Alarming stories
Once a source of water had been found and a temporary borehole sunk, huge camp fires of camedary dung were kindled and everyone sat down to talk and make music. The Muggs’ conversations abounded in old wives’ tales about the threats night presented. The most innocuous stories concerned Sugar Gnomes (more of them later), but others were considerably more frightening and bloodthirsty. There was, for instance, the legend of the Darkmen, who were made of night and had stars for eyes. Unwitting Muggs who travelled by night were borne up into the sky by these creatures and then hurled to earth, burning up like meteorites on the way. The Muggs spoke in whispers of huge snakes that looked in the dark like dunes and could swallow whole caravans at a single gulp. They also told the story of the Drowsy Dunes that slept all day, to awaken at dusk and transform themselves into treacherous quicksands. They knew stories about wind-, sand-and cactus-sprites that did their dirty work in the dark, about invisible crevasses, deadly scorpions, desert demons, and sand pirates. These tales were reason enough to avoid travelling at night, light a ring of camp fires around the caravan each evening, and spend the night in the shelter of the flames and the tribe.
A sleepless night
I cannot pretend that these stories made going to sleep any easier. One night I lay awake longer than usual. As if I didn’t find it difficult enough to sleep on the hard desert floor, I heard the weirdest noises in the darkness.
Sand coyotes were howling and prowling around the camp with glowing red eyes, rattlesnakes rattling the tips of their tails, monstrous cicadas chirping in their thousands. Rustling, crackling sounds were audible in every direction, for at night the desert awoke to a life that lay in wait by day. A seven-tailed hydrascorpion was dancing in a circle, seemingly in time to the music that had ceased long before.
Dust-moths fluttered around the camp fires, and every conceivable kind of insect came crawling out of the darkness, eagerly seeking the proximity of the flames. Stilt-legged spiders stumbled over stones, earwigs and venomous lizards vied for places in the foremost rows around the embers.
None of this worried the Muggs. They had mummified themselves tightly in their lengths of cloth and were blissfully snoring, whereas I kept an anxious eye on the small creatures that teemed on the desert floor. A multicoloured rainbow adder wormed its way up to me; I lashed out at it with a stick and drove it towards the camp fire. Dazzled by the firelight, a fat tarantula staggered around me in circles; that, too, I drove off with my stick. Four big dust-moths danced above my head, a cicada the size of a loaf jumped over me and sang its maddening song a mere two feet from my ear.
I began to realize that I wasn’t made for life in the desert. I could only hope we very soon reached a spot that would enable me to get my bearings sufficiently to go my own way. Meanwhile, I kept a wary eye on my surroundings. I could always sleep on my camedary the next day. If another unpleasant creature crept up on me, I would use my stick to fend it off.
Only a few yards away and to my front, the sand began to stir. Some insect must have overslept and was now struggling to the surface with the aim of helping its colleagues to terrorize me. I watched the process intently. There was a minute eruption, and the desert floor broke open. What came to light was no insect, however; it was a bony finger.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Subterranean Sandmen, The. Of all the →Demerara Desert’s unpleasant life forms, so-called Subterranean Sandmen are probably the most unpleasant. Before they can awaken and emerge, four conditions must be met:
1 Cogitating Quicksand. The first prerequisite is →Cogitating Quicksand. Zamonia’s largest deposits of Cogitating Quicksand are to be found in the numerous quicksand swamps of →Nairland and in certain parts of the →Demerara Desert.
2 Disreputable Cadavers. The second prerequisite is that one or more persons of evil repute should have sunk into this quicksand and given up the ghost.
3 Dehydration. The third prerequisite is that the quicksand has, in the course of the centuries, been baked by extreme heat into firm, sandy ground, and that it has absorbed its capacity for cogitation from the skeletons buried in its depths.
4 Victims. The fourth prerequisite is that one or more persons should bivouac for the night above the skeletons lurking in the sand. If all these conditions are met, there occurs the phenomenon referred to by Grailsundian demonologists as a ‘Malign Awakening’. Like ticks, the skeletons spend a long time in a trancelike or hibernant state before coming to life, burrowing their way to the surface, and killing any unwitting creature that happens to be asleep there.
