'What started to throb?' Gwendoline asked him.
'My member,' the Major said. 'I could feel every beat of my heart all the way along it. Pulsing and throbbing most terribly it was, and as tight as a balloon. You know those long sausage-shaped balloons children have at parties? I kept thinking about one of those, and with every beat of my heart it felt as if someone was pumping in more air and it was going to burst.'
The Major drank some wine. Then he studied the ash on his cigar. We sat still, waiting.
'So of course I began trying to puzzle out what might have happened,' he went on. 'I looked at my glass of whiskey. It was where I always put it, on top of the little white-painted balustrade surrounding the verandah. Then my eye travelled upward to the roof of the bungalow and to the edge of the roof and suddenly, presto! I'd got it! I knew for certain what must have happened.'
'What?' we said, all speaking at once.
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'A large Blister Beetle, taking an evening stroll on the roof, had ventured too close to the edge and had fallen off.'
'Right into your glass of whiskey!' we cried.
'Precisely,' the Major said. 'And I, thirsting like mad in the heat, had gulped him down without looking.'
The girl called Gwendoline was staring at the Major with huge eyes. 'Quite honestly I don't see what all the fuss was about,' she said. 'One teeny weeny little beetle isn't going to hurt anyone.'
'My dear child,' the Major said, 'when the Blister Beetle is dried and crushed the resulting powder is called cantharidin. That's its pharmaceutical name. The Sudanese variety is called cantharidin sudanii. And this cantharidin sudanii is absolutely deadly. The maximum safe dose for a human, if there is such a thing as a safe dose, is one minim. A minim is one-sixtieth of a fluid ounce. Assuming I had just swallowed one whole fully grown Blister Beetle, that meant I'd received God knows how many hundreds of times the maximum dose.'
'Jesus,' we said. 'Jesus Christ.'
'The throbbing was so tremendous now, it was shaking my whole body,' the Major said.
'A headache, you mean?' Gwendoline said.
'No,' the Major said.
'What happened next?' we asked him.
'My member,' the Major said, 'was now like a white-hot rod of iron burning into my body. I leapt up from my chair and rushed to my car and drove like a madman for the nearest hospital, which was in Khartoum. I got there in forty minutes flat. I was scared fartless.'
'Now wait just a minute,' the Gwendoline creature said. 'I'm still not quite following you. Exactly why were you so frightened?'
What a dreadful girl. I should never have invited her. The Major, to his great credit, ignored her completely this time.
'I dashed into the hospital,' he went on, 'and found the casualty room where an English doctor was stitching up somebody's knife wound. "Look at this!" I cried, taking it out and waving it at him.'
'Waving what at him, for heaven's sake?' the awful Gwendoline asked.
'Shut up, Gwendoline,' I said.
'Thank you,' the Major said. 'The doctor stopped stitching and regarded the object I was holding out to him with some alarm. I quickly told him my story. He looked glum. There was no antidote for Blister Beetle, he informed me. I was in grave trouble. But he would do his best. So they stomach-pumped me and put me to bed and packed ice all around my poor throbbing member.'
'Who did?' someone asked. 'Who's they?'
'A nurse,' the Major answered. 'A young Scottish nurse with dark hair. She brought the ice in small rubber bags and packed it round and kept the bags in place with a bandage.'
'Didn't you get frostbite?'
'You can't get frostbite on something that's practically red-hot,' the Major said.
'What happened next?'
'They kept changing the ice every three hours day and night.'
'Who, the Scottish nurse?'
'They took it in turns. Several nurses.'