Birth Of A Nation: A Novel

by Julian Rathbone

Genres: Historical Fiction; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Eddie Bosham (aka Charlie Boylan) is in prison on a murder charge. But he's not worried. He's innocent, and, anyway, he has hidden proof of a ghastly scandal that could bring down the monarchy.

Taking up his memoirs from where we left him, marooned on the Galapágos Islands, we find Eddie offering a young Charles Darwin an explanation of why the finches on the islands vary. In Texas, staunchly loyal to whichever side will win, he spies for General Santa Anna at the Alamo and, with the help of Emily Morgan, the ravishingly beautiful Yellow Rose of Texas, for Sam Houston at San Jacinto.

Eddie works the Mississippi riverboats as a cardsharp. Caught cheating, he is forced to jump ship and inadvertently stumbles across the secret that will launch the Californian Gold Rush. Finally, having traversed the girth of a nation, his disgraceful saga ends, back east, at a highly inflammatory revivalist meeting.

Release date: May 3, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

March 1853

Charlie Boylan, also known as Joseph Charles Edward Bosham, is back in his cell in Millbank prison, sitting at the table they have brought him, knowing that the following day he will be arraigned before the magistrates and formally charged with the attempted, or actual, murder of Thomas Cargill, a Home Office functionary, depending on whether or not Cargill lives through the night. Since Charlie is innocent he is not unduly bothered. He has a handle on the Powers-That-Be which he is confident will ensure not only that he will get off but also that they might at last agree to pay him a modest pension. He has been left with a pile of clean paper and a steel-nibbed pen and inkwell, in the hope that he might be induced to reveal the whereabouts of the cache of papers which forms the main plank of his claim for a pension. The papers are believed to include evidence of a forty-year-old scandal of royal incest and other similarly sensitive stuff.

Charlie, who could be as much as sixty-three years old, is not a pleasant sight. Long, straight, grey hair hangs down on either side of a face that was once good-looking enough though it always carried an ingratiating expression of complicity; his eyes of faded blue water a little, perhaps from the fumes of the candle they have given him; his nose, once discreetly aquiline, is studded with blackheads and pock marks; his thin top lip droops over a once generous, now merely floppy bottom lip, its corners merging into the deep lines etched on either side of a somewhat receding chin. His clothes, a black serge coat over a grey shirt and loose cravat, are old but, for the time being, tolerably clean and deloused. Still, sitting as he is, one is hardly aware of his two most extraordinary physical features. He is very short, about four-and-a-half feet tall, and he has, beneath his clothes, a pelt of furry hair, some of which is quite long, though it is patchy over his buttocks, knees and elbows. Once it was black, with a slightly reddish or gingery sheen: now it is all sorts of shades between dark grey and white. As the last of the few women, who, responding as much to suppressed maternal instincts as to sexual curiosity, have had him in their beds, remarked: he is a silver tabby.

So, there’s our Charlie. Or, as he prefers to be called through most of what follows, Eddie.

He pulls the paper towards him, adjusts the position of his candle, blows on his fingers. He lifts his head and hears again the thunder of the surf and sees again the sails of the Beagle, hull down, drop beneath the horizon, and with a sigh, dips his pen. The nib scratches on the cheap paper and a tiny spray of ink, which he brushes dry with his threadbare sleeve, flicks across the page.

Since the Voyage of the Beagle has been fully and well described by the Scientist on board, Mr Charles Darwin, in his extended account published in 1839, I will not endeavour to surpass his efforts but begin the next part of my tale on the day I was inadvertently marooned on the largest of the Galápagos Islands …

‘These finches, sir,’ I suggested, as a small flock of the little brown birds zipped away from us in a low fluttering flight, ‘are not identical to the ones we saw on Narborough Island.’

‘The differences are slight,’ young Mr Darwin replied, and strode on briskly, leaving me and his man Covington to struggle a little to keep within earshot, encumbered as we were by the impedimenta of our master’s trade, viz. teak boxes with brass handles for the specimens he collected, his hunting gun and a bandolier of made-up cartridges, provisions of ship’s biscuit with freshly cooked turtle meat in a soft leather bag with a drawstring and a wineskin filled not with wine but water. He was making for the lip of a crater, some hundred or so feet above us, the way rendered difficult by the overflow of lava that had tipped over its edge. The morning was already far gone and had been spent in prising barnacles from the rocks and pools by the seashore, these being of a shape and appearance altogether different to the knowledgeable eye from varieties commonly found on the coasts of England.

