Farmer, Philip Jose - A Feast Unknown

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A Feast Unknown
A FEAST UNKNOWN
Volume IX of
The Memoirs of Lord Grandrith
edited by Philip José Farmer
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lord Grandrith has written nine volumes of autobiography, totaling close to a million and a half words.
Yet this volume, the latest, covering only a part of 1968, is the only one published. Lord Grandrith had
planned to publish all the volumes someday, when it became possible to reveal his true identity and true
story. However, Grandrith turned against the Nine who had given him the elixir of prolonged youth.
The first eight volumes are hidden in a place only Grandrith and his wife know. He made
arrangements through the editor to publish Volume IX after he had failed to get it published in England,
France, Sweden, South Africa, and at several houses in the United States. Grandrith states the Nine were
behind the rejections and the various “accidents” to and “losings” of the mss. he sent out.
Fortunately, he had met the editor at the home of a common friend in Kansas City, Missouri. The
editor did not then know the true name of James Claymore, as he was calling himself at the time. A letter
sent from Lima, Peru, told the editor of Claymore’s actual name and identity. It also outlined the danger
that Grandrith, his wife, and several others were in. The next letter came from Dublin, Ireland. The third
had no postmark and was left in the editor’s mailbox between midnight and six a.m. The editor sent his
reply to a man in Stockholm, Sweden, as requested. The ms. of Volume IX was mailed from Western
Samoa.
The editor has Americanized various English terms, changing bonnet into hood, petrol into gas, lorry
into truck, etc. The locations of various places in Kenya and Uganda were purposely made vague by
Grandrith. This was not done to protect the Nine but to protect those foolhardy people who might try to
seek out the Nine or the now-buried gold mines of the valley which Grandrith named Ophir.
In addition, the incident of the landing at Penrith is not quite accurate. Penrith has no airport. The
events after the landing did happen as described, but the airport was created by Grandrith to obscure the
actual event. He wants to protect a friend who set out lights on a meadow so the plane could land there.
Grandrith refuses to change the incident to bring it closer to reality. We can only respect his reasons
without understanding them.
In his last letter, Grandrith says that “almost nobody, will believe this. Not at this moment, anyway.
But events conceived and brought forth by the Nine will soon convince the world. I hope then that it will
not be too late for the world. Meanwhile, we are all alive and fighting, though doing more hiding than
fighting. And I have added another book to the autobiography.”
—Philip José Farmer
FOREWORD
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Since the first eight volumes of his memoirs have not yet been published, Lord Grandrith has written a
special foreword which encapsulates the early part of Volume I. Without this, the reader would be puzzled
by some of the references in this volume.
•
I was conceived and born in 1888.
Jack the Ripper was my father.
I am certain of this, although I have no evidence that would stand up in court. I have only the diary of
my legal father. He was, in fact, my uncle, although he was married to my mother.
My legal father kept a diary almost up to the moment of his death. Shortly after he had locked it
inside a desk, he was killed. His last written words recorded his despair because his wife had just died and
I, only a year old, was wailing for milk. And there were no human beings within hundreds of miles, as far
as he knew.
I alone have read the entire diary. I have never permitted anyone else to read any of the diary
preceding the moment when my uncle and my mother sailed from England for Africa.
My “biographer” would have been too horrified by the truth to have written it if I had been unkind
enough to reveal it to him. He was a romanticist and, in many ways, a Victorian.
He would have made up a story of his own, ignoring the real story, as he did with so many of my
adventures. He was interested mainly in adventure for its own sake, although he did describe my
psychology, my Weltanschauung. However, he never really transmitted the half-infrahuman cast of my
mind.
Perhaps he could not understand that part of me, although I tried to communicate it as well as I
could. He tried to understand, but he was human, all-too-human, as my favorite poet says. He could never
grasp, with the human hands of his psyche, the nonhuman shape of mine.
That part of the diary which I had forbidden others to read describes how my mother happened to be
with her husband in Whitechapel on that fog-smothered night. She had insisted on going with him to look
for his brother, who had escaped from the cell in the castle in the Cumberland County. Private detectives
had quietly tracked John Cloamby to the Whitechapel district of London. His brother, James Cloamby,
Viscount Grandrith, had joined the hunt. My mother, Alexandra Applethwaite, related to the noble
family of Bedford, had insisted on accompanying him.
