The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  The next thing I saw, once I had rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, was a trio of figures attired from head to foot in dark blue robes. Protruding from the eyeholes in each robe were two little telescopes.

  One of the figures bent over me.

  ‘A bluebear!’ he said, more to his companions than to me. ‘How muggly!’

  I got to my feet at last and brushed the sugar-dust from my fur. Not far away I saw more such figures in dark blue robes – five hundred of them, perhaps, and at least as many camedaries.

  ‘Who are you, if I may make so bold?’ I murmured with the fearless torpor of someone just roused from his slumbers.

  ‘That would be telling,’ said the one who had bent over me. He took me by the arm and assumed a confidential tone. ‘Can bluebears keep a secret?’

  The tallest of the three broke in impatiently.

  ‘We’re Muggs – I’m sure you must have heard of us. We’re on our way to Anagrom Ataf. Would you care to come with us?’

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Muggs, The. Nomadic desert tribe resident in the →Demerara Desert of Zamonia. Thrown together by chance, this is an ad hoc community of social dropouts and outcasts who sought salvation in solitude but failed to find it and formed a nomadic tribal association whose numbers are still growing. If the Muggs find persons lost or suffering from hardship in the desert, they take them under their wing and into their tribe regardless of status, wealth, gender, or the dimension from which they come. Avowedly unwilling to lead a conventional, orderly, middle-class existence, the Muggs pursue their own ideals of freedom, leisure, and independence, preferably in extreme temperatures.

  The Muggs are sociable, hospitable, fond of animals, and firmly opposed to altercations of any kind. They readily espouse muddled sociopolitical ideas and have a predilection for bizarre names. They are expert camedary breeders [→Camedary, The] and have for some years been roaming the Demerara Desert in quest of a legendary city named →Anagrom Ataf.

  The Muggs’ clothing consists of a length of dark blue muggwool [a wool obtained from a blue edible mushroom which also plays a predominant role in the Muggs’ diet [→Muggroom, The]. Several yards long, this cloth is wound several times around the body and head until no ray of sunlight can reach the skin. Two miniature periscopes are always worn at eye level because the Muggs make a habit of burying themselves when sandstorms are imminent and like to keep a lookout.

  It may have been because I was sleepy, or because I was still eager to put as much distance as possible between me and the Great Forest, but I accepted the Muggs’ invitation without a second thought. Another incentive was the casual, friendly way in which they treated me. At least none of them wanted to dissolve my body with some purulent secretion and devour me. That betokened something of an improvement on my recent company.

  My admission to the Mugg tribe was gratifyingly informal and unbureaucratic. I was swathed in a length of dark blue cloth (I politely declined the periscopes) and someone loudly called out ‘Anagrom Ataf!’, whereupon all the other Muggs bellowed the same two words. Then the caravan set off and I simply trotted along with it.

  After a while I was approached by one of the Muggs, who asked if I was hungry and would like some muggroom to eat.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Muggroom, The. Biologically speaking, a rather inadequate description of the Lower Zamonian cactoid mushroom, which thrives exclusively in certain areas of the →Demerara Desert. The Lower Zamonian cactoid mushroom grows only in layers of soil that are situated far below sea level, exposed to strong solar radiation, and provided with an adequate sugar content. This hybrid plant possesses very great nutritional value, together with other qualities particularly prized by the →Muggs.

  The Muggs lived almost entirely on this blue cactoid mushroom, and so, now that I was by way of being an honorary Mugg, did I. We were in a desert, after all, and there was little else to eat unless you fancied sugar or knew how to catch and cook venomous electric adders or hydrascorpions.

  Muggrooms grew under almost every sizeable stone in the Demerara Desert, never went out of season, and were easy to pick and preserve. When you’ve eaten a lot of muggrooms (and the Muggs ate them all the time), you get into a stupidly emotional frame of mind. For one thing, you attribute far greater importance to all you see and all that happens than it merits; for another, everything strikes you as funny in some way. Most of the Muggs were in a permanent state of ecstatic hilarity, and we often had to halt the entire caravan because some member of the tribe was so tickled by the sight of a cactus leaf or a fold in the dunes that he couldn’t be persuaded to move on.

  The Muggs were forever laughing and chuckling, and someone was always having a fit of the giggles. The caravan made it a rule to halt during these paroxysms of mirth. A Mugg in that condition was known to be quite helpless and could not be left in the desert on his own – it might happen to anyone, after all. Many such paroxysms went on for hours, and the victims had to be tied to a camedary’s hump to enable the caravan to proceed. Other spasms were so infectious that the whole caravan was gradually overcome and ended up rolling around on the ground. In consequence, our progress was rather slow.

  On the other hand, it was the muggroom which ensured that the Muggs made any progress at all. Its effects were such that the simple act of walking acquired a dreamlike quality. You could march for hours without getting tired and remained in the best of spirits. It felt as if you were traversing the moon on ten-foot legs made of chewing gum, even when trudging up a sand dune in murderous temperatures.

