Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes Page B

disappearing archaeologist and a superior dog: these and a mound of sand. A problem, and one for which – uniquely – he had to force himself to care. For it was provincial and meaningless; a problem of the world-forgot, of the vacuum into which they had been hurled by Hoppo’s whale. Hoppo’s whales were on the high seas, they were in the narrow seas and in the central sea. The war planes were over Europe and Asia; their shadows cut the spires of England, the mosques of Africa, the storied and fretted temples of the East. The lights were out in Paris; in Pittsburgh they scarred the night to guide, at a thousand lathes, the planet’s biggest race yet; in Sydney, in Ankara, in Tokio hands were ready on the switch. Madness – but an action of magnitude and significance, a universal tragedy to which every human being stood in some moral relation, a great big fight directly and simply attractive to an unattached young man… But here there was only the death of Sir Ponto Unumunu and the quaint dignity of a highly bred dog.
    He walked slowly back. From the launch the Younger Crush were bathing; two frisky ladies had come on shore and were playfully pursuing a stout gentleman who flopped unbeautifully as he ran. Curious, Appleby reflected, that such an excessively un-Victorian way of life should have been foreseen by Edward Lear. But so it was:
     
    There was an Old Man of Corfu,
    Who never knew what he should do;
    So he rushed up and down
    Till the sun made him brown,
    That bewildered Old Man of Corfu –
     
    The very core of Hermitage Hotel doctrine was evidently in the lines… And suddenly Appleby’s heart warmed to the companions of his adventures. For they were not like that. Diana, who had found that nightmare voyage full-time; Miss Curricle, who had braced herself to begin all over again at Eve; Glover, who had remembered the propriety of reading a proclamation; even old Hoppo, who in a last delirium had disputed with the Great Doctor on the foundations of the Anglican faith; they were out of a different drawer.
    He was back where he had started and looking with a thoughtful eye at the paw-prints of the retreating George, at the brisk administrative capacity of the masculine Mrs Heaven… Yes, they were a different sort. One could make a team of them, if need drove.

 
     
11
    Miss Curricle adjusted a deck-chair to the least lounging of its positions and sat down. “The hotel is comfortable and clean,” she said.
    “Tolerably clean,” said Mr Hoppo.
    “The hotel is comfortable and clean.” Miss Curricle spoke with something like the semi-proprietorship of a man in a tourist office. At the same time her tone hinted at possible qualifications of the amenities described; the food might be indifferent or the guests undesirable. “Commonly I ask to be shown a room before booking. But in our present circumstances it would have been out of place. Particularly as Mr Heaven is a somewhat unusual type to be proprietor of an hotel. I wonder what his history can be, and where he found such a wife? A gentleman, it seems.”
    “Perhaps,” said Hoppo, “gentlemanlike would be the better description.”
    “I do not disagree with you. Possibly the son of a musician or painter of the self-made sort. His dress is not quite that of the gentleman. That diamond ring.”
    Colonel Glover looked up from a two-year old copy of the Times . “As a matter of fact, he claims to belong to the Shropshire Heavens. A bad hat, I suppose. He had to find himself a job, he says, being very much a younger son. And I know they are a – um – prolific family.”
    “Perhaps a Seventh Heaven.” Diana was looking happily into the depths of an enormous refrigerated drink. “And now” – the joke could be seen dawning on her mind in its full splendour – “he is Hoppo’s Heaven. They’re ever such cobbers – pals, I mean.”
    “How we all wish that we had Mrs Kittery’s inexhaustible wit,” Hoppo gave a laugh in which whisky and soda