Читать книгу The Master - T. H. White - Страница 6

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It was a blistering day in July, and the swell of the sea was like melted lemonade bottles.

The twins lay face down on the hot rock, dressed in nothing but overalls. Nicky was squinting at some stars or pin-points of light, which the sun threw on the glittering stone three inches from his nose. By letting his eyes go out of focus, these could be made to swim slowly to the left. Judy was fiddling with a broken egg-shell, admiring its thin, curved, fragile smoothness.

In the blue, unwinking sky above them—unwinking but it made you blink—dozens of sea birds were whirling and circling like snow flakes. As they came between you and the sun, they went brown, then black, and you could see through their wing feathers.

The children’s father was sitting with Mr. Pierrepoint on the slanting shelf about twenty feet away.

They had their backs turned and were eating sandwiches.

Mr. Pierrepoint had a coloured shirt with pictures of Balinese dancing girls painted on it in mauve and electric green. The Duke was dressed in his one-piece rompers, like Sir Winston Churchill’s, but his were made of water-proofed cheese-cloth. He had a theory about being porous. He had an oil-skin hat too, like the man in the advertisement for “Scotts Emulsion”. Both of them were in good humour.

“My dear sir,” the Duke was saying, “do you realize that ours may be the first of human feet to scale this craglet of the wine-dark sea, what?”

“Come again?”

“We are the first people to land here.”

“Duke,” said Mr. Pierrepoint, “it says in the book that St. Brendan landed here, on his way to discover the States. He was sailing on a mill-stone at the time, and he called the rock by the name of Brandion.”

“I know, my dear fellar, I know. But ...”

“It says ...”

The twins stopped listening.

Judy put down the egg-shell and said, “All the same, Nicky, it does feel queer.”

“What feels queer?”

“Being the First Human Feet.”

“I bet we’re not, anyway. What about in the last war? All the aircraft went over it—I know that, at any rate. Daddy’s information always seems to stop at about 1896.”

“Nicky!”

“Well, it does. And how could St. Brendan have floated on a mill-stone?”

“It’s supposed to be poetical, I suppose. Or religious.”

He made one of his seafaring noises.

The cliff on which they were basking was the island of Rockall, which comes in the weather forecasts. It is a granite peak, about seventy feet high, hardly bigger than a large house, and it juts out of the enormous, heaving, lonely Atlantic, some two hundred and fifty miles north-west from the nearest tip of Ireland.

Once it was part of Atlantis—perhaps—before that continent sank beneath the waves.

Round it, the abyss falls further than the thousand fathom line. Its fang of stone in the wilderness of water is the single speck which rises above the surface between Britain and America. It is the very home of sun and spray and solitude.

It is true that few people have landed there. For one thing, its loneliness used to make it difficult to find by navigation. For another, it is difficult to land on, being precipitous and often covered by the waves.

Apart from the legendary St. Brendan, Rockall has been mentioned a few times in history. Frobisher saw it once, in the spacious days. At that time it was actually wooded, so it must have been higher and larger then. In 1810, a Captain Hall of H.M.S. Endymion saw the white droppings of the sea birds on its summit and mistook these for a snowy topsail—so he gave it chase. The landing party which he sent to investigate was cut off by a sudden fog. (Fogs were another of the things which made it difficult to find Rockall. It was not easy in those days to sail 250 miles on a compass bearing and hit a dot which was only seventy feet high.)

Then there was a brigantine called the Helen, which was wrecked on an outlying reef in 1824. It is called Helen’s Reef even now. But it is strange that a ship should have collided with something no bigger than a ship, in the desert of the Atlantic Ocean. It is as if two fleas walking across a ballroom floor should meet end on.

In 1862, the boatswain of H.M.S. Porcupine was sent with a boat’s crew to try to scale the place. It was a tossing swell when they came alongside, so no landing was possible. But he managed to grasp a fragment of the island as they rose and fell. He knocked it off with his sounding lead. They brought the bit back to England. It is in the British Museum.

In 1896—the date which Nicky mentioned—the Royal Irish Academy organized an expedition specially to land there. It made two attempts, at a fortnight’s interval, but both attempts were beaten off by the heave of the sea, which was as high as the Himalayas.

