Galapagos Regained (60 page)

The rocket whooshed skyward, attaining an altitude of at least a hundred feet. Within five seconds the fire consumed the propellant, then ignited the map fragment, so that the nose cone exploded in a brilliant shower of sparks. A spontaneous cheer went up from all nine miners.

“Not the Star of Bethlehem,” said Mr. Chadwick, “nor even Halley's Comet, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.”

“
Mon Capitaine,
I congratulate you,” said Chloe to Léourier. “Between your airship and your rocket, I have never known a man so adept at defying gravity.”

*   *   *

The instant Léourier got them back home to Hood's Isle, landing the
Lamarck
on the southern shore, the miners burst out of the carriage and plunged into the surf, washing away the encrusted filth of the day's labors. Not since her immersion in the copper washtub at the Hotel da Borboleta Azul in Manáos (the three Arauaki women dissolving the residue of her voyage up the Rio Amazonas) had Chloe taken such pleasure in the act of bathing. Although the sea lions did not appreciate this invasion of their private beach by human beings, they made no attempt to shoulder the intruders aside but instead confined their hostility to irate stares and roars of annoyance.

The following morning the miners returned to Chatham Isle and resumed their troglodytic agenda. Despite the sweltering heat and the sporadic bat attacks, they extracted from the cavern enough guano to fill a second slopeback shell. As evening came to the Encantadas, Léourier declared that by his calculation they'd reaped the necessary ten pounds.

Back on Hood, Chloe realized that the forthcoming spectacle required a carefully wrought
scenario
. Given the success of her Lost Thirteenth Tribe masquerade, the task of structuring the eruption must obviously fall to her—and so that night she drifted off to sleep imagining an ineluctable progression from act one, “The Smoldering Summit,” to act two, “The Exploding Pumice,” to act three, “The Flying Stones.”

Wednesday found the vulcaneers boarding the
Lamarck
and flying to Indefatigable Isle on a threefold mission. Whilst Chloe wandered through the lowlands, harvesting bamboo shoots with the help of Cuniche, Nitopari, and Pirohua, the other Indians searched for supplementary guano in the cliff-side caves, even as Mr. Chadwick and Léourier attempted to persuade the Governor of his Christian obligation to reprieve the convicted defendants. Each initiative played out as Chloe had anticipated, her own team leaving Indefatigable toting a sack of rocket bodies, the guano party carrying off a full bucket of explosive material, and the vicar and the aeronaut bearing away distasteful memories of their encounter with Stopsack.

“He insists that clemency is out of the question,” Mr. Chadwick told Chloe as the flying-machine carried them home.

“I wonder if he'll dare show his face at the executions.”

“Not only does he plan to attend, he claims he'll do so with a clear conscience,” said the vicar. “As he puts it, ‘If Christians forbear to excise the cancer of blasphemy here in Galápagos, the tumor will spread throughout the Empire.'”

The vulcaneers devoted Thursday to assembling their ordnance. Owing to the Huancabambas' skillful hands, a pyrotechnic cottage industry soon emerged on Hood's Isle. To produce each bomb, Léourier required the Indians to stuff a prickly-pear cactus pad with a presumably optimum quantity of guano—enough to heave a boulder towards Mephistropolis, though not so much as to endanger anyone in the exercise yard—and by the noon hour thirty such devices filled a vacant shack.

Skyrocket production proceeded less efficiently. At one point the vulcaneers ran short of nose-cone material, the
Lamarck
having but a half-dozen maps on board and the leaves from Chloe's Bible being too flimsy to hold scoops of guano. But then Mr. Chadwick observed that the thick and creamy pages of “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” might accomplish the job.

Although there was no question that the treatise must be sacrificed, Chloe regarded this prospect with bittersweet emotions. Watching the Huancabambas smothering shite in evolutionary theory, she recalled the anxious night she'd copied the sketch by candlelight at Down House, back when Miss Annie was a healthy child and the Albion Transmutationist Club not yet born.

Friday was given to strategizing. The team agreed that Mr. Chadwick should station himself atop Mount Pajas, the perfect vantage from which to orchestrate the illusion. As the volcano erupted, Chloe and Léourier would exploit the pandemonium, piloting the
Lamarck
towards the scaffold and spiriting away Ralph and Solange.

