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in copra; he also wanted to produce oils and creams and send them off, attractively labeled, back into the Reich. He even envisioned inventing a shampoo; he described the fragrant coconut essence in the hair of ladies in fine Berlin societies, in his reasoning furtively bearing in mind that, in the end, Mrs. Forsayth was perhaps just a woman who occasionally longed to return to places not lacking in opera houses, hackneys, and luxuriously perfumed sitz baths with constant hot water. In addition and above all, he added, he had come to German New Guinea to establish a kind of commune that would pay homage to the coconut.
    Queen Emma ignored Engelhardt’s last sentence, which in any case was declaimed rather more inaudibly than his plans for the economic exploitation of Cocos nucifera . And the flattering words about coconut shampoo did not impress her in the least. So he wished to buy a plantation? She had exactly the thing for him. A little island! Yet wouldn’t Engelhardt perhaps first want to explore the interior and think about whether he might like a larger-scale plantation there, albeit in a hard-to-reach location? Depending on the weather, a four- or five-day journey away, that is, around sixty miles from Herbertsh ö he as the crow flies, there was a coconut planting of some twenty-five hundred acres whose owner—indeed, one must needs state it without hesitation—had gone mad and doused himself, his family, and three black employees with pitch and set them alight. That plantation could be had, considering its size, for nearly nothing, since the planter’s will, written in a state of complete mental barbarism, could not be validated ( Kill them all could be read in it) and the estate thus passed to the German Reich, and in particular to the firm Forsayth & Company, the director of which was sitting here before him.
    The island Kabakon, she continued, had only one hundred eighty-five acres of coconut palms, although it had the advantage of being located but a few nautical miles away from Herbertsh ö he somewhat to the north in the Neu-Lauenburg archipelago. An island would be both manageably sized and easy to cultivate. One needed only harvest and process the coconuts. One might then transport the yield by boat and offer it for sale in Herbertsh ö he, avoiding the arduous and dangerous path through the jungle that the haul would have to travel from the large inland plantation. Anyway, what an island, she rhapsodized: every year, the inhabitants of Kabakon sent a canoe out to sea laden with cowries and adorned with green leaves to compensate the fish for their relatives caught the previous year. And there was a charming tradition at weddings: a coconut was broken open over the heads of the couple and the coconut milk spilled out over them. The isle cost forty thousand marks, as did the gigantic plantation in the interior. Engelhardt exhaled audibly.
    Now, she could give him these two quotes, but he ought to have a look at both, please, and then decide. She likely knew that she had not only made the decision easy for him, but forced it with a steady hand—the plantation of the fellow gone mad was cheaper many times over but tainted for him with such bad kismet on account of her description of its circumstances that Engelhardt would choose the island Kabakon. In the end, she was a businesswoman, and if this young eccentric—for she had certainly heard that Engelhardt wanted to found an order of coconut-eaters, and Governor Hahl had of course reported on him already, too—wanted to leave his money with her, then so be it. Besides, well, she liked him, liked how he sat there, bearded, ascetic, with his impossible hair and those aqua-colored eyes, skinny as a sparrow.
    She couldn’t help thinking of a visit to Italy many years ago; it was as if she had already seen Engelhardt there before, but where? Yes! Of course! That was it! In the work of the Florentine master Fra Angelico, in his depictions of the savior Jesus