"Michael Moorcock - Oswald Bastable 1 - The Warlord of the Ai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

the small garrison of native police under the command of a very upright servant of the Empire,
Lieutenant Allsop. Over this spick and span collection of whitewashed stucco flies a proud Union
Jack, symbol of protection and justice to all who dwell on the island.

Unless you are fond of paying an endless succession of social calls on the other English people,
most of whom can talk only of mining or of missions, there is not a great deal to do on Rowe
Island. There is an amateur dramatic society which puts on a play at the Official Representative's
residence every Christmas, there is a club of sorts where one may play billiards if invited by the
oldest members (I was invited once but played rather badly). The local newspapers from Singapore,
Sarawak or Sydney are almost always at least a fortnight old, when you can find them, the Times is
a month to six weeks old and the illustrated weeklies and monthly journals from home can be
anything up to six months old by the time you see them. This sparsity of up-to-date news is, of
course, a very good thing for a man recovering from exhaustion. It is hard to get hot under the
collar about a war which has been over a month or two before you read about it or a stock market


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tremor which has resolved itself one way or the other by the previous week. You are forced to
relax. After all, there is nothing you can do to alter the course of what has become history. But
it is when you have begun to recover your energy, both mental and physical, that you begin to
realise how bored you are-and within two months this realisation had struck me most forcibly. I
began to nurse a rather evil hope that something would happen on Rowe Island-an explosion in the
mine, an earthquake, or perhaps even a native uprising.

In this frame of mind I took to haunting the harbour, watching the ships loading and unloading,
with long lines of coolies carrying sacks of corn and rice away from the quayside or guiding the
trucks of phosphate up the gangplanks to dump them in the empty holds. I was surprised to see so
many women doing work which in England few would have thought women could do! Some of these women
were quite young and some were almost beautiful. The noise was almost deafening when a ship or
several ships were in port. Naked brown and yellow bodies milled everywhere, like so much churning
mud, sweating in the intense heat-a heat relieved only by the breezes off the sea.

It was on one such day that I found myself down by the harbour, having had my lunch at Olmeijer's
hotel, where I was staying, watching a steamer ease her way towards the quay, blowing her whistle
at the junks and dhows which teemed around her. Like so many of the ships which ply that part of
the world, she was sturdy but unlovely to look upon. Her hull and superstructure were battered and
needed painting and her crew, mainly laskars, seemed as if they would have been more at home on
some Malay pirate ship. I saw the captain, an elderly Scot, cursing at them from his bridge and
bellowing incoherently through a megaphone while a half-caste mate seemed to be performing some
peculiar, private dance of his own amongst the seamen. The ship was the Maria Carlson bringing
provisions and, I hoped, some mail. She berthed at last and I began to push my way through the
coolies towards her, hoping she had brought me some letters and the journals which I had begged my
brother to send me from London.

The mooring ropes were secured, the anchor dropped and the gangplanks lowered and then the half-
caste mate, his cap on the back of his head, his jacket open, came springing down, howling at the
coolies who gathered there waving the scraps of paper they had received at the hiring office. As
he howled he gathered up the papers and waved wildly at the ship, presumably issuing instructions.