Finding something; sightseeing; then encountering sightseers who find something

I am attempting to write a fake novel. After each chapter is done, I toss it into this great big can that is labeled with my fake novel's title: BRYAN THE TYGER. Today I tossed another episode in the can.

P.S.

In other news: my Public Private Diary is fully printed; also I made a list of my latest novels that have been printed but not included in any collection.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Our whimsical act of smearing lamb’s blood on the convent’s entryway is apparently successful: for, over the next few months, the nunnery experiences a noticeable increase in customers and therefore ultimately a spike in profits.

Feeling that, yet again, our time here was extremely well spent, Myala and I now dash off into the woodland, seeking adventure.

The first thing that we encounter is a secluded hideaway within the nighttime forest where a rare flower is growing. Its beauty is exotic. We jungle cats perform extensive research on this flower, trying to figure out what its name is; we even take snapshots of our finding and mail them to the highest-paid Experts in Earth Science from all around the globe, asking these men (they are males only) to identify the thing: “Please tell us all the scientific classifications of this plant growth that we discovered.” And this message is followed by our paw-print signatures. — The Experts respond within a sennight, telling us that they have no idea what we’ve stumbled upon: “This is a certified Brand New Bloom that no one has ever seen before.” — I Bryan the Tyger and my soul-mate Myala the Black Panther rejoice at our fortune.

“Do you want to eat it, or can I?” sez Myala. “Or should we split it?”

“Well, it’s the only flower of its kind, and it exists nowhere else on Earth,” I say; “so you should have it. Just remember to describe, for the rest of us, how it tastes.”

Myala gives me a cat-kiss and then eats the rare, beautiful, exotic flower. Once she swallows, her eyes grow wide, and she exclaims:

“That was more exquisite than anything I’ve ever devoured in my life.”

I’m happy to learn that the rare flower is pleasing to the palate.

§

After a short nap, we leave this place and run until we’ve exhausted our surplus energy; then we slow to a trot. We then mosey at our leisure, for leagues and leagues, simply enjoying the look of the towns as we pass each one:

The first town we come to is made of swirling, ornate iron. Its people are all sitting outside, staring listlessly amid the dizzying array of patterns.

The next town is a regular, bustling city; like New York, if it were frozen in the 1940s.

The third town we see is uninhabited — at least it appears so, for all the houses are shacks, whose front doors are continually swinging open and banging shut, because the wind keeps blowing loudly on the soundtrack. This last town scares us, so we move on quickly without checking to see if any of the shacks are inhabited, or if these inhabitants are alive or dead.

The next town that we pass contains a plethora of clear glass domes that serve as houses. The whole town is partly submerged in water: the sea surface has risen to the midpoint of every house-dome (they’re all planted on a level), so the place has the appearance of a multitude of bubbles that haven’t yet popped. When you look into each of these transparent bubble-domiciles, the first thing you notice is that all the décor is uniformly fractured by the water-line: whatever lies beneath it appears magnified — this is an optical illusion. Also, all the citizens sport swimwear.

Then we arrive at a town that is teetering on a cliff. There is a concrete slab exactly the size of a landscape: it is oblong in shape and umpteen meters thick. Planted directly in the center of this slab is a threefold attraction consisting of a public bath, a liquor store, and a church. Spreading outward from this central zone are millions of mud huts, which riddle the slab to its utmost edges. “I hope this town doesn’t tip too far — it might fall!” I remark to Myala. And Myala replies: “If its people would huddle together strictly in their homeland’s northwest quarter, they would have the best chance of surviving. I hope they all produce lots of children.”

Lastly, we come to a postcard-perfect beach. It is typically gorgeous. The sand feels good upon our paw-pads. We walk parallel to the shoreline and watch the fish that keep jumping out of the ocean to greet us. We leave two long trails of paw prints behind us, side by side. I now glance over my shoulder and admire these trails that we’ve made:

“One who is adept at tracking wild animals,” I say, “might look at our prints here and exclaim: ‘I suspect that two mutant felines passed thru this beach, sometime today.’ And this person might crouch down and feel the inside of one of the prints with his or her own human hand; then remark: ‘They’re still warm: that means these prints are fresh — the beasts that made them might even still be in the vicinity’.”