My uncle objected to bringing his wife along for several reasons. The strongest was that his brother
had attempted to rape her when he had broken out of his cell after bending several iron bars and
uprooting them from their stone sockets. Only her screams and the prompt appearance of two
manservants armed with pistols had saved her. Alexandra, however, persisted in her insane belief that she
alone could make him surrender voluntarily when he was found. Also, she said that she alone could locate
him exactly. There was, she claimed, a psychic bond between them, “vibrations” which enabled her to
point toward and track him as if she were a human lodestone.
I use the word “insane” in describing this belief because later developments (described by my
“biographer” and by me in Vol. I) revealed her mental instability.
She also said that if she were not allowed to go with her husband in the search, she would inform the
police and the newspapers of what had happened.
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My uncle gave in to her. He had a horror of publicity of any kind and especially of this kind. Also, he
might have been arrested for concealing evidence of murder. He was, in fact, an accessory after the fact of
murder, if, indeed, there was a fact.
My uncle believed that his brother was responsible for the disappearance of two whores from villages
only a few miles from the estates. A severed breast was found on the shore of a tarn; this was all. The
locals presumed that somebody had done away with the two women and buried them somewhere. My
uncle connected his brother to the murders because of his ravings while in the cell about killing all
whores, including his mother. Especially his mother.
His mother, of course, was safe from him. She had killed herself when James, John, and Patrick, her
three sons, were quite young. Her husband had killed himself because he suspected that a Swedish
gentleman was the father of the boys and that she may have killed herself because her conscience made
life unbearable. Their aunt raised the three boys and was much loved by them. But John Cloamby never
forgave his mother, although he had never spoken of her until his madness took him.
Later, my uncle believed that John was Jack the Ripper. Before his breakdown, John had been a
medical doctor. His real motive in becoming a physician was not in curing the sick. He wanted to know
everything about the human body because he intended to find out the secret of immortality. To this end,
he had meant to learn much more of chemistry and botany than any medical doctor had ever known.
This obsession was supposed to be the cause of his sickness. Instead, it was the symptom.
It was ironic that he did not find that secret but that I, his son, did. I supposed this, only to have to
change my mind.
If my mother and uncle had not gone to Africa primarily to put my father behind them, I would not
have become immortal (have a very long prolonged youth, to be exact). Or so I thought.
I am immortal in the sense that I will be thirty-two years of age in body for a very very long time.
However, accident, murder, and suicide can reduce me to the rotting corpse which others usually become
before their hundredth birthday.
I omitted disease from the fatal list. The same elixir that gives me a potentiality of 30,000 years or
more also preserves me from disease. This does not, however, explain my seeming immunity from all the
diseases so common in tropical Africa before I became thirty-two.
My uncle’s diary recounts in an elegant style, reading like a prose Racine, a ride through the dark fog
of the night on March 21. He glimpsed his brother after hours of driving through the mists, and he leaped
out of his carriage and ran shouting after him. My mother sat shivering with cold and fear in the carriage
while she tried to peer through the wet grayness. A gas lamp nearby shot a ghastly half-light through the
swirls. She was alone. Her husband had not wanted a coachman because he might report the peculiar
occurrences of the evening to the police.
For a while, there was silence. Then she heard the clicking of hard heels on the stones. A man
appeared like a ship sailing through the fog. He stopped and turned, and by the dim light she saw her
husband’s mad brother.
When James Cloamby returned, he found his wife unconscious on the seat of the carriage. Her skirt
and petticoats were up over her face, and her undergarments had been cut off, probably with the scalpel
that later took apart the bodies of the Whitechapel whores in such grisly fashion.
My uncle was to reason that his brother had not killed her because she was not a whore. But John did
hate his older brother, and he may have raped Alexandra for revenge, or possibly because she was not a
whore and so was better than his mother, whom, in one part of him, he must still have loved. Also, since
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John loved Alexandra, or had said he loved her, it was possible that this was his act of love. Who knew
what the madman was thinking?
My uncle lit a match when she did not reply to his cry of alarm. He saw the white legs, stripped of
the black stockings, and the black, exceptionally hairy vagina out of which oozed my father’s spermatic
fluid and some of her blood.
