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Well, not that I’m much concerned on that point. No sweat. Not even in this here tropics. It's only for the sake of curiosity and stuff.
And that’s a pity I can’t wield the astrolabe or else by juxtaposing meridian to longitude you would see which of the Tropics your tan is from, namely.
Nope, I’ve been anything but a navy cadet… The matter is that last week the atoll’s lagoon (how on earth could it pop up here at all? the island 2Bsure is of volcanic origin) was visited by the Flying Dutch. You easily can judge it by her sails torn and fretted to hankie size and the bowsprit adorned with the brassiere XXXL big, also in tatters…
So, their boatswain wanted to peddle me an astrolabe for just three piastres.
No, he did not venture ashore and only waved to me ‘come aboard, bro!’, yet I abstained from taking risks because the holes in his singlet allowed for glimpses of his skeleton, well-gnawed and brightly polished in the process.
In the morning the vessel was no more in the lagoon and neither any trace of her. Hard to say the reason for their visit, not to replenish their supply of fresh water anyways.
The lagoon’s water body might be a junction in their traffic routes or else a rendezvous spot to hang out with seals in divers suites. I dunno…
However, to decide the day of week is easy as pie, each and every day here is Friday. Ha! The most best of the best days in the week full of yummy expectancy to live a little at long last after you’re thru the working week.
So, precisely last Friday, that is yesterday, in harmony with my after-dinner habit, I came down to the beach and stretched out in the palm-tree shade because the sand temperature is too scorching in the sun. And there lay I enjoying peace of mind, and the general state of imperturbation as it usually is on Friday after the dinner and rather evidently so. The fingers of my both hands laced under around the back of my head, I watched from the supine position the vast serenity of the brine expanse behind the monumental sight of the sea shell stuck in the middle of the beach.
It’s a bivalve, as the majority of its fresh-water counterparts which in the childhood you scrape out in the shallows of ponds and rivers, but the SOB clams latch themselves from inside and there are no means to break in until you let them bask for some time in the fire embers.
But this here mollusk beats them all, some overseas wonder, you can’t grab it – whew! caliber 1.5 meters, and the corresponding weight of over 500 pounds, however, the valves are rounded, not oval as by their tribe in the fresh water. And watch this exotic finishing, both luxurious and equatorial, how it spreads from the hinges connecting the two half-spheres all the way to the rounded edges, fanning off in a kinda basso-rilievo of cable-thick gimp trimming worked over with the finest polish, as if Ural serf artisans were sharing the know-how of malachite processing based on the local raw materials.
Deep in myself I’ve given this ogres the name of Pec-tin-din and it baffles me to guess why. The scallop-like bottom of this huge cauldron got buried in the sand as deep as the Peccy’s weight forces it to enter, and the lid is somewhat raised, like for airing.
But there’s nothing inside to air. Peccy had passed away to better world before my getting to the Isle of No Time, not even her mantle remained in between the shell valves, not a shred, all got looted, scraped, gnawed, swept up and taken away, and only this bare calcium structure still tarries half-buried in the sand of the beach… Of dust art thou knocked together and dust art thou to become…
Well, not quite Friday thoughts rolled up and, in unison to them, some wind began to whine in gusts that gave those wails a certain tincture of emotional curve, like, say, “O, woe! Peccy! Why have you left me!”
Besides, with a noteworthy impudence, the wind blew radically athwart the direction of monsoon winds that on Friday, in a well-established manner, blow either to the shore or off it. But no! This bitchy one pulls alongside the shoreline! Some shitty anomaly, that hydra of anti-hydrometeorology!
A split-moment before shining radiantly, the sky azure went out, squeezed by the cephalopod mollusk of the heavy black cloud unwinding, spreading its knotty-knobby tentacles all over the firmament.
The waves dropped out of caressing languidly the shore in the habitual foreplay and, all of a sudden, sprung erect, the tips amok and wheeling their whisked up foam, to rush and crash their whole mass onto the beach spread out in the boot-licking kowtow.
Darkness reigned all around, thru which, like whitish ghosts, there flashed foamy fragments of water sheets torn by the squall off the shore-lashing waves.
And now the tropical torrential rain joined the cluster pandemonium fucking with dogs and cats the surface of the flattened sand, spilling about splashy streams and violent rivulets.
Everything awaited for the thunder, everything, out of their mind, implored in crazy urge: do it! O, do it! And the thunderclap—KRGAHDAHDAN!!—burst out together with the lightning that sliced the world by its crackle-and-hiss into two, horizontally, shot with a knobby tentacle to the suckers in that at the opposite end of the world—SHUHHK-NNBA-CHUHKZZ!!
Bet your farm, I was up already full-length and hugging the palm bent after the fringe of its long drenched fronds jitter-bagging impetuously from the waving tree top.
I clenched to the trunk horrified by the might of the rain ready to wash me off into the berserk serf any next moment.
I clenched mortified by the fear that the following lightning wouldn’t miss this only tree in the beach.
Clung to the dribbling tree, I waited to see: which of my fears was the first to come true? And all of a sudden, against the deathlike backdrop of enraged foamy waves, I made out the shadowy half-sphere of Peccy’s lid.
What followed came off all by itself—a desperate dash… couldn’t you keep your gap wider, fucking slut?. the head is thru the rest will follow…
And tearing off me all that could be peeled by the sharp edges of the two valves, I squeezed into the Peccy’s nest, half-meter deep.
Discharged a deafening yet belated thunderclap. Eff you, bitch! You can’t reach me in here!.
I’m drenched thru and thru and it is so narrow a nook I am in, but the rain is not molesting me any further… I cuddle into the favorite posture of intrauterine babies. Good news the walls here lack any nasty lips.