Myala looks up at the clouds, to stimulate her imagination; then she sez: “Furthermore, you and I might be hiding in some bushes and secretly watching these folks who are hunting us. And, after they say what you said that they said, we might leap out and maul them.”

I stop dead in my tracks and say: “That’s a good idea. Lo, yonder lies a clump of bushes — shall we give it a try?”

So Myala and I — two vast jungle cats — hide ourselves in these bushes. (In case you skipped the beginning and only started reading our story at this point, I should inform you that I myself am a Burning Tyger from the Forests of the Night, and Myala is a Glowing Black Panther from Planet Jupiter.)

§

So within about forty-eight hours, a group of tourists comes to the beach. Just as we predicted, their guide thinks that he’s good at deciphering animal tracks. Upon espying our lengthy line of print-marks, this man stretches out both of his arms very stiffly, to prevent his small group of followers from stepping beyond him, lest they trample over the evidence.

“Stop!” the tour guide sez: “Look here! These are tracks left by a multitude of untamed animals.”

“Can you tell what type of beasts made these paw prints?” asks one of the tourists from the group.

The guide gets down on all fours and places his head so near to the sand that his ear almost touches it:

“They’re still on fire,” he remarks; “that means these tracks are no more than a few days old.” He dips his finger into the nearest print and brings it back and extends his tongue until its tip barely touches the sampling of granules. He closes his eyes and smacks his lips a couple of times. Then he reaches over again and grabs a heaping handful of sand: he holds it up so close to his nose that the flames tickle his nostrils; then he inhales deeply. Now he tips back his head, lifts his hand, pours the entire amount of sand into his mouth, and chews it for several tense moments.

“What can you tell?” another tourist’s voice breaks the silence.

After a great gulp, the guide proclaims: “It’s worse than I thought. This stuff is not only radiant — it’s radioactive.” He points at the trail: “See how it’s emitting that ominous hum, and faintly crackling?”

There follows a moment of silent observation; then one of the tourists remarks: “That sounds dangerous — should we leave?”

“No,” snaps the guide; “we need to follow this thru to the end.”

“Do you suspect,” another tourist asks, “that these tracks might have been left by extraterrestrials?”

“Absolutely not,” the guide rises to his feet with an angry look: “these are definitely wooly mammoth prints.”

“But that’s impossible,” sez yet another of the tourists; “wooly mammoths have been extinct for billions of years.”

Overhearing this remark, I Bryan the Tyger become so vexed that I almost give myself away — on instinct, I rise up from my hiding place in the bushes and yell: “You can’t say ‘billions’ just once, like that: it’s boring! You should instead say ‘billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of years’; or alternately you could be more specific and choose an actual, official number, such as ‘four point five four three billion years’.” Then I quickly duck back down and hide next to Myala, who is mutely-yet-violently motioning for me to shush.

The tourist who last spoke now turns and faces the tourist behind him, whom he mistakenly assumes voiced the comment above; and he declares: “Oh, you want specifics? Then I revise my statement to say that mammoths have been extinct for six hundred billion years.”

Now the guide rolls his eyes and then raises his voice, to address the now-belligerent tourist:

“Kent, hey, Kent, turn back around and face me again. — Don’t talk to one another; only talk to me. — Now, listen: these tracks here most definitely were made by the paws of wooly mammoths. But you’re wrong about their extinction, and your timeline is off. For Earth cannot be more than 600 years old, therefore it would be impossible for any of its species to have died out; for it takes at least one millennium to achieve extinction. Moreover, scientists recently cloned the wooly mammoths back out of extinction, by using DNA receipts from ancient buttercups, which are a type of exotic flower that the mammoth populace froze to death while dining upon.”

“Ooh!” Myala now almost gives herself away by rising from the bush where we’re supposed to be concealed: “I myself ate one of those singularly rare buttercups, not long ago — those things taste gr-r-reat!” (She rolls her ‘R’s.)

I raise my mighty forepaw and press Myala’s Panther-head down into the bushes with me; then I roar at her: “Keep yourself low and crouched down here, out of sight; poised and ready to attack: for we’re supposed to be hiding!”

The tour guide now lifts his head and looks around at his group of followers. “Who just growled?” he shouts.

