What, it suddenly occurred to me, would the Minipirates think if they could see me like this? I felt deeply ashamed. My cheeks burn, even today, when I recall that spectacle.
It was then that I resolved to escape from the Hobgoblins’ island. When bad habits become a habit, you have to turn over a new leaf.
AT DAWN ONE day, when early morning mist was drifting sluggishly across the clearing, I stole out of the forest. The Hobgoblins were still fast asleep in their hollow tree trunks. They had returned from a successful raid during the night, bloated and humming with contentment. Now, snoring and squeaking in their sleep like gorged opossums, they were digesting the fear they had absorbed. I gave them a last, distasteful glance, then set off for the beach.
I escape by sea
In the days beforehand I had dragged some small fallen trees from the edge of the forest to the shore and lashed them together with creeper. As the sail of my raft I used a big, fat palm leaf. I had scooped out a few coconuts, filled them with water, sealed them up again, and tied them to the mast with thin lianas, together with the unopened coconuts that were to serve as food. That was the sum total of my supplies.
I pushed my raft out into the breakers. The tide was just turning, so I was quickly carried out to sea. Where would the wind and waves take me? I had dispensed with a rudder on the principle that fate must be given a chance.
I was feeling wonderful. It seemed that the wind in my fur and the wild sea beneath me existed solely to transport me into a world of adventure. Could anything be more exciting than a journey into the unknown, a voyage of discovery across the great, wide ocean?
Becalmed
Three hours later my raft lay becalmed, bobbing in the midst of a vast expanse of motionless water. Could anything be more tedious than a sea voyage? The sea? Pooh! Just a salt-water desert, smooth and featureless as an enormous mirror. Any pool in the Hobgoblins’ forest had more to offer. Nothing happened, not even a seagull flew past.
I had been hoping for unknown continents and mysterious islands, or at least for a Minipirates’ ship, but not even a message-in-a-bottle floated by. After a considerable time, a rotten plank came my way. It took hours to drift past. That was the most interesting sight I’d encountered on my voyage to date. I cracked open a coconut and began to feel bored.
The younger you are, the more excruciating boredom becomes. Seconds crawl by like minutes, minutes like hours. You feel you’re being stretched on the rack – a time-rack, as it were – and very slowly torn apart. An infinite succession of wavelets splashes past, the sky is a bright blue vault of infinite extent. If you’re a relatively inexperienced seafarer and watch the horizon, you feel it must disclose something breathtaking at any moment. But all that awaits you beyond it is another horizon.
I would have welcomed any diversion – a storm, a seaquake, a terrible sea monster – but all I saw for weeks on end were waves, sky, and horizons. I was beginning to yearn for the Hobgoblins’ nauseating company when the situation changed dramatically. Although there was little wind, the sea had been unusually agitated for some days. The calm green water had transformed itself into a turmoil of grey foam, the air was filled with soot and the smell of rusty metal. Hopping excitedly to and fro on my raft, I vainly strove to discover the cause of it all. Then came a sound like never-ending thunder. It drew nearer and nearer, and the sky grew darker by the minute. I had my longed-for storm at last.
The SS Moloch
Or so I thought until a huge, black, iron ship appeared in the distance.
She had at least a thousand funnels, so tall that their tops were hidden by the smoke that rose from them. Soot entirely obscured the sky and turned the sea the colour of Indian ink, thanks to the smuts that kept raining down on it like black snow.
At first I thought the ship had come straight from hell to crush me, she seemed to be bearing down on me so purposefully. Then I was lifted by the bow wave and swept aside like a cork. I could now observe the iron colossus from a safe distance as it glided by like a dark mountain of metal. The screws that propelled it must have been bigger than windmills.
I don’t know how long the ship took to sail right past and disappear from view, but it must have been about a day and a night. Not that I knew it at the time, she was the SS Moloch, the largest ship that ever sailed the seas.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
SS Moloch, The. With 1214 funnels and a gross registered tonnage of 936,589 tons, the Moloch is held to be the biggest ship in the world. No precise specifications are available, or none that can be scientifically validated, because no one who has set foot in the Moloch has ever returned. Thousands of tales are told about this vessel, needless to say, but none that has any recognizable claim to credibility.
At night, thousands of portholes – the windows of that floating metropolis – shone brighter than the stars. The pounding of the engines was deafening. They sounded like an ironclad army tramping across the ocean.
During the daytime I tried to spot some of the crew, but the deck was so far above me I could scarcely make out a thing. Whenever distant figures came to the rail and threw garbage over the side, as they did from time to time, I set up a tremendous hullabaloo. I yelled and gesticulated, jumped up and down on the raft and waved my palm-leaf sail, but my efforts were as futile as the Minipirates’ attempts to board a merchantman.
They weren’t without their dangers, too. On more than one occasion I was almost sucked into the wash of the gigantic propellers, and swarms of sharks crowded around the hull to fight for the scraps of food that were forever being thrown overboard. At times the creatures were so numerous that I could have walked to the ship’s side across their backs.