The strange thing, to me, anyway, was that this was the first time my uncle had seen any of his wife’s
body below the shoulders.
Although they had been married for a month, the two had not had any sexual intercourse beyond
some kissing and slipping his hand, down her bodice and over her breasts. The day of the wedding, she had
begun menstruating and would not stop. He, being a Victorian, could not bed her while she was “unclean.”
(Although there were plenty of Victorians who would have done so.)
The day before John broke loose from the cell, Alexandra had ceased to flow. My uncle (as recorded
in his diary) was ecstatic. He could quit masturbating now and could stop eyeing his wife’s maid.
Then my father-to-be got out of his cell in the north tower of the half-ruined Castle of Grandrith. He
and his wife were too upset for some time to consider sexual intercourse. At least, she was.
Now, in the London fog, James Cloamby pulled his wife’s skirts down and revived her. She became
hysterical, and not until the next day did he discover that his brother had attacked his wife.
His wife seemed to recover. A few months afterward, they sailed for West Africa, where James was
to conduct a secret investigation for the Colonial Office. (This was not the investigation which my
“biographer” described, however. He knew the true reason, but he chose to give a spurious one.)
Alexandra now refused to have intercourse with James. She said that she was too “ashamed,” felt “too
unclean,” and, besides, wanted to make certain that she was or was not pregnant. If she was to have a
child, she wanted to be certain of its paternity.
Before they sailed, the first known murder by Jack the Ripper occurred on Easter Tuesday, April 3rd,
1888, on Osborn Street. My uncle heard about this (it was not reported in the Times) and wondered in his
diary if it could be the work of his brother. Later, he was certain that it was. Yet, so great was his dread of
the shame and disgrace if John should be caught, he did not inform the police.
He did continue the search on his own through private detectives. When he sailed for Africa, he sent
an anonymous note to the police, describing his brother but not naming him. This note is not in the
official records. Research has convinced me that it was suppressed by politically powerful influences.
My father disappeared when Jack the Ripper disappeared. It was not until 1968, the year of this
narrative, that I found out what had happened to him.
Alexandra Grandrith was finally able to accept her husband in bed. But by then she was too big with
child. My uncle continued to suffer and then backslid, as he put it, to masturbation and, once, a few days
before sailing, to the maid. These necessary discharges caused much breast beating in private and many
mea culpas.
The events that led to the Grandriths being stranded on the West African coast are familiar to the
readers of my “biographer.” The reality was somewhat different, but the result was much as depicted in
the romances based on my life. James Cloamby built a strong house on the shore near the jungle, and they
survived the first 20 months.
I was born November 21, 1888, at 11:45 p.m.
My mother’s mind was never thereafter quite in Africa. She spent most of her time in a dream
England, a country much better than the one she knew in reality, I’m sure. Despite this, she was very
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competent in taking care of me, if I am to believe my uncle’s diary. James could not make love to her then
because it would have been too much like taking advantage of an idiot. So my poor uncle suffered, and I
think he may have been glad when death came at the hands of the chief of a tribe of The Folk. Any horror
he felt would have been for his nephew, a 12-month-old baby crying for food and for his mother’s milk.
I was to get no more of that because she had died in her sleep a few hours before my uncle was killed.
I did get a mother’s milk, though it was not quite human milk.
1
The morning of March 21, 1968, was a fine morning. I was seventy-nine years old and felt, and looked,
thirty. The sun woke me up that morning. Or so I thought. Sometimes the African sun sneaks over the
horizon like an old lion on the prowl, the mists diffracting its rays into a mane. I awoke as if I had been
tickled on the nose with a hair from that mane.
The silence was like a breath on my face. It was the silence that had quietly awakened me.
The whinnying of horses, the bellowing of cattle, the squawking of chickens, the chittering of the
monkeys were compressed within lungs and sealed by mouths afraid to open.
The voices of the cooks, house servants, and yard men were there, but noiseless. They hung in the
sky, turned to cold blue air. I could sense them fluttering the windpipe.
Fear?
Or stealth by some and fear of others?
Treachery.
Perhaps.
Jomo Kenyatta had said that I was the only white man he had ever respected. What he meant was:
feared.
