“I don’t know either,” he said. “Perhaps it started with the division of labor, when one man worked for another, or many worked for a boss. Perhaps it started with our first backaches, the result of walking upright, instead of on all fours. Or perhaps it started with an irreversible error committed by our distant relatives about two hundred and fifty million years ago. Our forefathers, the foolish amphibians, took the wrong evolutionary turn and left the sea, our home, our mother. We’ve been going downhill ever since.”

He was quite serious. I suppose his jeremiad was no more absurd than any hypothesis of Original Sin or the Fall of Man, yet I found it worrisome. I stood there, haunted by the grisly inheritance of doom that he had bequeathed to me as if its very dubiety held some hidden truth. Were we lost, all lost, routed by some ruinous predestination, foreordained to live and die in darkness, without hope of self-deliverance or free will?

Curious and confusing, this old man and his hypothesizing on the source of human unhappiness. How was he even aware of the perceptions he spouted, this inconsiderably minor eminence on a rat-skin throne? Had he arrived at them by swilling his all-purpose beer, going into a trance to receive signals from some omniscient ancestor? Or did he, brooding in the wilderness, gedanken them through in a way that Chatterton would have approved of? I approved, but reluctantly. He’d thrown me off balance.

To say the least. Here he sat, cross-legged in a stifling room, a withered, knobby stalk of a man, still as a boulder in his burnoose schmatte, or some highly irregular vegetable that had cropped up out of the earth, yet with a mind as sharp and swift as a spear. He examined any idea that popped up. He espoused notions that might have been construed as faulty (who was to say?) but certainly he understood more about his world and mine than anyone (that is, I) would have suspected. That, I think, was what jostled me. And there was more to come.

“Of course, what I’m talking about are conjectures. Nobody really knows how or when or where it started.” He winced, he frowned. “But I do remember when I became aware that there were vividly spookish people in every society. I was at Cambridge rooming with a young man from the Lake District who’d relax from his studies by eating glass, preferably crystal…”

Now all his pronouncements and meanderings became clear, once I knew where he had picked them up, along with his curious vocabulary. It was beyond mannered or stuffy, beyond the broad, clipped fricatives of sprucey English. Had I misjudged this dog-eating pooh-bah?

The King registered my surprise. “Abdul never told you I went to Cambridge?”

“Not exactly. He said you went to an English school; I thought it was a missionary school. Elementary. Here.”