A Report of the Jewels Excavated From the Tomb of the Hectate, Done In a Kind of a Verse
Minute by minute is my fleshy integument perspired,
Lathered and lathed and laved in my own shiny sweat;
And my heart it beats rigorously and unremittingly against its costal chamber,
In the iliac region in which its imprisoned;
My palms greased with the sweat exuded in the face of a myriad more than
A thousand Saharan or Judean suns, and my body all over given over to
A sensation like unto that which is feverish;
This, then, is me, for I have seen the glorious dodecahedral gem of the
Imperial Hectate of the Barbarous Regions of the Realm of Ocaspariadon:
That mythic, magnifical jewel long held to be a legend and a fallacy....
But truly, it is true, it is real! I, the meandering explorer migratory,
I have seen it!
It lies in a tomb beneath the surface of those mounded tawny granular sands of the great desert of Kartoombauwei: That land beyond the last of the great mountains!
Beyond those mountains whose alpestrine peaks nearly scrape the empyrean,
And any one of which outstrips Everest in all his snow-crowned, empyreal, supernal glory...
Yea, that is where the precious gewgaw worth tens of septillions of dollars is kept....
And I, only I have seen it!
Do you then still dare to wonder at my face and my wild surmise?
I am not stark, not mad I might be said to be,
And so I seem, for who but I since ages long dead has laid
Trembling, unbelieving eyes on the refulgent glory of the most beauteous jewel that ever by the hand of man was shaped?
Raving I might be, and this my report on the incident, it could be said to be lunatic with irrepressible glee.
Yet, who am I to hold back?
I, who have the grandest thing ever beheld by mere mortal eyes?
And most fortuitous of all, unlike many another archaeological, excavated thing pried laboriously from the sandy solitudes underneath which they were originally found;
Unlike virtually every other find in existence,
No haunting, witching cruel myth of destruction attends it.
It is not haunted, this thing.
It can be taken. It is not guarded by restless spirits and ancient, long-forgotten spells.
The people who forged it were of a goodness unknown to mankind since before the fall of Rome,
(And indeed, that was a barbarous and pillaging time, of thieves superfluously soaking bloody sands;
The time of the wickedest cruelty in the history of mankind.
Yet, a goodness reigned in this place even then.)
And this is the thing mine eyes have tremulously witnessed....
But, despite this, can it be mine?
Copyright ©
Douglas Cate
|