The Ventriloquists Tale by Pauline Melville

Author:Pauline Melville
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Guyana
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1996-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

McKinnon gave a whoop and put down the paper. He went over to a drawer where he kept a calendar. The trouble was he had no idea what the date was. Blast it, he thought, Father Napier has already left to convert the Wai-Wai. Father Napier was the only person who would have any notion of the precise date. McKinnon knew it was 1919. And he knew it was May, but no more.

It was an opportunity that no amateur photographer could miss. Even if the total eclipse was not entirely visible from Waronawa – to be a hundred per cent sure of seeing it he should be a little further south – he would be able to take some fine photographs of a partial eclipse.

He sent one of the children to find Maba and Zuna. They came and stood on the stairs while he told them excitedly about the expected solar eclipse.

“You must alert me at the first sight of it so that I can take photographs.”

Maba fell stonily silent at the news. Her spirits sank. An eclipse too, she remembered, was a brother and sister coming together and eloping. It seemed there was no way to avoid what was happening.

“What’s the matter?” asked McKinnon, surprised by the silence of the two sisters.

Zuna explained.

“We wouldn’t too much like an eclipse,” she said, as if McKinnon could arrange to have it cancelled. “An eclipse is a disgrace. It brings chaos. Monsters come out of the bush and attack people. The big anacondas that float in the rivers, when an eclipse comes, they lift their great heads up to the sky. Even the dead rise up to see what is happening. And everything can change into something else. Animals into people. People into animals. The dead and the living all mix up.”

Maba had hurried back downstairs.

McKinnon went back eagerly to sit down and read more about the preparations being made for the expeditions.

The scientists would be laden with clocks, coelostats and the object glasses of astrographic telescopes. The carpenter employed by the Observatory had not yet been released from military service and so a civil engineer at the Royal Naval College had undertaken the construction of frame huts covered with canvas that were easily put together. A joiner had been loaned as well to deal with the woodwork of the instruments. The small mirrors had been silvered at the Observatory, but it was necessary to send the large ones away to be silvered. Photographic plates would be suitably packed in hermetically sealed tin boxes. All the instruments were to be packed in cases inside hampers.

It dawned on McKinnon that he did not know whether or not the Great War was over. If the war was still going on and the expeditions could not take place, he might be the only person to photograph the eclipse. Then he realised that his equipment was not good enough to take pictures that would prove Einstein’s theory. However, he cheered himself with the thought that there was no harm in trying.

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