A voice in my head
But the most astonishing feature was something else. In spite of the huge vessel’s monstrous ugliness, it held a mysterious fascination for me. There was no discernible reason for this. Although the ship was repulsive in every way, my dearest wish was to sail the seas in her. This desire had taken root in me when the Moloch first appeared on the horizon, a tiny speck growing bigger the nearer she came. While she was passing my raft it became positively overpowering.
‘Come!’ said a voice in my head.
‘Come aboard the Moloch!’
The words had an unearthly ring, as if uttered by some disembodied being in the world hereafter.
‘Come!’ it said. ‘Come aboard the Moloch!’
I should have liked nothing better than to obey its summons. I now know it was my good fortune that the sharks formed an insurmountable barrier between me and the ship, but at the time it nearly broke my little heart to watch the Moloch sail away.
‘Come! Come aboard the Moloch!’
The gigantic ship eventually disappeared from view, but the sky remained dark for a long time to come, like the aftermath of a receding storm.
The voice in my head grew ever fainter.
‘Come!’ it said, very softly. ‘Come aboard the Moloch!’
Then they were gone, both the ship and the voice. It saddened me somehow to think I would never see the Moloch again. I wasn’t to know what an important part she would play in one of my lives.
The sea had been calm and silvery again for days, the sky clear except when an occasional little fair-weather cloud came drifting over the horizon. Having seen the Moloch, I had lost all respect for my own craft. There couldn’t have been a more cogent demonstration of the difference between a ship and a raft.
I was just debating whether to jump overboard and strike out for land when I heard two voices, loud and clear.
‘I did, take it from me!’ said one.
‘No, you didn’t!’ snapped the other.
I peered in all directions. There was nothing to be seen.
‘I did, so!’ the first voice insisted.
‘Pull the other one!’ said the second.
> I stood on tiptoe. Still nothing in sight far and wide.
Nothing but waves.
‘But I told you only the other day, don’t pretend I didn’t!’
Was madness knocking at my door? Many a doughty mariner had been driven insane by the monotony of life at sea. All I could see were waves: little ones, middling ones, and two quite sizeable specimens heading straight for me. The nearer they got, the more audible the voices became.
‘Who do you think you are, giving me orders? If anyone gives the orders around here, it’s me!’
The two waves were having an argument.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Babbling Billows, The. Such waves almost always come into being in very remote and uneventful sea areas seldom frequented by ships, usually during prolonged spells of calm weather. No detailed scientific study or analysis of their origins has yet been undertaken because Babbling Billows have a tendency to drive their victims insane. The few scientists who have ventured to study them are now confined under guard in padded cells or lying on the ocean floor in the form of skeletons with tropical fish swimming in and out of them.
Babbling Billows normally appear only to shipwrecked sailors. They circle their helpless victims for days or weeks on end, bombarding them with tasteless jokes and cynical comments on the hopelessness of their predicament until the unfortunate seafarers, already weakened by thirst and exposure to the sun, completely lose their reason. An ancient Zamonian myth constitutes the basis of the popular fallacy that Babbling Billows are the material manifestations of oceanic boredom.
More shipwrecked sailors have, in fact, been killed by Babbling Billows than by thirst, but that I didn’t know at the time. To me they seemed no more than a welcome distraction from the tedium of the doldrums.
The two waves were quite close by now. When they saw me on my ramshackle raft, naked and bleached by the scorching sun, they had a fit of the giggles.
‘Good heavens!’ cried one. ‘What have we here?’
‘A luxury liner,’ cackled the other. ‘Complete with sun deck!’
They sloshed to and fro with laughter. Although I wasn’t sure what they meant, I thought it wise to establish contact with them by laughing too.
They circled the raft like a brace of sharks.
‘I expect you think you’ve gone mad, don’t you?’ asked one.
‘Babbling Billows are the first symptom of sunstroke, did you know that?’ asked the other.
‘Yes, and after that come singing fish. Why not make it easier on yourself? Just jump in!’
They sloshed to and fro, pulling frightful faces.
‘Hoo-oo-oo!’ cried one wave.
‘Woo-oo-oo!’ cried the other.
‘We are the Waves of Terror!’
‘Go on, jump! Put yourself out of your misery!’
I had no intention of jumping. On the contrary, I was delighted that someone was making an effort to entertain me at last. I sat on the edge of the raft and watched the waves’ performance with amusement.
‘But seriously, youngster,’ said one of them, aware that they were getting nowhere, ‘who are you? Where are you from?’
It was the first time in my life anyone had ever asked me a question. I wanted to answer it, but I had no idea how to.
‘What’s the matter, boy?’ the other wave demanded brusquely.
‘Swallowed your tongue? Can’t you speak?’
I shook my head. I could listen but not speak. Neither the Minipirates nor the Hobgoblins had thought it worth my while to learn how to speak. I myself had never thought it so until that minute.
The two waves looked first at me, then at each other, with a lingering expression of profound dismay.
‘But this is awful!’ exclaimed one. ‘He can’t speak – have you ever heard of anything so frightful?’
