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Fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds are beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous. Like the “Clean Sweepers” who would destroy the museum’s most precious artifacts because they deem them obscene, Fogginius was bereft of humor.

For a typical day in Pope Publius in the month of July, 1650, Fogginius’ journal reads: Bad air. A break in the moon’s halo. By means of which we shall have a wind.

Trained by a Jesuit theologian also named Fogginius, he once sold his shoes to buy a small red topaz because his master had assured him that, if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. Fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon’s influence was moist. Sleeping beneath it upon a high hill, he awoke with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. He had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week because an irresistible voice insisted that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea.

“The moon’s nature,” Fogginius wrote in a pamphlet that was published in Spain several years before his departure for the island, “is aerial and aquatic.” He was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the roof on nights when the moon was full. Fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. The hair grew to such profusion that she had not married after all but made her living by sitting on a little gilded chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. Later she returned to Spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations.

A follower of Lactantius, Fogginius ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. He believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the Old World to the New. When as a young man Phosphor ran away with merchantmen and was swept by fierce winds to the Polar Circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather—now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants’ sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies.

Entering into maturity, Phosphor refuted Fogginius as “a dangerous fool and a dogmatizer.” He had come to question more than his stepfather; he had come to question God. Home again, he could no longer stomach the company of Fogginius. So enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger’s lunacies, vanity, and incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which he continued to threaten him, that Phosphor became an atheist, shunning all things smacking of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and so to understand the mechanisms that—as hidden gears animate a music box—cause the world to spin. But, inevitably, such close investigation of the natural world led him back to ineffable mystery. Phosphor then turned to poetry to satisfy a need—the heart’s need, perhaps, and the need that mirrored his mind’s acute hunger for gnosis.

In the early years of his solitude and independence, Phosphor supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. These he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a nonbeliever and a cynic, as “miraculous impressions of the thoughts of angels.” Then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able—centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing—to capture an instant of time. This first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered.

His next attempt was to create an image in three dimensions. Able to focus at close range only, the ocularscope rewarded its inventor with an accurate—if illusory—vision of the three-dimensional world. Because the geometrical axes of the inventor’s eyes diverged drastically, the success of the operation was all the more extraordinary. Nuño Alfa y Omega’s ocularscope was not only the first stereoscope in Birdland, but the first one in the universe. Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city that exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.

Phosphor’s first images were of the natural world. He would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as Fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. Later he captured the sky, the creek-indented beaches, the city of Pope Publius and all its people.

Today as I sit in the National Museum and peer into the ocularscope’s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of Phosphor’s Birdland appear captured in silver. (Fugitive more than adequately describes this island formed of madrepore, cuttlebone, and sea lime, and which—as you are well aware—ceaselessly changes shape. If it were not for the sea wall circumventing it, pieces of Birdland would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather!)

I have before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beaches; an infant bathing in a barrel; a window brimming with a beauty’s yearning face; the mud huts of peons and the empty tombs of voyagers lost at sea; a parrot fish thrashing in a basket; a tortoise fisher; the white moon; a merchant’s rug, his cashbox, and his cup; a rhododendron forest; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the interstices of the leaves of a lemon tree—a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon—phases, Phosphor might have said, of the same riddle.

And now, may I offer you, dear Ved, a Garden View:

In the foreground, a fountain—tiered like those banquet trays so favored in the Renaissance, upon which were displayed shellfish or crayfish, or little birds—heads on—or little cakes. The tiers diminish as they rise, and each is brimming with a limpid water. This fountain is surrounded by a circular path which, forking, leads down and away into the very garden where, among pencil-necked cranes, Phosphor will embrace Professor Tardanza’s daughter fearlessly, and for the first time.

A Vanitas. Done in the classical manner, it contains a hollow bone—surely the skull of an aborigine, for it is set out among shells and feather ornaments, and a handful of those ubiquitous glass beads which gave delight before metamorphosing into deadly musket bullets and the teeth of ravenous dogs.

A Ripe Banana Plant. The clustered fruit, bristling and erect, appears to leap out from its sea of leaves, leaves as scored as the ears of bull elephants. There is also a slide of a small plantation of pineapples growing as thickly as thistles in an Irish meadow. Row upon row the fruit rises, an army sabered and plumed.

