Storks on Safari

In 2016 I had a safari honeymoon in Kenya, which was the fulfilment of a lifelong wish. The experience was all I imagined it would be, and the desire to revisit has been strong ever since. Thanks to the current state of the world, opportunities to travel are non-existent, so I am left to visit the wilds of Africa in my dreams. Last night I was back on the Masai Mara, but it was a restricted sort of trip in that we were without a driver or tour guide and had to rely upon ourselves to get around. We had a rental jeep, however my wife forbade me from driving more than an hour away from base camp when I expressed a desire to seek out hippos. Since there were no large bodies of water for miles around, I had to content myself with what fauna lived in our immediate vicinity.

I drove the jeep around aimlessly, avoiding dense areas of scrub, yet contrary to my real life experience, the well worn roads were mostly barren of life. We decided to visit a small town some miles distant, hoping to stock up on supplies and see new animals on the way. A small herd of buffalo (Syncerus caffa) resembling brooding storm clouds watched us warily from the bush, swishing flies away from broad black flanks. Knowing the moody and unpredictable temperament of these formidable bovines, I made sure to give them a wide berth. Their more fragile cousins, the ungainly blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) famous for vast numbers during migration season, were also present, although most of them were corpses strewn about in various degrees of decomposition. Some were entire, recently deceased bodies, whilst others mere sun-bleached bones with scraps of leathery hide clinging to them. In spite of my best efforts, I ended up driving over many, crunching their bones to dust. I was worried lest one of their curved horns should burst a tyre, but they were no match for the robust four-wheel drive.

We passed a lone giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) browsing from a thorny acacia tree, its dappled hide reflecting the sun kaleidoscopically. Soon the road was closely hemmed in either side by bushes, and we were forced to abandon the jeep and continue on foot. It was only a short distance left to town, but being now completely defenceless, we were nervous about ambush by predators. At the end of the sunlit passage we espied a trio of large birds pecking around a yard on the edge of town. I pointed out the species to my wife. There was an excessively ugly marabou stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer), known also as the 'undertaker bird', and with it, two saddle-billed storks (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis). Where the marabou is a grotesque brute with a fleshy, wizened appearance and a swinging gular sack, the saddle-bill is one of the more attractive specimens of the stork family, sporting a handsome black and white plumage, and a striking orange bill topped by its namesake yellow saddle.

At this moment I was too intimidated about the approaching saddle-bills to admire them, for they reach almost 5 foot in height. I remarked to my wife that they were probably used to being fed by tourists, so we turned our backs on them and pretended to walk away. Unperturbed, the birds followed us closely, ogling us with liquorice allsort eyes. Even though we knew the birds were harmless, we were creeped out by their proximity, and tried to shoo them away by stamping our feet. This only caused to give them a brief spindly flutter, whereupon they immediately recommenced their stalking behaviour. I woke up before the scene resolved itself, realising I'd dreamed about these particular species of storks because they feature dominantly in a chapter written for my novel.

Return of the Pink Lady

Readers from the Before Times may recall when your long suffering narrator was tormented by a particularly malevolent entity known as the Pink Lady. For anyone interested in her likely origins, one can research the Greencastle Ghost. I blame her latest resurgence on my disturbed state of mind after reading Jude the Obscure just before turning in for the night. I had reached that most disturbing of chapters immediately guessable to anyone familiar with the book, and having not been acquainted with or forewarned of this plot point beforehand, I was thrown into a state of despondency heightened by the lateness of the hour and the increased vulnerability of my emotions.

I was with my immediate family, dog included, at the ancestral seat of Heartbreak Hotel, sojourning for the weekend with my parents and their pack of unruly hounds. Heartbreak Hotel is a ramshackle residence, falling apart at the seams, with a hastily added wing that had already begun to deteriorate before it was fully finished. Usually a companionable beast who shadows me everywhere, my dog had opted to spend the night downstairs nestled within the pungent cocoon of his fellow canines. Our child slept soundly in the adjoining room, whilst my wife and I occupied another in the aforementioned new wing of the house. It was a restless night, for I have never slept soundly in that place, and I soon discerned that I was not alone in my nocturnal vigil. My wife was also awake.

