Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson Read Free Book Online Page B

we’ll hang the hurricane lamp in the window if the weather’s bad. Somebody’s bound to see it and understand that if they sail in this direction they’ll go aground. From one thing to another, don’t you think it would be a good idea to carry the beds up before it gets dark? I don’t trust those rickety stairs.’
    ‘I’ll carry them up on my own,’ said Moominpappa, taking his hat off its nail.
    *
    Out on the rock it was almost dark. Moominpappa stood watching the sea. ‘Now she’s lighting the hurricane lamp,’ he thought. ‘She’s turning up the flame and standing there looking at it as she always does. We’ve got plenty of paraffin…’
    All the birds had gone to sleep. The rocks at the western end of the island looked black against the sky where the sun had gone down. One of them had a beacon on it, or perhaps it was a cairn of stones.
Moominpappa lifted up the first bed, then stopped and listened.

    Far away he could hear a faint wailing sound, a strange, lonely shriek unlike anything he had heard before. It seemed to come to him across the water, a vast desolate waste. For a moment, Moominpappa thought he felt the rock trembling under him, but then everything was quiet again.
    ‘It must have been a bird,’ he thought. ‘They have very strange cries.’ He lifted the bed on to his shoulders. It was a good firm bed, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it. But the lighthouse-keeper’s bed up in the tower was his, and none of the others would use it.
    *
    Moominpappa dreamed that he was running up some stairs that never seemed to come to an end. The darkness surrounding him was full of the flapping of birds’ wings, birds that escaped silently. The staircase creaked with every step he made, and groaned loudly.
He was in a terrible hurry. He had to get to the top to light the lamp before it was too late, it seemed desperately important that he should get it to work. The stairs got narrower and narrower. Now he was conscious of the sound of iron under his paws, he was up where the lamp was waiting for him in its round house of glass. The dream got slower as Moominpappa groped round the walls looking for matches. Great pieces of curved coloured glass were in his way, reflecting the sea outside. The red glass made the waves as red as fire, and through the green glass the sea suddenly turned emerald-green, a sea that seemed cold and remote as though it were miles away on the moon, or perhaps nowhere at all. There was no time to lose, but the more he hurried, the slower things seemed to become. He stumbled over the cylinders of gas which rolled away across the floor, more and more of them, like waves. Then the birds returned and beat their wings against the glass. Everything prevented him from lighting the lamp. Moominpappa shouted loudly with fright. The glass broke and fell round him in a thousand shining splinters, and the sea rose high above the roof of the lighthouse, and he started to fall, deeper and deeper – and woke up in the middle of the floor with his blanket round his head.

    ‘What’s the matter?’ said Moominmamma.
    The room was still and blue, with its four windows outlining the night.
    ‘I was dreaming,’ said Moominpappa. ‘It was awful.’
    Moominmamma got up and put a few dry sticks on the glowing ashes of the fire. It burst into flame, and a warm golden light flickered in the darkness.
    ‘I’ll make you a sandwich,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re sleeping in a strange place.’
    Moominpappa sat on the edge of the bed and ate his sandwich and his frightening dream began to disappear.
    ‘I don’t think it’s the room,’ he said. ‘It’s this bed that makes one have such nightmares. I’ll make myself a new one.’
    ‘I think you’re right,’ said Moominmamma. ‘Have you missed anything? One can’t hear the trees in the forest any more.’
    Moominpappa listened. He could hear the sound of the sea murmuring round the island, and remembered how the trees used