E: stands for: Emerald Seal. That is, the so-called Scarab of the Sahara which is now in your possession. The name was given to this artifact by Mr. Himmer, who likes to live under the impression that he got it for nothing. Here are the documents. This is the result of the assay done at Hatton Gardens in London: Green stone: 45.7 carats. Specific gravity, 2.70: emerald. Here we have the report from the British Museum: “No ancient artifact of Egyptian provenance was made out of emerald.” And, here, you have a record of the sum paid by our agent to a certain Mohamed Imsak of Cairo: quite staggering, as you can see.
F: stands for: 1. FARD (see files). 2. Farout Islands (Himmer estate). As he may have told you, Mr. Himmer chooses to own nothing; nothing at all. What little money he had when they married — it could not have come to a million predevaluation dollars, at the most — he handed over to the Board. This file, therefore, is empty. That brings us to: 3. FUNDAMENTAL FUNDS, my own particular preoccupation and, then: 4. FOULBA, which will be yours. Here are some pictures of the boys during one of their annual orgies. I am not entirely in sympathy with these people. In fact, I think it might be said that we have had an, ah, floop with the Foulba. The Himmers may like to think they got them for nothing but the Foulba cost us a fortune, daily, in fodder alone. Just to keep them and their cows on this idle desert around “Malamut” means that we fly tons of hay in from Switzerland, three times a week. We call it the “Milk Run” and that is what I will be catching to Basel, tonight, if we ever get any lights on the field.
As you may know, the Foulba have lived for many a millennia in a state approaching symbiosis with their lovely lyre-horned cattle. As a Swiss, I love cows and of all cows these antique animals are the most beautiful. When we introduced the Foulba to “Hello Yes Hello,” it swept the Sahara as soon as we had paired off a few. Previously, there had been no real communication between them: “Never trust a fellow Foulba,” they say about themselves, ingenuously. A Foulba’s best friends were always his four-footed ones into whose soft furry ears the Foulba used to confide their infantile fantasies. They lived off their cattle without ever killing them, drinking their milk and enough of their salty blood for both man and beast to keep going together. Now, they have suddenly stopped; now, for the first time in their long history, they have become Assassins to their animals, killers of cows, cannibals. I don’t mean that they slaughter them; if only they did! Out there where you see the flickering lights of their campfires on the mainland, even now, they are feasting on raw, still-living beef. They hack quivering steaks out of the flanks of their bellowing, bleeding animals, who stumble and stagger away to die in the dark while their former lovers, the Foulba, cram their mouths with the meat. I have been a vegetarian all my life: I cannot pretend to judge these people, but I do know why it happened. They cut into their cattle, you understand, when the cattle could not communicate. “Hello Yes Hello,” said into a long silky ear got only: “Moo!” in reply and that is why those cattle are dying so atrociously out there tonight that you can hear their pitiful bellowing over the cry of the sea when the wind is right. For me, the lesson has been that we must communicate that the other may not devour us, but the Himmers insist there is much more to it than that and, no doubt, they are right.
Now, we come to the letter, H.
H: stands for: HANSON, Ulys Othello of Ithaca, New York: I think you will be amazed by our documentation on this person. If ever they get the generator going, you must project all the material on the screen over there. As I said, the original documents have been destroyed and all this file will be demagnetized and, ah, disintegrated the day you actually become the Ghoul.
H: also stands for: HORMONE (see BIO-KEY). You may find this horrid or endlessly, ah, fascinating. Some of the ramifications are, at present, quite distasteful; such as our dealings with Brazilian sources through Recife, where we have managed to tap a pituitary supply in the Amazonian jungle which looks as though it may be drying up. Amos has been concerned with the, ah, practical aspects of this business. It grew out of Mya’s determination to get her money out of, ah, money; long before the dollar was devaluated, as a matter of fact. Mya, today, is the world’s richest woman because she holds the key to the future in hormones: she’s got a grip on the Life Force, itself. The financing of “Malamut” has devolved on me. The, ah, philosophic, ah, theory, behind “Malamut,” we owe to Thay in his role as Bishop Himmer when he proposes the stockpiling of human pituitary glands as a sort of, ah, religious principle of, ah, Eternal Life. All our problems may be said to be genetic: it all depends who you like to have around. Race, color, creed, crime, cramps in the belly and death can be controlled only by hormones and hormones are horribly hard to come by. Each one of us has only one pituitary so, to prepare a thimble-sized stockpile of these hormones, we need five thousand cadavers. Your pituitary is a gland the size of a pea; right here at the base of your skull.
Now, if we are not merely to fulfill but surpass our, ah, purpose here on this planet, we need every single one of those pituitaries out there existing in Present Time. To begin with, the hormone content of that entire Foulba nation out there, nearly two million of them hacking apart their live cows, could be carried around in a briefcase. …
10
Happily, Hamid broke in at that point as he bobbed up from the lower depths of the house; the big rooms below being Mya’s bosom, I suppose. Hamid was sharp in nifty new threads; a Highland-heather purple-green Harris-tweed jacket, white yachting flannels and a cream-colored silk shirt with a black and pink striped bow tie that looked like the misplaced smile on a stuffed cat. Over this he wore his shimmering striped-silk jellaba down to the ground. I thought the first scene between Hamid and the Swiss lawyer Rolf Ritterolf might be a bit rough but they had already met and sized each other up like Dignity and Impudence; a Saint Bernard and plush monkey, perhaps. Talking right over Hamid’s head, Ritterolf said: “At first I thought that this one was an absolute primitive until I heard him explaining the Roman Lupercalia to Mya. Most extraordinary! Did you teach him all this?” Hamid was bouncing up and down, clapping his hands like a small sultan cracking the whip on his slaves and, inside two minutes, he had swept Ritterolf off to his plane; promising lights on the field as if he had everything in “Malamut” already under control and was really running the place. I saw Ritterolf go with the slightly sinking feeling that this stout Swiss was my last link with sanity. When Hamid starts running things, anything can happen and does.
I once made up a fable about this part of the world to match the fairy tale about the frog prince on whom the princess had only to drop three drops of her magic elixir to turn poor Froggy back into a man; some kind of Borbor, no doubt. Anyway, in all the backcountry of Africa, of all the world; in from the desert, out of the bush and down from the hills, millions of young princes in rags are marching forever toward town with their shoes in their hands. City lights dazzle their eyes as they march up to a jukebox. Neon flickers, music rocks and as three bottles of Caca-Culo are poured into them, they turn into toads. So, when I caught that sourly familiar apple odor off Hamid’s breath as he came back and threw his arms around me to give me a boozy wet kiss on the mouth, I knew Mya must have poured three bottles of champagne into him.