- end_line
- 9820
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:09.931Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9734
- text
- death, he and his faithful friend should be buried in one tomb.
It came to pass, the monarch died; and Poor Rozoko, now reduced to
second childhood, wailed most dismally:—no one slept that night in
Hooloomooloo. Never did he leave the body; and at last, slowly going
round it thrice, he laid him down; close nestled; and noiselessly
expired.
The king’s injunctions were remembered; and one vault received them
both.
Moon followed moon; and wrought upon by jeers and taunts, the people of
the isle became greatly scandalized, that a base-born baboon should
share the shroud of their departed lord; though they themselves had
tucked in the aged AEneas fast by the side of his Achates.
They straight resolved, to build another vault; and over it, a lofty
cairn; and thither carry the remains they reverenced.
But at the disinterring, a sad perplexity arose. For lo surpassing Saul
and Jonathan, not even in decay were these fast friends divided. So
mingled every relic,—ilium and ulna, carpus and metacarpus;—and so
similar the corresponding parts, that like the literary remains of
Beaumont and of Fletcher, which was which, no spectacles could tell.
Therefore, they desisted; lest the towering monument they had reared,
might commemorate an ape, and not a king.
Such the narration; hearing which, my lord Media kept stately silence.
But in courtly phrase, as beseemed him, Babbalanja, turban in hand,
thus spoke:—
“My concern is extreme, King Yoky, at the embarrassment into which your
island is thrown. Nor less my grief, that I myself am not the man, to
put an end to it. I could weep that Comparative Anatomists are not so
numerous now, as hereafter they assuredly must become; when their
services shall be in greater request; when, at the last, last day of
all, millions of noble and ignoble spirits will loudly clamor for lost
skeletons; when contending claimants shall start up for one poor,
carious spine; and, dog-like, we shall quarrel over our own bones.”
Then entered dwarf-stewards, and major-domos; aloft bearing twisted
antlers; all hollowed out in goblets, grouped; announcing dinner.
Loving not, however, to dine with misshapen Mardians, King Media was
loth to move. But Babbalanja, quoting the old proverb—“Strike me in the
face, but refuse not my yams,” induced him to sacrifice his
fastidiousness.
So, under a flourish of ram-horn bugles, court and company proceeded to
the banquet.
Central was a long, dislocated trunk of a wild Banian; like a huge
centipede crawling on its hundred branches, sawn of even lengths for
legs. This table was set out with wry-necked gourds; deformities of
calabashes; and shapeless trenchers, dug out of knotty woods.
The first course was shrimp-soup, served in great clampshells; the
second, lobsters, cuttle-fish, crabs, cockles, cray-fish; the third,
hunchbacked roots of the Taro-plant—plantains, perversely curling at
the end, like the inveterate tails of pertinacious pigs; and for
dessert, ill-shaped melons, huge as idiots’ heads, plainly suffering
from water in the brain.
Now these viands were commended to the favorable notice of all guests;
not only for their delicacy of flavor, but for their symmetry.
And in the intervals of the courses, we were bored with hints to admire
numerous objects of vertu: bow-legged stools of mangrove wood; zig-zag
rapiers of bone; armlets of grampus-vertebrae; outlandish tureens of
the callipees of terrapin; and cannakins of the skulls of baboons.
The banquet over, with many congees, we withdrew.
Returning to the water-side, we passed a field, where dwarfs were
laboring in beds of yams, heaping the soil around the roots, by
scratching it backward; as a dog.
All things in readiness, Yoky’s valet, a tri-armed dwarf, treated us to
a glorious start, by giving each canoe a vigorous triple-push, crying,
“away with ye, monsters!”
Nor must it be omitted that just previous to embarking, Vee-Vee, spying
a curious looking stone, turned it over, and found a snake.
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