a tiger had saved me from a hyena— surely a textbook example of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But the great beast was not behaving like a great beast, to such an extent that the hyena had taken liberties. Richard Parker’s passivity, and for three long days, needed explaining. Only in two ways could I account for it: sedation and seasickness.
Father regularly sedated a number of the animals to lessen their stress. Might he have sedated Richard Parker shortly before the ship sank? Had the shock of the shipwreck–the noises, the falling into the sea, the terrible struggle to swim to the lifeboat–increased the effect of the sedative? Had seasickness taken over after that?
These were the only plausible explanations I could come up with. I lost interest in the question. Only water interested me. I took stock of the lifeboat.
It was three–and–a half feet deep, eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, exactly. I know because it was printed on one of the side benches in black letters. It also said that the lifeboat was designed to accommodate a maximum of thirty-two people. Wouldn’t that have been merry, sharing it with so many?
Instead we were three and it was awfully crowded. It seems orange is the colour of survival because the whole inside of the boat and the tarpaulin and the life jackets and the lifebuoy and the oars and most every other significant object aboard was orange. Even the plastic, headless whistles were orange. The words Tsimtsum and Panama were printed on each side of the bow in stark, black, roman capitals.
I did not grasp all these details — and many more — right away. They came to my notice with time and as a result of necessity. I would be in the direst of dire straits, facing a bleak future, when some small thing, some detail, would transform itself 12th - - Page and appear in my mind in a new light. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important