PERSONAL JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN ARCHIBALD CARMODY, R.N.
Written aboard H.M.S. Aldebaran
Whilst on a Voyage of Scientific Discovery in the Indian Ocean
13 April 1899
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
Might there still be on this watery ball of ours a terra incognita, an uncharted Eden just over the horizon, home to noble aborigines or perhaps even a lost civilization? A dubious hypothesis on the face of it. This is the age of the surveyor’s sextant and the cartographer’s calipers. Our planet has been girded east to west and gridded pole to pole. And yet what sea captain these days does not dream of happening upon some obscure but cornucopian island? Naturally he will keep the coordinates to himself, that he might return in time accompanied by his faithful mate and favorite books, there to spend the rest of his life in blissful solitude.
Today I may have found such a world. Our mission to Ceylon being complete, with over a hundred specimens to show for our troubles (most notably a magnificent lavender butterfly with wings as large as a coquette’s fan and a blue beetle of chitin so shiny that you can see your face in the carapace), we were steaming south-by-southwest for the Chagos Archipelago when a monsoon gathered behind us, persuading me to change course fifteen degrees. Two hours later the tempest passed, having filled our hold with brackish puddles though mercifully sparing our specimens, whereupon we found ourselves in view of a green, ragged mass unknown to any map in Her Majesty’s Navy, small enough to elude detection until this day, yet large enough for the watch to cry “Land, ho!” whilst the Aldebaran was yet two miles from the reef.
We came to a quiet cove. I dispatched an exploration party, led by Mr. Bainbridge, to investigate the inlet. He reported back an hour ago, telling of bulbous fruits, scampering monkeys, and exotic blossoms. When the tide turns tomorrow morning, I shall go ashore myself, for I think it likely that the island harbors invertebrate species of the sort for which our sponsors pay handsomely. But right now I shall amuse myself in imagining what to call the atoll. I am not so vain as to stamp my own name on these untrammeled sands. My wife, however, is a person I esteem sufficiently to memorialize her on a scale commensurate with her wisdom and beauty. So here we lie but a single degree below the Line, at anchor off Lydia Isle, waiting for the cockatoos to sing the dawn into being.
14 April 1899
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
The pen trembles in my hand. This has been a day unlike any in my twenty years at sea. Unless I miss my guess, Lydia Isle is home to a colony of beasts that science, for the best of reasons, once thought extinct.
It was our naturalist, Mr. Chalmers, who first noticed the tribe. Passing me the glass, he quivered with an excitement unusual in this phlegmatic gentleman. I adjusted the focus and suddenly there he was: the colony’s most venturesome member, poking a simian head out from a cavern in the central ridge. More such ape-men soon appeared at the entrance to their rocky doss-house, a dozen at least, poised on the knife-edge of their curiosity, uncertain whether to flee into their grotto or further scrutinize us with their deep watery eyes and wide sniffing nostrils.
We advanced, rifles at the ready. The ape-men chattered, howled, and finally retreated, but not before I got a sufficiently clear view to make a positive identification. Beetle brows, monumental noses, tentative chins, barrel chests — I have seen these features before, in an alcove of the British Museum devoted to artists’ impressions of a vanished creature that first came to light forty-three years ago in Germany’s Neander Valley. According to my Skeffington’s Guide to Fossils of the Continent, the quarrymen who unearthed the skeleton believed they’d found the remains of a bear, until the local schoolmaster, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, and a trained anatomist, Hermann Schaaffhausen, determined that the bones spoke of prehistoric Europeans.
Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen had to amuse themselves with only a skullcap, femur, scapula, ilium, and some ribs, but we have found a living, breathing remnant of the race. I can scarcely write the word legibly, so great is my excitement. Neanderthals!
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
Unless there dwells in the hearts of our Neanderthals a quality of cunning that their outward aspect belies, we need no longer go armed amongst them. They are docile as a herd of Cotswold sheep. Whenever my officers and I explore the cavern that shelters their community, they lurch back in fear and — if I’m not mistaken — a kind of religious awe.
It’s a heady feeling to be an object of worship, even when one’s idolaters are of a lower race. Such adoration, I’ll warrant, could become as addictive as a Chinaman’s pipe, and I hope to eschew its allure even as we continue to study these shaggy primitives.
How has so meek a people managed to survive into the present day? I would ascribe their prosperity to the extreme conviviality of their world. For food, they need merely to pluck bananas and mangos from the trees. When the monsoon arrives, they need only to retreat into their cavern. If man-eating predators inhabit Lydia Isle, I have yet to see any.
Freed from the normal pressures that, by the theories of Mr. Darwin, tend to drive a race towards either oblivion or adaptive transmutation, our Neanderthals have cultivated habits that prefigure the accomplishments of civilized peoples. Their speech is crude and thus far incomprehensible to me, all grunts and snorts and wheezes, and yet they employ it not only for ordinary communication but to entertain themselves with songs and chants. For their dancing rituals they fashion flutes from reeds, drums from logs, and even a kind of rudimentary oboe from bamboo, making music under whose influence their swaying frames attain a certain elegance. Nor is the art of painting unknown on Lydia Isle. By torchlight we have beheld on the walls of their cavern adroit representations of the indigenous monkeys and birds.
But the fullest expression of the Neanderthals’ artistic sense is to be found in the cemetery they maintain in an open field not far from their stone apartments. Whereas most of the graves are marked with simple cairns, a dozen mounds feature effigies wrought from wicker and daub, each doubtless representing the earthly form of the dear departed. The details of these funerary images are invariably male, a situation not remarkable in itself, as the tribe may regard the second sex as unworthy of commemoration. What perplexes Mr. Chalmers and myself is that we have yet to come upon a single female of the race — or, for that matter, any infants. Might we find the Neanderthal wives and children cowering in the cavern’s deepest sanctum? Or did some devastating tropical plague visit Lydia Isle, taking with it the entire female gender, plus every generation of males save one?
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
This morning I made a friend. I named him Silver, after the lightning-flash of fur coursing along his spine like an externalized backbone. It was Silver who made the initial gesture of amicability, presenting me with the gift of a flute. When I managed to pipe out a reasonable rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer,” he smiled broadly — yes, the aborigines can smile — and wrapped his leathery hand about mine.
