.
‘We might almost think we were at a fair.”
“A good sign, no?” says Galt, who knows quite well
McCain’s remark was meant to be a slight.
Guiana’s business community,
Of whom the guiding Scot is one full third,
Is livid that the cableway contract
Was granted to a young St. Louis firm
Whose largest previous experience
Was building Ferris Wheels. “The carnival,”
Says Galt, “is Good King George’s Narrow Gauge.
I’ll have the freight lift operational
#7
Before they get the railhead in sight,
There’s nothing in an aerial too big
To come in by canoe. In 1903
Trade unions at the Exposition struck.
My father finished up a full size wheel
With parts I carried out to Forest Park
By streetcar.”
�“Wait until the next rain comes.
You’ll have to thread your line through waterfalls.”
“So much the better for the tourist trade, Mac.
There isn’t much to say for dukes and earls
But they will flock to where the big game is.
If there are pretty scenes along the way,
That ups the ante. Don’t you ever look?”
“No, only where I put my feet.” Galt sneers:
“Like in your mouth? How many days a year
Do we have fog up here?”
“Including this,
All of them. Here it comes.” A drift of rain
Lifts out of Venezuela, weakening
Into a restless fog as it goes east
Across the montaintop into Guiana
“ Ectoplasm,“ Galt identifies.
He knows his Conan Doyle. “And real life rust.
I hope the cables still are in one piece
The day we open. It’s all touch and go.”
He knots the silken line around a slick,
Freak boulder. “Let’s backtrack. Where is Brazil?”
…
#8
The firing of the rocket is remarked
Among the area’s indigenous,
Who number twenty. Women have no souls
And are not reckoned. As the chieftain-priest,
Ipupu, who is four foot eight, prevails.
“It is a waterfall turned into smoke.
It is a waterfall that rushes up.
A mighty feather, going back to God.”
�His new wife contradicts him. “It’s a dart,
Meaning they have a giant blowgun.”
Minds,
It may be, but not souls. Etak Etak
Is not a woman of the Tepi-Pupu.
She is of the Cui, a tribe nearby.
“In any case it is a sacrilege.
The Mother Mountain has been violated.
Let the red of neck be sacrificed.”
Etak speaks out. “They cannot be all bad.
They have enslaved the Tepi-Curucu.”
“And make slaves of us, if we allow.”
Exogamy, Ipupu now reflects,
May have its drawbacks. “Woman, if you speak
Again I’ll sell you to the red of neck
To work as servant by the Curucu.”
“The giant blowgun is the end of life,”
A tribal elder warns. “It will devour
The air we breathe. Its spit blots out the sun.”
#9
Idzumu, an enthusiastic youth
Not quite one week beyond is passage rite,
One year in age behind the tribal elder,
Tries a maiden speech. “If we obtain
Ourselves the giant blowgun we at least
Can down-cephalicize the Curucu
Before the world puffs out.”
“Great as it is,”
Responds the sorcerer-reductionist,
“My art cannot accommodate such numbers.
Sewing up the lips would take me days,
And I say nothing of the eyes and ears.”
�His staff is headed, in a strictest sense,
By an example of his work. Etak,
Meanwhile, will not be silenced. “Idiots!
Air that goes in comes out. If it did not
We should have suffocated long ago.
A hundred small blowguns are just as bad
As one big one. Are also just as good.
We can attack the strangers when we wish.
Or can attack the Curucu. But why?
Hang back and let them kill each other. Rape,
If we assume the Mountain has been raped,
They can avenge as easily as we.
That is, their corpses can. And now, My Lord,
Cut out my tongue, or when I have been sold
My buyers will be well informed as you.”
…
#10
The cableway construction camp is rope
And fabric, rather as if in the trees
A large balloon had wrecked. Here, red of neck
And red of beard, red-eyed, Norell McCain
Is lying in a hammock. Mirror hung
Uncertainly and basin on a stump,
An angered Roland Galt is red of throat,
His razor having cut him. “Bloody soap.
My face is like sandpaper.”
“Grow a beard.
We’ll make a colonist out of you yet..
You’re onto saying ‘bloody’.”
“Not quite. Nose
Rings might be next, and after that sharp bones
�Stuck-in wherever.”
“Which brings us to:
Has anybody ever figured out
How sex works in a hammock? Have the natives?”
“No, and the attempts were all mistakes.
Freak shows. It’s how straitjackets were discovered.
How spider monkeys got conceived. Don’t think
About it.”
“I suppose if you could get
Both legs firm on the ground, and grip the tree…”
“Is that a proposition?”
“Desperate,.
But not that desperate.”
“Oh well, take heart.
Our hotel architect gets here next week.
His name, according to the messengers,
#11
Is Artemus Davant, and anyone
Who has a name like that has got to be
A little odd. You’ll have a choice. Get up:
We have to show the natives how to roast.”
“Roast what?”
“Roast coffee beans. Or do you plan
To go on chewing coca leaves all day?”
�#12
III
East of Suez
At Soerakarta,in the Dutch East Indies,
Karsen Trip, a twenty-five year old
Zoologist already widely published,
Is going over for a second time
A cablegram he does not quite believe.
“…some dozen of the dragons. Breeding pairs,
Enough to stock a modest game reserve
And presently allow small hunts each year.
You payment will be as we may agree,
But will include a figure…based upon
How many reptiles reach Roraima live.
Expense in Komodo are of course
Included. Yours sincerely, Christie Hood>“
Although he lives on spacious private means,
The figure pops Mijnheer Trip’s blue eyes out
�“Land-crocodiles in South America,”
The young man muses, putting into Dutch
His Javanese for the Komodo “dragon,”
V. Komodoensis, otherwise.
The Giant Monitor. “For all I know,”
He thinks, “ a dozen may be all of them.
I ought to turn him down, but Krakatoa
Killed off more than ever hunters will.
So much for natural selection. And,
What other chance to see them at close range?”
#13
Between the gables of the bungalow,
Whose forms South Africans would recognize,
And of which Baker is not unaware,
A low verandah takes the heat, the lamps,
In spite of which, across the waxen tile,
As if a lizard went, a chill goes by.
Trip recognizes it for what it is:
Challenge, in its extremest, closest form-The dragon, of the fear of fear-of-death.
…
Henk’s Soerabaja Bar, a seedy twin,
In Soerakarta, of the Soerakarta
Bar in Soerabaja, is a shed
Among high palms. It too has lamps, the which
Sedately swing in midnight’s last of wind.
Drunk, Mijnheer Trip is shopping. He must have,
For his excursions, a dependable
Boy. Indonesians will not nearly do,
�As they are much too frail, and terrified
Of Varanus, known to them by reputation
If not by the experience direct.
A dark trio of merchant seamen flunks,
One after brute another, being each
Too stupid for the job description, part
Of which is to be Trip’s companion-valet,
Part of which is to be trapper-guide.
But now a massive, sober, yellow lascar
#14
Stands by Trip. “What is your name?” Trip asks.
“I? Lothringen. My friends call me Lorraine.”
“I take it that your friends are mostly French?”
He knows his history. Since Bismarck’s war
Alsace-Lorraine is Elsass-Lothringen.
“Not necessarily. Would you prefer
To be called Elsass, or be called ‘Al’s ass”,
As you Americans pronounce Alsace.”
“I’m not American. My name is Trip.
I’m Dutch. What makes you think I’m not?”
“You spoke.
And you are in a bar. Not at the Club.
I cannot really tell you what I am.
My father was--I think--a Legionnaire.
My mother was a Madagascarene,
But she was half Chinese. We came back out
Quite early. I grew up in Sarawak.”
“I’m looking for a trapper.”
“I can trap.
Trap what I want.”
Trap animals, I mean.”
“Before I went to sea I spent some time
�As first gun-bearer to the late White Rajah.
He was all but blind. I dealt with wounds
And crippled water buffalo a lot.”
“I’m leaving in a fortnight for Komodo.
Will you come?”
“A dragon hunt? They live
On Lombok too, you know. We had a few
In Sarawak. One tried to eat the Ranee.
#15
Lady Brooke was anything but blind.
The trophy is above her mantelpiece.”
“Opinion is, they will not go for humans.”
“Tell the Ranee.”
“Will you come?”
“For money,
No.”
“The price can be as we arrange.”
A smell of gin and rum and kerosene
Moves in the dead Cape Jasmine as the wind
Dies utterly and as the lamps burn out.
The smoke puts shadows on the White Man’s forehead
“Noon tomorrow at the sugar docks.”
…
A beach in Lombok, where a low surf crashes
And a pair of cots is under nets.
Side-on toward the warming morning sun,
A dragon lizard rises into life.
His forked tongue licks out to try the air;
His clear eyelids resist it in distrust.
The coldest blood, however, has its warmth.
He flicks a massive tail, and fronts the foe,
�Which is himself in slickest replica.
He stiffens, and the enemy responds
In kind. The reptile brain, the deep,
Intent automaton, will venture what it is
To have at once and wholly what it wants.
Imperative and challenge, risk and prize
#16
Come down to one, as does what bodies them
The fruitless serpent of the mindless tree
Will have his triumph nonetheless.
Invention, in the absence of the natural,
Will breed it sports as if it were a graft.
…
A small flotilla--six high-load canoes-Arrives at Camp Louisiana Purchase
In Guiana. From the last, in boots,
Straw boater, insect veils, and starchy blouse,
Steps out a slim young woman. Roland Galt
Receives her in blank, candid puzzlement.
“Miss. I was here to meet an architect.”
“You do. My name is Artemis Davant.
�#17
IV
On Top of Roraima
A rare clear day, and where the nations three,
On maps at any rate, precisely join,
The twenty mile square flattop mountain shows
Its red steep sides. The forests at its base
Thin-out to the immense savannas; cool,
An air upon the summit somewhat thick
Thins-out beyond the station on the prow.
In sheaves too much exposed, the cables turn.
The hotel architect turns on the gear
A practiced Arts and Crafts cold eye. Say she:
“I don’t mean to offend you, Mr. Galt,
But this construct of yours just does not seem,
Well, serious. It’s like a carrousel.
So temporary. Like a Ferris Wheel.”
Galt curses silently his heritage.
“It got the roof beams to you, didn’t it?”
“I do not speak of its efficiency;
I speak of its appearance. Let me build
A kiosk for it.”
“As you like. My thought
Was that our visitors might like to see
Machinery.”
“Undoubtedly they would,
And that is why it should be well concealed.
If I exposed my furnaces to them
�They would not feel that they had left Pittsburgh.”
“They would, they would,” Galt thinks, but banks his fires.
#18
Does not bank them enough, it now appears,
As Artemis Davant looks straight at him.
“The only naked furnaces on view
At present, Mr. Galt, are in your eyes.
I’d not be shocked at such offensiveness
In poor Norell McCain, but out of you?”
‘Unbridled lust” is not the phrase. That means
At some point it was bridled. Waterfalls
Are showers cold indeed, and I see scores,
But I do not see you two under them.
We work together. And I cannot work
If I am stared at like a can-can girl.
And do not think that I’m some sheltered prude.
I used to draw from models in a life class.
Meanwhile, if you would care to look at me
Not as an architect but as a woman,
Call on me and meet my chaperon.”
Galt is good looking and aware of it.
He grins somewhat to focus- down the flame.
“I’ve met your aunt. I had my ears slapped back
By her too. That time it was innocent.”
“Marie St. Boniface is not my aunt
Nor anybody else’s. She’s a nun.
Or was. She fell in love with Captain Dreyfus.
Left the convent to stuff envelopes
For Zola. Then she put on Zouave dress
And got as far as Martinique. Her sense
�#19
Of place out in the colonies is vague.”
“A bride of Christ would tend to pick a Jew.”
“Yes. He was the only man of whom she had seen
More pictures than of Jesus. She had hoped
To nurse him, but the French authorities
Would not permit her nearer than Cayenne.
I found her in Georgetown and hired her on.”
“High boots on chaste Diana and a nun
For chaperon… You’ve heard of triple brass?”
“In art school armor would have been a mercy.
One felt safer on the streets of Delhi.
Tea is at half-past, outside my tent.
You will be welcome, Mr. Galt, but dodge
Your own I have no doubt lax chaperon.”
…
Her mentor, having no desire himself
To sail halfway around the world to look
On Table Mountain magnified five times
And reddened in the geological
Equivalent of red shift, has allowed
His student full discretion as to site.
She has so situated his hotel
That it is nowhere near the cableway,
Infuriating her construction crews,
And sacrificing drama on the prow,
But sheltering its all too open rooms
From all but the plateau’s most stubborn fogs,
Using the mountain’s undulating face
�#20
For views that, after its thrice-nightly rains,
Quite shame the Falls of Iguassu. “Thank God,”
Says she, “we do not have a Tablecloth.
The fog ascends. It does not form on top.
We have a chance at fairly sunny days.”
“You grew up in the Cape, Miss Artemis?”
“In Durban, where I learned to speak Tamil,
That being why the Bakers took me in.
Pretoria, linguistically, was quite
Beyond him. Delhi speaks less English still.
Is that red hair of yours South African?”
McCain, who on the just completed stoep
Looks out toward Venezuela not with fire
But ashes, looks back toward that fine profile
Which is the torch of them. “Unless my dad
Was, no. But I know Cape Dutch when I see it”
Artemis is much amused. “You’re right;
I am the last who would deny it. What
We have is Groote Schuur with outside stairs
And mammoth window bays in both the gables.
Baker never does more than he must,
And when Sir Christie cut the estimates…”
“Some people have it easy. Iron-Jaw Galt’s
Had women at his feet since he was ten.
He has them like they went by on a wheel.”
The architect permits herself a wink.
“Well if he hasn’t it is not for want
Of trying. Boniface says he is snake
#21
�And apple and the flaming sword in one.
But Boniface comes late to all of that.
It’s she who’s bound as on the torture wheel.
Real women, do you notice, are perverse.
Do not jump off of lover’s leap just yet.”
#22
V
At Sea--Roraima--Johannesburg--At Sea
�The Matson freighter Mangareva strains
To hold at thirteen knots. Eastbound from Truk
She has, penned-up upon her fantail, ten
Immense Komodo Dragons, fatly fit
Upon a diet mostly suckling pigs
And such few rats as her Malaysian cooks
Can be annoyed to trap. One deck above,
In spotless, dazzling linen, white enough
To be a garment for Lord Jim come back
As medic-ghost-archangel, Karsen Trip
Looks on his charges. “Seven females, four
Grown males, including, that is, our old boy
Who walked the plank with your chronometer
Inside. Have you seen Peter Pan, Mijnheer?”
“Eleven times. I have eleven small
Grandchildren. You--I speak now as the Bridge-Are here advised to keep that half-breed giant
Of yours confined to quarters. Am I clear?
I do not want him mixing with my crew.
They have their own Far East depravities.
And if you have him on the quarterdeck
Procuring Chinks for you I’ll put you off
At Molokai, newts, him, pound sterling all.”
The Captain leaves as if to point his threat,
And as he mounts the port companionway
The Mangareva rises in a head-on swell.
#23
It throws the reptiles on their wire restraints;
One--three hundred pounds of sated sloth-Breaks free and goes agilely at the steps;
And as if now imagining himself
�To be a python, eats in measured gulps
The bottom two-thirds of the Captain, who,
A look of much vexation on his face,
Calls out “Exterminate the brutes,” and dies.
…
Two hours in bed, Marie St. Boniface,
In saffron lamplight, reads from her inscribed
Proof copy of J’Accuse. A face so plain
As to seem ageless has protected her
From perils she can only guess at, or,
Before Guiana, only could. Her tent
Flap lifts, and, night gowned, Artemis Davant,
Whose is the other camp bed, comes in damp.
“The worst fog yet. The Mountain cannot see
Its drenched hired hands before its dripping face.”
“And just as well. At sundown, on my hike,
I saw our gloomy Mr. Red McCain
Showering in the East Face cataract.
He will contract pneumonia. How cold
That water can be at the best of times!”
“Oh, he’s robust.”
“And since he’s shaved his beard
So much more youthful looking. Younger, some,
Than his superior. I did not think,
#24
At first, he was. What is it, Artemis,
That makes one pick one man above another?”
“His pince-nez?” the architect restrains
Herself from saying. “Drive,” she honestly
Replies, but wonders if she really knows.
“Except in special circumstances, like--
�Inheriting a firm that silvers mirrors,
One would never make Narcissus mate.
One would not want one’s children, how to say,
Not to inherit drive. Or otherwise
One would surely have them always at home.”
“At home? I think that I should like that.”
“No,
You would not. It would be your convent breached
And you without your freedom. That is what
The Serpent of the Garden did not say
Sufficiently to Eve our driven mother.
Hence we live out yet her discontents.”
“The Serpent has also his discontents.
Your engineer is laying leagues of pipe
To have a nearby shower of his own.”
…
Narayan Dar, the Lady Elva Hood’s
Upwardly mobile butler, slams her door
Abruptly in the wholly guileless face
Of an officious adolescent who,
However, goes on to insist, at length,
He is a cousin. “Not her cousin. Yours.
#25
I’ve come here all the way from Trinidad.”
The stately servant grudgingly relents.
“Go to the rear and have the kaffirs feed you.
“I’ll be there when I go off at ten.”
Pandokkies in Parktown are not less mean
For being Parktown, and the garconniere
Narayan occupies is one small room.
The cousin is asleep there in a fug
�Of curry over mealie pap.
“Get up.
I do not need strange bedbugs in my bed.”
“Superb my cousin. Know you of the plan
Your master has to cheat the Portuguese?”
“Is there a side to choose? The Goanese
Incline one toward the servants of the Raj.”
“No no. The Portuguese who are Brazil.”
“The border controversy? Certainly
I know. I am applying for the job
Of major-domo at the fort-hotel.”
“Exactly. Venezuela has a plan…”
…
“Hands off the crew, Lorraine. That French First Mate
Seems even more a prude than Captain Fitch.”
“He’s French Canadian.”
“So much the worse.
And I’m in no position now to pay
Hush money. Rajah Brooke’s huge appetite
Has cost us more than he’d have brought us live.”
“He is alive.”
#26
“What do you mean alive?
I saw him trussed an lowered overboard.
It was the only way to give poor Fitch
A decent burial.”
“I cut the cords
As he went over. He has followed us
To eat our garbage. I swam out last night
And fought him to exhaustion. He’s on board
And running loose around the forecastle.
The crew feed him live chickens.”
�“Lots of them,
I hope. If he attacks another man
There’ll be a mutiny. Farewell commodes,
Farewell Lorraine, and farewell Trapper Trip.”
#27
VI
In the Camp of the Tepi-Pupu and Elsewhere
Ipupu of the Tepi-Pupu, hidden
In the putrescent waters-cannibal
Of an enormous pitcher plant, and well
Aware his skin is being eaten off,
Is watching in wide-eyed puzzlement
Activity upon the cableway.
