Gay Phoenix Read Free

the right was Kangaroo Island – no more than six or seven times the size of the Isle of Wight, and so even less conspicuous in terms of the scale upon which nature built in this hemisphere. Between the two stretched Encounter Bay. (The explorers of Australia, Appleby reflected, had possessed a flair for naming both places and creatures which Adam in his Garden might have envied: cheek by jowl here were Cape Catastrophe, Mount Remarkable and Dismal Swamp.) In Encounter Bay you would be unlikely to encounter much. And beyond it – an empty four thousand miles off – hovered the chilly goal attained by Roald Amundsen on December 14, 1911.
    Rather vaguely – for the dinner just concluded had been an excellent one – Appleby endeavoured to visualize the South Pole. As a small boy he had naturally thought of it as something actually sticking up out of the snow – rather in the manner of the candle from the icing of his baby sister’s first birthday cake. He knew it couldn’t have been placed by men, since it had already been in position when the first men arrived. Was it perhaps something that God had failed to tidy up after finishing the Creation? Or had it – at least at the start of things – had a functional significance? That was probably it. God, having fashioned the earth, had taken its North Pole between his finger and thumb and set his vast new top spinning upon a South Pole mysteriously poised in space. It had been a humming top. That was why there was something called the music of the spheres.
    Accepting brandy from his host (not Australian brandy, although the wine had been wholly admirable Australian wine), Appleby progressed to less childish, yet still relaxed, musings on his present situation. The astronomical infinitudes the silence of which scared Pascal may be appreciated by anybody who steps into his Kentish or Berkshire garden on a starry night. But the answering vastness, by any human measure, of man’s own speck of dust within them has to be traversed to be realized. Even then, modern modes of locomotion can delude you. When Appleby had last flown from London to Naples he had almost missed the Alps through secluding himself for a couple of minutes in the plane’s loo – whereas Hannibal must have been constrained to acknowledge such natural calls scores or hundreds of times as he scrambled across them with his elephants. Years ago, Appleby had made the trip from Cape Town to Fremantle on a freighter; and that had been quite something. On the present occasion (having succumbed to the persuasion that sea voyages are restful) he had crossed the Pacific on quite a fast liner; and that had been the real revelation. There were people who said it could be done, and had been done, in rafts or in dugout canoes. There were people who – apparently quite unconcernedly – made such passages as a one-man show. Appleby reflected soberly on the existence of such supermen. He had never, so far as he could remember, encountered one of them. They set sail from Vancouver, from Lima, from Valparaiso, and eventually turned up in Sydney Harbour (which was quite worth turning up in). They were then accorded civic receptions, and received telegrams of congratulation from the Queen. And quite right, too.
     
    ‘My dear Sir John, I hope it isn’t too chilly for you out here?’ The eminent physician whose invitation Appleby had accepted set down the brandy and reached for a box of cigars. His name was Budgery, and it appeared that he was the university’s professor of clinical medicine. He wasn’t what one might crudely think of as a colonial type; he had all the polish you pay extra for in Harley Street or Wimpole Street. ‘How fortunate,’ he was now murmuring, ‘that the excellent Mr Castro still consents to export these trifling luxuries. They are no less lethal than the Jamaican sort – but preferable, if one happens to have the habit of them, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby took a