by James Morrow
“Here is what you are telling us,” complained Cuniche as translated by Akawo. “One day the universe decides, ‘I, Jehovah-Jesus, shall become a Creator, making a planet called Earth and a first man called Adam, fated to disobey me and thus infect himself and his children and his children’s children with a sickness called sin.’”
“‘Then I shall cause a human version of myself to grow inside a woman,’” Nitopari continued, “‘so that, thirty years later, my Creator side can murder my human side and offer up the corpse as a gift to the fallen angel Lucifer, thereby ransoming Adam’s descendants from that same demon.’”
“We cannot figure Jehovah-Jesus out,” said Cuniche.
“He must be one of those crazy gods the Jivaros worship,” Nitopari suggested.
Throughout the Indians’ Hebraicization, Solange periodically visited the council lodge, bearing bulletins from Ralph and Léourier. Although the Lamarck’s newly installed swim-bladder observation port worked splendidly, the engine was proving more difficult to revive than Léourier had imagined. He feared his airship would not become sky-worthy before the month was out.
“Then Dame Fortune has decided the matter for us,” said Chloe. “Noah’s ark will take us to the Encantadas—an adventure certain to be simpler and shorter than the forty-day voyage we read about in Genesis.”
“Dame Fortune?” said Solange. “Pray tell, mademoiselle, what about your favorite deity? Is it no longer in charge of the universe?”
“Miss Kirsop, I think perhaps we should modify your role in the masquerade,” said Mr. Chadwick. “Bianca Quinn was not only palsied in her fall, she also lost the use of her vocal cords—an injury that Lady Omega had failed to heal. I suggest you start practicing your aphasia now.”
Solange sneered and stalked out of the lodge.
Shortly after the courtesan’s departure, Chloe and Mr. Chadwick returned to the theological matter at hand. They realized that if the Huancabambas were to make sense of the masquerade, Lady Omega must be extracted from the Garden of Eden. In the revised scenario, God did not send the English mystic to purge the Serugites of congenital wickedness. Instead she’d come to warn them that shrinking their enemies’ heads and eating their enemies’ ashes would jeopardize their admission to Heaven.
Beyond their bewilderment over the doctrine of original sin, Chloe’s followers could not fathom her insistence that, should Señor Hallowborn express curiosity about the private portions of their anatomies, they must respond by saying, “Eight days after my birth, my foreskin was sliced from my male member.”
“What is a foreskin?” asked Nitopari.
“Señor Chadwick, please enlighten our players,” said Chloe.
Haltingly the vicar offered an explanation.
“But my jolly rod does have a foreskin,” said Rapra, placing a hand over his tangas apron.
“Mine as well,” said Pirohua, guarding his manhood.
“And mine,” said Yitogua, shielding himself.
“Nevertheless, you must tell Señor Hallowborn you are circumcised,” said Mr. Chadwick.
“Why does Jehovah-Jesus collect His favorite people’s foreskins?” asked Cuniche. “Does He put them in His masato? Does He make jewelry with them?”
“Ready, everyone?” said the vicar, ignoring Cuniche’s questions. “Repeat after me. ‘Eight days after my birth, my foreskin was sliced from my male member.’”
“‘Eight-days-after-my-birth-my-foreskin-was-sliced-from-my-male-member,’” chanted the Huancabambas.
For the final phase of the Indians’ education, Chloe required them to memorize sentences that would presumably increase the masquerade’s plausibility in Mr. Hallowborn’s eyes. Some of these lines concerned the English mystic’s relationship to the Serugites, including “Lady Omega has forbidden us to eat our enemies’ ashes” and “How fortunate that Lady Omega need not be crucified.” Other lines established the Serugites’ connection to Noah and the Deluge, including “With God’s guidance, we sailed the holy ark across the sea” and “Century after century, we have guarded the sacred vessel.” The majority of speeches, however, revealed the Lost Thirteenth Tribe’s familiarity with Hebrew lore, amongst them “God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah” and “Before Abraham could sacrifice Isaac, a ram appeared in the thicket” and “As punishment for the Tower of Babel, Jehovah confounded the tongues of men.”
