After a week or so of hiking across the grassy plains he saw, on the horizon, in front of him, a settlement of some sort. From this distance it was merely a group of dark specks, silhouetted against the light sky, but the thin plumes of ascending smoke indicated either human inhabitants or particularly sophisticated gerbils. As he tucked himself up under his grass blanket he breathed an interested sigh of expectation. He liked his own company, without doubt, but the thought that tomorrow he might meet some people filled him with a thrill. New people, he thought, were always interesting, and he remembered back to the last new people he met, back in that hidden valley.
Even if he and these new friends had no language in common, he imagined, they’d be able to share other, more basic things: such as the simple joy at being human and alive in such a huge and beautiful universe.
*
The next morning he rose early and looked to where he’d spotted the settlement the night before, but couldn’t see it. It should have been there, exactly there, he thought, pointing to the eastern horizon with his eyes. But it wasn’t. It was as flat and dully grassy as all the other horizons he’d been staring at for weeks had been. He looked around him a shade confused, a touch disillusioned and feeling uncharacteristically grumpy. As he packed his gear away and prepared to head off for another day of marching toward nothing much, he wondered what might have happened. Had he simply been mistaken? Perhaps it had been a mirage. Or maybe something sinister had happened in the night?
As he slung his backpack over his shoulders he happened to glance away to the north and there, sat on the horizon was the same set of specks he’d seen the night before. They were the same, weren’t they? They certainly looked the same, but it seemed they’d moved. From this distance, naturally, it was hard to be sure of their identity, but he had a good feeling that he’d refound his new friends. Maybe he’d rolled over in the night and had woken up facing the wrong direction. Yes, he thought inexpertly, maybe that was it.
He started walking northwards. All through the day he marched, never taking his eyes off the group of dark specks. Even when he stopped for lunch he didn’t look away. By late afternoon, and he knew it was late afternoon because he could feel his legs aching and his back complaining, and besides the sun was sitting low on the horizon in front of him, he was a little closer to the specks and he could make out movement around them and smoke curling up from a fire. But hang on, he thought, the sun is in front of me? That would mean I’m facing west, but I started off going north this morning and just followed the specks. Maybe they’d moved?
Before the sun sank completely and before he tucked down for the night, he drew a line in the earth pointing from his camp to exactly where those specks were. When he woke up in the morning and followed the line of his line to the horizon he was hardly surprised at all to find nothing there. The sun was already quite warm and the dew was evaporating as he packed his things and slung his pack once more. If that camp wasn’t going to play fair by staying still then he determined to spend no more time on it. He turned to face the rising sun and continue on his steady eastward trek. The sooner he reached a coast the sooner he could get home to England, he thought.
When he turned to begin his trek he saw the specks again. This time he could see that they were in fact round buildings which looked to be a cross between a tent and a hut. He could see that there were people milling around outside them and horses too and a thin blue wisp of smoke curled up from a fire somewhere amongst the encampment. He also noticed that the tents were only a hundred yards or so from where he stood.
As he stood there, looking at the buildings and at the children who were playing in the grass at the feet of an old lady who sat sewing a piece of leather onto another piece of leather, he wondered exactly what to do. They stared back at him with a disinterested curiosity, and continued getting on with the things they’d been getting on with, presumably, before he’d stood up. He could smell breakfast cooking on a fire somewhere, though he couldn’t see it. Horses whinnied where they mingled and chewed grass and the day just got on with things. Eventually a small man with a long drooping moustache, narrow shoulders, a furry hat with a spike poking out the top and little dark eyes, wandered towards him, holding, outstretched, in what Crepuscular took to be a traditional gesture of friendship, a loaded and tightly strung short bow.
Simone held out his hand and bounded over to introduce himself, delighted to be meeting someone after all this time alone. His rucksack bounced on his back and his loincloth flapped in the wind and a wide smile spread across his face.
So surprised was the Mongol Chieftain at the actions of this strange half-naked giant of a man, that he merely lowered his bow and shook Crepuscular’s hand.
His grandfather had once met a French missionary who had left an educational book behind with the tribe of nomads. This book was being read at that very moment by the Chieftain’s daughter in their ger. She was a simple, lovely girl, who had grown up with this one book, just as her father had, and just as all the members of the tribe had. It was a colourful book with pictures of all The Civilised Peoples Of The World in it, with little descriptions underneath, a variety of fascinating trivia and statistics, and a brief statement of why they were superior to the benighted heathens of, for example, the Mongolian plains. For this reason the Chieftain was able to put his finger on Crepuscular’s nationality, if nothing else, with forthright immediacy.
He ushered the Englishman into his tent, sat him down on his favourite cushion and handed him a slice of toast (made from grass-flour) smeared liberally with horse-butter. Simone took it hungrily and, wrestling down a virulent coruscating wave of nausea, happily munched away.
