Excerpt: ‘Cloud Atlas’
Thursday, 7th November — Beyond the indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their manufacturer, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsize Beaver, shoveling & sifting the cindery sand with a teaspoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten-spot yards aside. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility. His nationality was no surprise. If there be any aerie indeed desolate, or isle sol distant, that one may there repair unchallenged by an Englishman, ‘t is not down on any map I ever saw.
Had the repair misplaced anything on that blue shore ? Could I render aid ? Dr. Goose shook his head, knotted loose his ‘kerchief & displayed its contents with net pride. “ Teeth, sir, are the enamel grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this arcadian strand was a cannibals ‘ banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The tooth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones. But these base molars, sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how ? An craftsman of Piccadilly who fashions denture sets for the nobility pays handsomely for homo gnashers. Do you know the price a quarter syrian pound will earn, sir ? ” I confessed I did not. “ Nor shall I enlighten you, sir, for ‘t is a professional mystery ! ” He tapped his nose. “ Mr. Ewing, are you acquainted with Marchioness Grace of Mayfair ? No ? The better for you, for she is a cadaver in petticoats. Five years have passed since this harridan besmirched my name, yes, with imputations that resulted in my being blackballed from Society. ” Dr. Goose looked out to sea. “ My peregrinations began in that dark hour. ” I expressed sympathy with the sophisticate ‘s plight. “ I thank you, sir, I thank you, but these ivories ” — he shook his ‘kerchief — “ are my angels of redemption. Permit me to elucidate. The Marchioness wears alveolar consonant fixtures fashioned by the afore-mentioned doctor. following christmas, just as that scented She-Donkey is addressing her Ambassadors ‘ Ball, I, Henry Goose, yes, I shall arise & declare to one & all that our hostess masticates with cannibals ‘ gnashers ! Sir Hubert will challenge me, predictably, ‘Furnish your evidence, ‘ that peasant shall roar, ‘or grant me satisfaction ! ‘ I shall declare, ‘Evidence, Sir Hubert ? Why, I gathered your mother ‘s teeth myself from the spittoon of the South Pacific ! hera, sir, here are some of their fellows ! ‘ & fling these very tooth into her tortoiseshell soup tureen & that, sir, that will grant me my gratification ! The twittering wits will scald the icy Marchioness in their news sheets & by next season she shall be fortunate to receive an invitation to a Poorhouse ball ! ” In haste, I bade Henry Goose a beneficial day. I fancy he is a Bedlamite. Friday, 8th November — In the ill-bred shipyard below my window, sour progresses on the jibboom, under Mr. Sykes ‘s directorship. Mr. Walker, Ocean Bay ‘s lone taverner, is besides its principal timber merchant & he brags of his years as a victor shipwright in Liverpool. ( I am now versed enough in Antipodese etiquette to let such improbable truths lie. ) Mr. Sykes told me an entire workweek is needed to render the Prophet- einsteinium “ Bristol fashion. ” Seven days holed up in the Musket seems a black sentence, yet I recall the fangs of the banshee tempest & the mariners lost o’erboard & my present misfortune feels less acute. I met Dr. Goose on the stairs this dawn & we took breakfast together. He has lodged at the Musket since middle October after voyaging here on a brazilian bottom, Namorados, from Feejee, where he practiced his arts in a deputation. immediately the doctor awaits a long-overdue australian sealant, the Nellie, to convey him to Sydney. From the colony he will seek a position aboard a passenger ship for his native London. My sagacity of Dr. Goose was unfair & premature. One must be cynical as Diogenes to prosper in my profession, but cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues. The doctor has his eccentricities & recounts them gladly for a dram of portuguese pisco ( never to excess ), but I vouchsafe he is the only other valet on this latitude east of Sydney & west of Valparaiso. I may even compose for him a letter of initiation for the Partridges in Sydney, for Dr. Goose & beloved Fred are of the lapp fabric. Poor weather precluding my dawn out, we yarned by the peat fuel & the hours sped by like minutes. I spoke at duration of Tilda & Jackson & besides my fears of “ gold fever ” in San Francisco. Our conversation then voyaged from my hometown to my holocene notarial duties in New South Wales, therefore to Gibbon, Malthus & Godwin via Leeches & Locomotives. Attentive conversation is an cream I lack sorely aboard the Prophetess & the doctor is a authentic polymath. furthermore, he possesses a big army of scrimshandered chessmen whom we shall keep busy until either the Prophetess ‘s deviation or the Nellie ‘s arrival.
