Fritz Leiber - The Black Gondolier And Other Stories

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The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

Fritz Leiber

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Fritz and me

If you ask any long-time aficionado of fantastic literature to name his favorite authors, the fan of science

fiction will likely name Fritz Leiber somewhere in his top five. So, too, will the devotee of sword and

sorcery mention the wonderful tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as among the very best that the

genre has to offer. There have been many excellent writers of fantasy over the years, many excellent

writers of science fiction, and many fine writers of horror stories. Arguably, the very best of them all was

Fritz Leiber.

Leiber was the author that showed us what sword and sorcery fiction can and should be with his

Lankhmar stories that spanned nearly fifty years. In the realm of science fiction, his Change War saga has

stood the test of time and remains a classic in the genre. As far as horror fiction, most readers will place

Our Lady of Darkness andConjure Wife at or near the top of any list of great novels in the field. Then

of course we have the socio-political satire ofA Specter is Haunting Texas and the classicX-files- like

paranoia ofYou're All Alone , written years before Chris Carpenter was a twinkle in his father's eye.

I'm afraid that I won't be able to fill this introduction with many personal anecdotes, I met the author on

only a few occasions and our conversations often revolved around the malady of alcoholism and it's

peculiar affinity for the creative sort. A subject that holds considerable fascination for those for whom it's

a life or death issue, but to the average person it's a rather dull topic. I do treasure the fact that I was able

to meet and chat with the man whose influence on my own reading and writing was so profound.

Like many of us who came on their first genre fiction at an early age in the sixties, I'd quickly discovered

the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard; I was quite impressed, but when I stumbled

on a book entitledSwords Against Deviltry , I was transported ... This was what I'd been looking for! I

quickly used my meager allowance money to snap up every book that I could find that had the magical

name of Leiber on it. This included some terrific science fiction, the novelGather, Darkness, and finally a

handful of anthologies where I discovered “Smoke Ghost", “The Dreams of Albert Moreland", and

“Spider Mansion” for the first time.

Over the years I managed to accumulate as close to a complete collection of Leiber's work as you're

likely to find. And for years I assumed that all his work was readily attainable, if not perpetually in print.

The book that you hold in your hands is a result of a curious serendipity, that there is no author living or

dead that I would be more honored to pen an introduction about than Fritz Leiber goes without saying.

That I would've thought this to be an unlikely occurrence is an understatement. After all, Leiber belongs

to that pantheon of great writers that have shaped and molded the field of fantastic literature in the latter

half of the twentieth century and the works of such individuals are perpetually kept in-print and readily

accessible by one and all. Aren't they?

Apparently the answer to that question is in the negative. When Steve Savile first approached me to

verify the appearances of several Leiber stories in conjunction with a chapbook that he was preparing for

the British Fantasy Society I was amazed at just how much material was no longer available to modern

readers. A few e-mails later and we were busily at work preparing two volumes that would bring the

“lost Leiber” stories back into print. Even with the space of two volumes to work with it's been

impossible to include everything that we would have liked to. We've chosen to focus on those stories that

most modern readers would have the most difficult time locating with a couple of familiar tales included.

Some stories we considered far too significant to be excluded and you will see some of these familiar

tales interspersed in these two volumes. For the most part, our focus has been to restore to print the most

significant of Leiber's weird tales that have been unavailable for twenty or more years.

The first thing that became apparent to me as we assembled this collection was just how early in his

career Leiber had established himself as a master of the weird tale. While he did write a few stories that

could be considered standard fare for the pulps, (such as “Spider Mansion” with its weird-menace

excesses) as an example. From the very start his stories took on a modern attitude quite unlike that of his

contemporaries inWeird Tales , who were busily scrambling to pen stories of improbably-named cosmic

monstrosities and babbling aliens in a misguided homage to H.P. Lovecraft...

While Leiber's earliest stories can be classified as updates of the tropes of earlier horror fiction, there is a

decided modernity about them. A primary concern is that of the science fiction writer concerned about

technologies gone horribly awry. In the early story “Spider Mansion", for all its classic gothic trappings it

is at its core a tale of medical experiments gone wrong. The same can be said of the much later (1950)

tale “The Dead Man” In both cases, it's not thescience that is at fault for the dire consequences, but

rather the fallible human element that manages to muck things up badly.

