The Tale of the Unknown Island
Jose Saramago
Language: English
Pages: 51
ISBN: 0156013037
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
so many people gathered together all at once, the king very ungraciously fired off three questions one after the other, What do you want, Why didn’t you say what you wanted straight away, Do you imagine I have nothing better to do, but the man only answered the first question, Give me a boat, he said. The king was so taken aback that the cleaning woman hurriedly offered him the chair with the straw seat that she herself used to sit on when she had some needlework to do, for, as well as cleaning,
to the harbour master, tell him I sent you, and that he is to give you a boat, take my card with you. The man who was to be given a boat read the visiting card, which bore the word King underneath the king’s name, and these were the words the king had written as he rested the card on the cleaning woman’s shoulder, Give the bearer a boat, it doesn’t have to be a large boat, but it should be a safe, seaworthy boat, I don’t want to have him on my conscience if things should go wrong. When the man
ship that she understood the seagulls’ anger, there were nests everywhere, many of them abandoned, others still with eggs in them, and a few with nestlings waiting, mouths agape, for food, That’s all very well, but you’re going to have to move house, a ship about to set sail in search of the unknown island can’t leave looking like a henhouse, she said. She threw the empty nests into the water, but left the others where they were for the moment. Then she rolled up her sleeves and started scrubbing
of an unknown island, But these things don’t just happen from one moment to the next, it all takes time, my grandfather always used to say that anyone going to sea must make his preparations on land first, and he wasn’t even a sailor, With no crew members we can’t sail, So you said, And we’ll have to provision the ship with the thousand and one things you need for a voyage like this, given that we don’t know where it might lead us, Of course, and then we’ll have to wait for the right season, and
will have to do is transplant the fruit trees, sow the seeds from the miniature wheatfields ripening here, and decorate the flowerbeds with the flowers that will bloom from these buds. The man at the wheel asks the sailors resting on the deck if they can see any uninhabited islands yet, and they say they can see no islands at all, uninhabited or otherwise, but that they are considering disembarking on the first bit of inhabited land that appears, as long as there is a port where the ship can