by Paul Theroux
No one spoke, there was scattered applause and intense concentration as the sun burned through the fragmenting cloud, illuminating the wooly shreds. And when it emerged, still in haze but visible, it was not a perfect disk. There was a smooth measured bit out of the top of the sun. And while we watched the bite grew, until the sun looked like a moon crescent, a fat one, glimmering in daylight.
“What’s your setting?”
“One twenty-fifth at F-eight, a hundred ASA.”
It was like a command to fire, for as soon as the words were spoken there was a sucking sound of shutters and winders, a shooting that was like bolts being shot from crossbows in furious gulps.
“Check the focus.” “Look at that shadow.” “Anybody got an exposure?”
I was putting on and taking off my welder’s mask. With it, I saw a dim crescent. Without it, the glare dazzled and almost blinded me. I scrunched my eyes and glanced and then looked away, as though peering at a forbidden thing. The time was 7:24 and the sun was a golden banana, and two minutes later, the air had already begun to grow cool, and the banana had narrowed to a bright horn that kept thinning and was soon a brilliant splinter, and finally a sliver of intense whiteness. The rest was a dark disc, with specks of light glimmering at its edges, a phenomenon known as Bailey’s Beads.
At last the sun was in total darkness as though a dinner plate had been slid across it – the hand of God, someone had predicted, and that was how it seemed, supernatural. There was brief, hesitant applause, some worried whooping, and then silence, as a chilly shadow settled over us. In Hawaiian Pidgin the expression for goose pimples is “chicken skin,” and I could hear this word being muttered: cheecken skeen.
By 7:29 the world had been turned upside down. Again the stars appeared in daytime, the temperature dropped, flower blossoms closed, birds stopped singing, and we sat transfixed on our cooling planet, watching light drain from the world.
We stared blindly at the black sun until there was a sudden explosion at its top edge that showed a flare of red light.
Our amazement was not pleasurable – not fascination, it was compounded of fear and uncertainty, a feeling of utter strangeness. It was like the onset of blindness. I looked around. There was just enough light to scribble by if I held my little notebook near my face. It was not pitch darkness, but the eeriest glow around the entire horizon, a 360-degree twilight. The silence continued, and in the large crowd, all looking upward, the mood was sombre, though the morning air was unexpectedly perfumed by night-blooming jasmine.
It was a world of intimidating magic in which anything could happen.
Before the sun emerged again from its shadow, making the earth seem immeasurably grander than it ever had before, I kissed the woman next to me, glad to be with her. Being happy was like being home.
He just wanted a decent book to read …
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy.We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.
So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.
Whatever you like to read – trust Penguin.
www.penguin.co.uk
Join the conversation:
Twitter Facebook
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1992
Copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1992
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-96421-7
4: Walkabout in Woop Woop
* From the Sydney Daily Telegraph Mirror, 21 February 1991: “A magistrate has outraged police by ruling that it is acceptable to describe them as ‘f – poofters’ … On Tuesday, magistrate Pat O’Shane dismissed a charge of offensive language against Geoffrey Allan Langham, 43. Sitting at Lismore on the State’s north coast, Ms O’Shane said the words ‘f– poofters’ were not as upsetting as the term ‘collateral damage,’ used by military officials to describe human casualties. In the past three months, the NSW magistrates have ruled it acceptable to call police ‘pigs’ and to use the word ‘shit’ in public.”
20: The Cook Islands: In the Lagoon of Aitutaki
* Note: A violent mode of aggression between political rivals in South African townships, this involved the placing of a gasoline-soaked rubber tire over an opponent’s upper body and setting it and the live person on fire.
8: The Solomons: Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal
* The captain, Alvaro de Mendaiia, had sailed from Peru, inspired by Inca stories that islands of gold lay 600 leagues to the west. This seemed to me a brilliant way for the Incas to rid themselves of another conquistador.