Since then, a French research ship has visited and broken off a piece of Rockallite, without being able to land—in 1921—and a Mr. M. T. Bizony swam round the crag on a float lowered from the Fleetwood trawler Bulby in 1948. He also managed to chip off some.

As is well known, Great Britain annexed Rockall on September 18th, 1955, with a salute of 21 guns. This may have been a result of what I am going to tell you.

The reason why Mr. Pierrepoint and the Duke had come was so that they could say they had seen such a seldom visited spot, and had managed to land on it. People do these things without more particular causes.

One of the men who tried to climb Everest was asked why he did, and replied, “Because it is there.”

Mr. Pierrepoint’s skipper had found the rock by good navigation and they had scaled it by good luck—using a harpoon gun to throw a rope ashore.

They had been lucky with the weather.

In the offing, the big yacht with its yellow funnel and clipper-like lines—it had a sort of bowsprit—moved slowly round in the sunlight, the skipper worrying about reefs. They could see the Duchess on the sundeck under a red parasol, reading about palmistry, and her Irish setter called Sherry curled up beside her—a brown speck not interested in islands. At the foot of the crag on the west side, the ship’s boat lifted and sank like an elevator on the breathing bosom of the ocean. The disturbed birds circled above them in the fizzling aether. People have claimed to see on or near Rockall: Razorbills, Puffins, Gannets, Kittiwakes, Guillemots, Fulmars, two kinds of Skuas, Manx Shearwaters and even the Greater Shearwaters which nest on Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic. As a matter of fact, it was once believed that the Greater Shearwater nested on Rockall, but of course this is nonsense. No birds nest there.

With an oceanic “fetch” of thousands of miles—all the way from America—the local waves during great gales are at least sixty feet from crest to trough. Breaking surf—the water thrown up on meeting obstructions—goes to hundreds of feet. (The lighthouse at Dunnet Head on the Pentland Firth which is more or less in the Rockall area, stands on a cliff three hundred feet high—yet its windows have often been broken by wave-thrown stones.) These grand storms come four or five times a year. So how could any sensible bird nest on a crag only seventy feet above the surface?

But they do visit the place and they do rest on it.^*

*	After this novel was in the hands of the printers, an interesting book on Rockall was published by Mr. James Fisher (Geoffrey Bles, 18s.), which gives more facts about the island than were known to the author at the time of writing.

The Duke had brought a geological hammer with him, determined to out-do the boatswain of the Porcupine, and now he set to work.

The noise of his chopping mingled with the strange cries of the gulls.

There was one other living thing on Rockall, and this was Judy’s mongrel bitch, whose name was Jokey. They had called her Jokey when she was a puppy, because she really did seem a joke, and a bad one at that. She was such a muddle that all her legs seemed to be of different sizes. She had a long tail, and hair in her eyes, and her coat mostly grew the wrong way, like a hyena’s. She looked like a small, untidy, busy charwoman, who had been born in a dustbin. She was about the size of a Skye terrier. Judy loved her more than anything on earth. At the moment, she was yapping.

“Where’s Jokey?”

They had to raise their voices because of the gulls.

“She went down there.”

“Jokey!”

They whistled and shouted without result, getting only yaps and silences in answer—the silences being for investigation and the yaps for help.

“She must have found something.”

“It’s probably only a dead bird.”

“Jokey!”

“Oh, she is a nuisance,” said Judy. “She has probably got herself cliffed or something, and can’t get back.”

Indeed, the south-east side of Rockall was almost a precipice and they were lying on the edge of it. Or rather, it was two cliffs with a sort of step between them—the top cliff being about twenty feet and the lower one about fifty. There were fairly good foot-and hand-holds—good enough for children anyway, who are lighter in proportion to their energy than adults are.

“Jokey!”

“I suppose I shall have to go and see.”

“She’s all right.”

“But she might fall off.”

“Don’t fuss.”

You could almost see what the twins were thinking, as they lay face downwards. Judy was thinking, “Nicky is a man and ought to go, because men do things for women, except cooking.” Nicky was thinking, “It is her dog anyway.”

“You would be sorry if she was killed.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Nicky!”

