veined marble of the idol in the forest hadn’t been marble at all, had, indeed, been the petrified body of Narbondo himself, preserved by jungle shaman and witch doctors using Narbondo’s own serums. His eyes, being mere jellies, were removed and replaced with jewels, the optical qualities of the oddly wrought gems allowing him some vague semblance of strange vision. And there he had stood for close upon two hundred years, tended by priests from the tribes of Peewatin natives until that fateful day when Bill Kraken had gouged out his eye. Narbondo’s weird reanimation and slow journey west over the long years would, in itself, be a tale long in the telling, as would that of St. Ives’s quest for the lost ruby, a search that led him, finally, to a curiosity shop near the Tate Gallery where he purchased the gem for two pound six, the owner sure that it was simply a piece of cleverly cut glass.
At first I thought it was wild coincidence that Narbondo should arrive at the Explorers Club on the very day that St. Ives appeared with the ruby. But now I’m sure that there was no coincidence involved. Narbondo was bound to find his eye, and if St. Ives hadn’t retrieved it from the curiosity shop, then Narbondo would have.
The doctor, I can tell you, is safe and sound and has done us all a service by renewing Langdon St. Ives’s interests in the medical arts. Together, take my word for it, they work at perfecting the curious serums. Where they work will, I’m afraid, have to remain utterly secret. You can understand that. Curiosity seekers, doubting Thomases, and modern-day Ponce de Leons would flock forth gaping and demanding if his whereabouts were generally known.
And so it was that Doctor Narbondo returned. He had no army of supporters, no mutant beasts from the Borneo jungles, no hippos and apes with which to send a thrill of terror across the continent, no last laugh. Cold reality, I fear, can’t measure up to the curious turnings of a madman’s dreams. But if it was a grand and startling homecoming he wanted when he set sail for distant jungle shores two hundred years ago, he did quite moderately well for himself, I think you’ll agree.
Homunculus
“I’m possessed by the most evil aching of the head — such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as if through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I’m certain that the pain is my due — that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him. I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation…”
What a delicate speculation it is, after drinking whole goblets of tea, and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we shall have for supper — eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed upon cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be disparaged.
I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, Hazlitt’s essays would be a capital pocketbook on such a journey; so would a volume of Ashbless poems; and for Tristrarn Shandy I can pledge a fair experience.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Prologue
Above the St. Georges Channel clouds thick as shorn wool arched like a bent bow from Cardigan Bay round Strumble head and Milford Haven, and hid the stars from Swansea and Cardiff. Beyond Bristol they grew scanty and scattered and were blown along a heavenly avenue that dropped down the sky toward the shadows of the Cotswold Hills and the rise of the River Thames, then away east toward Oxford and Maidenhead and London. Stars winked and vanished and the new moon slanted thin and silver below them, the billowed crescent sail of a dark ship, swept to windward of stellar islands on deep, sidereal tides.
And in the wake of the moon floated an oval shadow, tossed by the whims of wind, and canting southeast from Iceland across the North Atlantic, falling gradually toward Greater London.
Two hours yet before dawn, the wind blew in fits above Chelsea and the sky was clear as bottled water, the clouds well to the west and east over the invisible horizon. Leaves and dust and bits of paper whirled through the darkness, across Battersea Park and the pleasure boats serried along the Chelsea shore, round the tower of St. Luke’s and into darkness. The wind, ignored by most of the sleeping city, was cursed at by a hunchbacked figure who drove a dogcart down the Chelsea Embankment toward Pimlico, a shabby vehicle with a tarpaulin tied across a humped and unnatural load.
He looked back over his shoulder. The end of the canvas flapped in the wind. It wouldn’t do to have it fly loose, but time was precious. The city was stirring. The carts of ambitious costermongers and greengrocers already clattered along to market, and silent oyster boats sailed out of Chelsea Reach toward Billingsgate.
The man reined in his horse, clambered down onto the stones, and lashed the canvas tight. A putrid stench blew out from under it. The wind was from the northeast, at his back. Such was the price of science. He put a foot on the running board and then stopped in sudden dread, staring at an open-mouthed and wide-eyed man standing on the embankment ahead with a pushcart full of rags. The hunchback gave him a dark look, most of it lost in the night. But the ragpicker wasn’t peering at him, he was staring skyward where, shadowing the tip of the moon overhead, hovered the dim silhouette of a great dirigible, a ribby gondola swinging beneath. Rhythmic humming filled the air, barely audible but utterly pervasive, as if it echoed off the dome of the night sky.
The hunchback leaped atop the seat, whipped his startled horse, and burst at a run past the stupefied ragpicker, knocking his barrow to bits against a stone abutment. With the wind and the hum of the blimp’s propellers driving him along, the hunchback scoured round the swerve of Nine Elms Reach and disappeared into Westminster, the blimp drifting lower overhead, swinging in toward the West End.
Along Jermyn Street the houses were dark and the alleys empty. The wind banged at loose shutters and unlatched doors and battered the new wooden sign that hung before Captain Powers’ Pipe Shop, yanking it loose finally in the early morning gray and throwing it end over end down Spode Street. The only light other than the dim glow of a pair of gaslamps shone from an attic window opposite, a window which, if seen from the interior of Captain Powers’ shop, would have betrayed the existence of what appeared to be a prehistoric bird sporting the ridiculous rubber beak of a leering pterodactyl. Beyond it a spectacled face, half frowning, examined a rubber ape with apparent dissatisfaction. It wasn’t the ape, however, that disturbed him; it was the wind. Something about the wind made him edgy, restless. There was too much noise on it, and the noises seemed to him to be portentous. Just when the cries of the windy night receded into regularity and faded from notice, some rustling thing — a leafy branch broken from a camphor tree in St. James Square or a careering crumple of greasy newspaper — brushed at the windowpane, causing him to leap in sudden dread in spite of himself. It was too early to go to bed; the sun would chase him there soon enough. He stepped across to the window, threw open the casement, and shoved his
