(Written after a visit to the Assyrian exhibition at the British Museum)
Behold me: the king!
I am Assur-bani-pal: mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria.
The king is the representative on earth of the gods. The duty of the king is to restore the earth to perfection, as it was created by the gods at the beginning of time.
Accordingly, I have rebuilt the shrines and temples, with proper reverence.
I have brought together in my libraries the books of the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians; the tales of their storytellers and poets, and the wisdom of their astrologers.
I have crushed those who rebelled against the will of the gods: I have destroyed their kings and nobles, scattered their peoples and laid waste their cities. My soldiers are as numerous as the sands of the desert.
I have slain lions without number, for they symbolise chaos and disorder.
And I have commanded my builders and sculptors to record my deeds in stone, that they may be remembered for ever.
Behold me: the king!
I didn't know Margaret at all well - she was only the friend of a friend, though after meeting her briefly at a party we'd kept in touch by letter - so I was distinctly surprised when, out of the blue, she invited me to spend a few days with her.
I found her home to be an apartment in an old building not far from the cathedral, and I had to ring the communication bell to ask her to unlock the front door by remote control. She was on the second floor, and I opted to walk up the stairs rather than use the lift. I wondered, no for the first time, why she wanted to see me again after our very brief acquaintance. It did pass through my mind that it might be sexual, but when she opened the door it was immediately apparent that this could not be the case,since Margaret was clearly in poor health. She was stooped over a zimmer frame, and her face was grey and drawn with pain, which caused her to look much older than I remembered. I muttered some expressions of sympathy, and desire not to put her to any trouble, but she brushed these aside, and her voice was cheerful enough.
"Oh, don't worry about me! I've done my back in, that's all!"
"Can I help with anything?"
"Well, yes; as a matter of fact you can. But we'll deal with that later. Come on in!"
She led me into the hallway and indicated a door on the right. "You'll be in the spare room there. Dump your stuff while I get us some tea".
The spare room was odd. For a start, there was a strange, faint smell that I couldn't place. There was a door in the corner by the window, which I assumed was a cupboard, but when I tried to open it to hang my coat there, I found it locked. For want of anywhere better, I draped the coat over a chair. One wall was entirely taken up with row upon row of small wooden boxes. In defiance of all the good manners expected of a guest, I attempted to open one or two which also proved to be locked. It was all very puzzling.
I made my way to the living-room, and soon Margaret appeared pushing a trolley of tea-things. We sat and talked about nothing in particular for a while, until I finally summoned up the courage to make reference to the mysterious boxes.
"Oh yes", she said, "My collection!"
She didn't say collection of what.
"I'm very proud of my collection. There's nothing like it in the world. I guard it with my life. I've never killed for it, yet. Not deliberately, anyway".
"Not yet?" I couldn't help but ask. "Not deliberately?"
"Well, it was his fault. He tried to break into one of my boxes. And I wasn't having that. And it was an accident really, but I knew people would think I'd killed him deliberately, so I hid the body in the cupboard. That's how I did my back in. So now I can't move him, so I'm wanting you to help me lug him downstairs and into my car, and then we'll drive out and dump him somewhere. You'll help me, won't you?"
The woman was clearly raving mad. I felt I had no option but to humour her.
"Yes, I'll help you", I said. "I'll just go to the loo, and then we'll take a look at him".
But of course I didn't go to the loo: instead I grabbed my things from the spare room and fled the scene. When I'd driven a good distance away, I thought to myself: I wonder if there really was a body in the cupboard? And an even nastier thought: suppose there was, and detectives found my fingerprints all over the room; what then?
That was some time ago. I haven't heard from the police yet, but I still don't sleep easily.
A Happy Christmas to everyone!.
I found this charming 15th century Nativity scene at the Petit Palais in Avignon.
It was a bright sunny afternoon. Gerry was sitting quietly in the park when a young man, a complete stranger, walked up to him.
"Are you ready to come with us?" he asked.
"I'm waiting for my girlfriend", said Gerry.
"She's with us. You'll meet her if you come with us. Are you ready?"
"All right", said Gerry, at a loss for anything else to say.
Immediately, everything went black. He felt that he had left the ground and was being sucked through a tight tube. When he opened his eyes, he was still in a park, but a different one, with trees and flowers that he could not recognise or name. A group of people stood around him. Their skins were somewhat darker than his, and they were dressed in white tunics.