‘And yet those on Narborough differ considerably from the flock we saw on Chatham Island,’ I added, raising my voice to be sure he would hear me, for Mr Darwin was always ready to discuss and note down differences between species of the same animal or vegetable genera, finches as readily as barnacles.

He was approaching the lip of the crater and his mind, behind its curtain of bushy black eyebrows, within that high magnificent forehead which yet rose to a higher cranial dome beyond it, was concentrated on what he would see when he crossed it. Nevertheless he paused and called back over his shoulder.

‘In what respect did they differ, Eddie?’

‘Those on Narborough were darker of hue, almost black.’

‘Why should that be, I wonder?’ he asked himself rather than us, but then pushed to one side the habit of speculation so as to take in the view that now opened before him.

This was striking enough: a vast crater, oval in shape, its longer axis being about a mile and the drop below its lip five hundred feet. The bottom was filled with a small lake, clear and blue, its surface sparkling beneath the sun. The attractiveness of this patch of water was enhanced by the overpowering heat of the day which was approaching noon. Mr Darwin hurried down the cindery slope, setting up a cloud of choking dust that billowed about our thighs as we followed him. He bent his knees and scooped up water in his palm, shuddered, turned his head, and called up at us as we approached.

‘Salt,’ he cried. ‘Salty as brine.’

He wiped his hand on his trouser, and his mouth on his loose shirt, and sat, knees spread, on a boulder of lava by the water’s edge.

‘Give us a swig then, Syms. That confounded saltiness has left me quite parched.’

Covington, whose first name was Syms, unstoppered the waterskin and passed it to his master, who took a gulp, swilled his mouth and spat, and then lowered it and looked over it. His dark eyes contrived to appear both serious and whimsical at the same time, while his thickish lips above his heavy jaw spread in a half-smile.

‘Any ideas, Eddie?’

‘About what, sir?’

‘The darkness of the finches on Narborough.’

‘Well, sir, could it not go like this?’ Having started so confidently I felt I must go on. I racked my brains, caught a glimpse of a thought flitting from branch to branch in the undergrowth of my mind. I determined to lime it. ‘Perhaps it is Nature herself plays the part of the breeder …’ Covington looked up at this with a sneer on his face and a scoffing laugh on his lips.

‘No, let him finish,’ said Mr Darwin, ever kindly and courteous.

‘The finches on Narborough,’ I continued, ‘lived among the black rocks of that island. Over the years could it not have been the case that those of paler hue were seen and singled out by birds of prey so only black ones survived to breed? Thus blind Nature makes the selection by using hawks to kill off all the paler varieties. You could call the process Natural Selection.’

Covington let out a yelp of laughter, but Mr Darwin’s heavy brows had contracted and he pinched his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger.

‘Eddie, you have a daring mind.’

‘My father, sir, foster father I should say, was a philosopher, a rationalist, and no doubt I acquired some of the characteristics.’

‘By Natural Selection or through example, do you think?’

‘Nature or nurture? Why there’s a conundrum deeper than why some finches are black and others are not and one my father frequently bothered his head with …’

Covington had to stick his oar in here.

‘The answer is simple enough,’ he cried, ‘and should not be contested by any good Christian. God said: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” On the fourth day, I think you’ll find.’

‘Fifth,’ said Mr Darwin. ‘The fourth was the two great lights.’

At which Covington sat for a moment or two, muttering to himself, and counting on his fingers like an infant tyro on his first day at Dame School.

The thing of it was, this Covington, a young man, not much more than a lad and country-bred, was in the way of having his nose put out of joint by my presence. He had been hired or taken on by Mr Darwin as personal assistant and general body servant for the duration of the trip, having, I believe, served the family in the past. My emergence on the Beagle, from behind the rum barrels in the spirit room, some four days out, and my acceptance by the crew as second cook and bottle-washer, had not impinged on him, but when, a year or so later, Mr Darwin took to making extensive walks over the lands we visited while the ship went about its business of charting hitherto uncharted coastlines, it was a different story. For such was the amount of gear he wanted to have at his disposal, and the collection of rocks and fossils he liked to take back to the ship, it became clear that a second pair of hands, and a second back, were needed. To begin with, being a stowaway and a presumed criminal who would be offloaded when the Beagle reached the penal settlements in Australia, I was not much talked to by either of them, but bit by bit I managed to get a word in here, offer a thought there, and so on, and by now Mr Darwin treated us as equals, and indeed seemed to find my conversation more rewarding than Covington’s.