Eight crocodiles, of unfamiliar form,
Contained in woven wicker basket-weave
Of necessarily fantastic strength,
Have been positioned on two large hooks
�Depending from the cable, so to rise
Impassive to the city in the sky.
Ipu long since has ceased to be surprised
At what goes on up there, but this exceeds.
A White Man who has not been seen before
Appears to be in charge; he is companioned
By his caboclo, who is on a scale
So large the Indian sinks to his nose
In fright. He chokes, and both men look at him,
But take no action. He has picked his blind
On the assumption no one else would hide
Inside a pitcher plant, or think to look,
Its chalice being mildly poisonous.
Lorraine and Trip would not have, but because
They do not know what pitchers are, nor that
There is surveillance. “It’s a little boy,”
#28
Trip says. “He looks a real Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”
“Or a pygmy in a plant for privy.”
…
Colon in Panama, and as the sun
Sets in the green Atlantic, to the wreck
Of those who do not understand the Isthmus,
Hotel Washington announces dinner.
First to enter is the Rajah Brooke,
Who, earlier, at Miraflores Lock,
Has jumped ship. Here, he eats at once two hams,
A swan carved out of ice, and one foot each
Off both the busboys. As the ice chills down
�His reptile blood he sinks to torpid sleep,
And is there dealt with by the Shore Patrol,
Who all agree that they have handled worse.
…
Etak Etak scrubs off the itching back
Of her decanted consort, who reports
“Apparently they worship them as gods.
Two priests attend them, offering them pigs.
Perhaps they are gods.”
“Gods would reach the sky
Without the aid of ropes, nor would they let
Themselves be bound in bamboo. These are beasts.”
“All who defile the mountaintop are beasts.”
“And can be killed as such. While you were stuck
In She-Who-Swallows-Flies I went to fish.
Not in the eastern streams but in the west.
#29
A stranger came, in a canoe of fire.
He was not from the mountaintop. At least
His language was not theirs. He spoke our own.
He gave us this, and said that if we do
That he desires we shall have weapons too.”
And from concealment near the fire, Etak
Takes out a pair of pliers six feet long.
…
The upper cable station, Artemis
Would be first to admit, is what she built
As “folly.” It has sweeping cornices
Suggesting wings, and the entire effect
Is as if on the Mountain’s narrow prow
A steel and concrete pterodactyl sat.
�Bright cables turn, and in a shining car
As if arriving from a planet new,
A blond young man comes to the untrod stair.
Behind a circular, clear aperture,
A window of, and onto mannerism,
Artemis is watching. She wears pearls.
The always level, gray-eyed measured gaze
That froze the life class fixes on the face,
To turn at once away. And in that turn,
That shows her profile, she converts a view.
“The profile of a goddess,” Trip compares.
“A goddess modeling as for a coin.:
A chokered head on a medallion.”
#30
Another car arrives, from which, in boots,
Dark jodhpurs, and a belt of leopard skin,
A servant-guardian emerges, tall,
Quick, powerful. And after him draw up,
One after another, eight of the commodes.
“I was expecting swords,” says Artemis.
“Not dragons. Not just yet.”
“Swords?” Trip inquires.
“As decorations.,” Artemis assures.
“Swords to be crossed above the mantelpieces.”
Karsen Trip allows his vision now
To take in background to the deity.
He sees, across the mesa’s broken rock,
A sort of causeway stretch, and at its end,
In fog and sunlight, what might be, elsewhere,
Government House. He shrugs, and to the way’s
Designer, for whom background also fades,
Announces, “I cannot be certain yet,
�But I see nothing here that would suggest
The Monitor cannot survive in this terrain.
It’s bare, but parts of their own habitat
Are just as barren.”
“I thought that Komodo
Was a jungle.”
“So it is. Lombok,
However, isn’t. It has lava fields.”
“Assuming we succeed, and that they live,
What must I do to keep them from the building?
Trust the hunters?”
“What you have done here.
#31 High walls and overhanging cornices.
Even the largest of them can climb well.”
“And what about your own life, Mr. Trip?
Can you be happy here? Can you survive?”
Trip nods. “All that it takes to create Eden
Is a man, a woman, and a reptile,”
…
McCain is forced to hear his tent-mate rave.
“I am not going to call a man Lorraine.“
“I wouldn’t argue. Did you see the size
Of that half-breed?” Norell McCain is less
Than sympathetic with the jealous rage
Of Roland Galt. “You are well out of it
It‘s obvious it will be open war
Among the chaperons. I saw this noon
‘Lorraine‘ give Artemis Davant a look
That would have frightened Genghjs Khan to death.
He watches over Trip as rabidly
As Attila the Nun guards Artemis.
The only dragons here aren‘t the commodes.”
�McCain‘s ten-mate is twisting in his hands
The helpless central lodge pole of the tent.
“Let go the pole. You‘’ screw us in the ground.”
“If need be I‘ll fight Attila and Trip
And you and all the dragons and Lorraine.
That woman was in love with me. I know.”
“Do you know how to spell f-i-c-k
e-l?”
No; you don’t either. It’s l-e.”
“Can you spell f-u-c-k-u? I can.”
#32
VII
At the Grand Hotel
On Saturday before the opening
The cable brings a rich variety:
A score of suckling pigs, some for the guests;
An armory of decorator swords;
Ten jeroboams of a good champagne,
And these entrusted to the bamboo weave
That brought up safely eight live monitors;
A crate of goats; two geese; a wireless set;
A carpet bag of purplish needlepoint;
A string trio; its stands and instruments;
Preceded by its legs, a grand piano;
Guns enough to stage the Jameson Raid;
And, two days early, Arthur Conan Doyle.
…
“I like it all,” says Lady Elva Hood,
“Except that Hanging Garden on the cliff.
A bit like Monte Carlo, don’t you think?
Suicide Terrace?”
�“Only if you miss,
Milady.” Artemis, who cut her teeth
On vicereines, takes the Press Lord’s wife in stride.
A spruced-up, Bengal-looking Lothringen
Is not so fortunate. “Dear God,” he says.
“It’s Lady Brooke. The Ranee.”
“What we know,”
Says Karsen, passing white tie and tails,
“As learning nothing and forgetting nothing.”
#33
“Vengeance. You have not seen what she’s like.”
In the receiving line Sir Christie Hood
Shakes hands with a Brazilian minister,
Who does not let his thoughts on boundaries
Deter him from a party. Lady Brooke
Is deep in conversation with a youth
Who is a son of Teddy Roosevelt,
Not that the name would signify to her.
“I’ve shot the brutes before. Go for the eye.”
Behind the trio and its potted palms
A sotto voice below the Eva waltz,
Trip whispers in the ear of Artemis,
Who wears a jeweled crescent in her hair.
The moment lengthens in the extra beat of love.
To three who watch, the scene screams at the eye.
McCain and Lothringen and Roland Galt,
Unlikely to make common cause, have one.
…
St. Boniface, unable to decide
What she can rightly wear, does not attend.
She stands, in ever-dampening late night,
On that small terrace Lady Hood dislikes.
�Her thoughts are suicidal truly. “So
Far, Alfred, and so near. Between us now
No barrier but air. I almost see
That vile confine of your imprisonment.”
The nun’s geography has not improved.
It is as vague as her chronology,
#34
And if her line of sight were much extended
She would see Caracas. But the sky
Of her despair cannot be limited.
Theology was never much more clear
For her than azimuth, and she debates
If suicide is more a mortal sin
Than living always as a Dreyfusard.
The answer will, just now, not be revealed
A painted hand is clapped across her mouth
From an imported orange tree above,
And she is pitched across the balustrade.
…
From printing promptings Arthur Conan Doyle
Addresses curtly the assembled guests.
“All I can say is that we have here life-Uh--imitating art--er--imitating
Life. Since nature has so thoughtlessly
Not put upon Roraima dinosaurs,
We have provided them. A year or two
And we can have a proper hunt. For now
We can afford to shoot one specimen
Alone. I wish you well. For Mr. Trip,
Whose scientific knowledge and whose skill
Has made this entertainment possible,
�Our thanks.” A little figure at the wide,
Now open door into the dining room
Raps twice upon the parquet’s pale rare wood
And sticks his staff into the speaker’s face.
#35
The author and the guests assume alike
He is an actor hired to entertain.
But Lady Elva hides her eyes and screams.
“Take him away. It is Narayan Dar.”
“You are distraught,” her tranquil husband says.
It clearly cannot be.”
“The head,” she shrieks
“The head upon the staff. The shrunken head.
It is Narayan pure. The eyebrow scar.”
…
“The worst of it,” so Lady Hood will say,
Years later, to Jan Christian Smuts, “was how
The head was fresh. It dripped. Was wet and dripped.
It shriveled -up the length of needle point
I made to be the bell-pull in the hall.”
…
The head reductionist is seized by Trip,
Who leaps across the cello case, and Galt,
Who topples all the music stands.
The Tepi-Pupu offers no resistance,
But before the men can pin his arms
A loud explosion, coming more or less
From the direction of the gun room, rocks
Hood’s ballroom, jumbles its precise parquet,
And swings the chandelier as if in wind.
Young Mr. Roosevelt writes off right there
A modest fortune in his father’s guns,
But Ranee Brooke nods at the Guianese
�Who mans the cloakroom and is handed thence
Her rifle, saying something, possibly,
About the social life of Sarawak.
#36
VIII
The Same--in the Camp--In the Gun Room
A line boss from the Narrow Gauge runs in,
Waving a German pistol in the air
As if it were the flagpole of a flag
Shot off. “The CooCoos have revolted. Run!
I’ve lost a dozen men. We have the line
Still open but I’m not sure for how long.“
Removing lamps from Baker’s trademark sconces,
Guests and staff rush toward the portico,
And, like a lynch mob each Diogenes,
Onto the causeway. Arriving at the prow,
The vanguard is demoralized to see,
Strap-hanging as it were, the Curucu
Come up the cable hanging-on by hand.
The White Ranee is not demoralized.
She lifts her rifle and with perfect aim
Begins to pick them off. Each hunter there,
If he is honest, envies her the chance.
It is a moonlit shooting gallery.
“Fruit dropping off the vine,” says Hood their host,
And hurries all of his distinguished guests
Into the next car that draws up. “Wait! Stop!
Cries Roland Galt, before the gate can close
“The gondola was empty. We don’t know
What’s on the ground.”
“I think that we’re all right,”
The line boss answers. “I see flares below.”
A second car arrives, and when it goes
�#37
Five persons only still are at the top,
St. Boniface still unaccounted for,
The servants having fled for who knows where.
Who knows in point of fact is Pu- Tahi,
Ipupu’s sorcerer reductionist,
Who in the panic has been let escape,
And leads, no doubt for reasons of his own,
A double file of ashen refugees
For the Brazilian face. It being night
They are not threatened by the dragons, but,
Not knowing this, break file at every sound.
Awaiting the opposing cable car,
That rises as its opposite descends,
Are Trip and Galt and Artemis Davant,
McCain, and, as a token menial,
He who is called, except by Galt, Lorraine.
For no cause Galt can see, the cable stops.
“Oh do restart it,” Artemis implores.
“If we are separated from the rest of us
We’ll never make the railhead.”
“If we do
Where are we,” Galt replies. “The Narrow Gauge
Has only handcars for its rolling stock.
Its locomotives are in Sheffield still.”
As he tugs backward on the master grip
An eerie twang, an A below low A,
Vibrates against the cliff as sounding board,
And, harp of harps, the cable separates,
�#38
A flailing end, a living tentacle
From what azoic beast in the abyss,
Encircles Red McCain around the waist,
Triumphantly swings him above the edge,
And drops him screaming off the precipice.
…
A fleet of handcars, headed by a peer,
The Lady Elva Hood, a K.B.E.,
Large dogs, and Ranee Iris Dudley Brooke,
Is pumping madly past the darkened camp
Of Chief Ipupu, soon made bonfire -bright
(Unwisely, given the proximity
And present mood of ten-score Curucu
Who were not moving targets of the hunt)
By pyramids of the abandoned lamps.
The kerosene begins to leak; the fire
Leaps up. Etak Etak, her arms upraised,
Assumes a pose of priestly dignity,
The six foot long wire cutters in her hands.
…
“I’m sorry. I’m still sick.” Davant sits down
Upon a broad up-ended rifle rack.
Trip turns a champagne bottle to her lips.
“If I had had the sense to look away.”
Destruction in the gun room seems complete.
No rifle is in working order, nor
Does it much matter, ammunition too
A casualty of packing and revolt.
#39
�“We can’t stay here,” says Trip. “Who knows how long
To send a rescue column.”
“Could one live
Indefinitely on champagne? I feel improved
At thinking so.”
“Die happily,
At any rate,” says Lothringen, whose own
Capacity is magna at a time.
“We have two choices,” Galt enumerates.
“Yes. Mumm and Piper Heidsieck.“.Vows default.
“Shut up, Lorraine. Two choices, neither good.
Stay here and starve to death, and that assumes
The Curucu will not be back, or, worse,
Maybe, try making our way down the face.
Need I remind you that the only route
Lies over dragon country. Thank you, Trip.”
“No face except Brazil is feasible?”
Galt sneers. “Would you like to attempt the prow?”
“What do we know about the western face?”
“It’s Venezuela, to whom, I suspect,
We owe four troubles in the first place.”
“Speed,”
Says Artemis. “Can men outrun the things?”
“On grass and pavement, yes. On broken ground
The Monitors have all of the advantage.”
Trip goes on. “If we can beat the sun
Our friends will still be sluggish. Can we reach
Brazil and do the ledge before the heat“
“We have a narrow window. It‘s from dawn
#40
Till nine. We cannot hope to go at night.
We do not know the route, and if we’re lost
�Out there when that cold blood is warming up…”
“We are unarmed,” Lorraine reminds the group.
“Unarmed completely. I will fight bare-hand
In water. On land, no.”
“But we have arms,”
Says Artemis, and rushes from the room.
When she returns she carries, like a page
In some bygone Mid-Eastern entourage,
A Persian sword that hung above a mantel.
“Baker insisted on the best. It’s real.”
#41
IX
At the Grand Hotel, cont.
It is the only weapon that is real.
The others, it turns out, are painted plaster.
�“In two words, bugger Booker’s,” Artemis
Unladylikely says, echoing what
Would be Guiana’s anthem, did it not
Lack music. Forwarders, wholesalers, crooks,
That firm adds forgery to its deceits.
“One sword among us,” Galt redundantly
Points out. “One chance. Does it make better sense
To go as four or go as two and two?
A man’s a full meal. He could bring delay.”
“Lorraine is more than one,” thinks Artemis,
Who knows Trip’s shadow hates her, and may well
Be more a danger than she yet has faced.
She looks at Galt. “The team with the best odds
Would be of course the one that knows the most
About the reptiles: Trip and Lothringen.”
Better, she thinks, to have it come from her
Than have Lorraine suggest it, and she knows
It has occurred to him. No man, and least
Of all a jealous one, is so opaque
As that. ‘Inscrutability’ exists
Behind the footlights only. “Torches. Fire.
Are they afraid of it?”
“Yes. But no torch
Would last that long. We have too far to go.”
Trip puts an arm around her. “I am sure
#42
We all agree your safety is the thing
That is the main consideration.”
“I
Do not agree. I am the odd man out.
Odd woman out. I should not like to live
With it upon me I had cost the life
�Of any man and let alone of three.
I’ll stay, and trust you three to summon help.”
“Or Mein Herr Galt can stay with you,” says one.
“Not bloody likely,” Mijnheer Trip replies.
The extra-sensory, if it exists,
Exists for just such crises, and the mind
Of Lothringen is as exposed to Galt
As it is dark to Trip. The ESP
Sparks over race and distance and distrust.
He’s figuring out how to get rid of us
So he and Trip can get away alive.
Clairvoyance is by definition clear.
And it is not--not just--to save his skin.
“Draw lots,” says Artemis. “But not till dawn.
It’s that or have you stay awake all night.
A fool could see you do not trust each other
Not to take the sword and flit by night.”
“Trust one another,” Galt corrects in silence.
But the inner ether sparks again
And it occurs to him that Artemis
Referred advisedly to two. Cheat, clear
As song, projects as with the ether’s aid.
#43
See to it I’m not left with Lothringen.
Telepathy implies the out-of-body.
Out of Red McCain’s disjected body
Comes as if to say “Beware the Ides”
A voice which says in fact “You cannot mean
To let that Far East Kaffir have a chance
To have a White girl in his debt. Come to.”
The Limbo of the Old Colonial,
�Upon the evidence South Africa,
Or, possibly, the middle management
At Booker’s, calls the warning echo back
And Roland Galt must function as he can.
“That Kaffir possibly one could,” he thinks
But hears again Limbo. “How desperate
Is desperate?”
“Much better not to know,”
He formulates as his convinced reply.
“I’d better keep the one true sword myself,”
The White Rose says. I guess I’ll sleep with it.
All of the properties of chivalry
And all of its discomforts. Rest you well.
I’m sorry Mr. Baker built no tower.”
…
“Release the goats,” says Trip to Lothringen.
“Satiety will be the best ally
We have.”
“The only.”
When his aide is gone
Trip finds himself on Baker’s service stair
#44
In declasse debate with Roland Galt.
“What is the opposite, in Double Dutch
Of well done good and faithful servant?”
“One
Of you,” Trip answers, ”will betray me. Not
That Lorraine would.”
“But could he Don’t pretend
You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“In Ceram
He has a wife and children.”
“Marvelous
�What thirty guilders will accomplish, no?”
“I ought to strike you.“
“Don’t. Just do you not
Suppose if in the morning when we draw
He wins, he will not take the sword and go.
At that point he will cease to be your ‘boy’
And let alone your servant. I and you
Will have to take him on. It will take both.”
…
“One foot outside the door,” says Artemis.
“I’ve lost one chaperon and now have two.”
The unlit corridor and unlit room
Do not conceal the faces pressing close.
The numismatic profile, in full face,
Is very young, as is the dragon-herd’s.
“You Dutchmen in the Indies never lose,
Somehow, a look of ice and silver skates.”
“Appearances deceive. Our blood warms up.”
The Old Hand’s youth is in his urging.”
“No.
#45
I hope with all my heart the draw is yours
But if it isn’t I go with the draw
No man should have to fight a dragon, Karsen,
For the sake of damaged goods. Goodnight.”
…
Not on an impulse, neither for a reason,
Roland Galt, before he heads for bed,
Goes down between the potted orange trees
And down the seven flights of zigzag stairs
To stroll the Suicide Parterre. So far
�It is a night without fog. Bright moonlight
Picks out, across the mountain’s southeast bay,
The day’s last waterfall, already going dry.
It is a spurting stream of diamonds.
Below him Galt can see the mist begin:
A patch or two, and then a ground of haze.
He leans upon the plaster balustrade;
His cigarette case drops out of his shirt.
Putting one leg across the balusters
To try the ledge, he climbs a few feet down.