"Is this him?" one of them asked.
"Yes: I chose him". Gerry recognised Anna, his girlfriend.
"Will he do?"
"He'll have to!"
Gerry looked around. Behind him, where in his town there had been a railway station, there loomed an enormous building. It reminded Gerry of a French chateau, though it was built in an architectural style unknown to him.
"Are we going there?" he asked.
"Not yet. First you must enter the wilderness".
Gerry wondered what could have happened. Was this time travel, a dimension-shift or a parallel universe? Or was it all just a dream? At any event, there seemed little option but to go along with what was required of him.
Between leaving school and going to university, I worked for six months at the County Library in Carlisle. One of the duties was to go out on the travelling library van, which once a fortnight toured round some of the most isolated places in the country: the lonely villages and isolated farmhouses towards the Scottish border, where I encountered some unusual people. Aside from such standard library fare as the woman who used a kipper’s backbone as a bookmark, and the man who kept a book on archaeology out on loan for over a year because he found it was exactly the right size to prop up a broken leg on his table, there were customers who would rely on us not only to bring the books, but to select suitable reading material from our shelves for their tastes. The procedure of one woman was invariable. “I want 5 murders, 3 romances and a western”, she would say, and leave us to choose them for her. She would then cast her eye over our selection, discarding a few because “they didn’t look very good“, or because she thought she might have read them before. (other customers had their own systems for dealing with the latter problem; such as making a pencil mark on a certain page once they’d read one of our books). In cold weather she would bring us a mug of tea each, though since she invariably stirred in large quantities of sugar, I could never drink mine.
She wasn’t the only customer who let us choose her books, and some of the choices we made must have caused some surprise. Harold the van driver once persuaded a lady at a remote farm to take home James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. “Is it a good book?” she asked. “It’s a very famous book”, said Harold. “I want something I can read in bed”, she said. “It’s probably best if you read this in bed”, Harold told her. I never found out what she made of it, since I don’t recall we ever saw her again.
Harold explained to me the perils of engaging these people in conversation. They probably never saw anyone except us and the postman for weeks at a time, and they were often desperate for a talk, but we had a tight schedule to keep, and if we let them stay on the van for too long, we’d never get round in time. Harold’s policy was to agree with everything they said. “You can’t have a proper conversation with someone who always agrees with you”, he said. I witnessed this technique in action at a farmhouse up near Kershopefoot border; the home of an artist who appeared to be a Nazi. He clambered onto the van in his paint-stained overalls. “Things are bad!” he told us, “There’s Jews in high places bleeding this country white!” “You’re right there!” said Harold. The man soon went away.
I’m afraid I forgot Harold’s advice on one occasion, when once an old farm labourer got on the van and told us, without any provocation, that all farm land should be nationalised. “You’ll be a socialist then”, I dutifully said. Oh no, he always voted Conservative. I couldn’t retrain myself from asking why, and he told me this long story about how, when he was a boy on the Earl of Lonsdale’s estate back before the First World War, he once opened a gate for the Earl’s carriage to come through, and there sitting beside the Earl was the Kaiser, who had come to spend Christmas up at the castle. The Earl had given him half-a-sovereign and said, “You look a promising young chap. If you ever want a job, come up to the hall and see me“. But then he’d gone off to the trenches, and it was only in the 1920s that he’d met the Earl at a county show and the earl had said to him, “I recognise you! You’re the lad who opened the gate for me back before the war! Why didn’t you come up to the hall and take the job I offered you?” And ever since then he’d voted Conservative. Politics was still a bit feudal up on the Border. I’ve often reflected that my vote could be cancelled out by someone like that.
Magro looked across the greensward. It always reminded him of home, and it was hard to remember that this wasn't Earth, that the plants beneath his feet weren't grass, and that the trees in the distance were wholly foreign. Amongst the trees stood one of the enigmatic buildings with which the expedition had become familiar: a cylinder of silvery metal, somewhat higher than a man, capped with a dome, without any visible windows or doors. None of the humanoid beings who inhabited this planet was currently in sight.
As well as feeling nostalgic, Magro felt depressed. They had been on this planet for almost a hundred of its days, and yet they had discovered nothing useful at all; about how its climate might change with the seasons, about its ecology and geology, about its wildlife (if any), and least of all about its inhabitants. After endless tests, the air was finally recognised as breathable and the crew had been able to remove their helmets. But the water from the streams and the fruit on the trees were still out of bounds: they contained no obvious poisons, but it was feared that they might cause stomach disorders. Then there were the inhabitants ......