I did not recoil from the gesture, but allowed Silver to lead me to a clearing in the jungle, where I beheld a solitary burial mound, decorated with a funerary effigy. Whilst I would never presume to plunder the grave, I must note that the British Museum would pay handsomely for this sculpture. The workmanship is skillful, and, mirabile dictu, the form is female. She wears a crown of flowers, from beneath which stream glorious tresses of grass. Incised on a lump of soft wood, the facial features are, in their own naïve way, lovely.
Such are the observable facts. But Silver’s solicitous attitude toward the effigy leads me to an additional conclusion. The woman interred in this hallowed ground, I do not doubt, was once my poor friend’s mate.
19 April 1899
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
An altogether extraordinary day, bringing an event no less astonishing than our discovery of the aborigines. Once again Silver led me to his mate’s graven image, whereupon he reached into his satchel — an intricate artifact woven of reeds — and drew forth a handwritten journal entitled Confidential Diary and Personal Observations of Katherine Margaret Glover. Even if Silver spoke English, I would not have bothered to inquire as to Miss Glover’s identity, for I knew instinctively it was she who occupied the tomb beneath our feet. In presenting me with the little volume, my friend managed to communicate his expectation that I would peruse its contents but then return the book forthwith, so he might continue drawing sustenance from its numinous leaves.
I spent the day collaborating with Mr. Chalmers in cataloguing the many Lepidoptera and Coleoptera we have collected thus far. Normally I take pleasure in taxonomic activity, but today I could think only of finishing the job, so beguiling was the siren-call of the diary. At length the parrots performed their final recital, the tropical sun found the equatorial sea, and I returned to my cabin, where, following a light supper, I read the chronicle cover to cover.
Considering its talismanic significance to Silver, I would never dream of appropriating the volume, yet it tells a story so astounding — one that inclines me to rethink my earlier theory concerning the Neanderthals — that I am resolved to forgo sleep till I have copied the most salient passages into this, my own secret journal. All told, there are 114 separate entries spanning the interval from February through June of 1889. The vast majority have no bearing on the mystery of the aborigines, being verbal sketches that Miss Glover hoped to incorporate into her ongoing literary endeavor, an epic poem about the first-century A.D. warrior-queen Boadicea. Given the limitations of my energy and my ink supply, I must reluctantly allow those jottings to pass into oblivion.
Who was Kitty Glover? The precocious child of landed gentry, she evidently lost both her mother and father to consumption before her thirteenth year. In the interval immediately following her parents’ deaths, Kitty’s ne’er-do-well brother gambled away the family’s fortune. She then spent four miserable years in Marylebone Workhouse, picking oakum until her fingers bled, all the while trying in vain to get a letter to her late mother’s acquaintance, Elizabeth With-erspoon, a widowed baroness presiding over her deceased husband’s considerable fortune. Kitty had reason to believe that Lady Witherspoon would heed her plight, for the Baroness had come to know Kitty’s mother, Maude Glover, under extraordinary circumstances.
Kitty’s diary contains no entry recounting the episode, but I infer that Lady Witherspoon was boating on the Thames near Greenwich when she tumbled into the water. The cries of the Baroness, who could not swim, were heard by Maude Glover, who could. (She was sitting on the banks, reading The Strand.) And so it was that Kitty’s mother delivered Lady Witherspoon from almost certain death.
Despite the machinations of her immediate supervisor, the loutish Ezekiel Snavely, Kitty’s fifth letter found its way to Lady Witherspoon’s abode, Briarwood House in Hampstead. The Baroness straightaway rescued Kitty from Snavely’s clutches and made the girl her ward. Not only was Kitty accorded her own cottage on the estate grounds, her benefactor provided a monthly allowance of ten pounds, a sum sufficient for the young woman to mingle with London society and adorn herself in the latest fashions. In the initial entries, Lady Witherspoon emerges as a muddle-minded person, obsessed with the welfare of an organization that at first Kitty thought silly: the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club and Benevolent Society. But there was more on the minds of these women than knocking balls through hoops.
CONFIDENTIAL DIARY AND PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS
of Katherine Margaret Glover
The Year of Our Lord 1889
Sunday, 31 March
Today I am moved to comment on a dimension of life here at Briarwood that I have not addressed previously. Whilst most of our servants, footmen, maids, and gardeners appear normal in aspect and comportment, two of the staff, Martin and Andrew, exhibit features so grotesque that my dreams are haunted by their lumbering presence. Their duties comprise nothing beyond maintaining the grounds, the croquet field in particular, and I suspect they are so mentally enfeebled that Lady Witherspoon hesitates to assign them more demanding tasks. Indeed, the one time I attempted to engage Martin and Andrew in conversation, they regarded me quizzically and responded only with soft huffing grunts.
I once saw in the London Zoo an orangutan named Attila, and in my opinion Martin and Andrew belong more to that variety of ape than to even the most bestial men of my acquaintance, including the execrable Ezekiel Snavely. With their weak chins, flaring nostrils, sunken black eyes, proliferation of body hair, and decks of broken teeth the size of pebbles, our groundskeepers seem on probation from the jungle, awaiting full admittance to the human race. It speaks well of the Baroness that she would employ creatures who might otherwise find themselves in Spitalfields, swilling gin and begging for their supper.
“I cannot help but notice a bodily deformity in our groundskeepers,” I told Lady Witherspoon. “In employing them, you have shown yourself to be a true Christian.”
“In fact Martin and Andrew were once even more degraded than they appear,” the Baroness replied. “The day those unfortunates arrived, I instructed the servants to treat them with humanity. Kindness, it seems, will gentle the nature of even the most miserable outcast.”
“Then I, too, shall treat them with humanity,” I vowed.
Wednesday, 10 April
This morning I approached Lady Witherspoon with a scheme whose realization would, I believe, be a boon to English letters. I proposed that we establish here at Briarwood a school for the cultivation of the Empire’s next generation of poets, not unlike that artistically fecund society formed by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their acolytes in an earlier part of the century. By founding such an institution, I argued, Lady Witherspoon would gain an enviable reputation as a friend to the arts, whilst my fellow poets and I would lift one another to unprecedented promontories of literary accomplishment.
Instead of holding forth on either the virtues or the liabilities of turning Briarwood into a monastery for scribblers, Lady Witherspoon looked me in the eye and said, “This strikes me as an opportune moment to address a somewhat different matter concerning your future, Kitty. It is my fond hope that you will one day take my place as head of the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club and Benevolent Society. Much as I admire the women who constitute our present membership, none is your equal in mettle or brains.”
