At the sound of the cries, the admiral and the marshal rush to the window. The cook makes use of this development to slip out of the kitchens and down the stone steps to the king’s aid. But by the time he has reached the twentieth step, the struggle with the monster is over. As the tentacles of the squid were uncoiling themselves over his head, the king realized that his interpretation of the radish statue was wrong. He is condemned to believe ever after that he is the cause of Isili’s death. The cook is rewarded richly for his loyalty and all the conspirators are imprisoned. Then the king hands over his kingdom to his younger brother and sails off to Europe. There he travels through land after land, along highways and across plains; he sits about in empty inns in the country; he walks about the biggest cities, whose streets merge in his dreams and memories into one endless city-labyrinth; he sleeps in cold hotels and inhospitable boarding houses. In the writing of his book, Fo forgets completely about his own past, but it returns to him in pictures that come to him through the dark. The description of the European wanderings of ex-king Dru are surely a result of the despair and disquiet of his own past, even if he remembers these no longer. The only despair he knows now is stirred by the multifarious images that elude his inner eye; the only disquiet that pursues him results from the frantic rush of sentences that propel themselves into the vortex of blurred images waiting for words to describe them while retreating from these very words.
Eyepiece of a telescope
It is a day in November, and Dru has been walking the paths and tracks of a forest for many hours. He is now so deep within it that he cannot find his way out. Night is falling and Dru is beginning to think he will have to sleep beneath the trees. But when he reaches the top of a low rise, he sees between the dark trunks before him a cluster of twinkling lights. He tumbles towards these through crackling drifts of leaves and soon finds himself on the edge of the villa quarter of a large town. As he goes along the streets and past dark gardens replete with the smell of decomposing grass, he meets no one. He looks into the lit windows of the villas. In one of these he sees a woman who is carefully moving a dust-cloth over the surface of a gleaming instrument. This is an astronomer’s telescope, the most complex telescope of all; Dru recognizes it from the times he was interested in astronomy. He looks up to see that the silhouette of the villa ends in a cupola, and that the barrel of the telescope is protruding from this at an angle. He recalls his erstwhile passion for the stars. After a few moments of hesitation, Dru rings the doorbell of the house. The door is opened by the woman he saw through the window. She is about fifty years old, and Dru imagines it is a long time since she spoke to anyone other than the man who keeps the shop on the corner of the street, whose illuminated window he has just passed. It seems to him that the long period of silence has forced the features of her face into a tight knot that lets nothing of her inside out. He asks the woman if she will permit him to look at the telescope. To begin with she refuses, but once he offers her money, she opens the door to him.
The telescope is in the middle of a room whose walls are lined with shelves bearing carefully arranged treatises on astronomy. The instrument’s optical centre is swathed in metal casing, but by its size it is obvious that it contains an immensely complex system of lenses and mirrors. Dru runs his hand along the instrument’s cool surface, as if he were a stroking a great motionless beast. Then he sits down in a chair and looks into the eyepiece. He sees a broad boulevard in a large city, where the palaces are built in a metal unknown to him. Walking in the streets are beings similar to humans, but with faces a gleaming gold. On the road surface there is an ultramarine dust; along it glide golden sleighs, their noses slim and curved like Viking ships. Dru is confused. Is he really looking at a city on a distant planet, or is this some kind of trick by which these moving pictures are generated somewhere in the depths of the instrument?
There is not much to be found out from the woman. She is the widow of the astronomer, who in his youth received many accolades from the world of science but whose irascible and obviously eccentric nature caused him to break with all his colleagues one after another, to conceive a hatred for other scientists, and close himself up in a private observatory he built for himself. He then dedicated all his energies to watching the stars and perfecting his instruments. He had nothing to do with other astronomers, he didn’t publish any papers or books, and he never spoke to his wife about his work. One morning she found his motionless body lying on the floor next to the telescope. After this she lived in the villa alone and cleaned her husband’s workroom every day just as she had when he was alive. Still she dusts his telescope every day. It has never crossed her mind to look into the eyepiece.
Dru offers the woman all the money that remains to him and they agree he will rent one of the rooms in the villa, with access to the telescope whenever he wishes. The woman is at first reluctant to go along with this, but her money is running out and she knows her only other choice is to sell the villa along with the telescope. So Dru moves into the villa and spends whole nights looking into the eyepiece of the telescope, set by its creator so as to watch the journeys of the planets across the sky. He cannot rid himself of the suspicion that he may not in fact be observing life on a planet that orbits a great purple sun in a distant galaxy but rather a projection produced somewhere inside the instrument; perhaps he is the victim of a practical joke the misanthropic stargazer prepared for one of his colleagues. One day he unscrews part of the instrument’s casing, but once confronted with the magnificent glass labyrinth composed of so many visions and lights, he lacks the courage to take the work of the grumpy astronomer to pieces. But the more he immerses himself in life seen through the eyepiece, the less he thinks about whether or not it is real. (Although on days when the sky is shrouded in cloud and he lies morose on the ottoman in his room, the thought does flash through his mind that the world that is slowly becoming his home is just an illusion, the joke of a dead scientist.)
But that year is notable for its clear nights; only rarely is the sky overcast. Dru begins to live with the inhabitants of the distant planet. To begin with all he does is watch the activity in the streets and thoroughfares and buildings, the latter of which fortunately have large glass windows that make it easy to look into the dwellings of the extra-terrestrials. The telescope is so sophisticated that it can be focused on any place on the planet’s visible side, its lenses set so that Dru can read without difficulty unknown gold characters on the red pages of the books the extra-terrestrials hold in their hands. Dru learns to lip-read the spoken word and to understand what it means from the context. After a time he has the impression he can hear conversations, along with the melody and timbre of voices. He looks through windows into classrooms and learns to read and write with small children; he looks over the shoulders of readers and reads along with them novels, epic poetry, and works of philosophy and history. He discovers that the planet’s name is Umur and learns about the most dramatic moments in the histories of its states, about its religions and thought systems.