Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes

Author:Michael Innes [Innes, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Appleby On Ararat
ISBN: 9780755120796
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-16T18:30:00+00:00

14

The undig dig, thought Appleby. The digger undone… He roused himself to join in the leisurely bustle of going out to inspect. A second umbrella was found for Dunchue and Diana; there was a little picnic basket and a thermos; it was all like a mild amusement planned to fill a children’s afternoon. Hailstone roused George with a sequence of progressively urgent whistles – rather as Montaigne’s father roused the infant essayist with a cautious music – and the party made its way into the beating sun and the louder lap of the sea. Far out the intense blue showed a single line of foam, as if on the impassive face of ocean the odd procession raised a tiny smile. A wandering wind brought a waft, a sob, a sickly and dying fall of music through the groves; an echo uncertainly murmured it ahead. Hailstone, under the stress of his pedestrianism, was silent and appeared to meditate his breathing. Appleby took advantage of his abstraction to study the topography of the place.

All this segment of the island’s east coast was flanked by that line of difficult hills which, from their first encampment, they had called the eastern range. On its lower slopes the jungle seemed here impassable, and before them as they moved south the uplands climbed steadily in formations which were increasingly rocky and forbidding until abruptly they swung east, and ended in precipices sheer above the sea – a Hebridean rather than a Polynesian effect. They were thus walking into a species of natural cul-de-sac. But before the termination of this, and across a narrow neck of land which now appeared on the left before them, lay a peninsula of low sandhills and scrubby grass. It was towards this that they were making their way, with the bungalow now a quarter of a mile behind them and the hotel perhaps a mile and a half behind that.

Appleby looked at the uplands on his right. Beyond them could momentarily be seen the merest tip of the eminence they had called Ararat; perhaps, he thought, it had now better be renamed Spy-glass Hill. From there the range cut off any view of most of this narrow coastal strip; hence had arisen their first inability to distinguish any signs of habitation on the island. He looked back at the bungalow, planted amid palms where the range swept nearest to the sea. It occurred to him that it would be pleasing to have a revolver – the way they were going could so very patently be a trap. But things might not stand like that at all… And his mind went back to consider the hotel and the shady sanctuary provided by Mr Heaven there.

Shadowy and unimportant it had appeared hitherto – an odd and possibly rather shameful institution which served as a convenience until one could get away. But now, with things perhaps going to happen – He turned to Hailstone. “This fellow Heaven,” he asked; “he didn’t bring his escapists all in one bunch?”

“I think they came in two lots.

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