I did not immediately understand the captain—until I turned away from him. We had reached the lee of the highest part of the hillside, where the yellowy ground was covered with a black dust more like ash than earth. This dust had collected in a wide and shallow crater that was crossed by a chain of stagnant pools, each of which was covered by a rainbow scum; I thought it must be produced by minerals in the earth beneath. The colors might have made the place look joyous, since they were as bright as peacock feathers, but their effect was entirely the opposite. The shimmer was revoltingly bright, and a sickly counterpart to the bare earth round about.
“Tread carefully,” said the captain, tightening the grip on his thumb-stick, and poking it into the earth before he took a step forward. “We are close now.”
“Here?” I asked uncertainly.
“Not here precisely,” he said, very watchful. “Follow me and you will see. We avoided this part when I came here recently; now we must enter it. Be careful!”
I did as I was told, treading in the captain’s footsteps as he set off across the crater. Every time my foot touched the earth, it produced a puff of black dust that coated my shoes and ankles, and floated so easily on the air it even crept into my nose. My eyes watered, and I began breathing in shallow sips to keep the stuff from entering my lungs.
When the captain stopped a moment later, and crouched to put his basket on the ground beside him, my first thought was: we had reached the treasure site. Then I saw, by the way he hoisted his stick like a spear and pointed the V of the thumb-rest toward the ground, that whatever was happening now had nothing to do with silver. We were standing where Scotland had told us we would find the snakes—the kind that made this miserable ash their only home on the island, and had killed his friend with a single bite. The captain was endeavoring to catch one. That is why we had brought the baskets. We were going to catch the snakes and bring them back with us to the Nightingale.
These thoughts slithered into my head very suddenly, confusing me and unnerving me. I took a breath and swallowed; I remembered the marshes at home, where I had crawled up to spy on unsuspecting creatures without a fear for my life. Why should I not be as fearless now? The question steadied me so much, I was able to peep over the captain’s shoulder and watch how he managed his work.
The snake in front of him was a foot long, and gray as the dust that now almost enveloped it, with its neck pinned in the V of his stick; its slender body lashed viciously from side to side, and it made a fierce hissing noise like a kettle on a hob. Moving very gingerly, the captain bent forward and took hold of it close behind the head, using his thumb and forefinger to lift it into the air—whereupon the hissing stopped and the creature hung limp as string, before he dropped it into his basket and swiftly replaced the lid.
“One!” he said to me, or rather shouted. His wide face was shining with sweat. “Now you.”
If there had been a minute to think, I might have asked him to continue as my teacher. But when I opened my mouth to say this, I noticed a second and smaller snake coiled an arm’s length away from me, its shiny tongue already darting between its lips as though the prospect of my leg were delicious. Without any delay, I plunged at it with my stick—which produced another explosion of dust—and found that I had trapped the creature as I wanted, and was able to lift it as the captain had done. The skin felt absolutely cold and lifeless, like the tallow of a candle that has long since been blown out.
Because we had caught these first two snakes very quickly, the captain and I then decided our work was easy—and set about finding ten or a dozen more, which we stored in our wicker baskets, where they lay coiled around one another’s bodies without any fuss. “Our security,” said the captain as we finished our work. “Our ‘arms,’ you might say.” I nodded at this, to show I knew what he meant without his needing to explain. We would use the snakes as weapons, since our firepower on the Nightingale was so limited; it pleased me very much to think the native spirits of the island were turning against the men who had defiled it.
We set off northwest again, and within a few minutes found ourselves on the slope of a crisp little ridge that seemed insignificant in itself. It turned out to mark the beginning of a long sweep that ran toward the northwestern shore of the island; the ground here was lush as an English park, being lightly covered with pine and live oak. Two especially tall pine trees stood directly in front of us, making an obvious landmark—so in this respect, at least, it was no surprise to see the earth between them had been torn up and thrown about.
“Here is where we discovered our loss,” said the captain, very heavily. I felt so determined not to say anything my father might have done, such as what a desecration it was, that I did not immediately reply. All the same, and using the strange sort of measurement the captain had suggested a moment before, when he had spoken about the earth’s capacity, I calculated the emptiness before me must be a very valuable one. It was not, perhaps, a vault to hold as large a fortune as the £700,000 my father and the others had removed from the island. But it could have contained at least half as much, which would have been a pretty amount for all of us.
We stood in silence—our heads bowed with the weight of failure, but also I suspect with guilt, since the sensation of being thwarted had exposed us to the consciousness of our own greed. In a short while, however, I found that my concentration was not directed where I meant it to be, but fixed on a succession of irritable click-clicks, quickly repeated, that came from one of the two pines that grew nearby. I recognized these as the sound a squirrel makes when defending its territory, and when I looked up I found that two pairs of eyes were regarding us from a large ball of twigs and moss. I supposed this must be a nest, and contained young the parents were anxious to protect—which was why they had raised their voices in our direction, and were determined to leave us in no doubt we were not welcome in this part of their parish.