Both of these stories foreshadow Leiber's later work where he fuses the concerns of the twentieth

century with the mold of the classic weird tale of decades past. In “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” he

considers the “vampirism” of advertising as a quite literal reality. In “The Black Gondolier", “The Man

Who Made Friends with Electricity", and “Mr. Bauer and the Atoms” present our modern forms of

energy in a new and terrifying light. Leiber's “mad” scientists are not mad in the sense of the old villains

from the old Universal films from the 1930's, but rather they are often as not blinded by an arrogance and

absolute certainty in their own wisdom that they fall afoul of their own inventions and concepts. In fact it

could be said of Leiber that among his contemporaries only Philip K. Dick was his equal at writing

science fiction that was truly horrifying.

The theme of humanity as but a bit player in the cosmic drama was an idea that Leiber often made use of

in ways far more inventive than that of many of his contemporaries. Whereas H.P. Lovecraft took this

idea in one direction, Leiber made the concept of an unknowable and hostile cosmos far more personal

in stories such as “The Dreams of Albert Moreland". In this story a chess master is drawn into a game

with frighteningly high stakes against an opponent reminiscent of one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones.

(Cthulhu as a galactic gamesmaster)? Not exactly, though in the hands of a lesser writer the story could

easily have become that ludicrous. In Leiber's hands it's more about the all-consuming nature of the

obsessive and the danger of actually getting what we want. Albert Moreland wants a suitable opponent

to test his skill on and he gets exactly that.

Leiber's correspondence with Lovecraft is interesting in that of all of Lovecraft's correspondents only

Leiber seemed immune to the desire to begin banging out slavish pastiches of the mythos created by the

elder writer. In fact, it may well be that Leiber's correspondence led him to an early realization that the

horrors of the past were just that, the past and would need a new and vital approach in the latter half of

the century. It was not until considerably after Lovecraft's death that Leiber penned an actual mythos

story. In this area as in other sub-genres, he excelled and his “The Terror from the Depths” is perhaps the

standout piece in Edward Berglund's watershed anthologyDisciples of Cthulhu .

Taken as a whole, this book chronicles Leiber's remarkable achievements in weird fiction, stories that are

thoroughly modern examples of the horror story, tales such as “The Thirteenth Step” which uses the

unlikely device of a speaker's “qualification” talk at an AA meeting to tales such as “Lie Still, Snow

White", a masterpiece of erotic horror written years before the term had degenerated into a marketing

label. There's a variety and richness here that could only have come from an author as gifted as Fritz

Leiber.

John Pelan

Midnight House, 2000

THE BLACK GONDOLIER

Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the

café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark's Plaza.

I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took

himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to

take seriously my story of Daloway's strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power

which was menacing him. The police even make light of the very material clues which I pointed out to

them.

Or else Daloway was taken off, grimly and against his will, to parts utterly unknown and blackly horrible.

That is my own theory, especially on lonely nights when I remember the dreams he told me of the Black

Gondolier.

Of course the canal is a rather small one, showing much of its rough gravel bottom strewn with rusted

cans and blackened paper, except when it is briefly filled by one of our big winter rains. But gondolas did

travel it in the illusion-packed old days and it is still spanned by a little sharply humped concrete bridge

wide enough for only one car. I used to cross that bridge coming to visit Daloway and I remember how

I'd slow down and tap my horn to warn a possible car coming the other way, and the momentary

roller-coaster illusion I'd get as my car heaved to the top and poised there and then hurtled down the

opposite dusty slope for all of a breathless second. From the top of the little bridge I'd get my first

glimpse of the crowded bungalows and Daloway's weed-footed trailer and close behind it the black

hunch-shouldered oil well which figured so strangely in his dreads. “Theirclosest listening post,” he

sometimes called it during the final week, when he felt positively besieged.