During the so-called Mau-Mau revolution, he told his men to stay away from me. My own tribe, the
blacks who had initiated me with blood-letting and buggering into their tribe and who had selected me as
their chief, hated the Agikuyu. And they loved me. Not as a brother but as a demigod. They would have
died to a man to defend me.
Besides, Kenyatta knew that though I was white, I was even more African than he. After all, I was
adopted and raised by The Folk. My blood-brothers and warriors, the original tribesmen, had almost all
died off. The survivors were creaking-boned whitehairs. I had been given the choice of becoming a citizen
of this African state and declaring the source of my wealth or getting out. Old Kenyatta felt strong enough
now to send me that ultimatum. Even though he was no longer the titular head of state, his voice was
behind the order.
I had refused to do either. And so I had waited. But I had waited so long for action to be taken that I
had become a little careless.
The sun was no longer an old lion. It was the red eye of Death, the drunken always-dry sot who had
thirsted for me for almost 80 years.
Now the red eye was bisected by my penis, which reared with a piss hard-on. I was lying on my back,
naked, and the scarlet ball climbed up the shaft and was on its way to being balanced atop it.
From some distance, there was a click.
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The sky was ripped as if it were rotten old cloth.
The sun was on top of the head of my penis, seeming almost to spurt out.
I knew what the ripping sound was the moment I heard it, and I knew what the click had been.
As if it were red seed, the sun burst open from my penis. It disappeared in smoke. The walls flew
apart as if they had become a flock of cranes disturbed by an eagle. The smoke poured into me and filled
me to the backs of my eyeballs. The noise was squeezed out of me.
I was turned inside out like a glove. I was a tuning fork trying to find the correct resonance.
The first shell may have struck just outside the bedroom window. The second shell may have
exploded at the end of my bed. By one of those freaks and coincidences that have caused many to mock
my biographer, but have actually happened to me, the blast lifted my spring and mattress and me upwards
and backwards and out the window behind me.
I must have landed in a pile of wood and plaster and bricks. I was still on my mattress, which was by
what was left of the veranda. I crawled slowly out of the pile, like the naked body of a tortoise working
through its shattered shell. I felt but could not hear other shells. None of these came close enough to
damage me; they must have been striking other parts of the house. Through the smoke, I could see the
stone foundations and these were sending off chips of stone and also pieces of wood were breaking off and
flying into the air. Machine guns and rifles were trying to shred away all the stone and brick and mortar
and wood and anything of flesh which the shells might have missed or failed to utterly destroy. Rock
fragments struck me in many places.
I was half-stunned, but I had one thought. That was to get to the refuge prepared for such an
emergency. More smoke poured over, obscuring my vision and making me cough. I had, however, seen
that the thin stone shell which was actually a doorway, an exit, to the refuge, had split open. I reached
inside the portion of foundation still standing, felt the steel handle, turned it, and slid inwards.
Even as I closed the door it swung in hard, propelled by a bullet. I was in darkness and utter silence. I
groped around until I found the oxygen bottles and cracked them to make sure they had a sufficient
supply. I couldn’t hear the hissing, so I felt out the nozzles. Cool air struck my palm.
I decided to use the lamp for a moment and examined the room. It was a box 12 feet by 12 by 8. It
was double-walled steel with fiber glass insulation between the walls. It contained the oxygen bottles, five
gallons of distilled water, medical supplies, some cans of food, pistols, 2 rifles, and ammunition. The main
entrance was through a trapdoor in the bedroom above, but the two small exits could be used as
entrances. The refuge had been built thirty years before and updated now and then, hence, the fiber glass
stuffing. I had built it at my wife’s insistence, who had pointed out that we would have been safe a
number of times if we had had the refuge. So I had built it and it had not been used until now. In fact, I
had almost neglected replacing the empty oxygen and water bottles and over-aged cans.
I hoped that no one outside there knew about the box. Since it had been built, I had taken great pains
to get the stores into it unobserved and to never speak of it to anyone besides my wife. If the enemy got
hold of an old Bandili who remembered it, and the old one talked, I would be as helpless as an elephant in
a pit.
While I crouched in a corner, I discovered that I had spouted jism over my right leg. This probably
occurred when the first shell exploded.
