RICHARD JAMES CATHETER WAS THE CHIEF attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Yorkshire, and kept the electric railway going, in the English year of 1863. Catheter was a practical electrician, but fond of whisky, a heavy red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the deity, but accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the mysterious East, and his name was Kazad-Dum. Strangely, Catheter called him Pooh-bah. Kazad-Dum came out of the east as terrible and mighty as Nostradamus's Great King of Terror, but Catheter christened him Pooh-Bah. Catheter liked a nigger because he would stand kicking -- a habit with Catheter's lineage, all the way back to Solomon and beyond -- and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the ways of it. Kazad-Dum was interested in the dynamos because they were deep underground and offered him a way even further, deep into the mantle -- into the Pandorra's box, deep into the very heart of things.

To define Kazad-Dum was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his nose had a bridge. Sometimes (this was totally beyond Catheter's comprehension) he would drop a Hindu or northern Australian Aboriginal expression into conversation. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow (residual traces of opium addiction, suggesting a stay in China or French Haiphong.) His broad cheekbones and narrow chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse way to a European's. Kazad-Dum was short of stature and still shorter of English (though, inexplicately, he could speak perfect Gaelic and Japanese.) In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness. Catheter tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and -- especially after whisky -- lectured to him against superstition and missionaries. Kazad-Dum, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it. For him the only god was down, beneath the soil -- not Satan but even deeper than that, beyond the concepts of right and wrong. A special sublimity which was closer than the skin, yet more distant than the stars. What would James Catheter make of that!