Notwithstanding, Farokh the Engineer continued to announce, in his own way of putting things, that he found the lair of the worm. What Farokh the Engineer meant by this was obscure, and the subject of contention between rival schools of literalists and interpretationists. —
Farokh
The foremost proponent of literalism was as ever Colloid, who appealed to a remark in a research paper [Mulholland & Yong-Hee 2008, q.v. ch9 above] concerning an outbreak of hot-tub-associated A.hydrophila folliculitis, hereinafter referred to as the ‘Brisbane case’. The substance of this passing remark was that the male of the two victims in the Brisbane case reported the presence of what he described as earthworms in the pipes of the hot tub installed in his home [ibid. p40], the hot tub being cited [eponymously] as the source of his indisposition. Apprised of this obiter dictum, Colloid not unreasonably inferred that Farokh the Engineer had quite literally found worms infesting the bowels of Charybdis, concluding by plausible heuristic that here ultimately was to be found the explanation for the misfortune which had befallen Herod given, as Mulholland & Yong-Hee remark in relation to the Brisbane case, that —
Charybdis (Pex ‘n’ Quads), Herod, Colloid, Aeromonas hydrophila
Nero Cesare was the decurion or standard-bearer for the interpretationist faction. This purveyor of natural, organic and demented New Age woo ever manifested the natural, organic and demented New Age predilection for specious and egregious unreason, and for arraying the gaudiest hypotheses in the drab vestments of established fact. In the present case, Nero Cesare developed a fixation with the Parsee, that is to say Zoroastrian heritage of Farokh the Engineer, seized upon the Iranian, that is to say Parthian or Persian origin of Zoroastrianism, and on the shallowest of pretexts (something to do with vultures, worms, and Zoroastrian dietary taboos, they tell me) linked this nonsense up with weird and wonderful speculations in relation to the death cult centred around, firstly the Chiesa Santa Maria del Purgatori ad Arco in the Via del Tribunali, in which his paternal grandmother participated, and secondly the Cimitero delle Fontanelle a mile or so to the Northwest, where his maternal grandmother had been a votary with notoriously sharp elbows. By such circuits and deceptions, at any rate, Nero Cesare professed to discern an approach on the part of Farokh the Engineer to some kind of obscurantistically encoded koanistic truth, which he apprehended as the wholehearted endorsement of his own obsession with cohaerentia omnes, and in such wise resolved to prosecute his natural, organic agenda with renewed vigour. —
Nero Cesare
With such a fanfare, the gentle reader might be pardoned for supposing this pair to have been bad Parsees or Persians, henchmen of Fadlallah, persecutors of the mild Bahai, shabiha rapists, vulpes atque lupes. List me now, for I disabuse thee of such idle fancy. 33 and 36, and likewise 34, 35, 37 and 38 were almost locals, having been propagated like ‘taters in the loam of the Somerset Levels. And indeed, their heads in their phrenological freakishness resembled nothing so much as very large potatoes indeed; moreover, they were interrelated by means of bewildering lineages, tuberous and subterranean in their complexity. From their villages, where grew the apple trees from which was plucked the terrible knowledge that they knew, Bristol could have been espied on a clear day, had not the bulk of the Mendips interposed itself. They rejoiced in ooh-arrr names, 33 and 36 being known under the respective sobriquets Cheddar and Meltynge, their colleagues above-mentioned and to whom we turn in due course bearing the following typical Somerset names, again respectively:- Wookey, Wurzel, Scrumpy and Chard. —
Cheddar, Meltynge
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