Lord of the Flies (50th Anniversary Edition)
By William Golding
Perigee Books
Copyright © 2003
William Golding
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0399529209
Chapter One
THE SOUND OF
THE SHELL
THE BOY WITH FAIR HAIR LOWERED HIMSELF
down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way
toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater
and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him
and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the
long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was
clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when
a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witchlike
cry; and this cry was echoed by another.
"Hi!" it said. "Wait a minute!"
The undergrowth at the side of the scar was shaken and a
multitude of raindrops fell pattering.
"Wait a minute," the voice said. "I got caught up."
The fair boy stopped and jerked his stockings with an automatic
gesture that made the jungle seem for a moment like the
Home Counties.
The voice spoke again.
"I can't hardly move with all these creeper things."
The owner of the voice came backing out of the undergrowth
so that twigs scratched on a greasy wind-breaker. The naked
crooks of his knees were plump, caught and scratched by thorns.
He bent down, removed the thorns carefully, and turned around.
He was shorter than the fair boy and very fat. He came forward,
searching out safe lodgments for his feet, and then looked up
through thick spectacles.
"Where's the man with the megaphone?"
The fair boy shook his head.
"This is an island. At least I think it's an island. That's a reef
out in the sea. Perhaps there aren't any grownups anywhere."
The fat boy looked startled.
"There was that pilot. But he wasn't in the passenger cabin,
he was up in front."
The fair boy was peering at the reef through screwed-up eyes.
"All them other kids," the fat boy went on. "Some of them
must have got out. They must have, mustn't they?"
The fair boy began to pick his way as casually as possible
toward the water. He tried to be offhand and not too obviously
uninterested, but the fat boy hurried after him.
"Aren't there any grownups at all?"
"I don't think so."
The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a
realized ambition overcame him. In the middle of the scar he
stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy.
"No grownups!"
The fat boy thought for a moment.
"That pilot."
The fair boy allowed his feet to come down and sat on the
steamy earth.
"He must have flown off after he dropped us. He couldn't
land here. Not in a place with wheels."
"We was attacked!"
"He'll be back all right."
The fat boy shook his head.
"When we was coming down I looked through one of them
windows. I saw the other part of the plane. There were flames
coming out of it."
He looked up and down the scar.
"And this is what the cabin done."
The fair boy reached out and touched the jagged end of a
trunk. For a moment he looked interested.
"What happened to it?" he asked. "Where's it got to now?"
"That storm dragged it out to sea. It wasn't half dangerous
with all them tree trunks falling. There must have been some kids
still in it."
He hesitated for a moment, then spoke again.
"What's your name?"
"Ralph."
The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn but this
proffer of acquaintance was not made; the fair boy called Ralph
smiled vaguely, stood up, and began to make his way once more
toward the lagoon. The fat boy hung steadily at his shoulder.
"I expect there's a lot more of us scattered about. You haven't
seen any others, have you?"
Ralph shook his head and increased his speed. Then he tripped
over a branch and came down with a crash.
The fat boy stood by him, breathing hard.
"My auntie told me not to run," he explained, "on account of
my asthma."
"Ass-mar?"
"That's right. Can't catch my breath. I was the only boy in
our school what had asthma," said the fat boy with a touch of
pride. "And I've been wearing specs since I was three."
He took off his glasses and held them out to Ralph, blinking
and smiling, and then started to wipe them against his grubby
wind-breaker. An expression of pain and inward concentration
altered the pale contours of his face. He smeared the sweat from
his cheeks and quickly adjusted the spectacles on his nose.
"Them fruit."
He glanced round the scar.
"Them fruit," he said, "I expect"
He put on his glasses, waded away from Ralph, and crouched
down among the tangled foliage.
"I'll be out again in just a minute"
Ralph disentangled himself cautiously and stole away through
the branches. In a few seconds the fat boy's grunts were behind
him and he was hurrying toward the screen that still lay between
him and the lagoon. He climbed over a broken trunk and was
out of the jungle.
The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned
or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred
feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank
covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of
fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings.
Behind this was the darkness of the forest proper and the open
space of the scar. Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk,
and screwed up his eyes against the shimmering water. Out there,
perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and
beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc
of coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lakeblue of all
shades and shadowy green and purple. The beach between the
palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently,
for to Ralph's left the perspectives of palm and beach and water
drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the
heat.