“Your praise touches me deeply, Madam, though I am at a loss to say why that particular office requires such qualities.”
“I shall forgive your condescension, child, as you are unaware of the organization’s true purpose.”
“Which is — ?”
“Which is something I shall disclose when you are ready to assume the mantle of leadership.”
“From the appellation ‘Benevolent Society,’ might I surmise you do charitable works?”
“We are generous towards our friends, rather less so towards our enemies,” Lady Witherspoon replied with a quick smile that, unlike the Society’s ostensible aim, was not entirely benevolent.
“Does this charity consist in saving misfits like Martin and Andrew from extinction?”
Instead of addressing my question, the Baroness clasped my hand and said, “Here is my counterproposal. Allow me to groom you as my successor, and I shall happily subsidize your commonwealth of poets.”
“An excellent arrangement.”
“I believe I’m getting the better of the bargain.”
“Unless you object,” I said, “I should like to call my nascent school the Elizabeth Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters.”
“You have my permission,” said the Baroness.
Monday, 15 April
A day spent in Fleet Street, where I arranged for the Times to run an advertisement urging all interested poets, “whether wholly Byronic or merely embryonic,” to bundle up their best work and bring it to the Elizabeth Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters, scheduled to convene at Briarwood House a week from next Sunday. The mere knowledge that this community will soon come into being has proved for me a fount of inspiration. Tonight I kept pen pressed to paper for five successive hours, with the result that I now have in my drawer seven stanzas concerning the marriage of my flame-haired Boadicea to Prasutagus, King of the Iceni Britons.
Strange fancies buzz through my brain like bees bereft of sense. My skull is a hive of conjecture. What is the “true purpose,” to use the Baroness’s term, of the Benevolent Society? Do its members presume to practice the black arts? Does my patroness imagine that she is in turn patronized by Lucifer? Forgive me, Lady Witherspoon, for entertaining such ungracious speculations. You deserve better from your adoring ward.
The Society gathers on the first Saturday of next month, whereupon I shall play the prowler, or such is my resolve. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but I trust it will serve to enlighten this Kitty.
Sunday, 28 April
The inauguration of my poet’s utopia proved more auspicious than I’d dared hope. All told, three bards made their way to Hampstead. We enjoyed a splendid high tea, then shared our nascent works.
The Reverend Tobias Crowther of Stoke Newingtown is a blowsy man of cheerful temper. For the past year he has devoted his free hours to “Deathless in Bethany,” a long dramatic poem about Lazarus’s adventures following his resuscitation by our Lord. He read the first scene aloud, and with every line his listeners grew more entranced.
Our next performer was Ellen Ruggles, a pallid schoolmistress from Kensington, who favored us with four odes. Evidently there is no object so humble that Miss Ruggles will not celebrate it in verse, be it a flowerpot, a teakettle, a spiderweb, or an earthworm. The men squirmed during her recitation, but I was exhilarated to hear Miss Ruggles sing of the quotidian enchantments that lie everywhere to hand.
With a quaver in my throat and a tremor in my knees, I enacted Boadicea’s speech to Prasutagus as he lies on his deathbed, wherein she promises to continue his policy of appeasing the Romans. My discomfort was unjustified, however, for after my presentation the other poets all made cooing noises and applauded. I was particularly pleased to garner the approval of Edward Pertuis, a wealthy Bloomsbury bohemian and apostle of the mad philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Mr. Pertuis is quite the most well-favored man I have ever surveyed at close quarters, and I sense that he possesses a splendor of spirit to match his features.
The “Abyssiad” is a grand, epic poem wrought of materials that Mr. Pertuis cornered in the wildest reaches of his fancy and subsequently brought under the civilizing influence of his pen. On the planet Vivoid, far beyond Uranus, the Übermenschen prophesied by Herr Nietzsche have come into existence. An exemplar of this superior race travels to Earth with the aim of teaching human beings how they might live their lives to the full. Mr. Pertuis is not only a superb writer but also a fine actor, and his opening cantos held our fellowship spellbound. He has even undertaken to illustrate his manuscript, decorating the bottom margin with crayon drawings of an Übermensch, who wears a dashing scarlet cape and looks rather like his creator — Mr. Pertuis, I mean, not Herr Nietzsche.
I can barely wait until our group reconvenes four weeks hence. I am deliriously anxious to learn what happens when the visitor from Vivoid attempts to corrupt the human race. I long to clap my eyes on Mr. Pertuis again.
Saturday, 4 May
An astonishing day that began in utter mundanity, with the titled ladies of the Benevolent Society arriving in their cabriolets and coaches. Five aristocrats plus the Baroness made six, one for each croquet mallet in the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. After taking tea in the garden, everyone proceeded to the south lawn, newly scythed by Martin and Andrew. Six hoops and two pegs stood ready for the game. The women played three matches, with Lady Sterlingford winning the first, Lady Unsworth the second, and Lady Witherspoon the last. Although they took their sport seriously, bringing to each shot a scientific precision, their absorption in technique did not preclude their chattering about matters of stupendous inconsequentiality — the weather, Paris fashions, who had or had not been invited to the Countess of Rexford’s upcoming soirée — whilst I sat on a wrought-iron chair and attempted to write a scene of the Romans flogging Boadicea for refusing to become their submissive client.
At dusk the Society repaired to the banquet hall, there to dine on pheasant and grouse, whilst I lurked outside the open window, observing their vapid smiles and overhearing their evanescent conversation, as devoid of substance as was their prattle on the playing field. When at last the croquet players finished their feast, they migrated to the west parlor. The casement gave me a coign of vantage on Lady Witherspoon as she approached the far wall and pulled aside a faded tapestry concealing the door to a descending spiral staircase. Laughing and trilling, the ladies passed through the secret portal and began a downward climb.
