“Deprived of my fruit of life, my wise and valiant sons; widowed, the child of solitude, I lie in this tomb, in this grave, in the place which I built…”
-Eshmunazar, King of Sidon, from the translation by the Reverend Dunbar I. Heath, as quoted by Burton in 1883
A Child’s Price
There he was, abandoned by his nurse to the horrors of the big black bedroom. Then it arose from the shallows of the deeper darkness, the black phantom of his baby-fears. The darkness was within, for his eyes were closed and he did not look upon any physical manifestation.
An immense cone lay before his closed eyes, from the apex of which rose a huge grinning face, advancing toward him from the unfathomable inner distance. It came on gradually but unavoidably.
No, no, standoff you terror! Mister Gilchrist it is upon me—help!
But on it came, the disembodied head of some damned pagan magician, whose body had been consigned to the flames, but his head spared to haunt the still living. He struggled within his tiny child’s body—no, the withered body of a sick diseased man—to squirm away from the encroaching horror. But on it came.
Soon its monstrous subhuman features and deep penetrating eyes were so close that he could feel their negative energy with every pore and whisker that covered his own helpless immoveable face.
What to do? Shall this be my price for not fully believing in the God of Man’s own arrogant self-image? Is this my Hades glimpsed only when I near the Bank of the Styx?
Yes, there will be no Blessed Isles for me, nor a fading shade’s fate; but damnation in Tartarus surely. So this is after all Hades’ messenger come to take me; he who had simply lingered at the margin of my dreams from my very birth.
Then, abruptly, and without warning, as was always the case for this particular terror—except one supposes when the actual time for damnation is upon you, you Gypsy charlatan—the monstrous face started back to the apex of the cone, receding from his inner sight to a deeper quarter than it had emerged, until only the dark eyes were left bobbing in the abyss, waiting as always, to return and haunt him unless he pulled himself away from the black bedroom of boyhood…
Awaken Gypsy, awaken to the world of a failed man’s pain or you are lost to the terrors of your inner child. Kismet’s turbaned headsman does not have you yet you teetering heretic. Awaken!
A Vile Fate
He returned to his earthly agonies, to the great house he and Isabel had taken over in grand style in Sao Paulo Brazil, where he served Her Majesty Queen Victoria as Regional Consulate to the Emperor and Empress of this despicable slaveholding colonial empire. In this savage land he had spent the last of his physical powers on a fruitless quest for gold, lost cities and even sea monsters. He had made journeys that no other Whiteman had endured, on this and other dark continents, and had finally paid for his adventuring with this apparently final break in his health.
He lay in the great bedchamber shared with his doting wife who he affectionately called ‘Zoo’ as she fussed and prayed over him while the good doctor had him bled, cupped and blistered to drain off the immense quantity of black clotted blood that was coming from his liver congestion and his undiagnosed lung complaint—probably some wretched parasite from the backlands.
It was a few months into 1868—it would be springtime in almost any civilized country—and they were losing faith in the doctor’s ministrations. After the draining of the blister he was given a great glass of port wine—what I would not give for some hashish or opium!—and put back to sleep, with only the company of Zoo’s little Chico, who paraded around the bed with an effigy of a jaguar held on a stick as he chanted some corrupted version of the Lord’s prayer in his pidgin Portuguese.
Brazil, as a post, was such a nasty assignment largely because there was no help that one could pay, for this was a slave society. One must first purchase slaves, and then pay them as free men if one was to maintain a descent hold on his humanity. Richard had purchased a number of Black slaves to attend to Zoo and the needs of the household. Zoo being an evangelical Catholic—what a contradiction my lovely wife is—had sought and obtained permission from the Bishop of Sao Paulo to teach the Gospels to these people, who believed themselves to have no souls on the account that they were Black. Such were the unjust precepts of a nation only second in size to snoring China and belching America. Of these three vast semi-barbarous realms Brazil was certainly the worst.
Of all of her servants Isabel was only able to convert Chico, the dwarf, who promptly repaid her blind and boundless kindness by roasting her favorite cat alive over the kitchen stove. Now Chico, carrying a charm apparently based on his domestic atrocity, was pacing around the bed, head lower than the mattress, chanting for his master’s well being even as the jaguar effigy bobbed disconcertedly about, and Richard thankfully drifted off into his feverish alcohol laced slumber…
