“Don’t worry, though, we’ll find him even if we have to take this whole island apart. There isn’t going to be any repetition of what happened when the Spaniards came.”
But though they searched all of the following day, and for several days afterwards, there was no sign of Professor Nordhurst. The Governor ordered all of the natives to make a search in any of the secret places known to them, but without avail. The only possible explanation was that the Professor had vanished off the face of the island as if he had never existed.
For six weeks, while the search continued, excavations were made at various points on the island. Some evidence to support Mitchell’s theory was turned up, but with Nordhurst’s mysterious disappearance, there was no sense of triumph in this. Now that the chief antagonist of his ideas had vanished, he lost all interest in the expedition. He was strangely glad when the time came for them to leave.
As the anchor rattled metallically up the sides of the ship, Mitchell stood on deck, leaning against the rail, staring at the dim greenness of Easter Island. Through the powerful binoculars, he could make out the various landmarks which he had grown to know so well. Halfway up the wide slope was the isolated figure of the statue they had dug out of the ground, exposing the entire body for its tremendous length of sixty feet. Around it were others, still standing there or lying on their faces. He moved the binoculars gently from side to side, studying the faces with a detached interest.
That there was some mystery, there was not any doubt but—
His thoughts gelled in his head. His hands shook so violently that he could scarcely hold the glasses steady as he stared at the vast stone face, the only one looking out to sea, the face of Nordhurst as he had seen him just before he had vanished.
THERE ARE MORE THINGS
BY JORGE LUIS BORGES
ON THE POINT OF TAKING MY LAST EXAMINATION AT THE University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm at the far end of the South American continent. I felt what we all feel when someone dies—remorse, now pointless, for not having been kinder. We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. My course of study was philosophy. I remembered that it was my uncle, at the Casa Colorada, his home near Lomas, on the edge of Buenos Aires, who, without invoking a single proper name, had first revealed to me philosophy’s beautiful perplexities. One of the after-dinner oranges was his aid in initiating me into Berkeley’s idealism; a chessboard was enough to illustrate the paradoxes of the Eleatics. Years later, he was to lend me Hinton’s treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space and which the reader is meant to imagine by means of complicated exercises with multicoloured cubes. I shall never forget the prisms and pyramids that we erected on the floor of his study.
My uncle was an engineer. Before retiring from his job with the railroad, he decided to build himself a house in Turdera, which offered the advantages of almost country-like solitude and of proximity to the city. Nothing was more predictable than that the architect should be his close friend Alexander Muir. This uncompromising man followed the uncompromising teachings of John Knox. My uncle, like almost all the gentlemen of his day, had been a freethinker or, rather, an agnostic, but he was interested in theology, just as he was interested in Hinton’s unreal cubes and in the well-constructed nightmares of the young H. G. Wells. He liked dogs, and he had a great sheepdog that he had named Samuel Johnson, in memory of Lichfield, his far-off birthplace.
The Casa Colorada stood on a height of land, bordered on the west by sun-blackened fields. Inside its fence, the araucarias did nothing to soften its air of gloom. Instead of a flat roof, there was a slate-tiled saddle roof and a square tower with a clock. These seemed to oppress the walls and the meager windows. As a boy, I used to accept all this ugliness, just as one accepts those incompatible things which, only because they coexist, are called the world.
I returned home in 1921. To avoid legal complications, the house had been auctioned off. It was bought by a foreigner, a Max Preetorius, who paid double what was offered by the highest bidder. No sooner was the deed signed than he arrived, late one afternoon, with two helpers and they carted off to a rubbish dump, not far from the old Drover’s Road, all the furniture, all the books, and all the utensils of the house. (I sadly recalled the diagrams in the Hinton volumes and the great globe.) The next day, Preetorius went to Muir and proposed certain alterations that the architect indignantly rejected. In the end, a firm from Buenos Aires took charge of the work. The local carpenters refused to furnish the house again. Finally, a certain Mariani, from Glew, accepted the conditions laid down by Preetorius. For an entire fortnight he had to labour by night behind closed doors. It was also by night that the new owner of the Casa Colorada moved in. The windows no longer opened, but chinks of light could be made out in the dark. One morning, the milkman found the sheepdog dead on the walk, headless and mutilated. That winter they felled the araucarias. Nobody saw Preetorius again.
News of these events, as may be imagined, left me uneasy. I know that my most obvious trait is curiosity—that same curiosity that brought me together with a woman completely different from me only in order to find out who she was and what she was like, to take up (without appreciable results) the use of laudanum, to explore transfinite numbers, and to undertake the hideous adventure that I am about to tell. Ominously, I decided to look into the matter.
My first step was to see Alexander Muir. I remembered him as tall-standing and dark, with a wiry build that suggested strength. Now the years had stooped him and his black beard had gone grey. He received me at his Temperley house, which, foreseeably, was like my uncle’s, since both houses followed the solid standards of the good poet and bad builder William Morris.
Conversation was sparse—Scotland’s symbol, after all, is the thistle. I had the feeling, nonetheless, that the strong Ceylon tea and the equally generous plate of scones (which my host broke in two and buttered for me as if I were still a boy) were, in fact, a frugal Calvinistic feast offered to the nephew of his friend. His theological differences with my uncle had been a long game of chess, demanding of each player the collaboration of his opponent.
Time passed and I was no nearer my business. There was an uncomfortable silence and Muir spoke. “Young man,” he said, “you have not come all this way to talk about Edwin or the United States, a country that I have little interest in. What’s troubling you is the sale of the Casa Colorada and its odd buyer. They do me, too. Frankly, the story displeases me, but I’ll tell you what I can. It will not be much.”
After a while he went on, unhurriedly. “Before Edwin died, the mayor called me into his office. He was with the parish priest. They asked me to draw the plans for a Catholic chapel. My work would be well paid. On the spot, I answered no. I am a servant of God and I cannot commit the abomination of erecting altars to idols.” Here he stopped.
“Is that all?” I finally dared to ask.
“No. This whelp of a Jew Preetorius wanted me to destroy my work and in its place get up a monstrous thing. Abomination comes in many shapes.” He pronounced these words gravely and got to his feet.
* * *
Outside, on turning the corner, I was approached by Daniel Iberra. We knew one another the way people in small towns do. He suggested that we accompany each other back to Turdera. I have never been keen on hoodlums, and I expected a sordid litany of violent and more or less apocryphal back-room stories, but I gave in and accepted his invitation. It was very nearly nightfall. On seeing the Casa Colorada come into view from a few blocks off, Iberra made a detour. I asked him why. His reply was not what I anticipated.