Quack quack . . . quack quack
An officer in the engineer corps of the British colonial military, while surveying one of the more remote corners of India, has a unit under his command nearly wiped out by the solar-phallic fiery flying tree serpents which he had previously regarded as a wild native superstition. While recovering from the trauma he discovers the writings of an English doctor who helped treat people bitten by the same creatures when a clutch of them came ashore in the Liverpool docks in a shipment of kumquats. The serpents entwine in his fevered imagination and transform into splitting and diverging streams descending from the dimmest mists of prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century. The General rallies his remaining forces for a desperate counter-attack in which the creatures are all killed; their skins stitched together into a seven-foot long scroll on which a chart of the serpentine rivers is scribed for posterity, with an accompanying booklet written in ink alchemically compounded from the serpents' venom mixed with the ashes of incinerated wooden penises found in Irish round towers, setting out in as plain language as the mores of the time permit -- which is to say, not plain at all -- the nature of the chains of belief that bind us all, and attempting to trace the course and descent of the underground stream of forbidden worships, unholy rites and nameless cults from its earliest origins to the present day.
An officer in the engineer corps of the British colonial military, while surveying one of the more remote corners of India, has a unit under his command nearly wiped out by the solar-phallic fiery flying tree serpents which he had previously regarded as a wild native superstition. While recovering from the trauma he discovers the writings of an English doctor who helped treat people bitten by the same creatures when a clutch of them came ashore in the Liverpool docks in a shipment of kumquats. The serpents entwine in his fevered imagination and transform into splitting and diverging streams descending from the dimmest mists of prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century. The General rallies his remaining forces for a desperate counter-attack in which the creatures are all killed; their skins stitched together into a seven-foot long scroll on which a chart of the serpentine rivers is scribed for posterity, with an accompanying booklet written in ink alchemically compounded from the serpents' venom mixed with the ashes of incinerated wooden penises found in Irish round towers, setting out in as plain language as the mores of the time permit -- which is to say, not plain at all -- the nature of the chains of belief that bind us all, and attempting to trace the course and descent of the underground stream of forbidden worships, unholy rites and nameless cults from its earliest origins to the present day.