“Why should she be killed?”

“Because it’s dangerous.”

“Well, go and find her then.”

“You ought to go.”

“Why ought I?”

“Because.”

But it was unanswerable really, for everybody knew that Jokey was Judy’s.

There was a resentful silence, except for the saw-mill cries of the Gannets and the clop of the hammer. In the distance, one of the Gannets on coastal patrol spotted a submarine fish, poised for a moment on stalling wing, and fell like a plummet, a thunderbolt, a dive-bomber. It went straight into the sea, plonk, and the little, white fountain of water rose behind it almost lazily into the sparkling air. You could count four slowly, and then there was the dark-looking head on the surface, shaking itself, swallowing the fish. Others of the squadron came to the signal, for it was evidently a shoal, and they peeled off, one after the other, plonk, plonk, plonk. Beautiful dives!

Judy got up complainingly—“a woman’s work is never done”—and began to pick her way among the sharp ledges of the rock. Soon she had worked her way round a shoulder of the cliff and vanished.

“Nicky!”

The thin call mixed with the bird noises.

“What?”

“Come here.”

“Why?”

“Please come.”

“Oh, all right.”

He used his grudging voice automatically, but jumped up willingly enough, because as a matter of fact he had wanted to go all the time. Only he had not known that he wanted to.

“What is it?”

“Come and see.”

Just below the ledge or step in the cliff face, and clinging rather precariously to a kind of natural shelf or pathway, Judy and Jokey were absorbed in something in front of their noses. Both noses were pointing at it, like the noses of setters, and Jokey’s head was on one side, the ears cocked forward.

Nicky made his way down the steepness of granite, putting the shoulder of Rockall between himself and his father. The noise of the hammer died away. Even the cries of birds seemed to fall silent. Now both children were out of sight and out of hearing, even of the yacht.

“What is it?”

“Oh, shut up, Jokey. Don’t yap.”

The ledge was broad enough to stand on, so she picked the dog up, struggling, and held its mouth shut with her fingers. Jokey was furious.

“It’s something in there.”

“Where?”

“Jokey!”

Kneeling down in the professional way which men have when they are called to mend the plumbing or find out what has gone wrong with the kitchen stove, Nicky examined the rock face where the dog had been sniffing. It was as if the three of them were standing on the keyboard of an upright stone piano. The cliff rose in front of them, where you put the music, and fell behind them to the pedals in the sea.

As a matter of fact, it was more like an enormous pianola. Behind the music rack in these, there is a panel which can be opened, to see the dotted music going round its drums. And straight in front of Nicky, cut in the living rock with the exactness of a cabinet maker, there were the ruled slits or cracks of what looked like a pair of garage doors.

The doors or whatever they were, were not smoothed or planed outside. They were rough and chunky like the rest of the cliff. They had no handles or bolts or visible means of opening them. From a few paces away you could not see the cracks. It was as if a giant with a sharp knife had cut a mathematical square in the side of the island, like cutting a slice of cake without taking the piece out.

“Gee!”

“Jokey says there is something inside.”

“It can’t be in the crack, Judy. Look, it goes straight up and straight along and down again. And look, it splits in the middle. It must be sort of doors.”

“But what’s it for?”

“It must be made by men. If it was Nature, it wouldn’t be straight lines.”

He ran his fingers along the crack, fascinated by the discovery. Judy, who was about twice as quick on the uptake as Nicky was, began to feel scared.

“Let’s go and tell Daddy.”

“No, wait a minute. I want to see. Look, if they opened outwards, there would be grooves in the ledge here for them to swing on. They must go inwards. Wait, I want to push.”

She stood doubtfully, clutching the wriggling mongrel to her chest, disapproving of the whole affair.

“Let’s get Daddy first.”

But Nicky was busy shoving at the cliff.

“They must be locked.”

“Perhaps they are just natural,” she said hopefully, “the result of an earthquake or something? Or a volcano?”

“Ass.”

“But Nicky ...”

At this point one of the doors opened of its own accord, smoothly and ponderously, like the door of a heavy safe.

A pair of yellow hands, with long finger nails like a mandarin’s, came from the dark interior—and courteously pushed both children off the cliff.