The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle

Author:Madeleine L'Engle [L'Engle, Madeleine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466814462
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

14

After lunch José brought three horses around to the bungalow, and Dr. O’Keefe, Poly, and Adam set off for the village, riding uphill to the plateau with the monolithic slabs of stone. As Joshua had stopped by the great central table the day before, so did Dr. O’Keefe, although he did not dismount. Poly and Adam reined up beside him. Adam’s spirits soared, despite the fierceness of the sun.

The doctor was sitting erect on his horse, as though waiting. He caught Adam’s inquiring gaze and said, “Virbius, the chief of the village, wished to meet us here. Visitors aren’t encouraged there. The people from the hotel have brought only disease and trouble. But you are under my aegis, and he will escort us.”

Adam nodded. Dr. O’Keefe continued to sit straight and tall, and Poly was in one of her rare silent moods. Adam looked around, at the great stone table, above which a large golden butterfly was fluttering. The flash of a bird’s scarlet wing led his gaze beyond the encircling stones and through the trees that edged the plateau and into a clearing. In the clearing were a few small, white slabs, with light moving over them, and leaf shadows, green, mauve, and indigo.

Again Dr. O’Keefe followed Adam’s gaze. “Yes. It’s a cemetery. A small one. The villagers have their own, and if anyone does anything as inconvenient as dying at the resort hotel they’re whisked back to the mainland as inconspicuously as possible.” He held up his hand for silence, and they could hear a rustling in the brush. A yellow-and-black bird flashed across the clearing, followed by a wizened old man on a horse, a dark and shriveled old man, with a few strands of soft, silvery hair. Adam had no doubt that this was Virbius, the chieftain. Poly had said that he was how old? a hundred and forty-nine? Adam knew that the villagers’ way of counting time was probably different from the way he had been taught in school, but if Virbius was not a hundred and forty-nine he was certainly the oldest man Adam had ever seen, far older than Old Doc, who, after all, was ninety.

Dr. O’Keefe raised his arm in greeting; Virbius responded, the gesture full of dignity despite the fact that his hand was tremulous with age. Without a word he turned his horse and headed into the brush again. Dr. O’Keefe followed, with Poly and Adam in single file behind him on the narrow path.

They rode through the low brush along the spine of the plateau; the sun was high and hot, so that their shadows were small dark blobs moving along the scrub. Somehow Adam was grateful for the golden warmth that seeped through him, even though his shirt began to cling damply to his body. The blue, almost cloudless sky was so high that there seemed to be between earth and sky a golden shimmering of sunlight. The red of Dr. O’Keefe’s and Poly’s hair was touched with

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