The Days of the King by Filip Florian Page A

and there was one among them who felt it was like a woman with whom he had shared his bed sheets for many years, a boyar, the one who, in the chill of autumn and old age, passed for prime minister, having previously devoted himself to engineering, secret societies, revolution, and literature, to high office and wine, a man famous above all for being the erstwhile Bey of Samos. By noon of the following day, the tenth of the month, they contemplated, from dry land, the waves as they shimmered and dissolved into spray. Then, in the early afternoon, they gazed upon the billows as they rose and swelled on the open sea, from the deck and through the portholes of the schooner
Yssedin.
Those endless undulations, in which the rays of the sun dissolved and transformed into ripples of light, bewitched not only souls but also stomachs, so that on the two-masted vessel, one among the countless velieros of the padishah, on board which they had been greeted by an adjutant general, no few were those who sought pots, troughs, and basins, retching as they furtively rid themselves of what remnants of lunch they still preserved inside them. The dentist enjoyed the cruise, but seeing the others he could not help remembering his crossing of that lake with three names (Bodensee, Schwäbisches Meer, and Konstanz) and his own sufferings. In contrast to the Swiss episode, however, when he had been able to opt for water and fresh air instead of buckets and nooks, here no one dared to lean over the rail, so as not to sully the blue expanses or annoy the matelots of the imperial Ottoman fleet. And the Bosporus was revealed to them after two more sunrises, to some as a wonder, to others as a strait overrun with ships and barges, girdled by land of every variety: summer residences seen through the filmy sheen of October, arid beaches and shorelines, yellowed orchards and vineyards, fishing villages. The great city was close by, its exhalation was like a breeze, and Joseph Strauss, who was changing the cold compresses on the cook's forehead, knew what he had to do. He opened his ruddy calfskin bag, from which, not long ago, in June, he had scraped the letter S, grasped his scalpel, and made an incision in one corner of the lining. Underneath, in the very spot where he was poking his index finger, he found what he was sure he would find. Then he went on tending to the livid, lanky Calistrache, who had managed to explain to him what
leuştan
(lovage) was, but had faltered at
chimen
(caraway),
leurdă
(ramson), and
rău de mare
(seasickness). It was not until he was inside a servant's chamber in the Küçüksu Palace that Joseph removed from the lining of his bag a small brown envelope and slipped it into his breast pocket. He read a few pages from Leibnitz about optimism, he thought of his mother and sister, Gertrude and Irma (who had been so enamored of that tea that they had sunk into beatitude and indolence, not noticing either the fire or the smoke), he lit two incense sticks on the nightstand, in memory of them, and when the news came that the Glorified Sultan was ready to receive the prince, he sprinkled into some boiling water a quarter of a teaspoon of the fine powder concealed in the brown envelope. It was
Amanita muscaria,
which he had prepared himself, gathering the white-flecked red mushrooms, peeling their cuticle, drying them in the darkness of the attic of his Berlin lodgings, chopping them finely, and crushing them with pestle and mortar. Karl Ludwig, the prince, blew on the piping hot liquid, sipped it, and did not set off on the visit that was giving him frissons until he had drained the cup. He made another, short voyage on the Yssedin, from the coast of Asia to the coast of Europe, and after the anchor had been cast he was transferred to a velvet-upholstered
kayik
with twelve rowers. He was wearing a parade uniform, that of a general of the United Principalities. All of a sudden he felt like giving a whoop, and could not