ESZTERHAZY AND THE AUTOGONDOLA-INVENTION
The mist was thick and white and wet, and from every side came the sounds of trickling waters. Huge grey rocks loomed, showed their lichenous and glistening contours, fell behind to be succeeded by impossibly steep vistas where tufts of grass and twisted trees lured the stranger on, perhaps only (the stranger thought) to betray him into placing his foot on a narrow and slippery footing whence he would at once plunge into a gorge. From right behind him a voice spoke. “You all right, Lieutenant?” said the voice.
Captain Skimmelffenikk of the Royal and Imperial Scythian- Pannonian-Transbalkanian Excise swore a bit. “How can anybody be all right who tries to climb a saturated mountain in riding-boots?” he asked, next.
He could not see the sergeant, but he was certain that the sergeant shrugged. The sergeant said, “You ought to wear rope-soled sandals, like the rest of us. Ain’t that right, Mommed?” The guide was up ahead and equally invisible; he was a Mountain Tartar and a Rural Constable. His reply was a grunt. That is, it sounded like a grunt to the lieutenant, but to the sergeant it had sounded like more. “Hey, that’s a good idea,” said he. “Stop a bit, sir. Now grab hold of that tree and hold it for balance. Now stick your leg backwards as if you was a mule and I was а-shoeing you. Right leg first.” It was a mad-sounding instruction, but no madder than anything else on this tour of duty; and the officer had no one but himself to blame as it was his own misconduct (sleeping off his annual hangover in a public place) which had brought him here as punishment — and lucky he hadn’t been cashiered! — here at the wild border of Hyperborea, one of the Confederated Hegemonies of the Empire. Holding onto the moist bole of a tree, he stuck his right leg backwards. The Royal and Imperial Excise was stern. But it was just. He, Lt. Skimmelffenikk, would sweat and suffer and do his damnedest to do his duty, and eventually he would find himself in some civilized jurisdiction again . .. the Scythian Gothic
Lowlands, perhaps ... or near the capital city of Avar-Ister, sometimes called “The Paris of the Balkans” (not often), in the broad plain of Pannonia.
Twisting his head, he looked to see what was being done. It would not have surprised him to see that his sergeant was actually preparing to hammer in an iron mule-shoe: not quite: the man produced an immense clasp-knife from which he now unclasped a something for which the tax-officer knew no name: somewhat like an awl and somewhat like a file and, on one edge, somewhat like a saw; and with this the man proceeded to score deep scratches in the soles of his superior’s boots. “All right, sir, now the left leg if you please. Aw haw haw! well, better put the right one down first, aw haw haw! Sir.”
But his superior was not looking at his feet. His superior was now looking straight in front of him at a slightly upward angle and at undoubtedly the most horrible sight he had ever seen in his life; he was looking at a face in the thicket and this face was diabolical. One side of it was bleach-white, one side of it was jet-black; it had yellow eyes and horns and a wreathed crown and a stinking beard, and it writhed its lips and it sneered as though the next moment it were about to pronounce some dreadful malediction. The exciseman uttered a thin wail and desperately tried to remember a prayer. At once the sergeant appeared alongside and lunged towards the frightful face, hand outstretched. The creature issued a fearful cry. Vanished. A commotion in the thicket. Only the wreathed crown remained. Or . . . was it really a wreath? Or merely a mass of flowering tendrils, adventitiously created as the creature had blundered through the bushes? A sudden small wind blew upon the wreath and it went tumbling orut of sight. Meanwhile, in the wake of the commotion, there fell at the exciseman’s feet some bits of earth and grass and some other objects, dark and about the size of chick-peas and smoking faintly in the cool misty air. “What was it?” he asked.
“Why sir, it was what the usual trouble here is about, a great big billy such as the Hypoes don’t want to pay no tax upon it if they can help it... there being no tax on a nanny, as you know, sir.”
The lieutenant had some faults in character. But he was able to confess them. “I was scared as Hell. I thought it was the Devil’s face,” he said, now.
And then he said, “Hark. What is that?” The two strained their ears. “Shepherds’ pipes?” the officer asked. But his man shook his head, No. It was far too high for shepherds, he said. Nor did they pipe so.
Unlike most excisemen, who seldom read anything except second- or third-hand copies of the so-called “French papers,” Skimmelffenikk was fond of the occasional issue of a monthly which sometimes carried articles about Natural History; he recalled one now about certain “honey-comb” rocks through which the winds sometimes blew with an effect like an
aeolian harp, and he now mentioned this to his sergeant.
Who said: “Huh. Well, it might have been.” They moved on. Slowly. The rough-cut soles, now both scored, gripped better. “Them Hypoes,” the sergeant was a Slovatchko and held the Hyperboreans in great contempt, “Well, it is said they sometimes do worship the Devil, ho, such fools! Don’t they, Mommed? — Oh, not you o’course for all you’re a Tartar and so a kissing-cousin to a Turk; but they others, don’t they be sometimes risking their souls by worshiping the devil?”
The Mountain Tartar’s reply may have been of a theological nature and then again it may not. Whatever it was he meant by saying it, he said it over and over again. “Watch step. Watch step. Watch step.”
The Monarch was feeling... more to the point, was behaving ... a bit grumpy. The Triune Monarchy had been “protecting” the pashalik of Little Byzantia on behalf of the Turks for a long generation, and now the seemingly interminable negotiations for its annexation to the Empire had taken a great lurch forward. The Sublime Porte had at last agreed to name a sum of money. But in return for this the Sultan was now insisting that the Emperor of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania should henceforth be known as Emperor of only Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. "What?” demanded Ignats Louis. "What? You mean that henceforth We’ve got to give up calling Ourself ‘Emperor de jure of New Rome and All Byzantium via Marriage by Proxy’? What?” His bulging eyes bulged more and his long nose seemed to grow longer; he gave the ends of his famous bifurcated beard two tremendous tugs. “WHAT?”
“Yes, Sire,” said his Prime Minister. He had been saying so for a long time. Or, at any rate, it seemed a long time to him.
“Won’t do it,” said his Royal and Imperial master. “Won’t think of it. Won’t yield the point. Never. Never.”
They were in the Privy Closet, a vast room jammed with curio cabinets and grand pianos covered with shawls and photographs and daguerro- types and miniatures, plus the single harpsichord on which Madame played for the King-Emperor sixteen minutes twice a day. The Prime Minister was terrified that he might accidentally brush to the floor a sketch on ivory of the infant King of Rome or an early ambrotype of the late Queen of Naples; the Emperor, who could be a sly old fox when he wished, knew this and sometimes chose the Privy Closet whenever he particularly wanted to punish the P.M. by making him be brief. Standing as stiff and motionless as he could, the P.M. said that the point had been repeatedly yielded. “It has been yielded to the Senate of the Republic of Venice, to the Holy Roman Emperor, to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, to the Vatican, and to the King of Greece. Among others.”