A ‘Malign Awakening’
A second finger broke through the desert floor, then a third, a fourth, and finally a whole hand.
The ground beside it broke open for a considerable distance, and a skull emerged. The same thing happened at several places inside the ring of camp fires. All the insects vanished into the night. Skeletons were now protruding from the ground waist deep, some of them wearing remnants of their former clothing, rusty helmets and coats of chain mail. Many were even brandishing notched sabres, which indicated that the quicksand’s victims had once been desert pirates.
The Subterranean Sandmen had come to life.
‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Wake up, all of you!’
The first skeleton had now dug its way out completely. Its bones were encrusted with pale brown sugar, which lent it a singularly unreal, ghostly appearance. It threw back its death’s-head and clattered its teeth together – an act which doubtless corresponds, in skeletal circles, to a triumphant laugh.
The Muggs had meantime scrambled to their feet and were blearily staggering around. More skeletons were breaking through the surface all over the place.
Subterranean Sandmen, The [cont.]. As already mentioned, one of the preconditions for the Sandmen’s emergence is their disreputable character. In most cases they are former criminals, desert pirates or murderers who have fled from the law and escaped into the wilderness. When coupled with the quicksand’s negative attributes, this produces a life form that leaves little to be desired in the way of savagery.
The Muggs shrieked and clung to each other but made no move to defend themselves. Their peaceable nature forbade them even to take up arms against bloodthirsty skeletons. They clustered together, wailing, while more and more Sandmen arose on every side.
I hurried over to a camp fire and pulled out a big, blazing piece of wood. Fire – everyone was scared of that! Then, running up to one of the skeletons, I hit out with my torch. The hissing flames parted the darkness, my weapon struck the skeleton’s shoulder, and for a moment we were both enveloped in a shower of whirling sparks. The skeleton threw back its head and clattered its teeth to gruesome effect. Then, quick as a flash, it wrested the torch from my hand, rammed it down its throat, and bit off the glowing tip, which slithered through its ribs to the ground. Having retained some of the embers in its mouth, it spewed them out into the darkness in a stream of sparks. Last of all, it casually tossed the remains of my now useless torch over its shoulder and into the desert.
The skeleton fixed me with its empty eye sockets, the Muggs clung to each other more tightly than ever.
Next, the skeleton raised its right arm and described a small circle in the air with its bony forefinger. This was the signal for the other Sandmen to take up their positions. They formed a big ring round us. By this time I, too, had joined the Muggs, feverishly trying to think of some way of fighting off the Undead. Fire was no use, that much was clear.
Subterranean Sandmen, The [cont.]. There is no point in defending oneself against Sandmen. Even discounting the fact that the layers of sugar-sand encrusting their bones render them invulnerable [e.g. to fire or cuts and thrusts with a sword], they no longer have any vital organs to pierce. Moreover, even if it were possible to kill a Sandman, it would make no difference to him
because he is already dead. The best advice that can be offered to those who experience a ‘Malign Awakening’ is to resign themselves uncomplainingly to their fate.
The ring of skeletons drew closer. When a camedary strayed inside the cordon, a dozen skeletons pounced on the poor beast and hauled it off into the darkness. Its desperate bleating rang briefly in our ears, then ceased abruptly.
The Sandmen were now within a yard of us. Their teeth grated together as they conversed in their skeleton tongue, probably discussing how to share out their prey. I shrank back into the throng of trembling Muggs and almost fell over: I had trodden in the half-drilled borehole leading to an underground stream. My hind leg remained stuck in the mud. Two Muggs hurried up and helped me to extract my paw from the ooze. There was a sucking sound, and I was free. A thin jet of water emerged from the hole and shot into the air.
The Sandmen stopped short. One of them indicated the spurting water with his jawbone and ground his teeth hideously. I seized the drilling pole that lay beside the hole and rammed it in with all my might. There were many puzzled exclamations, both from the Sandmen and from the Muggs. Then the muddy hole emitted a subterranean belch, and a jet of water as thick as a tree trunk broke surface and shot into the night sky.