And of course the Grand Canal is pretty dismal these days, with its several gracefully arching Bridges of

Sighs raddled with holes showing their cement-shell construction and blocked off at either end by heavy

wire barricades to keep off small boys, and with both its banks lined with oil wells, some still with their

towering derricks and some—mostly those next to beach side houses—with their derricks dismantled ,

but all of them wearily pumping twenty-four hours a day with a soft slow syncopated thumping that the

residents don't hear for its monotony, interminably sucking up the black petroleum that underlies Venice,

lazily ducking and lifting their angularly oval metal heads like so many iron dinosaurs or donkeys forever

drinking—donkeys moving in the somnambulistic rhythm of Ferde Grofe's Grand-Canyon donkey when

it does its sleepyhee ... haw. Daloway had a very weird theory about that—about the crude oil, I

mean—a theory which became the core of his dreads and which for all its utter black wildness may still

best explain his disappearance.

And La Gondola Negra is only a beatnik coffee house, successor to the fabulous Gashouse, though it did

boast a rather interesting dirty drunken guitarist, whose face always had blacker smears on it than those

of his stubbly beard and who wore a sweatshirt that looked like the working garment of a coal miner and

whom Daloway and I would hear trailing off (I won't venture to say home) in the small hours of the

morning, picking out on his twangy instrument his dinky “Texas Oilman Suite", which he'd composed very

much in imitation of Ferde Grofe's one about the Grand Canyon, or raucously wailing his eerie beatnik

ballad of the Black Gondola. He got very much on Daloway's nerves, especially towards the end, though

I was rather amused by him and at the same time saw no harm in his caterwauling, except to would-be

sleepers. Well, he's gone now, like Daloway, though not by the same route ... I think. At least Daloway

never suggested that the guitarist was one oftheir agents. No, as it turned out,their agent was a rather

more formidable figure.

And they don't call the plaza St. Mark's, but it was obviously laid out to approximate that

Adriatic-lapped area when it was created a half century ago. The porticos still shade the sidewalks in

front of the two blocks of bars and grimy shops and there are still authentic Venetian pillars, now painted

salmon pink and turquoise blue—you may have seen them in a horror movie calledDelirium where a

beautiful crazy slim Mexican girl is chased round and round the deserted porticos by a car flashing its

headlights between the pillars.

And of course the Venice isn't Venice, Italy, but Venice, USA—Venice, California—now just another

district and postal address in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, but once a proud little beach side

city embodying the laughably charming if grotesque dream of creating Venice, Italy, scaled down but

complete with canals and arched bridges and porticos, on the shores of the Pacific.

Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the

outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power, that did in Daloway. It is a place of dreams, not only the

tinseled ones, but also the darker sort such as tormented and terrified my friend at the end.

For a while toward the beginning of this century the movie folk and real estate agents and retired farmers

and the sailors from San Pedro went to spanking-new Venice to ride the gondolas—they had authentic

ones poled by Italian types possibly hired from Central Casting—and eat exotic spaghetti and gambol

romantically a bit with their wide-hatted long-skirted lady friends who also wore daring bathing suits with

bare arms and rather short skirts and long black stockings—and gamble too with piled big

yellow-backed green bills—and, with their caps turned front to rear, roar their wooden-spoked or

wire-wheeled open touring cars along the Speedway, which is now a cramped one-way street that

changes direction every block.

But then Redondo and Laguna and Malibu called away the film folk and the other people with fat

pocketbooks, but as if to compensate for that they struck oil in Venice and built wells almost

everywhere, yet despite this influx of money the gambling never regained its éclat, it became just bingo for

housewives, and the Los Angeles police fought that homely extramural vice for a weary decade, until

sprawling LA reached out a pseudopod one day and swallowed Venice up. Then the bingo stopped and

Venice became very crowded indeed with a beach home or a beach apartment or a beach shack on

every square yard that wasn't sidewalk or street—or oil well!—and with establishments as disparate as

Bible Tabernacle and Colonic Irrigation Clinic and Mother Goldberg's Home for the Aged. It would have

been going too far to have called Venice a beach slum, but it was trending in that direction.

