The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

Not so long ago, I decided to spend a few days in the West Indies. I was to go
there for a short holiday. Friends had told me it was
marvellous
.
I would laze around all day, they said, sunning myself on the silver beaches
and swimming in the warm green sea.

I chose Jamaica, and flew direct from London to Kingston. The drive from
Kingston airport to my hotel on the north shore took two hours. The island was
full of mountains and the mountains were covered all over with dark tangled
forests. The big Jamaican who drove the taxi told me that up in those forests
lived whole communities of diabolical people who still
practised
voodoo and witch-
doctory
and other magic rites.
"Don't ever go up into those mountain forests," he said, rolling his
eyes. "
There's
things happening up there that'd
make your hair turn white in a minute!"

"What sort of things?" I asked him.

"
It's
better you don't ask," he said.
"It don't pay even to talk about it." And that was all he would say
on the subject.

My hotel lay upon the edge of a pearly beach, and the setting was even more
beautiful than I had imagined. But the moment I walked in through those big
open front doors, I began to feel uneasy. There was no reason for this. I
couldn't see anything wrong. But the feeling was there and I couldn't shake it
off. There was something weird and sinister about the place. Despite all the loveliness
and the luxury, there was a whiff of danger that hung and drifted in the air
like poisonous gas.

And I wasn't sure it was just the hotel. The whole island, the mountains and
the forests, the black rocks along the coastline and the trees cascading with
brilliant scarlet flowers, all these and many other things made me feel
uncomfortable in my skin. There was something malignant crouching underneath
the surface of this island. I could sense it in my bones.

My room in the hotel had a little balcony, and from there I could step straight
down on to the beach. There were tall coconut palms growing all around, and
every so often an enormous green nut the size of a football would fall out of
the sky and drop with a thud on the sand. It was considered foolish to linger
underneath a coconut palm because if one of those things landed on your head,
it would smash your skull.

The Jamaican girl who came in to tidy my room told me that a wealthy American
called
Mr
Wasserman had met his end in precisely this
manner only two months before.

"You're joking," I said to her.

"Not joking!" she cried. "No
suh
!
I
sees
it happening with my very own
eyes!"

"But wasn't there a terrific fuss about it?" I asked.

"They hush it up," she answered darkly. "The hotel folks hush it
up and so do the newspaper folks because things like that are very bad for the
tourist business."

"And you say you actually saw it happen?"

"I actually saw it happen," she said. "
Mr
Wasserman, he's standing right under that very tree over there on the beach.
He's got his camera out and he's pointing it at the sunset. It's a red sunset
that evening, and very pretty. Then all at once, down comes a big green nut
right smack on to the top of his bald head.
Wham!
And that," she added with a touch of relish, "is the very last
sunset
Mr
Wasserman ever did see."

"You mean it killed him instantly?"

"I don't know about
instantly,"
she said. "I remember the next thing that happens is the camera falls
out of his hands on to the sand. Then his arms drop down to his sides and hang
there. Then he starts swaying. He sways backwards and forwards several times
ever so gentle, and I'm standing there watching him, and I says to myself the
poor man's gone all dizzy and maybe he's going to faint any moment. Then very
very
slowly he keels right over and down he goes."

"Was he dead?"

"Dead as a doornail," she said.

"Good heavens."

"That's right," she said. "It never pays to be standing under a
coconut palm when there's a breeze blowing."

"Thank you," I said. "I'll remember that."

On the evening of my second day, I was sitting on my little balcony with a book
on my lap and a tall glass of rum punch in my hand. I wasn't reading the book.
I was watching a small green lizard stalking another small green lizard on the
balcony floor about six feet away. The stalking lizard was coming up on the
other one from behind, moving forward very slowly and very cautiously, and when
he came within reach, he flicked out a long tongue and touched the other one's
tail. The other one jumped round, and the two of them faced each other,
motionless, glued to the floor, crouching, staring and very tense. Then
suddenly, they started doing a funny little hopping dance together. They hopped
up in the air. They hopped backwards. They hopped forwards. They hopped
sideways. They circled one another like two boxers, hopping and prancing and
dancing all the time. It was a queer thing to watch, and I guessed it was some
sort of a courtship ritual they were going through. I kept very still, waiting
to see what was going to happen next.

