【正文】 . and occasionally he saw a wheeling sea bird dive. T he light grew dimmer. He was aware that he had not eaten for some time, but he was not in the strict sense hungry 。 Nicholas ignored him。 like some palace maze being as it progressed more and more draped with creepers and lianas with green, scarlet, and yellow leaves, the palms interspersed with bamboo and deciduous trees dotted with flaming orchids until almost at the limit of his sight the whole ended in a spangled wall whose predominant color was blackgreen. 第 24 頁(yè) 共 22 頁(yè) The boy walked toward the beach, then down the beach until he stood in kneedeep water as warm as blood. He dipped his fingers and, tasted itit was fresh, with no hint of the disinfectants to which he was accustomed. He waded out again and sat on the sand about five meters up from the highwater mark, and after ten minutes, during which he heard no sound but the wind and the murmuring of the surf, he threw back his head and began to scream. His screaming was highpitched, and each breath ended in a gibbering, ululant note, after which came the hollow, iron gasp of the next indrawn breath. On one occasion he had screamed in this way, without cessation, for fourteen hours and twenty two minutes, at the end of which a nursing nun with an exemplary record stretching back seventeen years had administered an injection without the permission of the attending physician. After a time the boy pausednot because he was tired, but in order to listen better. There was, still, only the sound of the w ind in the palm fronds and the murmuring surf, yet he felt that he had heard a voice. The boy could be quiet as well as noisy, and he was quiet now, his left hand sifting white sand as clean as salt between its fingers while his right tossed tiny pebbles like beachglass beads into the surf. Hear me, said the surf. Hear me. Hear me. hit in the soft sand. He walked to the beach again and stood staring out at the water. Far off he could see it curving up and up, the distant bers breaking in white .foam until the sea became white flecked sky. To his left and his right the beach curved away, bending almost infinitesimally until it disappeared. He began to walk, then saw, almost at the point where perception was lost, a human figure. He broke into a run。s, turned from side to side. The boy was thin, and naked as a frog. Ahead of him the sand sloped gently down toward sapphire water。 then, as though goaded from below, he vaulted up and onto the beach, turned, and kic ked sand into the dar k hatchway from which he had emerged. It slammed shut. The boy was about fourteen. For a time he squatted, pushing the sand aside and trying t o find the door. A few centimeters down, his hands met a gritty, solid material which, though neither concrete nor sandstone, shared the qualities of both sandfilled anic plastic. On it he scraped his fingers raw, but he could not locate the edges of the hatch. Then he stood and looked about him, his head moving continually as the heads of certain reptiles go back and forth, with no pauses at the terminations of the movements. He did this constantly, ceaselessly alwaysand for that reason it will not often be described again, just as it will not be mentioned that he breathed. He did。 with dilated eyes hypnotically dark he paused, his neck just w here the ant lion39。 I responded. She hesitated, then pushed the bushes farther apart. I saw a girl a little shorter than I was, and perhaps a little younger. She wore reddishbrown dungarees with a yellow shirt. T he cross stitched to the front of the dungarees was of a dar ker brown material. Her hair was tied on e ither side of her head with yellow ribbons. She stood still for a few seconds as though uncertain about leaving the security of the bushes, then curiosity got the better of her caution, and she stepped out. I stared at her because she was pletely a stranger. From time to time there were gatherings or parties w hich brought together all the children for miles around, so that it was astonishing to encounter one that I had never seen before. A grain of sand, teetering on the brink of the pit, trembled and fell in。 then a shaking of the top twigs in a bunch of bushes caught my eye. The branches parted, and a face looked out at me. It was a small face, sunburned, and clustered about by dark curls. The expression was somewhat serious, but the eyes sparkled. We regarded one another for a moment, then: 39。 Hullo!39。 other people, as far as she knew, did not have such pictures in their heads, either sleeping or wa king, so it would be unwise to mention them. That was good advice, and luc kily I had the sense to ta ke it. People in our district had a very sharp eye for the odd, or the unusual, so that even my lefthandedness caused slight disap proval. So, at that time, and for some years afterwards, I did not mention it to anyone — indeed, I almost fot about it, for as I grew older the dream came less frequently, and then very rarely. 第 23 頁(yè) 共 22 頁(yè) But the advice stuc k. Without it I might have mentioned the curious understanding I had w ith my cousin Rosalind, and that would certainly have led us both into very grave trouble — if anyone had happened to believe me. Neither I nor she, I think, paid much attention to it at that time: we simply had the habit of caution. I certainly did not feel unusual. I was a normal little boy, growing up in a normal way, taking the ways of the world about me for granted. And I kept on like that until the day I met Sophie. Even then, the difference was not immediate. It is hindsight that enables me to fix that as the day when my first small doubts started to germinate. That day I had gone off by myself, as I often did. I was, I suppose, nearly ten years old. My next sister, Sarah, was five years older, and the gap meant that I played a great