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occasional buyer or gatherer of chicle or herbs or hides, an occasional
missioner or medical officer, at infrequent intervals would pass along this
corridor in the eternal jungle.
And then came a hurricane, smashing flat everything in its path. And
the trail vanished. And the trail was never recut. British Hidalgo had
prob-ably never been high on any list of colonial priorities at the best of
times. During the War of 1939-1945, they may have forgotten all about it in
London. Many of Hidalgo s able-bodied men were off on distant fronts. An
equal number had gone off to cut the remaining forests of the Isle of
Britain, to supply anyway a fraction of the wood which was then impos-sible
to import. Nothing could be spared for Mantee and its people; in King
Town, Mantee was deemed as distant as King Town was in Lon-don. The
p.c. never went there again. No missioner ever returned. Nei-ther had a
medical officer or nurse. Nor any trader. No one. Except for Malcolm
Stuart&
 He did try. Of course, he had his own concerns. During the War he
had his war work. Afterwards, he took up a block of land a few miles back
from here, and he had his hands full with that. And then, after, oh, I don t
remember how many years of stories, stories there is no televi-sion here,
you know, and few people have time for books stories about the Mantee
people, well, he decided he had to go have a look, see for him-self, you
know.
Were the Mantee people really eating raw meat and raw fish? He
would bring them matches. Had they actually reverted to the use of stone
for tools? He would bring them machetes, axes, knives. And ... as for the
rest of it& the rest of the rather awful and certainly very odd sto-ries ... he
would see for himself.
But he had seen nothing. There had been nothing to see. That is,
noth-ing which he could be sure he had seen. Perhaps he had thought that
he had seen some few things which he had not cared to mention to Jack,
but had spoken of to the Shiloh people.
They, however, were not about to speak of it to Jack.
 Adventure, said Amelia Lebedee, dismissing the matter of Mantee
with a sigh.  Nobody wants the adventure of cutting bush to plant yams.
They want the adventure of nightclubs and large automobiles. They see it in
the moving pictures. And you, Mr. Limekiller, what is it that you
want? coming, having come, from the land of nightclubs and large
au-tomobiles& 
The truth was simple.  I wanted the adventure of sailing a boat with
white sails through tropic seas, he said.  I saw it in the moving pictures. I
never had a nightclub but I had a large automobile, and I sold it and came
down here and bought the boat. And, well, here I am.
They had talked right through the siesta time. Tom McFee was ready,
now, to return for the few more planks which the sawmill might or might
not have managed to produce since the morning. It was time to stand up
now and to make thanks and say good-bye.  Yes, said Amelia Lebedee,
pensively  Here we are. Here we all are. We are all here. And some of us
are more content being here than others.
* * * *
Half past three at the Cupid Club. On Limekiller s table, the usual sin-gle
bottle of beer. Also, the three chaparitas of rum which he had bought but
they were in a paper bag, lest the sight of them, plus the fact that he could
invite no one to drink of them, give rise to talk that he was  mean. Behind
the bar, Alfonso Key. In the dark, dark back, slowly sipping a lemonade (all
soft drinks were  lemonade  coke was lemonade, straw-berry pop was
lemonade, ginger stout was lemonade& sometimes, though not often, for
reasons inexplicable, there was also lemon-flavored lemonade) in the
dark rear part of the room, resting his perpetually sore eyes, was old
Captain Cudgel.
 Well, how you spend the night, Jock? Alfonso ready for a tale of
amour, ready with a quip, a joke.
 Oh, just quietly. Except for the manatees. Limekiller, saying this, had
a sudden feeling that he had said all this before, been all this before, was
caught on the moebius strip which life in picturesque Port Cockatoo had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]