Within ten minutes I had furtively joined my benefactress and her friends in the manor’s most subterranean sanctum, its walls dancing with phantoms conjured by a dozen blazing torches. A green velvet drape served as my cloak of invisibility. Like the east lawn, the basement had been converted into a gaming space, but whereas the croquet field bloomed with sweet grass and the occasional wild violet, the sanctum floor was covered end to end with a foul carpet of thick russet mud. From my velvet niche I could observe the suspended gallery in which reposed the women, as well as, flanking and fronting the mire, two discrete ranks of gaol-cells, eight per block, each compartment inhabited by a hulking, snarling brute sprung from the same benighted line as Martin and Andrew. The atmosphere roiled with a fragrance such as I had never before endured — a stench compounded of stagnant water, damp fur, and the soiled hay filling the cages — even as my brain reeled with the primal improbability of the spectacle.
In the gallery a flurry of activity unfolded, and I soon realized that the women were wagering on the outcome of the incipient contest. Each aristocrat obviously had her favorite ape-man, though I got the impression that, contrary to the norms of such gambling, the players were betting on which beast could be counted upon to lose. After all the wagers were made, Lady Witherspoon gestured toward the far perimeter of the pit, where her majordomo, Wembly, and his chief assistant, Padding, were pacing in nervous circles. First Wembly sprang into action, setting his hand to a small windlass and thus opening a cage in the nearer of the two cell-blocks. As the liberated ape-man skulked into the arena, Padding operated a second windlass, thereby opening a facing cage and freeing its occupant. Retreating in tandem, Wembly and Padding slipped into a stone sentry-box and locked the door behind them.
Only now did I notice that the bog was everywhere planted with implements of combat. Cudgels of all sorts rose from the mire like bulrushes. Each ape-man instinctively grabbed a weapon, the larger brute selecting a shillelagh, his opponent a wooden mace bristling with toothy bits of metal. The combat that followed was protracted and vicious, the two enemies hammering at each other until rivulets of blood flowed down their fur. Thuds, grunts, and cries of pain resounded through the fetid air, as did the Society’s enthusiastic cheers.
In time the smaller beast triumphed, dealing his opponent a cranial blow so forceful that he dropped the shillelagh and collapsed in the bog, prone and trembling with terror. The victor approached his stricken foe, placed a muddy foot on his rump, and made ready to dash out the fallen creature’s brains, at which juncture Lady Witherspoon lifted a tin whistle to her lips and let loose a metallic shriek. Instantly the victor released his mace and faced the gallery, where Lady Pembroke now stood grasping a ceramic phial stoppered with a plug of cork. Evidently recognizing the phial, and perhaps even smelling its contents, the victor forgot all about decerebrating his enemy. He shuffled towards Lady Pembroke and raised his hairy hands beseechingly. When she tossed him the coveted phial, he frantically tore out the stopper and sucked down the entire measure. Having satisfied his craving for the opiate, the brute tossed the phial aside, then yawned, stretched, and staggered back to his cage. He lay down in the straw and fell asleep.
Cautiously but resolutely, Wembly and Padding left their sentry-box, the former now holding a Gladstone bag of the sort carried by physicians. Whilst Padding secured the door to the victor’s cage, Wembly knelt beside the vanquished beast. Opening the satchel, he removed a gleaming scalpel, a surgeon’s needle, gauze dressings, and a hypodermic syringe loaded with an amber fluid. The majordomo nudged the plunger, releasing a single glistening bead, and, satisfied that the hollow needle was unobstructed, injected the drug into the brute’s arm. The creature’s limbs went slack. Presently Padding arrived on the scene, drawing from his pocket a white handkerchief, which he used to clean the delta betwixt the ape-man’s thighs, whereupon Wembly took up his scalpel and meticulously slit a portion of the creature’s anatomy for which I know no term more delicate than scrotum.
The gallery erupted in a chorus of hoorays.
With practiced efficiency the majordomo appropriated the twin contents of the scrotal sac, each sphere as large as those with which the ladies had earlier entertained themselves, then plopped them into separate glass jars filled with a clear fluid, alcohol most probably, subsequently passing the vessels to Padding. Next Wembly produced two actual croquet balls, which he inserted into the cavity prior to suturing and bandaging the incision. After offering the gallery a deferential bow, Padding presented one trophy to Lady Pembroke, the other to Lady Unsworth, both of whom, I surmised, had correctly predicted the upshot of the contest. Lady Witherspoon led the other women — Baroness Cushing, the Marchioness of Harcourt, the Countess of Netherby — in a round of delirious applause.
The evening was young, and ere it ended, three additional battles were fought in the stinking, echoing, glowing pit. Three more victors, three more losers, three more plundered scrota, six more harvested spheres, with the result that each noblewoman ultimately received at least one prize. During the intermissions, a liveried footman served the Society chocolate cream with strawberries.
Dear diary, allow me to make a confession. The ladies’ sport repelled and delighted me all at once. Despite a generally Christian sensibility, I could not help but imagine that each felled and eunuched brute was the odious Ezekiel Snavely. I had no desire to assume, per Lady Witherspoon’s wishes, the leadership of her unorthodox organization, and yet the idea of my tormentor getting trounced in this arena soothed me immeasurably.
Clutching their vessels, the ladies ascended the spiral staircase. I pictured each guest slipping into her conveyance and, ere commanding the coachman to take her home, demurely snugging her winnings into her lap as a lady of less peculiar tastes might secure a purse, a music box, or a pair of gloves. For a full twenty minutes I lingered behind my velvet drape, listening to the bestial snarls and savage growls, then began my slow climb to the surface, afire with a variety of satisfaction for which I hope our English language never spawns a name.
Monday, 6 May
To her eternal credit, when I confessed to the Baroness that I had spied on the underground tournament, she elected to extol my audacity rather than condemn my duplicity, adding but one caveat to this absolution. “I am willing to cast a sympathetic eye on your escapade,” she told me, “but I must ask you to reciprocate by supposing that a laudable goal informs our baiting of the brutes.”
“I don’t doubt that your sport serves a greater good. But who are those wretched creatures? They seem more ape than human.”
The Baroness replied that, come noon tomorrow, I must go to the north tower and climb to the uppermost floor, where I would encounter a room I did not know existed. There amongst her retorts and alembics all my questions would be answered.
Thus did I find myself in Lady Witherspoon’s cylindrical laboratory, a gaslit chamber crammed with worktables on which rested the vessels of which she’d spoken, along with various flasks, bell jars, and test tubes, plus a beaker holding a golden substance that the Baroness was heating over a Bunsen burner. Bubbles danced in the burnished fluid. At the center of the circle lay a plump man with waxen skin, naked head to toe. Pink as a piglet, he was bound to an operating table with leather straps about his wrists and ankles. His name, the Baroness informed me, was Ben Towson, and he looked as if he had a great deal to say about his situation, but, owing to the steel bit betwixt his teeth, tightly secured with thongs, he could not utter a word.
