leave that beautiful place we had found together. The days and nights that followed were boundless in their minutes of love, they seemed to stretch on forever, but then one day she returned briefly to her village and soon after she came back she collapsed on the grass, cholera, and I could only whisper to her and hold her helplessly in my arms as the life ran out of her and all at once she was gone, simply that. I buried her in the glen. A few weeks we had, no more, yet I remember every blade of grass there, every spot of sun and every sound made by the water on the rocks. A memory by a stream, the most rapturous and wretched moments I have ever known in life.
Strongbow sighed. Haj Harun came over and rested a frail hand on his shoulder.
Yes, he said, a gentle Persian girl. Yes, you certainly must include her.
Strongbow got to his feet and shook himself out of the mood.
No it's not that kind of book. And anyway, that was all too long ago.
Too long ago? said Haj Harun dreamily. Nothing is ever too long ago. Once I had a Persian wife myself.
She was Attar's daughter.
Who do you mean? The Sufi poet?
Yes.
But he lived in the twelfth century.
Of course, said Haj Harun.
Strongbow studied him for a moment. There was something startling and transforming about the old Arab shyly smiling out from under the large Crusader's helmet. Haj Harun was rubbing his hands and nodding encouragement.
Won't you do it? Please? At least a few pages? Just to prove to yourself that nothing is ever too long ago?
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 volumes 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 comer 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,
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
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.
