The Penal Colony Read Online Free PDF Page A

same formation but on an even
more majestic scale, another bay stretched into the half-light. At
the farther stack the shoreline turned and there was nothing but
the dark, dawn-misted expanse of sea.
    Most impressive of all was the suddenness
with which the cliffs fell away. In places they appeared almost
vertical. The rock was stratified, consisting of thick,
perpendicular layers, each one aligned in the same direction and
pointing slantwise out to sea, so that, in the middle of the cove,
it presented a torn and uneven face, but at either side the open
layers made an overlapping series of smooth, artificial-looking
expanses of stone.
    Especially in the middle of the cove, slabs
of rock had calved off and crashed, littering the shore with
colossal rubble. Against and among these slabs, and on short
stretches of stony dark beach, the sea broke with a dutiful sort of
monotony, swilling through the channels and crevices and
occasionally throwing up a listless shower of spray. A dozen metres
out and directly below the place where Routledge was standing, a
ridge of rock lay athwart the tide. With each incoming wave the sea
poured over the ridge, making a seething waterfall; and as each
wave returned it poured back, making now a waterfall on the other
side. Elsewhere were ridges that as yet were too high for the tide,
or others that had already been submerged, only their peaks jutting
above the surface of the foam.
    A single white canister, perhaps an old
plastic bleach-bottle, lay washed up on the beach. Except for this
there was no trace of human life, no evidence whatever of
civilization or mankind. Bleach-bottle apart, the view from this
spot could not have changed materially in the past three thousand
years.
    After gazing for a moment longer, Routledge
remembered himself and turned back into the scrub. He was searching
for a suitable place to hide, somewhere he could safely sleep.
    He was no more than two kilometres from the
Village here, on part of the coast facing west. As far as he could
tell, the Village was sited on a peninsula at the south-western
corner of the island, isolated from the rest of Sert by a fortified
border made from two young thorn-hedges with an intervening no
man’s land of stakes, concrete rubble, rusty barbed wire, and other
materials retrieved from the ruined lighthouse, perhaps, or from
wartime defences on the beaches, or both. The gate through which he
had been expelled last night was sited at the western end of the
border, and was itself fortified even more heavily than the rest.
Three men had been on guard, armed with clubs and machetes; one had
been carrying an axe.
    Routledge had spent the night, cold, hungry,
and desperately thirsty, lying in the bracken a few hundred metres
from the gate. It had been too dark to go further without risk of
injury. As it was, he had fallen over several times, and had nearly
sprained his ankle in a rabbit hole.
    In the first greyness of morning he had begun
to move away, in line with the coast, first climbing some rising
ground to see what he could of the Village and of the island where
he was destined to spend, as the judge had told him, the remaining
term of his natural life.
    The light had been too poor to see much. The
vegetation was composed of rough grassland and scrub, with bracken,
gorse, and, especially near the cliffs, expanses of dwarfed,
scrubby woodland. The soil seemed poor and overgrazed; Routledge
recalled that Sert had once been used for sheep farming. A hazily
remembered television documentary about Sert – there had been a
national outcry when this, and the other islands, had been taken
over by the Home Office – had traced its occupancy from the Middle
Ages, when it had been the site of a monastery, through to the
final decline of the farming population in 1930 or so, concluding
with the subsequent importance of Sert as a nature reserve. Sitting
in front of his TV set – how long ago had that been? – in his
comfortable, complacent living