"There's something wrong with this house," she whispered. "I'm worried about Lucinda sleeping on her own, oughtn't we to check on her?" Before we could do so, the atmosphere in the room changed abruptly, arresting us with a stifling fear. In such situations one often reads of an icy chill permeating the room, yet in my experience, the reverse is quite usually the case. It is as though all the oxygen is suddenly withdrawn, leaving one as breathless and claustrophobic as though trapped in a tin garage on a hot summer's day. A wavering light had appeared at the foot of our mattress, and we perceived it to be a brown taper, floating quite independently of any hand. "Don't look at it," my wife instructed in a panicked whisper, but her warning had come too late.

Unable to tear my eyes from the candle as it bobbed closer, I was horrified when in its aura I beheld the wasted, spectral features of the Pink Lady. My persecution at the hands of this woman began back in my freshman years when she chased me down the corridors of the university campus one ill-fated night. Sometimes I can still hear the phantom clop of her hooves echoing down those empty halls. This night, only her face was visible, yet I knew it to be she by the all-too-familiar grip of suffocating fear she evoked, and those wild, abandoned eyes starting from deeply hollow sockets. I am not ashamed to admit I let out a cry of horror, cringing beneath the bedsheets in a shameful display of manhood.

When I eventually gathered the courage to look again, the Pink Lady's face was gone, but the hovering taper remained. This time I took my wife's advice and speedily averted my eyes, my breathing laboured in the closeness of the room, my legs feeling paralysed. Without a second assault on my nerves, I was able to rally somewhat, the paralysis left me, and I forced myself out of bed to hit the light switch. With the lights on, my courage returned and I shouted out a defiant challenge to the ghost, daring her to lay a hand on my family. A loud crash, followed by an audible pop of air pressure made me immediately regret my bravado. We checked next door and our daughter remained sleeping soundly.

Next we went downstairs and the dogs were likewise in an undisturbed state, groggily wagging their tails as we entered. Woken by the sound of my scream and our activity in the house, my mother joined us downstairs in her dressing gown and I told her what had happened. She seemed concerned, yet unsuprised by the news of the unwelcome presence. Since sleep was now impossible, she went about preparing to cook a meal in the kitchen. After all, it is far better to face up against the supernatural on a full stomach. A mousy professor of the arts from the nearby university was also staying at the house, for my parents took the occasional tenant, and she came to sit with us in the dining room.

"The Pink Lady was a great admirer of classical music," she explained. "Back when she was alive, the rigidity of the class system prevented her from enrolling on any degree, but after her tragic suicide, she haunted the antechambers of the music dons and many an orchestral performance was plagued by her shadowy presence, watching from the wings. Indeed, if you watch Disney's Fantasia closely, you can dimly make her out hovering next to Deems Taylor. They say she can still be summoned with music." With a return of my former recknlessness, I decided to test this theory, and boldly went to turn on the stereo.

As soon as the local radio station began to play, the lights in the dining room and kitchen cut out, and a glowing golden orb appeared near the patio doors. A throbbing sickness overtook me, and I tried to scream, but nothing but a hoarse croak escaped my parched lips. My mother screamed, and all of the dogs began to bark in terror. "What have you done?!" the professor cried. "Tis Irene O'Hare, we are forsaken!" In the morning, when I awoke, my wife complained that I had woken her by screaming in my sleep, whilst on her other side, our daughter was laughing in hers. I fear this will not be the last I encounter of the dreaded Pink Lady.

Mammoths in the Snow

Allow me dear reader to relate to you a singular incident which lately occurred, and which you may find to be in some measure surprising, and perhaps even a little disconcerting. Over the winter holiday I was spending time with family at our Sussex home, hemmed in by both foul weather and the beastly yet strictly necessary curfew as occasioned by an ongoing pandemic. It was at a late hour that I occupied a room upstairs, listening to the most atrocious blizzard blowing outside and watching as sheets of snow struck the windowpane. I was thankful for being comfortably indoors, lamenting that it must be a wretched man indeed who would brave such Siberian conditions as those raging out there. With a mind to smoke a pipe and lose myself in a book, I was distracted by another sound above the howling of the wind. A low rumbling noise, followed by a terrible crash sent me over to the window to look out onto the street.

Due to the driving flakes of heavy snow and the light at my back, it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness outside, but I was gradually to make out some looming shapes over by my neighbour's property. At first I assumed these to be some garish festive decorations, as we were in that period of gluttony and limbo between Christmas and New Year. I took out my camera, hoping by the flash to illuminate the darkness and get a better view of what I assumed would be some damage wrought by the storm. Imagine my stupefaction when, after clicking the shutter, I beheld two monstrous woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) intruding on the neighbouring lawn. As any self-respecting, half-witted fellow knows, these primeval pachyderms went extinct sometime between the Pleistocene and Holocene, so what then were they doing here alive in the modern day, and on my street no less?

