Easter Island (11 page)

In Tierra del Fuego, they anchor for two nights, waiting for the wind to slacken. The British consul, interested in the expedition, invites them to dinner. “I have always meant to make the trip myself. Only my poor health prevents me. Asthma, you see.” Over brandy he remarks on the perils of the straits, suggesting they enlist a tramp to tow them through.

But Edward, discouraged by their recent drifting, now takes great pains to prove his ability. He sits up straight. “We shan’t be discouraged by minor danger.”

“Edward.” Elsa sets her glass down.

The consul grins. “Ah, you see? The ladies often have ideas of their own.”

“Elsa,” says Edward. “We’re not amateurs. I’ve sailed with Lipton, considered one of the best. I hope you have some faith in my judgment in these matters.”

“Neither my faith nor your judgment is in question,” Elsa says flatly, aware she is spoiling the mood. The consul, to her right, shifts in his chair. “I only think we should take better stock of the situation before determining our course.”

“Mrs. Beazley,” says the consul, “it is the captain’s ordained task to determine the course of the boat.”

“The safe course.”

“Very well, we’ll take better stock,” Edward cuts in.

An awkward silence fills the room. Edward avoids Elsa’s gaze.

But on the third day, they do sail. The navigation of the First Narrows proves tricky. The water churns above the rusted wreckage—smashed hulls and broken masts thick with barnacles. Alert, hands ready to loosen or cleat a line, they station themselves on deck. “Remember, keep the sails loose,” says Edward. “We don’t want to catch any sudden gusts.” Slowly, the boat noses through the narrow waterway and at the first hint of dusk they drop anchor; at least Edward acknowledges the risks of sailing without full light.

At six
A
.
M
. they awake to pass the Second Narrows at slack tide, and make it safely, though exhausted, to Punta Arenas. Here the land is flat and windswept; it is sheep country, grassy and low. “A tow!” Edward tosses the word overboard. He rubs his knee, looks up at Elsa. “You see, Elsa, I would not lead us astray.”

“I see, Edward. I see that now.”

“I am looking out for us. For all of us.”

“I know.” And she is sorry. Sorry she let her doubt reveal itself to him. He has acted with caution and kindness the entire way, and she hopes that when they are there and settled, she can prove her growing trust.

For a fortnight they sail the Patagonian Channels, a labyrinth of fjords and coves and bays. Hundreds of giant petrels and albatross circle the stern, their wings forming a loosely knit canopy of white. Alice settles herself on the foredeck, wrapped in a blanket, her arms folded across her bosom, her head tilted back. For hours she watches the birds intently, warned by Eamonn not to wave or shout at the petrels, known as “stinkers,” for vomiting when frightened.

Elsa draws a map and plots the schooner’s progress against Darwin’s route. She is now reading
The Voyage of the Beagle,
devouring the descriptions of Rio de Janeiro, Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, the Falkland Islands, and Patagonia—all places they have passed. The pages have curled from the spray of seawater.

At Isla Desolación, they are detained by hail for five days, but as they zigzag north through the channels, the weather warms. Above them now, in misty splendor, rise the snowcapped Andes.

Christmas Day, they anchor in Golfo de Penas, off the coast of Chile. A light drizzle washes the boat as they dine on a special meal of salted beef and boiled potatoes. But the damp air holds warmth, and Elsa, for the first time in weeks, perspires beneath her dress. After their meal, despite the rain, Elsa, Alice, and Edward row the dinghy ashore. Alice insists on bringing Pudding. Once the dinghy is pulled onto the beach, they hike through a winding path of dripping vegetation.

“Elsa!” Edward calls from ahead. Pulling aside a cluster of wet vines, he peers into the dark mouth of a cave. “Shall we have a look?”

“Oh, let’s!” says Elsa, breaking into a run. The exertion delights her. How wonderful to be moving! Alice, slowed by Pudding’s cage, lags behind.

From his pack Edward pulls a revolver and a small lantern, which he lights beneath the shelter of his body. “Ready?”

But as he steps forward, Alice darts ahead. “Hullo in there! Hullo!” she shouts into the cave.

