Angel Island

Name: Angel Island
Author: Inez Haynes Gillmore

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Pages: about 223
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 4.1 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 2.3 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

It was the morning after the shipwreck. The five men still lay where they had slept. A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A long time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked almost as if they would never speak or move again. So bruised and bloodless of skin were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally, too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is caught in hypnotic trance.
It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally. Merrill still looked like a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level, monotonous, metallic. “If I could only forget the scream that Norton kid gave when he saw the big wave coming. It rings in my head. And the way his mother pressed his head down on her breast - oh, my God!”
His listeners knew that he was going to say this. They knew the very words in which he would put it. All through the night-watches he had said the same thing at intervals. The effect always was of a red-hot wire drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves. But again one by one they themselves fell into line.
“It was that old woman I remember,” said Honey Smith. There were bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey’s body. There was a falsetto whistling to Honey’s voice. “That Irish granny! She didn’t say a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!” He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away from him. “God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!”

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Angel Island

From the opening

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