No island. No small insignificant guano-covered rock. I re-did all the navigational calculations, and they put us still on course.
Trox Island, when to my vast relief it at last appeared visibly on our starboard bow, looked at first only like a straighter, longer, white-breaking wave crest. I shook Kris’s arm and pointed ahead and downwards, and saw the unacknowledged anxiety clear in a flash from his forehead.
He grinned again, vindicated. He lowered the aircraft from two thousand feet down to a few hundred, circling the narrow strip of dark-looking land carefully so as not to lose sight of it in the increasing cloud. He’d been told by Robin of the existence of the landing strip but, look as we might, neither Kris nor I could distinguish it until he made an almost despairing pass across the narrowest width of land at no higher than three hundred feet, and again, as all my attention was looking for it, it was I who first spotted the indistinct flat road-like line along the centre length of the otherwise rocky strip. The runway, disconcertingly, was greenish-grey, not tarmac, and was made of flattened, consolidated earth, overgrown with grass.
Kris, seeing the rudimentary strip also, swung closely round and flew the whole length of it at barely more than a hundred feet off the ground, but to neither his eyes nor mine were there any rocks or any other obstructions along its length.
‘Robin swore we could land here.’ Kris’s voice through the headphones sounded more brave than convinced.
I thought that Robin hadn’t taken the fierce crosswind into account. Had Robin ever landed on the strip himself at all? Robin wasn’t a flier. But then, nor was I... but I did at least understand wind.
Hands gripping the control yoke, Kris with tension in his whole body increased the engines’ power to near maximum and flew round the island again, gaining height and coming in finally to land from the other end of the runway, still in a crosswind but at least this time with a passable on-the-nose component.
Fighting the gusts, Kris forgot to lower the wheels — his Cherokee at White Waltham had a fixed undercarriage — and he looked horrified for all of five seconds while I pointed silently at the three lights that should have been green, but weren’t. Three green lights, I’d once read in a flying book, meant that all three landing wheels were down and locked in the landing position.
‘God,’ Kris shouted, ‘I’ve forgotten the downwind checks. I’ve forgotten them all... Brakes off, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, propellers fully fine...’ His busy ringers set everything right... all, I guessed, except his self respect. ‘Harness buckled, hatches closed and locked, autopilot disengaged, as if I’d engaged the bloody thing in the first place, hold on, Perry, hold on, here we go...’
He made, in the circumstances, a commendably adequate landing, and I’d been in some commercial tooth-rattlers that had shaken one’s spine a great deal worse.
‘Sorry,’ he said, which was unlike him. He stretched his fingers, loosening the muscles. ‘I forgot those bloody checks!’ He sounded tragedy-stricken, ‘How could I?’
‘We got down. Stop fussing,’ I said. ‘What do we do next?’
‘Um...’ In an absentminded trance he could think of nothing but his oversights.
I tried again. ‘Kris, we landed safely, didn’t we? So here we are, safe.’
‘Well... yes. Have you looked at the altimeter?’
I hadn’t, but I did then. The millibar scale still read 1002, but the needle gave our altitude at sea level as minus 360 feet. When Kris wound the needle again to zero, the millibars had dropped to 990, and he gazed at this result as if mesmerised.
‘Well, we’re not staying here at the end of the runway for ever, are we?’ I asked. ‘So how about snapping out of it? There’s Odin, don’t forget.’
His awareness seemed to click at once back to normal and as if I were stupid to ask, he said, ‘We flew over some buildings when we came into land, didn’t you notice? So that’s obviously the place to start.’
He turned the aeroplane and taxied back the length of the grass-grown strip, ending on the edge of what looked like a small model village consisting of three or four white-painted wooden houses, several long low sheds fashioned from hemispherical corrugated iron, a tiny church with a spire, and two large solid-looking concrete huts.
‘Robin said the mushrooms grow in the corrugated iron sheds,’ Kris announced, jumping down to the ground, ‘so we’d better take a look.’
Unexpectedly, there were no locked doors. Also, as surprising, there were no people.
Final astonishment... no mushrooms.
I took a few photographs of no mushrooms.
There were long waist-height trays in the sheds full of compost containing oak-wood chips; and chanterelles at least, I knew, flourished in oak woods, their natural habitat. The air smelled musty and full of fungus spores. Nothing I could see or smell was worth the trouble of our travels.
Kris wandered about on his own, and we met at length in one of the thick concrete huts to compare notes.
No fungi of any kind.
‘Not even a bloody toadstool,’ Kris said in disgust. ‘And very little else.’
The houses were empty of people and were untidily furnished with clutter due for discarding. The church had had tablets on the white internal walls, but they had been unscrewed and removed, leaving rectangular darker patches. Water came supplied, not in the pipes provided, but in buckets lifted by ropes from rainwater underground tanks.
The hut we stood in, cool owing to windowless concrete walls about four feet thick, had once, we guessed, been living quarters of sorts. There were four plank bunk beds but no bedding, and there had once been electric lighting, but all that remained were wires coming out of the walls.
‘There’s another hut that looks as if it once held a generator,’ Kris said, and I nodded. ‘The mushroom sheds had climate control once,’ I said, ‘and an efficient-looking pumped sprinkler system.’
‘The whole place has been stripped,’ Kris sighed. ‘We’re wasting our time.’
‘Let’s look at the landing stage,’ I suggested, and we walked down a hill of dried mud from the village to a concrete and wood dock long enough for a merchant ship’s mooring.
Again, no people and precious little else. No ropes, no chains, no crane. It was as if the last boat out of there had cleared up everything behind it.
As for living things, apart from humans, there were hundreds of big dark blue birds with brown legs, thousands of all sizes of iguana and a large slow-moving mixed herd of cattle that wandered free, ate grass and paid us no attention.
I photographed the lot, but by the end was no nearer understanding what Robin intended us to do there or see, and was still a light year from the answer to why.
We’d landed on the island at fourteen minutes after eleven, and by the time we’d concluded our comprehensive but fairly fruitless wander around, it was more than two hours later.
The wind, that had been intermittently gusty since our arrival, suddenly strengthened into a steady gale from the north, alarming us both, as it meant the outer winds of Odin, cycling anti-clockwise, would be buffeting not only us mortals soon, but would be threatening also the aeroplane, which could look after itself in the air, but might be blown onto its back on the ground.
We ran, the wind strengthening all the time, and Kris, scrambling into his seat, made only sketchy checks for once before starting the engines, and the briefest of gauge inspections afterwards. Then he pointed the aeroplane’s nose more or less straight up the runway and opened the throttles to maximum.
The aeroplane shook with protest but at a low ground speed leapt into the air so fiercely that Kris was fighting with quivering wrists to keep the climbing attitude within safe limits, and although it was the worst minute for it, I thought of the hurricane hunters who had in the past disappeared without trace... and understood how it could have happened.