“It all began on a lovely April afternoon in 1883, back when the Society was content to play croquet with inorganic balls,” said Lady Witherspoon. “I had arranged for a brilliant French scientist to address our group — Henri Renault, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History. A devotee of Charles Darwin, Dr. Renault perforce believed that modern apes and contemporary humans share a common though extinct ancestor. It had become his obsession to corroborate Darwin through chemistry. After a decade of research, Renault concocted a potent drug from human neuronal tissue and simian cerebrospinal fluid. He soon learned that, over a course of three injections, this serum would transform an orangutan or a gorilla into — not a human being, exactly, but a creature of far greater talents than nature ever granted an ape. Renault called his discovery Infusion U.”
“U for Uplift?” I ventured.
“U for Unknown,” Lady Witherspoon corrected me. “Monsieur le Docteur was probing that interstice where science ends and enigma begins.” Approaching a cabinet jammed with glass vessels, the Baroness took down a stoppered Erlenmeyer flask containing a bright blue fluid. “I recently acquired a quantity of Renault’s evolutionary catalyst. One day soon I shall conduct my own investigations using Infusion U.”
“One day soon? From what I saw in the gaming pit, I would say you’ve already performed numerous such experiments.”
“Our tournaments have nothing to do with Infusion U.” Briefly Lady Witherspoon contemplated the flask, its contents coruscating in the sallow light. Gingerly she reshelved the arcane chemical. “A few years after creating serum number one, Renault perfected its precise inverse — Infusion D.”
“For Devolution?”
“For Demimonde,” the Baroness replied, pointing to the burbling beaker. “Such unorthodox research belongs to the shadows.”
With the aid of an insulated clamp she removed the hot beaker from the flame’s influence and, availing herself of a funnel, decanted the contents into a rack of test tubes. She returned Infusion D to the burner. After the batch had cooled sufficiently, the Baroness took up a hypodermic syringe and filled the barrel.
“It was this second formula that Renault demonstrated to the Society,” said the Baroness. “After we’d seated ourselves in the drawing-room, he injected five cubic centiliters into a recently condemned murderer, one Jean-Marc Girard, who proceeded to regress before our eyes.”
Lady Witherspoon now performed the identical experiment on Ben Towson, locating a large vein in his forearm, inserting the needle, and pushing the plunger. I knew precisely what was going to happen, and yet I could not quite bring myself to believe what I beheld. Whilst Infusion D seethed in its beaker and the gas hissed through the laboratory lamps, Towson began to change. Even as he fought against his straps, his jaw diminished, his brow expanded, and his eyes receded like successfully pocketed billiard balls. Each nostril grew to a diameter that would admit a chestnut. Great whorling tufts of fur appeared on his skin like weeds emerging from fecund soil. He whimpered like a whipped dog.
“Good God,” I said.
“A striking metamorphosis, yes, but inchoate, for he will become his full simian self only after two more injections,” said Lady Witherspoon, though to my naïve eye Towson already looked exactly like the brutes I’d observed in the arena. “What we have here is the very sort of being Renault fashioned for our edification that memorable spring afternoon. He assured us that, before delivering Girard to the executioner, he would employ Infusion U in restoring the miscreant, lest the hangman imagine he was killing an innocent ape.” The Towson beast bucked and lurched, thus prompting the Baroness to tighten the straps on his wrists. “It was obvious from his presentation that Renault saw no practical use for his discovery beyond validating the theory of evolution. But we of the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club immediately envisioned a benevolent application.”
“Benevolent by certain lights,” I noted, scanning the patient. His procreative paraphernalia had become grotesquely enlarged, though evidently it would not achieve croquet caliber until injection number three. “By other lights, controversial. By still others, criminal.”
Lady Witherspoon did not address my argument directly but instead contrived the slyest of smiles, took my hand, and said, “Tell me, dear Kitty, how to you view the human male?”
“I am fond of certain men,” I replied. Such as Mr. Pertuis, I almost added. “Others annoy me — and some I greatly fear.”
“Would you not agree that, whilst isolated specimens of the male can be amusing and occasionally even valuable, there is something profoundly unwell about the gender as a whole, a demon impulse that inclines men to inflict physical harm on their fellow beings, women particularly?”
“I have suffered the slings of male entitlement,” I said in a voice of assent. “The director of Marylebone Workhouse took liberties with my person that I would prefer not to discuss.”
Before releasing my hand, the Baroness accorded it a sympathetic squeeze. “Our idea was a paragon of simplicity. Turn the male demon against itself. Teach it to fear and loathe its own gender rather than the female. Debase it with bludgeons. Humble it with mud. For the final fillip, deprive it of the ability to sire additional fiends.”
“Your Society thinks as boldly as the Vivoidians who populate Mr. Pertuis’s saga of the Übermenschen.”
“I have not read your fellow poet’s epic, but I shall take your remark as a compliment. Thanks to Monsieur le Docteur, we have in our possession an antidote for masculinity — a remedy that falls so far short of homicide that even a woman of the most refined temperament may apply it without qualm. To be sure, there are more conventional ways of dealing with the demon. But what sane woman, informed of Infusion D, would prefer to rely instead on the normal institutions of justice, whose barristers and judges are invariably of the scrotal persuasion?”
“Not only do I follow your logic,” I said, cinching the strap on the ape-man’s left ankle, “I confess to sharing your enthusiasm.”
“Dear Kitty, your intelligence never ceases to amaze me. Even Renault, when I told him that the Society had set out to cure men of themselves, assumed I was joking.” Bending over her rack of Infusion D, Lady Witherspoon ran her palms along the test tubes as if playing a glass harmonica. “Have you perchance heard of Jack the Ripper?” she asked abruptly.
“The Whitechapel maniac?” I cinched the right ankle-strap. “For six weeks running, London’s journalists wrote of little else.”
