少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 90

Chapter 90,I said, "Richard Parker, is something wrong? Have you gone blind?" as I waved my hand in his face.,For a day or two he had been rubbing his eyes and meowing disconsolately ¹, but I thought nothing of it. Aches and pains were the only part of our diet that was abundant. I caught a dorado. We hadn't eaten anything in three days. A turtle had come up to the lifeboat the day before, but I had been too weak to pull it aboard. I cut the fish in two halves. Richard Parker was looking my way. I threw him his share. I expected him to catch it in his mouth smartly. It crashed into his blank face. He bent ³ down. After sniffing ⁴ left and right, he found the fish and began eating it. We were slow eaters now.,I peered into his eyes. They looked no different from any other day. Perhaps there was a little more discharge in the inner corners, but it was nothing dramatic, certainly not as dramatic as his overall appearance. The ordeal ⁵ had reduced us to skin and bones.,I realized that I had my answer in the very act of looking. I was stairing into his eyes as if I were an eye doctor, while he was looking back vacantly. Only a blind wild cat would fail to react to such a stare.,I felt pity for Richard Parker. Our end was approaching.,I clung to life. I was weakly frantic ⁹. The heat was infernal. I had so little strength I could no longer stand. My lips were hard and cracked. My mouth was dry and pasty, coated with a glutinous ¹⁰ saliva ¹¹ as foul ¹² to taste as it was to smell. My skin was burnt. My shrivelled muscles ached. My limbs, especially my feet, were swollen ¹³ and a constant source of pain. I was hungry and once again there was no food. As for water, Richard Parker was taking so much that I was down to five spoonfuls a day. But this physical suffering was nothing compared to the moral torture I was about to endure. I would rate the day I went blind as the day my extreme suffering began. I could not tell you when exactly in the journey it happened. Time, as I said before, became irrelevant ¹⁴. It must have been sometime between the hundredth and the two-hundredth day. I was certain I would not last another one.,By the next morning I had lost all fear of death, and I resolved to die.,I came to the sad conclusion that I could no longer take care of Richard Parker. I had failed as a zookeeper. I was more affected ¹⁵ by his imminent ¹⁶ demise ¹⁷ than I was by my own. But truly, broken down and wasted away as I was, I could do no more for him.,Nature was sinking fast. I could feel a fatal weakness creeping up on me. I would be dead by the afternoon. To make my going more comfortable I decided ¹⁸ to put off a little the intolerable thirst I had been living with for so long. I gulped ¹⁹ down as much water as I could take. If only I could have had a last bite to eat. But it seemed that was not to be. I set myself against the rolled-up edge of the tarpaulin ²⁰ in the middle of the boat. I closed my eyes and waited for my breath to leave my body. I muttered, "Goodbye, Richard Parker. I'm sorry for having failed you. I did my best. Farewell. Dear Father, dear Mother, dear Ravi, greetings. Your loving son and brother is coming to meet you. Not an hour has gone by that I haven't thought of you. The moment I see you will be the happiest of my life. And now I leave matters in the hands of God, who is love and whom I love.",I heard the words, "Is someone there?",\"I suppose you have to have some friends before you can get in,'she added, disconsolately. “我看得先有些朋友才能进这一行
，\"她闷闷不乐地加了一句
。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹,The sailors oar slowly across the river.水手们慢慢地划过河去。