Appleby on Ararat Read Online Free PDF Page A

potatoes and came up against Glover at the tiller. “I feel myself,” he whispered, “getting higher and higher.”
    “Higher?” Glover looked up at the menacing line of water above them.
    “My position. I have been reconsidering the Thirty-nine Articles.”
    “Thirty-nine fathoms,” said Miss Curricle. “Forty fathoms. Forty-one fathoms.”
    Miss Curricle had gone out of her mind some days before and had been deep in the Tonga Trench ever since. It appeared from what she reported to be cool and dark – the darkness however relieved by streams and whorls and gyres of brilliantly illuminated fish. Some were dim masses with a single piercing searchlight in the brow; some, like a circus-tent at night, were outlined in beads of coloured fire; some were a single translucent glow. A Piccadilly Circus world of the not so long ago. And a predatory world. Miss Curricle swayed her body and one knew that she had again dodged the snap of cavernous jaws, the writhe and swoop of tentacles ten feet long.
    To Appleby at the prow Unumunu in the ghost of Unumunu’s voice whispered ceaseless anthropology. The Kipiti, the Aruntas, the Papitino, the Tongs. Phantasmagorically the café drifted over mango swamps, across deserts and tundras, beneath eucalyptus and palms. Internecine islands hovered on the horizon, thickened to archipelagos where the narrow seas were stained with blood. Assegais fell from the sun and the faint wind held the rhythm of drums, chants to unknown modes, tread of feet in ritual dance.
    (The tips of the swell, as if at the burgeoning of a fantastic Spring, were here and there flecked or streaked with foam; Glover sat like eroded granite at the tiller.)
    The Kola Islanders worship clouds, in the Luba Group people don’t know why babies come, the god of the Arrimattaroa is a gigantic termite. It was all enormously interesting, Unumunu whispered. Scientifically interesting. He spoke of institutes, endowments, expeditions; of monographs and museums. One never knew where one would get to – the fascination to a man of science like himself was there. The most fantastic rite, the most repellent custom might yield on study the basis for some masterful generalisation, some far-reaching and revolutionary anthropological theory.
    (The sun went down with its green flash and then – as if pleased with this trite effect – did it again. There was no one at the tiller; there was no tiller; the sail was a tattered gonfalon merely; the air was hot, still and dry, but there was a whisper in it, a moan behind the horizon.)
    Sprawled under his rug Hoppo no longer prayed; days ago he had conversed on the Thirty-nine Articles with the Seraphic Doctor and been rocketed higher than ever, so that he had further fascinated Mrs Kittery by announcing the performance of meditations on the Splendid Bride and the Nine Sacred Cataracts. And now, herself with the strength of the Seraphim, Mrs Kittery was hauling him by the heels – hauling at his heels because the sun was there again and his head must have shade or seethe.
    Appleby had ruled for a time, but now Mrs Kittery did that. She alone remained of the normal world – a normal woman fighting for life in a normal hazard of war. And among them she had the superior reality, the superior physical actuality, of a Homeric goddess. Miss Curricle’s hair was a ghost-coral and her limbs uncertainly waved; she was insubstantial to the point of losing a dimension, as if the incalculable pressure of a hundred fathoms had dealt with her like a hydraulic press. Glover was an obliterated monolithic figure, mysteriously upright but human or alive in nothing else; Hoppo was as shrunken as a Skin of Bartholomew; Unumunu was only a voice, now weirdly chanting, now desperately whispering anthropology still. But Mrs Kittery remained and ruled; five people were to be kept alive and she would hold down the job. She wound her watch and waited for the hour hand to circle twice before opening the last tin of