Where We Are For Now, As We Seek Lore Re: The Monster's Whereabouts, Activities, Weaknesses, Proclivities, And Favourite Passages From The Hadith

11 safar 1328 A.H.

The villagers in Xrum raise pigs; they live in in an arid valley where most alimentary plants will not thrive and cattle grow over-lean and suffocate in the heat. The pigs fatten off stone-moss, which they root out, blindly, like infants to the dug. The Xrumi call the pigs "blatgolo," or, "wonderings," because they provide for humans so faultlessly: Their pig-milk sustains children and the elderly or infirm, especially when mixed with pig-blood; their pig-ears are worn as necklaces by proud, pig-hunting warriors; their pig-entrails serve, meanwhile, as garlands for the warriors' beauteous women, some of whom are merely failed warriors, pretending to be women, because, as they say, "to wear the pig-garland is easy / for one who has no nose."

At night, we steal into Xrum and try to determine which garland-wearers are women, and which dispensable men; then we steal the women and take them back to our camp, to teach of the Highest of High, and to delight with our manliness and weaponistic keenness. Frightening noises erupt in the arrid night, where stars cannot thrive, due to the clouds coming from the higher, much be-jungled plateaus whereon the Gyrosphyrinx dwells... The garlanded girls are taught from youth to wear their garlands at certain jaunty, smellier angles, whereby the men-folk root them out, gradiently, trying first one then the other in a sociable communion of trial-marriages (their word translates, weirdly, to "partnerships") and eventual love-bonds, which are strengthened by a Wine Dipping.

The wine of the Wine Dipping, of course, comes from distilled pigs'-blood and -juices, mixed with "alleviated dirt" (Petty Lt. Fariz's translation) and the rust of the Holy Nail, that thing stolen from the Xrumi's paramount enemies, the Xkuth.

The Xkuthi, meanwhile, have learned to instruct their women and faux-women to wear their garlands of pig-intestines (and, in the cases of Princesses and Baronesses, garlands of hams and medallions and other more savory elements) at exactly un-jaunty angles, to infuriate the Xrumi warriors. The more infuriated the Xrumi, the happier the Xkuthi, and so in Xkuth it is now fashionable--at the root of all fashion--to wear the most un-jaunty garlands conceivable, thus making them jaunty, in fact, to their Xkuthi wearers and considerers.

The garlands are not very tasty. Reports Savage Robbert, the gigantic Scot we picked up at sea after his galleon-mates threw him o'erboard for "rind-thievin', bummy-pinchin', and song-ruin'n'," as he puts it, that the garland-wearers are much tastier. (We chastised him for this, Al--h knows; but we reconditely wonder if his theories and strange, Savage manners are worth greater investigatory gusto than I have yet shown. Have delegated thinking on this manner to our most godly Friend, Shamz-of-Tashkent, brother in spirit of Shamz-of-Ishtifar, who passed on last week due to Guinea Dragon-Worm of the gut.)

The garland-wearers are also good at rooting out certain things for us about ourselves: Though they know absolutely nihil concerning the Beast and her Voice, we all sleep later and better when they are by, and they seem to prefer sleeping in our beds than sleeping in the beds of the warriors of Xrum, who tire them out with long-winded explanations of pig-hunting.

Since the women of Xrum don't speak a word of Arabian, Berber, Turkic, Grecian, Romani, Spanish, Yemeni, Axumite, Hebrew, Semitic, Armenian, Persian, Aramaic, Babylonian, Ethiopic, or Ge'ez, and since we speak neither Xrumi, Xkuthi, Xpang!h, X!sho#, Z!X@a, Quoz, nor "Applic," as we've come to call the flittering almost-language of the whirling White Apple People who worship their terrific, human-eating Gyrosphyrinx: Since we've no lingual commonality at all, for the nonce, we get along very well. We coo love-things and address our stolen bed-mates with physicalities. The interposition of "thievery" or "adultery" does not bother them, for every couple in the Land of the White Apple is a freely-loving one, and we are thieves, pirates, and monster-seeks, if we must be to complete the Word of the Friend.

...

I must now go to attend to a tragedy, which is a Captain's duty. Second Chief Warrant Sea-Lad Raqiq Gratha has been strangulated, fatally, by the intestinal cord of the beautiful Zarella'um, who resisted his use of her friend Zbaid as a second thieved-wife. O Jealousy, were that humans here were really immune to your wiles and painted charms! But, eventual reader who finds my vellum, realise this is not the work of sexual-envy, love-envy, or the envy of the stolen or the foreign or the friend--but envy of meat-garland! For Zbaid had the prettiest pork-roundels worn in the whole dusty Valley Of Hanging Sky-Birds, as Q!th-Woa-Zqaz roughly transliterates to, and Zarella'um could not stand to think that, of all the men who had loved her or her loved her great wide-hipped femaleness, of all the men she had loved, it would be the--to her eyes--indisputably wonderful Secn. Chf. Warnt. SL R. Gratha who would pick a "mere dangle of chopped shoulder-and-butt" over a "fortress-gate's chain" of "tend'rest, delicat'st inter-woven ankles-and-eye sockets..."

(Let it be said, Zarella'um, who we will have Mullah Shaj metaphorically garrotte, then exile back to boring Xrum tomorrow after morning prayers, is here wrong; her garland was in no way as juicy or praise-worthy, we think, as Zbaid's, not that it matters: We are universally repulsed by the garlands and demand the Zrumi lovelies take them off when the bed us!)

This whole affair reminds me...

[A small stain, probably of jackfruit, here obscures the Qu'ranic parable quoted as envoi. --Ed.]