Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies
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A hundred feet below them was the narrow causeway, then the
stony ground, then the grass dotted with heads, and behind that the
forest.
“One heave,” cried Jack, exulting, “and—wheee—!”
He made a sweeping movement with his hand. Ralph looked to-
ward the mountain.
“What’s the matter?”
Ralph turned.
“Why?”
“You were looking—I don’t know why.”
“There’s no signal now. Nothing to show.”
“You’re nuts on the signal.”
The taut blue horizon encircled them, broken only by the 
mountain-top.
“That’s all we’ve got.”
He leaned his spear against the rocking stone and pushed back two
handfuls of hair.
“We’ll have to go back and climb the mountain. That’s where they
saw the beast.”
“The beast won’t be there.”
“What else can we do?”
The others, waiting in the grass, saw Jack and Ralph unharmed
and broke cover into the sunlight. They forgot the beast in the excite-
ment of exploration. They swarmed across the bridge and soon were
climbing and shouting. Ralph stood now, one hand against an enor-
mous red block, a block large as a mill wheel that had been split off
and hung, tottering. Somberly he watched the mountain. He clenched
his fist and beat hammer-wise on the red wall at his right. His lips
were tightly compressed and his eyes yearned beneath the fringe of
hair.
“Smoke.”
He sucked his bruised fist.
“Jack! Come on.”
But Jack was not there. A knot of boys, making a great noise that
he had not noticed, were heaving and pushing at a rock. As he turned,
the base cracked and the whole mass toppled into the sea so that a
thunderous plume of spray leapt half-way up the cliff.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
W i l l i a m G o l d i n g
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His voice struck a silence among them.
“Smoke.”
A strange thing happened in his head. Something flittered there in
front of his mind like a bat’s wing, obscuring his idea.
“Smoke.”
At once the ideas were back, and the anger.
“We want smoke. And you go wasting your time. You roll rocks.”
Roger shouted.
“We’ve got plenty of time!”
Ralph shook his head.
“We’ll go to the mountain.”
The clamor broke out. Some of the boys wanted to go back to the
beach. Some wanted to roll more rocks. The sun was bright and dan-
ger had faded with the darkness.
“Jack. The beast might be on the other side. You can lead again.
You’ve been.”
“We could go by the shore. There’s fruit.”
Bill came up to Ralph.
“Why can’t we stay here for a bit?”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s have a fort.”
“There’s no food here,” said Ralph, “and no shelter. Not much
fresh water.”
“This would make a wizard fort.”
“We can roll rocks—”
“Right onto the bridge—”
“I say we’ll go on!” shouted Ralph furiously. “We’ve got to make
certain. We’ll go now.”
“Let’s stay here—”
“Back to the shelter—”
“I’m tired—”
“No!”
Ralph struck the skin off his knuckles. They did not seem to hurt.
“I’m chief. We’ve got to make certain. Can’t you see the moun-
tain? There’s no signal showing. There may be a ship out there. Are
you all off your rockers?”
Mutinously, the boys fell silent or muttering.
Jack led the way down the rock and across the bridge.
Lord of the Flies
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s e v e n
S H A D O W S
A N D T A L L T R E E S
T
H E P I G
-
R U N K E P T C L O S E
to the jumble of rocks that lay
down by the water on the other side and Ralph was content to
follow Jack along it. 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 un-
visited 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. The
sun had swung over the vertical and the afternoon heat was closing in
on the island. Ralph passed a message forward to Jack and when they
next came to fruit the whole party stopped and ate.
Sitting, Ralph was aware of the heat for the first time that day. He
pulled distastefully at his grey shirt and wondered whether he might
undertake the adventure of washing it. Sitting under what seemed an
unusual heat, even for this island, Ralph planned his toilet. He would
like to have a pair of scissors and cut this hair—he flung the mass
back—cut this filthy hair right back to half an inch. He would like to
have a bath, a proper wallow with soap. He passed his tongue experi-
mentally over his teeth and decided that a toothbrush would come in
handy too. Then there were his nails—
Ralph turned his hand over and examined them. They were bitten
down to the quick though he could not remember when he had
restarted this habit nor any time when he indulged it.
“Be sucking my thumb next—”
He looked round, furtively. Apparently no one had heard. The
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hunters sat, stuffing themselves with this easy meal, trying to convince
themselves that they got sufficient kick out of bananas and that other
olive-grey, jelly-like fruit. With the memory of his sometime clean self
as a standard, Ralph looked them over. They were dirty, not with the
spectacular dirt of boys who have fallen into mud or been brought
down hard on a rainy day. Not one of them was an obvious subject for
a shower, and yet—hair, much too long, tangled here and there, knot-
ted round a dead leaf or a twig; faces cleaned fairly well by the process
of eating and sweating but marked in the less accessible angles with a
kind of shadow; clothes, worn away, stiff like his own with sweat, put
on, not for decorum or comfort but out of custom; the skin of the
body, scurfy with brine—
He discovered with a little fall of the heart that these were the con-
ditions he took as normal now and that he did not mind. He sighed
and pushed away the stalk from which he had stripped the fruit. Al-
ready the hunters were stealing away to do their business in the woods
or down by the rocks. He turned and looked out to sea.
Here, on the other side of the island, the view was utterly different.
The filmy enchantments of mirage could not endure the cold ocean
water and the horizon was hard, clipped blue. Ralph wandered down
to the rocks. Down here, almost on a level with the sea, you could fol-
low with your eye the ceaseless, bulging passage of the deep sea waves.
They were miles wide, apparently not breakers or the banked ridges 
of shallow water. They traveled the length of the island with an air 
of disregarding it and being set on other business; they were less 
a progress than a momentous rise and fall of the whole ocean. Now
the sea would suck down, making cascades and waterfalls of retreating
water, would sink past the rocks and plaster down the seaweed like
shining hair: then, pausing, gather and rise with a roar, irresistibly
swelling over point and outcrop, climbing the little cliff, sending at 
last an arm of surf up a gully to end a yard or so from him in fingers 
of spray.
Wave after wave, Ralph followed the rise and fall until something
of the remoteness of the sea numbed his brain. Then gradually the al-
most infinite size of this water forced itself on his attention. This was
the divider, the barrier. On the other side of the island, swathed at
midday with mirage, defended by the shield of the quiet lagoon, one
might dream of rescue; but here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the