The Wreck of the Incredible

Distinguished members of the Dilettante Society, I shall relate unto you concerning a little-known personage...
Chap name of Petronius – Gaius Petronius Secundus, if you want the full moniker, though frankly, he doesn't deserve the courtesy – ran a shipping concern out of Berenice. Rough sort of port, down the Red Sea coast. Catered to the India trade, mostly. Spices, silks, pearls, that sort of thing. Made a fortune, naturally. Enough fortune, apparently, to indulge in what one might charitably call… eccentric artistic patronage.
Now, Petronius wasn't your typical Roman gentleman collecting tasteful Greek bronzes. Oh no. Had a penchant for the macabre, the monumental, and the frankly bewildering. Got himself tangled up with a workshop – probably in Alexandria, one gathers, place was always crawling with oddballs – staffed by artisans who seemed to have peered several millennia into the future and developed a frightful obsession with a chap who wouldn't be born for another… well, ever. Utterly bizarre.
Their brief? Reproduce the great monsters and deities of myth. Not in the usual noble marble or dignified bronze, mind you. Oh no. Petronius demanded sheer, shocking opulence fused with a rather unsettling… anatomical frankness. Think Damocles meets Midas, with a dash of the abattoir.
The result? The cargo of the «Incredible». A name dripping with either hubris or a rather poor sense of irony. She was a monster herself – a corbita built on a scale that made other grain haulers look like dinghies. Oak timbers from Macedon, pitch from Syria, sails that could blot out the sun. And her hold? Packed tighter than a Vestal’s virtue.
What was inside? Well, this is where it gets properly rum. Imagine:
The Sphinx of Giza. Life-sized, naturally. But rendered entirely in hammered gold plate over some lighter core. Not serene and enigmatic, mind you. This one wore a rictus grin revealing teeth of sharpened crystal, and its famous riddle was inscribed around its base… inlaid with pulsing red coral that looked disturbingly like fresh capillaries. One rather dubious papyrus fragment suggests its eyes were flawed diamonds, giving it a perpetually accusatory stare.
The Lernaean Hydra. Not one head, not nine, but twenty-seven. Each serpentine neck crafted from twisted silver rods, culminating in heads of polished malachite, their mouths agape, fangs of milky quartz dripping (artfully, one assumes) simulated venom – solidified droplets of amber concealing trapped insects. The central body? A vast, repulsive lump of veined alabaster, suggesting putrefaction beneath the scales. The sheer weight of the thing must have been staggering.
Kali, The Destroyer. A four-armed whirlwind of dark, polished hematite, standing on a prostrate figure cast from solid electrum. Her necklace? Not skulls, but miniature, perfectly rendered human hearts, carved from blood-red carnelian and threaded on gold wire. Her tongue, lolling in fury, was a single, massive shard of ruby. Most unsettlingly, her lower hands held not symbolic weapons, but glistening entrails meticulously fashioned from coiled red coral and polished chalcedony.
Medusa Gorgon. Ah, the piece de resistance, according to Procopius of Alexandria (a notoriously unreliable gossip, but the only source we have). Not a bust. A full, decapitated head. Life-sized. The face, frozen in its death-scream, was carved from flawless, translucent rock crystal. But the snakes? Ah, the snakes! Hundreds of them, writhing from the scalp. Each serpent was solid gold, inlaid with intricate patterns of green malachite and turquoise, their eyes tiny, malevolent rubies. The effect, Procopius breathlessly claimed (likely after several amphorae of Falernian), was less petrifying beauty and more visceral horror – a testament to the inside of the myth, the gore and the terror, rather than the aesthetic.
There were others, fragments suggest: a Minotaur with golden horns piercing a silver labyrinth wall, its bull-head roaring soundlessly from a throat of carved obsidian; a Chimera with a lion's mane of spun gold wire, a goat's head with malachite eyes weeping jade tears, and a serpent's tail ending in a sting of sharpened crystal. All executed with astonishing, almost inhuman skill, but imbued with a sensibility that felt jarringly… modern. Or perhaps, post-modern millennia too early. It was art designed not to elevate, but to confront, to horrify, to stun with sheer, grotesque value.
Petronius, the fool, wasn't shipping this to Rome. Oh no. He'd found an even richer, arguably more deranged patron: some upstart Satavahana prince deep in the Deccan plateau, mad for exotic Hellenistic horrors. The «Incredible» set sail from Berenice, overloaded to the gunwales with gilded nightmares, sometime around the turning of the era. Late autumn. Just in time for the tail end of the monsoon reversal.
What happened next is the stuff of whispered curses in every port from Aden to Zanzibar. The most common tale speaks of a storm unlike any other – the kaskazi winds gone berserk, waves like collapsing mountains. Others murmur of divine retribution. Could Poseidon, or some local sea god, tolerate such blasphemous depictions of ancient powers riding in the belly of a floating warehouse? Did the gaze of the crystal Medusa, even boxed, drive the crew mad? Did the sheer wrongness of the art somehow offend the sea itself?
Whatever the cause, the «Incredible» never rounded the Horn of Africa. She met her end somewhere off the coast the Romans called Azania – that wild, mangrove-choked, reef-strewn stretch south of Rhapta. Perhaps she struck an uncharted pinnacle. Perhaps a wave simply rolled the top-heavy behemoth onto her beam ends. Down she went, taking Gaius Petronius Secundus's obscene investment, the Alexandrian artisans' uncanny genius, and the Satavahana prince's dreadful commission to the silty bottom.
Countless works of art? Undoubtedly. Worth more than the annual tribute of three provinces? Almost certainly. But "art"? That’s the question, isn't it? Procopius, in his more sober moments (rare, admittedly), called it "a floating mundus inversus," a world turned upside down where value resided in shock and material excess, devoid of the divine spark. He shuddered to think of it adorning some barbarian hall.
The wreck? Oh, it’s out there. Fishermen tell tales of snagging nets on "golden branches" deep down. Divers speak of unnatural glints in the murk, far beyond safe depths, near reefs that seem to shift shape. Treasure hunters dream of it – a find to dwarf Antikythera. But sensible chaps, the ones who’ve heard the full stories whispered over warm beer in Mombasa taverns… they leave it be. Some things, perhaps, are best left in the dark, with the weight of the Indian Ocean pressing down. The Incredible's cargo wasn't just gold and malachite, you see. It was hubris made manifest. And the sea, old chap, has a way of swallowing that whole.
Rather makes one glad for a quiet watercolour of the Downs, doesn't it? Now, about that tea...