Far and few, and far and few,/Are the lands where the Jumblies live;/Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,/…
-The Jumblies, Edward Lear
For a man to qualify today as a Jumblie he need not practice anthrophagy…It is comforting to imagine that when that day arrives we might be in a position to have the inhabitants of a nearby planet as our Jumblies.
-Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue, from the Foreward, Paul Bowles
Lear sailed up the Nile to the second cataract in 1867- ”Nubia delighted me,” he wrote, “it isn’t a bit like Egypt except there is a river in both”- where he might have seen green Sufi turbans worn on heads and blue Hands of Fatima painted on doors. Bowles would have happily found a Jumblie- silencing the B, he would become Jamali, Camel-like- on one of his trips into the Rif, a region he considered as Tangier’s Outer Space, but he hoped for better luck finding them on planets circling stars like Beta Draconis A, or Rastaban, Ra’s al-Thu’ban, Head of the Snake, and Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse, Yad al-Jawzaa’, Hand of the Middle.