Appleby on Ararat Read Online Free Page A

curious in an extreme.’”
    Mrs Kittery momentarily suspended her labours, Mr Hoppo gave the impression of a man who is absorbedly humming a little tune in his head. Unumunu, who had taken off his shirt as he worked, was ebony and immobile by what was to be the prow. And to the west the sun sank towards the Philippine Basin. They were alone with themselves and the nether world conjured about them by Miss Curricle. Barren and eternally striving, its every rising and withdrawing surface netted and embossed with veins, flecked and fretted with foam, the ocean possessed them. And they longed for the seaside, the approximate human thing, longed for the babble from the beach, the floating peel, the impatient hoot at the pier, the waddle or swoop of gulls. But about them there was only the momentary life of flying fish, fluid bodies half dissolved in light and, beyond, the occasional irresponsible roll of dolphins.
    Cerberus muriaticus was disposed of – the data given, the senses even. The mast was up and a sail rigged; it was possible to discern that the café moved other than at the will of the waters. Mr Hoppo talked of islands, of flying-boats, of pearl-luggers, of benevolent natives in ocean-going canoes. There were manoeuvres to provide a decent segregation of the sexes; there was an apportioning of stores and a meal which Mrs Kittery, eating ice cream and wafers, cheerfully called tea. The path to the sun was a foreshortened trail of fire; the orb reddened, grew, touched the horizon, and incontinently tumbled out of view in a flash of green light. Miss Curricle, providently scavenging crumbs, remarked that with one stride came the dark.
    Features faded; only forms remained; there was a brief loosening of tongues. “We ought to have Mr Hoppo’s hippo here,” said Mrs Kittery, with whom a joke did not readily lose its first freshness. “It would make it just like the Ark. Mr Hoppo, do you believe in the Ark – or is it just a story?”
    Miss Curricle coughed warningly, as if she felt their situation peculiarly unsuitable to theological discussion. But Mr Hoppo was not displeased. “I certainly believe in the historical authenticity of Noah’s Flood. But it is a story too, having been contrived by Providence with an allegorical intention.”
    “It seems a little hard on the poor sinners,” said Unumunu; “subjecting them for the purposes of allegorical statement to the horrors of a universal deluge. But on the historical fact I agree. Almost every folk-lore contains reference to a flood. The melting of a polar ice-cap may have had something to do with it.”
    Mr Hoppo could be seen to sit up, rather like a don stirred from somnolence by an unexpectedly intelligent undergraduate. “That the immediate mechanisms involved,” he said carefully, “should be explicable in what are commonly called natural or scientific terms is scarcely an argument–”
    “Miss Curricle,” interrupted Mrs Kittery, for whom abstract discussion had no appeal, “shall be Noah’s wife. And – and Sir Ponto is Ham.”
    “Mrs Noah if you please,” said Miss Curricle, somewhat heavily unbending. “If we are really like the Ark – and we could scarcely be less like a ship – it may be a good omen that we shall find an Ararat. And now I think that we had better go to bed.” She peered about her. “Or perhaps it is necessary to use a genteelism and suggest that we retire.”
    Mr Hoppo rummaged in the darkness. “How fortunate that there are several rugs! I am reminded less of the Ark than of the Swiss Family Robinson . You remember how everything necessary turned up.”
    “It is overdone.” Miss Curricle was decisive. “Too many visits to the wreck. I prefer Coral Island .”
    “For that matter,” said Glover, “I don’t think you can beat Robinson Crusoe . So dashed convincing…’stonishing book.”
    “My people have many stories of the finding of islands,” said Unumunu, and his voice sounded deeper with the night.