The crew had met them soon after landing, but were yet to make any meaningful contact with them. Someone had christened them the "Noids", for they looked distinctly humanoid. They were about the same height as humans, and they were entirely hairless. It was impossible to distinguish betweeen men and women, and there were never any children on view. They all dressed alike, in a simple shift reaching to the feet, so they gave the impression of gliding as they moved. They had ever been heard talking to each other.
Infuriatingly, they showed no interest in making contact with their visitors. They ignored the spaceship entirely, and when they encountered the crew they bowed slightly and then moved on. They appeared to walk around randomly, in ones and twos, never in groups. They were never heard to utter a sound, and were never seen eating or drinking. Whatever did these strange people do, Magro wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time.
Azarin, one of the crew, came running towards him. "I've just discovered something!" he called, gabbling in his excitement. "I saw one of the Noids entering a cylinder!"
"Go on!"
"Yes! He walked up to it, and suddenly a door opened and in he went! And I looked, but I couldn't see any sign of a door at all! So I sat outside for ages, waiting for him to emerge, but he never did. What do you think's going on?"
"How can I say? For all we know, it could just be a lavatory! They aren't very big, those cylinders: no room for more than two or three people inside."
"No. Unless, of course, they contain steps going down underground".
At this point Telemar, the commander of the mission, who must have been listening to the conversation after approaching unobserved, intervened to say, "Has it occurred to you that all this has been set up for our benefit? A scenario very close to life on earth has been specialy created here; only they haven't got it quite right.
"Consider: the air is breatheable, but contains too many rare gases. The water has trace elements that make it unsafe to drink. These plants under our feet look like grass, but they aren't. The fruit on the trees could be eaten, but the chances are that you'd be spending a long time on the toilet afterwards. Then again: there aren't any animals or birds. There aren't even any insects! I haven't seen an insect. Have you? And as for the Noids... have you never suspected that they might be robots? They aren't the slightest bit interested in our spaceship. Can you imagine chimpanzees, or even cattle, completely ignoring a strange new object that suddenly appeared in their territory?
"So: whoever might be in charge of this planet: how are they doing this? and even more importatly, why?"
"We could try forcing some truth out of them!" Azarin said.
"How?"
"Well, we could kidnap on ofthe Noids. We wouldn't hurt him: just take his clothes off, perhaps, and see what he'd got underneath. Anyway:make him communicate. Or we could blast our way into one of the cylinders. Or perhaps ignore the Noids entirely, setup the heavy digging equipment, and see if there's anything useful to be had here".
Telemar shook his head. "No; for a variety of reasons. Firstly, because, as you well know, we're strictly forbidden to use violence towards indigenous inhabitants unless we're in serious danger. Which at the moment, we're not; though we might be if we followed your suggestions. Whoever set up this ridiculous planet for us must be extremely intelligent; extremely powerful. Who knows what might follow if we started to get aggressive? Intergalactic war maybe?"
"Well,have you any bright ideas?" Magro asked.
"None at all. And in any case, we'll be leaving this planet soon enough."
"Leaving? whatever for? are we running out of food, or what?"
"You don't understand the politics of it. Voyages like this are fantastically expensive. It was made clear that this was our last shot, and if we didn't discover something really profitable, that would be it. Even food for the trip was cut back, to save money, so we can't stay here much longer even if we wanted to. And what's happened? We've discovered a planet that makes no sense, inhabited by creatures (if they are really creatures!) which make even less sense. So we'll go home having achieved precisely nothing. And that will be that. Goodbye to any further explorations".
Magro looked across the grass that wasn't grass, through the trees that weren't trees. The spaceship stood there, shining and silent and redundant.
I would like to believe in unicorns
the swift form, silver as the moon,
shyly lurking in deep woodlands, seen by few
The horn like sparkling barley-sugar, the neat cloven hoof
and the dark unplumbable eye, speaking wisdom
from remotest ages.
Saying that romance and adventure live yet
and will return, in an enchanted world
undreamed of by science
Where visions can teach truth, and gods or demons
once more speak to men, and there is wild exaltation
or black terror
And reason will fall from its usurped throne
leaving faith and magic to point the way
incomprehensible and glorious.
