Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [41]
The unspeakable details that these colors picked out were gargoyles that would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.
The gargoyles all looked inward from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, toward the statue, to which we will come in a moment.
And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles’ faces that the statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren’t, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn’t.
Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.
The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow that had been slaughtered, and of which Arthur had happened to eat a fillet steak, would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish that Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn’t like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point.
And what was most disturbing about all this, apart from the statue, to which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again.
And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.
In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.
And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression in the statue in the center of all this monstrosity that was a statue of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet tall if it was an inch, there was not an inch of it that wasn’t crammed with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of thing would be enough to make any subject feel bad. From the small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish cut of his dressing gown, there was no aspect of Arthur Dent that wasn’t lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.
Arthur appeared as a gorgon, an evil, rapacious, ravening, bloodied ogre, slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.
With each of the thirty arms that the sculptor in a fit of artistic fervor had decided to give him, he was either braining a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea out of his hair, or doing something that Arthur at first look couldn’t quite identify.
His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.
Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness of things.
And when he opened his eyes again, there in front of him stood the figure of the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he had supposedly been persecuting all this time.
“HhhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” said Agrajag.
He, or it or whatever, looked like a mad fat bat. He waddled slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.
“Look … !” protested Arthur.
“HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” explained Agrajag, and Arthur reluctantly accepted this on the grounds that he was rather frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.
Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.
His bat wings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were than if they had been strong muscular beaters of the air. The most frightening thing was probably the tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical odds.
He had the most astounding collection of teeth.
They looked as if each came from a completely