The, reaching out an arm to pull back up,
He feels a giant’s grasp, and easily
Is lifted like an infant from a tub.
“If you are jumping, don’t. If you are climbing,
Wait.” The grip is Lothar Lothringen’s.
Around his shoulder is a coil of rope
And in his hand a little alpenstock.
They are, for Galt, at once familiar.
#46
“Those are McCain’s. He had them in the camp.”
“He brought them topside for the opening.
Sir Christie thought the guests might like to climb.”
“Another weapon is another chance.”
“The alpenstock? Too short. Pick; handle too.
The handle brings one well within the jaws.
The pick would hardly pierce the outer skin.
I do not say it is not useful still.
I’ve done no climbing, but it’s time to learn.”
He hooks the pick beneath the other’s belt
And lifts him anything but playfully.
“Come with me. As you have seen, we are de trop
With Eve and Adam and the fruit up there.”
Galt feels that he is being cut in two
�By pressure of his inseams. “Put me down.”
“You haven’t answered my nice invitation.”
“I’ve climbed here, but that’s all there is of it.”
The East may be the fount of irony.
“All you will have to do is hang on tight.”
He hands him, handle first, the alpenstock.
“This is in case you’d like to sleep with it.”
…
As dawn breaks, the two men have formed a “rope.”
What nags at Galt is not the being bound
But what he hears McCain say out of Limbo.
“Face it, Man. You were just something kept,
As one might say, on Miss Lorraine’s back burner.”
#47
X
Without the Gates
Nature, supportive always of the hopes
Of man, puts out the brightest day in years.
A mammoth sun soars out of green Guiana,
Reddening the Mountain’s red sandstone.
The heat of day comes hard upon the dawn.
Trip has the sword in hand; he and the girl
Are at the gates. Eroded tableland,
A sort of Cappadocia countersunk,
Spreads out before them, dully glistening.
“It looks like German architecture: Poelzig”
Artemis comments abstractedly.
“It isn’t Petra. Half as old as time
Means here the fauna. With a little luck
We’ll miss them altogether. They aren’t bright,
�And if you wanted to invent a place
For them to like and stay, you’d be hard put
To better those depressions there. Keep close;
We’re sticking to the high ground” Not, it soon
Is patent, wise. Upon a narrow neck
Between two sinkholes rears a large female,
Her grooved tongue flickering in semaphore.
“You shall not eat of every tree?” it spells.
“Here is the beast,” Trip thinks, “and here the field,
But where’s the subtlety? And no fruit keeps.”
The tongue is bifurcated, what it says
Ambiguous. “Ye shall not surely die.”
#48
“Maybe, but I would say the odds aren’t good.”
Trip lifts the sword and aims it for the brain.
“If I am mangled take the sword and leave.
They always will prefer dead meat to live.”
…
Eight decades or an eon into time,
In the vicinity of Krakatoa, quakes
Are picked up on the open seismographs
As far as Honolulu. In the straits
At Lombok, later in the afternoon,
A monstrous bulge is seen upon the water,
Breaking to become a quiet cloud
Of a peculiar yellow. Drifting east
It settles toward Komodo, parts, re-forms.
It is a lazy, doubled crescent now,
Advancing on the Flores coast like rain,
�Or like Imperial Japan’s last fleets:
A suicide armada on the move,
Behind some mile-high cloud of chlorine gas.
#49
XI
Roraima--Manaus
Augustus Phelan, of Pacific Heights
And of the San Francisco curia
In the Sierra Club, collects the tour
Of which he is the organizer-guide
In the impressively restored foyer
Of Grand Hotel Guyana-Tepi, Cape
Dutch monument to a generic past,
That being, the country’s circumstances,
Relevant as any other kind.
The Booker Companies, the catering
Franchise, have flown-in jello, frozen shrimp,
And large ice carvings, which, in noonday heat,
Have melted into smaller, other shapes
Than those intended, some of them obscene.
“As soon as we are finished with our lunch,”
Says Dr. Phelan, ”we can take our cameras
And set off for the dragon pits. These are,
You know, the last surviving specimens
�Of the Komodo Giant Monitor.
In Indonesia it is now extinct.”
“It isn’t. In the Sumba Strait last year
I counted three. They swim as well as whales.”
The speaker is a Stanford botanist,
A longtime Baker Street Irregular,
To whom the tour was somewhat oversold.
“Fine news if true,” says Dr. Phelan suavely.
#50
“Not, however, vary likely.” He goes on:
“Varanus went out neither with a bang
Nor whimper. It went out as with a burp.
The gas eruptions of the 70s
Completed the destruction. We can thank
The foresight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And other humane conservationists
In founding the Roraima colony.
So far as we can tell from past accounts
The dragons here attain a greater size
Than ever was recorded in the wild.
It may be absence of competing life forms,
Diet, or selective breeding.. Trip’s
Originals are said to have been large
By what we think was standard for the time.
We are, in fact, as size for full grown males,
Well on the way to twenty feet. In short,
We’re breeding back, or forward if you like,
To proper dinosaurs. It’s The Lost World.
Now if you’ll gather up your cameras…”
…
�On their return the brave time travelers
Sense disarray in Booker’s caterers.
“You should have stayed in the hotel,” says one.
“A dragon jumped the wall and tried to mate
With one of my creations.”
“With the dolphin?”
“No. With R.M.S. Titanic. Froze
#51
Right to it and went off into a stupor.
Took all six of us to drag him out.”
“Well can you blame him? Long before dessert
It looked more like an iceberg than a ship,
And God knows there’s no air-conditioning.”
…
The festival, so called, “Of All the World,”
Spoleto-in-Manaus, mounts this year
That well known Cariocan opera
Coq d’Or. Teatro Amazonas lights
At intermission like the Opera
De Monaco or like the Palais Garnier
Itself. Encumbered by the Slavic bulk
Of émigrés positioned on her right,
A handsome woman in her diamond
And eye-makeup-alone decades resumes
Her conversation from the interval
Preceding, toward the left. “A lovely house,
But surely in a rubber capital
One hopes for softer cushions. Was the dance
Recital dire? I could jot bear to go.
The program spoke of bread and circuses.”
�“That group, the Nicaraguans, never showed.
They all came down with Hepatitis B
In Panama. We had a group from Guam
Who did a sketch about a hero type
Who saves a virgin from a dragon. Wild.
I mean a sketch.” The rich old lady smiles.
#52
“That is as good a start for marriage
As any other.”
“Hate me if I ask,
But are you not Viscountess Norwich?”
“No.
I’m often taken for her. Years ago,
In Singapore in 1941,
I met her. Very princess-like. I’m flattered.”
“What do you suppose,” the seat mate asks,
“The Amazon was like in 1910?
They knew already that it would not last.
The rubber seeds were long since smuggled out.
Two years, the Federated Malay States
Would do them in. Would they have built this house
If they had really known?” The profile not
Viscountess Norwich answers. “Oh, I speak
To that. I know exactly how it was.
In 1940, in Batavia,
We knew too well the Japanese would come-The Germans had the Netherlands and France
Already--knew, I say, that they would come,
But we did not know when. That is content:
To have your goodbyes said and not know when.
Buitenzorg had things well in control;
Without the interference from the Hague,
Better than usual. It was a calm
�Before the storm, but is there calm that‘s not?
My sons were in the war, but they were safe;
In training, both of them, In Nova Scotia.
#53
It was the best time of my marriage.
My husband, when the children still were young,
Was gone a lot. He was a scientist.
An expert on large lizards, if you please.
He had to sit through Wagner’s Siegfried once.
He found the opera ‘inaccurate’.
The threat of war kept him much more at home.
He had his funds to manage. I exist
On money that has gone from Tsarist bonds
To Royal Dutch to numbered Swiss accounts
To I.B.M. to gene research to gold.
I shall not tell you where I have it now.
But while we waited, every afternoon,
We sat in our pajamas on the lawn
And had the servants bring out ice and gin
And our two tortoise-shell fly swatters. These
Were our conceits. A gift from us to us.
They were for swatting little lizards with.
I had them with me on that last flight out
In 1942, and fortunate
I had. Australia is drenched in flies.
To dodge the Japs we had to fly at night.
A KLM eight-seat amphibian
Too old for the Defense to confiscate.
My husband put me on the plane at ten
And left for Flores in a motor launch.
He had experiments in progress there.
I have inferred--and I had seen his route--
�#54
He ran into a Japanese task force.
No man should have to face a dragon twice.
I have run on and on. Did not shops here
Outlast the rubber barons? I’ve found none.”
“There is a little woman off the Square
Who deals in emeralds and shrunken heads.”
“Oh no. I might see old acquaintances
I had a project in Guiana once.”
“They both are copies. Who would shrink a head
That looked like Yoko Ono in the first place.”
“Who would ruin glass for emeralds.”
…
The Widow Trip goes shopping nonetheless.
Her progress takes her past a Beaux-Arts mile
And toward the River, where a floating market
Vies for the attention with a fair.
In a Brazilian switch, the carrousel
Is silent and the Ferris Wheel has sound.
Or has one sound. It’s “Don’t tell me the lights…”
Is stuck. The uncompleted five-note phrase
Is maddening, and Artemis supplies,
On beat, “are shining, anywhere but there.”
The shaded ticket stand is occupied,
And massively, by an enormous man
Who wears a top hat, and a jaguar skin
He is the color of. He does not shill,
Trusting to his appearance to attract,
Or to repel; there is no knowing which.
�#55
A group of children buys a dozen fares
Without disturbing his indifference.
The man at the control is scrutable,
But seems to have some sort of injury.
Or be, perhaps, the victim of a stroke.
He pivots on one foot for all his moves,
And manages the two-hand grip with one.
A partial turn brings up a gondola;
In its design is something that the eye
Of one who used to be an architect
Responds to, but the congruence is gone
As quickly as it came. The wheel turns by;
A profile unmistakable, except
For Lady Norwich, turns full face, to see
The ‘grip’ look at her strangely. That, of course,
May be the stroke. The music comes unstuck;
The uncompleted sweeps on to its close.
The lights are shining as Diana leaves.
�#56
XII
On the Rand
In Parktown in Johannesburg, the lion
And the lizard keep. Majestically
At Bright Kop, Herbert Baker’s lion gate
Looks out on nothing, and the empty house,
Upon its street side blind with trellises,
Is open toward the North for any view.
The sash-ropes blow out toward Pretoria;
Rust slows the wind vane. In that quarter lag,
Where East is North and North is West, dead calm
Will come; the compass-rose upon the hearth
Select its final wind, its final stop.
All choices are coincidence; all wheels
Are gambler’s wheels. East may, across two seas
And two emerging continents, point then
To where Roraima weights the boundaries.
Those also are coincidence. Or were.
Heraldic beasts around the mounted globe
Intimidate their small originals,
Who may defer, but who will multiply.
The shrinking head dries in its knowledge still;
Empire and Barbary are where you look;
The sword and dragon where they always were.
�
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Developing_the_lost_world
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PDF Text
Text
I
Johannesburg
1913
“Call it the Mount Roraima Cableway
And Lost World Grand Hotel.”
“It’s copyright.
We’ll have to pay off Conan Doyle.”
“We’ll pay.
It’s issuing preferred stock for..”
Sir Christie Hood, the second richest man
In Parktown, and the richest not in mines,
( A Press Lord, not a Randlord ) overawes
His just returned from Delhi archiitect
Who, being Herbert Baker, is not awed
That easily. “He’s dottier than Rhodes,”
The great eclectic thinks,” and then, aloud,
“I cannot supervise the work myself.
I’ll have to deputize it. Deputies
Whom one can trust do not come cheaply.”
“No,
But profit was not all I had in mind.”
“If London is prepared to bail us out,”
Says Baker, “I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Would you like a Highland hunting lodge,
Or something more Cape Dutch.?” The Baronet
Cannot resist a once and future client’s
Smile at art’s predictability.
“A ‘stoep’ to conquer? That would tip our hand.”
The architect smiles, but puts his case.
#3
�“It isn’t all that far from Surinam.
Guiana was Dutch.”
“As the Transvaal was.
I think the less we look like Groote Schuur
The better. Why not model it on this?”
Bright Kop, the Baronet’s own house, is gloom
And sandstone, in deep shade which is the work
Of fifteen gardeners and fifteen years.
“If we are there to show the flag,” says Baker,
“Show it. Something High Imperial.”
Another reason not to self-repeat
Appears now in the hobble- skirted form
Of Lady Elva Hood, whose tatty tastes
On more than one occasion have reversed
Her architect’s. He coexists with these
In what is best described as an armed truce.
“How well you look, Dear Herbert. Is a tan
A sort of caste mark for you?”
“Artisans,
Milady, are a lowest caste. In India
As elsewhere.”
“Well, you always have your fees.
I’m making some more changes, by the way.
I want a trellis by this window. Sun
Could fade my needlepoint.” The architect,
Who oriented the huge teakwood room
To take advantage of its view, a sweep
Of highveld from the highest of the Rand
Decides a change of subject might be best.
#4
“Untouchables…” he says . But Lady Hood
Puts up a long forefinger to her lip
�And looks in the direction of the door,
At which At which a servant in a turban stands,
Bisected by a monstrous silver tray.
“Ah,” Lady Elva says, “Our Ovaltine.”
The Swiss Food Drink, her rival must concede,
Tops any going norm for tattiness.
“It’s for my husband’s ulcer,” laments she,
As if she read the opposition’s mind.
“It’s nothing by itself, but made with goat’s milk…”
“Let us hope the Swiss are more adept
At cableway construction than at drink.”
“The contract goes to the Americans,”
Sire Christie warns. “A Monroe Doctrine sop.
The Venezuelan Boundary Dispute
Is anything but over, in the mind,
At least of Venezuela. Uncle Sam
Will side with them, of course, as certainly
As the Colonial Office will back us.
Guiana has high grade petroleum,
And in the areas disputed, Grand
Hotel Lost World will see that it stays ours.
If it amuses some few millionaires
Meanwhile…”
“They will be well amused,
I’ll see to that,“ says Baker.
“Be amused
#5
“If they are men,” says Lady Elva tartly,
Confident in the two million pounds
She has inherited in her own right.
“Bushwhacking dinosaur is not my game,
�Although as Chris will tell you, I can shoot.
I’ve shot with maharajahs. So will you,
If you intend to keep your job. Your job
In Delhi. What your understudies do
On that poor mountain is your own affair
It‘s very wet, I‘m told. Do your roofs leak?
We are not here in summer. I don‘t know.
”Material for this house came by ox,”
Says Baker mildly. “I can deal with cables.”
…
As he leaves, the battered architect
Confronts, in his exiguous foyer,
Her Ladyship’s exotic footman, who,
His needlepointed turban much awry,
Adjusts his other clothing, as, intact,
A Coloured parlor maid, a game flushed out,
Hotfoots upstairs. “Your hat and blueprints, Sahib.”
“The Lady Elva’s hired a Touchable,”
Decides the future Nimrod of the Raj.
Beside the outer door--Empire of course
Laid on in seamless red-- a four- foot globe
Is mounted on the necks of dark bronze dragons.
Baker avoids it. “Scorpions,” he thinks.
They are for him the most of India.
#6
II
British Guiana
A smoking rocket breaks the jungle crests,
To feather like an upward cataract
The bare red-sandstone prow of Mount Roraima,
Climax of the cliffs that ring it round.
�The rocket trails a line of silken thread
That will in turn pull up a stronger line
To raise the pilot cable. At the top,
Having ascended the Brazilian face-The easier--the on-site engineer,
Whose name is Roland Galt, awaits the strike.
That hit, in spite of the prevailing damp,
Is like the downfall of a sparkler: bright
Quick jacks expiring as he reaches out.
“How gala,” says his British alpine-guide.
‘We might almost think we were at a fair.”
“A good sign, no?” says Galt, who knows quite well
McCain’s remark was meant to be a slight.
Guiana’s business community,
Of whom the guiding Scot is one full third,
Is livid that the cableway contract
Was granted to a young St. Louis firm
Whose largest previous experience
Was building Ferris Wheels. “The carnival,”
Says Galt, “is Good King George’s Narrow Gauge.
I’ll have the freight lift operational
#7
Before they get the railhead in sight,
There’s nothing in an aerial too big
To come in by canoe. In 1903
Trade unions at the Exposition struck.
My father finished up a full size wheel
With parts I carried out to Forest Park
By streetcar.”
�“Wait until the next rain comes.
You’ll have to thread your line through waterfalls.”
“So much the better for the tourist trade, Mac.
There isn’t much to say for dukes and earls
But they will flock to where the big game is.
If there are pretty scenes along the way,
That ups the ante. Don’t you ever look?”
“No, only where I put my feet.” Galt sneers:
“Like in your mouth? How many days a year
Do we have fog up here?”
“Including this,
All of them. Here it comes.” A drift of rain
Lifts out of Venezuela, weakening
Into a restless fog as it goes east
Across the montaintop into Guiana
“ Ectoplasm,“ Galt identifies.
He knows his Conan Doyle. “And real life rust.
I hope the cables still are in one piece
The day we open. It’s all touch and go.”
He knots the silken line around a slick,
Freak boulder. “Let’s backtrack. Where is Brazil?”
…
#8
The firing of the rocket is remarked
Among the area’s indigenous,
Who number twenty. Women have no souls
And are not reckoned. As the chieftain-priest,
Ipupu, who is four foot eight, prevails.
“It is a waterfall turned into smoke.
It is a waterfall that rushes up.
A mighty feather, going back to God.”
�His new wife contradicts him. “It’s a dart,
Meaning they have a giant blowgun.”
Minds,
It may be, but not souls. Etak Etak
Is not a woman of the Tepi-Pupu.
She is of the Cui, a tribe nearby.
“In any case it is a sacrilege.
The Mother Mountain has been violated.
Let the red of neck be sacrificed.”
Etak speaks out. “They cannot be all bad.
They have enslaved the Tepi-Curucu.”
“And make slaves of us, if we allow.”
Exogamy, Ipupu now reflects,
May have its drawbacks. “Woman, if you speak
Again I’ll sell you to the red of neck
To work as servant by the Curucu.”
“The giant blowgun is the end of life,”
A tribal elder warns. “It will devour
The air we breathe. Its spit blots out the sun.”
#9
Idzumu, an enthusiastic youth
Not quite one week beyond is passage rite,
One year in age behind the tribal elder,
Tries a maiden speech. “If we obtain
Ourselves the giant blowgun we at least
Can down-cephalicize the Curucu
Before the world puffs out.”
“Great as it is,”
Responds the sorcerer-reductionist,
“My art cannot accommodate such numbers.
Sewing up the lips would take me days,
And I say nothing of the eyes and ears.”
�His staff is headed, in a strictest sense,
By an example of his work. Etak,
Meanwhile, will not be silenced. “Idiots!
Air that goes in comes out. If it did not
We should have suffocated long ago.
