The Last Ship (12 page)

Barker’s head came up from the sea. “Rocks to port!”

“Stop the boat, Coxswain.”

“Aye, sir,” and we came swiftly dead in the water.

I went forward, flopped down by Barker and stretched out over the bow. I could see the rock formation to port, mean and jagged looking, enough to stove in the bottom of something much stronger than our boat. Then I leaned far over and looked to starboard. All appeared clear. I raised up on an elbow.

“Nice eyes, Barker,” I said. “Coxswain!”

“Sir!”

“Take her twenty degrees to starboard. Dead slow. Steady as you go.”

“Twenty degrees to starboard,” I heard come back. “Dead slow. Steady as she goes.”

The boat turning, we crept in, both Barker and I sprawled alongside, our eyes hard and intent through the sea. The water showed cleanly to starboard until abruptly, beyond, loomed another rocky ridge. I raised up on my elbow and yelled back.

“Stop engine!”

The boat went instantly dead. I stuck my head out again and, with Barker, peered through the water. I could see the sand beginning to slope upward. It appeared we were in a tiny channel between two rocky protuberances. I raised back up.

“What do you think, Barker?”

“I think it’ll take the boat, sir. Just.”

“So do I. Coxswain! Ten degrees to port. Take her in.”

“Ten degrees to port,” came back at me and we inched in. My eyes and those of Barker tracked the bottom, Barker to port, myself to starboard, never leaving it. Then we could feel the boat bump up against the shore. We raised up. We saw ourselves perched on a patch of sand with the boat squeezed neatly between large rocks on either side, the beginnings of the underwater formations. Barker took a long breath.

“Just fits, sir.”

“Make her fast,” I said.

The sailor jumped out, taking the painter with him, and secured the boat to one of the rocks. I debarked onto the sandy apron. I looked the length of the boat at Meyer, still in her pulpit, hand on the wheel.

“A fine piece of work, Coxswain.”

“Sure looks close enough.” Her voice carried her disapproval still of this risk to her boat.

I stood and took a bearing on our surroundings. Up and down the beach, formations of high rock cliffs stretched far as eye could see. I looked upward at our own cliff, having to crane my neck far back to the hurting point to do it, for the cliff rose straight and high immediately above us, then near the top arched out to overhang us. I turned and looked to either side of the cliff. Northwest the cliff continued unbroken into the distance. On the other side, to the south, I could see where we were at a small break in the cliffline. Here a narrow ladder of earth went upward alongside the rock. I strained around and examined it. It looked steep, not much off the vertical, but trees grew from it, moderate-sized trees continuing to the heights. They could be our pulleys. I looked back at the boat.

It seemed secure enough there and I pondered. By rights I should leave someone with it: simply good seamanship. But for very particular reasons of my own, and ones I wished not to disclose, I wanted both of them with me. I wanted to see what it was like up there. But if it looked in any way possible, I wanted them to have seen it, too. Both of them. I wanted to get his reaction and I wanted to get her reaction. Possessives I seldom thought about in relation to my crew, except just of late. I had begun my careful and tricky preparations—how cunning does feed on itself! Nothing more quickly becomes a habit, a very way of life. I was finding that out. I think my ship’s company would have every tendency to believe a report brought them by their captain. But such a report brought as well by their own: It would not hurt. I decided. The boat was not going to wedge itself out from between those rocks. I craned again, gazing up the cliffside; turned back.

“Let’s all have a look up there,” I said. “I think we can get up with the help of those trees.”

Meyer looked surprised. I imagine she wanted to go. But she was coxswain of this boat. It was her boat.

“All of us, sir?”

“Yes, I know, Meyer. The boat will be all right. Let’s shove off.”

She looked still hesitant. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed, not evaluated, and certainly not discussed.

“Did you hear me, Coxswain?” I said more sharply. “Let’s move it.”

“Aye, sir. May we give her another mooring, sir?”

“Very well,” I said shortly. “If you must.”

“Barker!” she snapped out. She was already throwing the line.

The startled Barker caught the line, having to jump to do it, and secured it to the opposite rock, affording the boat a double mooring.

“I suppose you’d like to put over the anchor, too,” I said, not meaning it.