And then, much later, the beats came, the gutter geniuses, the holy barbarians, migrating south in driblets

from Big Sur and from North Beach in Frisco and from Disillusion, USA, everywhere, bringing their ratty

art galleries and meageravant garde bookstalls and their black-trousered insolent women and their Zen

and their guitars, including the one on which was strummed the Ballad of the Black Gondola.

And with the beats, but emphatically not of them, came the solitary oddballs and lone-wolf intellectuals

like Daloway.

I met Daloway at a check-out desk of the excellent Los Angeles downtown public library, where our

two stacks of books demonstrated so many shared interests—world history, geology, abnormal

psychology, and psychic phenomena were some of them—that we paused outside to remark on it. This

led to a conversation, in which I got some first intimations of his astonishing mentality, and eventually to

my driving him home to save him a circuitous bus-trip, or, more likely, as I learned later, a weary

hitch-hike.

Our conversation continued excitingly throughout most of the long drive, though even in that first

exploratory confabulation Daloway made so many guarded references to a malefic power menacing us all

and perhaps him in particular, that I wondered if he mightn't have a bee in this bonnet about World

Communism or the Syndicate or the John Birch Society. But despite this possible paranoid obsession, he

was clearly a most worthy partner for intellectual disputation and discourse.

Toward the end of the drive Daloway suddenly got nervous and didn't want me to take him the last few

blocks. However, I overcame his reluctance. I remarked on the oil well next to his trailer—not to have

done so would have implied I thought he was embarrassed by it—and he retorted sardonically, “My

mechanical watchdog! Innocent-looking ugly beast, isn't it? But you've got to keep in mind that much

more of it or of its domain is below the surface, like an iceberg. Which reminds me that I once ran across

a seemingly well-authenticated report of a black iceberg—"

Thereafter I visited Daloway regularly in his trailer, often late at night, and we made our library trips

together and even occasional brief expeditions to sleazily stimulating spots like La Gondola Negra. At

first I thought he had merely been ashamed of his battered aluminum-walled home, though it was neat

enough inside, almost austere, but then I discovered that he hated to reveal to anyone where he lived, in

part because he hesitated to expose anyone else to the great if shadowy danger he believed overhung

him.

Daloway was a spare man yet muscular, with the watchful analytic gaze of an intellectual, but the hands of

a mechanic. Like too many men of our times, he was amazingly learned and knowledgeable, yet unable

to apply his abilities to his own advancement—for lack of connections and college degrees and because

of nervous instabilities and emotional blockages. He had more facts at his fingertips than a Ph. D.

candidate, but he used them to buttress off-trail theories and he dressed with the austere cleanly neatness

and simplicity of a factory hand or a man newly released from prison.

He'd work for a while in a machine shop or garage and then live very thriftily on his savings while he fed

his mind and pondered all the problems of the universe, or sometimes—this was before our meeting and

the period of his dreads—organized maverick mental-therapy or para-psychology groups.

This unworldly and monetarily unprofitable pattern of existence at least made Daloway an exciting

thinker. For him the world was a great conundrum or a series of puzzle boxes and he a disinterested yet

childishly sensitive and enthusiastic observer trying to unriddle them. A scientist, or natural philosopher,

rather, without the blinkered conformity of thought which sometimes characterizes men with professional

or academic standing to lose, but rather with a fiercely romantic yet clear-headed and at times even

cynical drive toward knowledge. Atoms, molecules, the stars, the unconscious mind, bizarre drugs and

their effects, (he'd tried out LSD and mescaline), the play of consciousness, the insidious interweaving of

reality and dream (as climatically in his dreams of the Black Gondola), the bafflingly twisted and folded

strata of Earth's crust and man's cerebrum and all history, the subtle mysterious swings of world events

and literature and sub-literature and politics—he was interested in all of them, and forever searching for

some unifying purposeful power behind them, and sensitive to them to a preternatural degree.

Well, in the end he did discover the power, or at least convinced himself he did, and convinced me too

for a time—and still does convince me, on lonely nights—but he got little enough satisfaction from his

knowledge, that I know of, and it proved to be as deadly a discovery, to the discoverer, as finding out

who is really back of Organized Crime or the Dope Traffic or American Fascism. Gunmen and poisoners

and scientifically-coached bombers would be loosed against anyone making any of the last three

discoveries; the agent who did away with Daloway was murkier-minded and deadlier even than the man

who shot Kennedy.