He jumped down from the terrace. The sand was thick over
his black shoes and the heat hit him. He became conscious of
the weight of clothes, kicked his shoes off fiercely and ripped off
each stocking with its elastic garter in a single movement. Then
he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there
among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms
and the forest sliding over his skin. He undid the snake-clasp of
his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked,
looking at the dazzling beach and the water.
He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have
lost the prominent tummy of childhood and not yet old enough
for adolescence to have made him awkward. You could see now
that he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of
shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and
eyes that proclaimed no devil. He patted the palm trunk softly,
and, forced at last to believe in the reality of the island laughed
delightedly again and stood on his head. He turned nearly on to
his feet, jumped down to the beach, knelt and swept a double
armful of sand into a pile against his chest. Then he sat back
and looked at the water with bright, excited eyes.
"Ralph"
The fat boy lowered himself over the terrace and sat down
carefully, using the edge as a seat.
"I'm sorry I been such a time. Them fruit"
He wiped his glasses and adjusted them on his button nose.
The frame had made a deep, pink "V" on the bridge. He looked
critically at Ralph's golden body and then down at his own
clothes. He laid a hand on the end of a zipper that extended
down his chest.
"My auntie"
Then he opened the zipper with decision and pulled the whole
wind-breaker over his head.
"There!"
Ralph looked at him sidelong and said nothing.
"I expect we'll want to know all their names," said the fat boy,
"and make a list. We ought to have a meeting."
Ralph did not take the hint so the fat boy was forced to
continue.
"I don't care what they call me," he said confidentially, "so
long as they don't call me what they used to call me at school."
Ralph was faintly interested.
"What was that?"
The fat boy glanced over his shoulder, then leaned toward
Ralph.
He whispered.
"They used to call me `Piggy.'"
Ralph shrieked with laughter. He jumped up.
"Piggy! Piggy!"
"Ralphplease!"
Piggy clasped his hands in apprehension.
"I said I didn't want"
"Piggy! Piggy!"
Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then
returned as a fighter-plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned
Piggy.
"Sche-aa-ow!"
He dived in the sand at Piggy's feet and lay there laughing.
"Piggy!"
Piggy grinned reluctantly, pleased despite himself at even this
much recognition.
"So long as you don't tell the others"
Ralph giggled into the sand. The expression of pain and concentration
returned to Piggy's face.
"Half a sec'."
He hastened back into the forest. Ralph stood up and trotted
along to the right.
Here the beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif
of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly
through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon
to make a raised jetty four feet high. The top of this was covered
with a thin layer of soil and coarse grass and shaded with young
palm trees. There was not enough soil for them to grow to any
height and when they reached perhaps twenty feet they fell and
dried, forming a criss-cross pattern of trunks, very convenient to
sit on. The palms that still stood made a green roof, covered on
the underside with a quivering tangle of reflections from the lagoon.
Ralph hauled himself onto this platform, noted the coolness
and shade, shut one eye, and decided that the shadows on
his body were really green. He picked his way to the seaward
edge of the platform and stood looking down into the water. It
was clear to the bottom and bright with the efflorescence of
tropical weed and coral. A school of tiny, glittering fish flicked
hither and thither. Ralph spoke to himself, sounding the bass
strings of delight.
"Whizzoh!"
Beyond the platform there was more enchantment. Some act
of Goda typhoon perhaps, or the storm that had accompanied
his own arrivalhad banked sand inside the lagoon so that there
was a long, deep pool in the beach with a high ledge of pink
granite at the further end. Ralph had been deceived before now
by the specious appearance of depth in a beach pool and he
approached this one preparing to be disappointed. But the island
ran true to form and the incredible pool, which clearly was only
invaded by the sea at high tide, was so deep at one end as to be
dark green. Ralph inspected the whole thirty yards carefully and
then plunged in. The water was warmer than his blood and he
might have been swimming in a huge bath.
Piggy appeared again, sat on the rocky ledge, and watched
Ralph's green and white body enviously.
"You can't half swim."
"Piggy."
Piggy took off his shoes and socks, ranged them carefully on
the ledge, and tested the water with one toe.
"It's hot!"
"What did you expect?"
"I didn't expect nothing. My auntie"
"Sucks to your auntie!"