A hundred small blowguns are just as bad
As one big one. Are also just as good.
We can attack the strangers when we wish.
Or can attack the Curucu. But why?
Hang back and let them kill each other. Rape,
If we assume the Mountain has been raped,
They can avenge as easily as we.
That is, their corpses can. And now, My Lord,
Cut out my tongue, or when I have been sold
My buyers will be well informed as you.”
…
#10
The cableway construction camp is rope
And fabric, rather as if in the trees
A large balloon had wrecked. Here, red of neck
And red of beard, red-eyed, Norell McCain
Is lying in a hammock. Mirror hung
Uncertainly and basin on a stump,
An angered Roland Galt is red of throat,
His razor having cut him. “Bloody soap.
My face is like sandpaper.”
“Grow a beard.
We’ll make a colonist out of you yet..
You’re onto saying ‘bloody’.”
“Not quite. Nose
Rings might be next, and after that sharp bones
�Stuck-in wherever.”
“Which brings us to:
Has anybody ever figured out
How sex works in a hammock? Have the natives?”
“No, and the attempts were all mistakes.
Freak shows. It’s how straitjackets were discovered.
How spider monkeys got conceived. Don’t think
About it.”
“I suppose if you could get
Both legs firm on the ground, and grip the tree…”
“Is that a proposition?”
“Desperate,.
But not that desperate.”
“Oh well, take heart.
Our hotel architect gets here next week.
His name, according to the messengers,
#11
Is Artemus Davant, and anyone
Who has a name like that has got to be
A little odd. You’ll have a choice. Get up:
We have to show the natives how to roast.”
“Roast what?”
“Roast coffee beans. Or do you plan
To go on chewing coca leaves all day?”
�#12
III
East of Suez
At Soerakarta,in the Dutch East Indies,
Karsen Trip, a twenty-five year old
Zoologist already widely published,
Is going over for a second time
A cablegram he does not quite believe.
“…some dozen of the dragons. Breeding pairs,
Enough to stock a modest game reserve
And presently allow small hunts each year.
You payment will be as we may agree,
But will include a figure…based upon
How many reptiles reach Roraima live.
Expense in Komodo are of course
Included. Yours sincerely, Christie Hood>“
Although he lives on spacious private means,
The figure pops Mijnheer Trip’s blue eyes out
�“Land-crocodiles in South America,”
The young man muses, putting into Dutch
His Javanese for the Komodo “dragon,”
V. Komodoensis, otherwise.
The Giant Monitor. “For all I know,”
He thinks, “ a dozen may be all of them.
I ought to turn him down, but Krakatoa
Killed off more than ever hunters will.
So much for natural selection. And,
What other chance to see them at close range?”
#13
Between the gables of the bungalow,
Whose forms South Africans would recognize,
And of which Baker is not unaware,
A low verandah takes the heat, the lamps,
In spite of which, across the waxen tile,
As if a lizard went, a chill goes by.
Trip recognizes it for what it is:
Challenge, in its extremest, closest form-The dragon, of the fear of fear-of-death.
…
Henk’s Soerabaja Bar, a seedy twin,
In Soerakarta, of the Soerakarta
Bar in Soerabaja, is a shed
Among high palms. It too has lamps, the which
Sedately swing in midnight’s last of wind.
Drunk, Mijnheer Trip is shopping. He must have,
For his excursions, a dependable
Boy. Indonesians will not nearly do,
�As they are much too frail, and terrified
Of Varanus, known to them by reputation
If not by the experience direct.
A dark trio of merchant seamen flunks,
One after brute another, being each
Too stupid for the job description, part
Of which is to be Trip’s companion-valet,
Part of which is to be trapper-guide.
But now a massive, sober, yellow lascar
#14
Stands by Trip. “What is your name?” Trip asks.
“I? Lothringen. My friends call me Lorraine.”
“I take it that your friends are mostly French?”
He knows his history. Since Bismarck’s war
Alsace-Lorraine is Elsass-Lothringen.
“Not necessarily. Would you prefer
To be called Elsass, or be called ‘Al’s ass”,
As you Americans pronounce Alsace.”
“I’m not American. My name is Trip.
I’m Dutch. What makes you think I’m not?”
“You spoke.
And you are in a bar. Not at the Club.
I cannot really tell you what I am.
My father was--I think--a Legionnaire.
My mother was a Madagascarene,
But she was half Chinese. We came back out
Quite early. I grew up in Sarawak.”
“I’m looking for a trapper.”
“I can trap.
Trap what I want.”
Trap animals, I mean.”
“Before I went to sea I spent some time
�As first gun-bearer to the late White Rajah.
He was all but blind. I dealt with wounds
And crippled water buffalo a lot.”
“I’m leaving in a fortnight for Komodo.
Will you come?”
“A dragon hunt? They live
On Lombok too, you know. We had a few
In Sarawak. One tried to eat the Ranee.
#15
Lady Brooke was anything but blind.
The trophy is above her mantelpiece.”
“Opinion is, they will not go for humans.”
“Tell the Ranee.”
“Will you come?”
“For money,
No.”
“The price can be as we arrange.”
A smell of gin and rum and kerosene
Moves in the dead Cape Jasmine as the wind
Dies utterly and as the lamps burn out.
The smoke puts shadows on the White Man’s forehead
“Noon tomorrow at the sugar docks.”
…
A beach in Lombok, where a low surf crashes
And a pair of cots is under nets.
Side-on toward the warming morning sun,
A dragon lizard rises into life.
His forked tongue licks out to try the air;
His clear eyelids resist it in distrust.
The coldest blood, however, has its warmth.
He flicks a massive tail, and fronts the foe,
�Which is himself in slickest replica.
He stiffens, and the enemy responds
In kind. The reptile brain, the deep,
Intent automaton, will venture what it is
To have at once and wholly what it wants.
Imperative and challenge, risk and prize
#16
Come down to one, as does what bodies them
The fruitless serpent of the mindless tree
Will have his triumph nonetheless.
Invention, in the absence of the natural,
Will breed it sports as if it were a graft.
…
A small flotilla--six high-load canoes-Arrives at Camp Louisiana Purchase
In Guiana. From the last, in boots,
Straw boater, insect veils, and starchy blouse,
Steps out a slim young woman. Roland Galt
Receives her in blank, candid puzzlement.
“Miss. I was here to meet an architect.”
“You do. My name is Artemis Davant.
�#17
IV
On Top of Roraima
A rare clear day, and where the nations three,
On maps at any rate, precisely join,
The twenty mile square flattop mountain shows
Its red steep sides. The forests at its base
Thin-out to the immense savannas; cool,
An air upon the summit somewhat thick
Thins-out beyond the station on the prow.
In sheaves too much exposed, the cables turn.
The hotel architect turns on the gear
A practiced Arts and Crafts cold eye. Say she:
“I don’t mean to offend you, Mr. Galt,
But this construct of yours just does not seem,
Well, serious. It’s like a carrousel.
So temporary. Like a Ferris Wheel.”
Galt curses silently his heritage.
“It got the roof beams to you, didn’t it?”
“I do not speak of its efficiency;
I speak of its appearance. Let me build
A kiosk for it.”
“As you like. My thought
Was that our visitors might like to see
Machinery.”
“Undoubtedly they would,
And that is why it should be well concealed.
If I exposed my furnaces to them
�They would not feel that they had left Pittsburgh.”
“They would, they would,” Galt thinks, but banks his fires.
#18
Does not bank them enough, it now appears,
As Artemis Davant looks straight at him.
“The only naked furnaces on view
At present, Mr. Galt, are in your eyes.
I’d not be shocked at such offensiveness
In poor Norell McCain, but out of you?”
‘Unbridled lust” is not the phrase. That means
At some point it was bridled. Waterfalls
Are showers cold indeed, and I see scores,
But I do not see you two under them.
We work together. And I cannot work
If I am stared at like a can-can girl.
And do not think that I’m some sheltered prude.
I used to draw from models in a life class.
Meanwhile, if you would care to look at me
Not as an architect but as a woman,
Call on me and meet my chaperon.”
Galt is good looking and aware of it.
He grins somewhat to focus- down the flame.
“I’ve met your aunt. I had my ears slapped back
By her too. That time it was innocent.”
“Marie St. Boniface is not my aunt
Nor anybody else’s. She’s a nun.
Or was. She fell in love with Captain Dreyfus.
Left the convent to stuff envelopes
For Zola. Then she put on Zouave dress
And got as far as Martinique. Her sense
�#19
Of place out in the colonies is vague.”
“A bride of Christ would tend to pick a Jew.”
“Yes. He was the only man of whom she had seen
More pictures than of Jesus. She had hoped
To nurse him, but the French authorities
Would not permit her nearer than Cayenne.
I found her in Georgetown and hired her on.”
“High boots on chaste Diana and a nun
For chaperon… You’ve heard of triple brass?”
“In art school armor would have been a mercy.
One felt safer on the streets of Delhi.
Tea is at half-past, outside my tent.
You will be welcome, Mr. Galt, but dodge
Your own I have no doubt lax chaperon.”
…
Her mentor, having no desire himself
To sail halfway around the world to look
On Table Mountain magnified five times
And reddened in the geological
Equivalent of red shift, has allowed
His student full discretion as to site.
She has so situated his hotel
That it is nowhere near the cableway,
Infuriating her construction crews,
And sacrificing drama on the prow,
But sheltering its all too open rooms
From all but the plateau’s most stubborn fogs,
Using the mountain’s undulating face
�#20
For views that, after its thrice-nightly rains,
Quite shame the Falls of Iguassu. “Thank God,”
Says she, “we do not have a Tablecloth.
The fog ascends. It does not form on top.
We have a chance at fairly sunny days.”
“You grew up in the Cape, Miss Artemis?”
“In Durban, where I learned to speak Tamil,
That being why the Bakers took me in.
Pretoria, linguistically, was quite
Beyond him. Delhi speaks less English still.
Is that red hair of yours South African?”
McCain, who on the just completed stoep
Looks out toward Venezuela not with fire
But ashes, looks back toward that fine profile
Which is the torch of them. “Unless my dad
Was, no. But I know Cape Dutch when I see it”
Artemis is much amused. “You’re right;
I am the last who would deny it. What
We have is Groote Schuur with outside stairs
And mammoth window bays in both the gables.
Baker never does more than he must,
And when Sir Christie cut the estimates…”
“Some people have it easy. Iron-Jaw Galt’s
Had women at his feet since he was ten.
He has them like they went by on a wheel.”
The architect permits herself a wink.
“Well if he hasn’t it is not for want
Of trying. Boniface says he is snake
#21
�And apple and the flaming sword in one.
But Boniface comes late to all of that.
It’s she who’s bound as on the torture wheel.
Real women, do you notice, are perverse.
Do not jump off of lover’s leap just yet.”
#22
V
At Sea--Roraima--Johannesburg--At Sea
�The Matson freighter Mangareva strains
To hold at thirteen knots. Eastbound from Truk
She has, penned-up upon her fantail, ten
Immense Komodo Dragons, fatly fit
Upon a diet mostly suckling pigs
And such few rats as her Malaysian cooks
Can be annoyed to trap. One deck above,
In spotless, dazzling linen, white enough
To be a garment for Lord Jim come back
As medic-ghost-archangel, Karsen Trip
Looks on his charges. “Seven females, four
Grown males, including, that is, our old boy
Who walked the plank with your chronometer
Inside. Have you seen Peter Pan, Mijnheer?”
“Eleven times. I have eleven small
Grandchildren. You--I speak now as the Bridge-Are here advised to keep that half-breed giant
Of yours confined to quarters. Am I clear?
I do not want him mixing with my crew.
They have their own Far East depravities.
And if you have him on the quarterdeck
Procuring Chinks for you I’ll put you off
At Molokai, newts, him, pound sterling all.”
The Captain leaves as if to point his threat,
And as he mounts the port companionway
The Mangareva rises in a head-on swell.
#23
It throws the reptiles on their wire restraints;
One--three hundred pounds of sated sloth-Breaks free and goes agilely at the steps;
And as if now imagining himself
�To be a python, eats in measured gulps
The bottom two-thirds of the Captain, who,
A look of much vexation on his face,
Calls out “Exterminate the brutes,” and dies.
…
Two hours in bed, Marie St. Boniface,
In saffron lamplight, reads from her inscribed
Proof copy of J’Accuse. A face so plain
As to seem ageless has protected her
From perils she can only guess at, or,
Before Guiana, only could. Her tent
Flap lifts, and, night gowned, Artemis Davant,
Whose is the other camp bed, comes in damp.
“The worst fog yet. The Mountain cannot see
Its drenched hired hands before its dripping face.”
“And just as well. At sundown, on my hike,
I saw our gloomy Mr. Red McCain
Showering in the East Face cataract.
He will contract pneumonia. How cold
That water can be at the best of times!”
“Oh, he’s robust.”
“And since he’s shaved his beard
So much more youthful looking. Younger, some,
Than his superior. I did not think,
#24
At first, he was. What is it, Artemis,
That makes one pick one man above another?”
“His pince-nez?” the architect restrains
Herself from saying. “Drive,” she honestly
Replies, but wonders if she really knows.
“Except in special circumstances, like--
�Inheriting a firm that silvers mirrors,
One would never make Narcissus mate.
One would not want one’s children, how to say,
Not to inherit drive. Or otherwise
One would surely have them always at home.”
“At home? I think that I should like that.”
“No,
You would not. It would be your convent breached
And you without your freedom. That is what
The Serpent of the Garden did not say
Sufficiently to Eve our driven mother.
Hence we live out yet her discontents.”
“The Serpent has also his discontents.
Your engineer is laying leagues of pipe
To have a nearby shower of his own.”
…
Narayan Dar, the Lady Elva Hood’s
Upwardly mobile butler, slams her door
Abruptly in the wholly guileless face
Of an officious adolescent who,
However, goes on to insist, at length,
He is a cousin. “Not her cousin. Yours.
#25
I’ve come here all the way from Trinidad.”
The stately servant grudgingly relents.
“Go to the rear and have the kaffirs feed you.
“I’ll be there when I go off at ten.”
Pandokkies in Parktown are not less mean
For being Parktown, and the garconniere
Narayan occupies is one small room.
The cousin is asleep there in a fug
�Of curry over mealie pap.
“Get up.
I do not need strange bedbugs in my bed.”
“Superb my cousin. Know you of the plan
Your master has to cheat the Portuguese?”
“Is there a side to choose? The Goanese
Incline one toward the servants of the Raj.”
“No no. The Portuguese who are Brazil.”
“The border controversy? Certainly
I know. I am applying for the job
Of major-domo at the fort-hotel.”
“Exactly. Venezuela has a plan…”
…
“Hands off the crew, Lorraine. That French First Mate
Seems even more a prude than Captain Fitch.”
“He’s French Canadian.”
“So much the worse.
And I’m in no position now to pay
Hush money. Rajah Brooke’s huge appetite
Has cost us more than he’d have brought us live.”
“He is alive.”
#26
“What do you mean alive?
I saw him trussed an lowered overboard.
It was the only way to give poor Fitch
A decent burial.”
“I cut the cords
As he went over. He has followed us
To eat our garbage. I swam out last night
And fought him to exhaustion. He’s on board
And running loose around the forecastle.
The crew feed him live chickens.”
�“Lots of them,
I hope. If he attacks another man
There’ll be a mutiny. Farewell commodes,
Farewell Lorraine, and farewell Trapper Trip.”
#27
VI
In the Camp of the Tepi-Pupu and Elsewhere
Ipupu of the Tepi-Pupu, hidden
In the putrescent waters-cannibal
Of an enormous pitcher plant, and well
Aware his skin is being eaten off,
Is watching in wide-eyed puzzlement
Activity upon the cableway.
Eight crocodiles, of unfamiliar form,
Contained in woven wicker basket-weave
Of necessarily fantastic strength,
Have been positioned on two large hooks
�Depending from the cable, so to rise
Impassive to the city in the sky.
Ipu long since has ceased to be surprised
At what goes on up there, but this exceeds.
A White Man who has not been seen before
Appears to be in charge; he is companioned
By his caboclo, who is on a scale
So large the Indian sinks to his nose
In fright. He chokes, and both men look at him,
But take no action. He has picked his blind
On the assumption no one else would hide
Inside a pitcher plant, or think to look,
Its chalice being mildly poisonous.
Lorraine and Trip would not have, but because
They do not know what pitchers are, nor that
There is surveillance. “It’s a little boy,”
#28
Trip says. “He looks a real Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”
“Or a pygmy in a plant for privy.”
…
Colon in Panama, and as the sun
Sets in the green Atlantic, to the wreck
Of those who do not understand the Isthmus,
Hotel Washington announces dinner.
First to enter is the Rajah Brooke,
Who, earlier, at Miraflores Lock,
Has jumped ship. Here, he eats at once two hams,
A swan carved out of ice, and one foot each
Off both the busboys. As the ice chills down
�His reptile blood he sinks to torpid sleep,
And is there dealt with by the Shore Patrol,
Who all agree that they have handled worse.
…
Etak Etak scrubs off the itching back
Of her decanted consort, who reports
“Apparently they worship them as gods.
Two priests attend them, offering them pigs.
Perhaps they are gods.”
“Gods would reach the sky
Without the aid of ropes, nor would they let
Themselves be bound in bamboo. These are beasts.”
“All who defile the mountaintop are beasts.”
“And can be killed as such. While you were stuck
In She-Who-Swallows-Flies I went to fish.
Not in the eastern streams but in the west.
#29
A stranger came, in a canoe of fire.
He was not from the mountaintop. At least
His language was not theirs. He spoke our own.
He gave us this, and said that if we do
That he desires we shall have weapons too.”
And from concealment near the fire, Etak
Takes out a pair of pliers six feet long.
…
The upper cable station, Artemis
Would be first to admit, is what she built
As “folly.” It has sweeping cornices
Suggesting wings, and the entire effect
Is as if on the Mountain’s narrow prow
A steel and concrete pterodactyl sat.
�Bright cables turn, and in a shining car
As if arriving from a planet new,
A blond young man comes to the untrod stair.
Behind a circular, clear aperture,
A window of, and onto mannerism,
Artemis is watching. She wears pearls.
The always level, gray-eyed measured gaze
That froze the life class fixes on the face,
To turn at once away. And in that turn,
That shows her profile, she converts a view.
“The profile of a goddess,” Trip compares.
“A goddess modeling as for a coin.:
A chokered head on a medallion.”
#30
Another car arrives, from which, in boots,
Dark jodhpurs, and a belt of leopard skin,
A servant-guardian emerges, tall,
Quick, powerful. And after him draw up,
One after another, eight of the commodes.
“I was expecting swords,” says Artemis.
“Not dragons. Not just yet.”
“Swords?” Trip inquires.
“As decorations.,” Artemis assures.
“Swords to be crossed above the mantelpieces.”
Karsen Trip allows his vision now
To take in background to the deity.
