Visitants by Randolph Stow Read Free Book Online

years of rain. The wooden walls were grey with it and the edges of the iron roof had turned to rusty lace. Under the floorboards pigs were rooting in the mud and rubbing flakes of wood from the rotting stilts. Beyond, between the stilts, I had a glimpse of the old man’s village: sago-leaf houses, grey-brown and rain-stained, fuming with smoke like steam. Cottages around a castle, I thought. And it
is
a castle: a sad mouldering castle that some day soon will collapse, as suddenly as Jericho, with a slow dank crunch into mud and leaves in the rain.
    But then it was in the yellow-green light of a clear late afternoon, that made the most of the green in the palms sweeping over the roof. And somewhere in the grove two birds were calling, two of the little butcher-birds of these parts, echoing the way in a plantation things do echo and hold on. It was the kind of evening when you feel that you could let all your thoughts go and empty yourself, and sit listening to your own silence like a shell.
    So I came out of the sunlight, to the sodden grey house in the gloom of the trees. Steep grey steps led up from the rank grass to a veranda as deep as the building, dividing the kitchen quarters from the rest. Shadowy up there, silhouetted against a glow from behind, Alistair leaned on a veranda-post and talked to someone his body hid.
    I looked at the steps, which seemed to have been built, like the island, by coral-insects, and thought that the heaviest man on the island was certainly me. With an eye on my feet, I went up to the veranda pound by pound.
    And that way the MacDonnell was laid out for me, when Alistair moved away, from bottom to top, by instalments. There was first of all the MacDonnell’s Army surplus boots, then a pair of puttees with nothing worth mentioning inside. Eighteen inches of pale pipe-cleaner legs got lost in flapping khaki shorts like a kilt. I followed up a narrow column of grey flannel singlet, and came to a pink silk scarf tied loose round a chicken-neck. Then I was looking into the MacDonnell’s face: thin, old, innocent, with perfectly round blue eyes behind perfectly round glasses. On top of it all was a greasy grey businessman’s hat. As I watched there was a sudden commotion in the air, and a white cockatoo came out of nowhere and skidded to a halt on the crown of the hat. In a high feeble voice it said to me: ‘Popu.’
CAWDOR
    That p.m. on the veranda, sea in front, jungle of pink frangipani behind. Inevitability. 50 years he has been here. TD’s eyes on stalks at the sight of him. Yet the island took him in & digested him almost at first sight.
    Think about that. The receptiveness. So many visitants coming, none that anyone knows of ever driven away.
    Think about the history. A riddle, but one can guess.
    1st. The mountains in the sea. Perhaps sudden, perhaps a storm of lava and steam. But time quietened them. Sea and wind, rain and ice.
    Then birds, seeds, floating fruit, uprooted trees. Green. Coral in the shallows, silt and sediment in the lagoon.
    Then the mountains sinking back into the sea, the coral struggling upward. Earth and seeds from the mountains lodging in the coral reefs, and the reefs becoming islands. The mountains disappearing, the ringed atolls left behind.
    Then the earth, it must have been, heaving again, and the seas pounding. The coral walls breached, the lagoons rejoining the ocean. Water boiling through today’s dripping caves. And the islands one after another going down, till Kailuana stood alone.
    Can’t even guess when people first came to Kailuana, how they came, where from. Probably in canoes blown by storms, lost and frightened. Perhaps the first were men without women, hunting, gathering food for a while, dying, leaving nothing. Or perhaps they did leave something: the megaliths. Because wouldn’t I, if it was me, even if it was me by myself, want to build, leave a sign? And the sign, here, would have to be something simple, something like flat coral slabs