They began to converse.
The Chieftain pointed at Simone’s shaven head and lifted his hat. Underneath it was dark, straight oily hair, tied back in a ponytail, but which clearly displayed a receding hairline. They laughed at the similarity. Crepuscular rubbed his hand over the shaggy growth of beard that covered his chin and then leant across and tugged, gently, at the Chieftain’s narrow moustache. The two men chuckled at the similarity. The Chieftain pointed at his guest’s two legs and then stood up and raised the edge of his long shirt to reveal that he too was blessed with a complete pair. Both men smiled at the similarity.
As the day went on they became close friends.
*
After a while Crepuscular married the Chieftain’s daughter, who had watched them conversing on that first morning from behind a curtain. She had looked from the pages of the book to the real Englishman sat in her ger and thought to herself how much better the reality was, which is, of course, sometimes often the way.
Simone stayed with the tribe for almost three years. He enjoyed the nomadic life, which, after all chimed with the life he’d recently been living in so many ways. Every morning he’d pull back the curtain door of his ger and look out at a completely different (if indistinguishable) patch of Mongolian steppe. He enjoyed the variety and in time became able to recognise a wide range of different grasses from one another (and not just short grass and tall grass, but even more than that). He appreciated change that was very little change; to know that change was going on continually, but without ever changing much at all. This sort of change he liked. That was why he’d spent so long watching rivers flow, he thought – much the same, day to day, much the same. But then you never knew what might suddenly flow down to you, a dead buffalo or a golden palanquin: you never knew, but could easily find out, just by waiting a little bit longer.
He didn’t marry the Chieftain’s daughter straight away. First he travelled with them for some months and learnt a little of their language and their ways. He made himself useful by being taller than most of the men, and found he had an unexpected talent for actually being able to ride horses. They found him calming, the horses that is, and settled easily around him. He became particularly adept at milking them, which was a skill highly prized by the nomads, because of his long fingers and warm hands. He became
a well-loved member of the tribe and, through working side-by-side with her, he came to love the Chieftain’s daughter, which made her very happy indeed.
The wedding was a joyous occasion and in celebration half a dozen other travelling tribes descended on this one corner of the plains and the biggest party Crepuscular had ever been invited to happened. Dancing went on late into the summer and rich presents were bestowed on the happy couple. Mostly rich presents of horse-milk, horse-cheese and horse-butter, but which in a dairyhorse economy were generous gifts indeed.
Shortly after the wedding Crepuscular's beautiful young wife became pregnant and in the spring of 1889 she gave birth to a son. To his lasting sadness there were complications with the birth and in the absence of advanced medical procedures and sanitation his wife died a few hours after holding her little baby boy for the first time. All Simone had to remind him of her was their son, who, out of respect for her and her people, he allowed the tribe to name. They gave him the traditional nomadic name of Rodney, which meant ‘Friend of Horses’ in their tongue.
In time it became apparent that the grasslands were filled with too much melancholy for Simone to consider staying much longer and so, with the blessing of his father-in-law, who understood heartbreak as well as any man does, he resumed his homeward journey home.
With his rucksack stuffed with horse-cheese and washcloths to help with the baby he set out, Rodney bouncing on his hip, toward the rising sun and away from the happy interlude of a life spent wandering in wide circles on the steppes.
Chapter 10
Education, Education & Education
As Quirkstandard read What I Did In India feelings of warmth and curiosity alternated through the grey matter of that original alma mater, his brain. This was, indeed, the thrill of learning – the best a man could get.
Unlike the pamphlets he’d read during the night, which were all of a more immediately practical nature (except for the one about the talking porpoise, which was just a true and tragic tale of the triumph of greed, villainy and pettiness over both human nature and nature’s unexpected miracles), the one he held in his hands here this morning imparted knowledge that he would most likely never be able to turn to his advantage. Quirkstandard wasn’t the sort of Englishman who was likely to set out for the subcontinent, for instance, and it is unlikely that, without doing so, he’d ever be able to put to use the contents of a long paragraph he enjoyed immensely, for example, about where best to stand in order to remain dry during the morning ablutions of a herd of elephants.
Crepuscular’s original pamphlet was filled with just such useful paragraphs as that, some with diagrams, some with drawings and all of them filled with quiet writing which never strayed into the hyperbolic, but which all the same managed to be gripping. It might’ve been his habit of becoming distracted in the middle of telling one anecdote and starting another, which in turn would become interrupted by a third, until finally a reader had no choice but to either read to the end with a breathless hopeful anticipation that the one particular story he or she wanted to discover the end of might actually be concluded somewhere, or to just let the experience of reading the pamphlet wash over them, as if Crepuscular were actually talking, and accept that you might never know the truth or the conclusion, but it’s been a really rather nice hour in an interesting man’s company all the same.
