In the Land of Time

by Lord Dunsany

  3 Nineveh was one of the capitals of Assyria, located on the east bank of the Tigris River near the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. It flourished from at least the eighteenth century B.C.E. to 612 B.C.E., when it fell to a combined force of Medes and Babylonians.

  4 The reference is to proposition 13 in Book 1 of Euclid’s Elements.

  5 Mount Etna, the highest active volcano in Europe, is in eastern Sicily, eighteen miles north of Catania. Stromboli is a volcano on an island of that name north of Sicily.

  6 Bucephalus was Alexander the Great’s horse. It died in 326 B.C.E. while Alexander was in India. Saint George, the patron saint of England, probably flourished in the early fourth century C.E. He is reputed to have slain a dragon while astride a horse, although this legend dates no earlier than the twelfth century. Roland, the hero of the Song of Roland (a chanson de geste dating to the twelfth century), was reputedly Charlemagne’s nephew and rode into battle against the Saracens on a horse. Rosinante is Don Quixote’s horse.

  7 Saladin (1138-1193) was sultan of Egypt and Syria. He defeated the Crusaders at Jerusalem in 1187. He was, however, unable to lift the siege of Acre in 1191, and the city fell to Christian forces commanded by Richard I, the Lion-Hearted (Coeur de Lion), king of England (1189-99). Richard was unsuccessful in attempts to recapture Jerusalem, and in 1192 he concluded a truce with Saladin. Paynims are pagans, heathens, or non-Christians in general.

  8 Perhaps a reference to Dunsany’s unsuccessful attempt in 1906 to become a Conservative member of Parliament for the district of West Wiltshire; in a heavily Liberal district he lost by only 1,450 votes.

  9 “And the twelve gates [of Heaven] were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass” (Revelation 21:21).

  10 Hanwell is a northwestern suburb of London where Hanwell Asylum, a mental hospital, was established in 1831. It is now called St. Bernard’s Hospital.

  11 Leviathan is a dragon or sea monster mentioned several times in the Old Testament (e.g., Job 41:1, Psalms 104:26).

  III. PROSE POEMS

  Much of Dunsany’s work, early and late, could be regarded as prose-poetic in its heavy use of metaphor, symbol, and rhythmic repetition, and its careful attention to cadence; but some works stand out as signal instances of prose poetry. A Dreamer’s Tales contains two such specimens, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow” (Saturday Review, 2 May 1908) and “Carcassonne” (not published periodically). Dunsany’s finest prose poems are found in Fifty-one Tales (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), most of which appeared in the Saturday Review from 1909 to 1913. Among the stories in this volume are “The Raft-Builders” (Saturday Review, 18 December 1909), “The Prayer of the Flowers” (Saturday Review, 18 December 1909), “The Workman” (Saturday Review, 26 March 1910), “Charon” (Saturday Review, 20 August 1910), “Roses” (Saturday Review, 31 December 1910), and “The City” (Saturday Review, 30 August 1913), many of which not merely predict, but welcome, the eventual extinction of the human race.

  1Tyre is an ancient city on the Mediterranean Sea, located about forty-five miles southwest of Beirut, in what is now Lebanon. Established by the Phoenicians no later than the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., it developed into a powerful city-state. It was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E., but later reemerged as an important port in Graeco-Roman times before being razed by the Muslims in 1291 C.E. Persepolis, located near the modern city of Shiraz, Iran, was founded around 515 B.C.E. by the Persian king Darius the Great as the center of his imperial cult. It was sacked and burned by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E.

  2 In Greek myth, Charon is the ferryman who, for a fee, conveyed the spirits of the dead across the river Styx to their final resting place in the Underworld.

  3 In Roman myth, Dis is the ruler of the Underworld, equivalent to the Greek Pluto.

  4 Carcassonne is a city in southeastern France, lying on the Aude River. Founded by the Romans in the first century C.E. as Colonia Julia Carcaso, it was made into a fortress town by the Visigoths beginning in the fifth century. It features the finest surviving remains of medieval fortifications in Europe. It is still inhabited, with a population of about forty-five thousand. Dunsany’s introductory note to the story suggests that he was perhaps unaware of Carcassonne’s actual existence. The line of poetry Dunsany quotes is from Gustave Nadaud’s poem “Carcassonne” (1879), as translated by M. E. W. Sherwood.

  5 “Leal” is an archaic variant of loyal.

