第十五章：小嗝嗝出发寻找宝石(9)

’ said Alvin with a kind of grim, gloomy smugness. ‘It’s not possible!’ screamed the witch. ‘He must be here somewhere! DIG! DIG, you fools, DIG!’ The witch sprang animal-like from her sand-yacht, and began to dig herself, with her iron fingernails, raking up the sand in great handfuls like some desperate exasperated dog. As if, in some extraordinary way, Hiccup could have spirited himself below the sand, sand-yacht and all. The Warriors and the slaves rushed to help her with their spades, digging yet another hopeless, pointless hole, like so many of the other hopeless pointless holes that they had dug in this bay. Suddenly the witch paused in her hopeless digging, hands full of sand, and sniffed the air. And she began to jump on all fours, and down to all fours again, like a cat leaping, and at the top of

each leap she clawed the very air with her bony hands, as if she could scratch the boy out of the sky itself with her long, iron fingernails, and bring him down with her puny arms. ‘He’s up here! I know it! I know it! I can see it! With my true blind eyes I see him!’ she screeched.
Quite an impressive effort for an elderly woman. And the crowds of Warriors and curious slaves watching this on their sand-yachts began to whisper to each other: ‘Ooh, she’s lost it now. She was always on the edge, but now she’s gone completely bananas…’ And then, because the Vikings are a superstitious lot, and impressed by anything that looks magic: ‘Did you see the boy, though? Completely disappeared, into thin air…