But I never saw what happened next because at that moment I became aware of a
great commotion on the beach below. I glanced over and saw a crowd of people
clustering around something at the water's edge. There was a narrow canoe-type
fisherman's boat pulled up on the sand nearby, and all I could think of was
that the fisherman had come in with a lot of fish and that the crowd was
looking at it.

A haul of fish is something that has always fascinated me. I put my book aside
and stood up. More people were trooping down from the hotel veranda and
hurrying over the beach to join the crowd on the edge of the water. The men
were wearing those frightful Bermuda shorts that came down to the knees, and
their shirts were bilious with pinks and oranges and every other clashing
colour
you could think of. The women had better taste, and
were dressed for the most part in pretty cotton dresses. Nearly everyone
carried a drink in one hand.

I picked up my own drink and stepped down from the balcony on to the beach. I
made a little detour around the coconut palm under which
Mr
Wasserman had supposedly met his end, and strode across the beautiful silvery
sand to join the crowd.

But it wasn't a haul of fish they were staring at. It was a turtle, an
upside-down turtle lying on its back in the sand. But what a turtle it was! It
was a giant, a mammoth. I had not thought it possible for a turtle to be as
enormous as this. How can I describe its size? Had it been the right way up, I
think a tall man could have sat on its back without his feet touching the
ground. It was perhaps five feet long and four feet across, with a high domed
shell of great beauty.

The fisherman who had caught it had tipped it on to its back to stop it from
getting away. There was also a thick rope tied around the middle of its shell,
and one proud fisherman, slim and black and naked except for a small loincloth,
stood a short way off holding the end of the rope with both hands.

Upside down it
lay
, this magnificent creature, with
its four thick flippers waving frantically in the air, and its long wrinkled
neck stretching far out of its shell. The flippers had large sharp claws on
them.

"Stand back, ladies and gentlemen, please!" cried the fisherman.
"Stand well back!
Them
claws is
dangerous,
man! They'll rip your arm
clear away from your body!"

The crowd of hotel guests was thrilled and delighted by this spectacle. A dozen
cameras were out and clicking away. Many of the women were squealing with
pleasure clutching on to the arms of their men, and the men were demonstrating
their lack of fear and their masculinity by making foolish remarks in loud
voices.

"Make yourself a nice pair of horn-rimmed spectacles out of that shell,
hey Al?"

"Darn thing must weigh over a ton!"

"You mean to say it can actually float?"

"Sure it floats.
Powerful swimmer, too.
Pull a
boat easy."

"He's a snapper, is he?"

"That's no snapper. Snapper turtles don't grow as big as that. But I'll
tell you what. He'll snap your hand off quick enough if you get too close to
him."

"Is that true?" one of the women asked the fisherman. "Would he
snap off a person's hand?"

"He would right now," the fisherman said, smiling with brilliant
white teeth. "He won't ever hurt you when he's in the ocean, but you catch
him and pull him ashore and tip him up like this, then man alive, you'd better
watch out! He'll snap at anything that comes in reach!"

"I guess I'd get a bit snappish myself," the woman said, "if I
was in his situation."

One idiotic man had found a plank of driftwood on the sand, and he was carrying
it towards the turtle. It was a fair-sized plank, about five feet long and
maybe an inch thick. He started poking one end of it at the turtle's head.

"I wouldn't do that," the fisherman said. "You'll only make him
madder than ever."

When the end of the plank touched the turtle's neck, the great head whipped
round and the mouth opened wide and snap, it took the plank in its mouth and
bit through it as if it were made of cheese.

"Wow!" they shouted. "Did you see
that!
I'm glad it wasn't my arm!"

"Leave him alone," the fisherman said. "It don't help to get him
all stirred up."

A paunchy man with wide hips and very short legs came up to the fisherman and
said, "Listen, feller. I want that shell. I'll buy it from you." And
to his plump wife, he said, "You know what I'm going to do, Mildred? I'm
going to take that shell home and have it polished up by an expert. Then I'm
going to place it smack in the centre of our living-room! Won't that be
something?"

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