"The Wrecker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stevenson Robert Louis)

In these hot and healthy islands winter is but a name.
The rain had not refreshed, nor could the wind
invigorate, the dwellers of Tai-o-hae: away at one end,
indeed, the commandant was directing some changes in
the residency garden beyond Prison Hill; and the
gardeners, being all convicts, had no choice but to
continue to obey. All other folks slumbered and took
their rest: Vaekehu, the native Queen, in her trim
house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian
commissary, in his be-flagged official residence; the
merchants, in their deserted stores; and even the club-
servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the
bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the
cards of navy officers. In the whole length of the
single shoreside street, with its scattered board
houses looking to the sea, its grateful shade of palms
and green jungle of puraos, no moving figure could be
seen. Only, at the end of the rickety pier, that once
(in the prosperous days of the American rebellion) was
used to groan under the cotton of John Hart, there
might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous
tattooed white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.

His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the
mountains droop, as they approached the entrance, and
break down in cliffs: the surf boil white round the two
sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight of
blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled
mountain-tops. But his mind would take no account of
these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along
the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would
serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown
faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and
chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would
recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn;
he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating
festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that
island princess for the love of whom he had submitted
his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now
sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so
strange a figure of a European. Or perhaps, from yet
further back, sounds and scents of England and his
childhood might assail him: the merry clamour of
cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song
of the river on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer
a ship about either sentinel, close enough to toss a
biscuit on the rocks. Thus it chanced that, as the
tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was startled