We had been moving through the jungle for sixteen days now. Our guide, Boolooboolo-Mongobong, had been killed three nights before during an attack by the evil Lord Quernsly’s native raiders. Supplies were running low.

“Darling?” asked my wife, Lady Belvedere.

“Yes dear?”

“Be a sweetheart and pass me the caviar.”

“Of course, my love.”

I passed her the caviar. All our bearers had been murdered or driven off during the attack except the caviar-bearer, so we were down to a diet of strict fish eggs: which may not sound especially arduous in contemplation, as they were the best black Beluga, of course, but at the time such spartan fare had begun to wear upon my spirits.

Luckily our chef had survived – the only other of our group besides Laura and myself and the witch doctor Oo-oo-Koracheese – and had been able to cobble together some sort of cracker out of a sliced and toasted local fruit or legume.

But a superb saucier is not necessarily much of a jungle guide, and ours fit the mold. So we were lost, and without a single glass of champagne to wash down the Beluga. A drop of sweat trickled down Laura’s flawless patrician nose and hung on the end of it, glistening like an evanescent nacreous pearl in the subdued sunlight under the deep green canopy of jungle.

“Cambooba! Jungo jungo ya peep bogo.” The witch doctor spoke.

“Come again?” I asked politely.

To be continued (in another dimension)

LWIII