Appleby on Ararat Read online

  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 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 pears.

  Unumunu stopped chanting; an ebony cloud hovered before Appleby; the voice was at his ear. “Or take the whole theory of the transference of strength. Primitive peoples are in nothing more interesting – more interesting to the scientist – than in that… What is your name?”

  “Appleby – John Appleby.”

  “There – you have given yourself away! Literally, Mr Appleby, I have your name and your name is you. I have you in my power. I have your power. Along with your name I have received it into myself. You see? It is a universal and most potent magic.” The voice paused, and then went hurriedly on. “Most interesting. It has been studied by Berthold and Kemp-Brown. By Oplitz among the Kagotas…work on the Guggenberg Foundation…the Poincet-Conti Expedition.” The voice paused again. “And cannibalism,” it said, “is much the same sort of thing.”

  (The Pacific Ocean had become very still. The dip and climb of the café was now only a delusion of the semi-circular canals; instead it spun like a dying roulette-wheel, like an infinitely lazy top. The café spun slower, slower yet, there was an instant of absolute motionlessness, it was spinning with faintly gathering momentum in reverse. A barometer, had there been one on board, would have been in process of registering a sensational drop. Perhaps it grew a shade cooler; perhaps because of this Appleby opened his eyes.)

  Appleby opened his eyes and saw a Sir Ponto Unumunu who was no longer talking anthropology. Instead, he was advancing painfully upon Mrs Kittery. In his hand he held a fair-sized penknife, open at the larger blade.

  The situation was clear. If there was s
trength to be magically acquired in the shape of a reasonably succulent collop, it was from Mrs Kittery that it must come. Appleby made a very great effort to call out. A noise of sorts must have resulted, because Mrs Kittery turned round. The black man, though quite nearly dead, was still a beautifully sprung and jointed machine; Mrs Kittery looked at him at once with disapproval and with continued frank sensuous enjoyment. He jumped at her. And she stepped out of the way and hit him hard on the head with a bottle.

  In the instant that Mrs Kittery hit Unumunu the storm hit the café. It ruined any dramatic effect that a little attempted man-eating might have had. The café spun madly, so that they were all flung to its periphery; then it bounded forward so that they tumbled in a common heap. A great demon was overhead, yelling as if tortured by a demon greater still; prowling the ocean about them were forces not conceivable even in demoniac terms. And it was suddenly dark – dark with a darkness the more intimidating because it was perhaps the issue only of senses supremely confused. The café veered and there was audible above the scream of the storm an ominous crack; veered again and seemed to plunge outright from the torrid to a frigid zone. They were soaked and chilled – but it was water from the heavens and not from an engulfing sea. Mysteriously impelled, the café raced as if on the brink of Niagara, as if plunging into that final vortex of the earth’s waters imagined by Poe. The café raced, the storm yelled and the humans, revived, yelled too – like airmen power-diving to their physical limit. Appleby yelled once and would have yelled again, but the mast came down and hit him much as the bottle had hit Unumunu. He saw, in a queer flash of extended awareness, Miss Curricle, very sane, looking up as if in gloomy collaboration with heaven. And then he tumbled to the glassy floor.

  4

  Commonly one emerges from a faint or an anaesthetic into a world of massive and confused sights and sounds – or into a mélange or continuum of these from which the normal boundaries of the senses presently disengage themselves. But Appleby came to entirely in terms of his nose.

  The universe consisted of a smell of earth – slightly dank, slightly lush, but splitting upon exploration into a magnificent multitudinousness, into a nasal splendour as of light cast through a spectroscope. Infinite beckoning labyrinths of scent, like a first-class grocer’s before Christmas. Sabean Odours from the spicie shoare of Arabie the blest. Fruits of pomegranate and peach. And all divinely new, like a first bringing the powers of manhood into play. The innocent nose… Appleby half sat up.

  Appleby half sat up and the movement brought him into a fresh olfactory stratum. There was a smell of charred aromatic wood; there was a further smell so primitive that it prickled at the roots of his hair and laid invisible fingers on his spine. Like roast pork. For a moment the universe contracted to a clamant square inch at the root of his tongue.

  He opened his eyes, or perhaps looked through eyes that were already open. And he saw Unumunu, ebon, vast, anointed, bare to the waist, turning a shapeless lump of flesh on a spit. The fingers on Appleby’s spine closed like a vice; his eyeballs refused their motion, transfixed on this sight; his memory worked…

  And then he painfully turned his whole head and saw Mrs Kittery, placidly seated in a Tahitan attitude on the farther side of a fire.

  Unumunu twisted his torso with a musclature remote as the Congo; spoke in a voice familiar as Isis or the Cam. “You are all right now, Appleby, my dear fellow? I gather the mast hit us both on the head.”

  “It was dreadful,” said Mrs Kittery, large-eyed and ardent. “Mr Hoppo insisted on administering the supreme junction.” She had a gourd in her lap and was sucking some pleasingly saccharine beverage through a cane.

  “The supreme junction?” Appleby got painfully to his knees. “Where are we now?”

  Unumunu’s teeth gleamed. “Not in Paradise – unless of the terrestrial sort. This is what the songs celebrate as a tropic isle.’’