Our brief repast concluded, Mr Darwin glanced at his pocket timepiece, looked up at the sun and announced we should move off if we were to examine as much of the island as he had a mind to see. He set off at a good lick, Covington seized the food bag, water bottle and Mr Darwin’s gun and left me to struggle behind with the two specimen boxes. Before long they were some way ahead, but then later, on an easier stretch, I almost caught up with them and overheard what perhaps they would have preferred to keep to themselves.

‘Yon Eddie Bosham is a rum sort of cove, is he not, sir,’ I heard Covington remark. ‘I wonder at times if he is truly human.’

‘Oh, he is human, all right,’ our master replied. ‘What other creature could he be?’

‘His stature, which is stunted, and his hairiness, put me in mind of an ape.’

‘I understand why you should say this, Syms, but I assure you if he is an ape he is a talking ape and if he is a talking ape then we must call him human.’

‘Aye,’ cried I, ‘a talking ape, perhaps, but not I think a doltish dullard.’

They stopped and turned. ‘Perhaps, Syms, he has the measure of you there.’

Mr Darwin laughed, and it was clear to me that Covington was quite seriously annoyed but hid all behind his young master’s broad back.

Whether or not Covington engineered what happened next I have no means of knowing, but I do believe there were sins of omission if not commission. If he did not actually say to Mr Darwin: ‘Sir, I am sure he was taken off on the first boat, there is no need to stay for him’, then I make no doubt that he did not press the possibility that I might still be on the island.

For the thing of it was, turtle flesh did not agree with me and, as I have already mentioned, it was cooked turtle flesh we had taken with us and off which we had made a pic-nic. It took three hours before it pressed its complaint against me in such a way that would not be denied, during which we continued to scramble over the lava fields collecting what scraps we could of living matter as well as rock from that barren landscape. At about three o’clock we turned back, heading for the beach called Bank’s Cove with about a league or so to cover before we got there, and at that point I realised I must evacuate my bowels as soon as maybe or suffer the humiliation of soiling my trousers. The problem was that in that lava field there was no boulder that thrust itself up more than the height of my knee above the rest, and no bushes, trees or thickets. In short, with a muttered excuse, I left the boxes and scrambled away a hundred yards or so, and over the visual ridge.

What followed was long, painful, noxious and noisome, and left my inner upper left leg not entirely free of faecal matter and no means to clean it. When I moved away some twenty minutes later, I was aware that I was taking the stench with me. Consequently, I completed the walk back to the beach at a slow gait. The boxes, incidentally, had gone and I must suppose that Mr Darwin and Covington contrived to take them. And, of course, once the cove was in sight, they were gone too: the cutter and the captain’s whaleboat and the four men who had brought us there. And the Beagle herself was already standing off under full sail on her way to James Island some forty leagues away, and I could not imagine that Captain Fitzroy would easily be persuaded to turn her round to pick up a criminal stowaway who had probably, I could almost hear him say it, chosen this lot in preference to being handed over to the proper authorities at Sydney Cove.

So there I was, some four or five days later, reduced to the habits and appearance of an ape, sitting, or rather crouching, on my rock, part musing on the wonders of Nature about me, part wondering was I not wasting my time waiting, watching out for a ship that would scarcely in the time have reached its destination, let alone done its business there and then returned to pick me up. At last with a sigh and a glance at the westering sun, and feeling the chill of the evening offshore breeze about my naked shoulders, I picked my way back to my more sheltered beach where the black sand and grit still held some warmth and the flies buzzed over the remains of a large lizard I had slain and managed to eat part of, raw.

Here’s a thought. Several, indeed many, times since the Beagle slipped her moorings in Plymouth harbour, I have seen Mr Darwin stripped to his waist and, believe me, he is almost as hairy as I am with a black pelt that swirls up his back and along his shoulders.

Make no doubt I was now king of Albemarle, lord of the islands, emperor of the ocean, god in residence. How can I be so sure? Picture me seated in splendour on my basalt throne, carved, ground, smoothed to an amber-coloured shine, fifteen feet above my beach. Around me flutter and flock a thousand finches, splendidly variegated as to colour, feeding habits, size and shape of beak: some feed on the ground and some take berries and seeds from the etiolated bushes, small trees and cacti, which sprout up where a residue of gravel has pooled itself between the cracks in the lava flow. The cactus finches are plain and brown and have dagger beaks, not the wedges of more ordinary finches, and they stab at the thick stems of the dildo cacti, which are shaped like giant erect pricks.

