Technical Difficulties

The Mirador, Chapter 4: 16,146 words

48,910 / 175,000 (27.9%)

Also, on Monday, I got about 1,000 words on The Second Son, on the AWB principle.

The Second Son: 301 words

Every word written is a good word. It may not be right, but it's still good.

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Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain.
    --W. B. Yeats, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Perennial - HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).

A little historical research (a very little) reveals that the Incident took place in 1881, the year before Kipling returned to India. He was 16.

No grubby small boy. Sorry, papersky.

On the other hand, this does mean that the proper model for Young Kipling is Stalky & Co.: Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle. Which is handy, as that's the only Kipling book I actually own and the only one with which I have more than a passing familiarity. (I don't know why that is, so don't even bother asking.) And a Stalky-esque Kipling could be rather fun to write, aside from being the sort of Eris-like creature who might be prone to smuggling Rossetti's wombat into Burne-Jones's garden.

The historical wombat appears to have belonged to an earlier era, since Rossetti Lamenting the Death of his Wombat is dated 1869. However, I am perfectly willing to assume that a man who would acquire a second wombat (sadly expiring almost immediately upon arrival) would not balk at going to the lengths of acquiring a third. And who can wonder that the Third Wombat is never mentioned, after its disgraceful and unchristian behavior in the garden of Edward Burne-Jones?

[ETA: and we just squeak in under the wire: Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in 1882, at the age of 56. Clearly this story was Meant To Be.]

... is there any other kind?

Found this anecdote in the other book I'm reading at the moment (The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle). It isn't quite as good as Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wombat, but it is rather sweet (for funny values of sweet, I grant you, but still).

Up to and during the nineteenth century, there was a pigment called "mummy." V. popular, made a lovely clear glowing brown. Thing is, it was really made out of, well, mummies. No, really. Ground up mummies. ("Raise your hand if ewwwww," as Buffy says.) So, one day in 1881, Lawrence Alma-Tadema comes across his colorman at work, cheerfully grinding up Egyptian mummies for paint. Alma-Tadema hadn't known what "mummy" was made of, and moreover he'd made his name (according to H. Pringle, who isn't so hot on the accurate details, in case somebody knows better) by painting beautiful Egyptian scenes. Horrified and appalled, he rushes to tell his friend Edward Burne-Jones:

Burne-Jones, too, was stunned. After a moment's thought, he hurried off to his studio and returned with a tube of mummy in hand. He wanted to give it a decent burial. "So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet," noted Georgiana Burne-Jones later, "and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it."

Now I want to be a painter, so I can paint A Decent Burial. Can't you just see it? Alma-Tadema and Burne-Jones in the foreground, A-T standing, hat doffed, staring down sadly at their hole, B-J kneeling down with the tube of mummy in his hand, ready to inter it, a cluster of grave, watching pre-Raph women in the background, English garden all around. Perfect.

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WORKS CITED
Pringle, Heather. The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. New York: Theia, 2001. pp. 203-204.