Appleby on Ararat (3 page)

“Six syphons and a case of mineral-water,” said Mr Hoppo, who was counting the unbroken stores. “Whisky, brandy, port, madeira, sherry –
fino
, I am glad to say – and a large number of liqueurs. An ice-box but no ice – that was what the steward, poor fellow, had gone to get a supply of. Caviare – an uncommonly big pot. A tin of biscuit-things to serve it on. Stuffed olives. Potato crisps, salted almonds, anchovies, pretzel-sticks: everything, in fact, to encourage a brisk traffic at the bar. A tin of salt, no doubt to give everything a sprinkle of from time to time. Glover, there is irony in this.”

“A thing for doing the fizzing to shakes,” said Mrs Kittery, who had crossed to the debris of the soda fountain. “It’s electric, so it won’t be much good.” She sighed her disappointment. “A packet of straws. A flagon of vanilla flavouring, not even cracked, and a label on the back saying it’s enough for forty gallons. A tub of cream, swizzle sticks, cherries, quite a lot of tinned fruit for making melbas and sundaes.” Innocent satisfaction was creeping into her voice. “Ice cream, raspberry balm, glacé pineapple–”

“Cigars,” said Miss Curricle, tapping a box with her toe. She spoke gloomily, as if this further useless discovery were a luckless materialisation of her own will. “And two fire-extinguishers.”

“Possibly a sail.” Appleby had found an inverted cupboard near a fragment of what had been the floor, and he was hauling out an enveloping sheet. “They swathed the soda fountain with it at night. But what about a mast?”

“Up here,” said Unumunu, “the teak is mostly three by three-quarters. But there’s one joist three by three. If we could step it–”

“And rig that counter as a rudder,” said Glover.

“With a table-leg,” said Hoppo, “for tiller–”

Miss Curricle, steadying herself as the café tilted and slid down a smooth gradient of water, opened her book. “While you are all busy with these technical things,” she said, “I shall read aloud. It will be well to mention that the book is called
Tonga Trench
and is a work of scientific oceanography. Dealing as it does with the ocean-bed in certain areas of the Pacific it is of particular interest in our present situation.”

The café was moving slowly skywards with the motion of an escalator; on the crest of the swell it wobbled and a flip of spray whipped them; it gave a tentative pirouette as of a ballerina waiting in the wings and slid smoothly downwards once more. The men sweated at the teak joist. Mrs Kittery, her flawless figure everywhere touched to an innocent and plastic voluptuousness by the sun, strenuously helped. It did not look like being an easy job.

“
‘Cerberus muriaticus,’
” read Miss Curricle, “
‘is uniquely distinguished by the possession of three distinct and separate digestive systems, with the full complement of orifices, tubes and accessory organs which this remarkable organisation entails. When all three stomachs are distended – commonly by the intake of the common sea-bun or sea-kidney – the creature presents a grotesquely bulbous appearance and seems to suffer acute discomfort not unsuggestive of the purely human ailment of
mal de mer.
The eye has a more than fish-like glaze, movement is hindered by violent spasms of colic, a suggestion of
rictus
attends the gape of the jaw
.’”

Mrs Kittery, whose eye had been wandering to the glacé pineapple, turned rather abruptly again to the mast. A complete absence of tools and the frangibility of the surfaces on which they were supported made progress slow: nevertheless it seemed likely that a mast, sufficient to support a sail filled with a light breeze, could be got up. The practical gain, Appleby reflected as he worked, would be of the slightest. Nothing could make their fantastic raft into a vessel capable of directing itself across the Straits of Dover, let alone to any goal amid this infinity of water. But the psychological use of being a little under way might be considerable; the shadow of navigation would be better than mere drift. Particularly at night, when the mind could give itself to the notion of steering by the stars.

Glover slapped the mast noisily, glanced warily at Miss Curricle – she was continuing to maintain the spirits of the company after her own fashion – and spoke in a low voice. “Appleby – what d’you think?”

“If the ocean stays like this we’re all right for several days. Then a week’s coma. With luck one of us might stay intermittently conscious for a fortnight. Which wouldn’t be bad.”

“
‘Distinct from this
,’” announced Miss Curricle, “‘
is cerberus muriaticus muricatus. Here each lower jaw carries a sharp spear or prickle, so that the general appearance is somewhat suggestive of a three-headed submarine unicorn.’”

“Not bad?” said Glover – and stared at Appleby hard but not disapprovingly.

“
‘When hunting in shoals through the eerie jungle of the ocean-bed this species gives a striking impression of combined ferocity and efficiency. A co-operative method has been evolved. Each individual impales three or more sea-buns on his prickle and then proffers the refection thus secured to its nearest companion.’”