Above them the æther is filled with larger denizens of the air. Out over the bay big brown pelicans cruise in pairs, flapping lazily behind their heavy probing beaks which can scoop up a shoal of silver anchovy in one gulp. High above them three albatross keep station on motionless wings. Meanwhile, swallow-tail and lava gulls squabble at the base of the cliffs over the flotsam remains of a baby seal. Neither species is gull-like in colour, having slate or even blue bodies and dark heads, rendering them difficult to see when they roost on the ledges of the cliffs.

A chapter of penguins passes in front of me, waddling along in their black and white habits, the white dusted with yellow, the black with blues and greens like those that illuminate the plumage of a crow. Over the sea-rounded stones and pebbles they go, hurrying a little more as they approach the runner of lacy spume that edges the margin of the sea. The younger novices push to be in front of their superiors in their rush to get at the silver fish and one topples on to his belly. For a moment or two he flaps his flippers and thrashes his webbed feet as if he were already in the water. By the time he has himself upright again only the very young are surging past him, while his coevals are already transformed into sleek swimmers, as graceful now as they were just previously comical and clumsy.

A whiskered sea lioness arches her flubby neck, lowers the fringed curtains of her eyes and dips her doggy snout before raising her blacker than ebony mask to emit a mellifluous cry. Thus she signifies obeisance and acknowledges her vassalage. To me. Poseidon. Trident-wielding lord of the vast and briny acres. Except I have no trident. This done she claps her flippers, turns, and with muscles rippling below the surface of her fatty back resumes the sea like a cape or gaberdine. With one last bark across her shoulder she flips her fluke, and is gone.

So here I am, sprawling in the little pool I have made myself, now that the heat of day is past, flat on my belly, with my elbows wide, fists clenched to prop up my chin. I kick both feet and as the water swooshes over my buttocks and up my back I feel how the tiny water lizards are cruising there: they make me laugh. And my prick swells deliciously as I roll it in the yielding soft sand. Above my head, eight feet or so up the cliff, a pumpkin vine drifts across the lintel of my cave: a yellow flower, shaped like a trumpet, drops and as it falls a bee circles out of it and lazily loops on buzzing wings until a passing gull snaps and takes it. Sometimes the vine lets go a fruit, and once I caught one as it fell, caught and crunched it, sweet as a melon.

I turn on my back and sit up, knees drawn to my chest, and look out over the sea, hatched with sunbeams, and maybe see in black silhouette a whale go by, breaking the mesh of fire it swims through. Such a sight prompts my mind to drift back to that last conversation with Covington and Mr Darwin regarding the Creator and Creation. It was a subject that exercised Mr Darwin greatly, and often as we trudged through the Argentinian pampas, the Patagonian wilds, or up the topless Andes, I heard him muse on the problems posed by the fossils he found, the time the rocks needed to assume their present contours, and such like matters while Covington stumbled behind misquoting the Scriptures to shield himself from such honest doubt. Sometimes, when he did this, Mr Darwin would scoff at his image of the Creator, saying he was no better or wiser than the Patagonians we had been among some months before, whose chief god was Setebos.

Well, I think to myself, if there is a god, he’s not much of one. He’s a mean bugger, a spoiler, a bully. Not just the whale, that great Leviathan, he made, and as I think about it my eye scans the world around me, sees the flightless auk, the finch that pricks deep into the dildo cactus for the worms that live there but will not eat ants, and the ants themselves that build a wall of seeds and settle stalks about their hole. He made all these and more, made all we see, and us too. Why? Out of spite. How else? He could not make a second self to be his mate – as well have made himself!

If I were he, and wishing I were born a bird, I could make a live bird out of clay and call it Eddie. I could give myself wings and a hoopoe’s crest. I could will me to fly to yon rock top, bite off the horns of the grasshoppers that make such a din through their veined wings, and I wouldn’t care a damn. I could break his leg off and if he lay there stupid, I should laugh, and if he didn’t beg and weep I might give him three legs. Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg and teach him he is mine and merely clay.

