Lord of the Flies Vocabulary Chapters 7-9

If you could shut your ears to the slow suck down of the sea and boil of the return, if you could forget how dun and unvisited were the ferny coverts on either side, then there was a chance that you might put the beast out of mind and dream for a while.

"I don't remember this cliff," said Jack, crestfallen, "so this must be the bit of the coast I missed."

Ralph looked back at Jack, seeing him, infuriatingly, for the first time. "Jack--that time you went the whole way to the castle rock." Jack glowered. "Yes?" "You came along part of this shore--below the mountain, beyond there." "Yes."

"I'm going up the mountain to look for the beast--now." Then the supreme sting, the casual, bitter word. "Coming?" At that word the other boys forgot their urge to be gone and turned back to sample this fresh rub of two spirits in the dark. The word was too good, too bitter, too successfully daunting to be repeated

So they sat, the rocking, tapping, impervious Roger and Ralph, fuming; round them the close sky was loaded with stars, save where the mountain punched up a hole of blackness.

"He's not a hunter. He'd never have got us meat. He isn't a prefect and we don't know anything about him. He just gives orders and expects people to obey for nothing. All this talk--"

Piggy gave up the attempt to rebuke Ralph. He polished his glass again and went back to his subject.

Each of them wore the remains of a black cap and ages ago they had stood in two demure rows and their voices had been the song of angels.

If Jack was astonished by their fervor he did not show it.

One piglet, with a demented shriek, rushed into the sea trailing Roger's spear behind it.

This time Robert and Maurice acted the two parts; and Maurice's acting of the pig's efforts to avoid the advancing spear was so funny that the boys cried with laughter. At length even this palled.

Then as the blue material of the parachute collapsed the corpulent figure would bow forward, sighing, and the flies settle once more.

Piggy once more was the center of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal.

Seeing there was no immediate likelihood of a pause, Jack rose from the log that was his throne and sauntered to the edge of the grass.

The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill.