The Monstifita station was located off a spur which terminated in a ruined cloister serving as a train shed. Here the restaurant car was decoupled and attached to a Belgian steam engine with a squat body and disproportionately large chimney. Men with grimy fingernails crowded the zinc counter for beer and cigarettes as the train moved out along the suspension railway toward the spa town of Sare.
As the little train traipsed along its miles of timbered superstructure, it sent up a pale feather of smoke. In the yellow fog of morning, the peonies were dropping their last petals and the lime trees were in flower.
Upon alighting, the Professor and his dog were surrounded by Skopje, gigantic yet fleshy Russians in black caftans who believe that Christ never died but wanders the earth in different forms, and will come again when the great bell of Uspenskisobor sounds. They offered him his choice of gigs: fan-tailed or tub-bodied; a chariotee, rockaway, or volonte; a stanhope, tilbury, or cabriolet; a victoria, barouche, or laundolet. Also available were a sedan chair, a hammer box, and a lineika (a six-wheeled Russian equatorial carriage), as well as an American invention, a three-wheeled gig with the third wheel in front in close connection to the shafts. The Professor chose an older, half-closed brougham with lemon sateen side-panels, a piebald mare who stared at his beard as if it were a new sort of hay, and the shortest and calmest of the drivers, who at six and a half feet could barely contain himself. His sallow skull was shaven in front, with flapping plaits fastened by clasps to his forehead, and his caftan embroidered with scrolls and flowers.
“And where can I take your Excellency?” he inquired in a high-pitched voice.
“To the river landing, if you please. The cost?”
“Whatever you like, your Excellency,” the coachman said as he whipped the beautiful fat bottom of the mare.
Gypsies fiddled, lepers begged, and drunks beat up one another as the brougham sped along polished cobbles, dodging a plentiful fall of steaming horseapples clotted with peppermint. Like phantoms in a fairy tale, they proceeded at a bone-jarring trot through the villages of Nask, Luda, and Zaza. Along the road, rain had eroded the soil a dozen feet down, and the Professor could make out traces of former roads passing through the valley, one on top of the other, Turkish gravel overlaying medieval slag overlaying heavy Roman paving stones. Once through the three-gated military border with its bevy of moneychangers and louche soldiers, King Pevney’s Royal Way opened before them into that degenerate forest of well-levers which bordered the Marchlands, where for twenty leagues the land had not changed in thousands of years. This was a remnant of a pre-settlement expanse, like those undulating plains which once spread from Kenya to Mozambique and Wisconsin to Texas — oak-studded savannahs intertwined with clumps of forest, wetlands, blowholes, and tallgrass prairie, cleansed by naturally occurring fires, pumped clean by slithering aquifers and artesian wells, a shimmering green carpet studded with wildflowers that popped up any time of year, usually after a fire or some mysterious subterranean lucubration.
For the first few miles, the Professor drowsily watched the coachman’s huge back and the lobes of the horse. After a few hours, though, he began noticing portions of the road sticking to the brougham’s wheels, as Homeric clouds gathered above. The next thing he knew, the carriage was driving up the bed of a tributary.
“Captain!” the Professor called out.
“Sir.”
“Don’t you think we shall be drowned?”
“Yes, sir, I do! May I offer your Excellency a cigar?” Which the Professor accepted as the coachman, making a desperate effort, succeeded in climbing the right bank. But then after a short jaunt cross-country, he drove straightaway into a lake.
“Captain, have you a cigar left?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, give it to me quick.”
Jolting from ditch to quagmire, water to mud, and back to water, they finally arrived at the steamer landing.
On further inquiry about the fee, the coachman said only, “We won’t need a judge to settle it, your Excellency. Next time, you really should go to the opera.” And he seemed more than happy with ten gulden.
The steamer Desdemona had started her career with a rudder at each end and a small hut on deck, her huge paddlewheels driven by horses on a capstan inside the hull. When a British firm, Andrews and Richard, bought the ship, a coal stove took over for the horses, and the hut was replaced by an elegant mirrored saloon with red plush couchettes. A diving bell sat funereally upon the stern. The new captain, a weather-beaten English seafarer, knew no more about the sandbanks of the Mze than the bed of the Yellow Sea, and so at flood-time the ship was often found marooned in the middle of a field. The engineer was Scotch and would happily explain mechanical details of the operation, while the jolly Italian cook always kept a pot of bouillabaisse on the boiler.
It took three quarters of an hour to load the carriages, the stevedores cackling and the peasants crossing themselves. Then the ship’s whistle sounded, a small cannon boomed, and the Desdemona shuddered away from the slimy embankment, the paddlewheels churning up water lilies and duckweed as it bore new shortcuts into the rank abundance of the river’s huge loops. Countless waterfowl rose from the dead estuaries — cormorants and kingfishers, herons and egrets, warblers and martins — and from the dark walls of alder and poplar, hungry, chirping nestlings in a thousand nests craned their naked necks.
The river course seemed to have changed substantially in only a month. The passage was most dreary, winding among queer little villages well back from the treacherous banks and monstrous hills covered with hideous, half-pruned vineyards, while the river emitted a peculiar hissing like soda water. They saw neither sail nor oar, and it was difficult to even make out the direction of the current. But the cook enlivened things by making pancakes stuffed with pickled walnuts, and occasionally while rounding a bend, the Professor was taken aback by adorable women in lilac and lavender walking fully dressed into the river up to their armpits.
Inside the mirrored saloon of the Desdemona, the Professor recalled his first sight of Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar. Confirming his worst suspicions out here in the country, his host had come out holding a riding crop and wearing a tweed Chesterfield smoking jacket, twill jodhpurs, and a floppy fedora protruding a long pheasant feather. How well he knew the type. Here stood the very symbol of the moral pathology of the West, genteel, courteous, and above all handsome, a “Christian gentleman” and sportive hunter-magistrate — all a glittering illusion covering over the sickness of society, distracting the masses from reality. Had not Spengler himself identified the gentry as the most reactionary of classes? The Professor knew this privileged caste and its hypocritical code all too well. Oh, it all sounded sportsmanlike—“No hitting below the belt!” and “May the best man win!”—but every generous and graceful gesture obscured a base struggle for power. He imagined his host drinking himself into insensibility each night over a game of cards, then walking a seven-minute mile in the morning to sweat out the toxins, followed by a bit of tennis or high jumping (nothing that would make you appear a clown, of course), before heading out for an agricultural congress or a junket to fix an election.
But then from behind Felix had appeared, sheathed in shot silk, the most beautiful creature of any species the Professor had ever seen, walking at a slightly impossible angle, like a ballerina falling out of a fouetté. Here she was, the perfect trophy companion for our sportive hunter-magistrate! (Why is it always the man of orthodox views who gets to bed the girls by the cartful?) As Ainoha proffered a tray of spritzers and bogberry jam, the traditional Cannonian welcome, the look of her had sent a crackling over his heart which he had experienced only among Italian ruins at dusk.