Lord of the Flies: Chapters 4-6

The decrease in size, from Ralph down, was gradual; and though there was a dubious region inhabited by Simon and Robert and Maurice, nevertheless no one had any difficulty in recognizing biguns at one end and littluns at the other.

Percival was mouse-colored and had not been very attractive even to his mother; Johnny was well built, with fair hair and a natural belligerence.

In his other life Maurice had received chastisement for filling a younger eye with sand.

Perhaps food had appeared where at the last incursion there had been none; bird droppings, insects perhaps, any of the strewn detritus of landward life.

Perhaps food had appeared where at the last incursion there had been none; bird droppings, insects perhaps, any of the strewn detritus of landward life.

Like a myriad of tiny teeth in a saw, the transparencies came scavenging over the beach.

He poked about with a bit of stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a vagrant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers.

There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense.

At first he was a silent effigy of sorrow; but then the lamentation rose out of him, loud and sustained as the conch.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.

Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him.

An interminable dawn faded the stars out, and at last light, sad and grey, filtered into the shelter.

This side of the castle, perhaps a hundred feet high, was the pink bastion they had seen from the mountain-top.

Then the sleeping leviathan breathed out, the waters rose, the weed streamed, and the water boiled over the table rock with a roar.

The squareness of the rock allowed a sort of plinth round it, so mat to the right, over the lagoon, one could inch along a ledge and turn the corner out of sight.