There remained the task of rigging the mountain in accordance with the
scenario
. Under cover of twilight Chloe and her friends took off for Charles Isle in the
Lamarck,
accompanied by Cuniche, Nitopari, Pirohua, and Ascumiche, the gondola jammed with thirty bamboo skyrockets, as many cactus-pad bombs, and two pots of guano for the fuses. Léourier skillfully guided the overburdened flying-machine across Villamil Quay, touching down in a wooded area, its soaring palms and
palo santo
trees presumably shielding the balloon from the scrutiny of prison guards and Minor Zionists.

After gathering together bundles of dry sticks and mounds of wet seaweed, the vulcaneers made a series of moonlit ascents, bearing the ordnance up the north face of Mount Pajas. Once the rockets and bombs were deposited at the peak, Léourier and the four Huancabambas set the stage for act one, “The Smoldering Summit,” ringing the crater with twenty stacks of kindling, each topped with enough sodden kelp to guarantee an ominous quantity of smoke. Léourier next turned his attention to act three, “The Flying Stones.” Descending a dozen paces to a broad outcropping of hardened lava, he decorated the ropy terrain with guano fuses, the white lines traversing the shelf like frosting on a hot-cross bun. At each intersection he and the Indians placed a cactus bomb surmounted by a boulder, so that when the axial fuse was lit the mountain would seem to disintegrate, hurtling pieces of itself towards the penal colony.

Whilst the aeronaut and the Huancabambas labored on the slopes, Chloe and Mr. Chadwick took up turtle-oil lanterns and climbed into the crater. The stench of sulphur suffused the cavity: the Devil's anteroom, mused Chloe—the foyer of the Inferno. Gingerly they moved along the jutting ledges of frozen lava, securing the bamboo projectiles with tuff and cinders, the nose cones all pointed towards the mouth of the volcano and the starry sky beyond. The vicar ran a stripe of guano from each rocket engine to the master fuse, which the
scenario
required him to ignite at the beginning of act two, “The Exploding Pumice.”

Considering the bleakness of their surroundings, this pit of ashen air and black rock, the last thing Chloe expected just then was an evocation of a sun-drenched and amorous moment from
Siren of the Nile—
Antony sauntering through an outdoor market in Alexandria, composing a love poem aloud. But soon it became clear that Mr. Chadwick would not leave the crater ere its walls resounded with his heart's deepest longings. “Might we return to the night you endorsed Stopsack's scheme for winning the Byssheans' gold?” he asked. “Responding to your question about Miss Bathurst's fate, I averred that her death had caused me considerable grief. That sentiment was utterly sincere. The simple fact, dear lady, is that I am smitten with you.”

“There was indeed a time when I believed that taking the ark to Oxford would serve humankind's best interests,” said Chloe, sidestepping the vicar's protestation.

“Once we are back in England, I hope you will become my lifelong companion,” Mr. Chadwick persisted. “True, my future is hardly auspicious. No income, no property, no prospects. And yet, were you to marry me, my dear Chloe—may I call you ‘my dear Chloe'?—I should count myself the happiest of men, sworn to making you the happiest of women.”

Her tongue grew palsied. No word of reply gained access to her lips. She found Mr. Chadwick's proposal at once poignant and ridiculous, touching and bumptious, but to share any of those adjectives with him just then would be to start a conversation she did not wish to have. She merely said, “You may call me ‘Chloe' but not ‘my dear Chloe.'”

“Am I to infer you are spurning my proposal? You will not become my bride?”

“I am gratified by your attentions, Reverend,” she replied, scanning the web of guano fuses for fractures, “but at present I can think only of my friends' predicament.”

“Should tomorrow's escapade cause you harm, I shall take solace in knowing that tonight I spoke my mind.”

“What is your meaning, Mr. Chadwick?” she snapped. “If you find yourself attending my funeral service ere long, you'll imagine it's really our wedding? That's not a very romantic thought.”

“Obviously I picked the wrong time and place to raise this subject. You are preoccupied.”

At last he'd made a sensible remark. She was preoccupied—and she remained so when, shortly after two o'clock in the morning, the mountain being primed and ready, the vulcaneers descended to sea level.

