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【阅读理解】Reading: The Last Lighthouse Keeper
When Mara Voss first saw the lighthouse at Dungeness, the windscreen was thick with salt.
She was thirty-four, a maritime historian from Ghent, and she had come to Kent to supervise the decommissioning of a lamp that had burned for one hundred and eighteen years.
The keeper, Elias Prynne, met her at the gate.
He was seventy-one, stout, with hands like sinew and a gaze that seemed to radiate heat.
"You're here to switch it off," he said.
It was not a question.
Mara nodded.
The lighthouse was to be replaced by a digital beacon, cheaper, unmanned, reliable.
Elias had kept the light for forty-three years; his father had done the same.
The lamp itself, a Fresnel lens of some four thousand prisms, rotated on a bath of mercury, a pulley and clockwork composition that had once been the most sophisticated interface between the sea and the shore.
"She's not a machine," Elias said, his voice low.
"She's a pledge."
Mara had heard this kind of rhetoric before.
She had spent a decade in archives, tracking the dissemination of lighthouse technology across the continental shelf.
She was not naive.
She had a schedule, a budget of 240,000 pounds, and a precise plan to register every component before the final farewell.
But that first night, when the light swept clockwise across the water and a fishing boat answered with a single blast, she felt a sensation she could not attribute to any document.
The beam was not merely illumination; it was a sort of understanding, a constant, inescapable presence that seemed to nurture the entire populace of the coast.
She began to speculate.
Over the following weeks, Mara and Elias fell into a session of daily fieldwork.
She would track the erosion of the chalk cliffs, measure precipitation, poll the local fishermen on their preference for the old light.
Elias would watch, sometimes hinder her, sometimes help.
"You objectify the sea," he said once, as she photographed the mechanism.
"You turn it into data.
The sea is not a monster to be defeated.
It is a neighbour."
She wanted to dispute this, but a sudden dizzy spell — the mercury fumes, perhaps — forced her to sit.
He brought her water, thrifty with words, and began to impart what he knew.
There was the winter of 1987, when a catastrophic storm had exposed the weaknesses of the backup generator.
There was the night a young couple, unregistered and desperate, had tried to cross to France in a gelatin of fog.
There was the adolescent boy who had been bullied at school and had come to the lighthouse to conceal his tears.
"The light does not ask why," Elias said.
"It merely rotates.
It is a sanctuary."
Mara began to repaint her own perspective.
She had come to enforce a decision, but she found herself gathering evidence for a supplementary report.
The lighthouse was not just a navigational aid; it was a hybrid of engineering and collective memory.
She interviewed forty-two residents.
Seventy-nine per cent said the light had helped them through an ailment of the spirit — loneliness, grief, insomnia.
A local entrepreneur, a woman named Priya Shah, ran a bistro in the old station house, and she had built her entire business around the lighthouse's idyllic reputation.
"If you turn it off," Priya said, "you don't just disempower a building.
You disempower us."
Mara's report grew to ninety pages.
She cited the interplay between acoustics and geography, the way the foghorn's low frequency could penetrate a storm.
She argued that the lighthouse had an intrinsic, if unquantifiable, value.
But the administration in London had its own logic.
The decision was final.
On the last evening, the personnel from the harbour authority arrived to supervise the switch-off.
Elias stood by the lens, his hand on the brass rail.
"You can't halt a millennium with a pen," he said, not bitterly.
"But you can remark it."
At 11:52 p.m., the beam stopped.
The dark was not a sudden splash; it was a slow stain, a fallow field where light had been.
Mara drove back to Ghent with a receipt for the lens — it would go to a museum — and a single question she could not answer.
Was the light a thing that existed, or a thing that we agreed to see?
In the morning, the fishermen went out anyway.
The sea was calm.
The sky was a pale, thirsty blue, and somewhere beyond the horizon, a freighter adjusted its course, dependent now on nothing but a satellite, a screen, and a set of coordinates that no one on the shore would ever see.
Questions
1. What is Elias Prynne's attitude towards the lighthouse?
A. He sees it as a pledge and a sanctuary. B. He considers it a profitable business. C. He views it as an outdated machine. D. He thinks it should be replaced by a digital beacon.
2. How many years had Elias kept the light?
A. 34 years B. 71 years C. 43 years D. 118 years
3. What does the word "sanctuary" in paragraph 7 most nearly mean?
A. A place of safety and comfort. B. A machine for navigation. C. A type of lens. D. A source of income.
4. What can be inferred about Mara's view of the lighthouse by the end of the passage?
A. She regrets not having fought harder to save it. B. She completely agrees with the administration's decision. C. She questions whether the lighthouse's value is real or agreed upon. D. She believes the lighthouse has only sentimental value.
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. The economic benefits of tourism. B. The daily life of a lighthouse keeper. C. The history of lighthouse technology. D. The conflict between progress and tradition.