This sight alone was enough to make us want to move our ground. Another reason was a second noise—much fainter—which I had never heard before, and which quickened my curiosity. It was a mixture of sighing and whistling, but sometimes broke into a sort of bark. Not a dog’s bark but something more drawn out, and more amused than affronted. It appeared to originate on the coast below.
The captain heard it too, which he showed by cocking an eyebrow and indicating we should walk on, and discover the origin of this strange music. It seemed a simple decision, but it marked a profound change in our mood. In fact, I might even say that while I could not entirely forget my fears for Natty, the next several minutes were the happiest of any that I spent on the island. The wind pressed gently against my back and drove me forward. The sun was warm as an English summer. The downward slope was easy. The talk … I cannot remember the talk, only that the captain and I were together, and did not say anything to break our mood of exaltation.
As we came toward the coast at last, the trees ended and the land began to dip more steeply, but in a succession of shallow natural steps, which must have been carved by the wind as it carried off the soil from one layer of rock and laid it on the one adjacent. This rock was pure black, and inhospitable to all but the smallest plants, such as sea campion and harebell; these had seeded in crevices, and now clung quivering as the wind blew across them.
When we reached the foot of the cliff we instantly recognized our sirens. The beach was narrow, and made of stones that had been rolled by the sea until they were almost perfectly circular. And reclining on these stones was a colony of sea lions. Several were fully as large as the captain himself, with skin that was wrinkled and dark brown around their heads, but greenish as it became sleek on their bodies. The large males had whiskers that made them look very fierce, yet they seemed completely accepting of our approach; the females and especially their pups wore the most appealing expressions, with mouths set in a continuous smile, and eyes—large and clear—gazing into my own with remarkable kindliness.
When I say they were reclining, I hardly do ju
stice to the posture of these creatures, since although each was forced by its lack of arms and legs to remain horizontal, each was nevertheless marvelously active with its flippers, and lumbered gleefully toward us as we approached.
“I reckon they’ve not seen anything like us before,” the captain said. He spoke quietly, since he did not want to alarm them, but was so obviously correct in his assessment, there was no question of us seeming a danger, even to the males. They trusted us completely, and sometimes even nuzzled us with their noses as we began walking among them. I could not help feeling this was one of the great privileges of my life, and wanted to praise God for granting it to me. I suspected the captain would think this excessive, so I confined myself to patting their tight flanks, and occasionally their heads, which always produced an eruption of barks and honks among the pups. Whether they thought we were very fine or very ridiculous, I did not want to decide.
The encounter gave us such a powerful sense of contentment, we continued strolling up and down the beach until we had greeted every family, and allowed every parent to introduce every child. And when we had finished our diplomacy, we still felt no appetite for a swift return to our own world and the troubles it contained. Without either of us needing to explain to the other what we were doing, we sat on a rock with our baskets and sticks at our feet, and stared out to sea. We had no reason to do this, beyond watching the waves roll toward the shore, and feeling our minds turn into stones as smooth as those around us, and noticing how the sun kept its heat longer today than yesterday, and how the seabirds fished, and other such important trifles.
When I had dallied in this way for long enough to wonder whether I might turn into a statue unless I moved, I suggested to the captain that we might like to swim and refresh ourselves. He looked at me sideways. When I asked him why, he told me (in a manner that was surprisingly awkward, considering our relative positions in the world) it was not because he feared any dangers in the water, but because he could not swim.
I told him I had heard this was common among sailors, which he did not deny, though neither of us liked to mention the reason or to think of Jordan Hands, and how he had proved the adage. But after sharing this embarrassment for a moment, and remaining beside him in silent contemplation of the waves, I nevertheless asked for his permission to go alone.
It was only when I had hobbled over the stones and reached the edge of the water that I noticed I had not seen any of the sea lions do as I was about to do. This, I told myself, was because their day was divided into separate activities, as a human community’s might be, and our arrival had coincided with their time for resting and not for hunting or playing. The minute I stripped off my shirt, however, and limped into the water, one of the larger pups—an animal about the same size as myself—decided I was proposing a game we might play together, and squirmed off his stones to join me.
It is a commonplace to say how creatures that are cumbersome on land are capable of great dexterity in their own element—and so it was with my companion. A body that had been heavy in rest now became acrobatic in play, and a brain that had been sluggish or idle, now seemed very agile. My own body, by comparison, felt extremely incompetent. This was because I was suddenly drawn into a powerful undertow, that ran where the waves drained back into the deep again, once they had broken on the beach.
Within a minute of entering the water I was at least thirty yards offshore, and doubted whether I had the strength to return. The change was as quick and shocking as that. I began to struggle hard, with no more result than a good deal of salt water flooding into my nose and panic squeezing my heart. For a moment, I really believed the price I would have to pay for my glimpse of paradise would be to see nothing more in this world. I began to say good-bye to my father and to Natty, and to revisit for the last time some of the places I had loved, such as the marshes behind the Hispaniola, which now appeared to me in vivid glimpses, tinged with their authentic blue light.
