少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 38

Chapter 38,I don't understand. For days the ship had pushed on, bullishly indifferent to its surroundings. The sun shone, rain fell, winds blew, currents flowed, the sea built up hills, the sea dug up valleys-the Tsimtsum did not care. It moved with the slow, massive confidence of a continent.,I had bought a map of the world for the trip; I had set it up in our cabin against a cork ¹ billboard ². Every morning I got our position from the control bridge and marked it on the map with an orange tipped pin. We sailed from Madras across the Bay of Bengal, down through the Strait of Malacca, around Singapore and up to Manila. I loved every minute of it. It was a thrill to be on a ship. Taking care of the animals kept us very busy. Every night we fell into bed weary to our bones. We were in Manila for two days, a question of fresh feed, new cargo ³ and, we were told, the performing of routine maintenance work on the engines. I paid attention only to the first two. The fresh feed included a ton of bananas, and the new cargo, a female Congo chimpanzee, part of Father's wheeling and dealing ⁴. A ton of bananas bristles ⁵ with a good three, four pounds of big black spiders. A chimpanzee is like a smaller, leaner gorilla ⁶, but meaner-looking, with less of the melancholy ⁷ gentleness of its larger cousin. A chimpanzee shudders ⁸ and grimaces ⁹ when it touches a big black spider, like you and I would do, before squashing it angrily with its knuckles ¹⁰, not something you and I would do. I thought bananas and a chimpanzee were more interesting than a loud, filthy ¹¹ mechanical contraption in the dark bowels ¹² of a ship. Ravi spent his days there, watching the men work. Something was wrong with the engines, he said. Did something go wrong with the fixing of them? I don't know. I don't think anyone will ever know. The answer is a mystery lying at the bottom of thousands of feet of water.,We left Manila and entered the Pacific. On our fourth day out, midway to Midway, we sank. The ship vanished into a pinprick hole on my map. A mountain collapsed ¹³ before my eyes and disappeared beneath my feet. All around me was the vomit ¹⁴ of a dyspeptic ship. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt shock. I felt a great emptiness within me, which then filled with silence. My chest hurt with pain and fear for days afterwards.,I think there was an explosion. But I can't be sure. It happened while I was sleeping. It woke me up. The ship was no luxury liner. It was a grimy, hardworking cargo ship not designed for paying passengers or for their comfort. There were all kinds of noises all the time. It was precisely ¹⁵ because the level of noise was so uniform that we slept like babies. It was a form of silence that nothing disturbed, not Ravi's snoring nor my talking in my sleep. So the explosion, if there was one, was not a new noise. It was an irregular noise. I woke up with a start, as if Ravi had burst a balloon in my ears. I looked at my watch. It was just after four-thirty in the morning. I leaned over and looked down at the bunk ¹⁶ below. Ravi was still sleeping.,I dressed and climbed down. Normally I'm a sound sleeper ¹⁷. Normally I would have gone back to sleep. I don't know why I got up that night. It was more the sort of thing Ravi would do. He liked the word beckon ¹⁸; he would have said, "Adventure beckons," and would have gone off to prowl around the ship. The level of noise was back to normal again, but with a different quality perhaps, muffled ¹⁹ maybe.,He looked at me sleepily. He shook his head and turned over, pulling the sheet up to his cheek. Oh, Ravi!,I opened the cabin door.,I remember walking down the corridor. Day or night it looked the same. But I felt the night in me. I stopped at Father and Mother's door and considered knocking on it. I remember looking at my watch and deciding against it. Father liked his sleep. I decided ²⁰ I would climb to the main deck and catch the dawn. Maybe I would see a shooting star. I was thinking about that, about shooting stars, as I climbed the stairs. We were two levels below the main deck. I had already forgotten about the funny noise.,It was only when I had pushed open the heavy door leading onto the main deck that I realized what the weather was like. Did it qualify as a storm? It's true there was rain, but it wasn't so very hard. It certainly wasn't a driving rain, like you see during the monsoons ²¹. And there was wind. I suppose some of the gusts ²² would have upset umbrellas. But I walked through it without much difficulty. As for the sea, it looked rough, but to a landlubber the sea is always impresive and forbidding, beautiful and dangerous. Waves were reaching up, and their white foam ²³, caught by the wind, was being whipped against the side of the ship. But I'd seen that on other days and the ship hadn't sunk. A cargo ship is a huge and stable structure, a feat ²⁴ of engineering. It's designed to stay afloat under the most adverse ²⁵ conditions. Weather like this surely wouldn't sink a ship? Why, I only had to close a door and the storm was gone. I advanced onto the deck. I gripped the railing and faced the elements. This was adventure.,"Canada, here I come!" I shouted as I was soaked and chilled. I felt very brave. It was dark still, but there was enough light to see by. Light on pandemonium ²⁶ it was. Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting ²⁷ is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited ²⁸. What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn't orchestrate. But the earthquake stopped at the ground beneath my feet. The ground beneath my feet was solid. I was a spectator safely ensconced in his seat.,Cork is a very buoyant material.软木是极易浮起的材料
。,He ploughed his energies into his father's billboard business.他把精力投入到父亲的广告牌业务中。