Well, it appeared that, with the aid of their muscular trunks, they were plucking off the brightly coloured baubles and Christmas lights from an overhead wire and popping them into their mouths. In spite of my great alarm, I could not help thinking that such a meal must not only be exceedingly unpleasant, but also potentially harmful. I took all of this in during the space of a few seconds, for at the flash of my camera, the beasts startled and began to lumber out onto the road, blinking their small eyes. I called my family upstairs to witness this extraordinary spectacle, but before they arrived the mammoths were already retreating down the road into the blizzard. They were sped on their way by a man riding a dromedary (Camelus dromedarius), furiously beating them with some manner of riding switch. When I recovered my senses, I remembered that I had taken a photograph of the mammoths, bad though the quality was.

With a frenzy of excitement, I began to communicate with everybody I knew, telling them what had transpired. For reasons I could not fathom, nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in my experience, they dismissed it out of hand and showed signs of disbelieving me, even with my photographic evidence. I spent the rest of the evening in bitter reflection that extinct animals coming back from the dead was less exciting than political debate. In the morning, the footprints of the mammoths had already been covered by the snow, but the effects of their devastation were everywhere present. I was much aggrieved to find that my bicycle was crushed beyond repair, pieces of twisted metal poking out of the snow. I wondered if the mammoths were some ominous portent of things to come, or the results of hybridisation and cloning. Before I could ruminate further, I was called by my wife to the kitchen where we have a broad view of the countryside.

The morning sun revealed a vast floodplain of many interconnected puddles, all glimmering in the golden light of dawn. An astonishing number and variety of waterfowl had settled on the waterlogged ground, as though some heavenly aviary had suddenly let loose all its flocks at once. Where outside the front of the house a fierce blizzard had blown, here at the back it had rained in Biblical proportions. My wife asked what the meaning of all these birds could be, and with grim foreboding I gleaned the truth. They were moving in to re-inherit the world from us humans. The mammoths too, were not the result of Soviet genetic engineering, but were in fulfillment of that prophecy as set down in the Book of Revelation which states 'all the dead will rise.' What could one do, but fall to one's knees and pray?

The Duke's Demesne

Welcome to The Dreaming Dandy - a repository of ruminations on life and its counter realm, the dreamscape. My name is Aloysius Nightingale, a 21st century dandy and your faithful narrator through the often perplexing and sometimes frightening episodes of existence. In some instances, place names and character names will be altered for privacy protection, for one cannot be too careful when publishing information on the Wild West Web. Now that introductions are out of the way, let us without further preamble fling open the gates of horn and ivory and meet a singularly eccentric personage, and explore the curious locale wherein he rules as lord.

I have written before about zoos appearing in strange places, but let me tell you now about an arrangement that would not have been out of the pale in times past. Our destination is the rolling green grounds of Sussex University campus, where I was assisting with the installation of a new teacher. During this task, I made the acquaintance of another professor from the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, known only as the Duke. He was a roguish gentleman rather past the middle years, approaching that age in life where all things are permitted or overlooked. His careless appearance sporting tobacco-stained tweeds and rambunctious side whiskers bespoke of a type more at ease in the stables than the classroom, and a marked preference for the wine cup over the lectern. I soon learned that he was only contracted to deliver one lecture a year, and even this he grumbled about. In addition to his sparing duties, of which he demanded a hefty annuity, he resided on the campus grounds at the university's expense as though he were Vice-Chancellor. Why should this bloated remnant of the aristocracy suck dry the struggling coffers of the university? Due to his contribution to film in a more active phase of his career, the Duke was held in high esteem by the academic community. He had long ago fallen into slothful and disreputable ways, and yet the university persisted in their belief that they were "very lucky to have him."

After complaining to the faculty about his upcoming lecture, the Duke left the teaching block to return to his manor, but not before inviting some staff and students, myself included, for a tour of his estate. On the way to the park on the edge of campus, where the 1960s Brutalist concrete gave way to the bucolic greens of National Heritage South Downs, I was surprised to discover a paddock of zebra (Equus quagga) and hear their distinctive whooping barks. It was explained that they were overspill from the Duke's private menagerie, which we would shortly be seeing more of. My interest thus piqued, we proceeded beneath a decorative archway to the tree-lined avenue that led to his domain. The Duke strolled a little ahead of the group with a haughty air, deigning not to exchange words with his guests. Everywhere one looked there were topiary hedges sculpted into upright phalluses, giving one a telling glimpse into the Duke's nature. In addition to his other vices, the Duke was a predatory invert who notoriously coerced male students to their defilement at his lair. His patrons turned a blind eye to these unsavoury incidents.

