Little Mr Noah
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
The authenticity of the clay tablets recently unearthed at Buyuk Agri Dagi, the biblical Mount Ararat, in Northern Turkey, and be- lieved by many archaeologists and others to be antediluvian in origin, has been hotly contested by the experts. Is it possible that these hard- baked, brittle shards, these thoughts from before the Flood, can really have survived intact into the twentieth century? Are they, perhaps, a gigantic hoax? Etienne Virgule de Guillemets, the author of Autour de Nous le Deluge, be- lieves that they are not only genuine, but of interest: if not for the rather feeble light they cast on events leading up to the catastrophe, at least for the unique impression they give us of the antediluvian author. In the interests of fluency, M Guillemets's translation takes some liberties with the text.
The situation really is too appalling. The Mizpahs came over for dinner last night. Reoth Mizpah is a cousin of the Mazda-Ashteroths, and she says they've been without eunuchs for a week. According to Reoth their Chief Eunuch suddenly flung his peacock-feather fan to the floor in the middle of a feast, stamped his foot, and said he didn't approve of the goings-on. Baa Ashteroth struck him senseless, and the eunuchs walked out to a man. Or rather to a eunuch. Zim Ashteroth, Baa's sister, who married Baa three years ago after her affair with her father broke up, says she came across one of the eunuchs the next morning paddling in the orna- mental pool under the Gingko-Biloba tree, and he said he hadn't had any objections at all to the goings-on, but if he hadn't minced out with the rest he'd have looked a sissy. He blames it all on some hothead called Mower or Blower who's been stamping about saying the earth is corrupt before God, whatever that means, and filled with violence. Of course it's filled with violence if silly little men go round unsettling the eunuchs. They're neurotic enough as it is in all conscience without people putting ideas into their heads. Our own, mercifully, remain loyal, though Father Obal the Hivite, the little priest round the corner who burns babies to Mog, tells me his supplies have dwindled to a trickle and puts it down to the general unrest.
Little Mr Noah, my gardener, came to see me this morning. I think he had been drinking. His squint seemed more intense than usual, and he kept rolling his great bald head about and tugging at his beard and muttering to himself. His speech was slurred, but I understood him to say he would be five hundred years old come Goginmas. I really can't believe he's as old as that, although his walk, even when he is sober, has become very distressing of late. He'll obvi- ously have to go one of these days, but he is quite a character in his way. He stumbled round the asparagus beds with me, mumbling away about the beasts and fowls and creeping things. and how it repented God that he had made them. I gather he's absolutely maddened by the pests this year, and is contemplating drastic a?tion to wipe them off the face of the earth, as he put it. He's also too gloomy about the weather, but I'm sure he's wrong. I can't remem- ber zilch a wonderfully hot dry summer. He also asked me for a couple Of lengths of
gopher wood: I tried to get him to tell me what it was for, but he waved his finger at me and said he wanted it to be a surprise.
My tapestry of Adamite Revels is going swimmingly. We had the AznarethrHashimites
over for lunch, and they absolutely couldn't keep their eyes off it. Sheb Aznareth-Hashimite I think is really a common little man : I believe his name used to be Nedrok, but he changed it when he married his present husband. He referred to my Adamite Revels as 'a little ooh-la-la for his taste' but admitted graciously that 'he didn't know much about art.' I can't think why we go on having them in the house, except that they were angelically helpful at the time I was murdering Mummy. They told a quite horrifying story about Thubgal, who used to be their slave-driver. They asked him in one evening after dinner to administer a little sophisticated corrective massage, and appa- rently he gave Sheb a really wicked cut across the buttocks with his flywhisk, absolutely out of the blue. &Set,: says he yelped like a stuck eunuch and couldn't sit down for a week. All their slaves were marvellously sympathetic and said they thought Thubgal had gone mad, and must have been listening to this appalling Mower or Thrower or whatever his ghastly name is. A frightful sound of sawing and ham- mering all through lunch. I bad to close the windows.
Too boring. The sellers of purple have all come out on strike in sympathy with the eunuchs. Just when I wanted only another thirty-six inches of purple wool to complete the figure of Oban the Giant in my Adamite Revels. If I ever lay my hands on Mr Grower hell wish he'd never been born. The sheer lack of consideration for others is unspeakable. As if that wasn't enough, Noah, my gardener, has taken the entire stock of the carpenters' store- room without so much as by your leave and we haven't got a stick of gopher wood in the house. What's more I suspect him of neglect- ing the garden and working on whatever it is he's doing in my time. I think he may be Jewish. If it wasn't for the appalling difficulty of getting domestic help I'd sack him on the spot. He finally had the effrontery this evening to come hiccuping into the house, very much the worse for wear, and saying it looked like rain. He told cook he wanted a bucket of pitch and a lavatory brush. Cook asked him what he wanted them for, and he went off sniggering again, tapping the side of his nose with his finger and saying 'Surprise, surprise.' He is quite intolerable.
A miserable night. Every time I fell asleep I had the most frightful nightmares about elephants trampling through the garden, and giraffes sticking their heads in through the bed- room windows, and worst of all millions of little furry things crawling over me in bed. Grob, my concubine, who is one of the sleepiest men I have ever encountered, said it must be someone I'd had for dinner and turned over and went to sleep again. Finally, in despair, I went down to the larder for a snack at about live and found absolutely everything gone. Looted. Ham Noah, old Mr Noah's simple son, was halfway through the back door with a sack '_= of passion fruit on his back: he turned round. gave an idiotic cackle, indicating the sky, and ran gibbering out into the garden. The we-dither has now turned beastly, and it's been raining cats and dogs since dawn. Thank God we're having lunch with the Mazda-Ashton:as, they have the most ravishing coiered verandah,
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