Imperium by Christian Kracht Page A

dispatched him there to sideline him, on the one hand (for he was somewhat of an oddball), and, on the other, to give him the opportunity to prove himself by running riot, so to speak, over the sixth continent. Could be, his masters in the far-off state of Michigan thought, could be that young Halsey will make something of himself down there among the kangaroos.
    The Kellogg brothers had recently founded the Sanitas Food Company in the United States, you see, and, with their idea for producing so-called breakfast cereals palatable to people, they were well on their way not only toward triggering a small revolution in the eating habits of their countrymen, but also toward becoming dizzyingly rich.
    Young Halsey had asked the two brothers for an appointment, had appeared in their sparse, orderly office, and had then thoroughly impressed upon them with the conviction of an incensed fanatic that cereals were by no means the right path to pure Adventist doctrine because ingesting them into the body necessitated the addition of cow’s milk—no one wanted to eat dry cereal alone. But the milk that provided the lubricant, as it were, was obviously an animal product; thus, they must cease cereal production immediately and come up with something new that could teach the American consumer to be a vegetarian. Good Lord , off to Australia with him, the brothers thought, for they may have been pious adherents of their Adventist faith, but were simultaneously incorrigible, unalloyed Yankees, confident of business as a raison d’ ê tre. And so Halsey traveled by steamer from San Francisco (which would be almost completely destroyed by an earthquake a very short time after his embarkation) across to Sydney and then to Cairns, and there he now lay, head to head with Engelhardt.
    It is possible that both vegetarians felt each other’s presence without being aware of it, as if the thin plywood panel between their heads were a kind of electrical conductor. Halsey was of course a genius, as was Engelhardt. It’s just often the case that one person’s genius is acknowledged in the world—his idea spreads and evolves like a well-told joke that isn’t forgotten, like the virus of some disease—while the other’s withers away under the saddest of circumstances. The Kellogg brothers, who had sent Halsey to the other end of the world, were convinced that their pupil’s lines of thought to a certain degree must seem too radical for their time, but they were also undoubtedly in love with him, in an avuncular sense. Still, they didn’t want him on the same continent because he had criticized their foundations, had nibbled away at their morals, so to speak.
    At any rate, on the following day the two sat at the same table in the breakfast room of the little boardinghouse, the windows of which looked out on a slightly sloping dusty street so that the sporadically recurring rain showers transformed it mostly into a muddy torrent. Frangipani blossoms would then come floating down the street, coming to rest before the boardinghouse, as they did today, for it was raining fiercely, and Engelhardt was brewing for himself with some care a cup of brown loam so as to spend the day reading in the boardinghouse and then to prepare for his well-earned departure from Australia.
    Halsey addressed him with interest, asking what sort of extract Engelhardt was mixing, and was informed that it was medicinal clay; if one couldn’t get hold of the original product from Germany, one could use any soil, it contained all the minerals the body needed, for his visits to so-called civilization would suck those substances out of Engelhardt, and this was the only way he could stay healthy. But didn’t Engelhardt live in civilization? Halsey wanted to know, whereupon the former replied with a dose of nonchalant pride that he was the leader and creator of the Order of the Sun and ran a coconut plantation in the German colonies north of Australia, so it depended on the