Imperium Read Online Free PDF Page B

civilization, though in its stead he would find quite a bit of adventure, largely diligent natives, and yes, absolutely, they had coconut palms in droves. Hahl’s brisk epistolary style, a bit crude in spite of its eloquence, intimated that though he was from the Berlin area, within him dwelled a Bavarian intellectual, a hardheaded loner, which suited Engelhardt just fine. Hahl wrote further that he ought to join the German Club immediately after his arrival, if he pleased, and meet with said Mrs. Emma Forsayth, who owned various landholdings in the protectorate and was able to grant not only favorable credit for the purchase of a plantation to assiduous planters from home (as long as she found them likable), but could also procure good and reliable workers. She was quite the celebrity, by the way. From New Pomerania to the Hawaiian islands, they called her simply Queen Emma. Engelhardt did not give a second thought to conditions in the colony, where a woman seemed to enjoy the same high status as the governor himself, for he was, after having torn open the envelope with the governor’s seal, much too thrilled about the possibility of having his reverie of cocovorism financed in advance. True, he had some money set aside. Aunt Marthe had passed away two years ago on the other side of the Swiss border and had remembered him in her will; still, he couldn’t scrape together more than twenty thousand marks, minus those bonds lost to the Tamil crook Govindarajan, of course.
    Our friend had missed Governor Hahl by only a few days; the hapless man had taken ill with blackwater fever and had left the protectorate on the Italian passenger ship R.N. Pasticcio , bound for Singapore, where he hoped to cure himself completely with quinine tonic while wrapped from head to toe in cold wet sheets soaked in vinegar. Blackwater fever, as Hahl was informed by his Indian physician during the passage, was a complication of malaria, the carrier of which had recently been ascertained as the common mosquito after centuries in which people died without the slightest clue as to why. Hahl was a strong man and quite accustomed to pain, and yet the constantly recurring bouts of fever had depleted him and left him hollow-cheeked and quietly despondent.
    When he reached Singapore, however, he recalled suddenly, in a brief moment of inspired lucidity, not only those letters from Nuremberg, but also the impressive young man who had written them (Engelhardt had included a photograph that depicted him standing on a hill near Nuremberg, arms stretched aloft to the heavens, to the sun), and the arranged meeting in his Herbertsh ö he residence, but just as swiftly, the next paroxysm overpowered him, his mind grew dark again, and Engelhardt’s imago, which had seemed to him that of a radical new man by virtue of his letters (and this one photograph, which today, of course, has long since vanished), yielded once more to his illness’s shiftless, dark brown realm of torment.
    While still in Herbertsh ö he, a few minutes before the mosquito—from whose erect proboscis the pathogens flowed into Hahl’s bloodstream—had breathed its pitiful last under the slap of his hand (while the governor’s crimson blood simultaneously pulsed through the insect’s nervous system like sugary soma), he had had a dinner brought to him so he could work late while eating at the large mahogany table. Listlessly shoving the sweet potatoes and the chicken breast back and forth on the porcelain plate with his fork, he had skimmed correspondence and court decisions, had once more read the delightful letter from his friend Wilhelm Solf, the governor of Samoa, and in the process had drunk one and a half glasses of tropically tepid Riesling. It had been a calm, velvety night. He had placed a wax record on the gramophone turntable, setting the needle at his favorite spot, and while the first brassy bars of Wagner’s Ritt der Walk ü ren had tumbled through the salon, he had sneezed a