30
Some Notes Concerning a Green Box
in matters occult, among them a rather notorious and disreputable old bookseller in the downtown section of San Diego. The man’s shop is no longer there, the structure it was located in having since been torn down and replaced by a multilevel parking lot, one section of which I am able to report sags at the oddest angle, despite repeated attempts to correct it.
Due to the obvious sincerity with which his department deplored his resignation, Professor Nolan agreed to keep in touch with his old friends by means of occasional letters which he would forward whenever the opportunity presented itself. These are the missives which I was able to copy so hurriedly at the anthropology library. On some, the postmark was stamped into the envelope with, sufficient force to leave an impression on the letter within, and by judicious use of fingerprinting materials, I have been able to bring them to a legible state. These dates vary from February 3 to May 18, 1967. All are postmarked from Valparaiso, Chile, and one of them confides that the expedition was forced to remain there for such an extended period of time so as to permit the repair of storm damage to their craft.
A letter to the man mentioned in that missive as the repairman, a Senor Juan Maria y Florez, brought as a reply a note scrawled hi an awkward hand, as though the wielder of the pen were unfamiliar with its use. Of the professors it had little to say, except that he, Florez, had always thought of professors as being very composed individuals, and that these two Americans seemed both nervous and jumpy. Instead he dwelt on the damage to their schooner, which was totally alien to him, a man who had worked on ships for over forty years. For example, he mentions that he did not feel Professor Turner’s explanation of an “unexpected heavy swell” entirely accounted for the odd twisting of the four-inch steel bar of the schooner’s left drive shaft, nor for how three of the four blades came to be broken off the screw. A local shipman in Long Beach assures me that Mr. Florez, despite his forty years, is here