Limekiller!

The familiar night tumult of the port city was all around, increased by the place and the occasion, but the Honourable Llewellyn Gonzaga McBride’s voice, though not particularly loud, was a voice which carried well (and, Gad! it better!). “— but I have just come down from Benbow Bight, where I was being hospitted by the White Creoles at Woodcutters’ Cove, and there I heard for the first time what I am sure must be an old folk song, Mr. Thomas Hardy cites it in one of his stories and I am sure you will be interested to hear it — ’’Jack was not sure he shared that surety, but the Queen’s Chief Minister in British Hidalgo had already raised his voice (somewhere in between tenor and baritone, and if musicologists had no term for it, so much the worse for them) in song: one listened.

Oh me trade it is a qveer vun,

Simple sailors all,

Me trade it is a soight to see!

For me customers Oi toi And Oi svings 'em up on hoigh,

And Oi vafts ‘em to afar countrie-ee-ee!

And Oi vafts ‘em to afar coun-trie!

The Black Bayfolk paused and laughed and called out to hear their clear tan leader singing in perfect imitation of the archaic accent of the White Creoles; called for more, More! but L. G. McBride, saying something about “a rather grim and grisly humor, eh?” with a wave of his hand and a smile passed on. Alex Brant also smiled at Limekiller, his rather thin, cool smile was neither friendly nor defiant, but seemed ready to be either. Limekiller looked at Felix and Felix looked at him. Her look. and it was a long, long look. was really neither grim nor grisly, neither defiant nor friendly; what was it then? he had never seen it nor anything like it until just these few hours: once again: it contained emphasis but emphasis of what? It was not familiar, this look, but he felt that he was going to have to become familiar with seeing it again. And perhaps again and again.

For, without having been swung up on high he had indeed been wafted to a far countrie, a very, very far countrie indeed. He had yet to learn exactly where it was.

But wherever it was, it was verv far from Eden.

AFTERWORD SECTION

Avram Davidson’s Limekiller stories are rooted in his travels in British Honduras in 1965–1966 and an extended period of residency in 1968. After the first visit, Davidson wrote a travel memoir that charts his itinerary in B. H. just before independence. Unpublished during his lifetime, Dragons in the Trees is colorful, rich in detail and filled with unusual characters and events. There are descriptions of Belize City and its leisurely pace of life; St. George’s Caye, devastated by a hurricane, with ruined burial grounds still visible; a visit to a vacation house at Gallows Point; accounts of Mennonite communities; the last traces of a settlement established by former Confederates; and boom time among the chicleros and mahogany cutters in Cayo, where “They call the Lebanese ‘Turks.’” Readers of the Limekiller stories will recognize many of these locales[1]. “Along the Lower Moho (The Iguana Church)” is one of the most memorable portions of Dragons in the Trees and offers some insights into how Davidson’s fiction grew out of actual experience. This extract was published with two others in the special Avram Davidson issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2000.

— Henry Wessells

ALONG THE LOWER MOHO (THE IGUANA CHURCH)

THE DRAGON DUET I BY AVRAM DAVIDSON

The Lower Moho is far different from the Upper Belize’s Eastern Branch, in which I so delighted when at Cayo; the latter, with its rushing current, visible bed of rock or of gravel, narrow and granite-bony banks, and its cataracts, is like muscular and sinewi- arms. The full flow of the Moho, current languid and slow, banks low and wide, bottom invisible but seeming to hint of mud, lush and lavish, is reminiscent of soft thighs and armpits. Often it is so wide and smooth as to resemble a lake, — I observed, bemused and entranced, a snow-white egret skimming slow and low- across the surface, his reflection like a double-goer companying with him beneath the mirror surface.