Hemingway and his imitator, Ruark, are usually full of shit when they speak of Africa. Or, as the
Yankees say, they didn’t know shit from shinola. But they were sometimes accurate in their observations
of animals, particularly leopards, shooting sperm at the moment of violent death. Ejaculation is a form of
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protest of the body against death. The cells want to live forever, and they will try to impregnate the air in
desperate copulation, to perpetuate themselves when faced with the end.
That is my explanation. I, personally, do not fear death, but my cells are not as rational as I.
What women do at the moment of suffering a violent death, I do not know. I never heard of a
woman shooting out an ovum. Perhaps they do this, but the egg is so small it’s unnoticed. Of course, there
are so many days when no egg is available, and a man always has sperm. It’s possible women substitute
voice for sperm; their ejaculations are screams.
I waited in the corner. The box was dark now because I had turned out the lamp to conserve the
battery. The silence continued for a long time. I had a sharp headache which I endured for some time and
then took two aspirins to relieve. The relief did not come. From time to time, I felt the vibrations of
explosions against my back. These, I imagine, were direct hits. The enemy certainly believed in overkill.
To use a cannon against one man seemed superfluous, but it was also guaranteed to destroy me entirely.
Like so many guarantees, it was worthless. So far. One or more of the direct hits must have blasted away
part of the outer steel wall. Another direct hit removed the fiber glass and the inner wall. I felt as if I were
buried under tons of dirt, and I lost consciousness.
2
When I came to, I could hear somewhat. My sense of smell was as sharp as ever, that is, much more
effective than a human’s but not quite as good as a bloodhound’s. (The reasons for this are explained in
Volume I along with another explanation, in the appendix of Volume I, of my YY chromosomal
mutation.)
There was, stronger than anything, the knife of gunpowder smoke. There was the needle of widely
scattered food. There was the saw-edge of pulverized plaster and rent wood. Faint, the odor of human
sweat and of a dog.
I opened my eyes. It was high noon. The sun blazed through a small hole in the mass of wood and
bricks covering the ripped open upper corner of the box. I was covered with smoke, ashes, and dirt. The
five gallon bottles of water had broken and spilled their contents over the room to make a fine mud. The
cans were broken open. I think shrapnel had bounced off the walls and struck them. The weapons were
buried under dirt that had fallen in.
On top of a pile of mud was a hunting knife. This was the knife I had found on my uncle’s skeleton in
the house he had built. I was ten then and had found out how to gain entrance. There were bones over the
floor; The Folk invading the house had eaten my uncle and mother before leaving it and taken some legs
and arms with them. I had used the knife much; hence, its thinness. It was now more of a stiletto than a
hunting knife, but I cherished it and kept it in my bedroom, though I had not carried it for many years. A
shell had lifted it up and cast it through the opening in the box before the opening was covered up again.
It seemed like a gift to me and cheered me up, despite my headache and earache.
I was also thirsty. I chewed some of the mud to get moisture, and I collected a thimbleful of food
from the cans. Then I pushed the mud into the corner opposite the opening, smoothed out my tracks, and
pushed the mud over me. Hours passed. My hearing sharpened. Drums beat. Voices shouted and laughed.
I smelled liquor, faintly. I heard cattle mooing and bellowing and then smelled blood. After a while, smoke
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drifted to me and the odor of cooking flesh.
Once, I heard footsteps and the rattle of wood being pushed aside. Several men spoke in the tongue of
the Agikuyu. I could imagine them looking down into the box. One said something about going down to
see what it was and what was in it. Another said something about tossing a grenade into it just for fun. I
did not move.
They talked among themselves in a much lower voice and agreed to come back tonight when no one
would notice them and climb down. Perhaps the Englishman had hidden money down there, or the gold
he was rumored to have in great quantities.
It became darker. The drums and shouts and stamping feet of dancing men became louder. The moon
paled the night and made a skeleton of the wood laid over the opening. I arose, stretched and bent until
my muscles were loose again, and then stepped on a ledge and opened a little door.
This was hidden by more debris, but I could see well enough through it. Capering figures in front of
great bonfires were lifting bottles from my liquor stores or shooting at the empties when they tossed them
into the air. Those who still wore their clothes were in the uniform of the army of Kenya. There was also a
number of my own tribesmen, all young fellows.
