Lost World: Extracts from the Professor's Diary. Saurions we did not call dragon §5: the Pisceosaur

...a foot in the air when they nudged our feet, and Johnson lashed out with the butt of her rifle, raising a fountain of water. But they were curious and playful, eighteen to twenty four inches long, shaped like fish but scaled like dinosaurs. They reminded us heavily of Chinese water dragons, inscrutable, playful, occasionally sinister, but mostly unconcerned with us and wonderful to know will still be gambolling in the streams when...

...the few meats that J. Clive and I agreed might be nutritious and non-inimicable to our existence in this place, but we could not bring ourselves to kill one. We hoped to find one naturally distressed (for however much we liked them, we were very tired of the ephemeral dry rations we had), but... J Clive found a spawning ground. I didn't know, but she convinced us the eggs would be utterly palatable...

...matched no skeletons I could recall from any period, though close to some. We eventually dubbed them pisceosaurs and moved on, remembering them fondly... joked I had permitted them a caviare disregard of etymology, upon which Janice and Johnson set upon her with...

J

From the first post there were four characters, J Clive, Johnson, the professor, and the narrator. In my mind Janice Clive knew about animals, Johnson was an explorer/hunter and good with the rifle, and the narrator possibly military, at any rate the calmest, the strategist if anyone was, and the one best able to break a raptor's neck.

I'm bad enough at thinking of names to start with, so I deliberately didn't name the narrator, which fed into the slightly other-worldly feel. And also gives people less to remember :) However, last week I had extracts from the professor's diary, and today I had to refer to the narrator, which gave me the problem, by what name?

I could make one up, but it might be confusing and I didn't want to. Any anonymous reference would be appropriate, but what? I could stick to generic references "the wrestler", "the fourth", but that wasn't very satisfying. I could hark back to Three Men in a Boat and use "J", which I liked a lot but was impossible as I already had Johnson and J. Clive and another J would be confusing and ridiculous. I could go with "I" but that would be confusing with the pronoun, or "JJ" or another letter, but none sounded right.

Then I realised I had the perfect out, if I could make the reference appear in one of the elisions. Neat, no?

When I was writing this post, I invented the military connection, which sort of fit, she might not have literally been one when she was alive, but if it comes up again, I think "colonel" fits.

NTL on demand

I wasn't at all sure whether NTL on demand was a sensible thing or not, but purely the ability to watch the current ep of Doctor Who any evening that week without any preparatory hassle in any form really is really nice.

Minutes from the Campfire 1

Previously we had talked only in the most general terms about who we had been in life, and how we had died. Our memories of travelling toward the valley, toward the looming mountain seemed to stretch back forever, an infinity of existence that never began, all compressed into a finite time. So there was never a good point to start talking about it.

However, as we grew closer to the mountain, it gave us a definite time to start, and one evening, clustered round a huddled camp-fire, the conversation drifted to speculation and we began comparing notes.

Our memories were vague before a couple of months ago, we remembered endless travelling together, but the days blurred into one, and we could find no definite points of correspondence, and the professor deduced that only since then had we really been experiencing time day by day.

( Read more... )