Ralph did a surface dive and swam under water with his eyes
open; the sandy edge of the pool loomed up like a hillside. He
turned over, holding his nose, and a golden light danced and
shattered just over his face. Piggy was looking determined and
began to take off his shorts. Presently he was palely and fatly
naked. He tiptoed down the sandy side of the pool, and sat there
up to his neck in water smiling proudly at Ralph.
"Aren't you going to swim?"
Piggy shook his head.
"I can't swim. I wasn't allowed. My asthma"
"Sucks to your ass-mar!"
Piggy bore this with a sort of humble patience.
"You can't half swim well."
Ralph paddled backwards down the slope, immersed his mouth
and blew a jet of water into the air. Then he lifted his chin and
spoke.
"I could swim when I was five. Daddy taught me. He's a
commander in the Navy. When he gets leave he'll come and
rescue us. What's your father?"
Piggy flushed suddenly.
"My dad's dead," he said quickly, "and my mum"
He took off his glasses and looked vainly for something with
which to clean them.
"I used to live with my auntie. She kept a candy store. I used
to get ever so many candies. As many as I liked. When'll your
dad rescue us?"
"Soon as he can."
Piggy rose dripping from the water and stood naked, cleaning
his glasses with a sock. The only sound that reached them now
through the heat of the morning was the long, grinding roar of
the breakers on the reef.
"How does he know we're here?"
Ralph lolled in the water. Sleep enveloped him like the swathing
mirages that were wrestling with the brilliance of the lagoon.
"How does he know we're here?"
Because, thought Ralph, because, because. The roar from the
reef became very distant.
"They'd tell him at the airport."
Piggy shook his head, put on his flashing glasses and looked
down at Ralph.
"Not them. Didn't you hear what the pilot said? About the
atom bomb? They're all dead."
Ralph pulled himself out of the water, stood facing Piggy, and
considered this unusual problem.
Piggy persisted.
"This an island, isn't it?"
"I climbed a rock," said Ralph slowly, "and I think this is an
island."
"They're all dead," said Piggy, "an' this is an island. Nobody
don't know we're here. Your dad don't know, nobody don't
know"
His lips quivered and the spectacles were dimmed with mist.
"We may stay here till we die."
With that word the heat seemed to increase till it became a
threatening weight and the lagoon attacked them with a blinding
effulgence.
"Get my clothes," muttered Ralph. "Along there."
He trotted through the sand, enduring the sun's enmity,
crossed the platform and found his scattered clothes. To put on
a grey shirt once more was strangely pleasing. Then he climbed
the edge of the platform and sat in the green shade on a convenient
trunk. Piggy hauled himself up, carrying most of his
clothes under his arms. Then he sat carefully on a fallen trunk
near the little cliff that fronted the lagoon; and the tangled reflections
quivered over him.
Presently he spoke.
"We got to find the others. We got to do something."
Ralph said nothing. Here was a coral island. Protected from
the sun, ignoring Piggy's ill-omened talk, he dreamed pleasantly.
Piggy insisted.
"How many of us are there?"
Ralph came forward and stood by Piggy.
"I don't know."
Here and there, little breezes crept over the polished waters
beneath the haze of heat. When these breezes reached the platform
the palm fronds would whisper, so that spots of blurred
sunlight slid over their bodies or moved like bright, winged things
in the shade.
Piggy looked up at Ralph. All the shadows on Ralph's face
were reversed; green above, bright below from the lagoon. A blur
of sunlight was crawling across his hair.
"We got to do something."
Ralph looked through him. Here at last was the imagined but
never fully realized place leaping into real life. Ralph's lips parted
in a delighted smile and Piggy, taking this smile to himself as a
mark of recognition, laughed with pleasure.
"If it really is an island"
"What's that?"
Ralph had stopped smiling and was pointing into the lagoon.
Something creamy lay among the ferny weeds.
"A stone."
"No. A shell."
Suddenly Piggy was a-bubble with decorous excitement.
"S'right. It's a shell! I seen one like that before. On someone's
back wall. A conch he called it. He used to blow it and then his
mum would come. It's ever so valuable"
Near to Ralph's elbow a palm sapling leaned out over the
lagoon. Indeed, the weight was already pulling a lump from the
poor soil and soon it would fall. He tore out the stem and began
to poke about in the water, while the brilliant fish flicked away
on this side and that. Piggy leaned dangerously.
"Careful! You'll break it"
"Shut up."