“The butcher slit the throats of at least five West End trollops, mutilating their bodies in ways that beggar the imagination. Last night Lady Pembroke went home carrying half the Ripper’s manhood in her handbag, whilst Lady Unsworth made off with the other half. You were likewise witness to the rehabilitation of Milton Starling, a legislator who, before running afoul of our agents, alternately raped his niece in his barn and denounced the cause of women’s suffrage on the floor of Parliament. You also beheld the gelding of Josiah Lippert, who until recently earned a handsome income delivering orphan girls from the slums of London to the brothels of Constantinople.”
“No doubt the past lives of Martin and Andrew are similarly checkered.”
“Prior to their encounter with the Society, they brokered the sale of nearly three hundred young women into white slavery throughout the Empire.”
“What ultimately happens to your eunuchs?” I asked. “Are they all granted situations at Briarwood and the estates of your other ladies?”
“Martin and Andrew are merely making themselves useful whilst awaiting deportation,” the Baroness replied. “Once every six months, we transfer a boatload of castrati to an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean — Atonement Atoll, we call it — that they may live out their seedless lives in harmony with nature.”
The patient, I noticed, had fallen asleep. “Is he still a carnivore, I wonder” — I gestured towards the slumbering beast — “or does he now dream of bananas?”
“A pertinent question, Kitty. I am not privy to the immediate contents of Towson’s head, just as I cannot imagine what was passing through his mind when he kicked his wife to death.”
“God save the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club and Benevolent Society,” I said.
“And the Queen,” my patroness added.
“And the Queen,” I said.
Sunday, 26 May
The second gathering of the Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters proved every bit as bracing as the first. Miss Ruggles presented four odes so vivid in their particulars that I shall never regard a button, a conch shell, an oil lamp, or a child’s kite in quite the same way again. Mr. Crowther charmed us with another installment of his verse drama about Lazarus, an episode in which the resurrected aristocrat, fancying himself commensurate with Christ, travels to Chorazin with the aim of founding a salvationistic religion. Mr. Pertuis brought his Übermensch into contact with a cadre of Hegelian philosophers, a trauma so disruptive of their neo-Platonic worldview that they all went irretrievably insane. For my own contribution, I performed a scene in which Boadicea, bound and gagged, is forced to watch as her two daughters are molested by the Romans. The other poets claimed to be impressed by my depiction of the ghastly event, with Miss Ruggles declaring that she’d never heard anything quite so affecting in all her life.
But the real reason I shall always cherish this day concerns an incident that occurred after the workshop adjourned. Once Miss Ruggles and Mr. Crowther had sped away in their respective coaches, having exchanged manuscripts with the aim of offering each other further appreciative commentary, Mr. Pertuis approached me and announced, in a diffident but heartfelt tone, that I had been in his thoughts of late, and he hoped I might accord him an opportunity to earn my admiration of his personhood, as opposed to his poetry. I responded that his personhood had not escaped my notice, then invited him for a stroll along the brook that girds the manor house.
We had not gone twenty yards when, acting on a sudden impulse, I told my companion the whole perplexing story of the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club. I omitted no proper noun: Dr. Renault, Ben Towson, Jean-Marc Girard, Jack the Ripper, Infusion U, Infusion D. At first he reacted with skepticism, but when I noted that my tale could be easily corroborated — I need merely lead him into the depths of Briarwood House and show him the caged brutes awaiting humiliation — he grew more liberal in his judgment.
“You present me with two possibilities,” said Mr. Pertuis. “Either I am becoming friends with an insane poet who writes of ancient female warriors, or else Lady Elizabeth Witherspoon is the most capable woman in England not excepting the Queen. Given my fondness for you, I prefer to embrace the second theory.”
“Naturally I must insist that you not repeat these revelations to another living soul.”
“I shan’t repeat them even to the dead.”
“Were you to betray my confidence, Mr. Pertuis, my attitude to you would curdle in an instant.”
“You may trust me implicitly, Miss Glover. But pray indulge my philosophical side. As a votary of Herr Nietzsche, I cannot but speculate on the potential benefits of these astonishing chemicals. Assuming Lady Witherspoon withheld no pertinent fact from you, I would conclude that, whilst the utility of Infusion D has been exhausted, this is manifestly not the case with the uplift serum. May I speak plainly? I am the sort of man who, if he possessed a quantity of the drug, would not scruple to experiment with it.”
“Mais pourquoi, Mr. Pertuis? Have you a pet orangutan with whom you desire to play chess?”
“I do not see why the uplift serum should be employed solely for the betterment of apes. I do not see why — ”
“Why it should not be introduced into a human subject?” I said, at once aghast and fascinated.
“A blasphemous idea, I quite agree. And yet, were you to put such forbidden fruit on my plate, I would be tempted to take a bite. Infusion U, you say — U for Unknown. No, Miss Glover — for Übermensch!”
Saturday, 1 June
When I awoke I had no inkling that this would be most memorable day of my life. If anything, it promised to be only the most philosophical, for I spent the morning conjecturing about what Friedrich Nietzsche himself might have made of Infusion U. Being by all reports insane, the man is unlikely ever to form an opinion of Dr. Renault’s research, much less share that opinion with the world.
Here is my supposition. Based upon my untutored and doubtless superficial reading of The Joyful Wisdom, I imagine Herr Nietzsche would be unimpressed by the uplift serum. I believe he would dismiss it as mere liquid decadence, yet another quack cure that, like all quack cures — most notoriously Christianity, the ultimate pater nostrum — prevents us from looking brute reality in the eye and admitting there are no happy endings, only eternal returns, even as we resolve to redress our tragic circumstances with a heroic and defiant “Yes!”
By contrast, I am confident that, presented with a potion that promised to fortify her spirit, my cruel and beautiful Boadicea would have swallowed it without hesitation. After all, here was a woman who took on the world’s mightiest empire, leading a revolt that obliged her to sack the cities that today we call St. Albans, Colchester, and London, leaving 70,000 Roman corpses behind. For a warrior-queen, whatever works is good, be it razor-sharp knives on the wheels of your chariot or a rare Gallic elixir in your goblet.
This afternoon Mr. Pertuis and I traveled in his coach to the Spaniard’s Inn, where we dined with Dionysian abandon on grilled turbot, stewed beef à la jardinière, and lamb cutlets with asparagus. Landing next in Regent’s Park, we rented a rowboat and went out on the lake. My swain stroked us to the far shore, shipped the oars, and, clasping my hand, averred that he wished to discuss a matter of passing urgency.
“Two matters, really,” he elaborated. “The first pertains to my intellect, the second to my affections.”
