6
The Old Man and the Sea
"Apsu, apsu, every where, nor any mead to drink..." sighed Noah, as he gazed across the unfathomable face of the deep.
"Shampoo, shampoo, every where, and all aboard did stink!" Joachim responded in a tone which somehow lacked his normal jocularity. Try as he might - and he had been trying for nearly six weeks now - he had not managed by one iota to cheer up the old soul who stood beside him at the prow. It seemed an insuperable task; for the entire voyage, the patriarch had retained a face as long as the drooping wings on the defunct albatross that hung about his neck.
"There I was," began the old man - as he had begun at least twice a day since the start of the voyage - "just beginning to enjoy my retirement with Winking, Blinking and Nod..."
"Ham, Sam and Yappy," Joachim corrected him for the fifteenth time that day.
"...taking over the business." As usual, Noah had either failed to hear him, or chosen not to. Joachim harboured a sneaking suspicion that the old man was deaf. He was certainly in his dotage. "All my life I'd fancied having a go at this home brewing stuff," he went on, "and just as I get my first batch bubbling away nicely, what happens?"
"Wha-" began Joachim.
"I'll tell you what happens," burst in Noah without even looking at Joachim. "This old geezer comes up to me and says, 'build a boat.' - 'What?' I say. Well, I mean, we don't even live near the sea, do we?"
"We do now," said Joachim, not entirely under his breath. Forty days with neither sight of land nor sound of - well, anything other than the endless lap of waves against the hull, the incessant beating of rain upon the roof, and the interminable squabbles among the crew. Six weeks of hell and high water. It was enough to break a lesser man. Even the lamb had taken to gambling with the other two lambs in the ship's saloon. Joachim was just thankful that the little blighter was shrewd enough to lose the odd game.
"'Cube,' he says, 'sixty yards a side.'" Noah spat into the sea. The caked plumage of the albatross evidenced six weeks of less careful aim. "I ask you, have you ever heard of a cubic boat? No, of course you haven't but that's what this guy wants. Thought I'd misheard him for a start - hearing isn't what it was, y'know - and that he wanted a normal boat sixty cubits long, but he fetches out this blueprint and there it is: a blinking building brick of a boat!"
"It's the Earth." said Joachim. Noah apparently didn't hear him. "It's the Earth." he shouted.
The ancient mariner turned to him. "Earth!" he snapped, "This isn't earth! I remember earth. Earth is that dusty stuff you stick grape pips in to grow wine, that damp smelly stuff you stick in your mobile coffin, brown powder you mix with boiling water, milk and sugar at eleven o'clock. This isn't earth; this is Water. This is the stuff you use to wash greasy dishes, flush toilets, hose down the piggery; this is the stuff you're dying to get rid of when you've had a pint or two. Earth is the significantly different third pin on the plug of your soldering iron; it's not at all the sort of thing you'd want to confuse with water."
Joachim let out an exasperated sigh; the old man was getting worse. "Not the sea, you dunderhead," he shouted, "the boat!"
"Ah," Noah said, "the boat. You should have heard how those three lads of mine, Nina, Pinta and Mary..."
"Hamish, Seamus and Hoppit," Joachim corrected him for the sixteenth time that day.
"...laughed when they saw me building a cubic boat." He chuckled, "Laughed on the other side of their faces when it started raining and they thought I wouldn't let them aboard, though. Good job for them I couldn't handle it alone." Then Joachim's words finally percolated through the prion filter of his brain: "What's all this stuff and nonsense about my boat being the Earth?" he asked.
"Babylonian," said Joachim. "They have this sexagesimal system for things like time, size of the Earth, the Ark. The polar circumference of the Earth is 216,000 stadia; the Ark is sixty yards cubed: figure it out."
After punching a few keys on the newfangled electronic calculator he'd been forced to buy as a replacement for the ship's loglog sliderule that had been trashed by the two pigs during their rooting around, Noah looked at Joachim with a new found respect. "D'ye know, my boy," he beamed, "You're right!"
"Of course I am," said Joachim. "In time, this vessel, or at least its square floor, will be washed up in the alluvial sands at the confluence of the divided stream. It's written in the stars."
"Never mind all that astrological claptrap," sniffed Noah, "Anyway, we haven't seen any stars for six weeks; nothing but rain, rain and more rain. Just tell me how to get off this infernal sea and back on to dry land."
"Well," began Joachim, "I've been using dead reckoning to plot our course and I reckon we're over the dead centre of India right now. The Hindu records of the flood..." He broke off as one of the two wolves sauntered on to the deck wearing what appeared to be a new guernsey. "Excuse me a moment," he said.
"Eh? Yes," the wolf said when Joachim asked it if it had just come from the saloon. "Novice at cards in there. I just fleeced him. Took the shirt off his back."
"Must have been a lot riding on the last bet," said Joachim.
"You bet!" the wolf grinned.
"Fond of riding, then?" asked Joachim, in his most innocent voice as he snatched up a passing red herring.
"Er...?" stuttered the wolf.
"Because if you are, you'll need a little red riding hood." And in an economy of motion and logic, Joachim slapped the herring down hard over the wolf's head and then divested it of the fleece - at once hoodwinking it and pulling the wool over its eyes. Within seconds, he had returned the fleece to the lamb, warned it not to mess around with the pack again, and sent it off to lie down with Judah, the lion, to nurse its wounded pride.
"Where was I?" he asked.
"India?" said Noah cautiously, not certain that the old D.T.s weren't returning.
"That's it," smiled Joachim. "Your Indian counterpart finds this talking fish while he's washing his hands and looks after it until it can fend for itself. Then the flood comes. Turns out the fish is Vishnu, the Preserver, who meanwhile has grown into a huge fish with a golden horn. You have to use a snake to lasso the horn to stop the Ark disappearing down the plughole of the ocean."
"You're joking!" Noah said.
Resisting the impulse to rehash the old joking rejoinder, Joachim fished out a scroll written in Hebrew. "Here it is," he said in triumph. "Last chapter: hollow of the hand ... water ... fish ... mouth ... hook! - And all in five final letters," he added, grinning through his long grey straggly beard.
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This is one of the Tales of Joachim |
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Ink Amera |
(C) David 1/9/2007 |
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