But I mentioned sensitivity. In many ways, it was the hallmark of Daloway. He'd start at sounds I couldn't

hear, or that were blanked out for me by the ceaseless ponderous low throb of the oil wells, especially

the one a few yards beyond the thin wall of this trailer. He'd narrow his eyes at changes in illumination

that didn't register on my retinas, or dart them at little movements I usually missed. He'd twitch his nostrils

for special taints that to me were blanketed, at least in Venice, by the stench of the petroleum and the

salt-fishy reek of the ocean. And he'd read meanings in newspaper articles and in paragraphs of books

that I would never have seen except for his pointing them out, and I am not exactly unsubtle.

His sensitivity was almost invariably tinged with apprehension. For example, my arrivals seemed always

to startle and briefly upset him, no matter how quiet or deliberately noisy I made them, and regardless of

how much he seemed afterwards to enjoy my company—or at the very least the audience-of-one with

which I provided him. Indeed this symptom—this jitteriness or jumpiness—was so strong in him that,

taken together with his solitary fugitive mode of life and his unwillingness to have his dwelling known, it

led me to speculate early in our relationship whether he might not be in flight from the law, or the criminal

underworld, or some fearsomely ruthless political or sub-political organization, or from some less tangible

mafia.

Well, considering the nature of the power Daloway really feared, its utter black inhumanity, its

near-omnipresence and almost timeless antiquity, his great apprehension was most

understandable—provided of course that you accepted his ideas, or at least were willing to consider

them.

It was a long time before he would unequivocally identify the power to me—give me a specific name to

hisThey. Perhaps he dreaded my disbelief, my skeptical laughter, even feared I would cut him off from

me as a hopeless crank. Perhaps—and this I credit—he honestly believed that he would subject me to a

very real danger by telling me, the same danger he was darkly shadowed by, or at least put me into its

fringes—and only took the risk of doing so when the urge to share his suspicions, or rather convictions,

with someone capable of comprehending them, became an overpowering compulsion.

He made several false starts and retreats. Once he began, “When you consider the source of the

chemical fuels which alone make modern civilization possible, and modern warfare too, and the

hope—or horror—of reaching other planets—” and then broke off.

Another time he launched off with, “If there is one single substance that has in it all of life and the

potentiality for life, all past life by reason of its sources and all future life by the innumerable infinitely

subtle compounds it provides—” and then shut tight his lips and opened them only to change the subject.

Another of these abortive revelations began with, “I firmly believe that there is no validity whatever in the

distinction between the organic and the inorganic—I think it's every bit as false as that between the

artificial and the natural. It's my absolute conviction that consciousness goes down to the level of the

electrons—yes, and below that to the strata of the yet-undiscovered sub-particles. The substance which

before all others convinces me that this is so, is—"

And once when I asked him without warning, “Daloway, whatis it you're afraid of, anyhow?” he replied,

“Why, the oil, of course,” and then immediately insisted he was thinking of the possible role of

hydrocarbons and coal tars—and their combustion products—in producing cancer.

I had better state as simply as possible Daloway's ideas about the power, as he finally revealed them to

me.

Daloway's theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude

oil—petroleum—was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern

lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or

sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and

even enforced the development of modern technological civilization. Created from the lush vegetation and

animal fats of the Carboniferous and adjoining periods, holding in itself the black essence of all life that

had ever been, constituting in fact a great deep-digged black graveyard of the ultimate eldritch past with

blackest ghosts, oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly

pulsing beneath Earth's stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled

rocky tanks and coursing through myriad channels and through spongy rocky bone, until a being evolved

on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself. When man had appeared and had attained

the requisite sensitivity, and technical sophistication, then oil-like some black collective unconscious—had

begun sending him its telepathic messages.

“Daloway, this is beyond belief!” I burst out here the first time he revealed to me his theoryin toto .