“Both faculties are of abiding interest to me,” I said.
“To be blunt, I have resolved to augment my brain’s potential through the uplift serum, but only if I have your blessing. I am similarly determined to enhance my heart’s capacity by taking a wife, but only if my bride is your incomparable self.”
My own heart immediately assented to his second scheme, fluttering against my ribs like a caged bird. “On first principles I endorse both your ambitions,” I replied, blushing so deeply that I imagined the surrounding water reddening with my reflection, “but I would expect you to fulfill several preliminary conditions.”
“Oh, my dearest Miss Glover, I shall grant you any wish within reason, and many beyond reason as well.”
“Concerning our wedding, it must be a private affair attended by only a handful of witnesses and conducted by Mr. Crowther. Your Kitty is a shyer creature than you might suppose.”
“Agreed.”
“Concerning the serum, you will limit yourself to a single injection of five centiliters.”
“Not one drop more.”
“You must further consent to make me your collaborator in the grand experiment. Yes, dear Edward, I wish to accompany you on your journey into the dark, feral, occult continent of Infusion U.”
“Is that really a place for a person of your gender?”
“I can tell you how Boadicea would answer. A woman’s place is in the wild.”
Dear diary, it was not the English countryside that glided past the window of Mr. Pertuis’s coach on our return trip, for Albion had become Eden that day. Each tree was fruited with luminous apples, glowing plums, and glistening figs. From every blossom a golden nectar flowed in great munificent streams.
We reached Hampstead just as the Society was finishing its final match of the day. Standing on the edge of the grassy court, we watched Lady Pembroke make an astonishing shot in which the generative sphere leapt smartly from the tip of her mallet, traversed seven feet of lawn, rolled through the fifth hoop, and came to rest at a spot not ten inches from the peg. The other ladies broke into spontaneous applause.
Now Mr. Pertuis led me behind the privet hedge and placed a farewell kiss — a kiss! — on my lips, then repaired to his coach, whereupon Lady Witherspoon likewise drew me aside and averred she had news that would send my spirits soaring.
“Today I informed the others that, acting on your own initiative, you learned of the Society’s true purpose,” she said. “Having already judged you a person of impeccable character, they are happy to admit you to our company. Will you accept our invitation to an evening of demon baiting?”
“Avec plaisir,” I said.
“Amongst the scheduled contestants is a notorious workhouse supervisor whom our agents abducted but four days ago. Yes, dear Kitty, tonight you will see a simian edition of the odious Ezekiel Snavely take the field.”
My heart leaped up, through not to the same altitude occasioned by Mr. Pertuis’s marriage proposal. “If Snavely were to fall,” I muttered, “and if it were permitted, I would put the knife to him myself.”
“I fully understand your desire, but we decided long ago that the incision must always be made and dressed by a practiced hand,” Lady Witherspoon said. “The gods have entrusted us with their ichor, dear Kitty, and we must remain worthy of the gift.”
Monday, 3 June
Saturday night’s tournament did not play out as I’d hoped. My bête noir conquered his opponent, an abhorrent West End procurer. Dear God, what if Snavely continues to win his battles, month after month? What if he is standing tall after the Benevolent Society has been discovered and toppled by the London Metropolitan Police? Will his apish incarnation, gonads and all, receive sanctuary in some zoo? Quelle horreur!
In contrast to recent events in the arena, this morning’s scientific experiments went swimmingly. We had no difficulty stealthily transferring the Erlenmeyer flask and the hypodermic syringe from the north tower to my cottage. So lovingly did Mr. Pertuis work the needle into my vein that the pain proved but a pinch, and I believe that, when I injected my swain in turn, I caused him only mild discomfort.
“Herr Nietzsche calls humankind the unfinished animal,” he said. “If that hypothesis is true, then perhaps you and I, fair Kitty, are about to bring our species to completion.”
At first I felt nothing — and then, suddenly, the elixir announced its presence in my brain. My throat constricted. My eyes seemed to rotate in their sockets. A thousand clockwork ants scurried across my skin. Sweat gushed from my brow, coursing down my face like blood from the Crown of Thorns.
Our torments ceased as abruptly as they’d begun, as if by magic — that is to say, by Überwissenschaft. And suddenly we knew that a true wonder-worker had come amongst us, le Grand Renault, blessing his disciples with the elixir of his genius. Brave new passions swelled within us. Fortunately I had on hand sufficient ink and paper to give them voice. Although we’d severed ourselves from our simian heritage, Edward and I nevertheless entered into competition, each determined to produce the greater number of eternal truths in iambic pentameter. Whilst my poor swain labored till dawn, and even then failed to complete his “Abyssiad,” I finished “The Song of Boadicea” on the stroke of midnight, two hundred and ten stanzas, each more brilliant than the last.
Thursday, 6 June
And so, dear diary, it has begun. We have bitten the apple, cut cards with the Devil, lapped the last drop from the Pierian spring. Come the new year my Edward and I shall be man and wife, but today we are Übermensch and Überfrau.
Such creatures will not be constrained by convention, nor acknowledge mere biology as their master. We are brighter than our glands. Each time Edward and I give ourselves to carnal love, we employ such prophylactic devices as will preclude procreation.
We do not disrobe. Rather, we tear the clothes from one other’s bodies like starving castaways shucking oysters in a tidal inlet. How marvelous that, throughout the long, arduous process of concocting his formula, Monsieur le Docteur remained a connoisseur of sin. How exhilarating that a post-evolutionary race can know so much of post-lapsarian lust.
To apprehend the true and absolute nature of things — that is the fruit of Nietzschean clarity. Energies and entities are one and the same, did you know that, dear diary? Wonders are many, but the greatest of these is being. Hell does not exist. Heaven is the fantasy of clerics. There is no God, and I am his prophet.
Fokken — that is the crisp, candid, Middle Dutch word for it. We fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck.
Wednesday, 12 June
An Überfrau does not hide her blazing intellect beneath a bushel. She trumpets her transfiguration from every rooftop, every watchtower, the summit of the highest mountain.
When I told Lady Witherspoon what Edward and I had done with the elixir, I assumed she might turn livid and perhaps even banish me from her estate. I did not anticipate that she would acquire a countenance of supreme alarm, call me the world’s biggest fool, and spew out a narrative so hideous that only an Überfrau would dare, as I did, to greet it with a contemptuous laugh.
