The Navigator by Morris West

Author:Morris West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760638474
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

‘I know you,

O sea,

Home of the sea-god.

I do not fight you Like a warrior,

O sea.

I do not sing to you Like a woman,

O sea.

I swim in you

Like the white shark. I ride on you Like the fisher-bird,

O sea.

I live in you

As I live in the house of my father,

O mirror of Hiva and the night-eyes.’

It was mid-afternoon before he lay off the reef again, a long way out, now seeing, now losing the beach and the huts and the small ant-figures moving between them. Their diminishment pleased him. They were removed, unreal, like manikins in a primitive picture. They were bound, locked between the mountain and the reef. He was free, large, strong, the king that Sally dreamed and he had almost forgotten.

He paddled inshore, steadily, easily, watching how the current swirled through the channel, and how the reef was buried under the high tide, and where the rollers broke evenly and where they crashed, turbulent and destructive, over the coral outcrops…He would show them something now! He would not run the channel. He would ride in over the reef itself. If he misjudged the wave, if it failed to run right – so be it! – he would never know! If he made it, then, by God they would know why a feeler-of-the-sea was different from other men!

It was a wild, drunken moment, but he surrendered himself to it, shouting with exultation as he paddled to the spot where the big rollers shaped themselves before the surf-line. He hung there a while, backing against the swell, feeling the surge and the lift, waiting for the fractional moment in which he must commit himself.

When it came, he gave a shout and plunged his paddle and felt himself heaved and carried, up and up, on a great hump of water. For one heart-stopping moment he thought it would break too soon and capsize him; but it held and curled like a long drum-roll under the hull, and carried him forward over the reef, and weltered into a foam that swept him fast as a running horse on to the shingle!

There should have been paeans and a chant of women welcoming the Koa – the superman of the sea. Instead there was only a rasping shout from Lorillard:

‘You’re an idiot, Thorkild. You could have broken your bloody neck!’

They had not been idle in his absence. Indeed, as Sally told him with a lover’s malice, they had been glad to be rid of him for a while and tend to their private business. Willy Kuhio and Tioto had walked inland, found the trees he had marked, rejected them as too big and hard to work, chosen others and slashed out a track for the log-slide. Franz Harsanyi and Hernan Castillo had completed a small assortment of tools – adzes, scrapers, fish-spears and even a primitive pump drill made from wood and cord and a pointed piece of basalt.

Adam Briggs was boiling up a foul-looking mess of coconut, breadfruit, bananas and assorted fruit scraps

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.