Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Puffin Books) by Rushdie Salman

Author:Rushdie Salman [Salman, Rushdie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141342399
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-11-28T20:00:00+00:00

The Guppee armada was well under way. Gradually Haroun became aware of what started out as a low buzz of noise and grew to a dull murmur and finally a rumbling roar. It took him a while to recognize that this was the sound of Guppees engaged in non-stop conversation and debate of growing intensity. ‘Sound carries over water,’ he remembered, but this quantity of sound would have carried even over a dry and barren waste. Water Genies, Floating Gardeners, Plentimaw Fishes and Pages were loudly arguing out the pro’s and con’s of the strategy to which they were committed.

Goopy and Bagha were as vocal on the subject as any of the other Plentimaws, and their bubbling cries of dissatisfaction grew louder as they moved further and further towards the Twilight Strip and the Land of Chup beyond:

‘Saving Batcheat! What a notion!’

‘What matters is to save the Ocean!’

‘That’s the plan to set in motion—’

‘—Find the source of the Poison Potion!’

‘The Ocean’s the important thing—’

‘—Worth more than the daughter of any king.’

Haroun was rather shocked. ‘That sounds like mutinous talk to me,’ he suggested, and Iff, Goopy, Bagha and Mali found that very interesting indeed. ‘What’s a Mutinus?’ asked Iff, curiously. ‘Is it a plant?’ Mali inquired.

‘You don’t understand,’ Haroun tried to say. ‘It’s an Adjective.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Water Genie. ‘Adjectives can’t talk.’

‘Money talks, they say,’ Haroun found himself arguing (all this argument around him was proving infectious), ‘so why not Adjectives? Come to that, why not anything?’

The others fell silent for a sullen moment, and then simply changed the subject back to the issue of the day: which should take priority, saving Batcheat or the Ocean? But Rashid Khalifa gave Haroun a wink, which made him feel a little less crushed.

The sounds of heated quarrelling came across the water from the Barge-Birds: ‘I say it’s a Wild Goose Chase to go after Batcheat!’ –‘Yes, and what’s more, she looks like a Wild Goose, too.’ —‘How dare you, sirrah? That’s our beloved Princess you’re talking about; our estimable Prince Bolo’s intended and beauteous bride!’ ‘—Beauteous? Have you forgotten that voice, that nose, those teeth …?’ —‘Okay, okay. No need to go into that.’ Haroun noticed that old General Kitab himself, mounted on a winged mechanical horse very like Bolo’s, was flitting from Barge-Bird to Barge-Bird to keep in touch with the various discussions; and such was the freedom evidently allowed to the Pages and other citizens of Gup, that the old General seemed perfectly happy to listen to these tirades of insults and insubordination without batting an eyelid. In fact, it looked to Haroun as if the General was on many occasions actually provoking such disputes, and then joining in with enthusiastic glee, sometimes taking one side, and at other times (just for fun) expressing the opposite point of view.

‘What an army!’ Haroun mused. ‘If any soldiers behaved like this on Earth, they’d be court-martialled quick as thinking.’

‘But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,’ declaimed

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