Ralph spoke absently. The shell was interesting and pretty and
a worthy plaything; but the vivid phantoms of his day-dream still
interposed between him and Piggy, who in this context was an
irrelevance. The palm sapling, bending, pushed the shell across
the weeds. Ralph used one hand as a fulcrum and pressed down
with the other till the shell rose, dripping, and Piggy could make
a grab.
Now the shell was no longer a thing seen but not to be
touched, Ralph too became excited. Piggy babbled:
"a conch; ever so expensive. I bet if you wanted to buy one,
you'd have to pay pounds and pounds and poundshe had it
on his garden wall, and my auntie"
Ralph took the shell from Piggy and a little water ran down
his arm. In color the shell was deep cream, touched here and
there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little
hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay eighteen inches of shell
with a slight spiral twist and covered with a delicate, embossed
pattern. Ralph shook sand out of the deep tube.
"mooed like a cow," he said. "He had some white stones
too, an' a bird cage with a green parrot. He didn't blow the white
stones, of course, an' he said"
Piggy paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that
lay in Ralph's hands.
"Ralph!"
Ralph looked up.
"We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting. They'll
come when they hear us"
He beamed at Ralph.
"That was what you meant, didn't you? That's why you got
the conch out of the water?"
Ralph pushed back his fair hair.
"How did your friend blow the conch?"
"He kind of spat," said Piggy. "My auntie wouldn't let me
blow on account of my asthma. He said you blew from down
here." Piggy laid a hand on his jutting abdomen. "You try, Ralph.
You'll call the others."
Doubtfully, Ralph laid the small end of the shell against his
mouth and blew. There came a rushing sound from its mouth
but nothing more. Ralph wiped the salt water off his lips and
tried again, but the shell remained silent.
"He kind of spat."
Ralph pursed his lips and squirted air into the shell, which
emitted a low, farting noise. This amused both boys so much
that Ralph went on squirting for some minutes, between bouts
of laughter.
"He blew from down here."
Ralph grasped the idea and hit the shell with air from his
diaphragm. Immediately the thing sounded. A deep, harsh note
boomed under the palms, Spread through the intricacies of the
forest and echoed back from the pink granite of the mountain.
Clouds of birds rose from the treetops, and something squealed
and ran in the undergrowth.
Ralph took the shell away from his lips.
"Gosh!"
His ordinary voice sounded like a whisper after the harsh note
of the conch. He laid the conch against his lips, took a deep
breath and blew once more. The note boomed again: and then
at his firmer pressure, the note, fluking up an octave, became a
strident blare more penetrating than before. Piggy was shouting
something, his face pleased, his glasses flashing. The birds cried,
small animals scuttered. Ralph's breath failed; the note dropped
the octave, became a low wubber, was a rush of air.
The conch was silent, a gleaming tusk; Ralph's face was dark
with breathlessness and the air over the island was full of bird-clamor
and echoes ringing.
"I bet you can hear that for miles."
Ralph found his breath and blew a series of short blasts.
Piggy exclaimed: "There's one!"
A child had appeared among the palms, about a hundred yards
along the beach. He was a boy of perhaps six years, sturdy and
fair, his clothes torn, his face covered with a sticky mess of fruit.
His trousers had been lowered for an obvious purpose and had
only been pulled back half-way. He jumped off the palm terrace
into the sand and his trousers fell about his ankles; he stepped
out of them and trotted to the platform. Piggy helped him up.
Meanwhile Ralph continued to blow till voices shouted in the
forest. The small boy squatted in front of Ralph, looking up
brightly and vertically. As he received the reassurance of something
purposeful being done he began to look satisfied, and his
only clean digit, a pink thumb, slid into his mouth.
Piggy leaned down to him.
"What's yer name?"
"Johnny."
Piggy muttered the name to himself and then shouted it to
Ralph, who was not interested because he was still blowing. His
face was dark with the violent pleasure of making this stupendous
noise, and his heart was making the stretched shirt shake. The
shouting in the forest was nearer.
