♦ ♦ ♦
Mungo stood to hitch up his pants. Dassoud knocked him down. The ululations of the women were fanning the crowd to a frenzy. “Eat pig, Christian,” they shouted. “Eat pig.” Mungo didn’t like their attitude. Nor did he like exposing his prat in mixed company. But there was nothing to be done about it: they’d cut his throat and bleach his bones at the least show of resistance.
Suddenly Dassoud had a dirk in his hand: narrow as an ice pick, dark as blood. “Infidel dog!” he shrieked, veins tessellating his throat. Ali watched from behind the folds of his burnoose, dark and impassive. The temperature inside the tent rose to 120°. The crowd held its breath. Then Dassoud leveled the blade at the explorer, gibbering all the while, like some rabid anatomist lecturing on the eccentricities of the human form. The point of the blade drew closer, Ali spat in the sand, Dassoud exhorted the crowd, Mungo froze. Then the blade pricked him — ever so lightly — down below, where he was softest, and whitest. Dassoud laughed like a brook gone dry. The crowd whistled and shrieked. It was then that a grizzled Bushreen with straw in his beard and an empty eye socket burst through the press to push Dassoud aside. “The eyes!” he howled. “Look at the devil’s eyes!”
Dassoud looked. The sadistic gloat gave way to a look of horror and indignation. “The eyes of a cat,” he hissed. “We must put them out.”
♦ ARISE! ♦
Ned Rise wakes with a headache. He has been drinking gin — a.k.a. Strip-Me-Naked, Blue Ruin, the Curse — enfeebler and enervator of the lower classes, clear as a souse’s urine and tart as the juice of juniper. He has been drinking gin, and he is not quite sure where he is. Though he is reasonably certain that he recognizes the soleless half-boots, hairy knuckles and cinnamon-red cape that are among the first things to present themselves to his eye. Yes: that cape, those knuckles and boots, the tear in the trousers: they are familiar. Intimate, even. Yes, he concludes, they belong to Ned Rise, and thus the splintered head and staved-in eyes which perceive these phenomena, however imperfectly, must in some way be connected to them.
He sits up, and after a long pause, rises. It seems that he’s been lying in a heap of discolored straw. On his hat. He bends to retrieve it, lurches forward, then regains his balance with an assertive belch. The hat is a ruin. He stands there a moment, assuming a meditative pose, something drumming in the back of his head. Then he scans the room through half-closed lids, feeling a bit like an explorer setting foot on a new continent.
He is in a cellar, no question about it. There’s the dirt floor, mop in a bucket, walls of rough stone. Against the back wall, a double row of sealed casks: Madeira, port, Lisbon, claret, hock. In the corner, a shovel or two of coal. Could these be the nether regions of the Pig & Pox Tavern? At this point Ned discovers that he is not alone. Other forms, possibly human, occupy patches of straw scattered over the floor. There is the sound of snoring, a moan and gargle like rain in the gutter. The concurrent odors of urine and vomit hang heavy in the air.
“So ye’re up then, are ye?” A balding crone, her face a memento mori, is addressing him from behind a plank set across a pair of hogsheads. A thin gold ring rides her lower lip like a bubble of sputum. “Well. Good mornin’ to ye sir,” she says. “Ha-haaa! And ‘ow was yer sleep and will ye ‘ave a dram to start the day off proper?” Two pewter measures the size of eggcups and a terra-cotta jug stand atop the plank in still life. A sow lies on her side beneath the makeshift bar, the swell of her jaw obscured by an overturned chamberpot. Hogarth would have loved it. Ned wonders what happened last night.
Suddenly the beldam shrieks as if she’s been stuck with a dagger, a long rasping insuck of breath: “Eeeeeeeee!” The drumming in Ned’s brain becomes a series of paradiddles, thunder rolls, the booming of a big bass drum. But wait. The crone isn’t suffering a stroke after alclass="underline" she’s laughing. Coughing now, hacking and pounding the plank until a long yellow taper of phlegm appears at the corner of her mouth and makes its resilient way to the countertop. “Cat. .” she chokes, “. . cat got your tongue, peach fuzz?”
