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May 3, 1934

An Island East of Yzerfontein

I have made it my habit these past five or six years to keep this journal after the style of that rascal mutt, Pepys. Not out of some grandiose delusion of fame, fortune, or an audience to come--God save the poor fool that finds these pages and is thereby moved to decipher my chicken scratch--but rather as an indulgent form of self-amanuensis. Plato loudly abhors all diverse styles of mnemotechnic, but I say the old embezzler is a hypocrite. Already I digress, as oft I do in the grip of some anxiety. While this rare Idea, of which I am but the humble image projected, did by crossed words encrypt his bluer interludes, I am my own margins should be therein enriched by similar frills and furbelows. Perhaps a second gin and juice will steady my nerves.

Right then. This morning in brief: woke before dawn, broke fast with T. and M.--my God, is there a duller pair of Pembrokes? One could happen upon them both in a dark alley and they'd scarcely notice--then retired to manage scholarly correspondence. Then to the café to meet with S., that scoundrel of a painted wolf, to refresh my supply of various powders at considerable but yet economical price. Must petition the department for a supplemental disbursement...

[Editor's Note: The remainder of this page is charred beyond legibility.]

...most peculiar invitation to his "experimental" greenhouse, obtained through a series of questionable if fortunate events, located some twenty miles off the coast. The lieutenant (recently retired: the old war wound to his thigh was grievous indeed. Though he implied that his crocodile batman escaped unscathed, one wonders if this were not mere bravado, a tale embellished in the telling to preserve some shred of his masculine pride--this I've yet to determine) was quite insistent that I should return with him, dine at his estate, and tour his compound in the morning. I'd have free rein to interview his gardeners to my heart's content as they tidied the grounds for the coming winter.

I could have made some excuse not to venture beyond my little enclave of expatriates, where rumors swirled regarding life in the wild bush. But the greyhound was a countryman, and a veteran at that--and after our recent travail, we shared a certain esprit des bains, as it were. I reassured myself that his service revolver would serve as sufficient deterrent, no matter the degree of his physical fraility. And perhaps I'd get material to submit a letter to the Society's Proceedings; that'd stick a thorn in X.'s paw when next my name came up for tenure. So we agreed to cross the strait to his home island with the noon ferry.

In short, I arrived at the marina no more than five or ten past the hour. Of course the ferry's coal-stack was no larger than a thumbtack on the horizon by then. Cursing either my chronic intemperance or extemporaneousness, and already quite put out, (and yes, with that old slack-jawed Jesuit Katzenmeister whispering in the back of my head about floating away from sunk costs, or something like that) I asked around for a suitable alternative.

Yes, I was also surprised at my initiative. I think the combination of exceeding my orders (viz., cataloguing the perplexing new genera of the Cape Floral Kingdom) and exceeding the comforts of civilization (such as they are), brought about some spontaneous realignment of my otherwise perpetually unbalanced humors. It also could have been the fresh supply from S., as I find it affects me most keenly at first before rapidly becoming stale. An experiment?

In the end a toothless hag took pity on a fellow lost aardwolf, and triangulated for me a reliable fisherman with a schooner of some probable seaworthiness. Perhaps I should mention--I don't think I have before--that I bear some passing resemblance to the local branch of Hyaenidae, though my ancestors traded begging at the heels of uncaring leonine kings for scraping at the somewhat fertile dunes circumscribing the Gulf of Suez, or thereabouts--though in any case I was made for Oxford-raised the moment I opened my muzzle.

In my starched shirt and trousers, the heat of midday and the sudden attempt at exercise made me perspire well before I located the fisherman's shack. A confident knock on the driftwood door produced a tall, scarred creature known in these parts as a strandwolf--six feet tall at least, long-legged and strapping, with a leathery snout gone dull from exposure to the elements. He was not the first I'd seen in my time at this posting, but he was by far the best specimen to date, hewn by simple Providence to the harsh conditions of his existence.

"Who're you?" He said in the local tongue, scratching himself unconcernedly.

He'd girded himself with a scrap of rag but that was the limit of his service to common decency--neither shocking nor unremarkable. I responded in kind, for S. and his troupe spoke a related dialect somewhat exclusively and took great amusement at my attempts to mimic them.

"I wish for you to take me across to the island," I said, straining the bounds of my lexicon.

"What island? I can piss on five from here." He laughed and leaned against the frame of his door, affecting indolence in the face of my incompetence.

I confess I gaped, open-jawed, for a span of ten or twenty seconds. By a circuitous route we arrived at what I hoped was the island on which the lieutenant dwelt. Despite the momentary confusion, the weather-beaten angler seemed to know it well. In the course of our debate, a woman interjected herself under his outstretched arm. She was pretty, evidently self-possessed, and carried well the unmistakable swell of a recent mother's bosom.