“Allie dear, careful.” Elsa gently pulls her backward. “You can’t just storm in there. There might be bats.”

“Bats!”

“Bats can’t harm you, Alice,” Edward says. “And it’s likely there aren’t any. I’ll go first, just to be sure. You hold Elsa’s hand.”

“I am not going where there are bats.”

“Allie.”

Alice shakes her head no.

“Then you can wait here and look after Pudding,” says Elsa. “Edward and I won’t be a minute.”

“Why do you want to go in there if there are bats? Oh, no. Don’t go in there, Elsa.”

“We want to explore, Allie. We’re going to be one minute. That’s all. I promise you we’ll be fine.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Alice’s eyes look from Elsa to Edward and back again, and finally she moves aside and squats by the cave’s entrance, settling Pudding’s cage in a patch of grass. The bird flutters and caws, agitated by the raindrops. Elsa unties her own cape and drapes it, like a hood, over Alice’s head.

“Why don’t you tell Pudding about the albatross you’ve seen.”

“I already did.”

“What about the flying fish?”

“Oh, no. He wouldn’t like that. Fish aren’t supposed to fly. If I tell him that he will think he can swim. I’m going to tell him about bats, Elsa. Big horrible bats in caves.”

“Allie, we’re going to be fine. I’ll call to you from inside.”

Edward passes Elsa the lantern and takes her hand. With his other hand he poises the revolver. Elsa calls, “We’ll be right back.”

Inside, the air is cool and moist. Their shoes thud against the hard ground; a slow drip pings against the rocks. The walls are slick with moss, the ceiling low, and they crouch forward through the narrow passage, Elsa’s eyes intent on where she steps. Soon Edward releases her hand and squeezes ahead.

“No bats, Allie!” she hollers back, watching Edward crouch down, uncock his revolver, and tap it against the rock face. She holds the lantern out. “How deep do you think it goes?”

“I think we’re at the end,” he says. “Hear that?” He taps the handle of the revolver once more against the rock. “There’s something hollow. Maybe another passage, but there’s no opening I can see.”

Elsa wiggles beside him. “Are you sure?” She’d been hoping for a brief adventure.

“Nothing is so final as a wall of rock.”

Elsa swings the lantern in a half arc over the passage’s end. “Not even a crack,” she says.

Edward tucks his revolver through his belt and takes the lantern. “Follow my light,” he says, brushing by her. He extends his hand back for hers.

“I can manage,” she says.

She gropes the walls for balance, carefully places her feet behind his. Outside, the light is gray, and they turn from each other, embarrassed by their brief physicality.

“Good Lord,” says Edward.

Alice’s post beside the cave has been abandoned. On the ground, the cape lies in a soggy heap.

“Allie!” Elsa shouts. “We’re out now.”

“Alice!” Edward shouts, his voice panicked.

“She’s not far,” Elsa says. “She’s no doubt waiting by the dinghy.”

Hurrying through the wet overgrowth, they retrace their steps along the coast, calling Alice’s name along the way. But when they finally spot her, she isn’t waiting by the boat. She is in it, steadily rowing away from the shore, her head tilted back so that the rain falls upon her small, upturned face. Pudding’s cage sits beside her, the bird’s wings flapping madly.

“Alice!” “Allie! Allie!” Their frantic voices stumble over each other. But Alice keeps her head back. Her mouth seems to be moving, her thin lips forming strange shapes, but Elsa cannot tell if Alice is speaking to them or simply lapping at the raindrops.

6

Greer awoke to the late-afternoon sun filtering through the burlap curtains. She propped herself up against the headboard, knuckled sleep from her eyes. She looked around the dim room—wicker nightstands, cement walls. On the desk opposite her a stack of books rose in an unstable spiral—
Plants of Polynesia. The Settlement of the Pacific. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Textbook of Pollen Analysis.
Ah, she remembered, Rapa Nui.