“Telepathy by itself is dubious enough, but telepathic communication between a lifeless substance and

man—"

“Do you know that many companies hunting oil spend more money for dowsers than they do for

geologists?” he shot back at me instantly. “For dowsers and for those psionic-electronic gadgets they call

doodlebugs. The people whose money's at stake and who know the oil lands in a practical way believe in

dowsing, even if most scientists don't. And what is dowsing but a man moving about on the surface until

he gets a telepathic signal from ... something below?"

In brief, Daloway's theory was that man hadn't discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn't

struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact with

Venice.

Everyone admits that oil is the lifeblood of modern technological culture—its automobiles and trucks and

airplanes, its battleships and military tanks, its ballistic missiles and reekingly fueled space vehicles. In a

sense Daloway only carried the argument one step further, positing behind the blood a heart—and behind

the heart, a brain.

Surely in a great age-old oil pool with all its complex hydrocarbons—the paraffin series, the asphalt

series, and many others—and with its subtle gradients of heat, viscosity, and electric charge, and with all

its multiform microscopic vibrations echoing and re-echoing endlessly from its lightless walls, there can be

the chemical and physical equivalent of nerves and brain-cells; and if of brain-cells, then of thought. Some

computers use pools of mercury for their memory units. The human brain is fantastically isolated, guarded

by bony walls and by what they call the blood-brain barrier; how much more so subterranean oil, within

its thick stony skull and earthen flesh.

Or consider it from another viewpoint. According to scientific materialism and anthropologic determinism,

man's will is an illusion, his consciousness but an epiphenomenon—a useless mirroring of the atomic

swirlings and molecular churnings that constitute ultimate reality. In any such world-picture, oil is a far

more appropriate primal power than man.

Daloway even discovered the chief purpose animating oil's mentality, or thought he did. Once when we

were discussing spaceflight, he said suddenly, “I've got it! Oil wants to get to other planets so that it can

make contact with the oil there, converse with extraterrestrial pools—fatten ontheir millennial strength,

absorbtheir wisdom..."

Of course a theory like that is something to laugh at or tell a psychiatrist. And of course Daloway may

have been crazy or seeking a dark sort of laughter himself. I mean it is quite possible that Daloway was

deceiving and mystifying me for his own amusement, that he elaborated his whole theory and repeatedly

simulated his dreads simply as part of a long-drawn-out practical joke, that he noted a vein of credulity in

me and found cruel delight in fooling me to the top of my bent, and that—as the police insist—even the

starkly material evidence for the horror of his disappearance which I pointed out to them was only a final

crude hoax on his part, a farewell jest.

Yet I knew the man for months, knew his dreads, saw him start and shiver and shake, heard him

rehearse his arguments with fierce sincerity, witnessed the birth-quivers of many of his ideas—and I do

not think so.

Oh, there were many times when I doubted Daloway, doubted his every word, but in the end his

grotesque theory about the oil did not elicit from me the skepticism it might have from another hearing it

elsewhere—perhaps, it occurs to me now, because it was advanced in a metropolis that is such a strange

confirmation of it.

To the average tourist or the reader of travel brochures, Los Angeles is a gleaming city or vast glamorous

suburb of movie studios and orange groves and ornate stucco homes and green-tiled long swimming

pools and beaches and now great curving freeways and vast white civic centers and sleekly modern

plants—aviation, missile, computer, research and development. What is overlooked here is that the City

of the Angels, especially in its southern reaches stretching toward Long Beach, is almost half oil-field.

These odorous grim industrial barrens interweave elaborately with airfields and showy tract housing

developments—with an effect of savage irony. There is hardly a point from which one cannot see in the

middle or farther distance, looming through the faintly bluish haze of the acrid smog, a hill densely studded

with tall oil derricks. Long Beach herself is dominated by Signal Hill with oil towers thick as an army's

spears and cruel as the murders which have been committed on its lonely slopes.

The first time I ever saw one of those hills—that near Culver City—I instantly thought of H. G. Wells’

War of the Worlds and of his brain-heavy Martians on their lofty metal tripods wherewith they strode

ruthlessly about the British countryside. It seemed to me that I was seeing a congeries of such tower-high

beings and that the next moment they might begin to stride lurchingly toward me, with something of the

feeling, modernistically distorted, of Macbeth's Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.