This does not show he’s right or wrong, kind or cruel. He’s strong and Lord. I’m strong compared to yonder crabs that march from the mountain to the sea. I’ll let twenty pass and crush the twenty-first with a rock, not loving or hating it, just because I choose so to do. So he.

Still, god-like though I am when I choose to be, I still lack one thing after a week of solitary rule. I am referring to man’s red fire, no less. I have spent hours clashing together rocks in all combinations: basalt against sandstone, lava against granite, I even tried the larger shells. Once or twice, no, more often than that, I got a spark, but never enough to take on a pile of seed shards, straw, feathers, whatever. Once a leaf blackened, I breathed on it, a tiny thread of red glowed along its outer edge, I blew harder … I blew it away! In desperation I scouted the beaches and coves, trawling the wrack, hoping for a wrecked ship’s timber still holding an iron hasp, a nail.

Why this desperation? Can you imagine eating raw lizard, raw tortoise or turtle? Mussels and oysters, yes. Whelks, just, and even shrimps. The Nips of Nippon I am told eat raw fish for a delicacy, but not I … anyway, not those varieties I could easily get. More easy yet were the birds. They were so ridiculously tame. Really. I could walk amongst them with a stick and knock them off their perches, stamp on their heads or smash them with a rock. But I couldn’t cook them.

No surprise then that my bathtime meditations were dissolved in the steadily growing hunger for a real, edible meal. Dismissing as bootless considerations of the nature of god, I called my privy council together to discuss the problem. These were: the stable-born Duke of Willingdone, my Lord Slitherpuddle, and Dick Add-it-on, known as Lord Acid-Mouth.

I sat on my throne of basalt and called the meeting to order.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the first item on the agenda, the last, and all those between, are … man’s red fire.’

‘Eddie. We know your game, we know what you’re up to. Got the measure of you.’ This from Duke Willingdone.

‘Man’s red fire, y’know?’ Acid-Mouth nodded his head portentously.

‘And why, that’s what I ask the House to consider. That’s the nub, y’know?’ Willingdone’s voice rose to a shout, the sort of noise that could turn the direction of a battle or send a train on its way from Waterloo. ‘ALL THE BETTER TO COOK US!’

‘Oh, I say,’ cried Lord Slitherpuddle, and he began to cry in earnest, so the sea filled and a wave splashed against my throne, dowsing me.

Mollification was in order. I applied it with a trowel.

‘I would not wish to cook all of you,’ I murmured. ‘Not all at once. Slitherpuddle on his own would keep me in cooked meat for at least a week.’

‘This is too much,’ Acid-Mouth, my homely secretary, squawked. ‘Give me my Six Acts. Call out the Yeomanry. Read the Riot Act, and send seditious libellers to the gallows …’ and with these and similar demands, threats and taunts, he set off across the sand, huge front flippers hauling him along with a rowing motion, back ones scrabbling in the sand like those of a man who attempts to push a recalcitrant load through snow.

‘Come back, come back,’ Slitherpuddle called after him. ‘We need a quorum, without a quorum we’re fucked.’

But Acid-Mouth paid no attention. He was on the sea’s margin now.

‘Hark, how the dogs do bark,’ he hollered. ‘Join hands when you’ve curtsied and the wild waves kissed. Just watch me!’

And he waddled into the lambent wavelets, shook his head as the first broke over it, and for a moment or two his great domed plated shell seemed to be gravity-glued to the bottom, then it floated, like a black islet in the bay. He flopped a flipper, whether in disdainful farewell or merely to add direction to his progress I do not know, and sank away, quite out of sight.

‘Turtledum and turtledee,’ Willingdone grunted and then fixed me with his baleful eye, clashing his lower beak against his hawk-like upper. ‘I’ve never had a lunch that was free, nor lovelier than a tree. Coming, Slitherpuddle? Give you a bunk up if you like.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Cactus grove at the top of the gully.’

‘That’ll do me.’

His red pouch glowed for a moment then he slithered off his rock, his nails going clickety-click on it as he went. Once on Willingdone’s back, he too looked at me, and swinged the scaly horror of his tail. I recalled how Mr Darwin had been much amused by taking a ride on the back of a tortoise.

‘Watch your step, moon-calf. Or you’ll end up crab meat.’

I watched their progress up the gully. They were very slow. Had hardly gone more than fifty yards before he who made us flapped the blanket of the night and let it settle. Through the darkness I heard Willingdone’s roar, made faint by distance and the churning of the waves.

‘Try buggeryjars, ma’am.’

