Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  139 Lawrence’s habit of muttering tenderly: Information on Lawrence comes from T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926; Adelaide: University of Adelaide Library, 2014, ebooks.adelaide.edu.au); Philip Walker, Behind the Lawrence Legend: The Forgotten Few Who Shaped the Arab Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (New York: Atheneum, 1990).

  139 the honeyed messages their progenitors had carried: Marius Kociejowski, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (London: Biblioasis, 2010).

  139 seized the wheat . . . starved: Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2007).

  140 “ ‘out-of-works,’ crooks, and undesirables”: De Beers, “Protection Report,” November 1930. Kleinzee Museum archives.

  140 and a trench known: “Picking Out Diamonds by Hand Along the Oyster Line.” Exhibit: series of clipped articles and photographs, Kleinzee Museum.

  140 “old, true love”: E. Reuning, “The Discovery of Namaqualand Diamonds: An Answer to Dr. H. Merensky’s Reply Published in January, 1929,” displayed in the Kleinzee Museum.

  141 “the stampede to the Diamond Coast”: Dr. Merensky, “How I Found the Richest Diamond Fields in the World,” Mining and Industrial Magazine, May 18, 1927.

  141 Ears sufficiently bent: Union of South Africa, Magistrate’s Office, Springbok, Namaqualand, “Certificate in terms of Section 62 of Act no. 11 of 1899,” October 7, 1927.

  141 “could bring chaos to the market”: “Merensky and Reuning.” Exhibit: series of clipped articles and photographs, Kleinzee Museum.

  141 promising to maintain: And thereby devising and instituting such notices as “Notice: Every Digger Shall Enter into This Register,” January 15, 1927. Kleinzee Museum archives.

  141 “a human story of hardship” . . . he died there alone: “Mr. Schlesinger Buys a Farm” (from Our Special Representative). Clipped article, Kleinzee Museum.

  142 “Were these gems tossed from a submarine . . .”: “Full Story of the Namaqualand Diamond Discoveries,” Mining and Industrial Magazine, May 18, 1927.

  148 Orpheus having trailed: Details of the Orpheus myth come from Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition (New York: Viking, 2018); Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by David Raeburn (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004); and Virgil, The Georgics of Virgil, translated by David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

  148 toasted ant heads and fetid dewdrops: The cuisine of the fairies also included the legs of mites, the brains of butterflies, and the thighs of fleas, a creampuff made of rainbows, and barleycorn beer.

  148 Greek funerary sculpture: Brittany Garcia, “The Symbolism of Birds on Ancient Greek Grave Steles,” classicsnewsneedsandnow.blogspot.com, November 5, 2013; and Janet Burnett Grossman, Greek Funerary Sculpture: Catalog of the Collections at the Getty Villa (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2001).

  148 Even the innumerable Furies: The Furies’ origins variously lie in the immaculate conception of Night herself, the miscarriages of the fetuses forged by Air and Mother Earth, and the coupling of the blood of Uranus’s castrated genitalia with the silt at the bottom of the sea into which the sky-godly bits were tossed.

  149 “With that, taking a cable”: Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1996).

  150 the bait traps of the cunning fowlers of the world: Prudentius, The Origin of Sin: An English Translation of the Hamartigenia, translated by Martha A. Malamud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). In the Hamartigenia, a cunning fowler sets his bait traps and “Some of the doves are attracted to the tempting food and are caught in the snares: they are strangled by cords or their wings are gripped by the sticky glue . . . The birds that refrain from turning their eyes toward the food fly off to the heavens, clapping their wings as they go; those trapped in the snares are captive, helplessly beating their wounded wings as they gaze in vain at the swift breezes.”

  150 “An impossible repetition”: Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Transgression and the Inexistent (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

  150 the sort of redundancy—chained to a suffocating hindsight: Such redundancy also plagued many other souls in the Tartarus abyss, but, when Orpheus plays his music, for a brief moment, the business of the underworld ceases. Tantalus—doomed to stand forever in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree that ever eludes his grasp, the water retreating whenever he stoops to sip from it—forgets, if only for a few seconds, his hunger and thirst. Sisyphus, forever doomed to roll his boulder uphill only to have it roll back down, is granted a brief respite, as he squats on his rock and eavesdrops on the song. Ixion, mad with guilt at having murdered his father-in-law, chained to a fiery solar wheel set to spin ad nauseam and infinitum in the corridors of Tartarus, sees, if only for the duration of Orpheus’s song, the horrible revolutions cease.

