Read Online Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page A

stretch of wet sand, public and taking the lightest imprint of a foot, the body of Unumunu had presumably been dragged – dragged for the purpose of pitching it into what was virtually a small sealed lagoon.
    Appleby sat down in the shade and longed for tobacco; perhaps, it occurred to him, one might find it growing wild on the island if one looked. One might find much on the island; after all, there was still a stretch of it unexplored… He returned to the problem of that dragging of a dead and unusually heavy body out of the jungle and into the bay – in daylight, as it must have been. Unumunu had wandered off after breakfast; a couple of hours later Appleby and Diana had been here with the whole beach under their eye. So here at least were certain limits in point of time.
    And time was a factor now, for the tide was coming up. He rose and walked the moist sand from end to end, confirming an impression he had already received; the sand took a clear print which held for minutes only, being rapidly obliterated from below. He tried again higher on the beach, and here he came presently upon traces of movement not accountable by anything known to have happened that day. They told him little except that they had been deliberately confused; he followed them laboriously up the soft sand to the jungle. Just here Unumunu’s body had been lugged out on the beach…he moved into the shadows and sat down to let his eyes accommodate themselves to the shade.
    For a moment the air about him was alive with the whirr of tiny wings; then it fell stagnant again – hot, moist and of the earth. The cricket outvoiced the distant fall of breakers beyond the farther reef; the clumsy stealth of lizards was about his feet; before his nose the fleshy mouth of a monstrous scarlet flower closed suddenly on a fly. Never, he thought, could mortal have essayed criminal investigation in an atmosphere more blatantly assertive of the irrelevance of human justice, of the fictitiousness of the conception that nature moves because before it there beckon desirable goals. Here evidently things moved only because there was always a shove from behind; things happened exclusively because other things had happened before. And Unumunu’s murder interested him – as all his other murders and allied horrors had done – simply because it was a species of occurrence in which the identity of the shoves from behind was particularly teasing. Particularly teasing and therefore, in the solution, particularly capable of gratifying that appetite for power, for assertive shoving on from behind, which seems to be the only dynamic principle nature will reveal…
    Appleby, who was not a philosopher, straightened his back in sudden reproach and dismay. It was probably over a hundred in the shade, and these speculative inclinations must be put down to that. He turned his inner eye to the contemplation of his companions and found them papery and thin, as if they obstinately preserved the phantasmic nature of their final days on the waters. Hoppo, indeed, had been more real when implicated with the Seven Sacred Cataracts; Glover more considerable when much was to be suffered and little to be done. As for Diana, although it would be extremely irrational in him to deny her the most emphatic physical existence, she had the character of evaporating from the mind when any picture of the dead man and his fate rose in it. Miss Curricle alone remained for anything resembling agreeable professional speculation. And Appleby suspected that Miss Curricle, in theory so deviously determined to lie with men, was in fact of those who incurably walk with the gods – with Proteus or the great Poseidon in the Tonga Trench, with Lilith the mother of all living in a fable that has long grown dim. She was not a woman with more than a veneer of the practical mind. She would murder an antipathetic notion, supposing notions to be susceptible of summary elimination in that way. She might murder a man if