Isvik (32 page)

I took the
South American Pilot Vol. II
from the bookcase at the back of the chart table. I had already put a marker in at the Beagle Channel page. It was the next number to the one that was out on the table. ‘Chart 3424.'

‘Have we got it?'

I checked through the chart drawer, found that we had and spread it out on top of the Ushuaia chart. Again he didn't seem interested in the approaches or the soundings in the little bay indicated by the co-ordinates. His mind was concentrated on the hinterland, the magnifying glass following the contours very slowly as though he were trying to visualise the terrain. But Admiralty Charts are not like geographical maps. They concentrate on the foreshore and seabed. In the end he gave it up, flinging the magnifying glass down and muttering something to himself about waiting till we got there. ‘What's the state of the moon? Almost at the full, isn't it?' And when I told him it would be full in two days' time, he nodded and said he hoped it would be a fine night.

‘We'll be picking him up during the night, will we?'

‘Not this night. Early Thursday mornin' – 0200.'

‘So why the hurry? We could have stayed at Ushuaia, topped up with diesel and had a meal ashore. Got drunk maybe.' I was thinking of the long weeks, possibly months ahead.

But all he said was, ‘Give me an ETA at that bay as soon as ye can.'

‘I can give you that right now,' I said, measuring off the distance with the dividers. ‘Sail or motor?'

‘Sail. The wind is westerly and we need to conserve fuel now.'

With the squares'ls reset we found we were logging a comfortable 6 knots. ‘Should be there shortly after midnight,' I told him.

He nodded. ‘Have the inflatable ready to launch as soon as we're anchored. Ye'll come with me. Okay?' And he disappeared below.

The wind force varied considerably during the latter part of the evening, reaching force 5 at times and veering northwesterly. The result was that we arrived well before midnight. There was still just a little light in the sky astern of us, but shoreward visibility was fitful with about seven-tenths cloud. We got the sails down and felt our way in under engine, the moonlight coming and going with the clouds very black in contrast.

There was a little beach with a stream pouring like a white streak across it, but the kelp forced us to anchor some way off in a depth of over thirty metres. Once the ship was settled, and the engine silenced, a sudden peace descended, only the racing, ink-black clouds to indicate that it was still blowing quite hard. Close in, we were under the lee, and the stillness, and the emptiness of the land, the sense of being at the world's end – it was almost spooky. And the kelp moving all the time, a slow, voluptuous lifting and falling as the waters of the strait heaved sleepily.

Iris wanted to come with us. I think she sensed a purpose behind Iain's haste to get ashore that in some way concerned her. ‘Ye'd only be in the way,' he said almost brutally. Her reply was drowned in the noise of the engine as he started it up and we headed for what appeared to be a passage through the kelp. It did not reach as far as the beach and just as we entered it a pile of wind-driven cloud swept over the face of the moon so that one minute we could see the kelp moving lazily either side of us, the next all was utter darkness.

Iain cut the engine and we drifted in an eerie stillness that was punctuated by strange grunts and sucking noises as the sea moved the weed and sloshed among the stones and rocks of the beach. The inflatable was stopped almost immediately, and while Iain tipped the engine up on its bracket, I got hold of one of the oars and began to paddle. In the Stygian darkness we had nothing but the sound of the water streaming down the steep slope of the beach ahead to guide us, and it was hard work, for we were literally sliding the boat over the long streamers of kelp.

I had just started to pole our way through the shallows when the moon swam out of the blackness overhead, and there was the beach, with the stream gleaming white barely twenty metres away. It seemed afterwards as though the circumstances of our arrival set the scene, preparing us for the shock of what we were about to find. Iain had brought a torch with him, but he hadn't used it, so that the eeriness of that little beach was exaggerated by what I can only describe as the stage lighting. It conditioned me, instilling a degree of nervous tension, as though at any moment those naked, half-savage Onas of the old land of Tierra del Fuego would come storming out of the darkness, intent on clubbing us to death to provide them with the plumpest, best-fleshed meal they had had in years.

