Lord of the Flies

The note boomed again: and then at his firmer pressure, the note, fluking up an octave, became a strident blare more penetrating than before.

He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

The heat of the tropics, the descent, the search for food, and now this sweaty march along the blazing beach had given them the complexions of newly washed plums.

Taking their cue from the innocent Johnny, they sat down on the fallen palm trunks and waited.

Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination.

The creature was a party of boys, marching approximately in step in two parallel lines and dressed in strangely eccentric clothing.

With that word the heat seemed to increase till it became a threatening weight and the lagoon attacked them with a blinding effulgence.

Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay eighteen inches of shell with a slight spiral twist and covered with a delicate, embossed pattern.

Ralph pursed his lips and squirted air into the shell, which emitted a low, farting noise.

He trotted through the sand, enduring the sun’s enmity, crossed the platform and found his scattered clothes.

The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be.

He stood now, warped out of the perpendicular by the fierce light of publicity, and he bored into the coarse grass with one toe.

The three boys rushed forward and Jack drew his knife again with a flourish.

Even while he blew, Ralph noticed the last pair of bodies that reached the platform above a fluttering patch of black.

“Them fruit,” he said, “I expect—” He put on his glasses, waded away from Ralph, and crouched down among the tangled foliage.

Beyond falls and cliffs there was a gash visible in the trees; there were the splintered trunks and then the drag, leaving only a fringe of palm between the scar and the sea.

Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was fumbling along.

Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure, and content.

The conch was silent, a gleaming tusk; Ralph’s face was dark with breathlessness and the air over the island was full of bird-clamor and echoes ringing.

\Piggy paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands.

Three small children, no older than Johnny, appeared from startlingly close at hand, where they had been gorging fruit in the forest.

Then they inched the grotesque dead thing up the rock and toppled it over on top.

In a few seconds the fat boy’s grunts were behind him and he was hurrying toward the screen that still lay between him and the lagoon.

There came a pause, a hiatus, the pig continued to scream and the creepers to jerk, and the blade continued to flash at the end of a bony arm.

Ralph paddled backwards down the slope, immersed his mouth and blew a jet of water into the air.

They were twins, and the eye was shocked and incredulous at such cheery duplication.

Its voice was thin, needle-sharp and insistent.

A deep, harsh note boomed under the palms, spread through the intricacies of the forest and echoed back from the pink granite of the mountain.

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

Ralph lolled in the water.

Then the creature stepped from mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing.

There were badges, mottoes even, stripes of color in stockings and pullovers.

Then he got muddled; the twins shook their heads and pointed at each other and the crowd laughed.

Ralph’s breath failed; the note dropped the octave, became a low wubber, was a rush of air.

He tried to be offhand and not too obviously uninterested, but the fat boy hurried after him.

Here, the eye was first attracted to a black, bat-like creature that danced on the sand, and only later perceived the body above it.

Piggy persisted.

By the time Ralph finished blowing the conch the platform was crowded.

Ralph inspected the whole thirty yards carefully and then plunged in.

The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made; the fair boy called Ralph smiled vaguely, stood up, and began to make his way once more toward the lagoon.

He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood and not yet old enough for adolescence to have made him awkward.

Trees, forced by the damp heat, found too little soil for full growth, fell early and decayed: creepers cradled them, and new saplings searched a way up.

Then the piglet tore loose from the creepers and scurried into the undergrowth.

He noticed that he still held the knife aloft and brought his arm down replacing the blade in the sheath.

The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realized ambition overcame him.

The note boomed again: and then at his firmer pressure, the note, fluking up an octave, became a strident blare more penetrating than before.

His face was dark with the violent pleasure of making this stupendous noise, and his heart was making the stretched shirt shake.

The most usual feature of the rock was a pink cliff surmounted by a skewed block; and that again surmounted, and that again, till the pinkness became a stack of balanced rock projecting through the looped fantasy of the forest creepers.

Sleep enveloped him like the swathing mirages that were wrestling with the brilliance of the lagoon.

None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack.

The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings.

There was a group of little boys urging him forward and he did not want to go.

The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made; the fair boy called Ralph smiled vaguely, stood up, and began to make his way once more toward the lagoon.

They were in the beginnings of the thick forest, plonking with weary feet on a track, when they heard the noises— squeakings— and the hard strike of hoofs on a path.

There was pushing and pulling and officious cries.