Strongbow laughed.
All right, why not, I will include her. But I think you should keep that helmet. You’ll obviously be able to put it to better use than I can.
Strongbow turned and went into the back room humming to himself, eager to begin on this whole new aspect of his work. Behind him he saw Haj Harun already beginning to nod over the faded manuscript in his lap, the helmet slipping slowly down over his eyes as he drifted away on some reverie in the stillness of that hot summer Sunday afternoon.
A curious man, thought Strongbow. He actually seems to believe what he says. Perhaps someday there’ll be time to get to know him.
Strongbow’s forty-year haj ended with the publication of his gigantic thirty-three volume study, the volume containing some sixty thousand pages of straight exposition and another twenty thousand pages in fine type listing footnotes and allied contortions, all together a production of well over three hundred million words, which easily surpassed the population of the Western world.
Most of the footnotes could only be read with a magnifying glass equal in power to Strongbow’s own, but a glance at any one of the volumes was sufficient to convince the most skeptical reader that Strongbow had immersed himself in the details of his subject with unerring scientific skill, making full use of the rational premises of the nineteenth century.
And this at a time when the authoritative English medical manual on sex stated that the majority of women had no sexual feelings of any kind, that masturbation caused tuberculosis, that gonorrhea originated in women, that marital excess led to a full spectrum of fatal disorders, and that other than total darkness during a sexual act caused temporary hallucinations and permanent brain damage.
Strongbow’s dismissal of these and other absurdities was nothing compared to the demented esoterica that followed, such as the Somali practice of slicing off the labia of young girls and sewing their vulvas together with horsehair to assure virginity upon marriage.
Nor was the massive presentation in any way hampered by the engraving on the frontispiece which showed a scarred determined face swathed in Arab headgear, permanently darkened by the desert sun yet still undeniably that of an English aristocrat whose family had been honored in England for six and a half centuries, despite a certain inherent lethargy.
Nor was the impact lessened by the author’s note in the preface that for the last forty years he had been an absolute master of every dialect and custom in the Middle East, and that he had spent those forty years variously disguised in order to penetrate freely every corner of the region.
Strongbow’s study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting bedouin encampments along the way.
All claims were substantiated at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the Victorian manner. Yet the facts were still implacable, the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions terminal.
Given his subject matter, it was only to be expected that the great majority of people would find the work revolting. For even if such practices did occur in the infamous hot lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was still no reason to put them into words.
And especially such explicit words, wogs for example, which had always been used to designate everyone east of Gibraltar but had never before appeared in print, even in the most scurrilous publications. But here was Strongbow making it the contents of his entire first chapter, tirelessly repeating it line after line and page after page together with its customary prefix bloody, bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody as if to signal the utter contempt for all known standards of decorum that was to follow.
Yet other revolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century were also confronting topics subversive to society, and what was surprising at first was that unlike them, Strongbow solicited no initial support whatsoever. Instead his thesis outraged both the contemporary defenders of Darwin and Marx and the future defenders of Freud.
And always for the same reason. In both cases Strongbow contradicted the new masters by denying all precepts and mechanisms whether subtle or bold. He had the effrontery to suggest that far from there being any laws in history or man or society, there weren’t even any tendencies toward such laws. The race was capricious, he said, thrusting or withdrawing as its loins moved it at the moment.
Nothing else was discernible. In the framework of Strongbowism events were random and haphazard and life was unruly and unruled, given to whimsy in the beginning and shaken by chaos at the end, a kind of unbroken sensual wheel made up of many sexes and ages revolving through time on the point of an orgasm. Thus those who courageously held liberal views, and who might have been expected to be Strongbow’s natural champions, found themselves forced to denounce him bitterly with personal cause.
For there was an unmistakable hint in Volume Sixteen, and again twenty million words later in Volume Eighteen, that all unorthodox thinkers were being indicted for secret crimes. Under the tenets of Strongbowism, these seemingly brave believers in modern times stood accused of an abominable retreat into respectability because they embraced grand schemes of order.
This they did, said Strongbow, solely to conceal from themselves the rank disorder of their true natures, the inner recesses where sexual fantasies somersaulted down slippery slopes with the gamboling abandon of lambs drunk on spring grass.
So much for his possible defenders, Darwinians and Marxists alike. Having been apprehended as undercover sex maniacs, they had no choice but to become vehement enemies of Strongbowism.
As for the great bulk of his countrymen, who were traditionally in favor of dispatching large armies overseas, they were appalled by Strongbow’s assertion that any military expedition was merely a disguised sexual sickness, more specifically a profound fear of impotence.
In Volume Twelve, repeated ninety million words later in Volume Twenty-two, he pointed out that fuck you and fuck them and fuck off were the common terms of hostility preferred by imperialists and patriots. Thus armies were raised, he said, because it was likely their raisers could raise nothing else.
As for the very foundations of imperialism, the profits accruing from military expeditions overseas, he likened them in a vulgar manner to excrement. The revolting passage appeared in Volume Eight.
There is nothing a young child values as highly as his own feces, for the simple reason that it is the only product he can produce at such an early age.
Therefore builders of empires and others with a concern for money are the perennial children of every era, at flay with their feces, and in yet another guise we find men contriving to clothe their formidable sexual chaos in respectability.
For it is axiomatic in the West that it is improper to spend one’s life playing with shit, whereas a thoughtful accumulation of lucre is seen commendable and even noble.
Nor did Strongbow limit his anal assaults to those caught with money in their hands. He also included all club members and anyone who propounded ceremonies or band music. The offensive material could be found in a few short sentences in Volume Twenty-six.
What are these enthusiasts actually up to? Could it be they fear the slippery and slithering and wholly unmarchable rhythms of true sexuality? Is that why they organize themselves into a counter-orgy of numbing rituals and dreary Sunday afternoon concerts? Because they are reduced to expressing pride in the only sensual act of which they are capable?