The Duke's park was a heavily wooded one, made up of superb beech and elm trees. The sun filtered through this leafy canopy, suffusing everything with a golden green glow, lending an impression of a sylvan grotto. One may well have believed themselves to have entered Circe's enchanted glade, for imagine my great astonishment when we came upon the ornate cages of exotic animals. Some way to the left through the trees was a wrought iron cage with green painted bars in the Victorian style, behind which paced a great tawny lion (Panthera leo). Even from this distance, I could tell that the beast was of a formidable size not often seen today. Hard by the lion cage was a meshed, multi-levelled compound housing a troop of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) with their iconic painted faces and rumps. Directly in our path was another enclosure separated by a narrow moat and populated with enormously overfed brown bears (Ursus actos), their wet black noses snuffling expectantly for food as we got closer. To the right of the avenue, opposite the bears, was a dome-topped temple for gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), dimly glimpsed sifting through their hay as hulking black shadows.

I was much struck by the prodigious largeness of all these animals, and upon hearing our appreciative comments, the Duke turned around to boast that they were "Beasts of empire selectively bred from prime imperial stock, not like the piddling specimens found in modern public zoos." Like a spoiled child showcasing his toys, he gestured towards a red and gold oriental pavilion past the gorilla house, proudly asserting that he also kept giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), prestigious gifts from the Chinese government. From an unseen lake came the honking cries of waterfowl, many of which in his philanthropy he had donated to the university for free. He lamented that this was all that remained of a once thriving collection. We were given leave to wander at will whilst he returned to his sprawling stone mansion beyond the menagerie. The Duke spent much of his time indulging his introverted passions of animal husbandry and tinkering with toys. A miniature track had been set up around the grounds, along which he raced radio controlled cars. I was disappointed to learn from a groundsman that the park was normally strictly off limits to visitors, as I had hoped to spend an occasional lunch break there.

The reek of the animals and their copious amounts of waste was overpowering in its mammalian pungency and had attracted large swarms of flies that worried the faces of the resident bears. An American film student with tanned skin, white teeth, and blonde hair, perhaps a future victim of the Duke, posed for a selfie in front of the bears, and soon his face too was covered in flies. The huge animals loomed over a railing I worried was far too low to contain them. When they rose to stand on two legs, they presented a wall of matted fur and brawn eight feet high. Before I had an opportunity to explore the other exhibits, we received word that the tour was over and the Duke kindly requested we vacate his premises. The party dispersed and I made my way back alone, quite overwhelmed by all I had seen. As I exited the park and drew near the zebras, the unmistakable laughing grunts of hippos (Hippopotamus amphibibius) reached my ears, and I saw something I had missed earlier. Part of the Duke's lake extended down to the campus proper, and an enclosed section of the water was hemmed in by teaching buildings.

Hippos have long been a favourite animal of mine, and I walked over for a closer look. I was not alone in hoping to get a sight of them, a Muslim man and his young children were excitedly pressing against the rails. Preferring such experiences alone, I tarried until they should move on, but unaware of the danger presented by these African juggernauts, in a brace of shakes, the children had scaled the fence and were down in the mud and water. Their delighted cries turned to screams of fear as they were boisterously harassed by two junior hippos. The broad grey bulk of a full-grown adult hippo cruised through the water towards the children. Like any father worth his salt, the man was over the fence and floundering to rescue his offspring. A crowd of bewildered spectators gathered, and with their assistance, the family were dragged to safety not a moment too soon. The avenging hippopotamus erupted from the pool, chomping its fleshy jaws and splashing everyone with muddy backwash.

I reflected on the university's indulgence of the Duke, the dangers that his animals represented, and the less than sanitary conditions in which they were kept. It was evident that before long, a more serious incident would occur, and that would be the end, if not of his unorthodox position, most certainly of his bestiary. I do hope that you enjoyed this surprising tale of a man out of time, and that you will look forward to more such adventures in the years to follow. For now, I bid my gentle readers a happy and prosperous New Year. May the less than exemplary conduct of the Duke stand as warning to your own.