The Lonely Sea
Collection of riveting tales of the sea including the story that launched his writing career, the account of the epic battle to sink the German battle ship, Bismarck, and two new stories collected here for the first time.THE MASTER STORYTELLER IN HIS ELEMENT…Alistair MacLean has an unmistakable and unrivalled skill in writing about the sea and its power and about the men and women who sail it, and who fight and die in it.His distinctive voice was evident from his very first prize-winning story, ‘The Dileas’, and has been heard time and again in his international career as the author of such bestsellers as H.M.S. Ulysses and San Andreas.The Lonely Sea starts where MacLean’s career started, with ‘The Dileas’, and collects together his stories of the sea. Here is a treasury of vintage MacLean, compelling and brilliant, where the master storyteller is in his element.This reissue includes two new stories, ‘The Good Samaritan’ and ‘The Black Storm’, which bear all the classic hallmarks of MacLean’s finest writing and are published here for the very first time.
Читать The Lonely Sea онлайн беплатно
Alistair Maclean
The Lonely Sea
Collected Short Stories
HarperCollins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1985 then in paperback by Fontana 1986
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1985, 2009
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
City of Benares, The Arandora Star, Rawalpindi, The Meknes, The Jervis Bay and Lancastriapublished by the Sunday Express 1960.
Rewards and Responsibilities of Success, The Black Storm and The Good Samaritan published by the Glasgow Herald 1982, 1995 and 1996.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780006172772
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007289332
Version: 2018-11-21
Table of Contents
MacHinery and the Cauliflowers
McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones
Three hours gone, Mr MacLean, three hours—and never a word of the lifeboat.
You can imagine just how it was. There were only the four of us there—Eachan, Torry Mor, old Grant, and myself. Talk? Never a word among the lot of us, nor even the heart of a dram—and there on the table, was a new bottle of Talisker, and Eachan not looking for a penny.
We just sat there like a lot of stookies, Seumas Grant with his expressionless face and yon wicked old pipe of his bubbling away, and the rest of us desperately busy with studying the pattern of the wallpaper. Listening to the screech of the wind, we were, and the hail like chuckies battering against the windows of the hotel. Dhia! What a night that was! And the worst of it was, we couldn’t do a thing but wait. My, but we were a right cheery crowd.
I think we all gave a wee bit jump when the telephone rang. Eachan hurried away and was back in a moment beaming all over. One look at yon great moonface of his and we felt as if the Pladda Lighthouse had been lifted off our backs.
‘Four glasses, gentlemen, and see’s over the Talisker. That was the lightkeeper at Creag Dearg. The Molly Ann got there in time—just. The puffer’s gone, but all the crew were taken off.’
He pushed the glasses over and looked straight at old Grant.
‘Well, Seumas, what have you to say now? The Molly Ann got there—and Donald Archie and Lachlan away over by Scavaig. Perhaps you would be saying it’s a miracle, eh, Seumas?’
There was no love lost between these two, I can tell you. Mind you, most of us were on Eachan’s side. He was a hard man, was old Seumas Grant. Well respected, right enough, but no one had any affection for him and, by Jove, he had none for us—none for anyone at all, except for Lachlan and Donald, his sons. For old Seumas, the sun rose to shine on them alone. His motherless sons: for them the croft, for them the boat, for them his every waking thought. But a hard man, Mr Maclean. Aloof and—what’s the word?—remote. Kept himself to himself, you might say.
‘It’s a miracle when anyone is saved on a night like this, Eachan.’ Old Grant’s voice was slow and deep.
‘But without Donald and Lachlan?’ Eachan pressed. Torry, I remember shifted in his seat, and I looked away. We didn’t care for this too much—it wasn’t right.
‘Big Neil’s weel enough in his own way,’ Grant said, kind of quiet. ‘But he’ll never be the lifeboat coxswain Lachie is—he hasn’t got the feel of the sea—’
Just then the hotel door crashed open, nearly lifted off its hinges by the wind. Peter the Post came stumbling in, heaved the door shut and stood there glistening in his oilskins. It only required one look at him to see that something was far wrong.
‘The lifeboat, Eachan, the Molly Ann!’ he jerked out, very quick and urgent. ‘Any word of her yet? Hurry, man, hurry!’
Eachan looked at him in surprise.
‘Why surely, Peter. We’ve just heard. She’s lying off Creag Dearg and…’
‘Creag Dearg! Oh Dhia, Dhia, Dhia!’ Peter the Post sunk down into a chair and gazed dully into the fire. ‘Twenty miles away—twenty miles. And here’s Iain Chisholm just in from Tarbert farm—three miles in four minutes on yon big Velocette of his—to say that the Buidhe ferry is out in the middle of the Sound, firing distress rockets. And the