He sees, across the mesa’s broken rock,
A sort of causeway stretch, and at its end,
In fog and sunlight, what might be, elsewhere,
Government House. He shrugs, and to the way’s
Designer, for whom background also fades,
Announces, “I cannot be certain yet,
�But I see nothing here that would suggest
The Monitor cannot survive in this terrain.
It’s bare, but parts of their own habitat
Are just as barren.”
“I thought that Komodo
Was a jungle.”
“So it is. Lombok,
However, isn’t. It has lava fields.”
“Assuming we succeed, and that they live,
What must I do to keep them from the building?
Trust the hunters?”
“What you have done here.
#31 High walls and overhanging cornices.
Even the largest of them can climb well.”
“And what about your own life, Mr. Trip?
Can you be happy here? Can you survive?”
Trip nods. “All that it takes to create Eden
Is a man, a woman, and a reptile,”
…
McCain is forced to hear his tent-mate rave.
“I am not going to call a man Lorraine.“
“I wouldn’t argue. Did you see the size
Of that half-breed?” Norell McCain is less
Than sympathetic with the jealous rage
Of Roland Galt. “You are well out of it
It‘s obvious it will be open war
Among the chaperons. I saw this noon
‘Lorraine‘ give Artemis Davant a look
That would have frightened Genghjs Khan to death.
He watches over Trip as rabidly
As Attila the Nun guards Artemis.
The only dragons here aren‘t the commodes.”
�McCain‘s ten-mate is twisting in his hands
The helpless central lodge pole of the tent.
“Let go the pole. You‘’ screw us in the ground.”
“If need be I‘ll fight Attila and Trip
And you and all the dragons and Lorraine.
That woman was in love with me. I know.”
“Do you know how to spell f-i-c-k
e-l?”
No; you don’t either. It’s l-e.”
“Can you spell f-u-c-k-u? I can.”
#32
VII
At the Grand Hotel
On Saturday before the opening
The cable brings a rich variety:
A score of suckling pigs, some for the guests;
An armory of decorator swords;
Ten jeroboams of a good champagne,
And these entrusted to the bamboo weave
That brought up safely eight live monitors;
A crate of goats; two geese; a wireless set;
A carpet bag of purplish needlepoint;
A string trio; its stands and instruments;
Preceded by its legs, a grand piano;
Guns enough to stage the Jameson Raid;
And, two days early, Arthur Conan Doyle.
…
“I like it all,” says Lady Elva Hood,
“Except that Hanging Garden on the cliff.
A bit like Monte Carlo, don’t you think?
Suicide Terrace?”
�“Only if you miss,
Milady.” Artemis, who cut her teeth
On vicereines, takes the Press Lord’s wife in stride.
A spruced-up, Bengal-looking Lothringen
Is not so fortunate. “Dear God,” he says.
“It’s Lady Brooke. The Ranee.”
“What we know,”
Says Karsen, passing white tie and tails,
“As learning nothing and forgetting nothing.”
#33
“Vengeance. You have not seen what she’s like.”
In the receiving line Sir Christie Hood
Shakes hands with a Brazilian minister,
Who does not let his thoughts on boundaries
Deter him from a party. Lady Brooke
Is deep in conversation with a youth
Who is a son of Teddy Roosevelt,
Not that the name would signify to her.
“I’ve shot the brutes before. Go for the eye.”
Behind the trio and its potted palms
A sotto voice below the Eva waltz,
Trip whispers in the ear of Artemis,
Who wears a jeweled crescent in her hair.
The moment lengthens in the extra beat of love.
To three who watch, the scene screams at the eye.
McCain and Lothringen and Roland Galt,
Unlikely to make common cause, have one.
…
St. Boniface, unable to decide
What she can rightly wear, does not attend.
She stands, in ever-dampening late night,
On that small terrace Lady Hood dislikes.
�Her thoughts are suicidal truly. “So
Far, Alfred, and so near. Between us now
No barrier but air. I almost see
That vile confine of your imprisonment.”
The nun’s geography has not improved.
It is as vague as her chronology,
#34
And if her line of sight were much extended
She would see Caracas. But the sky
Of her despair cannot be limited.
Theology was never much more clear
For her than azimuth, and she debates
If suicide is more a mortal sin
Than living always as a Dreyfusard.
The answer will, just now, not be revealed
A painted hand is clapped across her mouth
From an imported orange tree above,
And she is pitched across the balustrade.
…
From printing promptings Arthur Conan Doyle
Addresses curtly the assembled guests.
“All I can say is that we have here life-Uh--imitating art--er--imitating
Life. Since nature has so thoughtlessly
Not put upon Roraima dinosaurs,
We have provided them. A year or two
And we can have a proper hunt. For now
We can afford to shoot one specimen
Alone. I wish you well. For Mr. Trip,
Whose scientific knowledge and whose skill
Has made this entertainment possible,
�Our thanks.” A little figure at the wide,
Now open door into the dining room
Raps twice upon the parquet’s pale rare wood
And sticks his staff into the speaker’s face.
#35 ( MISSING )
The author and the guests assume alike
He is an actor hired to entertain.
But Lady Elva hides her eyes and screams.
“Take him away. It is Narayan Dar.”
“You are distraught,” her tranquil husband says.
It clearly cannot be.”
“The head,” she shrieks
“The head upon the staff. The shrunken head.
It is Narayan pure. The eyebrow scar.”
…
“The worst of it,” so Lady Hood will say,
Years later, to Jan Christian Smuts, “was how
The head was fresh. It dripped. Was wet and dripped.
It shriveled -up the length of needle point
I made to be the bell-pull in the hall.”
…
The head reductionist is seized by Trip,
Who leaps across the cello case, and Galt,
Who topples all the music stands.
The Tepi-Pupu offers no resistance,
But before the men can pin his arms
A loud explosion, coming more or less
From the direction of the gun room, rocks
Hood’s ballroom, jumbles its precise parquet,
And swings the chandelier as if in wind.
Young Mr. Roosevelt writes off right there
A modest fortune in his father’s guns,
But Ranee Brooke nods at the Guianese
Who mans the cloakroom and is handed thence
�Her rifle, saying something, possibly,
About the social life of Sarawak.
#36
Her rifle, saying something, possibly,
About the social life of Sarawak.
#37
VIII
The Same--in the Camp--In the Gun Room
A line boss from the Narrow Gauge runs in,
Waving a German pistol in the air
As if it were the flagpole of a flag
Shot off. “The CooCoos have revolted. Run!
I’ve lost a dozen men. We have the line
Still open but I’m not sure for how long.“
Removing lamps from Baker’s trademark sconces,
Guests and staff rush toward the portico,
And, like a lynch mob each Diogenes,
Onto the causeway. Arriving at the prow,
The vanguard is demoralized to see,
Strap-hanging as it were, the Curucu
Come up the cable hanging-on by hand.
The White Ranee is not demoralized.
She lifts her rifle and with perfect aim
Begins to pick them off. Each hunter there,
If he is honest, envies her the chance.
It is a moonlit shooting gallery.
“Fruit dropping off the vine,” says Hood their host,
And hurries all of his distinguished guests
�Into the next car that draws up. “Wait! Stop!
Cries Roland Galt, before the gate can close
“The gondola was empty. We don’t know
What’s on the ground.”
“I think that we’re all right,”
The line boss answers. “I see flares below.”
A second car arrives, and when it goes
#38
Five persons only still are at the top,
St. Boniface still unaccounted for,
The servants having fled for who knows where.
Who knows in point of fact is Pu- Tahi,
Ipupu’s sorcerer reductionist,
Who in the panic has been let escape,
And leads, no doubt for reasons of his own,
A double file of ashen refugees
For the Brazilian face. It being night
They are not threatened by the dragons, but,
Not knowing this, break file at every sound.
Awaiting the opposing cable car,
That rises as its opposite descends,
Are Trip and Galt and Artemis Davant,
McCain, and, as a token menial,
He who is called, except by Galt, Lorraine.
For no cause Galt can see, the cable stops.
“Oh do restart it,” Artemis implores.
“If we are separated from the rest of us
We’ll never make the railhead.”
“If we do
Where are we,” Galt replies. “The Narrow Gauge
Has only handcars for its rolling stock.
Its locomotives are in Sheffield still.”
As he tugs backward on the master grip
�An eerie twang, an A below low A,
Vibrates against the cliff as sounding board,
And, harp of harps, the cable separates,
A flailing end, a living tentacle
#39
From what azoic beast in the abyss,
Encircles Red McCain around the waist,
Triumphantly swings him above the edge,
And drops him screaming off the precipice.
…
#39 ( M I S S I N G )
A fleet of handcars, headed by a peer,
The Lady Elva Hood, a K.B.E.,
Large dogs, and Ranee Iris Dudley Brooke,
Is pumping madly past the darkened camp
Of Chief Ipupu, soon made bonfire -bright
(Unwisely, given the proximity
And present mood of ten-score Curucu
Who were not moving targets of the hunt)
By pyramids of the abandoned lamps.
The kerosene begins to leak; the fire
Leaps up. Etak Etak, her arms upraised,
Assumes a pose of priestly dignity,
The six foot long wire cutters in her hands.
…
“I’m sorry. I’m still sick.” Davant sits down
Upon a broad up-ended rifle rack.
Trip turns a champagne bottle to her lips.
“If I had had the sense to look away.”
Destruction in the gun room seems complete.
No rifle is in working order, nor
Does it much matter, ammunition too
A casualty of packing and revolt.
�“We can’t stay here,” says Trip. “Who knows
How long to send a rescue column.”
“Could one live
Indefinitely on champagne? I feel improved
At thinking so.”
“Die happily,
At any rate,” says Lothringen, whose own
Capacity is magna at a time.
“We have two choices,” Galt enumerates.
“Yes. Mumm and Piper Heidsieck.“.Vows default.
“Shut up, Lorraine. Two choices, neither good.
Stay here and starve to death, and that assumes
The Curucu will not be back, or, worse,
Maybe, try making our way down the face.
Need I remind you that the only route
Lies over dragon country. Thank you, Trip.”
“No face except Brazil is feasible?”
Galt sneers. “Would you like to attempt the prow?”
“What do we know about the western face?”
“It’s Venezuela, to whom, I suspect,
We owe four troubles in the first place.”
“Speed,”
Says Artemis. “Can men outrun the things?”
“On grass and pavement, yes. On broken ground
The Monitors have all of the advantage.”
Trip goes on. “If we can beat the sun
Our friends will still be sluggish. Can we reach
Brazil and do the ledge before the heat“
“We have a narrow window. It‘s from dawn
Till nine. We cannot hope to go at night.
We do not know the route, and if we’re lost
#41
�Out there when that cold blood is warming up…”
“We are unarmed,” Lorraine reminds the group.
“Unarmed completely. I will fight bare-hand
In water. On land, no.”
“But we have arms,”
Says Artemis, and rushes from the room.
When she returns she carries, like a page
In some bygone Mid-Eastern entourage,
A Persian sword that hung above a mantel.
“Baker insisted on the best. It’s real.”
#42
IX
At the Grand Hotel, cont.
It is the only weapon that is real.
The others, it turns out, are painted plaster.
“In two words, bugger Booker’s,” Artemis
Unladylikely says, echoing what
Would be Guiana’s anthem, did it not
Lack music. Forwarders, wholesalers, crooks,
That firm adds forgery to its deceits.
“One sword among us,” Galt redundantly
Points out. “One chance. Does it make better sense
To go as four or go as two and two?
A man’s a full meal. He could bring delay.”
“Lorraine is more than one,” thinks Artemis,
Who knows Trip’s shadow hates her, and may well
Be more a danger than she yet has faced.
She looks at Galt. “The team with the best odds
Would be of course the one that knows the most
About the reptiles: Trip and Lothringen.”
Better, she thinks, to have it come from her
Than have Lorraine suggest it, and she knows
It has occurred to him. No man, and least
Of all a jealous one, is so opaque
�As that. ‘Inscrutability’ exists
Behind the footlights only. “Torches. Fire.
Are they afraid of it?”
“Yes. But no torch
Would last that long. We have too far to go.”
Trip puts an arm around her. “I am sure
#43
We all agree your safety is the thing
That is the main consideration.”
“I
Do not agree. I am the odd man out.
Odd woman out. I should not like to live
With it upon me I had cost the life
Of any man and let alone of three.
I’ll stay, and trust you three to summon help.”
“Or Mein Herr Galt can stay with you,” says one.
“Not bloody likely,” Mijnheer Trip replies.
The extra-sensory, if it exists,
Exists for just such crises, and the mind
Of Lothringen is as exposed to Galt
As it is dark to Trip. The ESP
Sparks over race and distance and distrust.
He’s figuring out how to get rid of us
So he and Trip can get away alive.
Clairvoyance is by definition clear.
And it is not--not just--to save his skin.
“Draw lots,” says Artemis. “But not till dawn.
It’s that or have you stay awake all night.
A fool could see you do not trust each other
Not to take the sword and flit by night.”
“Trust one another,” Galt corrects in silence.
But the inner ether sparks again
And it occurs to him that Artemis
Referred advisedly to two. Cheat, clear
�A song, projects as with the ether’s aid.
See to it I’m not left with Lothringen.
#44
Telepathy implies the out-of-body.
Out of Red McCain’s disjected body
Comes as if to say “Beware the Ides”
A voice which says in fact “You cannot mean
To let that Far East Kaffir have a chance
To have a White girl in his debt. Come to.”
The Limbo of the Old Colonial,
Upon the evidence South Africa,
Or, possibly, the middle management
At Booker’s, calls the warning echo back
And Roland Galt must function as he can.
“That Kaffir possibly one could,” he thinks
But hears again Limbo. “How desperate
Is desperate?”
“Much better not to know,”
He formulates as his convinced reply.
“I’d better keep the one true sword myself,”
The White Rose says. I guess I’ll sleep with it.
All of the properties of chivalry
And all of its discomforts. Rest you well.
I’m sorry Mr. Baker built no tower.”
…
“Release the goats,” says Trip to Lothringen.
“Satiety will be the best ally
We have.”
“The only.”
When his aide is gone
Trip finds himself on Baker’s service stair
In declasse debate with Roland Galt.
#45
�“What is the opposite, in Double Dutch
Of well done good and faithful servant?”
“One
Of you,” Trip answers, ”will betray me. Not
That Lorraine would.”
“But could he Don’t pretend
You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“In Ceram
He has a wife and children.”
“Marvelous
What thirty guilders will accomplish, no?”
“I ought to strike you.“
“Don’t. Just do you not
Suppose if in the morning when we draw
He wins, he will not take the sword and go.
At that point he will cease to be your ‘boy’
And let alone your servant. I and you
Will have to take him on. It will take both.”
…
“One foot outside the door,” says Artemis.
“I’ve lost one chaperon and now have two.”
The unlit corridor and unlit room
Do not conceal the faces pressing close.
The numismatic profile, in full face,
Is very young, as is the dragon-herd’s.
“You Dutchmen in the Indies never lose,
Somehow, a look of ice and silver skates.”
“Appearances deceive. Our blood warms up.”
The Old Hand’s youth is in his urging.”
“No.
I hope with all my heart the draw is yours
�#46
But if it isn’t I go with the draw
No man should have to fight a dragon, Karsen,
For the sake of damaged goods. Goodnight.”
…
Not on an impulse, neither for a reason,
Roland Galt, before he heads for bed,
Goes down between the potted orange trees
And down the seven flights of zigzag stairs
To stroll the Suicide Parterre. So far
It is a night without fog. Bright moonlight
Picks out, across the mountain’s southeast bay,
The day’s last waterfall, already going dry.
It is a spurting stream of diamonds.
Below him Galt can see the mist begin:
A patch or two, and then a ground of haze.
He leans upon the plaster balustrade;
His cigarette case drops out of his shirt.
Putting one leg across the balusters
To try the ledge, he climbs a few feet down.
The, reaching out an arm to pull back up,
He feels a giant’s grasp, and easily
Is lifted like an infant from a tub.
“If you are jumping, don’t. If you are climbing,
Wait.” The grip is Lothar Lothringen’s.
Around his shoulder is a coil of rope
And in his hand a little alpenstock.
They are, for Galt, at once familiar.
“Those are McCain’s. He had them in the camp.”
“He brought them topside for the opening.
#47
Sir Christie thought the guests might like to climb.”
�“Another weapon is another chance.”
“The alpenstock? Too short. Pick; handle too.
The handle brings one well within the jaws.
The pick would hardly pierce the outer skin.
I do not say it is not useful still.
I’ve done no climbing, but it’s time to learn.”
He hooks the pick beneath the other’s belt
And lifts him anything but playfully.
“Come with me. As you have seen, we are de trop
With Eve and Adam and the fruit up there.”
Galt feels that he is being cut in two
By pressure of his inseams. “Put me down.”
“You haven’t answered my nice invitation.”
“I’ve climbed here, but that’s all there is of it.”
The East may be the fount of irony.
“All you will have to do is hang on tight.”
He hands him, handle first, the alpenstock.
“This is in case you’d like to sleep with it.”
…
As dawn breaks, the two men have formed a “rope.”
What nags at Galt is not the being bound
But what he hears McCain say out of Limbo.
“Face it, Man. You were just something kept,
As one might say, on Miss Lorraine’s back burner.”
#48
X
Without the Gates
Nature, supportive always of the hopes
Of man, puts out the brightest day in years.
A mammoth sun soars out of green Guiana,
Reddening the Mountain’s red sandstone.
The heat of day comes hard upon the dawn.
Trip has the sword in hand; he and the girl
Are at the gates. Eroded tableland,
�A sort of Cappadocia countersunk,
Spreads out before them, dully glistening.
“It looks like German architecture: Poelzig”
Artemis comments abstractedly.
“It isn’t Petra. Half as old as time
Means here the fauna. With a little luck
We’ll miss them altogether. They aren’t bright,
And if you wanted to invent a place
For them to like and stay, you’d be hard put
To better those depressions there. Keep close;
We’re sticking to the high ground” Not, it soon
Is patent, wise. Upon a narrow neck
Between two sinkholes rears a large female,
Her grooved tongue flickering in semaphore.
“You shall not eat of every tree?” it spells.
“Here is the beast,” Trip thinks, “and here the field,
But where’s the subtlety? And no fruit keeps.”
The tongue is bifurcated, what it says
Ambiguous. “Ye shall not surely die.”
“Maybe, but I would say the odds aren’t good.”
#49
Trip lifts the sword and aims it for the brain.
“If I am mangled take the sword and leave.
They always will prefer dead meat to live.”
…
Eight decades or an eon into time,
In the vicinity of Krakatoa, quakes
Are picked up on the open seismographs
As far as Honolulu. In the straits
At Lombok, later in the afternoon,
A monstrous bulge is seen upon the water,
Breaking to become a quiet cloud
Of a peculiar yellow. Drifting east
It settles toward Komodo, parts, re-forms.