At the nearest fire, 60 feet away, three men were holding down my pet bitch, a German shepherd
named Esta. A young Bandili, Zabu, naked except for an ostrich feather headdress—which he had no right
to wear according to tribal law—was holding the bitch by the flanks. His hips moved back and forth
rapidly while the soldiers and Bandili laughed and clapped their hands in rhythm with Zabu’s strokes. The
dog was howling in agony and struggling frantically.
Zabu was a leader of the youth of the villages in this area. He hated all whites, and most of all he
hated me. I don’t bother to explain my position or views very often, but I had done so with the young
racists of my tribe. I tried to explain that the color of my skin was not relevant. I was not as other men,
black or white. My rearing by The Folk had resulted in a lack of conditioned reflexes concerning skin color
among men.
Nor had I exploited the blacks, as other whites had. Actually, the Bandili had no cause to complain
about any whites. I had kept whites from possessing, or even living in, this relatively broad territory. I had
also kept the Agikuyu from attempting to run the Bandili out. And I had spent much money to establish
local schools, bring in qualified teachers, and send young Bandili, male or female, to colleges as distant as
England and America.
All of this made no difference to Zabu and his fellows. I was a white. I must go.
I don’t like to be forced into doing anything. On the other hand, it would have been a great relief to
get away from my duties and obligations as the owner of the Grandrith plantation and as chief of the
Bandili. Especially, it would be a relief to get away from the overcrowdedness, noisiness, bickering, and
hatefulness of the humans here.
Once, there were only a few small tribes here and much room to roam and great herds. Now . . .
I was stubborn, and I stayed.
I had recently sent my wife off to England to shop, visit friends in London, and inspect the ancestral
estate in the Lake District. Thus, I did not have to worry about her. I had only myself to take care of, and
that is the way I like it.
Zabu was not content with my death. He had to revenge himself on the poor dog because she was
mine. There was nothing I could do for the moment to help her. I did, however, crawl out to hide behind
a pile of bricks and stones. I did not want to be caught in the box if the three who planned on searching
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the box did return. I was covered with dirt and mud, so my white skin did not show. And I had the
hunting knife in my hand.
After a while, an officer pushed the onlookers aside and violently yanked Zabu off the dog. Zabu
arose and staggered back, turning, and I saw, by the light of the fire, that his belly and genitals were
covered with blood. The slit of the animal had not been large enough for him, so he had used a knife.
The officer shouted at Zabu in his tribal speech and then in Swahili and drew his pistol. I thought he
was going to shoot Zabu, but he turned and held the muzzle a foot from the bitch’s head and fired. She
jerked once.
Zabu had held up his hands in a pleading gesture, evidently thinking that the officer was going to kill
him. The officer was a Mugikuyu and so hated the Bandili.
Seeing that he was spared, Zabu laughed and took a bottle from a man and swaggered off. The officer
spat at Zabu’s back. I didn’t know whether he interfered with Zabu because of humane feelings or because
he wanted to bug a Bandili.
I waited. I was hungry and thirsty, but I would be stupid to try to stroll out through that crowd in the
light of the bonfires. If I could get past the fires, I might pass for one of them. I was taller than most, but a
few were the equal of my six foot three, and at a distance, in the dark, I was muddied enough to look
black-skinned. There was no chance just then, however.
I fixed my eyes on Zabu and hated him. After a while, as if he were hypnotized by me, he lurched
very near. He was mumbling to himself, his head swinging low. I rose up behind him and chopped him on
the side of the neck with the edge of my palm and dragged him back behind the pile. Nobody had noticed
us. Everybody was looking at a group of young Bandili dancing a spear dance around the dead dog.
3
Zabu awoke on his back with my hand over his mouth and my knife at his throat. His eyes widened like
water boiling over. He shook. With a rip of gas, he shot out a long turd. His breath stank of my whiskey
and of terror. The blood on his belly and genitals stank of the terror and agony of the bitch, and of the
sperm he had loosed.
“Tell me how this happened, Zabu,” I said. “Otherwise, I kill you right now.”
He was willing to buy a few minutes of life, although his grandfather and father would have died
rather than tell an enemy anything. His lips spewed Bandili. His eyes rotated as if he were looking for some
device to appear from the air and give him a handhold whereby he could be whisked away from my knife.