After Chloe and Mr. Chadwick had spent two weeks instructing the aborigines in a mélange of arrant mendacity and Holy Writ, Solange brought word that the ark was nearly ready to sail, adding that the six disciples must now learn from Ralph how to man the jury-rigged barge. And so it was that, after putting on the white robe she’d received from Akawo, Chloe led her newly minted Jews along the shores of the Jequetepeque towards the sea. When at last the parade reached the moored Covenant, she cast a satisfied eye on the three soaring masts with their byzantine configurations of sails, yardarms, lines, and shrouds. Waving her Bible about like a semaphore flag, she exhorted her followers to mount the pier, climb the rope ladder, and join Señor Dartworthy on the weather deck.
“That white robe becomes you, my fair philosopher!” Ralph called down from the gunwale. “’Tis as splendid as the raiment you wear whilst declaiming Omar Khayyám! Thou art surely the canniest prophet in Peru!”
“Think not of my role in the masquerade!” Chloe shouted back. “You are tasked with eating, sleeping, and drinking the part of Edward Cabot!”
“‘Touch not your flesh of myrrh, your golden hair’!” Ralph recited.
“I’m not that person anymore!”
“‘Except to bring them tender love and care’!”
As Ascumiche, the last of the Indians, attained the weather deck, Chloe turned her gaze from the Covenant, staring at a range of banyans and mangroves thriving along the tide line. Affixed to the branches like webs spun by an immense spider, a dozen nets belonging to local mestizo fishermen lay drying in the sun.
“‘Know your own wonder, worship it with me’!” shouted Ralph. “‘See how I fall before you deep in prayer’!”
Determined to place herself beyond the reach of her erstwhile paramour’s histrionics, Chloe hurried along the labyrinth of docks, past dories and smacks tied to bollards, their hulls painted in bright yellows, blues, and reds. She paused before a wrecked brigantine, its hull completely submerged. Shorn of canvas, the mainmast and the foremast rose from the water like crosses on Golgotha, their spars holding the largest fishing net in the harbor.
The mass of cords transfixed her. Such an enigmatic thing, that net, partaking less of form than of void, its holes more immanent than its stuff. Was the God of her epiphany an equally paradoxical entity? Did the Presence in fact have a doppelgänger, a profane absence, determined to prevent her from ever again knowing the serenity she’d felt on her Manáos sickbed?
Suspended between the absolute and the abyss, and not very happy about it, she firmed her grip on her Bible, climbed down to the beach, and marched towards the salty savannah.
BOOK THREE
A PREFERENCE FOR THE APE
11
Arriving in the Encantadas, Chloe Discovers the Empire of Duntopia, Where Maximum Mediocrity Yields Minimum Disappointment
Blessed by clear skies and buoyed by a following sea, the Covenant blew across Pacasmayo Harbor, bound for the Humboldt Current, her Huancabamba crew energized by the honor of serving a ship their ancestors had assembled and held sacred. Either Ralph was a consummate teacher or the Indians were natural-born sailors, but in any event it seemed to Chloe that they performed their tasks—casting off the lines, hoisting the sails, working the helm—with supreme aplomb. Overhead, the gannets squawked with an urgency verging on panic, as if pleading for berths on the ark (a second Deluge being imminent), even as a community of mestizo fishermen waved amiably from their dories and smacks. Evidently these toilers of the sea believed that the Covenant posed no threat to their industry, for what sane person would build so elaborate a b
oat for the mere purpose of catching fish?
Thanks to Capitaine Léourier’s generosity, all signs pointed to a safe crossing. Not only had he given Ralph the Lamarck’s primary collection of Pacific charts, he’d handed over his best spyglass and sextant, his reserve implements being adequate for the Encantadas journey he would himself be making ere long. According to this newest scenario, the instant that repairs were completed, Léourier and Mr. Chadwick would refuel the flying-machine with kerosene from Puerto Etén, take to the air, and land on Indefatigable Isle several days after the Covenant. Seeking out Governor Stopsack and Lady Omega, Mr. Chadwick would feign to corroborate the female prophet’s exalted status in Heaven’s eyes. The vicar would then go straight to Simon Hallowborn and report that this English mystic was truly a divine messenger, privy to God’s unfavorable opinion of the proposed massacre.