�It is a lazy, doubled crescent now,
Advancing on the Flores coast like rain,
Or like Imperial Japan’s last fleets:
A suicide armada on the move,
Behind some mile-high cloud of chlorine gas.
#50
XI
Roraima--Manaus
Augustus Phelan, of Pacific Heights
And of the San Francisco curia
In the Sierra Club, collects the tour
Of which he is the organizer-guide
In the impressively restored foyer
Of Grand Hotel Guyana-Tepi, Cape
Dutch monument to a generic past,
That being, the country’s circumstances,
Relevant as any other kind.
The Booker Companies, the catering
Franchise, have flown-in jello, frozen shrimp,
And large ice carvings, which, in noonday heat,
Have melted into smaller, other shapes
Than those intended, some of them obscene.
“As soon as we are finished with our lunch,”
Says Dr. Phelan, ”we can take our cameras
And set off for the dragon pits. These are,
You know, the last surviving specimens
Of the Komodo Giant Monitor.
In Indonesia it is now extinct.”
“It isn’t. In the Sumba Strait last year
I counted three. They swim as well as whales.”
The speaker is a Stanford botanist,
A longtime Baker Street Irregular,
To whom the tour was somewhat oversold.
“Fine news if true,” says Dr. Phelan suavely.
�“Not, however, vary likely.” He goes on:
#51
“Varanus went out neither with a bang
Nor whimper. It went out as with a burp.
The gas eruptions of the 70s
Completed the destruction. We can thank
The foresight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And other humane conservationists
In founding the Roraima colony.
So far as we can tell from past accounts
The dragons here attain a greater size
Than ever was recorded in the wild.
It may be absence of competing life forms,
Diet, or selective breeding.. Trip’s
Originals are said to have been large
By what we think was standard for the time.
We are, in fact, as size for full grown males,
Well on the way to twenty feet. In short,
We’re breeding back, or forward if you like,
To proper dinosaurs. It’s The Lost World.
Now if you’ll gather up your cameras…”
…
On their return the brave time travelers
Sense disarray in Booker’s caterers.
“You should have stayed in the hotel,” says one.
“A dragon jumped the wall and tried to mate
With one of my creations.”
“With the dolphin?”
“No. With R.M.S. Titanic. Froze
Right to it and went off into a stupor.
Took all six of us to drag him out.”
#52
�“Well can you blame him? Long before dessert
It looked more like an iceberg than a ship,
And God knows there’s no air-conditioning.”
…
The festival, so called, “Of All the World,”
Spoleto-in-Manaus, mounts this year
That well known Cariocan opera
Coq d’Or. Teatro Amazonas lights
At intermission like the Opera
De Monaco or like the Palais Garnier
Itself. Encumbered by the Slavic bulk
Of émigrés positioned on her right,
A handsome woman in her diamond
And eye-makeup-alone decades resumes
Her conversation from the interval
Preceding, toward the left. “A lovely house,
But surely in a rubber capital
One hopes for softer cushions. Was the dance
Recital dire? I could jot bear to go.
The program spoke of bread and circuses.”
“That group, the Nicaraguans, never showed.
They all came down with Hepatitis B
In Panama. We had a group from Guam
Who did a sketch about a hero type
Who saves a virgin from a dragon. Wild.
I mean a sketch.” The rich old lady smiles.
“That is as good a start for marriage
As any other.”
“Hate me if I ask,
#53
But are you not Viscountess Norwich?”
“No.
I’m often taken for her. Years ago,
In Singapore in 1941,
�I met her. Very princess-like. I’m flattered.”
“What do you suppose,” the seat mate asks,
“The Amazon was like in 1910?
They knew already that it would not last.
The rubber seeds were long since smuggled out.
Two years, the Federated Malay States
Would do them in. Would they have built this house
If they had really known?” The profile not
Viscountess Norwich answers. “Oh, I speak
To that. I know exactly how it was.
In 1940, in Batavia,
We knew too well the Japanese would come-The Germans had the Netherlands and France
Already--knew, I say, that they would come,
But we did not know when. That is content:
To have your goodbyes said and not know when.
Buitenzorg had things well in control;
Without the interference from the Hague,
Better than usual. It was a calm
Before the storm, but is there calm that‘s not?
My sons were in the war, but they were safe;
In training, both of them, In Nova Scotia.
It was the best time of my marriage.
My husband, when the children still were young,
Was gone a lot. He was a scientist.
#54
An expert on large lizards, if you please.
He had to sit through Wagner’s Siegfried once.
He found the opera ‘inaccurate’.
The threat of war kept him much more at home.
He had his funds to manage. I exist
On money that has gone from Tsarist bonds
To Royal Dutch to numbered Swiss accounts
�To I.B.M. to gene research to gold.
I shall not tell you where I have it now.
But while we waited, every afternoon,
We sat in our pajamas on the lawn
And had the servants bring out ice and gin
And our two tortoise-shell fly swatters. These
Were our conceits. A gift from us to us.
They were for swatting little lizards with.
I had them with me on that last flight out
In 1942, and fortunate
I had. Australia is drenched in flies.
To dodge the Japs we had to fly at night.
A KLM eight-seat amphibian
Too old for the Defense to confiscate.
My husband put me on the plane at ten
And left for Flores in a motor launch.
He had experiments in progress there.
I have inferred--and I had seen his route-He ran into a Japanese task force.
No man should have to face a dragon twice.
I have run on and on. Did not shops here
#55
Outlast the rubber barons? I’ve found none.”
“There is a little woman off the Square
Who deals in emeralds and shrunken heads.”
“Oh no. I might see old acquaintances
I had a project in Guiana once.”
“They both are copies. Who would shrink a head
That looked like Yoko Ono in the first place.”
“Who would ruin glass for emeralds.”
…
The Widow Trip goes shopping nonetheless.
Her progress takes her past a Beaux-Arts mile
And toward the River, where a floating market
�Vies for the attention with a fair.
In a Brazilian switch, the carrousel
Is silent and the Ferris Wheel has sound.
Or has one sound. It’s “Don’t tell me the lights…”
Is stuck. The uncompleted five-note phrase
Is maddening, and Artemis supplies,
On beat, “are shining, anywhere but there.”
The shaded ticket stand is occupied,
And massively, by an enormous man
Who wears a top hat, and a jaguar skin
He is the color of. He does not shill,
Trusting to his appearance to attract,
Or to repel; there is no knowing which.
A group of children buys a dozen fares
Without disturbing his indifference.
The man at the control is scrutable,
But seems to have some sort of injury.
#56
Or be, perhaps, the victim of a stroke.
He pivots on one foot for all his moves,
And manages the two-hand grip with one.
A partial turn brings up a gondola;
In its design is something that the eye
Of one who used to be an architect
Responds to, but the congruence is gone
As quickly as it came. The wheel turns by;
A profile unmistakable, except
For Lady Norwich, turns full face, to see
The ‘grip’ look at her strangely. That, of course,
May be the stroke. The music comes unstuck;
The uncompleted sweeps on to its close.
The lights are shining as Diana leaves.
#57
�XII
On the Rand
In Parktown in Johannesburg, the lion
And the lizard keep. Majestically
At Bright Kop, Herbert Baker’s lion gate
Looks out on nothing, and the empty house,
Upon its street side blind with trellises,
Is open toward the North for any view.
The sash-ropes blow out toward Pretoria;
Rust slows the wind vane. In that quarter lag,
Where East is North and North is West, dead calm
Will come; the compass-rose upon the hearth
Select its final wind, its final stop.
All choices are coincidence; all wheels
Are gambler’s wheels. East may, across two seas
And two emerging continents, point then
To where Roraima weights the boundaries.
Those also are coincidence. Or were.
Heraldic beasts around the mounted globe
Intimidate their small originals,
Who may defer, but who will multiply.
The shrinking head dries in its knowledge still;
Empire and Barbary are where you look;
The sword and dragon where they always were.
�
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Developing_the_lost_world
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https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/74c18946d9b2a3d8d2d4f2cb69b676e7.pdf
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EPIC1 -- DLWX1 -- Turner Cassity
“It isn’t all that far to Surinam.
#2
Guiana was Dutch.”
“As the Transvaal was.
I think the less we look like Groote Schuur
The better. Why not model it on this?”
Bright Kop, the Baronet’s own house, is gloom
And sandstone, in deep shade which is the work
Of fifteen gardeners and fifteen years.
“If we are there to show the flag,” says Baker,
“Show it. Something High Imperial.”
Another reason not to self-repeat
Appears now in the hobble- skirted form
Of Lady Elva Hood, whose tatty tastes
On more than one occasion have reversed
Her architect’s. He coexists with these
In what is best described as an armed truce.
“How well you look, Dear Herbert. Is a tan
A sort of caste mark for you?”
“Artisans,
Milady, are a lowest caste. In India
As elsewhere.”
“Well, you always have your fees.
I’m making some more changes, by the way.
I want a trellis by this window. Sun
Could fade my needlepoint.” The architect,
�Who oriented the huge teakwood room
To take advantage of its view, a sweep
Of highveld from the highest of the Rand
Decides a change of subject might be best.
“It isn’t all that far to Surinam.
Guiana was Dutch.”
“As the Transvaal was.
I think the less we look like Groote Schuur
The better. Why not model it on this?”
Bright Kop, the Baronet’s own house, is gloom
And sandstone, in deep shade which is the work
Of fifteen gardeners and fifteen years.
“If we are there to show the flag,” says Baker,
“Show it. Something High Imperial.”
Another reason not to self-repeat
Appears now in the hobble- skirted form
Of Lady Elva Hood, whose tatty tastes
On more than one occasion have reversed
Her architect’s. He coexists with these
In what is best described as an armed truce.
“How well you look, Dear Herbert. Is a tan
A sort of caste mark for you?”
“Artisans,
Milady, are a lowest caste. In India
As elsewhere.”
“Well, you always have your fees.
I’m making some more changes, by the way.
I want a trellis by this window. Sun
�Could fade my needlepoint.” The architect,
Who oriented the huge teakwood room
To take advantage of its view, a sweep
Of highveld from the highest of the Rand
Decides a change of subject might be best.
#4
“If they are men,” says Lady Elva tartly,
Confident in the two million pounds
She has inherited in her own right.
“Bushwhacking dinosaur is not my game,
Although as Chris will tell you, I can shoot.
I’ve shot with maharajahs. So will you,
If you intend to keep your job. Your job
In Delhi. What your understudies do
On that poor mountain is your own affair
It‘s very wet, I‘m told. Do your roofs leak?
We are not here in summer. I don‘t know.
”Material for this house came by ox,”
Says Baker mildly. “I can deal with cables.”
…
As he leaves, the battered architect
Confronts, in his exiguous foyer,
Her Ladyship’s exotic footman, who,
His needlepointed turban much awry,
Adjusts his other clothing, as, intact,
A Coloured parlor maid, a game flushed out,
�Hotfoots upstairs. “Your hat and blueprints, Sahib.”
“The Lady Elva’s hired a Touchable,”
Decides the future Nimrod of the Raj.
Beside the outer door--Empire of course
Laid on in seamless red-- a four- foot globe
Is mounted on the necks of dark bronze dragons.
Baker avoids it. “Scorpions,” he thinks.
They are for him the most of India.
.
#5
II
British Guiana
A smoking rocket breaks the jungle crests,
To feather like an upward cataract
The bare red-sandstone prow of Mount Roraima,
Climax of the cliffs that ring it round.
The rocket trails a line of silken thread
That will in turn pull up a stronger line
To raise the pilot cable. At the top,
Having ascended the Brazilian face-The easier--the on-site engineer,
Whose name is Roland Galt, awaits the strike.
That hit, in spite of the prevailing damp,
Is like the downfall of a sparkler: bright
Quick jacks expiring as he reaches out.
�“How gala,” says his British alpine-guide.
‘We might almost think we were at a fair.”
“A good sign, no?” says Galt, who knows quite well
McCain’s remark was meant to be a slight.
Guiana’s business community,
Of whom the guiding Scot is one full third,
Is livid that the cableway contract
Was granted to a young St. Louis firm
Whose largest previous experience
Was building Ferris Wheels. “The carnival,”
Says Galt, “is Good King George’s Narrow Gauge.
I’ll have the freight lift operational
#7
The firing of the rocket is remarked
Among the area’s indigenous,
Who number twenty. Women have no souls
And are not reckoned. As the chieftain-priest,
Ipupu, who is four foot eight, prevails.
“It is a waterfall turned into smoke.
It is a waterfall that rushes up.
A mighty feather, going back to God.”
His new wife contradicts him. “It’s a dart,
Meaning they have a giant blowgun.”
Minds,
It may be, but not souls. Etak Etak
Is not a woman of the Tepi-Pupu.
She is of the Cui, a tribe nearby.
�“In any case it is a sacrilege.
The Mother Mountain has been violated.
Let the red of neck be sacrificed.”
Etak speaks out. “They cannot be all bad.
They have enslaved the Tepi-Curucu.”
“And make slaves of us, if we allow.”
Exogamy, Ipupu now reflects,
May have its drawbacks. “Woman, if you speak
Again I’ll sell you to the red of neck
To work as servant by the Curucu.”
“The giant blowgun is the end of life,”
A tribal elder warns. “It will devour
The air we breathe. Its spit blots out the sun.”
#8
Idzumu, an enthusiastic youth
Not quite one week beyond is passage rite,
One year in age behind the tribal elder,
Tries a maiden speech. “If we obtain
Ourselves the giant blowgun we at least
Can down-cephalicize the Curucu
Before the world puffs out.”
“Great as it is,”
Responds the sorcerer-reductionist,
“My art cannot accommodate such numbers.
Sewing up the lips would take me days,
And I say nothing of the eyes and ears.”
�His staff is headed, in a strictest sense,
By an example of his work. Etak,
Meanwhile, will not be silenced. “Idiots!
Air that goes in comes out. If it did not
We should have suffocated long ago.
A hundred small blowguns are just as bad
As one big one. Are also just as good.
We can attack the strangers when we wish.
Or can attack the Curucu. But why?
Hang back and let them kill each other. Rape,
If we assume the Mountain has been raped,
They can avenge as easily as we.
That is, their corpses can. And now, My Lord,
Cut out my tongue, or when I have been sold
My buyers will be well informed as you.”
…
#9
The cableway construction camp is rope
And fabric, rather as if in the trees
A large balloon had wrecked. Here, red of neck
And red of beard, red-eyed, Norell McCain
Is lying in a hammock. Mirror hung
Uncertainly and basin on a stump,
An angered Roland Galt is red of throat,
His razor having cut him. “Bloody soap.
My face is like sandpaper.”
“Grow a beard.
�We’ll make a colonist out of you yet..
You’re onto saying ‘bloody’.”
“Not quite. Nose
Rings might be next, and after that sharp bones
Stuck-in wherever.”
“Which brings us to:
Has anybody ever figured out
How sex works in a hammock? Have the natives?”
“No, and the attempts were all mistakes.
Freak shows. It’s how straitjackets were discovered.
How spider monkeys got conceived. Don’t think
About it.”
“I suppose if you could get
Both legs firm on the ground, and grip the tree…”
“Is that a proposition?”
“Desperate,.
But not that desperate.”
“Oh well, take heart.
Our hotel architect gets here next week.
His name, according to the messengers,
#10
Is Artemus Davant, and anyone
Who has a name like that has got to be
A little odd. You’ll have a choice. Get up:
We have to show the natives how to roast.”
“Roast what?”
“Roast coffee beans. Or do you plan
To go on chewing coca leaves all day?”
�#11
III
East of Suez
At Soerakarta,in the Dutch East Indies,
Karsen Trip, a twenty-five year old
Zoologist already widely published,
Is going over for a second time
A cablegram he does not quite believe.
“…some dozen of the dragons. Breeding pairs,
Enough to stock a modest game reserve
And presently allow small hunts each year.
You payment will be as we may agree,
But will include a figure…based upon
How many reptiles reach Roraima live.
Expense in Komodo are of course
Included. Yours sincerely, Christie Hood>“
Although he lives on spacious private means,
The figure pops Mijnheer Trip’s blue eyes out
“Land-crocodiles in South America,”
The young man muses, putting into Dutch
His Javanese for the Komodo “dragon,”
V. Komodoensis, otherwise.
The Giant Monitor. “For all I know,”
He thinks, “ a dozen may be all of them.
�I ought to turn him down, but Krakatoa
Killed off more than ever hunters will.
So much for natural selection. And,
What other chance to see them at close range?”
#12
Between the gables of the bungalow,
Whose forms South Africans would recognize,
And of which Baker is not unaware,
A low verandah takes the heat, the lamps,
In spite of which, across the waxen tile,
As if a lizard wnet, a chill goes by.
Trip recognizes it for what it is:
Challenge, in its extremest, closest form-The dragon, of the fear of fear-of-death.
…
Henk’s Soerabaja Bar, a seedy twin,
In Soerakarta, of the Soerakarta
Bar in Soerabaja, is a shed
Among high palms. It too has lamps, the which
Sedately swing in midnight’s last of wind.
Drunk, Mijnheer Trip is shopping. He must have,
For his excursions, a dependable
Boy. Indonesians will not nearly do,
As they are much too frail, and terrified
Of Varanus, known to them by reputation
�If not by the experience direct.
A dark trio of merchant seamen flunks,
One after brute another, being each
Too stupid for the job description, part
Of which is to be Trip’s companion-valet,
Part of which is to be trapper-guide.
But now a massive, sober, yellow lascar
#13
Stands by Trip. “What is your name?” Trip asks.
“I? Lothringen. My friends call me Lorraine.”
“I take it that your friends are mostly French?”
He knows his history. Since Bismarck’s war
Alsace-Lorraine is Elsass-Lothringen.
“Not necessarily. Would you prefer
To be called Elsass, or be called ‘Al’s ass”,
As you Americans pronounce Alsace.”
“I’m not American. My name is Trip.
I’m Dutch. What makes you think I’m not?”
“You spoke.
And you are in a bar. Not at the Club.
I cannot really tell you what I am.
My father was--I think--a Legionnaire.
My mother was a Madagascarene,
But she was half Chinese. We came back out
Quite early. I grew up in Sarawak.”
“I’m looking for a trapper.”
“I can trap.
�Trap what I want.”
Trap animals, I mean.”
“Before I went to sea I spent some time
As first gun-bearer to the late White Rajah.
He was all but blind. I dealt with wounds
And crippled water buffalo a lot.”
“I’m leaving in a fortnight for Komodo.
Will you come?”
“A dragon hunt? They live
On Lombok too, you know. We had a few
In Sarawak. One tried to eat the Ranee.
#14
Lady Brooke was anything but blind.
The trophy is above her mantelpiece.”
“Opinion is, they will not go for humans.”
“Tell the Ranee.”
“Will you come?”
“For money,
No.”
“The price can be as we arrange.”
A smell of gin and rum and kerosene
Moves in the dead Cape Jasmine as the wind
Dies utterly and as the lamps burn out.
