+- Story-Portal (https://time-tales.af/storys)
+-- Forum: EBOOK (https://time-tales.af/storys/forumdisplay.php?fid=27)
+--- Forum: EBOOK (https://time-tales.af/storys/forumdisplay.php?fid=28)
+--- Thread: The Cosmic Turtle (1976) (/showthread.php?tid=2683)
The Cosmic Turtle (1976) - WMASG - 12-15-2025
It would be best, it would make matters simpler, if the writer were to be identified as an old monkey. A monkey sprung from the tribe at Sangeh in the interior. This monkey is clever but not wise. Mischievous without malignancy. If others feel superior to him, he does not know it, since he is dictatorial, paternalistic and egoistic: yet not indifferent to the greater good of all. Aggressive or defensive as occasions demand. Desirous of respect, contemptuous of familiarity. Instinctively, territorially conservative in an age when nosy-parkers and stickybeaks abound. Ah, tolerance, tolerance! — the intruders are necessary to his health. They help define the limits of his universe. At sight of them invading he rushes gibbering to the boundaries, his glands healthily secreting great gushes of adrenalin.
His joyful triumph is a marvel to witness when invaders scamper back to their own overcrowded warrens, giggling as they go. The defended territory is no great matter: some glades of trees, some lawns and gardens overflowing flowers to the lagoon’s edge. A line of foam flashes on the reef: the end of Asia. From that verge one slip, one false step, will (splash) thrust you struggling for survival into the waters of the true antipodes, caught in a current that races with the speed of bolting sea-horses from here to the crocodile-infested mangrove swamps of Carpentaria.
One night in dry season, to the terrace by the sea-wall over-looking the dreaming lagoon, came a visitor. My friend Leonard. Or should he be styled my semi-tragic friend Leonard, the victim of a brilliant intellect infatuated by logic? — or introduced as my illogically inspired French-Russian-Jewish-English-Swiss friend, the native of Padua?
No matter. I like him, despite his being strenously a man of excess. Of excessive everything — excessive desire, despair. Excessive virtues and vices, indulging excesses of intelligence, talent, poverty, extravagance. ,
His remarkably finely modelled features have the pallor of alabaster; a setting for dark eyes and black brows, framed by close curling black hair neatly topiaried to the silhouette of a Byzantine apostle.
His garments also dispose themselves in apostolic folds — loose folds of light cotton that hint at Thebaid solitudes, ashrams near the snowline where the winds sing and set the prayer-wheels spinning.
But not to prayers do his talents lead him. Instead, to electronics, and through the technology of sound to multi-lingual translations for International Conferences and a United Nations