  Versatile mushrooms

  Muggrooms tasted delicious, I might add, having a flavour midway between tuna and roast pork with a faint, appetizing hint of sage. They were tastiest and most effective when eaten raw and least effective when roasted or boiled. They could also be grilled or steamed, puréed or fried in oil and preserved. When dried and packed in airtight containers they kept almost indefinitely, though concentrated muggroom lasted even longer when pounded with a mixture of salt and ant oil and compressed into little balls that could be chewed for hours. When boiled up with desert sugar and vanilla, then cooled and broken into squares, they made delicious muggroom toffee. Finely ground muggrooms were used to season muggroom dishes, though this struck me as nonsensical as seasoning lemons with lemon juice. All you had to avoid were the thorns, which contained a lethal poison. Prick yourself on one, and you were dead before you hit the ground. Without its thorns, however, the muggroom was quite harmless. You had only to remove the bones, so to speak.

  Travelling by camedary gave me a certain amount of trouble at first. Riding that desert beast isn’t exactly comfortable and takes a lot of getting used to.

  On horseback you feel as if you’re moving in time to classical music; a camedary seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk. It puts its feet down in a wholly arbitrary order, sometimes favouring a forefoot, sometimes a hind foot, and is forever tripping itself up. It sways first right, then left, falls to its knees and struggles up again. If I have ever in my lives suffered from anything akin to seasickness, it was on a camedary in the middle of the desert, not aboard some ship on the high seas.

  The Muggs’ secret

  I would dearly have liked to know what the Muggs looked like under their dark blue robes, but they made a great secret of this. As I discovered in the course of time, they travelled, slept, and even bathed with their bodies entirely shrouded in those peculiar lengths of cloth. What a Mugg looked like in the nude was one of the great mysteries of the Demerara Desert. According to an anthropologist who had specialized in the subject and written a dozen or more books about it, Muggs were one-time Alpine Imps who had suffered from total hair loss and were so
ashamed of this that they swathed themselves in dark blue robes and took refuge in the desert. I myself do not subscribe to this theory. It is based solely on three Alpine Imp hairs which the aforesaid anthropologist found in a crevice halfway between the Impic Alps and the Demerara Desert.

  Life in the caravan was exceptionally harmonious. Disputes, altercations, problems, et cetera, were wholly repugnant to the Muggs, who always sought the most acceptable solution. Even when they disagreed on which way to go, as they sometimes did, they didn’t take a vote on the matter because a vote would have betokened a conflict; they compromised by adopting a zigzag course.

  The Muggs were fond of music, but only of home-made music produced by home-made instruments, which they liked to play round their camp fires at night. It wasn’t particularly good music, in my opinion. It was more a way of making a soothing noise that would lull everyone to sleep. Most of the instruments, into which the Muggs hummed in a melodious way, consisted of dried cactus stalks hollowed out and stripped of their thorns. Others had drumskins made from camedary udders and were beaten very slowly. Those Muggs who didn’t play instruments simply swayed to the beat and conveyed their appreciation of the musicians’ efforts by uttering an occasional, encouraging ‘Muggly!’ Finally, tired out after the long day’s march and sedated by the music, we would all subside into the dust of the desert floor and fall asleep. We must have presented an astonishing sight as we trekked across the desert like a procession of dark blue, giggling mummies. Despite their uniform outward appearance, Muggs were staunch individualists. This made us something of a walking paradox, a community of lone wolves welded into a pack by force of circumstance. The Muggs had rules like every community, but they were so refreshingly different from traditional rules and regulations that it was almost a pleasure to obey them. Twelve in number, they had been discovered by the Muggs in a so-called desert message-in-a-bottle.

  The desert postal service

  These messages-in-a-bottle are always turning up in the Demerara Desert. They are often, especially in an emergency, the only means of sending an SOS. You cork up your messages in glass bottles and insert them in a drifting dune in the often illusory hope that it will forward them fast. Sadly, drifting dunes are thoroughly unpredictable where speed and direction are concerned, so the chances of their ending up in the right hands are very slim. The message the Muggs found must have been in transit for a very long time, because the paper was yellow with age and the writing on it faded and in an old-fashioned script. However, since a violent sandstorm blew up just as they were unfolding it, they construed this as an omen and made the twelve rules on it their code of conduct. They read as follows:

  1 Honour the muggroom.

  2 Thou shalt not address a white cockerel by name.

  3 Thou shalt eat no wood.

  4 If thou seest two sticks lying one on top of the other, thou shalt walk backwards over them with thy left foot first, not forwards with thy right. Moreover, thou shalt not devour them.

  5 Should a vulture’s shadow fall across a fire that has gone out, thou shalt rekindle it three times or a great misfortune will ensue.

  6 If thou cross the path of a white cockerel seated on two superimposed sticks, thou shalt not strike it, nor shalt thou address it by name nor partake of the said sticks.

  7 Thou shalt bear a name unlike any other in the entire universe. On encountering one of thy brethren thou shalt address him by his full name without a single slip of the tongue. (I shall, in due course, have a tale to tell about this innocuous-sounding rule!)