Chloe spent the first day of the voyage stationed beside Cuniche at the helm, helping him to cut a straight wake. Inevitably she imagined Noah standing on the weather deck of the primal ark, his ears throbbing with the screams of terrified sinners and the howls of drowning beasts. As the patriarch stared at the death-choked waters, his wife and daughters-in-law fidgeted anxiously by his side, whilst Shem, Japheth, and Ham, keeping watch in the prow, praised God for modifying, in the case of Homo sapiens, His quota of only two representatives per species.
Shortly before noon on the Covenant’s tenth day at sea, an amorphous mass materialized dead ahead, breaking the silvery horizon like an onyx pendant on a pearl necklace. Consulting Léourier’s map, Ralph concluded that they were approaching Charles Isle, home of the Christian utopianist who styled himself Emperor Eggwort.
The advent of Galápagos occasioned a dispute aboard the ark. Ralph wanted the troupe to spend the day getting to Indefatigable, so they could perform the masquerade for Governor Stopsack the following morning (assuming the slaughter had not yet occurred), thereby enlisting his allegiance in the struggle against Hallowborn. But Chloe argued that the company should make immediate landfall on Charles Isle, find Orrin Eggwort, and rehearse the show in his presence, so they might learn which parts were persuasive (to a Christian utopianist at least) and which demanded revision.
“My instincts tell me Eggwort will prove a vital ally,” she said.
“My instincts tell me he will prove a woeful distraction,” said Solange.
“In either case, our leader obviously wishes to clamp eyes on a healthy lizard or tortoise as soon as possible,” said Ralph, “and so our goal, Solange, must be Charles Isle, whether you and I like it or not.”
As the sun dipped towards its illusory rendezvous with Borneo, Ralph piloted the ark around the island’s western shore and dropped anchor in Post Office Bay. Casting her mind back to Mr. Darwin’s travel journal, Chloe recalled that the inlet owed its name to the mail delivery system devised in the previous century by a whaling master, Captain Colnett. The linchpin of this institution was a wooden barrel into which outbound European sailors deposited their private correspondence. Philanthropic mariners would then retrieve the letters with the aim of posting them once back on English or Continental soil.
Clad in her white cotton robe, Chloe descended the rope ladder to the longboat, Solange, Cuniche, and Nitopari following, the plan being for Ralph and the remaining Indians to reef the sails, then come ashore in the cutter. Like the devout imitation disciples they were, the Indians fervently rowed their sham prophet across the bay. Terns, storm petrels, and blue-footed boobies rode the thermals and updrafts: scores of birds, alive and well—an avian extravaganza in which Chloe took no delight, for Hallowborn’s death list would have included none of those species.
As the longboat drew near shore, she fixed on the breakers, wave after wave smashing against a bifurcated beach, one side covered in green silicates, the other strewn with tuff and pumice rising to cliffs of shining black lava. Swathed in crimson lichens, the volcanic chunks atop the promontories were quite the most beautiful objects she’d ever seen, not only in their outward aspect but also in their talent for locomotion: yes, no question, these rocks were wriggling and twitching—being not rocks at all but, wonderful to tell and still more wonderful to behold, the fabled red marine iguanas of the southern Encantadas!
“Do you see that, Solange?” The arrival of the dove, olive branch in beak, could not have given Noah greater joy than these lizards brought Chloe. “The rocks are moving! We’ve outrun Hallowborn!”
The Indians labored heroically, stroke upon stroke, until the longboat reached the beach. A dilapidated wharf jutted into the cove. Like teeth protruding from a jawbone, a series of docks extended from the pier to form a half-dozen berths, five empty, the sixth holding a shallop called the Cumorah. Hitching up her robe, Chloe vaulted over the gunwale and sprinted through the surf, soon attaining the glassy shore. Arrayed in spikes and spines, their red hides flecked with turquoise, the lizards took no notice of the intruder but simply huddled on their sooty pedestals, soaking up the westering sun and snorting like disaffected basilisks. Each time an iguana exhaled, a filament of seawater streamed from its nostrils, even as the booming rollers showered the colony with spindrift. Occasionally a lizard would slither off its perch, dive into the swirling foam, and vanish, returning with a mass of seaweed clamped in its maw.