“Not bad in that it does give us an outside chance. On a shipping-route – even in the Pacific – fourteen days is something. And of course there may be a search; it depends on what the wireless people managed.” Appleby’s glance went grimly to the empty sea.

“‘
The reproductive mechanisms of these creatures
,’” read Miss Curricle unflinchingly, “‘
are curious in an extreme.’”

Mrs Kittery momentarily suspended her labours, Mr Hoppo gave the impression of a man who is absorbedly humming a little tune in his head. Unumunu, who had taken off his shirt as he worked, was ebony and immobile by what was to be the prow. And to the west the sun sank towards the Philippine Basin. They were alone with themselves and the nether world conjured about them by Miss Curricle. Barren and eternally striving, its every rising and withdrawing surface netted and embossed with veins, flecked and fretted with foam, the ocean possessed them. And they longed for the seaside, the approximate human thing, longed for the babble from the beach, the floating peel, the impatient hoot at the pier, the waddle or swoop of gulls. But about them there was only the momentary life of flying fish, fluid bodies half dissolved in light and, beyond, the occasional irresponsible roll of dolphins.

Cerberus muriaticus
was disposed of – the data given, the senses even. The mast was up and a sail rigged; it was possible to discern that the café moved other than at the will of the waters. Mr Hoppo talked of islands, of flying-boats, of pearl-luggers, of benevolent natives in ocean-going canoes. There were manoeuvres to provide a decent segregation of the sexes; there was an apportioning of stores and a meal which Mrs Kittery, eating ice cream and wafers, cheerfully called tea. The path to the sun was a foreshortened trail of fire; the orb reddened, grew, touched the horizon, and incontinently tumbled out of view in a flash of green light. Miss Curricle, providently scavenging crumbs, remarked that with one stride came the dark.

Features faded; only forms remained; there was a brief loosening of tongues. “We ought to have Mr Hoppo’s hippo here,” said Mrs Kittery, with whom a joke did not readily lose its first freshness. “It would make it just like the Ark. Mr Hoppo, do you believe in the Ark – or is it just a story?”

Miss Curricle coughed warningly, as if she felt their situation peculiarly unsuitable to theological discussion. But Mr Hoppo was not displeased. “I certainly believe in the historical authenticity of Noah’s Flood. But it is a story too, having been contrived by Providence with an allegorical intention.”

“It seems a little hard on the poor sinners,” said Unumunu; “subjecting them for the purposes of allegorical statement to the horrors of a universal deluge. But on the historical fact I agree. Almost every folk-lore contains reference to a flood. The melting of a polar ice-cap may have had something to do with it.”

Mr Hoppo could be seen to sit up, rather like a don stirred from somnolence by an unexpectedly intelligent undergraduate. “That the immediate mechanisms involved,” he said carefully, “should be explicable in what are commonly called natural or scientific terms is scarcely an argument–”

“Miss Curricle,” interrupted Mrs Kittery, for whom abstract discussion had no appeal, “shall be Noah’s wife. And – and Sir Ponto is Ham.”

“Mrs Noah if you please,” said Miss Curricle, somewhat heavily unbending. “If we are really like the Ark – and we could scarcely be less like a
ship
– it may be a good omen that we shall find an Ararat. And now I think that we had better go to bed.” She peered about her. “Or perhaps it is necessary to use a genteelism and suggest that we
retire.”

Mr Hoppo rummaged in the darkness. “How fortunate that there are several rugs! I am reminded less of the Ark than of the
Swiss Family Robinson
. You remember how everything necessary turned up.”

“It is overdone.” Miss Curricle was decisive. “Too many visits to the wreck. I prefer
Coral Island
.”

“For that matter,” said Glover, “I don’t think you can beat
Robinson Crusoe
. So dashed convincing…’stonishing book.”

“My people have many stories of the finding of islands,” said Unumunu, and his voice sounded deeper with the night. “They are found after many suns, some of them – and many moons. Some are not found at all, and they are the fortunate islands – the islands of the blessed. And that is another universal legend.” He sighed. “Known, Mrs Kittery, whether where
Japhet
dwells, or
Cham
, or
Sem
.”

“Once I saw a serial” – Mrs Kittery’s voice was a shade uncertain in the darkness – “and some people were wrecked and found an island…”

They were asleep. Strangely quickly – except Appleby, who took first watch – they were asleep in corners of their hazardous craft. The stars blazed, an electric multitudinous fire, and Orion somersaulted towards the horizon. Cork-like the café rose and fell to the slither of the ocean. Of sound there was only a lapping; the ear, cheated and uneasy, sought the quiver, the rhythmic thud and swish of a liner’s progress, the high uncanny whistle that comes into a ship’s rigging below the line. They were running before a faint westerly, and conceivably making over a knot; in nine months, Appleby reflected, they might reach Peru. And learn what was left of the world…

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.

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.