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Saturday, 9th November — sunrise bright as a silver dollar. Our schooner however looks a deplorable picture out in the Bay. An indian war canoe is being careened on the shore. Henry & I struck out for “ Banqueter ‘s Beach ” in holy-day temper, happily saluting the maid who labors for Mr. Walker. The heavy miss was hanging laundry on a shrub & ignored us. She has a tinge of black lineage & I fancy her beget is not far removed from the hobo camp engender. As we passed below the indian hamlet, a “ hum ” aroused our curiosity & we resolved to locate its source. The settlement is circumvallated by a interest wall, so decayed that one may gain entrance at a twelve places. A hairless gripe raised her head, but she was toothless & dying & did not bark. An out ring of ponga huts ( fashioned from branches, earthen walls & entangle ceilings ) groveled in the lees of “ grandee ” dwellings, wooden structures with carve header pieces & vestigial porches. In the hub of this greenwich village, a public cane was under way. Henry & I were the only two Whites confront, but three castes of spectating Indians were demarked. The captain occupied his toilet, in a feather cloak, while the tattoo gentry & their womenfolk & children stood in attendance, numbering some thirty in full. The slaves, duskier & sootier than their nut-brown masters & less than half their number, squatted in the mud. such connatural, bovine torpor ! Pockmarked & pustular with haki-haki, these wretches watched the punishment, making no answer but that bizarre, beelike “ hum. ” Empathy or execration, we knew not what the noise signified. The flog passkey was a Goliath whose human body would daunt any frontier prizefighter. Lizards mighty & small were tattooed over every edge of the beast ‘s muscular structure : — his hide would fetch a all right price, though I should not be the man assigned to relieve him of it for all the drop of O-hawaii ! The hapless prisoner, hoarfrosted with many coarse years, was bound naked to an A-frame. His body shuddered with each excoriating lash, his back was a vellum of bloody runes, but his insensible face bespoke the repose of a martyr already in the care of the Lord. I confess, I swooned under each drop of the lash. then a peculiar thing occurred. The beat savage raised his slump question, found my eye & fall me a attend of eldritch, amicable knowledgeable ! As if a theatrical performance performer saw a long-lost ally in the Royal Box and, undetected by the audience, communicated his recognition. A tattoo “ blackfella ” approached us & flicked his nephrite dagger to indicate that we were unwelcome. I inquired after the nature of the prisoner ‘s crime. Henry put his arm around me. “ Come, Adam, a fresh man does not step between the beast & his kernel. ” Sunday, 10th November — Mr. Boerhaave sat amidst his conspiracy of believe ruffians like Lord Anaconda & his garter snakes. Their sabbath “ celebrations ” downstairs had begun ere I had risen. I went in search of shaving water & found the tavern slop with Tars awaiting their twist with those poor indian girls whom Walker has ensnared in an impromptu whorehouse. ( Rafael was not in the debauchers ‘ number. ) I do not break my Sabbath debauched in a whorehouse. Henry ‘s sense of repulsion equaled to my own, so we forfeited breakfast ( the maid was undoubtedly being pressed into alternative service ) & set out for the chapel service to worship with our fasts unbroken. We had not gone two hundred yards when, to my alarm, I remembered this journal, lying on the board in my room at the Musket, visible to any bibulous boater who might break in. Fearful for its condom ( & my own, were Mr. Boerhaave to get his hands on it ), I retraced my steps to conceal it more disingenuously. Broad smirk greeted my return & I assumed I was “ the devil being spoken of, ” but I learned the true cause when I opened my door : — to wit, Mr. Boerhaave ‘s ursine buttocks astraddle his Blackamoor Goldilocks in my bed in flagrante delicto ! Did that devil Dutchman apologize ? Far from it ! He judged himself the injured party & roared, “ Get ye hence, Mr. Quillcock ! or by God ‘s B — five hundred, I shall snap your crafty Yankee beak in two ! ” I snatched my diary & clatter downstairs to a riotocracy of gaiety & ridicule from the White savages there gathered. I remonstrated to Walker that I was paying for a private room & I expected it to remain private even during my absence, but that scoundrel merely offered a one-third dismiss on “ a quarter-hour ‘s gallop on the comeliest filly in my stable ! ” Disgusted, I retorted that I was a conserve & a father ! & that I should rather die than abase my dignity & decency with any of his poxed whores ! Walker swore to “ decorate my eyes ” if I called his own beloved daughters “ whores ” again. One toothless garter snake jeered that if possessing a wife & a child was a one merit, “ Why, Mr. Ewing, I be ten clock time more pure than you be ! ” & an unobserved handwriting emptied a tankard of sheog over my person. I withdrew ere the melted was swapped for a more flinty projectile. The chapel service bell was summoning the God-fearing of Ocean Bay & I hurried thitherwards, where Henry waited, trying to forget the holocene foulnesses witnessed at my lodgings. The chapel service creaked like an erstwhile bathtub & its congregation numbered little more than the digits of two hands, but no traveler ever quenched his thirst at a desert oasis more thankfully than Henry & I gave worship this morning. The Lutheran collapse has lain at lie in his chapel ‘s cemetery these ten winters past & no ordained successor has so far ventured to claim captainship of the altar. Its denomination, therefore, is a “ rattle bag ” of christian creeds. biblical passages were read by that half of the congregation who know their let- ters & we joined in a hymn or two nominated by rota. The “ custodian ” of this demotic flock, one Mr. D’Arnoq, stood beneath the meek cruciate & bid Henry & me to participate in similarly manner. Mindful of my own salvation from last week ‘s storm, I nominated Luke ch. 8, “ And they came to him, & awoke him, saying, Master, master, we perish. then he arose, & rebuked the wind & the angry of the body of water : & they ceased, & there was a composure. ”
Henry recited from Psalm the Eighth, in a voice arsenic heavy as any school dramatist : “ Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands ; thousand has put all things under his feet : all sheep & oxen, yea & the beasts of the field ; the bird of the air & the pisces of the sea & any passeth through the paths of the seas. ” No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the fluke chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed. We resembled more the early Christians of Rome than any late Church encrusted with secret & gemstones. Communal prayer followed. Parishioners prayed ad lib for the eradication of potato blight, mercifulness on a dead baby ‘s soul, blessing upon a new fishing boat, & c. Henry gave thanks for the cordial reception shown us visitors by the Christians of Chatham Isle. I echoed these sentiments & sent a entreaty for Tilda, Jackson & my father-in-law during my run absence. Excerpted from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell Copyright © 2004 by David Mitchell [quote] –Michael Chabon. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
