considerable accomplishment, particularly since the smallest of these dogs is twice Hunk’s weight. Nevertheless, courage and combative prowess do not suffice. Hunk is pulled down, savaged, killed, then torn to bits. Thus a hero dies, and then is eaten; and shortly nothing is left of him but a scrap of his skull and the final third of his tail.
And the Princess Sabitha?
Let the shameful truth be told!
She has already forgotten him.
Yes, it is true. Sabitha Winolathon Taskinjathura has encountered another lover, and the pair are singing a passionate duet as a preliminary to the consummation of their fresh-found relationship. In the stews of Lubos they sing, while the drums of the drummers beat thus:
Blab-mup blab-mup blab-mub blab!
Rub-thump rub-thump rub-thump rub…!
While the drums beat, the night deepens to ‘those dragon depths in which swim the darker monsters of dreams’, to quote the estimable Mabin Lab Ev.
Look! Savour the moment. Midnight has arrived. Or (to translate from the Dub) the night’s last half is raping the first out of the way. Or, as the periphrastical Janjuladoola tongue would have it, by the many breathings of a bat’s wing beating has the heat of undokondra been fanned away that now the cool of bardardornootha may begin. (Poetic, perhaps, though bloated poetry; but unfortunately inaccurate, as the watch from midnight to dawn is scarcely a fraction cooler than the stretch which leads to the apotheosis of the ghost bells — bells lately unsounded, unglorified in deference to the harmonic prejudices of the Crab.) The Toxteth is simplest: owl rests, half home.
Midnight, then.
Hot is the night in its deepening, hot as virginity surrendering, sweaty as an orgy’s armpit.
In the docklands of Marthandorthan, in Xtokobrokotok (the big warehouse owned by the drug dealer Firfat Labrat), people are yet awake. For Shabble is conducting a marriage guidance counselling session. The young couple who have sought advice from the High Priest of the Holy Cockroach are of Janjuladoola breed. They are trying to breed but are encountering considerable difficulty in managing the mechanics of that which books of etiquette refer to as ‘the initiating process’.
Shabble hears their tale.
What, you may ask, does Shabble know of breeding?
Enough.
For when the couple have finished, Shabble asks a very astute question, then says:
‘Try doing it lying down.’
The couple look at him incredulously.
You must remember that they are of the Janjuladoola people: and, as has been stated elsewhere, the Janjuladoola folk shun the ground. Their very furniture they build top-heavy to show their contempt for gravity and all its works; though the possession of such furniture is a matter much governed by class and caste. Let us note also that, throughout the Izdimir Empire, the use of stilts is reserved for the imperial family; and, in Obooloo, sumptuary codes forbid the wearing of platform shoes to all but those of the highest castes and classes. All of which serves to emphasize the contempt in which gravity and ground alike are held.
This prejudice against yielding to the demands of planetary physics has contaminated all areas of Janjuladoola culture, including sexuality — and, in particular, pornography. Now it is a feature of pornography that it caters to fantastic desire rather than to the dictates of reality; consequently, the bawdry of Janjuladoola, whether it be verbal, sculptural or delineative in expression, is characterized by one extraordinary but predictable peculiarity, inasmuch as the conjugation of bodies is invariably shown as an activity that takes place either standing up or (more often) while suspended in mid air.
The pervasive influence of such pornography is demonstrated by a survey of one thousand virgins in the province of Ang, which showed that a full 64 per cent believed that the human body becomes weightless during copulation. Naturally, such expectations often lead to marital difficulties for those amorous but inexperienced couples who fall back upon literary or artistic role models in their pursuit of earthly delights.
But is Shabble the right person to advise such unfortunates in their search for a practical sexual mechanics?
What, for example, does Shabble know of orgasm?
Answer: nothing.
While Shabble has participated in many orgies (let your mind boggle in its own time, for time and space will not be wasted here in any description of such low and shameful occasions, or in any enumeration of the gleeful rogues and ladies who were therein involved) Shabble has no appreciation of orgasm. While willing partners have in the past endeavoured to remedy this lack of experience, the most cunning exploitation of Shabble’s tactile receptors has succeeded merely in demonstrating that the imitator of suns is ever so slightly ticklish. The ingenuity of experimenters has been somewhat frustrated by the fact that the shining bubble has very limited facilities for physical intercourse with the world; for Shabble has neither outlets nor inlets for anything apart from heat; and the throwing of fire or the absorbing of the same gives Shabble a pleasure as innocent as that which children take in the variously flaring or exploding fireworks of the Dungeon Feast of Obooloo.
Nevertheless, Shabble is a canny mathematician with a firm grounding in physics both basic and advanced. As this free-floating sphere has moved through human societies with near perfect freedom for the last twenty millennia, it has been given (and has taken) many opportunities to observe human flesh accommodating itself to the demands posited by such physics. And therefore gives advice as good as any which unfortunate young couples would be likely to receive from a doctor.
‘Yes,’ says Shabble. ‘Do it lying down. Oh, and use dikle.’
‘Eat it, you mean?’ says the boy.
‘As an aphrodisiac?’says the girl.
‘No, no,’ says Shabble, squeaking in excitement; the excitement in question being not prurient interest but an instructor’s zeal. ‘As a lubricant, that’s how you use it. You-’
But here we must leave them, for Shabble will shortly proceed to give contraceptive advice. And this must not be set down in print, for if it is then this chronicle will most surely be outlawed in the historian’s homeland lest knowledge relating to the prevention of pregnancy fall into the hands of people aged less than sixteen.
(As the disasters of time may some day separate these writings from their bibliographical context, let it here be noted that the native heath of the volumist responsible for this paper-staining is Quilth, land of the taniwha; and, furthermore, that in the absence of any prospect of substantial pecuniary reward for the historian, the writing of the tract you have now to hand has been sponsored by the genereous gentlemen of the Taniwha Guarantee Corporation. Thanks to such generosity, the historian is able to eat twice a day, instead of once every twiceday; and, moreover, to eat offal — the guts of seagulls and such — instead of taro and seaweed as formerly. For this bounteous charity he is duly grateful.)
Now it happens that, in the historian’s homeland, girls from the age of eleven go courting; and many are the pregnancies, abortions and diseases that befall them. Furthermore, the most highly paid persuaders of commerce labour by night and day alike to persuade young girls that courtship is the ultimate trial of their value; and to sell them all manner of fripperies on that account. Thus those of female gender are propagandized by the subtle arts of their elders, beset on all sides by suggestions and allurements; the entire thrust of this informal education being to persuade them that a complete hymen means an incomplete woman. Women, of course, they most desperately wish to be, as boys wish to be men.
But, in the face of unstinting publicity designed to impel (if not compel) the female young into the arms of their coevals of opposite sex, the government of the above-mentioned land has, in its wisdom, chosen to censor all sources of contraceptive advice which threaten to contaminate the minds of people of such tender years with knowledge of techniques which might save them from a good many diseases and despairs.
This censorship is carried out at the bidding of a stem Religion, which preaches the theoretical benefits of a universal chastity, a chastity which (if one is to judge from generations of practical experience) is not to be obtained in practice, not even when the sanctions of law enforce it. Thus a nation legislates ignorance for its young, preferring frequent abortion, endemic disease and the occasional suicide to the revelations of a rational system of sexual hygiene.
What is more, the nation which thus oppresses a part of its population thinks itself free; and, indeed, many voices are raised within that nation, calling for further censorships and greater oppressions with a view to