We stumbled ashore through ankle-twisting boulders, hauling the inflatable up a beach that looked like, and probably was, the moraine of an old glacier. I stopped to wrap the painter round a large stone so that Iain was ahead of me when the lighting suddenly dimmed, the moon sliding behind the ragged edge of a cloud. I could see the vague shape of him picking his way over the black debris of fallen trees that marked the tide line and the edge of the stream.

‘Beaver,' he said as I fought my way up to him. The tide line had once been treed, but now they were fallen, rotting sticks, all lying higgledy-piggledy as though destroyed by the whirling vortex of a tornado. We struggled on for almost a hundred yards, picking our way through the mad, ankle-twisting debris of crumbling timber. ‘Some bloody fool of an Argentinian thought it'd be nice to import a few Canadian beaver to Tierra del Fuego.' He swore as his foot slipped from under him. ‘Ye saw the black debris of the tide line as far back as the Cockburn Channel. Nobody hunts them, so they've multiplied like mad.'

Away from the stream, there must have been a change of soil. Suddenly there were no tree stems lying around and we were wading in among hard, wiry stems of some sort of low-growing vegetation that could stand the cold of the winter at the bottom of the world. Away to the left there was a patch of tussac grass standing like the solid woolly heads of a little army of golliwogs. He found a path of sorts that climbed steadily up the shoulder of a bluff, the top of it just visible, a vague outline humped against the half-lit sky. And then the moon popped out again, the stage lighting switched on and the bluff was smooth as Sussex down-land. We reached the top and looked down on to a rolling plain. ‘Sheep country,' Iain whispered quite unnecessarily, for there, right in front of us, was a whole flock of them standing bunched and motionless, staring in our direction. ‘The Dark Tower,' he murmured, nodding away to our left where a huddle of dilapidated huts crouched against the side of a stony hill.

‘I don't see any tower,' I said. ‘More like the quarters of some military outpost.'

‘
Childe Roland
,' he murmured, and the way he said it sent a shiver through me, for I too had read my Browning. ‘Ushuaia was an Argentine penal settlement at one time, did ye know that?'

‘No.'

The going was easier now. We were walking on firm, close-cropped grass, the huts getting steadily nearer. ‘Is this an old prison then?' I asked. ‘Did you know it was here?'

He made no answer, striding on ahead. We reached the first of the huts and the moon slipped behind the black bulk of a cloud. The wind rattled the panes in a broken window, a door creaked – stage effects that included the winged shadow of a bird taking off into the night. There was a padlock on the door, but the hasp was broken and Iain pushed his way in, the beam of his torch stabbing out to show rusting iron beds stacked against the far wall. The only windows were either side of the door through which we had entered. At the far end was a shower cubicle and a tin washbasin, also a stack of galvanised iron buckets. The beam swept across the walls, hesitated and steadied on the single word ‘
HOY
' scratched into the cement just to the right of a curved pipe that had presumably been the smoke outlet for a stove that had been removed. I heard him sigh. ‘The poor bastards.'

‘What's it mean?'

‘Today,' he said. ‘
Hoy
means today.' He led the way out of the wind-shattered door and into the next hut. The huts were in three lines, four to each line, every hut alike and all in the same dilapidated condition. There was no barbed wire, no guardroom or jailers' quarters, no watchtowers. And in every one of the huts we found wall scratchings: lines of poetry, cries to God –
Que dios me salve
or simply,
Salvame
– demands for justice, the names of loved ones, and always, somewhere, a calendar. Not a proper calendar, no dates, but the weeks and the months recorded and the days scratched off as they passed.
En desesperación
. That word
desesperación
appeared again and again. ‘No way out, nowhere to go – “desperation” about sums it up.' Iain's voice was muted, a sadness in the way he spoke.

‘You knew this place existed, didn't you?'

As before, he didn't answer my question. He was probing with his torch, briefly checking each piece of graffiti.

‘You looking for something?' I asked.

‘Try and remember some of the names,' he said. ‘Somebody, somewhere, must have a list.'

I started to write some of the names down on a scrap of paper, remembering now that Iris's brother Eduardo had been one of the Disappeareds. But Eduardo is a common enough name, and though I found quite a few Eduardos, either they did not add any surname, or else it was the wrong one. ‘It's like a concentration camp,' I muttered as we were walking into the next row of huts.

