The Castaways Read Free

and everywhere?
    I poked Midgely “Are there savages?”
    “On the
Mascarenes
?” he said, as though I’d asked if there were men on the moon. “They’re British, Tom, them islands. But no one lives there.”
    I longed so badly to step ashore that I was leaning forward on my seat, urging the boat to go faster, the way a horseman urges a jumper to the fence. Then I had no seat to sit on, for Boggis came and smashed it away.
    He fed the pieces to the fire. He hacked our long sculling oar into six lengths and shoved them one by one past the red-hot door of the firebox. He burned the wood chips that he’d made. He started on the gunwales.
    Five miles from the island, we could see the palm trees swaying. We could see the water curling up to break against the coral, the bursts of spray that leapt and vanished. We stared at the gap in the reef that would take us into sheltered water. The lagoon behind it glowed white and silver from the sand on its bottom.
    Three miles from the island, we could smell the earth and the trees. Boggis pried the topmost plank from the ribs of the boat. In his arms he held every scrap of wood that was left to burn. I eased the throttle so that he could keep the fire going.
    But less than half a mile from the island, the engine stopped.

three

WHAT MIDGELY SAW IN THE OFFING
    It seemed the cruelest fate to come so close to land, and not be able to reach it. But the boat was then just a hollow shell, like a cracked-open egg. The ribs were higher than the planks, so that their ends stood up like rows of teeth, or like the bones of a rotting carcass.
    All day we drifted there, in the thunder of the surf, so close to the reefs that we could see starfish and anemones. We might have tried swimming ashore, if not for the dreadful surf, and for the sharks that we feared were lurking nearby. We prayed that a current—or a favorable change in the wind—would carry us through the gap to the sheltered lagoon. Yet it was not to be; truly, I was cursed. We drifted back the way we’d come, too slowly to see any change moment bymoment. But the boom of the surf grew fainter, the ghosts of leaping spray grew smaller, and the line of palms along the shore became again a smear of green. For three days we could see the island. It shrank to half its size, to a speck, and one morning we woke to find that it was gone.
    A sense of loneliness came over me such as I had never felt. I clung to Midgely, for the empty sea put terror in my heart.
    I remembered being a child, and watching rainwater rise in a small pool. I had squatted down beside it to study four black beetles that were clinging to a twig stuck upright in the mud. They had climbed higher as the water rose, until they were clambering in a panic over top of each other on the last quarter inch of twig. Then that tiny branch had sprung loose, becoming an ark for the beetles, who had to squirm their way aboard as it spun and rolled, all topsy-turvy. I remembered being both horrified and thrilled. I was not yet six years old, already afraid of water.
    Now I was no better off than one of those beetles. Oh, I could think and dream, and wonder about things. But in the end we were just five beetles being carried away by water and wind.
    Night by night, the Southern Cross rose higher in the sky. We were drifting south toward the frozen continent at the bottom of the world, the soulless, hopeless Terra Incognita. The sun rose and set, and rose and set, and soon we had no food to eat, no water to drink. Even the rust-filled drippings that we could draw from the boiler were of no use. Gaskin Boggis, long ago, had watered his engine from the sea.
    It seemed at first there was one blessing from our sharedmisery, and it pleased me to find that we were better than the beetles after all. No one argued, and we pulled together. The squalls that we dreaded brought rain that we needed, and all five of us took hold of Midgely’s turtle shell to form a basin for the rain. From that we