Each tourist now points confidently at his or her neighbor.

The guide’s attention eventually is drawn toward the place where Myala and I have all along been spying upon him.

“Wait a minute,” the guide announces: “look at that, over there — those burning bushes where the paw-print tracks curve toward and lead to. How is all that greenery aflame and bathed in an eerie glow but not burnt up or melted? And why are there two tails protruding from either end of this vegetation, swishing and swaying? Let’s take our group over there for a closer look — I’m positive that it’ll be safe.”

So the band of tourists begins to approach us jungle beasts, as we try to stay still and look casual in our tentative headquarters.

The tour guide stands directly before the bushes and uses his arms to divide the verdure, revealing two ferocious faces: mine and Myala’s.

“Ay me!” the guide exclaims; “I was wrong: this is no gathering of mammoths — these are Saber-toothed Hellcats, of the type that our ancestors claim pulled the sleigh of Kris Kringle during Rudolph’s Rescue Mission, which predated the Rise of the Orangutans.”

I turn to Myala with a bewildered look: “Has so much time elapsed since we brought all of humankind back from the safe haven on Jupiter’s Red Spot that their memory of our adventure has undergone the Telephone Effect, also known as Chinese-Whispers Syndrome?”

“Yes,” sez Myala.

“He-e-elp!” the guide screams in fear, after Myala and I deliver the above lines to each other. — “They’re growling at us and threatening to pounce upon us,” he cries; “they’ll rip us limb from limb, and drink our blood! For the life is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11)! Their young ones also suck up blood (Job 39:30)!”

I, Bryan the Tyger, now rise to my full stature, and the flame-plumes of my fur surge to thrice their previous height. “Can anyone among your assembly grasp what I’m saying?” (I ask this in the kindest tone that I can manage.)

Among the general panic, one voice lifts up:

“Yes, I understand you.”

My eyes widen, “Good! Who said that?”

A tourist steps to the front of the general commotion. “I am he who spoke.”

“What’s your name, Mademoiselle?”

“Unknown,” sez the androgynous persona.

“You don’t know your own name?” I marvel. “That’s intriguing.”

“No, that is my name,” sez the androgyne. “It’s what everyone calls me. I have no middle name or any other beyond my first and last (or alpha and omega), which is: Unknown God.”

“God is your cognomen?”

“Well, it’s either my surname, or a title,” the androgyne sez; “my birth certificate is a mess.”

“Were your parents drunk when they filled it out?” I ask sincerely.

“No, I completed it myself,” the androgyne winks; “I have no parents; and, at the time, I was zero years old; so I hadn’t yet developed many bureaucratic skills.”

“No parents?” I mock-gasp. “Mmm; understood, understood.” Then, after thinking about this for a span, while the commotion of the panicking tourists continues in the midground, I add: “Well, I’m glad that you can comprehend what I’m saying, because I just wanted to speak a few words to your tour guide and this group of souls he’s in charge of — My message is this:

“O foolish folks, please calm down. I am Bryan the Burning Tyger, whom you saw, and this Glowing Black Panther beside me is my shadow-self Myala. We hid here in these bushes with the aim of attacking you; but, now that we have watched you for a few minutes and observed with attention your arguments regarding the age of the Earth, plus listened to your gossip about wooly mammoths and other strange creatures, we cannot bring ourselves to consume you. Yes, Myala and I have decided not to maul you. Thus, I beg you from my heart to please stop fretting; tell your congregation to desist from screeching and spazzing: I give you my word, we intend you no harm. Now, I am sending this message by way of one of your underlings: Mister or Misses UNKNOWN GOD. So, if you or anyone who was here today ever want anything, then simply send a message back to us felines via the same channel, and we will ship you bags of money. For we possess more caesar banknotes than we know what to do with.”

The androgyne finishes jotting this message in his detective’s notepad.

“Do you think you can remember all that?” I say.

“Yes: I wrote it down,” the androgyne taps her notepad smartly.

“Ah, very good idea!” I pat his head.

We now part ways with this androgyne: she sinks back into the herd of tourists, while we jungle beasts head toward the horizon. Soon the grating commotion from that group of humans fades out, and the sound of songbirds returns to annoy us.