William Golding's Lord of the Flies Vocabulary chapters 1-3

“They used to call me Piggy.”

A conch he called it.

The shore was fledged with palm trees.

1 The Sound of the Shell
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

This was filled with a blue flower, a rock plant of some sort, and the overflow hung down the vent and spilled lavishly among the canopy of the forest.

The undergrowth at the side of the scar was shaken and a multitude of raindrops fell pattering.

He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

They found a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers,
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throwing itself at the elastic traces in all the madness of extreme terror.

“Them fruit,” he said, “I expect—” He put on his glasses, waded away from Ralph, and crouched down
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among the tangled foliage.

He gesticulated widely.

Ralph made a cupping gesture.

Most of the wood was so rotten that when they pulled, it broke up into a shower of fragments and woodlice and decay; but some trunks came out in one piece.

All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat.

For the
moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside: he went very pink, bowed his head and cleaned his glasses again.

The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings.

Where the pink cliffs rose out of the ground there were often narrow tracks winding upwards.

“My auntie told me not to run,” he explained, “on account of my asthma.”

But there was a stillness
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about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and at- tractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch.

Ralph was already clambering over the first smashed swathes of the
scar.

“So long as you don’t tell the others—” Ralph giggled into the sand.

Immured in these tangles, at perhaps their most difficult moment, Ralph turned with shining eyes to the others.

“Shut up, Fatty.”

The first thing we ought to have
made was shelters down there by the beach.

His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.

He turned neatly on to his feet, jumped down to the beach, knelt and swept a double armful of sand into a pile against his chest.

The shore was fledged with palm trees.

He didn’t blow the white stones, of course,
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an’ he said—” Piggy paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in
Ralph’s hands.

He laid a hand on the end of a zipper that extended down his chest.

The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings.

Jack nodded and pulled at his underlip.

He was a shrimp of a boy, about six years old, and one side of his face was blotted out by a mulberry-colored birthmark.

The conch was silent, a gleaming tusk; Ralph’s face was dark with breathlessness and the air over the island was full of bird-clamor and echoes ringing.

There were flames coming out of it.”

He tried to be offhand and not too obviously uninterested, but the fat boy hurried after him.

Then the creature stepped from mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing.