The lady who owns this cave is a nymph … a very wise nymph who knows not just a thing or two but … at least … a thing or sixteen! There are also thirty-second degree nymphs and she may well be one of these … or she might be of even higher rank, who knows? For the moment, that doesn’t matter because she’s … well, how shall I put it? … a fairly simple provincial nymph, in her own way. She doesn’t have a villa with a swimming pool on Capri, like Circe, but she’s doing all right … right here in Africa. There’s a full moon … it is night. Straight down there … right down where those Arabs are night-fishing … there, you see it? … a boat. She sits here, perfectly still on this rock, interviewing the moon as it crawls on its knees across the floor of her cave to her feet. Down there … rooting around in the brush under this cliff, she hears what might be a boar … a wild boar or an even more dangerous animal … Man! Nothing happens for quite a while and then … abruptly … there is a real man peering over that ledge!
“I am the nymph Calypso,” she says, drawing herself up. “Who are you?” The intruder is somewhat taken aback. He gulps and gives her what sounds like a phony title: “The king of Ithaca,” he mumbles … taking a good look around. When he spies all the edible goodies she has stored up in the back of her cave, he calls up his men to share in a good hot supper at her expense … with champagne! Charles Heidsieck champagne, as a matter of fact. Here, Hassan … just let me pour some more of my wine. … So! She takes out a vial and pulls out the stopper with her teeth … like this … and drops three drops of a magical elixir into his glass. “Here, drink this up, my Lord Emperor of Africa!” she says. Here, Hassan … cheers … drink up!
Nothing happens for quite a while, of course … the stuff doesn’t take effect immediately, naturally. He wipes his lips and hands his half-empty cup on to his second-in-command, who drinks deep and passes it on around the circle of men, who finish it up. Calypso looks wise. I don’t suppose we could get your magicians … I mean, your musicians to share this champagne with us right now, could we? … or I’d show you what I can do with this stuff. This is Borbor, Hassan … and you’ve just taken a dose. No, don’t worry … so have I, so I’ll be along on the trip with you. Wait! Nothing at all happens to Ulysses, Hassan … that is the trick! Borbor makes him more than ever what he really is … every inch a king! His followers, now … well, that’s something else again. My sister Circe used to turn them into what they are … into pigs, for example. My caretaker … Calypso, here … might have more mangy dogs to feed and fend off if we gave your musicians some Borbor, tonight. On that other occasion … or so I am told by my potty professor from Oxford … Ulysses threw back his big black burnous and, under it, he was wearing … not a UHER tape recorder … my dear … but a breastplate looted from Troy, made of purest soft-solid gold. In Present Time, I propose you hang this Order of the Golden Fleece over the microphone around your neck. This chain was made by Benvenuto Cellini for the Habsburg Emperor Charles whose Spanish grandmother, Queen Isabella, had been far-sighted enough to pick up the Americas for him … quite cheap … he lost them, of course. This valuable bauble once belonged, too, to the Rothschilds, who wore it to fancy-dress parties in Paris. You might attach the Emerald Seal to it with a thread or a fine thong. Don’t use a gold chain … it would cut into the stone.
What happens … Now? why … in his case, that first Ulysses took seven long years … so the story goes … to find out who he really was … not the lady’s husband at all! Now, Thay Himmer the Seventh, last White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Isles, and I … although we’ve known each other for seven years … have been married just seven weeks! That leaves me an American Ranee … if I want to be! But, shucks, that ain’t nuttin’, no more! Ranee of a long-lost kingdom the size of a coral atoll on the other side of the world, lost in the middle of the Pacific? Thanks very much but no thanks! I mean, I simply adore Thay … who wouldn’t? … He is such a child … besides, it’s very handy in Present Time to be a U.S. citizen BUT … I have my eye on much bigger game right here in Africa. Africa, today, is where it really can happen. … Watch me! On the other hand, I wouldn’t dream of divorcing poor Thay … he’s an absolute elf! And, he’s quite right: It’s going to suit me to have a husband who never talks. … Poor Thay, he’s so helpless. …
Thay Himmer was brought up helpless, like royalty … until Japan overran the Farouts when Thay was just six. The Himmers had founded the Farouts when the first Bishop Himmer of Hyannisport, Mass., got himself there first on a Clipper … and waded ashore with his Bible and his wife. I’m sure you think you know the rest of the story. … “Stop the music, stop the dancing, wear Mother Hubbards and get down to work. …” but, no! The Himmers were different. In the next generation, the family went native to conform with some local prophecy which allowed them to crown themselves rajahs with full native pomp. They introduced sugar-planting, built a refinery … a bakery, a brewery … and grew very rich. Always under the American flag, of course, and … while they married no native girls … the Himmers were always very much of the East. They shopped in Singapore instead of San Francisco, for example … things like that. Black sheep of the family, like Thay’s queer Uncle Willy, fled to Hong Kong and Macao before settling down on a remittance in some super-civilized place like Peking. Girls of the family were rather more spartan. They ran away to spin in an ashram in India with Gandhi … or took vows as Buddhist nuns at the court of the Queen of Siam. Thay found himself in the ashram of Sri Auribindo in Pondicherry with his grandmother, the old Ranee, when the war broke out. He had to burn the old lady with his own hands, eventually, on a funeral pyre by the banks of the Ganges … very bad for his asthma, he said.
Thay’s mother, the young Ranee, was prisoner for a couple of years in Japan and then … after V-J Day … Thay joined her at a Brain-breathing establishment in Carmel, California, where she was killed by a hitchhiker, eventually. Thay was terribly upset. He was madly in love, at the time, with a middle-aged Hindu Swami … in a purely spiritual sense. I never laid eyes on his guru, myself. … But I’ve seen photos in which the Swami seems to be smiling sardonically at some sinister private joke as he chews away on the end of his own long hooked nose. You can picture him selling you … and for a whole lot of money! … a very wrong rug. After some silly old stock-market crash swept away the Swami’s first fortune, the Swami snapped: “Money talks! I don’t need to talk!” Whereupon he took a vow of total silence which he’s kept to this day. I think that’s influenced Thay, too. From his Shrine of Silence, the Swami launched his “Ten Million Dollar Nirvana Fund” … which was to “Build the Invisible Temple of Love in Everybody’s Heart.” Thay tried to give his entire inheritance to the Swami but his brother-in-law, Renfrew … he’s a big lawyer in San Francisco and one of Thay’s trustees … called in the cops. Thay fought them tooth and nail on it but the family finally got the Swami deported before they actually had to fork over any property. Thereupon, Thay refused to have anything more to do with the family or his money and took off alone for New York … on his own for the first time in his life.