"What's this?" She asked, understandably, and he gave a summary of the tasking. Unmoved, she continued. "And what are you getting out of it?"

Here my grasp of their dialect failed me, or so I thought, for the fisherman replied with complete nonchalance: "It'll tame my crocodile and save you the trouble."

She laughed and tittered quickly some response I couldn't follow, but in the end she said, "No, impossible. What's more, the cubs are all ours tonight; leave me alone with them and you can find a fish to--"

I had no intent to cause domestic strife, so I explained in halting sentences I'd take the ferry back. If we were quick, her husband would return well before dark. All agreed, he took me by the paw to the beach and the beached sailboat that was evidently his pride and joy.

It was ship-shape, more or less, and skimmed right past the breakwaters. While he pranced about the ship, tacking this sail, shaking out that reef, and generally being a spry and nimble captain, my old complaint reared its ugly head. I passed a miserable ten minutes slumped over the railing, hurling my guts into the South Atlantic. I longed for an antiemetic, but of course I'd left my pharmacopeia behind. Presently, it seemed the vessel slowed to a crawl. Turning back to seek the reason, I found myself square in the strandwolf's shadow.

"You good?" He asked, peering down limpidly. I nodded, gulping for breath, too out of sorts to frame an answer. He offered me a scoop of water, drawn from an open barrel on the deck. Lukewarm, it served to clear the acrid taste from my tongue.

"Good. About your payment."

"My what?"

I looked up and discovered, much to my chagrin, he was even less encumbered now. His barbarously long, shaggy fur was the color of Turkish tobacco (save for his yoke, where it turned a buff paling) and would have preserved decorum in all but the current circumstance. I sputtered, disavowing any such practice with what eloquence I could manage. He sighed, and shook his head, and cupped my muzzle with unseemly tenderness.

"I know well your greyhound friend," he began, speaking with deliberation in plain English. "I have fished him many treasures from the sea. But none he likes to sup on as much as the crocodile, and you are the same. Why else would you be so hurried to reach him?"

"I don't understand?" I cried, scrambling out of his grasp. "The nearest croc is hundreds of miles away, wallowing unmolested in some brackish swamp!"

Driven off by this incredulous ejaculation, my hat--my favorite hat--rolled right off my head and tumbled to the tottering sea. I will be hard pressed to find a replacement.

"No, you fool!" He laughed. "Here's one now; or would you rather I turn my boat back to shore?"

Too late I apprehended what kind of toll he had intended. Their word for the great reptile, as I understand it, is similar to the role played in our language by a certain common name for G. gallus domesticus. I learned my Milton well at Corpus Christi: such homophones are a consequence of the Fall. This purely academic lore was to me of little use as I fell into the crocodile's maw, or, as it were, conversely. So sank I further into the depths of my fraility.

If this ignominy were not enough, he insisted I join him au naturel--I employed my trusty journal as dead weight, so that my clothes did not join my dear, departed hat in Davy Jones' locker. The sea breeze brushed the sweat out of my fur; I felt refreshed despite the growing nausea. Satisfied with this turn of events, he was gentle if not genteel, more accustomed to the way of all flesh than my years as an venial reprobate had made me. At first I inferred from his repose some intent to reciprocate, but the difference in our stature made such action uncomfortable (contrary to the cheeky saw that men are the same height lying down). So instead, with some trepidation on my part, he chose to embezzle me instead. For me, it was an unprecedented sensation, instilling within me a literal horror vacui.

Then there were other, paraleptic acts (certainly known to Aristotle but denied a place at his table of categories), which even I do not dare commit to base paper. All I can say is that something definitely happened, or otherwise occurred; it was as though a fire was emplaced within me with such penetrating blaze that mariners would at once both take me for a lighthouse beacon leading them away from rocky shoals and carry me as their matelot wheresoever they dare roam on the low seas. Yet my companion was not particularly fatigued. He left me on the deck and plotted a course correction, for we had drifted far from our anticipated path. I had sufficient time before the island crept over the horizon to repair myself and regain my poise as a proper scholar.

The lieutenant greeted us at the dock with the juice of some fantastic mixture of citrus fruits, some sweet, some bitter, but all from his own tediously curated agricultural library. After some brief conversation--who knows if those words belied some hidden meaning more subtle than this simple crocodilian cypher--the fisherman, still nameless to me, departed. We dined in his conservatory, smoked in his lounge, and in the drawing room drank slightly to excess. Tomorrow I think I shall peruse the grounds, as was my previously intended aim; but just now, as I lay in these most comfortable guest quarters, a quiet knock at the door has cut the din of hissing prawns. I shall return anon.