Free Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition by Akif Pirinçci Page A

kind, maybe little steamers fuelled by their personal bio-gas, of which they certainly had ample supplies, and we were about to weigh anchor, reach the sea by way of the sewage system and chug off on holiday in the direction of Rhodes. Their distinctly alarming remarks just now had only been clumsy jokes, both a greeting and a test of a newcomer's courage. That's the way pirates act. Wow, those stinkers had really had me worried ...
    The throng surrounding me with all the avidity of visitors to the Colosseum in days of old and glaring intently at me in spite of their total blindness began to part in the middle. A narrow passage gradually formed between the audience on the stone walkway. It began to dawn on me, as I observed this act of collective anticipation, that Rhodes was not the Mediterranean island with its aura of legend, or any other holiday destination either. 'Rhodes' must be beyond anything imaginable, just as certain things slumber behind the very last steely gates of the unconscious, things that even the producers of nightmare horror shows daren't stage. An uneasy whisper passed through the grubby throng, and a sinister shadow could now be seen at the end of the corridor it had opened up. This shadow came closer and closer, positively rolling down the corridor like a tide of something slimy, and its approach was accompanied by a terrifying stamping that seemed to make the whole place tremble. Gradually a shapeless figure which towered at least a head above those surrounding it came into sight. There was something ox-like about its movements. Clumsily and with forceful impact the shadow marched on, and at every step it took its entire astonishing corpulence wobbled in slow motion, like waves of fat breaking. But darkness still concealed this monstrous giant, and I could only speculate about its true appearance.
    The closer it came, the louder swelled the awe-inspiring murmur of the sewer-dwelling monsters, as if they themselves feared the spirit they had conjured up. Then it stepped out into the light, and if the morbid fascination exercised by this amazing creature hadn't taken hold of my entire being, I'd surely have fainted dead away. He was the biggest Red Persian male I had ever seen: a Titan, a dinosaur from that fabled world where you don't take precise notice of animals' dimensions. He had no eyes either, but in his case that was the literal truth. Both eyes had been put out by some monster even worse than himself. Instead of shrinking together, however, the edges of his eye sockets had grown farther apart, so that they looked like craters surrounded by harsh shadows on some eerie planet. The left corner of his mouth, distorted by a scar, was somewhere in the region of his cheekbone; a horrible operation of some kind, probably performed with a knife, had extended it towards his upper jaw. Consequently his lower jaw hung down, and his mouth, constantly open and producing torrents of saliva, showed teeth which were badly damaged but still looked as dangerous as a set of butcher's knives. His long Persian coat had large bare patches showing wrinkled skin, probably as the result of bad burns. Rhodes had obviously been the victim of the most barbaric ill-treatment ever suffered at the hands of the lowest species of animal on earth, a species which none the less for some mysterious reason always regards itself as the highest. All the same, the martyrdom he had suffered had not improved his character. Instead of adopting the attitude of a tolerant pacifist, he preferred the silent role of executioner. For if this mountain of flesh, with his powerful pong, who was obviously barking mad and had all the charm of a bulldozer - if he wasn't an ice-cold killer then I was a white poodle with its arse shaved bare.
    Rhodes strode all the way down the passage left free for him, displaying more and more of the horrible details of his many deformities as he did so, and finally he stopped in front of me. His clumsy halt made