Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Great Slave Scam Part II

If any of my readers are of the Dundonian persuasion, they will already know that Dundee is rich in treasures just ripe for the plucking. They will also know that many of the city's choicest and rarest artifacts were mysteriously stolen over the last few months. If any of my readers are not of the Dundonian persuasion, they need not worry as they will likely have read the information I have just imparted in the last few sentences to my Dundonian readers and so will now be sufficiently up to date with the relevant exposition. In retrospect, there was no need for me to be quite so divisive in separating my readership into Dundonians and non-Dundonians, but I have done it now so we shall have to make the best of it.

One such treasure held in Dundee is the infamous and priceless "Newari Eye". Every Dundonian school child knows the history of this artifact, so if you are such a school child you can probably safely skip the next little section, though it isn't long and you might do well to refresh your memory anyway. Before it came to Dundee the jewel had a long and terrible history which I will not bother to recount because I do not know it. What I do know is that it was brought to Dundee in Victorian times from Nepal. It had been found affixed to a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu where it had formed the idol's green 'eye'. A brave British soldier (whom my mother always told me was one of my distant relations) was asked by a young lady to steal the jewel for her to prove that his love for her was genuine. Well, the soldier succeeded in prising the jewel from the statue and presented it to his sweetheart as a token of his desire to mate with her. Of course, legend has it that the jewel was cursed, and of course, the British soldier was brutally killed the same night. Well, the woman, the daughter of a colonel, kept the jewel and took it back with her to her family's mansion in Dundee. Within a year, all their fortunes had failed and she was reduced to hawking second-hand shoelaces in Lochee. She was left with no option but to sell the jewel, which she did - to Mark McManus who owned the McManus Museum and Galleries.

There it remains to this day. Or rather, there it remained until a few months ago, when I successfully used the slave Fell to purloin it. The jewel is priceless, which means it is worth about 10 million quid. I will explain the heist in the next entry...
(the ellipsis again indicates that more is to follow and is intended to excite you)

The "Newari Eye" (about the size of a watermelon)

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