II

The duchess had been bothered by a reoccurring nightmare. The nightmare, though not by any means disturbing or violent, had left a deep impression on her thoughts. The duchess would be sitting on the seashore, quite alone, looking out to sea. She would see nothing there; the infinite tranquil voids of blue sky reflected in the equally serene glass of the ocean, the diminutive, slightly curved, as if drawn in careless pencil, line where the two converged at the horizon and perhaps, a garbagey little bird clumsily diving into the water and then reemerging with a fish in mouth. In a word, sights that would not be out of place in a pleasant dream. The space of the ocean presented to the dutchess, endless in its blank plenitude, was a vastness she found comforting, and she would wriggle her toes in the sand and lower her eyes as she allowed herself a small smile. But she would raise her eyes after a moment and notice, far off, a miniscule speck, formerly absent, on the horizon. She scanned the horizon and noticed others dotting the periphery of the oceans surface, barely perceptible, but becoming increasingly numerous as she looked harder. Then the unmistakable dark pall of doom would settle over her and she would think to herself, “Ah yes, of course, the islands are rising. What a horror.”

By what means did these islands creep into the duchess’s mind, to crouch like odious beasts in the distant haze and spoil her seaside leisure? We cannot, as much as we might like to, illuminate the lightless recesses of her mind and find the place from which the islands had crept in and established their troublesome camp. The possibilities, daunting in their boundlessness, are not to be speculated upon. They are too far away and too great in number for us to make reasonable assertations. Regardless of these uncertainties, we may be sure that several years after the death of the duke, the duchess, having emerged from the frozen cocoon of the obligitory (but in her case voluntary, for she loved the late duke dearly) period of mourning, rose early from her lonely bed after having one of these nightmares and, finding that the view from the windows revealed the green forest surrounding the estate to be utterly obscured by a vast and impenetrable fog, ordered her manservant to ready the barouche.

They set forth. Trudging through the walls of fog at a funerary pace, there was: a team of fine sable stallions with blinds over their eyes, a portly coachman who stroked ridiculous sideburns and wheezed, a carriage, of limber and somber dark wood imported at great cost, within which sat the dutchess with her eyes like bruised moons, wrapped in innumerable layers of glistening crepes. So there, across well traveled roads, but very much alone, they went.

Presently the equipage arrived at a wharf, where the back of a faded fisherman sitting on an overturned vessel came into view. Presently noticing the arrival of the equipage that had so unexpectedly appeared, the man, who had been pondering vaguely the fog that hung so thickly above the lake, hopped from his perch and approached the splendid carriage meekly, with shabby hat gripped between his hands. We see the dingy fellow standing by the window of the carriage, shifting from foot to foot and every so often nodding vigorously, but alas, our vantage point does not allow us to evesdrop on this conversation. But no matter, for moments later the fisherman scurried away and stationed himself at the oars of a spidery little skiff with cracked red paint, where he was shortly joined by the silent duchess who gathered her voluminous skirts as she sunk into the boat, allowing us to make fairly confident suppositions concerning the nature of their conversation. The skiff pushed off, leaving small crystalline ripples in its wake and soon disappeared, swallowed by the fog. On the wharf, the driver sat on the coachbox, grumbled something to himself, and vaulted in some direction a globule of foul black tobacco spit.