“A very good idea, sir.” She scrambled around in the boat’s bottom, came up with it, and heaved it astern, where it hit water with a loud splash.

“Are you satisfied, Coxswain?”

“I think probably she’ll be all right now, sir.”

I looked at her. “Actually you were right, Meyer,” I said, a bit tersely. “Never leave a boat unattended. If you must, do everything to secure her.”

“I thought so, sir.”

I gave her a sharp look. She was straight-faced.

“Now
shall we ascend?”

I led us around the cliff to the tree-laced earth just to its side. I started up. It was hard going, but the trees were sturdy enough and frequent enough that you could get ready purchases to pull yourself upward. I looked back to see Meyer just below me and Barker just below her. They were doing as I was doing, digging their feet hard into the angled earth, reaching out then for a tree, finding a handhold, pulling themselves to the tree, pausing there, digging their feet in, then passing themselves to the next tree. We hoisted ourselves up tree by tree. I could feel the sweat and the twitch in my thighs. Patches of broken sunlight came flickering down through the trees and I heard a bird squawk. They probably had nests in those rock cliffs. They had made them here rather than on the island’s windward, unprotected side. Those tern nests on the eastern shore had been summer-house breeding nests. Their real homes were here. Birds had their own built-in Beaufort scales, better than anything man knew. They must have seen high winds, and doubtless hurricanes, on the island, and being sensible creatures had situated their homes where they were properly sheltered. I held to a tree, getting breath. I looked back and saw Meyer holding on to another tree below me. I could hear her quick breathing.

“Are you all right, Coxswain?”

I started to reach out a hand, but caught myself. Looking at her I knew it was not a thing to do.

“Just fine, sir,” came back at me, quite briskly. “No problem.”

She looked below her. “Barker?”

I could just make him out beyond her, also holding on to a tree.

“All’s well down here,” I heard him call up. His voice had a panting edge to it. “I think.”

He stumbled momentarily and I saw her reach a hand quickly down to him.

“Come on, Billy,” she said, and yanked him vigorously up. I was surprised at a number of things: the strength in that taut little body as she gave a hand to such a bigger one; the sudden softness of concern and of entreaty, if insistent, in her tone; and even the name she called him—it had always been “Barker!” usually with an exclamation point and a certain rasp.

We moved upward, through the darkness and toward the sunlight, quite slowly, sweating, climbing steadily, working our way as we sought tree holds, pausing and gasping for breath, then upward again. An odd matter of defenses crossed my mind: Anything up there would certainly be invulnerable to attack of whatever kind. It was almost by surprise that we found ourselves stepping out onto the top, and onto a broad smooth rocky shelf that surmounted the cliff like a pie plate. We stood there breathing hard. Straight down, far below, we could see the boat fastened snugly in her rocky moorings. Then, having regained breath, we looked up and down the island. Then, one on each side of me, together we gazed out to sea.

Sea and sky lay in an impossible solitude, in a comradeship of palest blues. Not a whisper of wind stirred, not the smallest strip of cirrus broke the towering vault of blue arching over the other mighty blaze of blue beneath. The sea stood naked: Not an object, not a speck flawed the surface, north, south or west to a horizon so distant you felt you could see the curve of the planet. Nothing, nothing but the infinity of blue, the great waters standing in awesome serenity, in all majesty, voiceless save for a lone and rhythmic susurration where they met the rocks below. You felt it must have been like this in the beginning, before God spoke to these waters and decreed earth. The sea looked the one immortal thing ever created, alone everlasting where all else, sooner or later, passed away; regnant, sacramental, only and true queen of the universe. I thought how the earth was seven-tenths ocean and that in that sense it belonged to sailors more than to anyone else, a thought which strangely lifted me. I felt I was gazing at eternity itself. Perhaps all along, from the beginning, only the sea had been meant to endure.

We stood there looking for what must have been minutes. Not a word was spoken and for that I felt an intense closeness to the two fellow seamen alongside me. But along with this came an overpowering sense of aloneness, as if there were only us on all the earth; an aloneness that seemed to speak to us, saying that all we had was ourselves and so must cling to and love one another, shipmates. And suddenly there was comfort, a kind of healing, in that. I thought one thing more, like a light of divination. The sight, what it gave to one, seemed an omen. Sailors believe strongly in omens. We must, with such as that, have come to a place meant for us.

“Let’s have a look,” I said.

We turned around. We stood facing a forest of high trees, a forest broad both ways down the cliffs, the trees standing in august and serried ranks as far as we could see into it, and ahead of us to a depth we could not make out. The trees, soaring toward the sky, were grander by far than anything on the eastern side of the island, shamelessly flourishing in their proud greenness and of a guardsman-like straightness. They had obviously stood here over unnumbered years, against any kind of weather. The sunlight flashed down through them, dancing off their emerald leaves, the long dazzling shafts of whiteness bathing their columns in a stateliness cathedral like.

“Let’s see what’s in there,” I said.

“Oh, yes, let’s,” Coxswain Meyer said. There was such unaccustomed eagerness in her voice, such unwonted girlish excitement, that both Barker and I laughed. Under the checkered sunshine, spilling through the high branches, we walked into the radiant stillness, between the trees and through the forest, hearing our padded steps on the soft forest bed, Barker and myself bracketing the coxswain, hardly reaching to the shoulder of either of us. Now and then the trees broke, presenting sizable clearings of the forest floor, with patches of bright lime-green grass decorated here and there with small blue and yellow wildflowers. We stopped in one and looked up, the fulgor of light tumbling down on us from the lavish encircling green. I had a sense of pure beauty all around me, undefiled, healing in its texture, stilling troubled souls. Now into that deep peace came up, high overhead, a freshening of breeze from off the sea, surprising in its nature, telling us of a west wind on the island not before known to us that brought a gentle and palliating coolness across the high cliffs; a soughing wind, trembling the upmost branches and leaves, sending them singing sweetly in the stillness. Meyer’s head was craned back, looking high into that green and sunlit vault. She had taken off her sailor’s hat and her hair stirred in the wind, her upturned face softened, transfigured.

“I’ve never seen a place so lovely,” she said, her voice soft, hushed in the green silence, a wonder in it. “Do you think anyone has ever been here, Captain? Could we be the first ever to see this?”

It was the same question Barker had asked on the beach on the other side when first we set foot on the island.

“I don’t know. I’d guess yes.”

And yet—there is a feeling one has about such things. In this instance, that men had been here, even been here recently. An eerie feeling one had in that direction. And something more, never stated—that they were still here somewhere in the dark breadth of this land, somewhere between the place we now stood and the other side of the island where the ship lay—jungle wilderness home to them, impenetrable to us. It was a daydream—or a nightmare. I put it away as nonsense. Certainly, whatever it was, it was the last thing I should trouble any of my crew with now.

“I don’t think any human eye ever saw any of this,” I said, quite firmly. “We’re the first.”

We moved forward again, farther into the forest. We could not have gone far when we first heard it, somewhere up ahead of us, a low murmuring of sound.

We stopped and looked at one another, all alert. The sound was too far in to be of the sea and besides it clearly came from ahead, not behind. No one spoke. Then we resumed walking, very slowly, instinctively bearing off a little to follow it, hearing it grow spectrally larger. Then, the sound still mounting though never truly loud but like a steady humming, the forest came to a break, the land appeared to end as if sliced off. We stood startled, and a bit shaken, rather more than less afraid, on an edge, looking far down.

“Good Lord,” Barker said. “Captain.”

Below us lay a sudden deep green valley.

“Look!” Meyer said, and her arm came up.

At what appeared to be the head of the valley, a waterfall, embraced in arms of green, shining white in the sunlight flashing off it, came tumbling over a cliff. It was not wide, perhaps twenty feet across, not loud and angry but rather curling over the high place in a kind of lulling sweetness of intonation and for a remarkable drop until it found earth, and there far below formed a circular pool. From the pool we could see a strong stream emerge, so clear-bottomed in the light glittering through the high trees that overhung it that we could see the shining rocks there, cutting its way, with a distant, gently rippling timbre, down the valley until it disappeared in the thickening forest. We looked back at the waterfall. Now and then a breath of sea breeze, sliding between the trees and through the forest, played across it, sending out a gentle spume. I looked back down the valley.