Ch3-Passages

 Passage 1 Passage 2 Passage 3 Passage 4

**Passage 1 Top


 * Pg. 48-49

Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earth... He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped.

His sandy hair, considerably longer than it had been when they dropped in, was lighter now; and his bare back was a mass of dark freckles and peeling sunburn. A sharpened stick about five feet long trailed from his right hand, and except for a pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife-belt he was naked. He closed his eyes... and breathed in gently with flared nostrils, assessing the current of warm air for information.

At length he let out his breath in a long sigh and opened his eyes. They were bright blue, eyes that in this frustration seemed bolting and nearly mad.

Only when Jack himself roused a gaudy bird from a primitive nest of sticks was the slience shattered and echoes set ringing by a harsh cry that seemed to come out of the abyss of the ages. Jack himself shrank at this cry with a hiss of indrawn breath, and for a minute became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees.

Analysis

**Passage 2 Top


 * Pg. 50-51

"Been working for days now, and look!" Two shelters were in position, but shaky. This one was was a ruin. "And they keep running off. You remember the meeting? How everyone was going to work hard until the shelters were finished?.. Well, the littluns are... hopeless. The older ones aren't much better.... The're off bathing, or eating, or playing."

"Meetings. Don't we love meetings?... We Talk.... I bet if I blew the conch this minute they'd come running. Then we'd be, you know, very solemn, and someone would say we ought to build a jet... When the meeting was over they'd work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting."

Jack flushed. "We want meat."

"Well, we haven't got any yet. And we want shelters. Besides, the rest of your hunters came back hours ago."

"I went on," said Jack.... "I went on. I thought, by myself--" The madness came into his eyes again. "I thought I might kill."

Analysis

**Passage 3 Top


 * Pg. 52

"If it rains like when we dropped in we'll need shelters all right. And then another thing. We need shelters because of the... Well. They're frightened.... As if this wasn't a good island.... As if,... the beastie or the snake-thing, was real."

Analysis

**Passage 4 Top


 * Pg. 56-57

He picked his way up the scar, passed the great rock where Ralph had climbed on the first morning, then turned off to his right among the trees.... Here the littluns who had run afte him caught up to him.... Simon found for them the choicest [fruit] from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands.

Simon turned away from them and went where the just perceptable path led him. Soon high jungle closed in.... He came at last to a place where... the creepers had woven a great mat that hung at the side of an open space in the jungle... The whole space was walled with dark aromatic bushes, and was a bowl of heat and light.

He looked over his shoulder as Jack had done at the close ways behind him and glanced swiftly round to confirm that he was utterly alone.... Then he bent down and wormed his way into the center of the mat.... When he was secure in the middle he was in a little cabin screened off from the open space by a few leaves.

Now the sunlight had lifted clear of the open space and withdrawn from the sky. Darkness poured out, submerging the ways between the trees till they were dim and strange as the bottom of the sea.

Analysis