A sign hangs on the wall behind her, its characters scrawled in a clonic hand:
DRUNK FOR A PENNY
DEAD DRUNK FOR TUPPENCE
CLEAN STRAW, FREE
Ned bites his thumb at her. “Screw you and your mother and your hagborn dropsical brood, you scrofulous tit-sore slut!” he shouts, already beginning to feel better.
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!” she screeches. “Ye’ve no taste for Mother Geneva’s ‘lixir, eh? Taste enough ye had for it last night. . ‘Ere, give Mother a look at yer manhood then — she’ll find a cure for ye,” lifting her skirts with a leer, the spindle legs and yellowed bush like the denouement of a Gothic tale.
Off to the left a flight of ramshackle stairs leads up to an outer door, through the chinks of which Ned can discern the chill light of dawn. He curses himself for wasting breath on the crazed hag — there’s business to tend to this afternoon — and starts up the reeling stairs to the door.
“Eeeeee!” shrieks the old woman, “Mind yer gown now, fairy quean!”
Ned gives her the finger, draws the cinnamon robe tight, and swings back the door on Maiden Lane and the light of day. Behind him, from the depths, a broken shriek like a viola gone sour: “Beware, beware, beware the hangman’s cravat!”
♦ ERE HALF MY DAYS ♦
The machine for extinguishing sight consists of two strips of brass and looks something like an inverted chastity belt. One strip circles the head at eye level, the other fits snugly over the crown. There are two screws involved: each has a convex disk attached to the working end. The device was originally fabricated in the ninth century for al-kaid Hassan Ibn Mohammed, the blind Bashaw of Tripoli. Insecure about his infirmity, the Bashaw decreed that all who desired to come into his presence must first submit to having their eyes put out. He was a very lonely man.
The machine operates on the same principle as a vise. The screws are twisted until they meet the surface of the eye, and are then tightened, crank by crank, until the cornea bursts. Simple, inexorable, final.
A hush has fallen over the crowd. A moment earlier they’d been on the brink of hysteria, razzing and gibbering like the hoi polloi at a bullbaiting or a freak show. But now: silence. Flies saw away at the hot still air, and the sound of a goat or camel making water in the sand is like the boom of a cataract. Sandals shuffle, a man scratches his beard. Many have drawn rags over their faces, as if to escape the contamination of the explorer’s gaze.
Dassoud and the one-eyed interloper stare down at him, arms akimbo, faces solemn.
Mungo has had difficulty grasping the gist of the proceedings. He is reasonably certain that he has pinned down one word at least — the word for eye, unya—which he recalls from Ouzel’s Arabic Grammar (“We lift up our unyas to heaven wherein Allah resides”). But why on earth would they be nattering about eyes? And the sudden hush — he wonders about that too. But it is hot, beastly hot, and he can hardly keep his mind on anything at all. So hot in fact that it surpasses anything in his experience, with the possible exception of the Swedish Baths off Grosvenor Square. Sir Joseph Banks, Treasurer and Director of the African Association, had taken him to the baths one afternoon to iron out some of the details of Mungo’s drive for the Niger. There they had been subjected to the emanations of baked stones, stones that glowed like molten lava — or so it seemed. An attendant thrashed them with birch switches and buffeted their kidneys and backbones with the sharp heels of his hands. Sir Joseph seemed to find the whole operation invigorating. The explorer nearly lost consciousness. He is beginning to experience the same sort of lightheadedness at the moment, in fact. And small wonder, when you consider that not only must he contend with the sun, sand fleas, dysentery and fever, but with inanition as well. The Moors have confiscated his supplies, appropriated his horse and interpreter, and apparently decided to put him on a stringent diet. Too stringent, by his way of thinking: he hasn’t seen a scrap of food in two days.