Signs of life were visible now on the beach. The sand, trembling
beneath the heat haze, concealed many figures in its miles
of length; boys were making their way toward the platform
through the hot, dumb sand. Three small children, no older than
Johnny, appeared from startlingly close at hand, where they had
been gorging fruit in the forest. A dark little boy, not much
younger than Piggy, parted a tangle of undergrowth, walked on
to the platform, and smiled cheerfully at everybody. More and
more of them came. Taking their cue from the innocent Johnny,
they sat down on the fallen palm trunks and waited. Ralph continued
to blow short, penetrating blasts. Piggy moved among the
crowd, asking names and frowning to remember them. The children
gave him the same simple obedience that they had given to
the men with megaphones. Some were naked and carrying their
clothes; others half-naked, or more or less dressed, in school uniforms,
grey, blue, fawn, jacketed, or jerseyed. There were badges,
mottoes even, stripes of color in stockings and pullovers. Their
heads clustered above the trunks in the green shade; heads brown,
fair, black, chestnut, sandy, mouse-colored; heads muttering, whispering,
heads full of eyes that watched Ralph and speculated.
Something was being done.
The children who came along the beach, singly or in twos,
leapt into visibility when they crossed the line from heat haze to
nearer sand. Here, the eye was first attracted to a black, bat-like
creature that danced on the sand, and only later perceived the
body above it. The bat was the child's shadow, shrunk by the
vertical sun to a patch between the hurrying feet. Even while he
blew, Ralph noticed the last pair of bodies that reached the platform
above a fluttering patch of black. The two boys, bullet-headed
and with hair like tow, flung themselves down and lay
grinning and panting at Ralph like dogs. They were twins, and
the eye was shocked and incredulous at such cheery duplication.
They breathed together, they grinned together, they were chunky
and vital. They raised wet lips at Ralph, for they seemed provided
with not quite enough skin, so that their profiles were blurred
and their mouths pulled open. Piggy bent his flashing glasses to
them and could be heard between the blasts, repeating their
names.
"Sam, Eric, Sam, Eric."
Then he got muddled; the twins shook their heads and pointed
at each other and the crowd laughed.
At last Ralph ceased to blow and sat there, the conch trailing
from one hand, his head bowed on his knees. As the echoes died
away so did the laughter, and there was silence.
Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was
fumbling along. Ralph saw it first, and watched till the intentness
of his gaze drew all eyes that way. Then the creature stepped
from mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was
not all shadow but mostly clothing. The creature was a party of
boys, marching approximately in step in two parallel lines and
dressed in strangely eccentric clothing. Shorts, shirts, and different
garments they carried in their hands; but each boy wore a square
black cap with a silver badge on it. Their bodies, from throat to
ankle, were hidden by black cloaks which bore a long silver cross
on the left breast and each neck was finished off with a hambone
frill. The heat of the tropics, the descent, the search for food,
and now this sweaty march along the blazing beach had given
them the complexions of newly washed plums. The boy who
controlled them was dressed in the same way though his cap
badge was golden. When his party was about ten yards from the
platform he shouted an order and they halted, gasping, sweating,
swaying in the fierce light. The boy himself came forward, vaulted
on to the platform with his cloak flying, and peered into what
to him was almost complete darkness.
"Where's the man with the trumpet?"
Ralph, sensing his sun-blindness, answered him.
"There's no man with a trumpet. Only me."
The boy came close and peered down at Ralph, screwing up
his face as he did so. What he saw of the fair-haired boy with
the creamy shell on his knees did not seem to satisfy him. He
turned quickly, his black cloak circling.
"Isn't there a ship, then?"
Inside the floating cloak he was tall, thin, and bony; and his
hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and
freckled, and ugly without silliness. Out of this face stared two
light blue eyes, frustrated now, and turning, or ready to turn, to
anger.
"Isn't there a man here?"
Ralph spoke to his back.
"No. We're having a meeting. Come and join in."
The group of cloaked boys began to scatter from close line.
The tall boy shouted at them.
"Choir! Stand still!"
Wearily obedient, the choir huddled into line and stood there
swaying in the sun. None the less, some began to protest faintly.
"But, Merridew. Please, Merridew ... can't we?"
Then one of the boys flopped on his face in the sand and the
line broke up. They heaved the fallen boy to the platform and
let him lie. Merridew, his eyes staring, made the best of a bad
job.
"All right then. Sit down. Let him alone."
"But Merridew."
"He's always throwing a faint," said Merridew. "He did in
Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor."
This last piece of shop brought sniggers from the choir, who
perched like black birds on the criss-cross trunks and examined
Ralph with interest. Piggy asked no names. He was intimidated
by this uniformed superiority and the offhand authority in Merridew's
voice. He shrank to the other side of Ralph and busied
himself with his glasses.
