The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4Poe, Edgar Allan
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4
Poe, Edgar Allan
American fiction -- 19th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales, American; Short stories
April 8.—Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. A balloon from Kanadaw
spoke us to-day and threw on board several late papers; they
contain some exceedingly curious information relative to
Kanawdian or rather Amriccan antiquities. You know, I presume,
that laborers have for some months been employed in preparing the
ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the Emperor’s principal
pleasure garden. Paradise, it appears, has been, literally
speaking, an island time out of mind—that is to say, its northern
boundary was always (as far back as any record extends) a
rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm of the sea. This arm was
gradually widened until it attained its present breadth—a mile.
The whole length of the island is nine miles; the breadth varies
materially. The entire area (so Pundit says) was, about eight
hundred years ago, densely packed with houses, some of them
twenty stories high; land (for some most unaccountable reason)
being considered as especially precious just in this vicinity.
The disastrous earthquake, however, of the year 2050, so totally
uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was almost too large to
be called a village) that the most indefatigable of our
antiquarians have never yet been able to obtain from the site any
sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or inscriptions)
wherewith to build up even the ghost of a theory concerning the
manners, customs, &c., &c., &c., of the aboriginal inhabitants.
Nearly all that we have hitherto known of them is, that they were
a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe of savages infesting the
continent at its first discovery by Recorder Riker, a knight of
the Golden Fleece. They were by no means uncivilized, however,
but cultivated various arts and even sciences after a fashion of
their own. It is related of them that they were acute in many
respects, but were oddly afflicted with monomania for building
what, in the ancient Amriccan, was denominated “churches”—a kind
of pagoda instituted for the worship of two idols that went by
the names of Wealth and Fashion. In the end, it is said, the
island became, nine tenths of it, church. The women, too, it
appears, were oddly deformed by a natural protuberance of the
region just below the small of the back—although, most
unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the
light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women
have in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd,
very—like something between a turkey-cock and a dromedary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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