The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin Page B

enclosing alchemic symbol. I can tell you what it says, but as to what it means, I confess that at present I am able to offer little in the way of exactitude.”
    “We will settle for what it says, then,” said Jim.
    “All right.” Professor Slocombe held up Omally’s sketch, and traced the lines of the symbol as he spoke. “We have here the number ten, here the number five and here enclosing all the alchemic C.”
    “A five, a ten and a letter C,” said Jim. “I do not get it.”
    “Of course you don’t, it is an ideogram: the expression of an idea, if I might be allowed to interpret loosely?” The two men nodded. “It says, I am ‘C’ the fifth of the ten.”
    The two men shook their heads. “So what does that mean?” asked Omally.
    “Search me,” said Professor Slocombe. “Was there anything else?” Pooley and Omally stared at each other in bewilderment. This was quite unlike the Professor Slocombe they knew. No questions about where the symbol was found, no long and inexplicable monologues upon its history or purpose, in fact the big goodbye.
    “There was one other thing,” said the rattled Omally, drawing a crumpled cabbage leaf from his pocket.
    “If it is not too much trouble, I wonder if you would be kind enough to settle a small dispute. Would you enlighten us as to what species of voracious quadruped could have wrought this destruction upon Small Dave’s cabbage patch?”
    “His
Pringlea antiscorbutica
?”
    “Exactly.” Omally handed the Professor the ruined leaf.
    Professor Slocombe swivelled in his chair and held the leaf up to the light, examining it through the lens of a horn-handled magnifying glass. “Flattened canines, prominent incisors, indicative of the herbivore, by the size and shape I should say that it was obvious.” Swinging back suddenly to Omally he flung him the leaf. “I have no idea whatever as to how you accomplished that one,” he said. “I would have said that you acquired a couple of jawbones from Gunnersbury Park Museum but for the saliva stains and the distinctive cross-hatching marks of mastication.”
    “So you know what it was then?”
    “Of course, it is
Camelus bactrianus
, the common Egyptian Camel.”
     
    There was something very very odd about
Camelus bactrianus
, the common Egyptian Camel. Norman squatted on his haunches in his rented garage upon the Butts Estate and stared up at the brute. There was definitely something very very odd about it. Certainly it was a camel far from home and had been called into its present existence by means which were totally inexplicable, even to the best educated camel this side of the Sahara, but this did not explain its overwhelming oddness. Norman dug a finger into his nose and ruminated upon exactly what that very very oddness might be.
    Very shortly it struck him with all the severity of a well-aimed half-brick. When he had been leading the thing away to his secret hideout, it had occurred to him at the time just how easy it had been to move. And he recalled that although he, an eight-stone weakling of the pre-Atlas-course persuasion, had left distinctive tracks, the camel, a beasty of eminently greater bulk, had left not a mark.
    And now, there could be little doubt about it, the camel’s feet no longer reached the ground. In fact, the creature was floating in open defiance of all the accepted laws of gravity, some eighteen inches above the deck.
    “Now that’s what I would call odd,” said Norman, startling the hovering ship of the desert and causing it to break wind loudly – a thing which, in itself, might be tolerable in the sandblown reaches of the Sahara, but which was no laughing matter in an eight-by-twelve lock-up garage. “Ye gods,” mumbled Norman, covering his nose with a soot-stained pullover sleeve.
    It was now that he noticed yet another untoward feature about the animal, which, had it been the property of the now legendary P.T. Barnum, would no doubt have earned that great showman a