Chloe cast an eye inland. The Colnett mail barrel and its adjacent notice board stood at a safe distance from the incoming tide, the fat drum shielded from sun and rain by a peaked roof, beyond which lay a range of volcanic cones perhaps fifteen feet high. She steeled her nerves and scrambled up the nearest slope, the sharp pumice abrading her palms and ankles. Gaining the summit, she set off along the ridge, taking care lest she tumble into a crater, then paused and faced the sea, her robe billowing in the wind. Fastened to the center of the bay, the Covenant rode on her hawser, bathed in the coppery afternoon light, her reefed sails hanging from the spars like sloths clinging to jungle branches.
Descending the cinder mountain, she proceeded across a plain broken at intervals by bare trees and leafless thickets, plus stands of prickly-pear cacti, the very variety she’d tended at Down House. The stark terrain culminated in a dormant volcano, its slopes covered by a shawl of formerly molten rock, the static waves rolling across the vale like a sea of frozen pitch. To the west the rigid lava yielded to a tranquil pool, domain of ten saddleback tortoises, some lumbering along the shore, others wallowing in the mud. The thirsty ones waded into the shallows and, submerging their heads completely, imbibed prodigal quantities of mossy water.
“It’s a miracle!” cried Solange, dashing to Chloe’s side.
“Since when do you believe in miracles?”
“I didn’t say I believed in miracles,” said Solange. “I merely noted that a miracle had occurred.”
Acting with unspoken but complete accord, each woman selected a tortoise, then collapsed prone across its carapace. Chloe’s creature smelled of ashes, tuff, algae, and muck: a not unpleasant fragrance—in truth quite exhilarating. Briefly she wondered why she felt rather more inclined to embrace this beast than to make a joyful noise unto the Presence. But then she recalled a reflection Mr. Darwin had offered during the fateful Down House luncheon: “I cannot explain myself—only God, wherever He may be, can do that—but I shall attempt to explain my theory.” If a great scientist could be a stranger to himself, then she must be permitted the same foible. Tomorrow she might attempt to decipher the riddle of Chloe Bathurst, but for now it was sufficient to hug a tortoise.
* * *
For some while Chloe and Solange lay athwart their respective reptiles, watched over by Cuniche and Nitopari, and they would have continued their devotions had the other masquerade troupers not arrived. Ralph was delighted to find Charles Isle so fecund—“Evidently we’ve gained Galápagos with time to spare!”—but before he could expand on this sentiment six women came striding across the lava field. Clothed in the sorts of calico gowns favored by the wives of North American pioneers, they were presumably
citizens of Orrin Eggwort’s experimental community, their sunburnt faces evoking the indigenous marine iguanas, each complexion tinted a different shade of red.
“The Supreme Emperor sends you his howdy-do,” said the maroon pioneer, addressing Ralph. “An hour ago, Orrin and the rest of us watched you drop your anchor in the bay.”
“Lovely ladies, allow me to introduce our company,” said Ralph. “I am Professor Edward Cabot, instructor in anthropology at King’s College and master of the good ship Covenant, out of Puerto Etén. My fellow British citizens include the aerialist Bianca Quinn, palsied last year in a fall but now fully recovered, and Lady Omega, an English mystic who healed Miss Quinn’s broken back. Our Peruvian natives count themselves amongst Lady Omega’s followers.”
“Rebecca Eggwort at your service,” said the maroon pioneer, then indicated her five companions and gave their names, the burgundy woman being Sarah, the scarlet Ruth, the strawberry Naomi, the rose Hagar, and the coral Miriam. “Orrin’s other wives are back in Minor Zion”—she gestured towards the volcano—“over yonder, behind Mount Pajas.”
“His other wives?” said Solange. “You mean, you’re all married to Mr. Eggwort?”
“Happily,” said Sarah.
“On balance,” said the pregnant Ruth.
“Truly happily,” said Naomi, likewise in a gravid state.
“I thought Mr. Eggwort was a Christian, not a Persian,” said Solange.
“You’re darn tootin’ he’s a Christian,” Rebecca replied, “but like many a Latter-Day Saint, Orrin practices the venerable Bible custom of plural marriage. ‘If it was good enough fer David and Solomon,’ he says, ‘it’s good enough fer me.’ At the moment he’s on top with nine wives, whereas our Associate Emperor and our Assistant Emperor ain’t got but six.”
“Six all together?” asked Solange.
“Apiece,” answered Rebecca.
“If Mr. Eggwort proposes marriage to me, I shall refuse,” said Solange. “I would never share my husband with another woman, much less a harem.”