Upon her return to Villamil Quay, Chloe considered inhaling
epená
to hasten her passage to Morpheus's domain, then decided against it, having consumed such extravagant quantities during the final hours of
Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn
. Instead she harvested a dozen palm fronds and spread them across the gondola floor to create a luxurious mattress. Stretching out along her new bed, she soon found herself astride a winged dragon as it wheeled above Léourier's lost city, melting the golden spires with its volcanic breath, a dream that needed no interpretation.

*   *   *

The Reverend Granville Heathway was a pigeon priest in both senses of the term. He was a priest who happened to raise pigeons—and he was gifted in ministering to a rock dove's deepest spiritual needs. The soul of a pigeon was for Granville as accessible as its feet. Thus it happened that Heathway's Columbine Carnival proved a great success, an awesome spectacle of birds walking on tightropes, diving into pails of water, pirouetting in pairs as their teacher whistled a waltz, and playing cricket using a grape for the ball and a paintbrush for the bat.

Amongst the carnival's patrons was Dr. Earwicker, who afterwards asked Granville to conduct bird-training classes for the other inmates. Though flattered by this invitation, he declined, being loath to abandon the security of his immediate accommodations. For it happened that the scarecrows were on the march again, sweeping westward from Wellingborough and Ecton, and there was no safe haven in Warwickshire except the cell he called home.

Against the odds, Charlemagne returned. Somehow the indomitable courier had slipped past enemy lines and found his way to the dovecote. In light of Bertram's previous missive, with its woeful account of the Diluvian League's loss and Miss Franklin's death, Granville steeled himself for sorrowful tidings—and yet Charlemagne had brought an uplifting message.

Dearest Father,

I am writing to you from Paestum on the southern coast of Italy. Shortly after we departed Constantinople, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple decided that, rather than sailing directly for England, we should spend a day rambling about the ruins of this Greco-Roman city, famous for its archeological treasures. Such a respite would do us a world of good, he insisted, salving the pain of our failure to procure the ark.

“In recent weeks,” Mr. Dalrymple told the
Paragon
's assembled company, “I have searched my soul as extensively as we scoured the slopes of Ararat, asking myself, ‘Why did we not find the Relic of Relics?' Now I see the answer. Over the years God has favored Mankind with three incomparable gifts: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a disposition to believe that both are true. For Him to have proved His existence through the ark would be tantamount to His taking away that third great blessing, faith. Our recent disappointment is in fact a species of gospel, good news. It merely
seemed
to be malspel, bad news—or, rather, it was malspel only for those unworthy of following our Savior in the first place.”

We began our explorations with the Temple of Neptune, a remarkably well-preserved structure in the Doric style, the architraves and pediments still
in situ
. Our group then strolled to the adjacent Basilica, another Doric
tour de force
—though I cannot fathom how a name indicating a Roman secular building became attached to a Greek temple.

I now abandoned our party and hiked on my own to the isolated Temple of Ceres, the city's third Doric masterpiece, where I enjoyed an extraordinary encounter with a German philosopher. As a young man, Herr Doktor Schopenhauer had traveled throughout Italy, and now at age sixty-three he was pleased to find himself in Paestum again.

Upon inquiring about my own journey, Schopenhauer became greatly excited to hear that my
Paragon
companions were Shelley Prize contestants who'd hoped to find and exhibit Noah's ark. Pulling a manuscript from his valise, he explained that, having read of the Great God Contest in a German-language newspaper, he'd recently composed a short essay for Lord Woolfenden's eyes.

“As the world's greatest living philosopher, I felt obligated to inform the Byssheans that their competition is misguided,” Schopenhauer explained. “Personally, I've never had much use for the God hypothesis, unless by ‘God' we mean Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or Spinoza's inscrutable pantheist entity, which is hardly the quarry your Oxford
flâneurs
are after. Sift through my writings, and you'll find definitive rejoinders to the Ontological Proof and the Cosmological Proof. Evidently your Mr. Dalrymple was pinning his hopes on the Argument from Relics, but of course he failed to find the necessary artifact, the Deluge story being utterly fanciful.”