If I am to believe the Baroness, Dr. Renault also wondered whether Infusion U might be capable of causing the consummation of our race. His experiments were so costly they depleted his personal fortune, entailing as they did lawsuits brought against him by the relations of the serum’s twenty recipients. For it happens that the beneficence of Infusion U rarely persists for more than six weeks, after which the Übermensch endures a rapid and irremediable slide toward the primal. No known drug can arrest this degeneration, and the process is merely accelerated by additional injections.
The subjects of Renault’s investigations may have lost their Nietzschean nerve, but Edward and I shall remain true to our joy. We exist beyond the tawdry grasp of the actual and the trivial reach of reason. As Übermensch and Überfrau we are prepared to grant employment to every species of whimsy, but no facts need apply.
Something June
The third meeting of the Witherspoon Academy was another rollicking success, though Miss Ruggles and Mr. Crowther would probably construct it otherwise. When Miss Ruggles inflicted her latest excrescence on us, a piece of twaddle about her garden, Edward suggested that she run home and tend her flowers, for they were surely wilting from shame. She left the estate in tears. After Mr. Crowther finished spouting his drivel, I told him that his muse had evidently spent the past four weeks selling herself in the streets. His face went crimson, and he left in a huff.
Thursday?
Kitty’s head swims in a maelstrom of its own making. Her stomach has lost all sovereignty over its goods, and her psyche has likewise surrendered its dominion. Her soul vomits upon the page.
Another Day
Ape hair on Edward’s arms. Ape teeth in his mouth. Ape face covering his skull.
A Different Day
Ape hair in the mirror. Ape teeth in the mirror. Ape face in the mirror.
Another Day
They pitted me against him. In the mud. My Edward. We would not fight. They did it to him anyway. Necessary? Yes. Do I care? No. Procreation kills.
No Day
On the sea. Atonement Atoll. A timbre intended is a tone meant. I shall never say anything so clever again. I weep.
habzilb larzed dox ner adnor ulorx qron mizrel bewq xewt ulp ilr ulp xok ulp ulp ulp ulp ulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulpulp
PERSONAL JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN ARCHIBALD CARMODY, R.N.
Written aboard H.M.S. Aldebaran
Whilst on a Voyage of Scientific Discovery in the Indian Ocean
20 April 1899
LAT. 1°10' S, LONG. 71°42' E
I slept till noon. After securing Miss Glover’s diary in my rucksack, I bid the watch row me ashore, then entered the aborigines’ cavern in search of Silver. Despite Kitty’s fantastic chronicle, I still think of them as Neanderthals, and perhaps I always shall.
My friend was nowhere to be found. I proceeded to his mate’s grave. Silver né Edward Pertuis sat atop the mound, contemplating Kitty’s graven image. I surrendered the diary to the gelded ape-man, who forthwith secured it in his satchel.
The instant I drew the Bible from my rucksack, Silver understood my intention. He wrapped one long arm about the sculpture, then set the opposite hand atop the Scriptures. I’d never performed the ceremony before, and I’m sure I got certain details wrong. The ape-man hung onto my every word, and when at length I averred that he and Katherine Margaret Glover were man and wife, he smiled, then kissed his bride.
22 April 1899
LAT. 6°11' N, LONG. 68°32' E
Two days after steaming away from Lydia Isle, I find myself wondering if it was all a dream. The lost race, their strange music, the bereaved beast grieving over his mate’s effigy — did I imagine the entire sojourn?
Naturally Mr. Chalmers and Mr. Bainbridge will corroborate my stay in Eden. As for the strange diary, I am at the moment prepared to give it credence, and not just because I spent so many hours in monkish replication of its pages. I believe Kitty Glover. The subterranean tournaments, the demimonde drug, the uplift serum: these are factual as rain. I am convinced that Kitty and Edward ventured recklessly into the terra incognita of their primate past, losing themselves forever in apish antiquity.
My wife is an avid consumer of the London papers. If, prior to my departure, Briarwood House had been found to conceal a cabal of sorceresses bent on reforming miscreant males through French chemistry and Roman combat, Lydia would surely have read about it and told me. Until I hear otherwise, I shall assume that the Hampstead Ladies Croquet Club is a going concern, making apes, curing demons, knocking balls through hoops.
And so I face a dilemma. Upon my return to England do I inform the authorities of debatable recreations at Briarwood House? Or do I allow the uncanny status quo to persist? But that is another day’s conversation with myself.
23 April 1899
LAT. 15°06' N, LONG. 55°32' E
Last night I once again read all the diary transcriptions. My dilemma has dissolved. With Übermensch clarity I see what I must do, and not do.
In some nebulous future — when England’s men have transmuted into angels, perhaps, or England’s women have gotten the vote, or Satan has become an epicure of snowflakes — on that date I may suggest to a Hampstead constable that he investigate rumors of witchery at Lady Witherspoon’s estate. But for now the secret of the Benevolent Society is safe with me. Landing again on Albion’s shore, I shall arrange for this journal to become my family’s most private heirloom, and I shall undertake a second mission as well, approaching the Baroness, assuring her of my good intentions, and inquiring as to whether Ezekiel Snavely finally went down in the mud.
For our next voyage my sponsors intend that I should sail to Gávdhos, southwest of Crete, rumored to harbor a remarkable variety of firefly —the only such species to have evolved in the Greek Isles. Naturalists call it the changeling bug, as it exhibits the same proclivities as a chameleon. These beetles mimic the stars. Stare into the singing woods of Gávdhos on a still summer night, and you will witness a colony of changeling bugs blinking on and off in configurations that precisely copy horned Aries, clawed Cancer, poisonous Scorpio, mighty Taurus, sleek Pisces, and the rest.
The greatest of these tableaux is Sagittarius. Once the fireflies have formed their centaur, the missile reportedly shoots away, rising into the sky until the darkness claims it. Some say the constituents of this insectile arrow continue beating their wings until, disoriented and bereft of energy, they fall into the Aegean Sea and drown. I do not believe it. Nature has better uses for her lights. Rather, I am confident that, owing to some Darwinian adaptation or other, the beetles cease their theatrics and pause in mid-flight, forthwith reversing course and returning to the island, weary and hungry but glad to be amongst familiar trees again, called home by the keeper of their kind.