Mice, and the Lighthouse -Updated...

At the lighthouse, the cat can rest, -the population of mice brave and intelligent enough to build boats out of lashed-together sardine cans and discarded chopsticks is small. Only a few of these mice land here, most go on, toward the west, the setting sun lures them. They dream of cheese, and rumoured cities where houses tower further into the sky than even lighthouses. A land where cheese is plentiful, where a mouse, a humble mouse has made it big, and has two magic kingdoms. O, brave mice, only a torn-out sail, ripped in the gale, might make them seek shelter on the lighthouse rock....

Once there, they search for a fragment of cloth to remake their sail. The perfect prize would be silk lingerie, (not much hope in the lighthouse of that....) -Lingerie of silk, light, strong, perfumed, it is prized above all others by mouse-navigators, who will recount how, long ago (in mouse terms, about five years in human ones), the great Fernando Mus, scavenging in the bedrooms of a grand Scottish mansion, discovered the grail of silken lingerie.

He was the first to hoist a triangular lateen sail, curved, perfectly proportioned.... The great storm of '02 ripped to shreds the sails of the flotilla, but Fernando Mus, brave leader of rodents, sailed to windward, picking up survivors, and later told how he owed his life to the extra strength of a double-stitched gusset.

A year later, he arrived in New York on his third voyage in record time, with an entirely new silken sail of his own devising, the Powder-Blue "C" Cup Spinnaker.
Sadly, it was at the termination of that voyage that he lost his life to a passing cat, and thus, we will never know if the Fishnet Fish-net was a success, nor whether it is true that he was once catapulted from a heaving bosom from which he was attempting to steal the bra.

Fernando's descendants, it is rumoured, are seeking to build a great new vessel.. A Sardine-can catamaran, twin hulled, twin masted.... see the logic of that?

(I so wish I had an illustrator for this.....)

Updated! Stop Press:

Look! An illustration. I'm delighted! This just in from Minx, to whom much thanks, she's pretty much got the scenario.... I envisaged a slightly more diagonal roll to the foredeck, and a slightly slimmer, more wiry crew, but WOW! Who'd have thought it! wish for an illustrator and Bzzzt! An illustrator responds! She says it's only a rough draft, and being short of a mouse, a hamster posed for the artwork. The full colour 6'X8' oil painting is at sketch stage, and I should receive it in three months or so...

Red Dirt Girl.... (-am I allowed to link?) suggests this may all be just a figtree of my fevered imagination, a fragment of fantasy prompted by cough medicine and cheese sandwich interaction.Nothing could be furthermore from the truth. If you, R.D.G., were to come out here; knock on the lighthouse door, I would take you climbing, up to the lantern gallery, and there we could sit, watching a twinkling myriad of tiny silk sails, catching the evening light, scattered across the sunset sea, all heading west. As the great orb settles on the horizon, and the light of those multicoloured sails goes dark, (From passionate mulberry, chocolate, powder blue, dramatic purple, black lace, flesh, to grubby many-times washed white....), a constellation of tiny sardine-oil lights twinkle upward, we would listen, in the darkness, to a thousand mouse voices, raised in a chanty,

" O shenandoah, I love your daughter
Look away, you rollin’ river
It was for her I’d cross the water.
Look away, we’re bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri

For seven long years I courted sally
Look away, you rollin’ river
Seven more years I longed to have her
Look away, we’re bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri "

Fading away, into the warm ocean night......

p.s. Any takers for further illustrations?