Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [141]
Easy to recall what the Doctor had already learned about the realm of the apes. Whenever the traveller visited the place, he or she took a piece of him or herself too. It was as if every one of those present at the wedding had seen his or her own territory, defiled by the enemy, like a vision of his or her tradition’s own future. No account survives of what Mr Van Burgh, the Virginian, saw. The white-fronted houses of the new America, perhaps, stained with filth and claw-marks. Maybe even apes wearing the polite hats of American slave-drivers, whipping the white men who laboured in the tobacco fields.
The most detailed, though not necessarily the most reliable, story comes from Scarlette herself. Though she hadn’t known exactly what to expect at the moment in which she bound herself to the Doctor (and vice versa), by her own admission she expected to be transported alongside him. Not so. When she vanished from the Church, she was to find herself among ancient ruins, old even by the standards of the Kingdom.
There were grand pillars, but the pillars had cracked and fallen. There were idols, graven images of enormous elephantine heads, with huge circular eyes and grill-like mouths, snapped tusks protruding from their faces. But the statues had sunk into the dirt, and been overgrown with grey, dull foliage. There were things which might have been pyramids (Scarlette’s description is vague), or at least stepped ziggurats like those of the forgotten South American civilisations. Every surface, she says, was inscribed with the symbolic languages of dead races. All this under a blue sky, all this under a black sun.
Her accounts of oversized, animalistic structures are more than a little suggestive of Polynesian ruins, of the buildings which might have been left by the Mayakai if the Mayakai hadn’t been so thorough in destroying their own culture before their extinction. There were no apes to greet her in this desolation. Her only company, she claims, was a single female figure who stood among the fallen totems and bleached creepers. It took her a while to recognise her companion, as it turned out to be none other than the elder Mayakai warrior, the woman commonly believed to be the last surviving member of her race.
It’s unlikely, of course. The elder Mayakai was confined to bed, after all… and the Kingdom of Beasts isn’t described, even in the most fanciful of texts, as some astral dream-realm of unlikely encounters. It was a harsh, brutal place, where the real world overlapped the horizon and bloodshed was always the result. Yet here, Scarlette claims she met the woman who’d helped tutor and initiate her, an aged amazon-cum‐sorceress who couldn’t possibly have stood on her own two feet. Perhaps it was another metaphor. Scarlette’s next recollections are almost reminiscent of the later writings of Shelley:
I looked about this fallen grandeur, and did despair… and I asked the Mistress, to whose word I had always held, why it should have come to this. She could only croak in her own tongue… [that] this was the nature of things, as even the Moak [giants] had commanded it. This struggle, she wished to remind me, was intended to firm the future of all our kind. To this favour, as Shakespeare might have said, the present had to come…
The Mistress was never one for delicacy of thought. It was a harsh lesson, to which I did not altogether subscribe.
And what of the Doctor himself? Barely able to even walk on his own, it’s easy to think of him as an invalid, as helpless in all this chaos. This doesn’t seem to have been the case. Weak as he may have been, his presence was still strong enough to influence