Perhaps he thought I had been killed and my ghost had come back.
He had gone through school and college with my assistance. He had denied believing in ghosts. He
was an educated man, he had said. But he believed. The hindbrain is almost always stronger than the
forebrain, though in a subtle fashion.
Zabu said that the Kenyan army had moved in with the assistance of some of the young Bandili. At
the last moment, the older Bandili in the nearby village had found out about the attack. They were told to
keep quiet or die. Three of the old men had tried to warn me.
One was Paboli, the Spear-Launcher, Zabu’s grandfather. All three did die.
A strange thing happened then. Zabu, speaking of his grandfather’s death, wept.
file:///G|/rah/Philip%20Jose%20Farmer%20-%20A%20Feast%20Unknown.html (9 of 110) [2/17/2004 11:18:00 AM]
A Feast Unknown
The army units had moved in on three fronts, leaving the western open because I was returning from
a hunting trip in that direction. After I got home, the units quietly closed the gap.
During the night, with utmost care, a cannon and six .50-caliber machine guns were hauled in by foot
soldiers. The trucks were kept far out in the savanna to avoid noise. The young Bandili had told the army
officers that the stories of my supersensitive hearing and sense of smell were not exaggerated.
Zabu talked on and on, as if enough words would build up a wall thick enough to bar my knife. He
tried to justify his treachery, although he did not call it that. He called it patriotism and Africanism.
Humans are always labeling deeds. No doubt, he thought he was right. But he was moving his
thoughts around in two boxes labeled BLACKS and WHITES, just as the whites he hated—with the
exception of myself—moved their thoughts around in their two boxes.
What happened next surprised me. I did not intend to do it and had no thought of doing any such
thing.
Looking back, I see that the treachery, so unexpected in those who had been my people for 60 years,
combined with the shock of the explosions, had literally loosened something in me.
Rather, loosed it.
It had always been in me but shoved down as deep as deep was.
I stunned him with the knife hilt. While he lay half-unconscious, I cut his tongue off close to the root
to keep him from screaming. The pain brought him to his senses. He tried to sit up, and his mouth gaped.
The blood shot out.
I kissed him. One, to drink the blood, which I needed because I was thirsty. Two, to stop any sound
he might have made. Three, I was compelled to do so.
The blood was salty and unpleasant, as if it contained the essence of a sea-bottom built up from the
decomposing flesh and bones of a million poisonous fish. It contained a trickle of tobacco, which I hate. In
other words, his blood was like most of the humans from whom I have drunk.
But the blood was strengthening, and I began to feel an excitement similar to that which I felt when
in battle or making a kill. However, when it became more intense, it was obviously sexual.
Quickly, before I climaxed, I cut Zabu open with a stroke down his belly. It was not deep enough,
however, to cut into the intestines. I know my anatomy well.
As the knife sank into the flesh, I spurted over his belly and the knife.
For a moment, I lost control. My arm straightened, and the knife went in to the hilt.
He writhed briefly as he died. I shook like a tree in a storm.
I sat back, gasping. I wiped off my knife on his hair. I wondered what had made me behave thus. I had
intended to stick my penis into the wound and do to him what he had done to my dog.
4
Finally, I quit trying to explain to myself my strange compulsion. I am a relentless hunter but only if there
is a scent or track to follow.
I waited. The noise increased, and the celebrators staggered even more. When the moon had
quartered the sky, the inevitable fights broke out between the Agikuyu and the Bandili. The few officers
not thoroughly drunk separated the fighters and sent them on their way. Some soldiers, however, staggered
file:///G|/rah/Philip%20Jose%20Farmer%20-%20A%20Feast%20Unknown.html (10 of 110) [2/17/2004 11:18:00 AM]
摘要：

AFeastUnknownAFEASTUNKNOWNVolumeIXofTheMemoirsofLordGrandritheditedbyPhilipJoséFarmerEDITOR’SNOTELordGrandrithhaswrittenninevolumesofautobiography,totalingclose oamillionandahalfwords.Yetthisvolume,thelatest,coveringonlyapartof1968,istheonlyo epublished.LordGrandrithhadplannedtopublishallthevolume...

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