  150 “It is indeed the incompletion”: Sophie Chiari, Renaissance Tales of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

  BARTHOLOMEW VARIATION #5

  159 “The Soales of the feet . . . Madness”: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Natural History, in Ten Centuries (London, 1670). Available at archive.org.

  159 failed to cure . . . vengeful ghosts: Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. (London: Bream’s Buildings, 1901).

  CHAPTER 12: THIS SECURITY THING

  165 shot through the head: “Diamond Deals Gone Wrong, 1991.” Exhibit: plaque and article, Port Nolloth Museum.

  165 “highest number of rough diamonds secreted . . . suspect’s anus”: “Avoiding the X-Rays, Stealing Diamonds.” Exhibit: plaque and article, Port Nolloth Museum.

  165 “in the vicinity of the subject’s lower stomach”: “With Criminal Intent.” Exhibit: plaque and article, Port Nolloth Museum. The report also justified further invasive search policies: “over the years diamond thieves have repeatedly attempted to secrete [sic] contraband in every bodily crevice or orifice, including ears, mouths, foreskins, rectums, and even behind testicles.”

  167 They smuggle also the rotten edicts: Allan Anderson, “Pentecostals and Apartheid in South Africa During Ninety Years, 1908–1998,” Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research, September 11, 2000; and David Maxwell, “Historicizing Christian Independency: The South African Pentecostal Movement c. 1908–1960,” Journal of African History 40, no. 2 (July 1999): 243–64.

  168 the human brain contains magnetite: Robert O. Becker, Cross Currents: The Promise of Electromedicine, the Perils of Electropollution (New York: Penguin, 1990).

  168 “Skinner conducted his research on a group of hungry pigeons”: “Superstition: How Skinner’s Pigeon Experiment Revealed Signs of Superstition in Pigeons,” psychologistworld.com.

  BARTHOLOMEW VARIATION #6

  173 At a time like this, does he suddenly recall lily pads: As earlier in the text, this references the ocean voyages of HMS Beagle and the imagined lamplight of Darwin’s (and his pigeon companion’s) cabin; the First World War, during which the heroic pigeon Cher Ami, trained by the U.S. Army pigeoneers, saved the lives of the U.S. Army’s “Lost Battalion” in the loamy Argonne forest of France; and Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon (who reportedly spent some of her early days in the University of Chicago office of Professor Charles Otis Whitman, who doted on her and gave her comfort, especially during the great Chicago thunderstorm of 1885, which not only shook Professor Whitman’s office building, but also rattled the windows of the newly erected Home Insurance Building—the world’s first skyscraper, its iron skeleton initially drawing ridicule from the architectural community who dismissed it as “impractical” and “ludicrous”—and flushed the sewage of the Chicago River deep into Lake Michigan, all the way out to the city’s drinking water intake cribs). Martha spent her final days in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo, under the scant care of head zookeeper and former
circus elephant handler Salvator “Sol” Stephans, who, in the company of the dancers of the nearby Empress Burlesque Theater (where the G-string was invented), often stood drunk before Martha’s cage late at night, after hours, tossing sequins that had loosed themselves from the Empress dancers’ bustiers into the pagoda-shaped cage, which, at first, Martha would confuse for seed. As Martha tried to sleep, Sol and the dancers would routinely revel deep into the night at the Zoo Club restaurant, laughing amid the columns of the wraparound porch as the resident musicians, forced to work overtime, took their places beneath the bandstand, lifted their horns to their lips, and played their jazz amid the low groans of Pheasant Yard, the Monkey House, and the Carnivora Building. At some point during Martha’s last days in 1914, she had an apoplectic stroke. When visitors to the zoo came to see her, she was so slack that they often decided to throw sand and concessions—typically popcorn—at her in order to make her more interesting to them. Oftentimes, she appeared dead, flat on her back, until that thrown thing struck her breast and she was, once again, as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, “shocked . . . into” feeble “activity” (“The Days of the Last Passenger Pigeon,” August 18, 1914).

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