Dawn in slate-grey mantle touched my brow with greasy fingers. I awoke parched and hungry. On the sand, facing the entrance to my cave, a semicircle of blue-backed gulls watched me with baleful eyes, red-rimmed, the colour of yew berries. The capo of them put his head on one side, the better to suss me out, then waddled on spread webs a little closer. The gang followed, closing ranks as the radius of the arc they made contracted. Beyond, the grey sea heaved and rolled like a monster emerging heavily from slumber and at the end of the headland, white water plumed and fell. A ball of thorny twigs trundled across the sand between the gulls and the swirling, spumy hem of the ocean. The wind on which it rode ruffled a few feathers. A rattling, rustling noise above my head: the wind was shredding my pumpkin vine.

‘Shit,’ I thought. ‘There’s going to be a storm.’

I straightened creaking, painful joints, stubbed my toe on a boulder as flat as a Dover sole and, hobbling, got myself out from under the rocky lintel. Immediately the wind gusted about me and I hugged my elbows with my hands. The gulls took three steps each backwards, looking over their shoulders to see which would take wing, not wanting to be the first.

Buggeryjars. What could he have meant?

Breakfast I needed. But my stomach heaved at the thought of whelks or barnacles, limpets or winkles. The last pumpkin had gone. I could club a gull and tear a leg or wing off. Bile rose from my empty stomach at the thought and stained my taste buds with gall and bitterness. I spat yellow.

The storm was rising with the tide, the crash of rollers, the howl of the wind, the blackness of the racing clouds. And of course I was still ravenously hungry. I stayed more or less where I was for an hour or so, either huddled like a womb-bound foetus with knees pulled up, or making a determined start in one direction or the other only to turn back after ten yards or so to resume my sulky crouch in the shelter of an overhanging rock.

But at last, as the storm broke and hurled driving rain almost horizontally so that, even sheltered as I was, it whipped my shins and shoulders, and the thunder clapped and the lightning forked, despair conspired with the madness of the elements to drive me staggering out on to the sand and towards the gully, the one I had followed with Mr Darwin and his cursed Covington. I felt I would be safer inland. I feared my cave would be inundated by the rising sea.

I strode along the strand, hands in my armpits, my eyes watering. My scrotum and prick shrank away, like hibernating dormice in their nest of hair. The gulls followed for a few yards then launched into the air, cruised above me for ten yards or so then tilted to the wind and let themselves be carried up, up and away, over the cliffs, inland. Wind-blown spume and sand stung my shins and thighs.

I turned inland. A storm-tossed albatross slid helplessly down the corridor of wind above me. At least the force of it all was behind me now and at times I felt I was being lifted by an invisible Lemuel Gulliver himself towards the crest.

From the top, from the edge of the plateau of lava that tilted upwards towards the mountains, I began to pick my way over the petrified waves and runnels and lumps. The lava was greasy with rain; there was no shelter from the wind which blew now not from behind but on my side or even took me head on so it filled and ballooned my cheeks if I let my mouth hang open and threatened to dump me on my back. Of course I slipped more than once and sat there while wind and rain tore the tears from my eyes and I struggled to overcome sudden fits of shakes much more violent than mere shivering.

Head down, watching my footing rather than where my feet led me, I stumbled on, occasionally barking my knees on a rock higher than the rest, or using my hands to guide me round obstacles even bigger, and as I did so I became aware that the gale was now taking me from behind, and even the left rather than the right. I glanced up and saw that the granite-hued ocean, striated like black marble with white plumed rollers, pounding out of the swirling murk that veiled the furthest horizon, was still behind me. And as I looked I heard a roar rising to a banshee shriek, punctuated by ear-shattering cracks of thunder; I turned and saw, racing towards me across the barren rocks, that most dreadful of sights, a twister, two thousand feet high, a swaying pillar of iron grey in whose heart the lightning flashed and forked behind the spiralling wall of shrubs, trees, grit, small stones, dead or dying birds it sucked up to its spreading crown. My last memory of it is of being snatched off my feet, of the air being sucked out of my lungs, of being buffeted by the corpses of finches and skewered in the thigh on the barbed beak of a frigate bird before being swung, as if I were the ball on the end of an Argentinian vaquero’s bola, into the second circle of Dante’s Hell. I don’t recall though that I met there Francesca da Rimini or her naughty lover.

Waking moments alternated with hours (days even?) of dream and I canno