The Dodo Bird

Abstract

Dick Gibson talking low on the low band. Were on Mauritius. Formerly Ile de France. Indian Ocean, east of Mada gascar. Breasting the 20th parallel like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all volcanic?R?union (a French possession), Rodrigues and the St. Brandon group. (Who's St. Brandon, patron of what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those spic brothers R?union and Rodrigues for sister isles? What miscegenous, nigger-in-the-woodpile history went on here anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing, looking for what trade routes, asking the way east from the way west like those other old junkmen of science, the alchemists, lowering what boats of which mutineers or the sea-sickened say, burying the beriberied, promising to return, putting them ashore?as the government Collins and me?on some open ended will-call, found this place? Charted it on maps, informing the old cartogra phers so they could erase their ancient lame finesse, Hie sunt leones? It is the world, real as Paris. And ah significance returns, grazing the surfaces of the place like that random spinning spotlight of the world, the sun, illuminating?the light is terrible, I have no smoked glasses, though Collins, an officer does?the landscape as monks an initial letter in an old text. ) not much here. Lieutenant Collins agrees. Wait, I have my map. Hmn. Well. Hmn. Oh. Mnh hmn. Say, let's try that. Here's how I read it. I see from the Miller Cylindrical Projection that we are the last island cluster of democracy in the Tropic of Cancer, a short?as the bomber hops?hop from the Tropic of Capricorn Border. We are the Gateway to the Antarctic then, a bright prize in the tactics, a key cog in the bitter battle to control the glaciers. Yes. The glaciers. Am I getting warm? When I was a boy I imagined war as a cataclysm, an extended chaos. There was nothing in what I read of the daily, and I puzzled where soldiers slept, when they ate. After a while I came to believe that wars had no silences save tho?e of ambush. War seemed some eternal fire, sourceless and undying like a nasty mir acle. Just a hint of the undisrupted was more exotic than the fiercest massacre. There's our humanity?to feast on the commonplace and make a mystery of the ordinary. What, the mail goes through? The lottery isn't stopped? The restaurants are full? Imagine. Now I perceive something of the thinness of cataclysm and know that more bombs fall in the sea than on the city, and I gauge the under