The Confusion

JACK WAS STANDING ON A beach, letting warm surf surge and foam around his sore feet, and watching a couple of Hindoo men working with a fragile-looking bow-drill, using it as a sort of lathe to shape a round peg of wood from the purple heartwood of some outlandish tree. “Peg-makers are a wholly different caste from plank-whittlers, and will on no account intermarry with them, though on certain days of the year they will share food,” he remarked.

No one answered him; no one even heard.

Enoch, Jimmy, Danny, and Surendranath were standing on the beach a few yards away with their backs to him. On one side they were lit up by the reddish light of the sun, which (because they were so near the Equator) was making a meteoric descent behind the hills from which they had just descended. They were as motionless as figures in a stained-glass window, and in fact this was no mean similitude, since their heads were tilted back, their lips parted, their eyes clear and wide, much like Shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem or the Three Women in the empty tomb. Waves surged around their ankles and leapt up as high as their knees and they did not move.

They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.

“Aye,” Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, “sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to’ve been shaped by man.”

“They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man,” said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.

Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.

“For Christ’s sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!” Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.

“Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude,” Jack hollered sarcastically, “and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ’s! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory-it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath-how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand-how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?”

Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, “You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess-what on earth were you expecting?”

“I was being poetickal.”

Jimmy and Danny had long since clambered aboard, and were running from stem to stern and back again, hooting like schoolboys. Enoch had been walking about her, tracing short segments of arcs on the wet sand, and was now standing in violet light with the water up around his knees.

“My first thought was that she couldn’t have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,* which will make her fast but will bar her from most Dutch harbors.”

“There are no Dutch harbors around here, you’ll notice,” Jack observed.