Friday, August 18, 2006

Seven: Vengeance Falls

Victoria Falls, in the heart of Africa. The longest waterfall in the world. As you get off the train, you can hear a sound loud as thunder, see what seems to be a huge plume of smoke rising over the jungle, just outside the town.

There are two hotels, just past the station, one a Las Vegas-style horror version of Great Zimbabwe. Appropriately this hotel contains a Casino. However, the doorman is dressed as an Ndebele warrior (inappropriate as the Ndebele, refugee Zulus who were running from King Shaka because they'd kept a herd of cows, looted and burned Great Zimbabwe almost as soon as they arrived in the Zambezi valley.

The other Hotel, the Victoria Falls Hotel, is an old-fashioned Victorian establishment, and the service was impeccable back in 1998. Sadly, with the clamp-down on foreign travel, the office of the Green Man now has to make do with a hotel in Livingstone, the Zambian side of the Falls.

Arthur Salesbury, mercenary, was staying at the Victoria Falls hotel in 1998, resting after his massacre of 1,000 men, women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This news reached the ever-alert ears of the Green Man.

At the hotel, Salesbury met a charming young redhead. She resisted his crude attempts at seduction, and soon he found himself falling truly in love, for the first time in his life. They took long walks by the Falls. She, in shorts and tee-shirt, stood and let him snap her in front of the Falls. She laughed with him, dined with him, kissed him, but when he suggested going further cut him off with a lively giggle. Fascinated, he continued his pursuit of her, even agreeing to leave his pistol in his room when they went for their long walks, as she said it dug into her when they cuddled.

One day, they drove to a lonely spot by the Zambezi, upstream from the Falls. There, after a long walk from the car, the Green Man overpowered Salesbury, helped by the redhead. He begged her to help, to consider his love for her. She laughed in his face and told him that he had not heeded the cries and begging of innocents. Salesbury was bound, and flung into the river. A good swimmer, he tried to make it to the other side, despite his bonds. He was, he thought, too far upstream to go over the Falls.

And he was right. But that far upstream, the crocodiles can also survive. The Green Man and the redhead watched while the crocodiles acted as mute agents of vengeance.

They found his arm a month later. The rest of him has never been recovered.

6 comments:

Zack said...

Did it turn up in Lady A's swimming pool?

Or did somebody reel it in on a peaceful fishing afternoon. Ever afterwards in recounting the tale, exaggerating its length until nobody believed him?

Zack said...

I hope they didn't just waste it....

The female has always wishing she had a spare arm.

The Green Man said...

The arm was found inside a crocodile by a poacher.

A certain redhead stole it off him and had it stuffed. It is now displayed above the mantepiece in her Swiss Chalet.

Anonymous said...

Nice to see the Green Man has enabled 'other' comments at last. Being an old duffer without a blogger id, I just had to read this. Got a wire from home today. Apparently Lady Arcos took a certain septic wart known as Willoughby to the dogs' home Wednesday, smeared him in basting juice and locked him in.

The dogs' home owner wants compensation for the nail marks on the doors. Honestly, the litigious culture we live in...

I mean, he didn't need to feed the dogs that day, did he? Some people are so ungrateful.

Zack said...

I shall have to tell Voltaire about this. We have been in communication by incense stick (Just whip it out, light it up, and you're ready to go- no one suspects a thing. People talk to their incense sticks all the time). I wonder what he came back as. He seems to be avoiding a personal encounter. I read that beans are evil. I have my suspicions that he's actually sitting on a shelf in Aldi.

How kind of Lady Arcos to care for the dumb animals. She has just that tremblingly sweet and beautifully sensitive nature I always imagined your wife would possess.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, sir.

On contacting people from the other side, I remember a medium in Los Angeles who got people to kill other people through having their loved ones tell them to do it in order to make their afterlife more comfortable. Turned out the dear boy was a ventriloquist.

Well, I induced him to throw his voice in the bin, and Lady Arcos finished him off with a crystal ball.