Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Porpoise Empire (part 1)

THE PORPOISE EMPIRE

Introduction

Any historian of the peoples, indigenous or not, of the Maelian hinterlands of Europe must primarily acknowledge the work of Anatole France. While my study is of the implacable racial foes and foils of the folk of his seminal work ‘Penguin Island’, and hence references to it will be as slight as the rules of copyright necessarily demand, it would be ingenuous to deny that the need for a definitive account of the Porpoise Empire, its origins, rise, and eventual fall, would not have occurred to me without the impeccable and precise scholarship of the earlier works in this field.

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

In their natural state, Porpoises are suave, lovable, sleek, toothy, gregarious, and proverbially intelligent enough either never to molest a human swimmer (and often to bring them to port or respond to the pipes of a to-be-keelhauled Greek lad) or if
inclined against one to drown them only cautiously at the dead of night when no other human will suspect. The humanoid porpoises of the Maelian hinterland however are a quite distinct type or subspecies, and their departure from the root-stock of the modern porpoise is sufficiently recent as to leave no visible fossil records of intervening links. The Porpoise (this history will dignify them with a capital P) are
bulky, prognathous of jaw, grey of skin (shading to a mottled brown in the more mitteleuropean) , and – inclining still to a tendancy to have one eye on either side of their head - prone to an ossilation of the head from side to side similar to that seen in some suffers of syphllis and the late Professor Moriarty.

This speciation then is sufficiently surprising to have given rise to a number of legends and it is right for any history to recount them here in their proper
place.

[to be continued...]

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