"Jack London - Yah! Yah! Yah!" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds;
dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that
attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He
must have been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I
used to imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders
as fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.

I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up with
that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not died
suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people were
high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet of the
graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades, rusty old
bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns,
bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace,
and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of
the early Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not
thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for
repair, had been cut off with all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of
the GASKET, a sandalwood trader, perished. There was a big French bark, the
TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp
tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors
escaping in the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of
the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a
matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY.
But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the
meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one degenerate
Scotch despot live.

One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over the
lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across the
hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the reef. It was
dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and the sun was
directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before on its journey
south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season of the southeast
trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest monsoon had not yet
begun to blow.

"They can't dance worth a damn," said McAllister.

I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to the
Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than his
cantankerousness. But it was too not to argue, and I said nothing. Besides, I
had never seen the Oolong people dance.

"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover boy,
a labor recruit, who served as cook and general house servant. "Hey, you, boy,
you tell 'm one fella king come along me."

The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at ease,