She stepped out of the bed and pulled back the curtain. A warm glow bathed the courtyard, its eclectic vegetation reminding her of Rousseau’s paintings. Greer once spent a month investigating each floral image in
The Dream
after reading a turn-of-the-century botanist’s paper that accused Rousseau of inventing his tropical flora. “Jungle Jousts and Botanical Brawls” claimed Rousseau concocted aesthetically pleasing plants: broad emerald stalks with giant fronds, white blossoms on velvet-black branches. In
The Dream
, Greer had found a subtropical mimosa branch depicted at ten times its normal size, a Japanese clover blossom, and an agave native to the African desert. The plants were real but the proportions confused, and their biogeographic combination a greenhouse mishmash: a biota worthy of Dr. Frankenstein’s imagination. In fact, that was what she titled her article—“Frankenstein’s Jungle”—which she sent to several botany journals, all of which rejected the manuscript for its lack of scientific relevance. She then sent the article to a dozen art magazines, who likewise rejected it, this time for its inconsequence to art. It now sat in a drawer in Marblehead inside a folder bulging with other articles on hybrid, unpublishable subjects—subjects that, she now knew, once you were established in the scientific community would suggest to colleagues your robust intellectual appetite but, as a young post-doc, simply suggested a lack of focus, and imaginative, perhaps emotional, tendencies.

Greer pulled the curtain shut, lifted the books from her desk, and spilled them on the bed. She’d brought botany and pollen guides; her collections of Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, and Linnaeus; two contemporary volumes on the history of the island with excerpts from early European visitors. But she knew she would need their full accounts. Roggeveen’s or Cook’s journal might, after all, mention the island’s flora. Somewhere in their building, SAAS maintained a good library, but the materials were locked away, and access required paperwork. It would have to wait.

As Greer settled on the bed, her stomach grumbled—she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day’s banana. Now she threw on a cardigan and a long skirt, then stepped into her sandals. Grabbing some of her pollen texts and
On the Origin of Species
—always a good dinner companion—she made her way to the room with the emerald globes. Mahina was nowhere in sight. Greer called her name, then pulled back a beaded curtain behind the desk that revealed an empty office. It was six forty-five, almost time for dinner, so Greer settled into one of the high-backed wicker chairs flanking the card table and reread Darwin’s famous passage:

No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us. Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world during the many past geological epochs in its history. Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous.

Deliberate study and dispassionate judgment, thought Greer. Darwin, who after twenty years of meticulous study rushed like a madman to publish his theory of natural selection before the young George Wallace beat him to the punch! It was a story Greer loved, one her father used to tell. Darwin, fearfully holed up in his house in Down, England, writing to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker for advice: Should he patiently compose his opus on evolution or slap together a makeshift theory before Wallace went public? His judgment, in the end, was entirely passionate. He moved quickly, garnered his fame, but not without the haunting question of the letters he received from Wallace that somehow disappeared, and of Wallace’s own natural selection manuscript, which Darwin received but claimed to have set aside, unread, as though the subject bored him. But was dispassion ever possible, Greer wondered, in a science that required decades of observation to grasp one fundamental principle? Natural selection—an idea so basic, so
natural
, it would appear self-evident to every generation that followed. Above all else, science demanded passion. But what she admired in Darwin was his ability to sound as though his ideas were of no personal consequence; he could present himself as the clinical observer. That had always been Greer’s problem—she had difficulty masking her private interest, had trouble making her judgments seem detached.

The bells above the door chimed, and Mahina strode across the threshold with a look of concern. “
Doctora! Hola, Doctora!
You are well now? I come at noon to make up room, and you are sleep.”

Greer closed her book. “The travel must have worn me out,” she said. “
Cansada?
I feel fine now. But I haven’t eaten anything. If it’s not any trouble, could I get dinner a little early?”

“Yes. Dinner. We find you dinner.” Mahina closed the door behind her. She was wearing a white skirt and a bright pink blouse with seashell buttons. A hint of a lace brassiere showed through the fabric. “You come.” Without setting down her hat, she led Greer down a corridor and into a whitewashed room with four round tables draped with floral tablecloths, neatly laid with shining tracks of forks and knives. “Sit,
Doctora,
” Mahina ordered, pulling a chair from the table by the window.