The smoke puts shadows on the White Man’s forehead
“Noon tomorrow at the sugar docks.”
…
A beach in Lombok, where a low surf crashes
And a pair of cots is under nets.
�Side-on toward the warming morning sun,
A dragon lizard rises into life.
His forked tongue licks out to try the air;
His clear eyelids resist it in distrust.
The coldest blood, however, has its warmth.
He flicks a massive tail, and fronts the foe,
Which is himself in slickest replica.
He stiffens, and the enemy responds
In kind. The reptile brain, the deep,
Intent automaton, will venture what it is
To have at once and wholly what it wants.
Imperative and challenge, risk and prize
…
#15
Come down to one, as does what bodies them
The fruitless serpent of the mindless tree
Will have his triumph nonetheless.
Invention, in the absence of the natural,
Will breed it sports as if it were a graft.
…
A small flotilla--six high-load canoes-Arrives at Camp Louisiana Purchase
In Guiana. From the last, in boots,
Straw boater, insect veils, and starchy blouse,
Steps out a slim young woman. Roland Galt
�Receives her in blank, candid puzzlement.
“Miss. I was here to meet an architect.”
“You do. My name is Artemis Davant.
#16
IV
On Top of Roraima
A rare clear day, and where the nations three,
On maps at any rate, precisely join,
The twenty mile square flattop mountain shows
Its red steep sides. The forests at its base
Thin-out to the immense savannas; cool,
An air upon the summit somewhat thick
Thins-out beyond the station on the prow.
In sheaves too much exposed, the cables turn.
The hotel architect turns on the gear
A practiced Arts and Crafts cold eye. Say she:
“I don’t mean to offend you, Mr. Galt,
But this construct of yours just does not seem,
Well, serious. It’s like a carrousel.
So temporary. Like a Ferris Wheel.”
Galt curses silently his heritage.
“It got the roof beams to you, didn’t it?”
“I do not speak of its efficiency;
I speak of its appearance. Let me build
A kiosk for it.”
“As you like. My thought
�Was that our visitors might like to see
Machinery.”
“Undoubtedly they would,
And that is why it should be well concealed.
If I exposed my furnaces to them
They would not feel that they had left Pittsburgh.”
“They would, they would,” Galt thinks, but banks his fires.
#17
Does not bank them enough, it now appears,
As Artemis Davant looks straight at him.
“The only naked furnaces on view
At present, Mr. Galt, are in your eyes.
I’d not be shocked at such offensiveness
In poor Norell McCain, but out of you?”
‘Unbridled lust” is not the phrase. That means
At some point it was bridled. Waterfalls
Are showers cold indeed, and I see scores,
But I do not see you two under them.
We work together. And I cannot work
If I am stared at like a can-can girl.
And do not think that I’m some sheltered prude.
I used to draw from models in a life class.
Meanwhile, if you would care to look at me
Not as an architect but as a woman,
Call on me and meet my chaperon.”
Galt is good looking and aware of it.
He grins somewhat to focus- down the flame.
�“I’ve met your aunt. I had my ears slapped back
By her too. That time it was innocent.”
“Marie St. Boniface is not my aunt
Nor anybody else’s. She’s a nun.
Or was. She fell in love with Captain Dreyfus.
Left the convent to stuff envelopes
For Zola. Then she put on Zouave dress
And got as far as Martinique. Her sense
#18
Of place out in the colonies is vague.”
“A bride of Christ would tend to pick a Jew.”
“Yes. He was the only man of whom she had seen
More pictures than of Jesus. She had hoped
To nurse him, but the French authorities
Would not permit her nearer than Cayenne.
I found her in Georgetown and hired her on.”
“High boots on chaste Diana and a nun
For chaperon… You’ve heard of triple brass?”
“In art school armor would have been a mercy.
One felt safer on the streets of Delhi.
Tea is at half-past, outside my tent.
You will be welcome, Mr. Galt, but dodge
Your own I have no doubt lax chaperon.”
…
Her mentor, having no desire himself
To sail halfway around the world to look
�On Table Mountain magnified five times
And reddened in the geological
Equivalent of red shift, has allowed
His student full discretion as to site.
She has so situated his hotel
That it is nowhere near the cableway,
Infuriating her construction crews,
And sacrificing drama on the prow,
But sheltering its all too open rooms
From all but the plateau’s most stubborn fogs,
Using the mountain’s undulating face
For views that, after its thrice-nightly rains,
#19
Quite shame the Falls of Iguassu. “Thank God,”
Says she, “we do not have a Tablecloth.
The fog ascends. It does not form on top.
We have a chance at fairly sunny days.”
“You grew up in the Cape, Miss Artemis?”
“In Durban, where I learned to speak Tamil,
That being why the Bakers took me in.
Pretoria, linguistically, was quite
Beyond him. Delhi speaks less English still.
Is that red hair of yours South African?”
McCain, who on the just completed stoep
Looks out toward Venezuela not with fire
But ashes, looks back toward that fine profile
�Which is the torch of them. “Unless my dad
Was, no. But I know Cape Dutch when I see it”
Artemis is much amused. “You’re right;
I am the last who would deny it. What
We have is Groote Schuur with outside stairs
And mammoth window bays in both the gables.
Baker never does more than he must,
And when Sir Christie cut the estimates…”
“Some people have it easy. Iron-Jaw Galt’s
Had women at his feet since he was ten.
He has them like they went by on a wheel.”
The architect permits herself a wink.
“Well if he hasn’t it is not for want
Of trying. Boniface says he is snake
And apple and the flaming sword in one.
But Boniface comes late to all of that.
#20
It’s she who’s bound as on the torture wheel.
Real women, do you notice, are perverse.
Do not jump off of lover’s leap just yet.”
#21
V
At Sea--Roraima--Johannesburg--At Sea
The Matson freighter Mangareva strains
�To hold at thirteen knots. Eastbound from Truk
She has, penned-up upon her fantail, ten
Immense Komodo Dragons, fatly fit
Upon a diet mostly suckling pigs
And such few rats as her Malaysian cooks
Can be annoyed to trap. One deck above,
In spotless, dazzling linen, white enough
To be a garment for Lord Jim come back
As medic-ghost-archangel, Karsen Trip
Looks on his charges. “Seven females, four
Grown males, including, that is, our old boy
Who walked the plank with your chronometer
Inside. Have you seen Peter Pan, Mijnheer?”
“Eleven times. I have eleven small
Grandchildren. You--I speak now as the Bridge-Are here advised to keep that half-breed giant
Of yours confined to quarters. Am I clear?
I do not want him mixing with my crew.
They have their own Far East depravities.
And if you have him on the quarterdeck
Procuring Chinks for you I’ll put you off
At Molokai, newts, him, pound sterling all.”
The Captain leaves as if to point his threat,
And as he mounts the port companionway
The Mangareva rises in a head-on swell.
It throws the reptiles on their wire restraints;
One--three hundred pounds of sated sloth--
�#22
Breaks free and goes agilely at the steps;
And as if now imagining himself
To be a python, eats in measured gulps
The bottom two-thirds of the Captain, who,
A look of much vexation on his face,
Calls out “Exterminate the brutes,” and dies.
…
Two hours in bed, Marie St. Boniface,
In saffron lamplight, reads from her inscribed
Proof copy of J’Accuse. A face so plain
As to seem ageless has protected her
From perils she can only guess at, or,
Before Guiana, only could. Her tent
Flap lifts, and, night gowned, Artemis Davant,
Whose is the other camp bed, comes in damp.
“The worst fog yet. The Mountain cannot see
Its drenched hired hands before its dripping face.”
“And just as well. At sundown, on my hike,
I saw our gloomy Mr. Red McCain
Showering in the East Face cataract.
He will contract pneumonia. How cold
That water can be at the best of times!”
“Oh, he’s robust.”
“And since he’s shaved his beard
So much more youthful looking. Younger, some,
Than his superior. I did not think,
�At first, he was. What is it, Artemis,
#23
That makes one pick one man above another?”
“His pince-nez?” the architect restrains
Herself from saying. “Drive,” she honestly
Replies, but wonders if she really knows.
“Except in special circumstances, like-Inheriting a firm that silvers mirrors,
One would never make Narcissus mate.
One would not want one’s children, how to say,
Not to inherit drive. Or otherwise
One would surely have them always at home.”
“At home? I think that I should like that.”
“No,
You would not. It would be your convent breached
And you without your freedom. That is what
The Serpent of the Garden did not say
Sufficiently to Eve our driven mother.
Hence we live out yet her discontents.”
“The Serpent has also his discontents.
Your engineer is laying leagues of pipe
To have a nearby shower of his own.”
…
Narayan Dar, the Lady Elva Hood’s
Upwardly mobile butler, slams her door
Abruptly in the wholly guileless face
�Of an officious adolescent who,
However, goes on to insist, at length,
He is a cousin. “Not her cousin. Yours.
I’ve come here all the way from Trinidad.”
The stately servant grudgingly relents.
#24
“Go to the rear and have the kaffirs feed you.
“I’ll be there when I go off at ten.”
Pandokkies in Parktown are not less mean
For being Parktown, and the garconniere
Narayan occupies is one small room.
The cousin is asleep there in a fug
Of curry over mealie pap.
“Get up.
I do not need strange bedbugs in my bed.”
“Superb my cousin. Know you of the plan
Your master has to cheat the Portuguese?”
“Is there a side to choose? The Goanese
Incline one toward the servants of the Raj.”
“No no. The Portuguese who are Brazil.”
“The border controversy? Certainly
I know. I am applying for the job
Of major-domo at the fort-hotel.”
“Exactly. Venezuela has a plan…”
…
“Hands off the crew, Lorraine. That French First Mate
Seems even more a prude than Captain Fitch.”
�“He’s French Canadian.”
“So much the worse.
And I’m in no position now to pay
Hush money. Rajah Brooke’s huge appetite
Has cost us more than he’d have brought us live.”
“He is alive.”
“What do you mean alive?
I saw him trussed an lowered overboard.
It was the only way to give poor Fitch
#25
A decent burial.”
“I cut the cords
As he went over. He has followed us
To eat our garbage. I swam out last night
And fought him to exhaustion. He’s on board
And running loose around the forecastle.
The crew feed him live chickens.”
“Lots of them,
I hope. If he attacks another man
There’ll be a mutiny. Farewell commodes,
Farewell Lorraine, and farewell Trapper Trip.”
#26
VI
In the Camp of the Tepi-Pupu and Elsewhere
Ipupu of the Tepi-Pupu, hidden
In the putrescent waters-cannibal
�Of an enormous pitcher plant, and well
Aware his skin is being eaten off,
Is watching in wide-eyed puzzlement
Activity upon the cableway.
Eight crocodiles, of unfamiliar form,
Contained in woven wicker basket-weave
Of necessarily fantastic strength,
Have been positioned on two large hooks
Depending from the cable, so to rise
Impassive to the city in the sky.
Ipu long since has ceased to be surprised
At what goes on up there, but this exceeds.
A White Man who has not been seen before
Appears to be in charge; he is companioned
By his caboclo, who is on a scale
So large the Indian sinks to his nose
In fright. He chokes, and both men look at him,
But take no action. He has picked his blind
On the assumption no one else would hide
Inside a pitcher plant, or think to look,
Its chalice being mildly poisonous.
Lorraine and Trip would not have, but because
They do not know what pitchers are, nor that
There is surveillance. “It’s a little boy,”
#27
Trip says. “He looks a real Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”
�“Or a pygmy in a plant for privy.”
…
Colon in Panama, and as the sun
Sets in the green Atlantic, to the wreck
Of those who do not understand the Isthmus,
Hotel Washington announces dinner.
First to enter is the Rajah Brooke,
Who, earlier, at Miraflores Lock,
Has jumped ship. Here, he eats at once two hams,
A swan carved out of ice, and one foot each
Off both the busboys. As the ice chills down
His reptile blood he sinks to torpid sleep,
And is there dealt with by the Shore Patrol,
Who all agree that they have handled worse.
…
Etak Etak scrubs off the itching back
Of her decanted consort, who reports
“Apparently they worship them as gods.
Two priests attend them, offering them pigs.
Perhaps they are gods.”
“Gods would reach the sky
Without the aid of ropes, nor would they let
Themselves be bound in bamboo. These are beasts.”
“All who defile the mountaintop are beasts.”
“And can be killed as such. While you were stuck
In She-Who-Swallows-Flies I went to fish.
Not in the eastern streams but in the west.
�#28
A stranger came, in a canoe of fire.
He was not from the mountaintop. At least
His language was not theirs. He spoke our own.
He gave us this, and said that if we do
That he desires we shall have weapons too.”
And from concealment near the fire, Etak
Takes out a pair of pliers six feet long.
…
The upper cable station, Artemis
Would be first to admit, is what she built
As “folly.” It has sweeping cornices
Suggesting wings, and the entire effect
Is as if on the Mountain’s narrow prow
A steel and concrete pterodactyl sat.
Bright cables turn, and in a shining car
As if arriving from a planet new,
A blond young man comes to the untrod stair.
Behind a circular, clear aperture,
A window of, and onto mannerism,
Artemis is watching. She wears pearls.
The always level, gray-eyed measured gaze
That froze the life class fixes on the face,
To turn at once away. And in that turn,
That shows her profile, she converts a view.
“The profile of a goddess,” Trip compares.
“A goddess modeling as for a coin.:
�A Chokered head on a medallion.”
#29
Another car arrives, from which, in boots,
Dark jodhpurs, and a belt of leopard skin,
A servant-guardian emerges, tall,
Quick, powerful. And after him draw up,
One after another, eight of the commodes.
“I was expecting swords,” says Artemis.
“Not dragons. Not just yet.”
“Swords?” Trip inquires.
“As decorations., “ Artemis assures.
“Swords to be crossed above the mantelpieces.”
Karsen Trip allows his vision now
To take in background to the deity.
He sees, across the mesa’s broken rock,
A sort of causeway stretch, and at its end,
In fog and sunlight, what might be, elsewhere,
Government House. He shrugs, and to the way’s
Designer, for whom background also fades,
Announces, “I cannot be certain yet,
But I see nothing here that would suggest
The Monitor cannot survive in this terrain.
It’s bare, but parts of their own habitat
Are just as barren.”
“I thought that Komodo
Was a jungle.”
“So it is. Lombok,
�However, isn’t. It has lava fields.”
“Assuming we succeed, and that they live,
What must I do to keep them from the building?
Trust the hunters?”
“What you have done here.
#30
High walls and overhanging cornices.
Even the largest of them can climb well.”
“And what about your own life, Mr. Trip?
Can you be happy here? Can you survive?”
Trip nods. “All that it takes to create Eden
Is a man, a woman, and a reptile,”
…
McCain is forced to hear his tent-mate rave.
“I am not going to call a man Lorraine.“
“I wouldn’t argue. Did you see the size
Of that half-breed?” Norell McCain is less
Than sympathetic with the jealous rage
Of Roland Galt. “You are well out of it
It‘s obvious it will be open war
Among the chaperons. I saw this noon
‘Lorraine‘ give Artemis Davant a look
That would have frightened Genghjs Khan to death.
He watches over Trip as rabidly
As Attila the Nun guards Artemis.
The only dragons here aren‘t the commodes.”
�McCain‘s ten-mate is twisting in his hands
The helpless central lodge pole of the tent.
“Let go the pole. You‘’ screw us in the ground.”
“If need be I‘ll fight Attila and Trip
And you and all the dragons and Lorraine.
That woman was in love with me. I know.”
“Do you know how to spell f-I-c-k-
#31
e-l?”
No; you don’t either. It’s l-e.”
“Can you spell f-u-c-k-u? I can.”
#32
VII
At the Grand Hotel
On Saturday before the opening
The cable brings a rich variety:
A score of suckling pigs, some for the guests;
An armory of decorator swords;
Ten jeroboams of a good champagne,
And these entrusted to the bamboo weave
That brought up safely eight live monitors;
A crate of goats; two geese; a wireless set;
A carpet bag of purplish needlepoint;
A string trio; its stands and instruments;
Preceded by its legs, a grand piano;
�Guns enough to stage the Jameson Raid;
And, two days early, Arthur Conan Doyle.
…
“I like it all,” says Lady Elva Hood,
“Except that Hanging Garden on the cliff.
A bit like Monte Carlo, don’t you think?
Suicide Terrace?”
“Only if you miss,
Milady.” Artemis, who cut her teeth
On vicereines, takes the Press Lord’s wife in stride.
A spruced-up, Bengal-looking Lothringen
Is not so fortunate. “Dear God,” he says.
“It’s Lady Brooke. The Ranee.”
“What we know,”
Says Karsen, passing white tie and tails,
“As learning nothing and forgetting nothing.”
“Vengeance. You have not seen what she’s like.”
#33
In the receiving line Sir Christie Hood
Shakes hands with a Brazilian minister,
Who does not let his thoughts on boundaries
Deter him from a party. Lady Brooke
Is deep in conversation with a youth
Who is a son of Teddy Roosevelt,
Not that the name would signify to her.
“I’ve shot the brutes before. Go for the eye.”
Behind the trio and its potted palms
�A sotto voice below the Eva waltz,
Trip whispers in the ear of Artemis,
Who wears a jeweled crescent in her hair.
The moment lengthens in the extra beat of love.
To three who watch, the scene screams at the eye.
McCain and Lothringen and Roland Galt,
Unlikely to make common cause, have one.
…
St. Boniface, unable to decide
What she can rightly wear, does not attend.
She stands, in ever-dampening late night,
On that small terrace Lady Hood dislikes.
Her thoughts are suicidal truly. “So
Far, Alfred, and so near. Between us now
No barrier but air. I almost see
That vile confine of your imprisonment.”
The nun’s geography has not improved.
It is as vague as her chronology,
And if her line of sight were much extended
#34
She would see Caracas. But the sky
Of her despair cannot be limited.
Theology was never much more clear
For her than azimuth, and she debates
If suicide is more a mortal sin
�Than living always as a Dreyfusard.
The answer will, just now, not be revealed
A painted hand is clapped across her mouth
From an imported orange tree above,
And she is pitched across the balustrade.
…
From printing promptings Arthur Conan Doyle
Addresses curtly the assembled guests.
“All I can say is that we have here life-Uh--imitating art--er--imitating
Life. Since nature has so thoughtlessly
Not put upon Roraima dinosaurs,
We have provided them. A year or two
And we can have a proper hunt. For now
We can afford to shoot one specimen
Alone. I wish you well. For Mr. Trip,
Whose scientific knowledge and whose skill
Has made this entertainment possible,
Our thanks.” A little figure at the wide,
Now open door into the dining room
Raps twice upon the parquet’s pale rare wood
And sticks his staff into the speaker’s face.
#35
( MISSING )
Who mans the cloakroom and is handed thence
�#36
Her rifle, saying something, possibly,
About the social life of Sarawak.