  IV. FANTASY AND REALITY

  The Book of Wonder features a number of stories in which the conflict between fantasy and reality is the focus; two of the most poignant of these are “The Wonderful Window” (Saturday Review, 4 February 1911) and “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” (Sketch, 1 March 1911). The former tale was adapted much later as a play, Golden Dragon City, first produced on BBC radio on 17 September 1934 and included in Plays for Earth and Air (1937). The Last Book of Wonder (London: John W. Luce, 1916; London: Elkin Mathews, 1916 [as Tales of Wonder]) continues the theme in such tales as “The City on Mallington Moor” (Saturday Review, 7 June 1913), “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux” (Smart Set, January 1915), “The Exiles’ Club” (Smart Set, November 1915), and “Thirteen at Table” (not published periodically). “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux” became one of Dunsany’s most frequently reprinted stories, and was also adapted as a play, The Bureau de Change, first produced on BBC radio on 16 April 1934 and included in Plays for Earth and Air. Tales of Three Hemispheres is on the whole a disappointing collection of miscellaneous pieces marking the end of Dunsany’s early fantasy work, but it does contain the striking tale “The Last Dreams of Bwona Khobla” (Atlantic Monthly, September 1919), in which the power of the human imagination is stressed.

  1See part 2, note 10.

  2 Mallington Moor is imaginary, but the name is probably derived from East and West Malling, communities in Kent about ten miles from Dunsany’s home, Dunstall Priory, in Shoreham. The other places mentioned in the story—Lingwold, Tetherington, and Uthering—are also imaginary, but the first two are similar in form to actual places: Lingfield in Surrey, and Tytherington (the name of several towns in England, in Cheshire, Wiltshire, and elsewhere). Uthering may be Dunsany’s contraction for Wuthering.

  3 Bromley is a parish in Kent, about ten miles southeast of central London. Sydenham is now a southeastern suburb of London, about three miles northwest of Bromley.

  4 The medieval legend of the Flying Dutchman tells of a ship whose captain dared to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in the teeth of a storm. Warned by an angel to desist, the captain shot at and cursed the angel, thereby condemning himself and his crew to sail perpetually around the cape and lure other ships to their destruction.

  5 In hunting jargon, a point is a straight cross-country run.

  6 The reference is to Marc Antony’s monologue (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”) in act 3, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, during which he frequently pauses to solicit responses from the “plebeians” he is addressing.

  7 The Kikuyus are a Bantu-speaking people living in west-central Kenya.

  8 The Carlton Club at 69 St. James’s Street in London was founded by Tory politicians in 1832. It remains an important social and political branch of the Conservative Party. Dunsany was in all likelihood a member.

  V. JORKENS

  The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931) included the first thirteen of the adventures of the clubman Joseph Jorkens, and is probably the best of the five published Jorkens volumes. It contains the first Jorkens story, “The Tale of the Abu Laheeb” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1926), along with the bizarre and half-parodic science fiction tale “Our Distant Cousins” (Saturday Evening Post, 23 November 1929). The second Jorkens collection, Jorkens Remembers Africa (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1934; London: William Heinemann, 1934 [as Mr. Jorkens Remembers Africa]), contains a brooding horror tale, �
��The Walk to Lingham” (Life and Letters, [December 1933-January 1934]). Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (London: Putnam, 1940) is the third Jorkens collection and contains “The Development of the Rillswood Estate” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1938), which might be considered a genial parody of Dunsany’s early tales of elves and sprites. The Fourth Book of Jorkens (London: Jarrolds, [1947]; Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1948), contains “A Life’s Work” (Modern Reading, 1945), a seemingly lighthearted tale that carries a grim message on the futility of human effort.

  1Malakal is a city in south-central Sudan, on the right bank of the White Nile (Bahr el Jebel).

  2 Kosti is a city in central Sudan, about 150 miles south of the nation’s capital, Khartoum (more properly El Khartûm).

  3 The Bahr el Zeraf is a river in southern Sudan that emerges out of the White Nile and, flowing northward, empties back into the Nile near Malakal.

  4 A dahabeeyah is a large sailing boat used by travelers on the Nile.

  5 The Dinkas are an African people inhabiting the southern Sudan just west of the White Nile. They have occupied the region since about the tenth century C.E.

  6 The Shilluk are an African people also occupying the western shore of the White Nile.

  7 A shikari is a hunter or sportsman. The word is Urdu and entered English through the British colonization of India.

  8 Imaginary. The first civil aerodrome in the London area was at Hounslow Heath (1919), followed by Croydon (1920).

  9 Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a British sculptor whose avant-garde public sculptures often provoked controversy. He executed a memorial to the author W. H. Hudson in Hyde Park in 1923-25, depicting the figure of Rima, the nature spirit who is the heroine of Hudson’s novel Green Mansions (1904). The sculpture’s overt sensuality provoked violent condemnation by the public as well as by such figures as Hilaire Belloc and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but was defended by Bernard Shaw, Sibyl Thorndike, and others. Dunsany was notoriously hostile to modern art; see his witty parody, “The Art of Longjuju,” Saturday Review 39, No. 51 (22 December 1956): 9, p. 9.

