I shrugged, ceding to his argument. “OK,” I said, “no heroics. We go, we reconnoiter, and at the very first sign of hostility, we withdraw.” I spoke sourly, but I knew David was right to insist on caution. We were two middle-aged brothers, one of whom wanted to be a bishop, and though an atavistic part of me still wanted to tear the Genesis community apart, common sense suggested we would be hopelessly outgunned and savagely outfought if we took on von Rellsteb’s group with our two ancient rifles.
David, seeing my disappointment, smiled. “If we’re lucky,” he tried to console me, “we’ll find Nicole without any complications.”
So, rigged with cautious good sense, we sailed on.
We sailed through the scenery of a suddenly limpid and serene paradise. The wind was dying, and, denied its power, our sails flapped impotently. David went below to make lunch, and, impatient to make progress, I started Stormchild’s motor.
By the time we had eaten our meal of pickles, cold salted pork, bread and margarine, the tide had turned against us and Stormchild was struggling against a surge of water that poured between two dark headlands which, if my chart was correct, marked our passage into the Desolate Straits.
“Not long now,” I said nervously. Our wake was a slash of reflected sunlight against the suddenly dark water.
There was no sign of the Genesis community’s presence in these waters; it seemed as though David and I were the first people ever to invade this wilderness. We passed between the twin headlands and the channel widened once more. The water swirled darkly past our hull as kelp geese and black-necked swans paddled desperately away from our intrusion. David, dividing his attention between the birds and the chart, suddenly pointed to a long hilly stretch of land that lay beyond a low rocky promontory and said that, unless he very much missed his guess, those spiky hills were part of the Isla Tormentos.
I stared at the jagged skyline and thought of Nicole in a burst of sudden, incoherent, and utterly unexpected joy. I was near to rescuing my daughter, and surely all the old love that had been so strong between us would revive when we met, and my heart was so full of love and hope that I dared not express myself for fear of weeping. Nicole, Nicole! I had crossed a world to find her, and now she was so close, and I felt nothing but a welling of love and expectation. David, sensing my feelings, stayed silent.
We turned eastward to cross a wide stretch of open water, then turned southward again into the Desolate Straits proper. In one of the pilot books David had brought from England I had read that the straits took their name from the false hope they offered a mariner. They seemed to promise a sheltered deep-water route clear down to the Land of Fire, while in reality they were merely a long inlet that stretched into the very heart of the Isle of Torments and, once in that stony heart, came to a blind and bitter end. A skipper, thinking to save himself a hard outer passage, but finding, instead, that he had wasted a day’s sailing only to reach a dead end, would call these deceptive straits desolate indeed.
Yet here the channel ran straight and inviting. Stormchild’s engine purred sweetly, driving her across the now mirror-smooth water, on which our wake fanned in gorgeous silver ripples. To port a black cliff spilled a thin stream of falling white water, while to starboard a slope of sun-drenched trees ended at a beach of white stones. The landscape dwarfed our boat and overwhelmed our senses.
“It’ll be nice to see old Nickel again,” David awkwardly broke our silence. He had always been fond of Nicole; it had been David, rather than Joanna or myself, who had taught Nicole to sail, and who had first discovered her fierce ambition. David had harnessed that ambition to dinghy racing and often said that, if her brother’s death had not skewed her life, Nicole would have achieved what David himself had so narrowly missed: a place on Britain’s Olympic sailing team. Nicole, David always maintained, was simply the finest sailor he had ever seen.
“She’ll be surprised to see us!” I said. Our conversation was stilted because neither of us could match with words the apprehension we felt for the approaching moment. “Perhaps,” I said to cover the clumsiness of our feelings, “we should take in the sails?”
We stowed the canvas. I was becoming increasingly nervous as we came closer to the bay, which had been marked as the site of the Genesis settlement on the charts in Captain Hernandez’s office. Fine on Stormchild’s starboard bow we could see a rocky headland crowned by a row of wind-splintered pine trees, and, if the Captain’s chart was right, the Genesis community lived just beyond that promontory.
David propped the rifle against the folded spray hood, then stooped to light his pipe. “I hope we don’t have to use violence,” he said nervously, then laughed. “Dear Lord, but I sound just like the American girl, don’t I?”
The thought of Jackie gave me a sudden and astonishing pang, but then even Jackie vanished from my thoughts as Stormchild cleared the pine-topped promontory and there, like an evanescent dream given unexpected shape and solidity, was the bay where the first von Rellsteb had made his settlement.
“Oh, God,” I murmured, and it was a prayer of thanks as well as a plea for help, for sunlight was dazzling us where it reflected from a windowpane. For suddenly, in one of the last wildernesses of earth, we had found the straight lines of human habitation. There was smoke above a roof. There was a rank smell that was the stench of people.
Stormchild had brought us to Genesis.
I had always imagined the von Rellsteb settlement would be graced by a grand Victorian farmhouse with carved eaves, turrets, and wide verandas. Common sense had told me that no house built to withstand the Patagonian weather could possibly have an exterior as fussily detailed as my imagined Victorian mansion, but nevertheless the fancy had persisted so that when I did at last see the building I felt an immediate disappointment, for it looked like nothing more than a range of overlarge and decaying farm sheds.
The ugly house and its ragged extensions stood in the shelter of a semicircle of low steep hills and above a lawn that sloped down to the bay’s shingle beach. The house, which faced eastward toward the water, was made of a limestone so pale that it looked like concrete. It was an immensely long and disproportionately low house of only two stories, but with sixteen windows on each of those two floors. The house might not have looked as grand as my Victorian fancy had embroidered it, but the first von Rellsteb had certainly built large. Had he imagined a slew of grandchildren pounding down his long, echoing corridors? The building, except for its size, was otherwise unremarkable, unless one took exception to the bright red corrugated iron roof through which a dozen stone chimneys protruded. Two of those chimneys showed wisps of smoke, betraying humanity’s presence.
The house had two single-storied wings, one to the north and the other to the south. Those two extensions each added sixty feet to the long facade of the house before they turned at right angles toward the protective western hills, presumably making a huge three-sided yard at the rear of the house. The two wings were built in the same pale stone as the house and roofed with the same ugly sheet metal. The only structure that in any way matched my original expectations was a cast-iron gazebo, incongruously like a park bandstand, that stood in front of the house to offer anyone sitting in its shelter a long view down the Desolate Straits. The gazebo was an inappropriate touch, like a clown’s red nose stuck on the waxy face of a corpse, and its existence added to the sense of unreality that assailed me as we motored farther into the bay. All around the settlement were vegetable gardens, which, even in this day’s cheerful sunlight, looked forlorn and unproductive, while on the steep ridge that lay a half mile behind the buildings was a tall, slender radio mast that was strongly guyed against the island’s fierce winds.