And here and there along with the oil derricks, like their allies or reinforcements, one sees the gleaming

distillation towers and the monstrous angular-shouldered cracking plants with muscles of knotted pipe,

and the fields of dull silver oil tanks, livid in the smog, and the vaster gas tanks and the marching files of

high-tension-wire towers, which look at a distance like oil derricks.

And as for Venice herself, with the oil's omnipresent reek, faint or heavy, and with her oil wells

cheek-by-jowl with houses and shacks and eternally throbbing, as if pulsing the beat of a vast

subterranean chemic heart—well, it was only too easy to believe something like Daloway's theory there.

It was from the beach by Venice, in 1926, that Aimee Semple McPherson was mysteriously vanished,

perhaps teleported, to the sinisterly-named Mexican town of Black Water—Agua Prieta. The coming of

the illusioneers to Venice, and of the beatniks—and of the black oil,aceite prieto —all seemed alike

mindless mechanic movements, or compulsive unconscious movements, whether of molecules or people,

and in either case a buttressing of Daloway's wild theory—and at the very least an ironic picture of

modern man's industrial predicament.

At all events the black savage sardonicism of that picture, along with Daloway's extreme sensitivity, made

it easy to understand why his nerves were rasped acutely by the Ballad of the Black Gondola, as the

black-smeared lurching beatnik guitarist came wailing it past the thin-walled trailer in the small hours of

the night. I heard it only two or three times and the fellow's voice was thick to unintelligibility, though

abominably raucous, so it was mostly from Daloway that I got the words of the few scattered lines I

remember. They were a half-plagiarized melange of ill-fitted cadences, but with a certain garishly eerie

power:

Oh, the Black Gondola's gonna take you for a ride

With a cargo of atom bombs and Atlases and nightmares...

The Black Gondola's gonna stop at your door

With a bow-wave of asphalt and a gravel spray ...

The Black Gondola'll ... get ... you ... yet!

Even of those five lines, the second comes—with a few changes of word—from a short poem by Yeats,

the fifth derives from Vachel Lindsay'sThe Congo , while the Black Gondola itself sounds suspiciously

like the nihilism-symbolizing Black Freighter in Brecht's and Weill'sThe Three-Penny Opera .

Nevertheless, this crude artificial ballad, in which the Black Gondola seems to stand for our modern

industrial civilization—and so, very easily, for petroleum too—may well have shaped or at least touched

off Daloway's dreams, though his Black Gondola was of a rather different sort.

But before I describe Daloway's dreams, I had better round out his picture of the power which he

believed dominated the modern world and, because he was coming to know too much about it, menaced

his own existence.

According to Daloway, oil had intelligence, it had purpose ... and it also had its agents. These beings,

Daloway speculated, might be parts of itself, able to move independently man-shaped and man-sized for

purposes of camouflage, composed of a sort of infernal black ectoplasm or something more material than

that—a darkly oleaginous humanoid spawn. Or they might be, at least to begin with, living men who had

become oil's worshipers and slaves, who had taken the Black Baptism or the Sable Consecration—as he

put it with a strange facetiousness.

“The Black Man in the Witch-cult!” he once said to me abruptly. “I think he was a forerunner—spying

out the ground, as it were. We have to remember too that oil was first discovered, so far as the modern

world is concerned, in Pennsylvania, the hexing state, though in another corner than the Dutch

territory—at Titusville, in fact, in 1859, just on the eve of a great and tragic war that made fullest use of

new industrial technologies. It's important to keep in mind, incidentally, that the Black Man wasn't a

Negro, which would have made him brown, but simply a man of Caucasian features with a dead-black

complexion. Though there are dark brown petroleums, for that matter, and greenish ones. Of course

many people used to equate the Black Man with the Devil, but Margaret Murray pretty well refuted that

in herGod of the Witches and elsewhere.

“Which is not to say that the Negro's not mixed up in it,” Daloway continued on that occasion, his

thoughts darting and twisting and back-tracking as rapidly as they always did. “I think that the racial

question and—as with space flight—the fact that it's come to the front today, is of crucial significance.