For the first time in ages, it was raining in the desert.
The Muggs still failed to see what underlay my course of action, but the Sandmen had already grasped what lay in store for them. Fat, heavy drops of water came pattering down on the skeletons. Dumbfounded, they put their skeletal arms over their skulls and tried to shield them from the downpour. But the water permeated their bony frames unhindered, soaking the mixture of bonemeal, sugar – sand, and malevolence. One skeleton lost an arm, which simply fell to the ground and broke into three pieces. Another’s leg dissolved – it flailed its limbs for a moment, then measured its length on the ground. The skull of another skeleton toppled off, while that of yet another dissolved into gruel and trickled into its thoracic cavity. Jawbones fell off into the mud.
The Sandmen were liquefying.
At last the Muggs grasped what had to be done. Seizing the pole, they rammed it repeatedly into the borehole to enlarge the aperture and reinforce the jet. The downpour grew steadily heavier.
The Sandmen staggered helplessly around, trying to escape their fate. Skeletons completely dissolved and oozed to the ground like porridge.
The Muggs went prancing through the rain. I myself took care to see that none of the skeletons got away.
Meantime, nearly all of them had liquefied and seeped back into the ground from which they had come. The few skulls that still lay here and there, grinding their teeth, were carefully trampled underfoot by the Muggs. Before long, not a single trace of the Sandmen remained. The Muggs slapped me on the back and congratulated me on my vigilance.
We decided to move on by night, for once, and pitch camp in another spot.
I decide to quit
The Sandmen incident clinched my decision to try to leave the Demerara Desert and strike off on my own. These were definitely not the surroundings in which I wanted to spend my remaining lives. It was becoming ever clearer to me that the Muggs’ way of life was not, in the long term, compatible with my own. Living with them was not quite as easy as it had at first appeared. As time went by I noticed a number of whims and peculiarities which would have driven even the most easygoing bluebear to distraction.
The curse of long names
For a start, the message-in-a-bottle’s Rule No. 7 had prompted them to adopt terribly elaborate but hopelessly unimaginative names such as Tabitha Tetrachotomous Sunsister, or Polycarp Polyethylene Glycol, or Cosmo Uncuncle Universuncle. For fear of failing to observe the rule and choosing a name that occurred twice in the universe, they burdened themselves with appellations whose main characteristic was their great length and monstrous number of syllables. What made matters more difficult was that, in conformity with the second part of the rule, they insisted on being addressed by their full name. Nicknames and other forms of abbreviation were not only taboo but reputed to bring bad luck.
Pelpemperem Papriami Parmisani was relatively easy to memorize because it possessed a certain melodious quality, but tongue-twisters like Clapcan Caplacan Planplacpaclan presented greater difficulty. If you got so much as a single syllable wrong, the Mugg in question would be deeply offended and trail around after you for days, complaining bitterly. You then had no choice but to perform a ritual act which the Muggs called ‘muggrifying’. This entailed sprinkling your head with sugar-sand and shouting out the relevant name, word perfect, until the injured party graciously forgave you. Depending on the complexity of the name and the extent of the injured party’s disgruntlement, this could take days. The result was that I did my best to steer clear of any Muggs whose names were exceptionally complicated. One, for instance, was called Charch Chachcherachchech Chechchachcherachchach and another Fneckfepffepperepell M. Shrabshubshabremshubram (I didn’t dare ask what the ‘M’ stood for). To this day I have a suspicion that many Muggs deliberately chose names that would trip you up, so as to be able to wallow in righteous indignation. Why? Because there was so little else to do in the desert. I was particularly wary of one Mugg, whose name – I shall never forget it – was Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthreeone. The catch was that his surname was easy to remember because it consisted of the numerals one to ten, less two, recited backwards. You concentrated so hard on missing out the two that – no idea why – you always ended up saying it. The said Mugg persisted in dogging my footsteps, and he managed to engage me in conversation every time. The outcome was more or less as follows:
He (I shall use ‘he’ rather than have to keep writing ‘Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthreeone’) (casually): ‘Hello, Bluebear.’
