Death in the Andamans Read Free Page B

beside her, frowning. Every morning since her arrival in the Islands she had been awakened by a clamorous chorus of birds: unfamiliar tropical birds. Parrots, parakeets, mynas, sunbirds, orioles, paradise fly-catchers, shouting together in a joyous greeting to the dawn. But today, for the first time, no birds were singing. ‘I expect they’ve migrated, or something,’ said Copper lightly. ‘Look at that sky, Val! Isn’t it gorgeous?’
    The cool, pearly sheen of dawn had warmed in the East to a blaze of vivid rose that deepened along the horizon’s edge to a bar of living, glowing scarlet, and bathed the still sea and the dreaming islands in an uncanny, sunset radiance.
    â€˜â€œRed sky at morning”,’ said Valerie uneasily. ‘I do hope to goodness this doesn’t mean a storm. It would be too sickening, right at the beginning of Christmas week.’
    â€˜Good heavens,’ exclaimed Copper blankly, ‘I’d quite forgotten. Of course — this is Christmas Eve. Somehow it doesn’t seem possible. I feel as if I’d left Christmas behind at the other side of the world. Well, one thing’s certain: there won’t be any snow here! And of course there isn’t going to be a storm. There isn’t a cloud in the sky.’
    â€˜I know — but I still don’t like the look of it.’
    â€˜Nonsense! It’s wonderful. It’s like a transformation scene in a pantomime.’
    As they watched, the fiery glow faded from the quiet sky and the sun leapt above the horizon and flashed dazzling swords of light through the diamond air. Hard shadows streaked the lawns, and the house awoke to a subdued bustle of early morning activity.
    The new day was full of sounds: the low, hushing, interminable murmur of the sea; the sigh of a wandering breeze among the grey-green casuarina boughs; a distant hum and clatter from the servants’ quarters; and the dry click and rustle of the bamboos.
    â€˜Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not,’ quoted Copper, who had once played Miranda to Valerie’s Ferdinand in a sixth-form production of The Tempest.
    She had been thinking of the contrast between the darkness and terror of the past night and the shining glory of the morning when Caliban’s charmed, immortal lines slipped into her mind, and she had repeated them almost without knowing it: speaking them as though they were an assurance of safety and a spell against evil, and so softly that the words were barely audible. But Valerie’s ear had caught them, for she said with an unexpected trace of sharpness: ‘That’s all very well, but speaking for myself I’m distinctly afeard, and at the moment I’d say Keats was more on the ball than Caliban!’
    â€˜ Keats? Why Keats?’
    â€˜â€œLa Belle Dame sans Merci”. That place by a lake, where “no birds sing”. Well, there are still none singing here this morning and I don’t like it — or that red sky either! I don’t like it one bit! ’
    Copper stared at her: and puzzled by her uncharacteristic vehemence, turned to lean out of the window again and listen intently. But Valerie was right. The isle was still full of noises. But in its gardens no bird sang.

2
    The Andaman Islands, green, fairy-like, enchanted, lie some hundred miles off the Burmese coast in the blue waters of the Bay of Bengal. Legend, with some support by science, tells that their hills and valleys were once part of a great range of mountains that extended from Burma to Sumatra, but that the wickedness of the inhabitants angered Mavia Tomala, the great chief, who caused a cataclysm which separated the land into over two hundred islands, and marooned them for ever in the Bay of Bengal.
    For close on a hundred years a small part of the Andamans had been used by the Government of India as a penal settlement. The only important