"Robert Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne. The Wrecker (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

The Wrecker

by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

August, 1997 [Etext #1024]


This etext was prepared by Tony Adam, Prairie View, TX.





PROLOGUE.


IN THE MARQUESAS.

It was about three o'clock of a winter's afternoon in Tai-o-hae, the French
capital and port of entry of the Marquesas Islands. The trades blew strong
and squally; the surf roared loud on the shingle beach; and the fifty-ton
schooner of war, that carries the flag and influence of France about the
islands of the cannibal group, rolled at her moorings under Prison Hill.
The clouds hung low and black on the surrounding amphitheatre of mountains;
rain had fallen earlier in the day, real tropic rain, a waterspout for
violence; and the green and gloomy brow of the mountain was still seamed
with many silver threads of torrent.

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 beflagged 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