Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The geographers and marvel-collectors of the classical Arabic world — Al-Qazwini in his great cosmography, the anonymous compilers of the Thousand and One Nights , the lexicographers who catalogued every creature a Bedouin might name — recorded, among the wonders of the far deserts and the islands beyond, a being whose horror is entirely a matter of division . The nasnas is half a man : not a man missing a part, but a man split down the middle and only one side kept — a single arm sprouting from a single shoulder, one leg, half a head with one eye and half a mouth, half a torso — a vertical hemisphere of a person, complete on its one side and simply absent on the other, as though the world had been given the left half of a man and told to make do. And it moves as such a thing must: it hops , the tellings insist, springing on its one leg across the sand with a speed that no whole man can match — bounding, one-eyed, half-mouthed, over the dunes of the Hadramawt and the Empty Quarter a...

The Khoikhoi peoples of southwestern Africa — the herders of the hard country where the Kalahari's red sands run down toward the Namib's mountainous dunes — kept in their story-hoard a man-eater built around the strangest anatomical decision in the whole world's ogre-literature. The aigamuxa (the collectors of the old Nama and Khoikhoi tales wrote it many ways) are giants of the dune country: huge, man-shaped, dreadful of strength, with the long teeth the office requires — devourers of travelers, haunters of the thirstland tracks, everything an ogre of the wastes ought to be. And they have no eyes in their heads . None at all. The aigamuxa's eyes are set — the tellings deliver the detail flatly, as a fact of natural history — in the tops of its feet : or, in some versions, in the heels; and from this one placement flows the entire comedy, terror, and philosophy of the creature. For consider what it means in practice. An aigamuxa at rest — standing still in the lee of ...