Free The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock Page A

pair of long piroques. Bill Kraken gave his pocket watch to the local shaman in return for an odd bamboo umbrella with a shrunken head dangling from the handle by a brass chain. Kraken was, of course, round the bend in those days, but his purchase of the curious umbrella wasn’t an act of madness. He stayed far drier than the rest of us in the days that followed.
    We set off, finally, down the Wangi beneath grey skies and a canopy of unbelievable green. The river was swollen with rain and littered with tangles of fallen tree trunks and vegetation that crumbled continually from either shore. Canoeing in a monsoon struck me as a trifle outré as the Frenchman would say, but St. Ives and Priestly agreed that the very wildness of the river would serve to discourage the vast and lumbering crocodiles which, during a more placid season, splashed through the shallows in frightful abundance. And the rain itself, pouring from the sky without pause, had a month before driven most of the cannibal tribes into higher elevations.
    So we paddled and bailed and bailed and paddled, St. Ives managing, through a singular and mysterious invention of his own, to keep his pipe alight in the downpour, and I anticipating, monsoon or no, the prick of a dart on the back of my neck or the sight of a toothy, arch-eyed crocodile, intent upon dinner.
    Our third night on the river, very near the coast, we found what amounted to a little sandy inlet scooped into the riverside. The bank above it had been worn away, and a cavern, overhung with vines and shaded by towering acacias and a pair of incredible teaks, opened up for some few yards. By the end of the week it would be underwater, but at present it was high and dry, and we required shelter only for the night. We pushed the piroques up onto the sand, tied them to tree trunks, and hunched into the little cavern, lighting a welcome and jolly fire.
    That night was full of the cries of wild beasts, the screams of panthers and the shrill peep of winging bats. More than once great clacking-jawed crocodiles crept up out of the river and gave us the glad eye before slipping away again. Pygmy hippopotami stumbled up, to the vast surprise of the Professor, and watched us for a bit, blinking and yawning and making off again up the bank and into the undergrowth. St. Ives insisted that such beasts were indigenous only to the continent of Africa, and his observation encouraged Priestly to tell a very strange and sad tale—the story of Doctor Ignacio Narbondo. This Doctor Narbondo, it seems, practiced in London in the eighteenth century. He claimed to have developed any number of strange serums, including one which, ostensibly, would allow the breeding of unlike beasts: pigs with fishes and birds with hedgehogs. He was harried out of England as a vivisectionist, although he swore to his own innocence and to the efficacy of his serum. Three years later, after suffering the same fate in Venice, he set sail from Mombasa with a herd of pygmy hippos, determined to haul them across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Archipelago and breed them with the great hairy orangutans that flourished in the Borneo rain forests.
    He was possessed, said Priestly, with the idea of one day docking at Marseilles or London and striding ashore flanked by an army of the unlikely offspring of two of the most ludicrous beasts imaginable, throwing the same fear into the civilized world that Hannibal must have produced when, with ten score of elephants, he popped in from beyond the Alps. Narbondo, however, was never seen again. He docked in Surabaja, disappeared into the jungles with his beasts, and, as they say of Captain England in Mauritius, went native. Whether Narbondo became, in the years that followed, the fabled Wildman of Borneo is speculation. Some say he did, some say he died of typhus in Bombay. His hippopotami, however, riddled with Narbondo’s serum, multiplied-within a small area of Eastern Java.
    The explanation of the existence of the