#37
VIII
The Same--in the Camp--In the Gun Room
A line boss from the Narrow Gauge runs in,
Waving a German pistol in the air
As if it were the flagpole of a flag
Shot off. “The CooCoos have revolted. Run!
I’ve lost a dozen men. We have the line
Still open but I’m not sure for how long.“
Removing lamps from Baker’s trademark sconces,
Guests and staff rush toward the portico,
And, like a lynch mob each Diogenes,
Onto the causeway. Arriving at the prow,
The vanguard is demoralized to see,
Strap-hanging as it were, the Curucu
Come up the cable hanging-on by hand.
The White Ranee is not demoralized.
She lifts her rifle and with perfect aim
Begins to pick them off. Each hunter there,
If he is honest, envies her the chance.
It is a moonlit shooting gallery.
“Fruit dropping off the vine,” says Hood their host,
�And hurries all of his distinguished guests
Into the next car that draws up. “Wait! Stop!
Cries Roland Galt, before the gate can close
“The gondola was empty. We don’t know
What’s on the ground.”
“I think that we’re all right,”
The line boss answers. “I see flares below.”
A second car arrives, and when it goes
#38
Five persons only still are at the top,
St. Boniface still unaccounted for,
The servants having fled for who knows where.
Who knows in point of fact is Pu- Tahi,
Ipupu’s sorcerer reductionist,
Who in the panic has been let escape,
And leads, no doubt for reasons of his own,
A double file of ashen refugees
For the Brazilian face. It being night
They are not threatened by the dragons, but,
Not knowing this, break file at every sound.
Awaiting the opposing cable car,
That rises as its opposite descends,
Are Trip and Galt and Artemis Davant,
McCain, and, as a token menial,
He who is called, except by Galt, Lorraine.
�For no cause Galt can see, the cable stops.
“Oh do restart it,” Artemis implores.
“If we are separated from the rest of us
We’ll never make the railhead.”
“If we do
Where are we,” Galt replies. “The Narrow Gauge
Has only handcars for its rolling stock.
Its locomotives are in Sheffield still.”
As he tugs backward on the master grip
An eerie twang, an A below low A,
Vibrates against the cliff as sounding board,
And, harp of harps, the cable separates,
A flailing end, a living tentacle
#39
From what azoic beast in the abyss,
Encircles Red McCain around the waist,
Triumphantly swings him above the edge,
And drops him screaming off the precipice.
…
#39 ( M I S S I N G )
#40 ( M I S S I N G )
Till nine. We cannot hope to go at night;
We do not know the route, and if we’re lost
#41
�Out there when that cold blood is warming up…”
“We are unarmed,” Lorraine reminds the group.
“Unarmed completely. I will fight bare-hand
In water. On land, no.”
“But we have arms,”
Says Artemis, and rushes from the room.
When she returns she carries, like a page
In some bygone Mid-Eastern entourage,
A Persian sword that hung above a mantel.
“Baker insisted on the best. It’s real.”
#42
IX
At the Grand Hotel, cont.
It is the only weapon that is real.
The others, it turns out, are painted plaster.
“In two words, bugger Booker’s,” Artemis
Unladylikely says, echoing what
Would be Guiana’s anthem, did it not
Lack music. Forwarders, wholesalers, crooks,
That firm adds forgery to its deceits.
“One sword among us,” Galt redundantly
Points out. “One chance. Does it make better sense
To go as four or go as two and two?
A man’s a full meal. He could bring delay.”
“Lorraine is more than one,” thinks Artemis,
Who knows Trip’s shadow hates her, and may well
�Be more a danger than she yet has faced.
She looks at Galt. “The team with the best odds
Would be of course the one that knows the most
About the reptiles: Trip and Lothringen.”
Better, she thinks, to have it come from her
Than have Lorraine suggest it, and she knows
It has occurred to him. No man, and least
Of all a jealous one, is so opaque
As that. ‘Inscrutability’ exists
Behind the footlights only. “Torches. Fire.
Are they afraid of it?”
“Yes. But no torch
Would last that long. We have too far to go.”
Trip puts an arm around her. “I am sure
#43
We all agree your safety is the thing
That is the main consideration.”
“I
Do not agree. I am the odd man out.
Odd woman out. I should not like to live
With it upon me I had cost the life
Of any man and let alone of three.
I’ll stay, and trust you three to summon help.”
“Or Mein Herr Galt can stay with you,” says one.
“Not bloody likely,” Mijnheer Trip replies.
The extra-sensory, if it exists,
Exists for just such crises, and the mind
�Of Lothringen is as exposed to Galt
As it is dark to Trip. The ESP
Sparks over race and distance and distrust.
He’s figuring out how to get rid of us
So he and Trip can get away alive.
Clairvoyance is by definition clear.
And it is not--not just--to save his skin.
“Draw lots,” says Artemis. “But not till dawn.
It’s that or have you stay awake all night.
A fool could see you do not trust each other
Not to take the sword and flit by night.”
“Trust one another,” Galt corrects in silence.
But the inner ether sparks again
And it occurs to him that Artemis
Referred advisedly to two. Cheat, clear
A song, projects as with the ether’s aid.
See to it I’m not left with Lothringen.
#44
Telepathy implies the out-of-body.
Out of Red McCain’s disjected body
Comes as if to say “Beware the Ides”
A voice which says in fact “You cannot mean
To let that Far East Kaffir have a chance
To have a White girl in his debt. Come to.”
The Limbo of the Old Colonial,
Upon the evidence South Africa,
�Or, possibly, the middle management
At Booker’s, calls the warning echo back
And Roland Galt must function as he can.
“That Kaffir possibly one could,” he thinks
But hears agin Limbo. “How desperate
Is desperate?”
“Much better not to know,”
He formulates as his convinced reply.
“I’d better keep the one true sword myself,”
The White Rose says. I guess I’ll sleep with it.
All of the properties of chivalry
And all of its discomforts. Rest you well.
I’m sorry Mr. Baker built no tower.”
…
“Release the goats,” says Trip to Lothringen.
“Satiety will be the best ally
We have.”
“The only.”
When his aide is gone
Trip finds himself on Baker’s service stair
In declasse debate with Roland Galt.
#45
“What is the opposite, in Double Dutch
Of well done good and faithful servant?”
“One
Of you,” Trip answers, ”will betray me. Not
That Lorraine would.”
“But could he Don’t pretend
�You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“In Ceram
He has a wife and children.”
“Marvelous
What thirty guilders will accomplish, no?”
“I ought to strike you.“
“Don’t. Just do you not
Suppose if in the morning when we draw
He wins, he will not take the sword and go.
At that point he will cease to be your ‘boy’
And let alone your servant. I and you
Will have to take him on. It will take both.”
…
“One foot outside the door,” says Artemis.
“I’ve lost one chaperon and now have two.”
The unlit corridor and unlit room
Do not conceal the faces pressing close.
The numismatic profile, in full face,
Is very young, as is the dragon-herd’s.
“You Dutchmen in the Indies never lose,
Somehow, a look of ice and silver skates.”
“Appearances deceive. Our blood warms up.”
The Old Hand’s youth is in his urging.”
“No.
I hope with all my heart the draw is yours
#46
�But if it isn’t I go with the draw
No man should have to fight a dragon, Karsen,
For the sake of damaged goods. Goodnight.”
…
Not on an impulse, neither for a reason,
Roland Galt, before he heads for bed,
Goes down between the potted orange trees
And down the seven flights of zigzag stairs
To stroll the Suicide Parterre. So far
It is a night without fog. Bright moonlight
Picks out, across the mountain’s southeast bay,
The day’s last waterfall, already going dry.
It is a spurting stream of diamonds.
Below him Galt can see the mist begin:
A patch or two, and then a ground of haze.
He leans upon the plaster balustrade;
His cigarette case drops out of his shirt.
Putting one leg across the balusters
To try the ledge, he climbs a few feet down.
The, reaching out an arm to pull back up,
He feels a giant’s grasp, and easily
Is lifted like an infant from a tub.
“If you are jumping, don’t. If you are climbing,
Wait.” The grip is Lothar Lothringen’s.
Around his shoulder is a coil of rope
And in his hand a little alpenstock.
�They are, for Galt, at once familiar.
“Those are McCain’s. He had them in the camp.”
“He brought them topside for the opening.
#47
Sir Christie thought the guests might like to climb.”
“Another weapon is another chance.”
“The alpenstock? Too short. Pick; handle too.
The handle brings one well within the jaws.
The pick would hardly pierce the outer skin.
I do not say it is not useful still.
I’ve done no climbing, but it’s time to learn.”
He hooks the pick beneath the other’s belt
And lifts him anything but playfully.
“Come with me. As you have seen, we are de trop
With Eve and Adam and the fruit up there.”
Galt feels that he is being cut in two
By pressure of his inseams. “Put me down.”
“You haven’t answered my nice invitation.”
“I’ve climbed here, but that’s all there is of it.”
The East may be the fount of irony.
“All you will have to do is hang on tight.”
He hands him, handle first, the alpenstock.
“This is in case you’d like to sleep with it.”
…
As dawn breaks, the two men have formed a “rope.”
What nags at Galt is not the being bound
�But what he hears McCain say out of Limbo.
“Face it, Man. You were just something kept,
As one might say, on Miss Lorraine’s back burner.”
#48
X
Without the Gates
Nature, supportive always of the hopes
Of man, puts out the brightest day in years.
A mammoth sun soars out of green Guiana,
Reddening the Mountain’s red sandstone.
The heat of day comes hard upon the dawn.
Trip has the sword in hand; he and the girl
Are at the gates. Eroded tableland,
A sort of Cappadocia countersunk,
Spreads out before them, dully glistening.
“It looks like German architecture: Poelzig”
Artemis comments abstractedly.
“It isn’t Petra. Half as old as time
Means here the fauna. With a little luck
We’ll miss them altogether. They aren’t bright,
And if you wanted to invent a place
For them to like and stay, you’d be hard put
To better those depressions there. Keep close;
We’re sticking to the high ground” Not, it soon
Is patent, wise. Upon a narrow neck
Between two sinkholes rears a large female,
�Her grooved tongue flickering in semaphore.
“You shall not eat of every tree?” it spells.
“Here is the beast,” Trip thinks, “and here the field,
But where’s the subtlety? And no fruit keeps.”
The tongue is bifurcated, what it says
Ambiguous. “Ye shall not surely die.”
“Maybe, but I would say the odds aren’t good.”
#49
Trip lifts the sword and aims it for the brain.
“If I am mangled take the sword and leave.
They always will prefer dead meat to live.”
…
Eight decades or an eon into time,
In the vicinity of Krakatoa, quakes
Are picked up on the open seismographs
As far as Honolulu. In the straits
At Lombok, later in the afternoon,
A monstrous bulge is seen upon the water,
Breaking to become a quiet cloud
Of a peculiar yellow. Drifting east
It settles toward Komodo, parts, re-forms.
It is a lazy, doubled crescent now,
Advancing on the Flores coast like rain,
Or like Imperial Japan’s last fleets:
A suicide armada on the move,
Behind some mile-high cloud of chlorine gas.
�#50
XI
Roraima--Manaus
Augustus Phelan, of Pacific Heights
And of the San Francisco curia
In the Sierra Club, collects the tour
Of which he is the organizer-guide
In the impressively restored foyer
Of Grand Hotel Guyana-Tepi, Cape
Dutch monument to a generic past,
That being, the country’s circumstances,
Relevant as any other kind.
The Booker Companies, the catering
Franchise, have flown-in jello, frozen shrimp,
And large ice carvings, which, in noonday heat,
Have melted into smaller, other shapes
Than those intended, some of them obscene.
“As soon as we are finished with our lunch,”
Says Dr. Phelan, ”we can take our cameras
And set off for the dragon pits. These are,
You know, the last surviving specimens
Of the Komodo Giant Monitor.
In Indonesia it is now extinct.”
“It isn’t. In the Sumba Strait last year
I counted three. They swim as well as whales.”
The speaker is a Stanford botanist,
�A longtime Baker Street Irregular,
To whom the tour was somewhat oversold.
“Fine news if true,” says Dr. Phelan suavely.
“Not, however, vary likely.” He goes on:
#51
“Varanus went out neither with a bang
Nor whimper. It went out as with a burp.
The gas eruptions of the 70s
Completed the destruction. We can thank
The foresight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And other humane conservationists
In founding the Roraima colony.
So far as we can tell from past accounts
The dragons here attain a greater size
Than ever was recorded in the wild.
It may be absence of competing life forms,
Diet, or selective breeding.. Trip’s
Originals are said to have been large
By what we think was standard for the time.
We are, in fact, as size for full grown males,
Well on the way to twenty feet. In short,
We’re breeding back, or forward if you like,
To proper dinosaurs. It’s The Lost World.
Now if you’ll gather up your cameras…”
…
On their return the brave time travelers
�Sense disarray in Booker’s caterers.
“You should have stayed in the hotel,” says one.
“A dragon jumped the wall and tried to mate
With one of my creations.”
“With the dolphin?”
“No. With R.M.S. Titanic. Froze
Right to it and went off into a stupor.
Took all six of us to drag him out.”
#52
“Well can you blame him? Long before dessert
It looked more like an iceberg than a ship,
And God knows there’s no air-conditioning.”
…
The festival, so called, “Of All the World,”
Spoleto-in-Manaus, mounts this year
That well known Cariocan opera
Coq d’Or. Teatro Amazonas lights
At intermission like the Opera
De Monaco or like the Palais Garnier
Itself. Encumbered by the Slavic bulk
Of émigrés positioned on her right,
A handsome woman in her diamond
And eye-makeup-alone decades resumes
Her conversation from the interval
Preceding, toward the left. “A lovely house,
But surely in a rubber capital
One hopes for softer cushions. Was the dance
�Recital dire? I could jot bear to go.
The program spoke of bread and circuses.”
“That group, the Nicaraguans, never showed.
They all came down with Hepatitis B
In Panama. We had a group from Guam
Who did a sketch about a hero type
Who saves a virgin from a dragon. Wild.
I mean a sketch.” The rich old lady smiles.
“That is as good a start for marriage
As any other.”
“Hate me if I ask,
#53
But are you not Viscountess Norwich?”
“No.
I’m often taken for her. Years ago,
In Singapore in 1941,
I met her. Very princess-like. I’m flattered.”
“What do you suppose,” the seat mate asks,
“The Amazon was like in 1910?
They knew already that it would not last.
The rubber seeds were long since smuggled out.
Two years, the Federated Malay States
Would do them in. Would they have built this house
If they had really known?” The profile not
Viscountess Norwich answers. “Oh, I speak
To that. I know exactly how it was.
In 1940, in Batavia,
�We knew too well the Japanese would come-The Germans had the Netherlands and France
Already--knew, I say, that they would come,
But we did not know when. That is content:
To have your goodbyes said and not know when.
Buitenzorg had things well in control;
Without the interference from the Hague,
Better than usual. It was a calm
Before the storm, but is there calm that‘s not?
My sons were in the war, but they were safe;
In training, both of them, In Nova Scotia.
It was the best time of my marriage.
My husband, when the children still were young,
Was gone a lot. He was a scientist.
#54
An expert on large lizards, if you please.
He had to sit through Wagner’s Siegfried once.
He found the opera ‘inaccurate’.
The threat of war kept him much more at home.
He had his funds to manage. I exist
On money that has gone from Tsarist bonds
To Royal Dutch to numbered Swiss accounts
To I.B.M. to gene research to gold.
I shall not tell you where I have it now.
But while we waited, every afternoon,
We sat in our pajamas on the lawn
�And had the servants bring out ice and gin
And our two tortoise-shell fly swatters. These
Were our conceits. A gift from us to us.
They were for swatting little lizards with.
I had them with me on that last flight out
In 1942, and fortunate
I had. Australia is drenched in flies.
To dodge the Japs we had to fly at night.
A KLM eight-seat amphibian
Too old for the Defense to confiscate.
My husband put me on the plane at ten
And left for Flores in a motor launch.
He had experiments in progress there.
I have inferred--and I had seen his route-He ran into a Japanese task force.
No man should have to face a dragon twice.
I have run on and on. Did not shops here
#55
Outlast the rubber barons? I’ve found none.”
“There is a little woman off the Square
Who deals in emeralds and shrunken heads.”
“Oh no. I might see old acquaintances
I had a project in Guiana once.”
“They both are copies. Who would shrink a head
That looked like Yoko Ono in the first place.”
�“Who would ruin glass for emeralds.”
…
The Widow Trip goes shopping nonetheless.
Her progress takes her past a Beaux-Arts mile
And toward the River, where a floating market
Vies for the attention with a fair.
In a Brazilian switch, the carrousel
Is silent and the Ferris Wheel has sound.
Or has one sound. It’s “Don’t tell me the lights…”
Is stuck. The uncompleted five-note phrase
Is maddening, and Artemis supplies,
On beat, “are shining, anywhere but there.”
The shaded ticket stand is occupied,
And massively, by an enormous man
Who wears a top hat, and a jaguar skin
He is the color of. He does not shill,
Trusting to his appearance to attract,
Or to repel; there is no knowing which.
A group of children buys a dozen fares
Without disturbing his indifference.
The man at the control is scrutable,
But seems to have some sort of injury.
#56
Or be, perhaps, the victim of a stroke.
He pivots on one foot for all his moves,
And manages the two-hand grip with one.
�A partial turn brings up a gondola;
In its design is something that the eye
Of one who used to be an architect
Responds to, but the congruence is gone
As quickly as it came. The wheel turns by;
A profile unmistakable, except
For Lady Norwich, turns full face, to see
The ‘grip’ look at her strangely. That, of course,
May be the stroke. The music comes unstuck;
The uncompleted sweeps on to its close.
The lights are shining as Diana leaves.
#57
XII
On the Rand
In Parktown in Johannesburg, the lion
And the lizard keep. Majestically
At Bright Kop, Herbert Baker’s lion gate
Looks out on nothing, and the empty house,
Upon its street side blind with trellises,
Is open toward the North for any view.
The sash-ropes blow out toward Pretoria;
Rust slows the wind vane. In that quarter lag,
Where East is North and North is West, dead calm
Will come; the compass-rose upon the hearth
Select its final wind, its final stop.
All choices are coincidence; all wheels
�Are gambler’s wheels. East may, across two seas
And two emerging continents, point then
To where Roraima weights the boundaries.
Those also are coincidence. Or were.
Heraldic beasts around the mounted globe
Intimidate their small originals,
Who may defer, but who will multiply.
The shrinking head dries in its knowledge still;
Empire and Barbary are where you look;
The sword and dragon where they always were.
�
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Title
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dlw0.wps
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Cassity, Turner.
Date Created
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2005-05-27T21:57:36
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2005-05-28T22:08:52
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Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
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Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt].
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application/pdf
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f67d9760b7bc077db48a204ba3f1f7ae
Developing_the_lost_world