Pincher Martin by William Golding

Author:William Golding
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780571267460
Publisher: Harvest
Published: 1956-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

He shook his head as though he were shaking water out of his hair.

“I came down here for something.”

But there was nothing, only weed and rock and water.

He climbed back to the Red Lion, gathered some of the uneaten mussels that he had left from the morning and went up the High Street to the Look-out. He sat under the south side of the winking Dwarf and opened them with his knife. He ate with long pauses between each mouthful. When he had finished the last one he lay back.

“Christ.”

They were no different from the mussels of yesterday but they tasted of decay.

“Perhaps I left them too long in the sun.”

But they hang in the sun between tides for hours!

“How many days have I been here?”

He thought fiercely, then made three scratches on the rock with his knife.

“I must not let anything escape that would reinforce personality. I must make decisions and carry them out. I have put a silver head on the Dwarf. I have decided not to be tricked into messing about with the water-hole. How far away is the horizon? Five miles? I could see a crow’s-nest at ten miles. I can advertise myself over a circle twenty miles in diameter. That’s not bad. The Atlantic is about two thousand miles wide up here. Twenty into two thousand goes a hundred.”

He knelt down and measured off a line ten inches in length as near as he could judge.

“That makes it a tenth of an inch.”

He put the blade of his knife on the line at about two inches from the end and rotated the haft slowly till the point made a white mark in the grey rock. He squatted back on his heels and looked at the diagram.

“With a really big ship I could be seen at fifteen miles.”

He put the point of the knife back on the mark and enlarged it. He paused, then went on scraping till the mark was the size of a silver threepenny-bit. He put out his foot and scuffed the seaboot stocking over the mark until it was grey and might have been there since the rock was made.

“I shall be rescued today.”

He stood up and looked into the silver face. The sun was still shining back at him. He traced mental lines from the sun to the stone, bounced them out at this part of the horizon and that. He went close to the dwarf and looked down at the head to see if he could find his face reflected there. The sunlight bounced up in his eyes. He jerked upright.

“The air! You fool! You clot! They ferry planes and they must use this place for checking the course—and Coastal Command, looking for U-boats——”

He cupped his hands at his eyes and turned slowly round, looking at the sky. The air was dense blue and interrupted by nothing but the sun over the south sea. He flung his hands away and began to walk hastily up and down by the look-out.

“A thinking day.

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