Mosoget was in the mansion three hundred metres away. The mansion was owned by Commissioner Omenda. The large impressive house stood in the swamp. With the tree behind Moran’s house, and with the gum trees of the islet The Prophet Broadcaster lived on, and with the acacia at the back of the home of Hiti, was the mansion competing for dominance of village view. Three concrete walls surrounded the mansion. On top of the walls stuck out rows of spikes of iron and of broken bottles. They were high walls. The second wall, it was said, was higher than the first. The third wall, it was said with a modicum of confidence, was either higher than the second wall or lower than the first wall or lower than the first and the second walls. Or the walls were of exactly the same height. The walls were spaced three metres apart. Or the space between wall one and wall two was three metres, and the space between wall two and wall three was of three metres, to the greatest degree of accuracy. And, you see, there was more than one space separating wall one from wall three. Working that out using some effective method, the distance of wall three from wall one came to six metres or thereabouts. It should however be borne in mind, with regard to the computation, that the first amount of space was in feet and the second in miles, and that, before computing the third, what was firstly to be done, to enable meaningful comparisons, was to convert the first amounts of space into metres or some other unit of measurement in this village, such as the village. It should also be borne in mind that, as to which fortification was the first or the second or the third, etcetera, was somewhat in doubt, given that the fortifications were never numbered and no method was given for calculating the order, ascending or otherwise, of the fortifications. The middle one was said to have been neither wall two nor wall three. That too was disputed though. But either wall in front or at the back of the middle wall was either wall one or wall two — the three white walls were built by different foreign construction companies at the same time — or, depending on your perspective, the wall on the left side of the middle wall and the wall on the right side of the middle wall were wall one at once. An axiom of a notional order of walls was allegedly established. But however hard one tried to establish the true facts about the axiom, the result was invariably inconclusive. And the consequent conclusion was that whether a notional order of walls did indeed exist was said to have not been known for a fact. What was however certain about the walls, that is, in addition to their having been constructed by different foreign construction companies simultaneously, was the fact that each had an opening facing the bog. What you could also rely on to be true about the walls was the fact that all the three spaces you could pass through to or from the mansion were always closed by gates. And the gates, owing to what defeated concerted efforts to determine, had to be opened in the following order: Gate one, if you could be courageous enough to undertake the tricky task of calling any of the gates gate one, had to be opened first. To be opened after that gate was gate two, after which the third gate had to be opened — From the doubt reigning in the way in which the walls were placed in relation to each other, it followed that there also reigned doubt in the way the gates were placed in relation to each other. But none the less, that appeared not to have posed so great a problem that Abel, Jacob, Grace, and Commissioner Omenda, that is to say, the only people who could open or close the gates, could not overcome. That, that is, the structure of opening the gates, was always the case, whether you were coming to or coming from the mansion. The structure of closing the gates, due to what the struggle to ascertain the causes of which continues, was on the other hand said to have been a bit trickier. On some days, and at some hours of the day, the middle gate had to be closed last. On the rest of the days, however, the middle gate it was to be closed first without fail. The first gate, that is, making no allowance for the impossibility of a first gate, had to be closed first all Sundays every week, every month, every year. On Saturdays, without fail, had the first gate to be closed last. The last to be closed on days and on hours of the day and of every week and of every day and of every year when no gate was to be closed before the third gate, that is, if you rule out the impossibility of knowing gate one or gate two or gate three, was the third gate. And when none of the gates was closed before the third one was the third gate closed before any other gate. And the gates were ever locked. And were you neither Abel nor Jacob nor Grace nor Commissioner Omenda himself — and never was a fact ever verified more thoroughly than this fact — you had to ring the bell outside the compound so that one of the aforesaid persons could unlock and open the gates for you. Even Limited, yes, even Limited herself had to ring the bell to get into the grand mansion.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 18:09:18 +0000
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