I supposed this was proof I must already be drowning—which was confirmed by what I could see of the captain. In a hazy distance that greatly diminished his height and bulk, he was running along the beach, flinging his arms about and shouting. This alarmed the sea lions so much, they began a formidable honking, which I heard in snatches whenever my head bobbed above the waves. He later told me he had been saying: Let the current take you; don’t fight against it—because he believed I would then be swept around the northern tip of the island, as my father had been in his coracle, and eventually come to a place where I might easily swim ashore. At the time, my confusion and fear were so great, I was not able to follow this sensible advice, but continued to pitch all my strength against the sea, although I knew it must soon drag me down.
By now I had entirely forgotten the fellow creature that had come with me into the water. But as my body began to tire, and a film covered my mind, his shining head rode through the waves beside me. To judge by the friendliness of his expression, and the mewing noises he made, he found the game that I was playing to be highly entertaining—but at the same time sufficiently alarming (being accompanied by a great deal of splashing) to persuade him to keep at a respectful distance.
As my movements slowed, this fearfulness disappeared and he swam closer. I saw his eyelashes were beaded with water drops, and heard his breath snuffling in his nose as his nostrils opened and closed. These, I genuinely believed, would be my last sights of the earth, apart from the dark-blue water into which I was sinking.
Except, as my descent began, and I lost my connection with everything in the light, my companion was no longer content merely to watch, but wanted to position himself underneath me. In fact, he had managed to stand upright on his tail in the water, with the whole length of his body pressed against my own. His skin felt slippery, but not so much that it was impossible for me to hold and grip him. I understood that he meant the next part of our game, which he had only this minute invented, should involve me putting my arms around him—which I did. He then gave another flick or shrug as he passed from the vertical to the horizontal, and I found that I was lying on top of him, with my head resting on his back, my body trailing along the ridge of his spine, and my arms joined around what I would have called his chest if he had been a man.
During the minute it took him to carry me back to shore, I was so preoccupied by coughing the ocean out from my lungs, and sucking the air into them, I was hardly able to notice anything about the journey. I do recall, however, that on the beach ahead of me the other pups were giving loud barks, which I took to be encouragement. Even more clearly, I remember the feeling of wonderment rushing through me in successive waves, each of which had their own peculiar feeling of buoyancy.
I have called my rescuer a companion. Had he been such a thing in the usual sense, I should have thanked him with all my heart, and promised to do as much for him, should the need ever arise. As it was, no such things were possible. When he had brought me a few yards from dry land, where I could easily reach the stones again, he gave another quick shudder which released me into the shallows—while he withdrew into the deeper water. There was no particular look in the eyes, only the same blank friendliness for as long as the head stayed in sight, then the empty waves when it slid below. The action that to me meant life to my companion meant nothing—or nothing that I could understand. It was therefore not his but the captain’s chest I leaned against as soon as I was able, and into which I sobbed my relief and thanks.
26
My Life Before Me
THE QUESTION IS one of accommodation. How does a mind create space for so large a thing as the clear sight of death? It was not a question that troubled me while I lay on the beach, hauling the life back into my lungs. I was too exhausted for thinking. But as my breathing steadied, and the world became clear again, my thoughts began traveling in two different directions at once. One part searched for significance in what I had endured, and longed to know how it fed my affection for life—and especially my feelings about my father and Nat
ty, who had appeared so vividly to me. Another part of me wanted to fix entirely on matters at hand—and for the time being, at least, this approach seemed best. The captain and I had work to do, and attention to detail was an essential part of it.
After we had retraced our steps to the Nightingale, the captain’s first duty was to store our baskets and their contents in his cabin—in the same chest where he kept our pistols, which had a lock and key. Then he summoned me, along with Bo’sun Kirkby and other shipmates, to parley in the roundhouse. The history of my recent escapade did something to lift spirits, but once I had turned myself back from a fish to a man for the third or fourth time, the miracle of my rescue seemed commonplace; the unhappiness of losing both our treasure and Natty flooded over us once again.
I had never seen the men so listless and miserable as they were now. The cook, Mr. Allan, whose talk generally bubbled like a boiling pot, stood by one of the windows and said nothing, but watched the rain clouds that by now were sweeping across the wide gray mouth of the river. Mr. Tickle even forgot to light his pipe, although he did sometimes pat his beard, as if fire might have broken out there by spontaneous combustion.
To give my friends the credit of seeming anxious as well as thwarted, I should also say they were preoccupied by thoughts of tomorrow, and how they would perform the roles allotted to them. Although the captain was very decisive in reminding everyone of their duties, we could not safely predict their result, nor entirely reconcile our wish to recover the silver with our wish to right the wrongs that had been done on the island. Maybe we would become barbarians ourselves, if we punished the barbarity of the pirates? Maybe we were no better than them, in wanting to gratify our desire for wealth?
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