*
When the Crepusculars arrived in London they went straight to the Tourist Information Centre. Simone decided this would be a fine idea, following the advice he’d been given by a policeman who had grown tired of his questions.
He spent the morning waiting, with his two boys, in the waiting room thinking intensely. There wasn’t a queue, but he didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Every few minutes his face would light up and he’d stand and wander over to the little window behind which sat the Tourist Information Officer. She would look up from her desk, sigh and brace herself.
‘Excuse me madam,’ he’d begin, ‘could you tell me who it was who had the greater influence on Kant’s Theory of Transcendental Apperception? Was it Plato or Aristotle?’
Generally at this point the lady would remove her glasses, pinch the bridge of her nose, replace them and say, ‘I’m sorry sir, but I don’t know.’
‘Oh? Well, thank you all the same.’
‘Yes, thank you, sir.’
And Crepuscular would return to the bench, make a note in his notebook and resume his thinking.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ he would begin a few minutes later, ‘could you explain the point of the letter ‘C’ in the English alphabet?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The letter ‘C’, madam. It seems to me, from just a cursory examination of the language, to have no real value of its own. I was wondering if you might know of some?’
‘I must say, sir,’ she’d reply, ‘I really couldn’t tell you.’
‘Oh. Is that the same as saying you won’t tell me?’
‘I can’t tell you, sir.’
‘You’re unable?’
‘I just don’t know, sir.’
‘You don’t know if you’re able?’
‘No sir, I am quite certain that I am unable.’
‘Ah, so you mean you don’t know?’
‘No sir, I’m dreadfully afraid that I, with all due respect sir, don’t have a clue.’
‘Oh? Well, thank you for your time,’ he would say as he resumed his seat and his thinking once more.
The woman would tidy her small pile of commemorative maps of the London Borough of Hackney and sympathise with the Greeks of ancient Athens who had become so irritated with the questions of Socrates that they made him drink hemlock. She wished she had a little book that might tell her just what hemlock was, where she could purchase it and how it should be prepared for maximum speed and efficiency.
After a whole morning filled with the garnering of almost no new information at all he wondered if maybe there wasn’t a niche here that he could fill? He’d read a penny account of Socrates’ life too, quite possibly the same one the lady in the Tourist Information Office had read, except she’d read all the way to the end and knew the final results, whereas Simone had got as far as reading about Socrates’ endless questioning, the way he always helpfully pointed out the flaws and inconsistencies in his friends’ suggested answers, the way they always ended up saying, ‘Well, we don’t know, Socrates, why don’t you tell us … what is Truth (or Value (or Justice)) etc.?’ and how Socrates would always look at them sagely and say, ‘Well, to be honest, I don’t know either.’
Simone had put the booklet down at that point, astonished at the man’s tenacity and his honesty. He thought he recognised some of the same values in himself. The curiosity and the humbleness to not always believe he knew better than anyone else. What he missed out on by putting the book down at that point was how all the gentlemen of Athens would go home each evening feeling mightily pissed off at Socrates, with his pointless pontificating and habit of making everyone else look like a fool. Of course, Socrates always slept soundly, for much the same reason.
Crepuscular knew that like Socrates he didn’t know anything either, or rather that he didn’t know the answers, but he had quite a clear bead on the questions and the sort of questions that fascinated him. Maybe, he thought, like the big S., he ought to try to spread some of these questions about, maybe someone would work an answer out, or maybe an answer would just come to him at some point – but there would be no chance of finding any answers by never asking the questions. So he decided to write down (or to organise all the writing he had spent the best part of the last twenty years making) his thoughts, his observations, his experiences, his questions, his troubles and his opinions in the hope that if they were interesting to him, then they might be interesting to someone else too.
So, he got up one final time and walked over to the Tourist Information Office’s little window and asked the lady inside the booth whether she might have a map to hand which would show the premises
of a printer of some kind. He knew that the world had changed since Socrates’ day and that it wasn’t possible to do what he wanted to do by simply talking to people. This was the age of mass communication, of newspapers, books, magazines and penny dreadfuls.
After she’d said ‘No’ out of habit, she listened closer to his question and realised that at last he had grasped the true nature of her job. Sometimes all it takes, she thought to herself, is for a man to wait long enough and the truth will bob up.
Smiling she pulled a map from her little pile, circled a few addresses and handed it over the counter.
‘That’ll be a penny,’ she said, delighted to finally be earning her supper.
*
Crepuscular found a printer that same afternoon. He was happy to typeset and produce a pamphlet for a very reasonable fee. Now all they needed were some words. Simone sat down on the Embankment with his notebook in his lap and stared out at the sluggish black water and the lights that reflected in it from the buildings along the far bank and the rising moon in the sky. All he wrote, for a time, was his name in the top right hand corner. But then a little later he got to work and added the date.
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 8