The beasts have a king, and in this shape he is not the lion: the crocodile wears the crown. The crown rests, however, on a single authority — Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist, filed one record here, a tradition of the Fang of Africa set down by the collector Trilles — and that page still waits unread on our shelf.

What the reading turns up around the empty throne is the crocodile's other honors, none of them quite kingship. In The Golden Bough (the abridgement published 1922), Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish comparatist, keeps a crocodile of the Calabar River "popularly supposed to contain the external soul of a chief"; when an officer at last hit the beast, "the chief was laid up with a wound in his leg". Among the Fans of the Gaboon — perhaps the very people the unread authority intends — a wizard at initiation binds his life to some fierce wild creature, crocodile among them. The Bechuanas of the Crocodile clan "call it their father, swear by it", though it is "hateful and unlucky" even to catch sight of one. And in the Thousand and One Nights (a corpus compiled c. 800–1500 CE), the sage Dooban, his eyes already bandaged for the sword, pleads "Wouldst thou return me the recompense of the crocodile" — a story he refuses to tell, so Edward William Lane (1801–1876), the English translator, supplies it in a note: the fable of the crocodile carried to the Nile on a camel's back, an "ungrateful and treacherous monster" justly left where he was found.

Father, oath-witness, keeper of a chief's soul, villain of an untold fable: the record grants the crocodile every dignity except the throne the shape promises. What sort of king is it whose subjects keep their souls in him and still dread to meet his eye?