He nodded. ‘That's probably what it was.' And he added, ‘Let's go and see if we can find their grave.'

‘Is it the
Desaparecidos
?'

He led the way out, tramping in silence across the sheep-cropped grass as we circled the derelict camp. But there was no communal grave such as had been the last resting place of the gassed victims of Hitler's concentration camps, only a few lone headstones, a wooden cross or two, that was all.

‘So where did they go?'

He shrugged, standing there in the wind, the racing clouds black overhead, gazing down at the huts. Finally he turned to me. ‘You're not to mention this to anyone. Least of all to Iris – or to Connor-Gómez when he arrives. Ah don't want him to know we've seen it. Ye understand?'

I nodded, and after staring at the huts in complete silence for another minute or so, he started back towards the beach. We were in a clear patch of sky then, the moon very bright and still, the clouds all gone and the wind getting stronger. Away to our right, clearly visible in the stark brilliance, the line of an old track slanted up across a stony hillside.

The question in my mind, of course, was why Connor-Gómez had chosen to join ship at this Godforsaken place rather than at Ushuaia. Was it because he was
persona non grata
throughout Argentina? Then why send us all the way round the west side of Tierra del Fuego when, if he had joined us at Punta Arenas, we would have had a downhill run to the Falklands and South Georgia? I did my best to get an explanation out of Iain as we retraced our steps to the beach, but he just shrugged his shoulders. And when I pressed him for an answer, he finally turned on me and said, ‘Keep yer mouth shut and yer eyes open, that way ye'll get at least some of the answers.'

The moon had disappeared again as we reached the beach, but he didn't use the torch and we stumbled about in the dark looking for the boat. There was more movement in the water now, the kelp sloshing about and waves actually breaking on the beach. We got pretty wet launching the inflatable and once we had poled and paddled our way out into open water we had a rough passage to the ship. ‘Remember what I said,' he whispered to me as we made the inflatable fast and started below. ‘Ye'll be on yer own tomorrow when ye go in to pick him up. No questions. Ye understand? Ye take everythin' fur granted, and ye don't provoke him – either then or in the future. Okay?'

Sleep eluded me for a long time that night. It was blowing force 6 or 7 and the halyards frapping against the mast were a constant irritant. In a sense they matched my mood, my mind going over and over the voyage ahead, the problems that must inevitably arise with such an ill-assorted crew. And there was the question of navigation, for I had already discovered that we were at the very limit of Satnav. The satellites for this are in fixed positions directly over the equator and they move with the rotation of the earth, so that they are always conveniently sited for the big concentrations of shipping in the northern hemisphere. Down here on the edge of the Southern Ocean I was having to check the accuracy of every Satnav reading by star sights taken with the navigator's old, reliable standby, the sextant.
Isvik
had all the necessary tables, of course. What I didn't often have was a clear sight of the stars I needed.

It worried me. But what worried me still more was the imminent arrival of Connor-Gómez and the memory of that ghastly little huddle of huts standing derelict and forlorn in the intermittent moonlight.

I could hear Andy snoring, or was it Go-Go's broad nostrils reverberating up for'ard? They had all been asleep when we came back from our recce ashore, but just after turning in I thought I heard Iris questioning Iain. But it was probably my imagination, the ship's frames creaking and groaning, the halyards frapping and banging. I made a mental note to rig some lizards. I had seen some of these elastic fastenings in the store.

There were other things I tried to make a mental note of, for one thing we had gained out of the voyage from Punta Arenas through those wild inshore waters was that it had shown up all the various things that needed to be put right, particularly the stowage of some of the gear, the stores too. It had been as good a shake-down cruise as I could have wished for.

It rained all the following day, cold, driving rain that made work on deck a misery, and it didn't start to ease off until late afternoon. The wind died, too, but the cloud level remained low so that even the smallest hilltops were obscured, and there was a lurid sunset. By then we were all set to go, and shortly after 23.30 I lowered myself into the inflatable. Iain leaned down over the rail. ‘We up anchor and leave the moment he's on board.'