Oil's using the black as another sort of camouflage."

“What about atomic energy? You haven't brought that in yet,” I demanded a little crossly, or more likely

nervously.

Daloway gave me a strange penetrating look. “Nuclear energy is, I believe, an entirely separate

subterranean mentality,” he informed me. “Helium instead of marsh gas. Pitchblende instead of pitch. It's

more introspective than oil, but it may soon become more active. Perhaps the conflict of these two

vampiristic mentalities will be man's salvation!—though more likely, I'm afraid, only a further insurance of

his immediate destruction."

Oil's dark agents not only spied, according to Daloway, but also dispersed clues leading to the discovery

of new oil fields and new uses for oil, and on occasion removed interfering and overly perceptive human

beings.

“There was Rudolf Diesel for one, inventor of the all-important engine,” Daloway asserted. “What

snatched him off that little North Sea steamer back in 1913?—just before the first war to prove the

supremacy of petro-powered tanks and armored cars and zeppelins and planes. No one has ever begun

to explain that mystery. People didn't realize so well then that oil is as much a thing of the salt

water—especially the shallows above the continental shelves—as it is of the shores. I say that Diesel

knew too much—and was snatched because he did! The same may have been true of Ambrose Bierce,

who disappeared at almost the same time down in the oil lands between Mexico and Texas, though I

don't insist on that. The history of the oil industry is studded with what some call legends, but I believe are

mostly true accounts, of men who invented new fuels, or made other key discoveries, and then dropped

out of existence without another word spoken. And the oil millionaires aren't exactly famous for

humanitarianism and civilized cosmopolitan outlook. And every oil field has its tales of savagery and its

black ghosts—the fields of Southern California as much as the rest."

I found it difficult—or, more truthfully, uncomfortable—to adjust to Daloway's new mood of piled

revelations and wild sudden guesses, in contrast to his previous tight-lipped secrecy, and especially to

these last assertions about a black lurking infernal host—here, in the ultramodern, garishly new American

Southwest. But not too difficult. I have never been one to be dogmatically skeptical about preternatural

agencies, or to say that Southern California cannot have ghosts because its cities are young and philistine

and raw that sprawl across so much of the inhospitable desert coast and because the preceding Amerind

and Mission cultures were rather meager—the Indians dull and submissive, the padres austere and cruel.

Ghostliness is a matter of atmosphere, not age. I have seen an unsuccessful subdivision in Hollywood that

was to me more ghostly than the hoariest building I ever viewed in New England. Only thirty years ago

they had scythed and sawed down the underbrush and laid out a few streets and put in sidewalks and a

water pipe and a few hydrants. But then the lot-buyers and home-builders never materialized and now

the place is a wilderness of towering weeds and brush, with the thin-topped streets eroded so that at

some points they are a dozen feet below the hanging under-eaten sidewalks, and the water pipe is

exposed and rusting and each hydrant is in the midst of a yellow thicket and the only living things to be

seen are the tiny darting lizards and an occasional swift sinuous snake or velvet dark shifty tarantula and

whatever else it is that rustles the dry near-impassable vegetation.

Southern California is full of such ghost-districts and ghost-towns despite the spate of new building and

hill-chopping and swamp-draining that has come with the rocket plants and television and the oil

refineries and the sanatoria and the think-factories and all the other institutions contributing to the area's

exploding population.

Or I could let you look down into Potrero Canyon, an eroded earthquake crack which cuts through

populous Pacific Palisades, another postal address in Los Angeles. But I could hardly lead you down into

it, because its sides are everywhere too steep and choked with manzanita and sumac and scrub oak,

where they don't fall away altogether to the clay notch of its bottom. Trackless and almost impenetrable,

Potrero Canyon dreams there mysteriously, the home of black foxes and coyotes and silently-soaring

sinister hawks, oblivious to the bright costly modern dwellings at its top—“that deep romantic chasm ... a

savage place ... holy and enchanted,” to borrow the words of Coleridge.

Or I could invite you on any clear day to look out across the Pacific at the mysterious, romantically

crested Santa Barbara Islands—all of their 218,000 acres, save for Santa Catalina's 55,000, forbidden

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