The Highest Mountain 94

So I became betrothed at dawn to the most beautiful woman in the world. And I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.

“Papa” wasn’t dead yet, and it was Frank’s feeling that I should get “Papa’s” blessing, if possible. So, as Borasisi , the sun, came up, Frank and I drove to “Papa’s” castle in a Jeep we commandeered from the troops guarding the next President.

Mona stayed at Frank’s. I kissed her sacredly, and she went to sacred sleep.

Over the mountains Frank and I went, through groves of wild coffee trees, with the flamboyant sunrise on our right.

It was in the sunrise that the cetacean majesty of the highest mountain on the island, of Mount McCabe, made itself known to me. It was a fearful hump, a blue whale, with one queer stone plug on its back for a peak. In scale with a whale, the plug might have been the stump of a snapped harpoon, and it seemed so unrelated to the rest of the mountain that I asked Frank if it had been built by men.

He told me that it was a natural formation. Moreover, he declared that no man, as far as he knew, had ever been to the top of Mount McCabe.

“It doesn’t look very tough to climb,” I commented. Save for the plug at the top, the mountain presented inclines no more forbidding than courthouse steps. And the plug itself, from a distance at any rate, seemed conveniently laced with ramps and ledges.

“Is it sacred or something?” I asked.

“Maybe it was once. But not since Bokonon.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody climbed it?”

“Nobody’s felt like it yet.”

“Maybe I’ll climb it.”

“Go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you.”

We rode in silence.

“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after a while.

“Not even God, as near as I can tell.”

“Nothing?”

“Just one thing.”

I made some guesses. “The ocean? The sun?”

“Man,” said Frank. “That’s all. Just man.”

I See the Hook 95

We came at last to the castle.

It was low and black and cruel.

Antique cannons still lolled on the battlements. Vines and bird nests clogged the crenels, the machicolations, and the balistrariae.

Its parapets to the north were continuous with the scarp of a monstrous precipice that fell six hundred feet straight down to the lukewarm sea.

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big.

The castle was built according to the wish of Tum-bumwa, Emperor of San Lorenzo, a demented man, an escaped slave. Tum-bumwa was said to have found its design in a child’s picture book.

A gory book it must have been.

Just before we reached the palace gate the ruts carried us through a rustic arch made of two telephone poles and a beam that spanned them.

Hanging from the middle of the beam was a huge iron hook. There was a sign impaled on the hook.

“This hook,” the sign proclaimed, “is reserved for Bokonon himself.”

I turned to look at the hook again, and that thing of sharp iron communicated to me that I really was going to rule. I would chop down the hook!

And I flattered myself that I was going to be a firm, just, and kindly ruler, and that my people would prosper.

Fata Morgana.

Mirage!

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 531