Read Online The Prospector by J.M.G Le Clézio - Free Book Online Page A

read and heard afterwards, but I recall how strange he looks that afternoon when he asks me into his office.
    It’s a room we never go into, except in secret, not that it is categorically off-limits, but there’s something secretive about that office which intimidates, even frightens us a little. At the time, my father’s office is a long narrow room all the way at one end of the house, wedged between the living room and my parents’ bedroom, a silent room, facing north with a parquet and panelled walls of varnished wood and furnished simply with a large writing table that has no drawers, and one easy chair and a few metal trunks filled with papers. The table is up against the window so that when the shutters are open Laure and I can see – from our hiding place behind the bushes in the garden – the silhouette of our father reading or writing, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke. From his office he has a view of the Trois Mamelles and the mountains of the Black River Gorges and can watch the course of the clouds.
    I remember going into his office then, almost holding my breath, looking at the books and journals piled up on the floor, the maps tacked to the walls. The map I prefer is the one with the constellations that he’s already shown me to teach me astronomy. Whenever we go into the office we read the names of the stars and their formations in the night sky in awe: Sagittarius, led by the star named Nunki, Lupus, Aquila, Orion. Boötes, with Alphecca in the east, Arcturus in the west. Scorpius with threatening lines, with Shaula at the end of its tail like a luminous stinger and the red Antares in its head. The Greater Bear and each of the stars along its curve, Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Dubhe, Merak, Auriga, whose main star – Menkalinan – rings oddly in my mind.
    I remember the Greater Dog that has the lovely Sirius in its mouth – like a fang – and down below it a triangle in which Adhara pulses. I can still see one perfect drawing, the one I love most, that I look for, night after night, in the summer sky over in the direction of Le Morne: that of the vessel Argo, which I sometimes draw in the dust on the paths like this:

    My father is standing up, he’s talking and I don’t understand what he’s saying very well. He’s not really talking to me, the child with the too-long hair, the sun-browned face, the torn clothing from running through the underbrush and the cane fields. He’s talking to himself, his eyes are bright, his voice a bit husky with excitement. He’s talking about the immense treasure he’s going to discover, for he knows at last where it’s hidden, he’s discovered the island upon which the Corsair stowed his hoard. He doesn’t say the Corsair’s name, but just – as I will later read in his documents – the Mysterious Corsair, and even today that name still seems to me to be more real and filled with more magic than any other. He’s talking to me for the first time about Rodrigues Island, a dependency of Mauritius, that takes several days to reach by boat. Tacked to the wall of his office is a map of the island covered with signs and landmarks that he’s copied in India ink and painted in watercolour. At the bottom of the map I recall reading these words: Rodrigues Island , and under that Admiralty Chart, Wharton 1876 . I’m listening to my father without hearing him, as if from deep in a dream. The legend of the treasure, the research that’s been done over the last hundred years on Amber Island, in Flic-en-Flac, in the Seychelles. Maybe it’s the feeling of being overwhelmed or the anxiety that’s keeping me from understanding, because I can tell it’s the most important thing in the world, a secret that can at any moment mean our salvation or our downfall. Now there’s no more talk of electricity or any other project. The light of the Rodrigues treasure