‘Never!’ cried the other. ‘I imagine it must be even worse than evaporating!’
They circled me with a solicitous air.
‘The poor little creature! Fancy being condemned to perpetual silence! How pathetic!’
‘Honestly, it’s the most distressing thing I’ve ever seen in my life!’
‘Distressing is a pale description of my reaction to such a fate. It’s a tragedy!’
‘A classical tragedy!’
And they both began to weep bitterly.
From one moment to the next they calmed down, put their crests together, and went into a huddle.
‘I don’t feel like tormenting him.’
‘Neither do I, I’m too upset. It’s strange, but … well, somehow I feel like helping him.’
The other wave shook itself a little. ‘Yes, me too! An odd sensation, isn’t it?’
‘Very odd, but interesting too, somehow. Crazy and novel and quite unprecedented!’
‘Crazy and novel and quite unprecedented!’ the other wave repeated enthusiastically.
‘Yes, but how can we help him? What on earth can we do?’
They continued to circle my raft, deep in thought.
‘I’ve got it!’ cried the first wave. ‘We’ll teach him to speak!’
‘You think we could?’ the second wave said doubtfully. ‘He looks a bit retarded to me.’
One of them sloshed right up to me. ‘Say “Ah”,’ it commanded, looking deep into my eyes and extending a seawater tongue.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘You see!’ it cried. ‘Anyone who can say “Ah” can learn to say “binomial coefficient” in no time at all!’
I am taught to speak
In the weeks that followed, the Babbling Billows tirelessly circled my raft and taught me to speak. First I learned simple words like ‘sun’ and ‘sea’, then harder ones like ‘longitude’ and ‘circumnavigation’. I learned big words and little words, nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions, nice words and swearwords you should never say at all. I learned how to spell and pronounce, decline and conjugate, substantivize and genitivize, accusativize and dativize. Then we got on to clauses – principal clauses and subordinate clauses, pendant clauses and relative clauses – and, finally, whole sentences.
To avoid any misapprehension, I must add that the Babbling Billows didn’t teach me to write, only to speak. The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.
But the Babbling Billows were not content merely to teach me to speak; they wanted me to master all forms of speaking perfectly.
They taught me to murmur and maunder, gabble and prattle, whisper and bellow, converse and confabulate, and – of course – to babble like themselves. They also taught me how to deliver a speech or a soliloquy and initiated me into the art of persuasion; not only how to talk someone else to a standstill, but to talk my way out of a life or death situation. I learned to hold forth under extremely difficult conditions – standing on one leg, for instance, or doing a pawstand, or speaking with a coconut in my mouth while the Babbling Billows showered me with seawater.
Their spitefulness had long ceased to be perceptible, probably because they had never before been engaged in such a responsible and interesting activity. They became utterly engrossed in it, and I have to admit they were genuinely good teachers. Where babbling was concerned, they knew their onions.
I myself became a master of the spoken word. My progress after five weeks was such that the waves couldn’t teach me any more – indeed, I’d almost surpassed them. I could utter any given phrase at any required volume, both forwards and backwards. ‘tneiciffeoc laimoniB’ (binomial coefficient) was among the simpler ones.
I could deliver a speech, propose a toast, swear an oath (and break it), declaim a monologue, compose a verse, oil a compliment, talk drivel, blather incomprehensibly. I could speak my mind, wax indignant, sound off, wag my tongue, run people down, fire off a tirade, give a lecture, deliver a sermon, and ??
? from now on, of course – spin a seaman’s yarn of my own.
Now that I’d learned to speak I could at last hold a conversation, though only, for the time being, with the Babbling Billows. I didn’t have much to tell them because my experience of life was so meagre, but they had plenty to impart. Anyone who had traversed the oceans for centuries, as they claimed to have done, was bound to have seen a few things in his time. They told of mighty hurricanes that drilled holes in the sea, of giant sea serpents that fought each other with jets of liquid fire, of transparent red whales that swallowed ships whole, of octopuses with miles-long tentacles capable of crushing whole islands, of water sprites that danced on the crests of waves and caught flying fish with their bare hands, of blazing meteors that made the sea boil, of continents that sank and surfaced again, of underwater volcanoes, ghost ships, foam-witches, sea-gods, wave-dwarfs, and earthquakes in the depths of the ocean. What they liked best of all, however, was to run each other down. Whenever one of them got separated from the raft, the other promptly cast aspersions on its character and urged me not to believe a word it said, et cetera. The worst of it was, I couldn’t tell them apart. They were, in fact, identical twins. For once, and in this particular case, the preconceived notion that one wave resembles another proved to be correct.
I had long become used to the two of them. You make friends quickly when you’re young, and you think things will remain the same for evermore. But a day came when the Babbling Billows’ lighthearted manner underwent a change. They had been circling the raft for several hours without uttering a word. This was unusual, and I wondered if I had done something wrong. At last they came sloshing over to the raft and proceeded to hum and haw.
‘Well, I suppose we ought to …’ said one.
‘The law of the sea, et cetera …’ snivelled the other.
Then they both began to weep.