Appleby on Ararat Read Online Free Page B

“They are found after many suns, some of them – and many moons. Some are not found at all, and they are the fortunate islands – the islands of the blessed. And that is another universal legend.” He sighed. “Known, Mrs Kittery, whether where Japhet dwells, or Cham , or Sem .”
    “Once I saw a serial” – Mrs Kittery’s voice was a shade uncertain in the darkness – “and some people were wrecked and found an island…”
    They were asleep. Strangely quickly – except Appleby, who took first watch – they were asleep in corners of their hazardous craft. The stars blazed, an electric multitudinous fire, and Orion somersaulted towards the horizon. Cork-like the café rose and fell to the slither of the ocean. Of sound there was only a lapping; the ear, cheated and uneasy, sought the quiver, the rhythmic thud and swish of a liner’s progress, the high uncanny whistle that comes into a ship’s rigging below the line. They were running before a faint westerly, and conceivably making over a knot; in nine months, Appleby reflected, they might reach Peru. And learn what was left of the world…
    In the dark somebody softly, briefly groaned. Each in his little bed conceived of islands… He rose and lashed the tiller – work in the morning might make the steering-gear less a convention – and moved cautiously round the café. They had shipped no drop of water; the thing rode on an even keel, like some craft fantastically disguised for a regatta and overtaken by night. But in the centre of what was now the floor stood a ventilator, an affair of strong and watertight louvres. A tug at that – Appleby’s fingers went over it thoughtfully, as might the fingers of others on other watches during successive nights. A tug, and much almost certainly futile suffering would be cut out, would drift down unborn amid the wheeling platoons of cerberus muriaticus .
    He had a small torch and flashed it circumspectly. The ventilator was operated by a handle – no, not by a handle, but by a species of key, the kind that is merely a tapered bar of metal with a handle at the broader end. He tugged it out and pitched it into the sea. He moved to the bar and pitched out the whisky and the liqueurs; to the soda fountain and pitched out the flagon of chemical stuff that would flavour forty gallons. Returning to the tiller his foot struck the box of cigars; he removed four and threw away the box. The policeman’s instinct, he thought to himself, and lighting his own cigar sat down again at his post. Scraps of verse ran in his head. To be or not to be. To lie in cold obstruction and to rot. If I drink oblivion of a day so shorten I the stature of my soul. But need’st not strive officiously to keep alive… He drew at the cigar – a good cigar, with its place in that hierarchy of desirable sensations which makes man inescapably desirous to fulfil his day and to draw out the night of age. He looked up at the stars. They had nothing to say, but they were undoubtedly pretty and it was easy to feel that they were majestic and mysterious. He looked out over the darkness of the ocean. Too much infinity doesn’t do. He fell to thinking of the situation in Turkey. There were interesting possibilities there.

 
     
3
    The sun now took longer – at least twice as long – to circle the heavens and its beams were hotter – at least twice as hot. The rugs were rigged to give sluggishly drifting parallelograms of shade. Under one Hoppo knelt in prayer. And they were embarrassed – all except Mrs Kittery, who had never come across the thing before, and who watched with her blue and black lips parted in innocent interest. She was still physically splendid, Appleby thought. Like a better quality linoleum, that wears the same all through. But there was not much wear left even in Mrs Kittery.
    The café swooped down a lengthening glissade of water: something was going to happen to the weather. Hoppo rolled over and over like a half-filled sack of