I (sighing): ‘Hello, er … Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthree … one.’ (Phew!)
He: ‘Muggly weather today, eh, Bluebear?’
I: ‘Yes, really muggly … (groan) Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthree … one (Phew!)
He: ‘The weather wasn’t as muggly yesterday, though, was it, Bluebear?’
I: ‘No, the weather yesterday wasn’t as fine as it is today, (very quickly) Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthreeone, not by a long chalk.’
He (impressed): ‘Well … I must be going, Bluebear.’
I (so relieved that I lose concentration): ‘See you around, then, Constantine Constantinople Canstontinaple TennineeightsevensixfivefourthreeTWOone – Aaargh!’
He (throwing up his hands in feigned indignation): ‘Oh, how could you be so hurtful! No one has ever subjected me to such … (and so on and so forth)
I spent the next three days showering myself with sugar-sand and faultlessly shouting out a name I really don’t care to write down again. In the end, heaven be praised, I thought of a way out of this intolerable dilemma. I appeared before the assembled Muggs and solemnly announced that I myself had assumed a new name. I had a perfect right to do this, being a Mugg probationer, but had never taken advantage of the fact. From now on I was to be addressed as Tihiviranipiri Kengklepperkengkereng Tadjifioparifztugghhtrtrhhgsrtgh Keek Kaak Kokkeek Barp Bluebear the Threehundredandfiftyeight-thousandsixhundredandeighth. This was the longest name any Mugg had ever given himself. After that, peace descended on the dunes. No one dared to engage me in stupid chitchat any longer – in fact I even started to feel a bit lonely.
After three months spent trekking through scorching heat in a series of nonsensical zigzags, spirals, and wavy lines, the Muggs were beginning to get me down. What contributed to my irritation were their everlasting cries of ‘Muggly!’ and their constant indecision, their monotonous musical soirées and unvarying diet (i.e. muggrooms). I consider myself a peace-loving creature, but I’m bound to confess that life with the Muggs was so irksomely peaceful that I
sometimes itched to start a little quarrel. Their monotonous talk of Anagrom Ataf (other subjects of conversation included sand quality, wind strength, and muggroom recipes), the sticky, sugary atmosphere, the discordant bleating of the camedaries, the annoying sugar-flies that tried to sup the little fluid I had inside me from the corners of my eyes – taken in combination, all these things were enough to make one run off into the desert, screaming, and devour a cactus. But I pulled myself together and faithfully followed the bleating caravan on its journey to nowhere.
The Sugar Flux
One day – we had been on the march since dawn, and even the toughest Muggs were showing signs of fatigue – I noticed that the ground was stickier than usual. It was becoming harder to detach our feet from the desert sand with every step we took. We might have been walking across a sheet of glass with suction cups attached to our soles.
The Muggs had also noticed this.
Confused cries of ‘Sugar Flux! Sugar Flux!’ arose.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Sugar Flux. Cane sugar melts at a temperature of 320° Fahrenheit and congeals into an amorphous mass as it cools, becoming hygroscopic and, when it has settled, crystalline. Continuous heating at 320° Fahrenheit turns cane sugar into fructose or glucose, but at 374° into bitter brown caramel. During the summer months, temperatures in the central areas of the →Demerara Desert can exceed 200°, particularly when boosted by lack of wind. In basin-shaped tracts of land [flat valleys, dried-up lakes] this may result in the process known as Sugar Flux, during which the desert becomes caramelized for miles around, later to solidify when the temperature drops.
These periods of Sugar Flux present a threat, not only to the sand eels and rattlescorpions whose favourite habitat such areas happen to be, but also to the unsuspecting traveller who finds himself in the midst of a sea of deliquescent sugar. First trapped without warning by the feet, the helpless victim sinks ever deeper into the molten carbohydrate until it envelops him completely like a prehistoric insect in amber. Either that, or – an even worse fate, perhaps – the caramel cools before it wholly engulfs him, imprisoning him waist-deep in congealed sugar and condemning him to a miserable death by thirst.