COMPETITION
Elsiemos
Jaspistos
In Competition No. 1449 you were asked for an imaginary letter to the outside world from the first visitor to a lost island, describing its unique flora, fauna, inhabi- tants, customs etc. My title obviously apes Erewhon, that marvellous book featuring Mr Nosnibor, `one of those valuable men who are paid not by the year, month, week, or day, but by the minute', and the Musical Banks, which will soon be with us as soon as NatWest get round to recorded vocalists who `seem to have derived their inspira- tions from the songs of birds and the wailing of the wind, which last they try to imitate in melancholy cadences that at times degenerate into a howl'. Oddly enough, the only time I almost got into Mr Nosnibor's league was when I wrote for a glossy American magazine (at a dollar a word) an article on Erewhemos, an un- named, almost backward island which, ten Years later, was ruined by a royal couple. Not many of you managed to be truly Butlerian or Swiftian or Wellsian. Most of your isles were pretty ghastly holes. Jere- miah Sowerby's visitor was immediately forced to be a human counter in a series of board games, culminating in 'brutal Shove Ha'penny'. On D. A. Prince's there is only one plant, a glaucous, cabbage- looking affair redolent of elderly compost heaps, and one animal looking like a cross between a primitive donkey and a Soay sheep', on Berth Wellgell's 'sex takes place communally, every new moon, under a massive rattan duvet: its sole objects are displeasure, remorse, disgust'. Perhaps it was the same off-putting place that Paul Kennedy's castaway described: `The first thing I saw when I stepped ashore was about 300 prams ranged along the beach.' It was a relief to turn to Martin Fagg's Lear-like list of 'delectable fruits utterly unknown to Christendom — zangoes, trinces, meldrums, glooces and jum-jums'. The winners below get £12 each, and the bonus bottle of Ferreira Late Bottled Vintage Port, donated by Stowells of Chelsea, goes to Charles Mosley. There's a sort of giant parsnip here, v. tasty when simmered in pauku juice. Pauku is what the natives — restless chaps, a bit like Albanians in character, only more obliging — hunt with packs of tapirs (same idea as pigs and truffles), digging them up with curious wooden spoons.
There are pigs, but they're savage, untamable brutes. A curious thing, though, they actually have wings. Purely vestigial of course; they can no more fly than ostriches.
The man-eating lettuces — well, they look like lettuces — are the things to avoid. The natives feed criminals to them. A criminal is anyone who calls in question my divinity. (Me! I wasn't even confirmed at school.) Apparently there's this prophecy about a red god arriving from overseas. (I admit I was a bit sunburnt when I stepped ashore.) How can I deny it and face that man-eating lettuce? (Charles Mosley) Dear Mother, Levitatus is a coral island en- veloped in a dense magnetic field producing gravitational effects twenty feet in space, all material being suspended at this level. Vegeta- tion appears to be cobalt-related, the undulating roots having lethal, positive charges. The most numerous creatures are purple, luminous hedge- hogs that bounce clockwise around the reef. Our humanoid equivalents are giant manatees, the females Gracie Fields look- and sound-alikes, with three-point mating sockets in their thor- axes; the smaller, more timid males drone like vacuum-cleaners and possess three-point plugs in their lower jaws. Continuous coupling is accompanied by showers of beautiful sparks. These humanoids are electropsychic mutations of old theatre programmes, gramophone re- cords, an upright hoover washed ashore in 1939 and radioactive dugongs. Swimming in the electrolytic surf, they receive music from pre- war Batavia through a time warp, the vibrations enabling them to regurgitate hallucinogenic jelly-babies, a primal link in their complex food chain . . . (Russell Lucas) There are so many lichens here, gold, green and various tones of brown: umber, chestnut, bronze, dried blood. They patch the blue-grey rocks. There are innumerable mosses. Among the grass, crickets and grasshoppers dwell in such profusion that fifty or a hundred spring up at every step I take. Birds are unknown and there is only one mammal, a small rodent, which I call the Hopper-Eater. I have also identified and christened seventy-two insects. I feel like Adam naming creation (also like Abel, farming my little rodents and treacherously cooking and eating them). It is curious. I breed the beautiful Jewelheads (spectacular little crickets) to feed the Hopper-Eaters. My three tall bushes I love for their ethereal pink blossom. So it may have been in Paradise. But there have been people here before. I found a bone button in the river bed and there is a gibbet on the hill.
(Gerard Benson) The inhabitants are pygmies, the tallest man being four foot in height, and they have trained the cat (which is charmingly 'pus' in their language and the island's only non-human mam- mal) to hunt and retrieve the numerous birds for them.
Social life consists of composing poetry, set- ting it to music and hearing and judging it. The most acclaimed poets have the greatest number of mates and bags of the fragrant berries of a parasitic plant — like a cross between a sweet- pea and mistletoe — which induces blissful dreams.
I have not been able to identify any sort of government or monetary system. I wear a surgeon's sterilised mask at all times not to afflict these happy beings with my microbes. There appear to be no indigenous diseases. When they die — usually full of years — they are set high up in the boughs of a sweet-barked tree, and the same is done for the cats.
(George Moor)
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