WHEN THEIR DAYS TRAMPING THE WILDS PROVED WITHOUT MERIT they returned to the beaches. Their ship sunk in the bay as if eviscerated by some ancient and terrible beast. And in the open sun, new plants and animals grew in place of the charred remains of the old. And they found neither bone nor char nor any other evidence that human life once walked these shores, until they found the rusted anchor of some ship perhaps moored and rotted into nothingness a thousand years prior embedded in the sands. And a many-colored bird landed on the anchor’s edge, reptilian eyes bulging, and the bird spoke the name of the chief they had murdered. And the bird took flight when they lifted their muskets to fire, the alien shrill of its voice cackling as it fled.

And they constructed a shanty of banana fronds for the Admiral to sleep beneath, while the crew slumbered under the stars, dreaming of the houses they would build on this beach, houses in the style and fashion of those owned by merchants they had known in their youths. And in the dawn they chopped timber, and with their bare hands they dug foundations, and here in the soil lay the scattered skulls and bones of men and the armor of these men, their rusted helmets and breastplates. How the crew crouched and gazed into the empty sockets of some long-ago man. The Admiral ordered them thrown into a pyre. When the fire perished and bones and armor yet protruded the ash, the Admiral ordered a yet greater fire constructed. And the terrible immensity of this new flame, the eyebrows and arm hairs of the crew curling into white ash, and the black smoke, and the crackling and snapping into oblivion of what lay beneath.

In the days to follow they raised up many structures, the shadows of the beams falling in the shapes of bones. And they were no more the men they had been, for now their eyes blazed red and black, now they were hued ebony and their hair was wild, rife with lice and fleas.

Now the outline of a city raised, birds perched atop the beams, silhouetted and screaming, while lizards crouched and hissed in doorways. And in their hours of labor, when one man spoke to the next he did so in a language of his own construction and the other fellow answered back in guttural tones. And when one man looked into the black and cavernous eyes of the next he knew no more the soul of the fellow who watched from within. When a man hungered he ventured into the wild with his sword, and there he murdered a monkey while its fellows danced and beat their paws against a tree. And these the men skinned and wrapped in banana leaves and roasted over coals. They brought steaming handfuls of flesh to the Admiral, who now wore only monkey skins fashioned into the robe of a holy man. Through the hours of the day he muttered to the mountain, pressed his brow to the earth, and in so doing he said the name of the Almighty.

And when a man fell to fever or when a man in his sorrow attempted self-slaughter or a man crazed for want of a woman coupled with another man, he was shackled and led to the Admiral, who laid hands upon him. And the Admiral said, “We could not find Paradise for we carry it within,” and he said, “We must forsake the inelegance of the flesh, for only then will we understand peace.”

And he commanded they pray through all hours of the day. And he commanded they make burnt offerings: the monkeys they slit open and roasted upon the cinders, the smoke of cooked monkey wafted toward the mountain with banana fronds.

And the Admiral thrashed in his sleep, and it was said he knew the names of the dead upon his lips. And it was said he knew the dead atop the mountain, watching him and gnashing. Someday they would come for him. They stood in the shadow of a monstrous creature, beneath the black wings of this beast, the red eyes of fire, and now around them the yellow teeth.

When he woke he wrote on the sands of the beach a misshapen and impossible language, an alphabet of images only, of mutilations and many-headed beasts, and within this transcription the Admiral believed he detected “the end of time.”

When the sky filled with the light of a dozen fireballs, staining the night’s blackness with trails of yellow and red, the Admiral stood in the tatters of his robe, calling out in a voice hoarse and hollow, “Hosanna, hosanna.” And he held out his arms as if in wait, as if the creature would swoop from the burning night and take now the Admiral into its belly. And his men watched in horror, and they watched in awe. They watched with hands clasping swords.

When at dawn something immense moaned in the bay the Admiral said, “He waketh from his slumber,” and when the dark seemed lit with the yellow of the eyes of a grand and impossible beast the Admiral said, “He disapproves of our worship.” So the Admiral commanded each man to bathe in the salt water, to light a fire upon the shore, to offer into the flame some minuscule animal, to stamp his brow to the ash and mud. So they did. Now the men slowly disappeared from the shore. No screams were heard. No violence seen. Their bodies simply washed ashore some hours later, torn at the throat and their chest cavities crawling with crabs. The remaining men peered into the blackness of the bay: the dim shadows of fish, weeds tangled in the murk, and then darkness, mystery, nothingness. And when a thousand, thousand stars melted across the blackness, these men in their simple experience understood the lights merely hinted at the depth of the universe. And in this way those men understood the darkness of the bay scarcely hinted at the horrors below. To these few the Admiral lectured: “We struggle futilely when we believe we move with ease.” He said, “We grope in a darkness we believe to be a world well lit.”

And when only one crew member remained the Admiral summoned him to his shanty. The Admiral in the rotten skins of his robe, his tangled and lice-filthy beard, the sacred hollows of his eyes. And now the man asked, “What howls in the night? What murders our number?” and the Admiral said, “It is our Father who sits on the mountain, for He lives in all things.” The Admiral touched this man on the chest. “He was in the men we murdered,” said the Admiral. The man nodded, and he contemplated, and finally he asked, “In the women as well?” And to this the Admiral returned only silence.

And in the night the man burned a lizard by the shore and he prayed to the Almighty upon the mountain. Soon the screams of this man were lost within the roaring of some awesome and eternal beast. And then the Admiral alone remained.

And when the Admiral fell he fell by some affliction long latent in the flesh. He fell feverish onto the floor of a house built for another man. He fell shivering. He fell saying the names of the natives crowding the peak of the mountain, milling and watching with dank, absent sockets. He fell in the shadow of the creature come before him, this towering apparition of teeth and wings, and flame and roaring, claws and sinew and blood, horror and eternity. He fell as the beast lifted aside the roof and opened its savage maw. And in the voice of every language it said the name of the man given by his father, and it said the name gifted unto the man by the Almighty upon His black mountain.

And the Admiral’s name has not been uttered in all the years since.