Thursday, October the 28th, 2004

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With Dobson in the Land of Nod

Some time ago we mentioned that Dobson compiled a gazetteer of the Land of Nod, the place to where Cain was banished after he slew his brother Abel. Dobson, of course, never travelled to the Holy Land, nor indeed to Nod. What he did, however, was to rent a field and build a scale model using firewood, netting, straw, plastic packaging, paint, plasticine and corrugated cardboard, among other things. Careful analysis of the Bible and other historical records meant that Dobson's model Nod is probably as close as we could get to appreciating the blasted land in which the first murderer lived out his miserable days. Here is a charming old goat-shed; here is a clump of cypress trees shrivelled by drought; here is a Von Danikenesque landing strip for an extraterrestrial spaceship; here are tares and bushels, asps and vipers, and a river of burning pitch.

Dobson built Nod before writing his gazetteer, which runs to eight closely-typed pages illustrated with cack-handed pencil drawings. The text has been ridiculed by Biblical scholars, who accuse Dobson of poltroonery, undue haste, credulousness and stupidity. Such criticisms were swatted aside by the out-of-print pamphleteer like so many flies, midges, ticks, or similar tiny flying pests, well-represented, incidentally, in the model Land of Nod, where Dobson had hit upon the idea of using chocolate-flavoured one hundreds and thousands, scattered hither and thither around the rented field, to show swarms of buzzing and twanging insect life. For larger forms such as locusts, he used cashew nuts, delicately carved by volunteers from the Pang Hill Orphanage, some of whom lost their eyesight carrying out such painstaking miniature work for days on end in the dank and gloomy basement of the building.

Dobson believed that receipts from visitors' fees to his model Nod would provide him with an income in his declining years. It was not to be. On a damp and overcast Tuesday in 1964, the field was laid waste by an inexplicable cataclysm, the day before Marigold Chew was due to photograph it using a borrowed camera. The Land of Nod was swept away, swept away and gone.