These pleasure gardens and plantations (and very likely the objects comprising the vanitas as well) belonged to Señor Fantasma. His lands were vast, stretching to the sea. They also flanked the city park; later, when Phosphor wanted to take pictures unobserved, he crouched among the pineapples behind an iron fence and spied upon couples strolling the public gardens. A small artificial cascade was visible from within a certain clump of trees, and once Phosphor saw a young woman and her lover take off their shoes and stockings and bathe their feet together in the foam. For a lonely, diminutive man with a clubfoot, the sight was infinitely dolorous. The resulting image is the most poignant of the entire collection.

In those days the women of Birdland wore skirts shaped like bells; the hoops beneath made them appear to levitate. Phosphor was captivated by these ethereal creatures, creatures he believed he could never possess. Yet it seems to me that once one becomes accustomed to the poet’s strabismus and the rest, one cannot help but admire the intensity and intelligence of his gaze, his noble features, the beauty of his beard (and his mouth is very fine).

Next: The Big House—Old Fantasma’s sprawling palace. Twinned spiral staircases, apparently of fossil-studded marble, ascend to the pillared porch. The entrance door, lavishly paned with cut glass, is framed with a garland of aboriginal faces and leaves, and carved of precious wood. To the left one can perceive the hemisphere of the library roof—a library empty of books, but filled with card tables.

The Old Fantasma had a large formal dining room. In it stood a majolica stove and an immense glass-fronted cabinet. This cabinet contained a complete collection of faience dinner dishes entitled Allegories of the Four Continents—an encyclopedic series illustrating all the peoples of the world. These figures were portrayed standing in jungly landscapes, their culture’s idiosyncrasies largely interpreted by the artist. The younger Fantasma was a man bereft of schooling—although he took great pains to conceal his illiteracy. It was Phosphor’s conviction that all Fantasma knew of the greater world he had learned from these dishes and from conversations with Fogginius. Once, in that bleakly sumptuous room, Phosphor, cringing with loathing, listened to Fogginius pontificate upon a dish:

“Just as waterfowl exude a grease to keep them afloat, so the Eskimo exudes a wax that keeps him from desiccating. In his inimitable manner, Yahweh created a distinct species of man exemplarily suited to each part of the terrestrial shelf. The races were meant to be fixed, once and for all, like nails in a door.”

My favorite ocularscopic images belong to an evocative series of staged tableaux illustrating apocryphal scenes from vanished indigenous life. The series depicts an aboriginal “queen”—in truth a beauty of the Catalan type—dressed only in her hair and a pair of grass garters. Here she sits in a sled of branches pulled by an armadillo, in a painted landscape opulent with turkeys, toucans, hawksbill turtles, peacocks, parrots, and shells. This beauty suckles a small monkey.

Curiosities of Phosphor’s Birdland: sea cows that sailors once took for sirens. An abandoned Dutch settlement at the bottom of a crater. A scarlet shell sporting a white horn—so poisonous one need but see it to die. Mountains truffled with lizards and a sky flooded with birds—many of them mute. (But the lizards continue to whistle, and the beetles to tick like clocks.)

By the way: to my delight, a new exhibit has been installed in what was one of the museum’s drearier rooms—a slice of landscape ten feet across and as many deep, and sealed behind glass. It reveals in cross section the lives of those unique clockwork coleoptera from larval stage to burglar nymphs sucking stolen honey, to couples (suspended from string) fertilizing as they copulate those white orchids we once sent, you and I (so long ago!), to Lise Villimpenta—anonymously. You are undoubtedly asking at this instant: Whatever happened to Lise? She never married, but lives with a black-eyed Cuban named Emelina (which explains, perhaps, a certain mystery we had once attempted to solve). They run a great restaurant on Paradise Street (across from the museum) called the House of the Edible Ark Clam and propose, among other wonders, a palm oil and shrimp dish native to the island, an authentic Cuban arroz con pollo, and—hold on to your hat!—ravioli di zuca al burra versa! (No danger of meeting up with a “Clean Sweeper” there: the place is far too sensuous!)