  8 Should a vulture’s shadow fall across a white cockerel seated on two charred sticks in the ashes of a dead fire, thou art in a deplorable predicament. Notwithstanding this, thou shalt not (illegible) nor address the cockerel by name, nor devour the sticks, nor strike the vulture, nor greet thy brother in an inadequate fashion.

  9 Thou shalt not finkle backwards. (Since none of the Muggs knew what ‘finkling’ entailed, no one could could do it. Consequently, this rule was one of the easiest to keep.)

  10 Thou shalt not finkle forwards. (See Rule 9.)

  11 Thou shalt not sleep on a dune that drifts in the direction of noon. Should it drift towards evening, thy time has come.

  12 Thou shalt betake thyself to the city named Anagrom Ataf and, when thou hast found it, trap it and make it thy home for evermore.

  Since there were no white cockerels in the desert and I genuinely had no intention of eating any wood, I had no problem with the rules other than my failure to understand them completely. I found the last rule the most puzzling of all. How could one ‘trap’ a city? My own view was that none of these rules should be taken too seriously. The truth was, I suspected that they had been written under the influence of sunstroke, but I didn’t say as much to the Muggs for fear of hurting their feelings.

  And so, on the strength of a crackbrained message-in-a-bottle, the Muggs had devoted themselves to the task of finding, trapping, and occupying a city named Anagrom Ataf. This was not an entirely new idea, it should be added, but the Muggs were the only community to have adopted it as their mission in life.

  Anagrom Ataf

  The legend of Anagrom Ataf – a city situated somewhere in the Demerara Desert which many claimed to have seen in the distance but none had ever entered – had been current in Zamonia for hundreds of years. It was rumoured to be a pleasanter place to live in than anywhere else on earth. There were no rents to pay, no crime, no air pollution, plenty of parking places for camedaries, and so on – everything, in fact, that anyone could want of a dream city in the desert. Such, at least, were the idyllic conditions reputed to prevail there.

  Many people could describe the place, at least from the outside: a city of low white buildings with red and gold roofs interspersed with numerous shady palm trees and an occasional slender minaret. Nothing spectacular, in other words, just a typical oasis city of medium size. But anyone who tried to enter it found that it shrank away like a timid deer and vanished into the desert. It was precisely because no one had ever seen Anagrom Ataf from the inside that it had acquired such a legendary reputation.

  Adventurers surmised the existence of fabulous treasures, the old and frail of medicinal springs or fountains of eternal youth, gluttons of a land of milk and honey. Many people even believed that Anagrom Ataf was the gateway to the Garden of Eden and had set out to find it, but none had ever quite got there. The desert was littered with the bleached and sand-blasted bones of those who had pursued this phantom of a city ever further into the waterless waste. Moreover, no one had ever evolved a reasonably convincing scientific theory about this phenomenon. No one, that is to say, except Professor Nightingale.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Anagrom Ataf. This is a semi-stable Fata Morgana or semi-solid mirage in the shape of an oasis city situated in the so-called →Demerara Desert, an arid tract of land on the continent of Zamonia. In temperatures exceeding 320° Fahrenheit, the sugar of which the Demerara Desert consists begins to melt [→Sugar Flux], releasing a cloud of fine sugar vapour. If the temperature drops sharply at that moment [e.g. because of sudden katabatic winds], the sugar hardens in mid-air; and if, in addition, the image of a real oasis city is projected on the crystallizing sugar molecules, its layout can become permanently imprinted on them. This produces the semi-solid mirror image of a city that can be blown hither and thither by the wind, creating the impression that it is moving of its own volition.

  I, on the other hand, took the view that Anagrom Ataf had resulted from centuries of muggroom-eating and from the monotony of the desert – that it was the idealized image of a city dreamed up by people half dead from thirst. But still, I had no intention of depriving the Muggs of their dreams. Anagrom Ataf was the only thing that kept them going.

  The Muggs roamed by day and slept by night. I myself considered this nonsensical, becau
se it would have been much easier for them to make progress during the relatively cool nights than in the scorching heat of the day. They would have consumed less water and found their bearings more easily. There were hardly ever any clouds over the Demerara Desert, so the night sky was always clear and well lit, particularly when the moon was full, thanks to the highly reflective crystalline surface.

  But the Muggs feared the night in a way that reminded me of the Minipirates. When dusk approached they looked for a camp site near some source of water. It was always a great pleasure to watch the Muggs searching for an underground reservoir. They began by consuming vast quantities of muggrooms to sensitize themselves to the proximity of a spring. Then they tottered across the twilit desert with their arms outstretched like inebriated albatrosses. If a Mugg began to rotate on the spot and hum like a top, it meant that he had found a watercourse. The others had then to hurry to his assistance, because he couldn’t stop spinning by himself. Many Muggs, having mistakenly strayed too far from the group in search of water, continued to rotate for hours before they were found. This left them feeling dizzy for days, and care had to be taken to prevent them from falling off their camedaries again and again.