Merridew turned to Ralph.
"Aren't there any grownups?"
"No."
Merridew sat down on a trunk and looked round the circle.
"Then we'll have to look after ourselves."
Secure on the other side of Ralph, Piggy spoke timidly.
"That's why Ralph made a meeting. So as we can decide what to
do. We've heard names. That's Johnny. Those twothey're twins,
Sam 'n Eric. Which is Eric? You? Noyou're Sam"
"I'm Sam"
"'n I'm Eric."
"We'd better all have names," said Ralph, "so I'm Ralph."
"We got most names," said Piggy. "Got 'em just now."
"Kids' names," said Merridew. "Why should I be Jack? I'm
Merridew."
Ralph turned to him quickly. This was the voice of one who
knew his own mind.
"Then," went on Piggy, "that boyI forget"
"You're talking too much," said Jack Merridew. "Shut up,
Fatty."
Laughter arose.
"He's not Fatty," cried Ralph, "his real name's Piggy!"
"Piggy!"
"Piggy!"
"Oh, Piggy!"
A storm of laughter arose and even the tiniest child joined in.
For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with
Piggy outside: he went very pink, bowed his head and cleaned his
glasses again.
Finally the laughter died away and the naming continued.
There was Maurice, next in size among the choir boys to Jack,
but broad and grinning all the time. There was a slight, furtive
boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner
intensity of avoidance and secrecy. He muttered that his name
was Roger and was silent again. Bill, Robert, Harold, Henry; the
choir boy who had fainted sat up against a palm trunk, smiled
pallidly at Ralph and said that his name was Simon.
Jack spoke.
"We've got to decide about being rescued."
There was a buzz. One of the small boys, Henry, said that he
wanted to go home.
"Shut up," said Ralph absently. He lifted the conch. "Seems
to me we ought to have a chief to decide things."
"A chief! A chief!"
"I ought to be chief," said Jack with simple arrogance, "because
I'm chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp."
Another buzz.
"Well then," said Jack, "I"
He hesitated. The dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke
up.
"Let's have a vote."
"Yes!"
"Vote for chief!"
"Let's vote"
This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack
started to protest but the clamor changed from the general wish
for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of
the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence
had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious
leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat
that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance;
and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch.
The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the
platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set
apart.
"Him with the shell."
"Ralph! Ralph!"
"Let him be chief with the trumpet-thing."
Ralph raised a hand for silence.
"All right. Who wants Jack for chief?"
With dreary obedience the choir raised their hands.
"Who wants me?"
Every hand outside the choir except Piggy's was raised immediately.
Then Piggy, too, raised his hand grudgingly into the
air.
Ralph counted.
"I'm chief then."
The circle of boys broke into applause. Even the choir applauded;
and the freckles on Jack's face disappeared under a blush
of mortification. He started up, then changed his mind and sat
down again while the air rang. Ralph looked at him, eager to
offer something.
"The choir belongs to you, of course."
"They could be the army"
"Or hunters"
"They could be"
The suffusion drained away from Jack's face. Ralph waved
again for silence.
"Jack's in charge of the choir. They can bewhat do you
want them to be?"
"Hunters."
Jack and Ralph smiled at each other with shy liking. The rest
began to talk eagerly.
Jack stood up.
"All right, choir. Take off your togs."
As if released from class, the choir boys stood up, chattered,
piled their black cloaks on the grass. Jack laid his on the trunk
by Ralph. His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph
glanced at them admiringly, and when Jack saw his glance he
explained.
"I tried to get over that hill to see if there was water all round.
But your shell called us."
Ralph smiled and held up the conch for silence.
"Listen, everybody. I've got to have time to think things out.
I can't decide what to do straight off. If this isn't an island we
might be rescued straight away. So we've got to decide if this is
an island. Everybody must stay round here and wait and not go
away. Three of usif we take more we'd get all mixed, and lose
each otherthree of us will go on an expedition and find out.
I'll go, and Jack, and, and...."
He looked round the circle of eager faces. There was no lack
of boys to choose from.
Continues...
Excerpted from Lord of the Flies (50th Anniversary Edition)
by William Golding
Copyright © 2003 by William Golding.
Excerpted by permission.
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