PROFESSOR FLUMMOX'S COMPLEAT ACCOUNT OF THE DRY COUNTRIES

Being a Confident and Exhaustive Description of Foreign Parts, Their Customs and Absurdities, Compiled Entirely Without Leaving the Parish.

By Professor Horatio Flummox, F.R.S.S. (Fellow of the Realm's Solitary Society), of Mucklecombe. The Professor wishes it known that he has never travelled, considering it unnecessary: the world may be deduced from first principles by any sufficiently clever man in a dry chair, and he is that man, and it is nearly a dry chair.

A PREFACE, IN WHICH THE METHOD IS DEFENDED

There are those who say a man cannot describe the dry countries without going to them. To these people I say: can the astronomer not describe the moon, which he has likewise never visited? He can, and does, and is never once contradicted by the moon. So it is with abroad.

My sources are impeccable. I have the accounts of a sailor who put in at Saltgate once and spoke to me for the better part of an evening, until the ale ran out and his memory with it. I have three letters from a cousin in Drudgeford who has also never left, but who thinks as I do, which is the next best thing to knowing. And I have the evidence of reason itself, which tells us that if a thing is true in Sogmarsh — and what is true anywhere is surely true here first, and best — then it must be true, in some degraded foreign fashion, everywhere.

I have accordingly compiled the whole of the outer world. It took a fortnight. I could have done it in a week, but it rained.

OF THE DRY COUNTRIES IN GENERAL, AND THEIR AFFLICTION

The lands beyond our own are known, correctly, as the Dry Countries, and are to be pitied.

It is reported — and I see no reason to doubt it, the reports being uniformly dreadful — that in these places the ground is hard, and stays where it is put, and does not take a boot, or a cart, or the occasional cousin. The rivers are said to run only downhill, and only forwards, and to arrive where they set out for, which strikes the Sogmarsh mind as showing a want of imagination bordering on the sinister. Worst of all, it is claimed that in the dry countries the rain, when it deigns to fall at all, stops.

I confess I do not fully believe this last. A land where the rain stops is not a land; it is a rumour with a drought in it. But I set it down, in the interest of completeness, and I pity them.

The remedy — for I am not a man to describe a problem without proposing its cure — is drainage in reverse: were the dry countries to dig channels bringing water in, rather than the barbarous local practice of letting it out, they might in a generation or two achieve a respectable bog, and begin, at last, to live. I have posted this suggestion to several foreign courts. None has replied, which I take as the silence of men too moved to speak.

OF THEIR MEASUREMENT OF DISTANCE, WHICH IS PITIABLE

The dry countries, I am reliably told, measure the road in a unit called the mile, which is a length of ground with no inn attached to it.

Consider the horror of this. A man of Drudgeford, asked how far to the next parish, will tell you it is "two inns and a wet stretch," and you will know at once whether to set out — for a distance is not a number, it is a promise about supper. But the dry-country traveller is told only that his destination lies "forty miles off," which tells him nothing of the slightest use: not whether he will be warm at the end of it, not whether the lamp will be lit, not whether he will arrive at all. I can only conclude that in the dry countries nobody ever arrives anywhere, but wanders their hard, forward-running, un-inned roads until they die of exposure to arithmetic. It is a mercy we are spared it.

OF THEIR DEAD, WHICH IS FRANKLY IN POOR TASTE

Here I must ask the reader of a delicate constitution to sit down.

It is asserted — the sailor was most insistent, though he had by then had a good deal of ale — that in the dry countries the dead stay dead, and are collected on time, and do not linger, or gossip, or attend their own dinners, or take two hundred years to get round to leaving.

I reject this utterly, as any feeling man must. A realm whose Reaper is never late is a realm of monstrous, inhuman efficiency, in which a grandmother, having died on the Tuesday, is simply gone by the Wednesday, with no decent interval for the family to keep laying her place, no over-haunting, no warmth. I would not live in such a country and I would not die in it either. Our own arrangement — a single, overworked, perpetually late Reaper on a coughing scooter, so that our dead may take their unhurried leave among people who love them — is plainly the superior system, and the dry countries' cold punctuality is exactly the sort of thing one expects of a people whose rivers arrive.

OF THEIR LORD, WHO IS ALLEGED TO ANSWER

The dry countries are said to worship a Lord who answers prayers.

I find this improbable and, if true, faintly vulgar. Our own Disinterested Lord, in His great wisdom, answers nothing whatsoever, and is praised at moderate length precisely for that — a Lord with the good taste to leave well alone, who does not meddle, who noted us once in an enormous book and has had the decency not to interfere since. A Lord who answers is a Lord with time on His hands and opinions about your business, forever smiting this and blessing that, and I cannot think it makes for a restful Sunday. We ask our Lord for miracles and He does not provide them and we are all, as a result, still alive. The dry countries may keep their busybody deity. Ours has the dignity of a locked office.

OF THEIR MONEY, AND WHY IT IS SILLIER THAN OURS

They are reported to use round metal discs, stamped with the face of a dead king, and to call these coins, and to set great store by them.

Now, I am a fair man, and I will grant that this is not so very different from our own arrangement, under which we set great store by the potato. But observe the crucial superiority of the potato. In a hard winter, when the snow is on the ground and the cupboard is bare, a man with a sack of our money may eat his fortune and live to be poor another day. Whereas the dry-country miser, snowed in with a chest of metal discs bearing a dead king's face, may suck on them all he likes; he will not get a supper, and serves him right. Their money is our money with the sense taken out. I have written to the Pennyworths suggesting they raise this point at the next opportunity. They have not replied, but then they never do, being busy compounding.

OF THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD, ESTABLISHED BY PROOF

I come at last to my chief discovery, and I set it down plainly, for the ages.

Sogmarsh is the centre of the world. I have proved it. Taking the great fireplace of the Crown & Engine as my fixed point — it being the one thing in the realm that never moves, the maps beside it notwithstanding — and reasoning outward in all directions, I find that everywhere else is further from here than here is, which is the very definition of a margin. The dry countries lie at the edges, where the map thins and gives out and the surveyors turn back; and we, the wet and the central, lie at the pivot, upon which all events turn. When something happens in the world, it happens here first, and most, and reaches the dry countries later, diluted, and wrong.

The capital may dispute this. The King may dispute this. They are welcome to; disputation is a suburb of relevance, and the centre does not stoop to it.

A CLOSING WORD, AGAINST THE TRAVELLERS

I am aware there are men who will go and look — who will take ship from Saltgate, or walk toward the Hem, and come back with tales that flatly contradict the sound conclusions of this volume. To these men I say only this: a fact you had to leave home to learn is not a fact, it is a rumour with mud on its boots, and I will not have it in my library. The world is knowable from a dry chair. It is nearly a dry chair. And it is, in every particular that matters, exactly like Sogmarsh, only drier, and sadder, and further away, and wrong.

Here ends the Compleat Account. The Professor is available to describe any further countries the reader may require, sight unseen, at his usual rate, payable in potatoes.

Marginal note, a later and plainer hand — Goodwife Muckle's, they say: "He is wrong in every line, and he has never been past Drudgeford, and I would not change a word of him. Show me the man who is certain about a place he has never been, and I will show you every soul in this parish, looking in a mirror, and calling it a window."