A Void Read Online Free PDF Page A

his unusually robust constitution
    allows him finally to sit up and look around him. Our protagonist
    is now disturbingly skinny but can still, if with difficulty, climb
    out of his pit — a pit that was almost his tomb. So Ishmail
    starts living again by first luxuriandy slaking his thirst; now
    swallows an acorn but instandy spits it out in disgust; and soon
    works out which fruits and mushrooms won't do him any harm.
    A particular fruit (akin to an apricot) brings him out in a rash of
    itchy, purplish spots, but bananas, avocados, nuts and kiwi fruit
    abound.
    At dusk, using a sharp rock, Ishmail cuts a notch on a stick
    (to tick off his first night as a castaway); and, with a total of 20
    such cuts, constructs a hut, a sort of impromptu shack, with a
    door, four walls, and flooring and roofing built out of mud.
    With no matchsticks at hand, though, his food is invariably raw.
    Constant, too, is his panic that an animal might attack his camp;
    but, as it turns out (such, anyway, is his supposition), no lynx
    or puma, no jaguar, cougar or bison, stalks his island. At most,
    comfortably far off, and only at sundown, a solitary orang-utan
    prowling around but not caring (or daring?) to approach him.
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    And if it did, Ishmail had cut a stout club out of a mahogany
    branch that would firmly put paid to any assailant.
    This lasts a month. At which point, his physical condition
    improving on an almost daily basis, our Robinson Ishmail (if I
    may so call him) starts making a tour of his unknown Tristan da
    Cunha, taking a full day to walk around it, his club in his hand,
    and by nightfall pitching camp on top of a hill that would allow
    him a panoramic command of his domain.
    At dawn, cupping his hand to his brow and gazing about him,
    Ishmail looks northwards and sights a kind of canal swirling and
    foaming into marshland, and also, to his horror, not too far from
    his hut, a row of mounds (akin to that sort known as tumuli), six
    in all; cautiously slinks down towards this curious construction
    (possibly a sort of windpiping?); and hazards an assumption (and
    rightly so) that it's by a tidal flow that it functions.
    Now, abrupdy, as it dawns on him what it is and of what it
    consists, Ishmail starts noticing signs of habitation - a housing
    compound, a radio installation, an aquarium.
    But it all looks forlorn and vacant, its fountain as dry as a
    structuralist monograph (and playing host to a trio of fat and
    languorous armadillos), its pool mouldy with fungus.
    As for its housing compound, it was built, circa 1930, in a
    crypto-rococo fashion imitating, variously, a pink-icing casino in
    Monaco, a bungalow on a Malayan plantation, a colonialist villa,
    an ultra-chic condominium in Miami and Tara from GWTW.
    Passing through a tall swing-door with slats and a mosquito
    guard, you would walk along a corridor, about four yards high
    and six yards long, taking you into a largish sitting room: on its
    floor is a vast Turkish rug and, all around, divans, sofas, arm-
    chairs, cushions and mirrors. A spiral stair winds up to a loggia.
    From its roof, built out of a wood that, though light in colour,
    is actually rock-hard (most probably sumac or sandalwood), a
    thin aluminium cord, from which hangs a shiny brass ring of
    outstanding craftsmanship, supports a colourful lamp no doubt
    brought back from a trip to Japan and which casts a dim but
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    oddly milky light. Finally, via four bow windows inlaid with
    gold, you could go out on to a balcony surmounting a fabulous
    natural vista.
    With a caution born of suspicion, Ishmail now pays this com-
    pound a visit from top to bottom, from ground floor to loggia,
    tapping its roof, its walls and its wainscoting, going through
    its cupboards, not missing any nook or cranny and noting, in
    particular, in a downstairs stock room, a labyrinthian circuit
    which, linking up an oscillograph, a prismatic mirror, a two-way
    radio, a hi-fi (with an apparatus to amplify its sound), a multi-
    track