The Parable Of The Chati, Now Seen, Child-Like, In Full Glory In The Wood-Land, Or Heath, Beyond The Vortex-Desert

30 safar 1328 A.H.

A chati (Felis mitis) was seen recently dragging a squid up a cliff, paw by paw, delirious with hunger but unwilling to consume its prey until entering the sufficiently mysterious, obfuscating bosom of darkness afforded to the cliff by a low-hanging bank of snapper-junipers, which are like normal, non-White Applean junipers, except they snap at you as you walk past. (The vile trees ignore, of course, the chati and its dumb aliment.)


Good-Dredging Samuel, a strongman and Jew with whom I have had many a laugh, told me that spotting a chati dragging a squid--or any impossibly juicy sea-life--is a sign of extreme good luck.

But Oliver Hadith, a despicable Angle who converted to Islam in order to marry my cousin, who is named Quite Pretty Sala, says that spotting an animal drag another animal up a cliff is bad luck. (Down a cliff, good luck, but only to sailors; to the rest of us, it is ambivalent or even ornery, stupid luck.)



...envious of this chati and his squid. Recalling a parable told us by Mama in the Early Days of existence, when we had not yet set off to pyrate ourselves a world from the Savages, Heathens, Pagans, Cross-Bearers, Monstres, Vampyres, Rivals, and Unlicensed Vintners. Mama told me that a chati once asked a djinn to explicate the origin and justification of Evil in a world created by awesome, limitless Good. The djinn told the chati to ask the prickling pear or Opuntia littoralis. The chati ran off and spoke to the pear, but learned nothing. Returning to the djinn, he asked what he'd done wrong. The djinn laughed and told the chati that pears are very hard of hearing, that he must lean closer and speak louder.

The chati leaned closer and closer to the pear, finally rubbing his face into the trunk of the plant, whereat the spikes guard the juicy organs inside. The spikes, of course, rubbed back!, burning into the cat's face, making it leap up in fright.

When the poor chati returned to the djinn to eat him, the djinn had turned into a kindly-smiling old man, who offered the wounded animal a dish of milk. "Do you see, chati," the djinn-man said, "to eat the fruit's juices, you must know the evil of its hair!"

...which always struck me as something crazy only a Mama would say, since fruit doesn't, generally speaking, have hair.

Still, the problem of Theodicy remains.

As we welter in the tall heat of the mountains above the dry hinter-plains, we can see a City loom in the distance, some days' travel off. The sun sets, and the city's russet, stone towers glitter like evil teeth on the sun's lowest jaw. What it holds for us, whether its inhabitants have heard of Law and Light, what they think of the Gyrosphyrinx and her beautiful but deadly song--we do not know.

But we know, thanks to a fleet vire from Savage Robbert, that roast-of-chati with pickled-squid-lips-and-sand delights the tongue, nose, and eyes (and who can say, perhaps the ears or lower manhood as well).