  “There are yams,” breathed Mrs Kittery, “and coconuts and you can make a house of bamboos. You can – you can wear a sarong.”

  “Have some toasted terrapin.”

  “You can rub in coconut oil and go absolutely brown.”

  Appleby ate terrapin cautiously and became for a time absorbed in an astounding consciousness of his metabolic processes. It was like being a hysterical subject and seeing one’s own inside. “Are we the only survivors?” he asked presently.

  “Oh, no!” Mrs Kittery was slightly shocked. “There’s Miss Curricle, of course. She’s gone for a bathe round the point.”

  “And Glover and Hoppo,” said Unumunu, “have gone for a walk. It seems that the colonel has Anglo-Catholic tendencies and Hoppo is expostulating from the Low Church standpoint. On a mundane level they are looking for eggs.”

  “–For dinner,” added Mrs Kittery. “The colonel says that now we are properly settled we had better dine at eight. That” – she pointed to the terrapin – “is the end of lunch. And this” – she held up the gourd – “is afternoon tea – I mean, is tea.” She sucked again.

  Appleby felt a new dazedness come over his sense. It was so difficult to catch up. “Is the island, then, uninhabited?” he asked.

  Unumunu nodded regretfully. “I am afraid so – although there are still parts to explore. What an opportunity for fieldwork lost! Think if we had hit upon a matriarchy, or a new clan system! The Guggenberg Foundation–”

  The terrapin was stowed; Appleby closed his eyes, and with them his ears closed too. When he awoke it was to find his companions vanished and only the remains of the fire to assure him he had not been dreaming. Perhaps Mrs Kittery was applying coconut oil; perhaps Unumunu was hopefully seeking some Man Friday’s footsteps in the sand. He got to his feet and found his legs by no means shaky; he strolled about and examined his environment.

  It was exotic enough, a sub-tropical confusion tumbling to a sickle of beach with calm sea and a reef beyond. No doubt there were yams. Perhaps there would be mammee and manchineel and mangostan as well. But compared with the nightmarish absurdity of the sun-deck café the place was as comfortingly commonplace as could be. Appleby, though without any taste – or talent, maybe – for a South Sea Idyll, looked about him with moderate approval. As Mrs Kittery had remarked, one could construct a shelter of bamboos. There was terrapin and fruit and – apparently – water. They commanded fire. It was not a rainy season. They had only accident, disease and each other to reckon with – and perhaps a steamer would turn up one day.

  He descended to the beach and looked out to sea. There was a shark in the lagoon – impossible to mistake that triangular fin. On the reef beyond, and silhouetted against the dazzle of the declining sun, were two curved and sickly palms; their effect was as of home-made decorations in a forlorn-hope teashop; Appleby surveyed them and felt no stirring of romance. But beyond them and beyond the farthest strip of ocean something was happening. For a moment it looked like a ship coming hull-up on the horizon; then it rose a fraction into air, like Gulliver’s floating island. And an island it was – or perhaps the tip of a continent – miraging up from an indeterminable distance beyond the curve of earth. Appleby stared at it, absorbed. Perhaps one could really actualise some schoolboys’ yarn; perhaps one could make tools with which to make tools to make – A voice spoke behind him. “Evening on Ararat,” it said.

  He turned round and saw Miss Curricle. A woman who has plumbed the Tonga Trench ought to be older for the experience – but Miss Curricle, he saw at once, looked younger than before. Perhaps it was her clothes; these, originally conceived on angular lines, had been collapsed by the sea and now conformed approximately to the contours beneath. One was aware, Appleby saw with vague foreboding, that Miss Curricle belonged to the same order of beings as Mrs Kittery. A superior policeman must have the instinct of experiment. “Ararat?” he said. “Mrs Kittery thinks of it rather as Eden; And I believe she is going to wear a sarong.”

  Miss Curri
cle noncommittally smiled – something of a Gioconda smile, that might be as good as a sarong itself if one were in the mood. Appleby was not in the mood. “I’m afraid,” he continued with a suggestion of haste, “that we may be here for some time.”

  “Evening on Ararat.” Miss Curricle repeated her words with a faint proprietorship in the tone; she might have been standing beside a myriorama, prepared to flick a switch and offer Morning on Mont Blanc instead. “The thought has implications.” She looked, darkling, at the ocean. “Has it occurred to you, Mr Appleby, that this may be a second Ararat?”

  “No. I fear I haven’t got a theological mind.”

  Miss Curricle gave what, but for her new character of Inscrutable Woman, would have been a snort. “Figuratively, of course. Noah and his family on Ararat were the only people left alive on earth. As things go, it might be approximately the same with us.”

  Appleby smiled. “I see what you mean. But I should be inclined to put the emphasis on approximately, all the same. They can’t quite exterminate each other.”

  “You ought,” said Miss Curricle very solemnly, “to read H G Wells.”

  “Perhaps. But I’m not likely to have the opportunity for some time. As I say, we’re likely to be here for a good bit.”

  Miss Curricle shook her head, disapproving of the levity. “Certainly we may be here for a good bit – and as the only representatives of our species left on the planet. We may be here until there is another convulsion and some land bridge rises to lead us again into the world.”