  10 Dunsany refers to Edward Lear (1812-1888), the British author of nonsense verse. His late article “That Supresensical Lear,” New York Times Book Review, 19 July 1953, pp. 6, 22, is a parody of modern criticism in its pedantic analysis of a poem by Lear.

  11 Dunsany’s devotion to dogs was lifelong. See his article “Tales about Dogs,” Tail-Wagger Magazine 23, no. 2 (February 1951): 28-30. In the play The Use of Man the dog displays an effusive and uncritical devotion to humanity: “He is man: that is enough. More is not needed. More could not be needed. All wisdom is in him. All his acts are just; terrible sometimes, but always just. No use can be asked of him, only to be man. Man he is. He is man. The supreme perfection of which life is capable. Man! Man! Man!” Plays for Earth and Air (London: William Heinemann, 1937), p. 59.

  12 Eros is one of the largest asteroids in the asteroid belt lying between Mars and Jupiter. Its average radius is 4.3 miles. Its orbit is such that every thirty-one years it comes to within 14 million miles of Earth.

  13 Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, freiherr von Münchhausen (1720- 1797) was a German officer and hunter who became celebrated as the teller of eccentric and implausible stories of his adventures. They first appeared in English as Baron Münchhausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), compiled by R. E. Raspe.

  14 Imaginary. Dunsany may have devised this name not only because it is a plausible-sounding English name (there is a Ling-wood in Norfolk) but because there is a pun on the Latin word lignum (wood).

  15 Camille Corot (1796-1875), French landscape painter, chiefly in the naturalist tradition.

  VI. SOME LATE TALES

  Dunsany gathered some of his later tales in two collections, the first of which is The Man Who Ate the Phoenix (London: Jarrolds, [1949]), which contains “The Policeman’s Prophecy” (Fortnightly Review, January 1930), “The Cut” (a story read by Dunsany on BBC radio on 1 November 1936; published in the Listener, 4 November 1936), and “Poseidon” (Spectator, 13 June 1941). The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories (London: Jarrolds, 1952) contains the half-parodic detective tales narrated by the self-effacing Smethers, the first of which is “The Two Bottles of Relish” (Time and Tide, 12 and 19 November 1932), as well as other non-Smethers stories, one of the most delightful of which is “The Pirate of the Round Pond” (not published periodically). But dozens of Dunsany’s tales, early and late, remain uncollected; two of the best of them are “Helping the Fairies” (Strand Magazine, May-June 1947) and “The Romance of His Life” (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1952). The latter suggests the shrewdness of Dunsany’s analysis of human character in a tale that bears not even the faintest trace of fantasy and yet retains the delicacy and wistfulness that typify the entirety of his work.

  1Dunsany was one of the greatest amateur chess players of his day, once playing the celebrated champion J. R. Capablanca to a draw. He published many chess problems in the Times Literary Supplement.

  2Crab, in this sense, is British slang (dating to c. 1890) for the act of finding fault with something or someone.

  3 Sevenoaks is a town in Kent, twenty-two miles southeast of London, and the nearest town of any considerable size to Dunsany’s home in Shoreham, being about five miles south of Dunstall Priory.

  4 Cf. the play Mr. Faithful, in which a man, Dick Johnson, desperate for work takes up a “job” as a watchdog: “JAGGERS: Collar comfortable, Captain Johnson? DICK: Not really. The great thing is it’s white. I insisted on having it enamelled white. So much seems to depend on a white collar.” Mr. Faithful (New York: Samuel French, 1935), p. 44.

  5 An imaginary but plausible-sounding Irish name: rath means “fort” in Irish.

  6 Blackheath is a suburb in southeast London. A railway station opened there in 1849. It was a popular place for musical and other entertainments, chiefly at the Rink Hall, which opened in 1870.

  7 The Round Pond is a nearly circular pond, about three hundred by two hundred yards in dimensions, in the western part of Kensington Gardens in the Kensington district of western London. Built in 1728, it long remained popular as a place for sailing model boats.

  8 A deliberate misquotation of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), ll. 446-51: “Like one, that on a lonesome road / Doth walk in fear and dread, / And having turned round walks on, / And turns no more his head; / Because he knows, a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread.”