There was a whisper of wind, and the swirling fog wisped away briefly; a corridor of deep night air opened for one moment of amazing clarity, revealing the ghostly shadow of a strange, pale craft, half submerged, lying in wait out there on the sea. It looked like a white submarine, ancient and finned, a submarine from Atlantis, perhaps, lost in the fog. In an instant it vanished as a swirl of mist rose from the ocean. Jim couldn’t say whether the odd craft had simply slipped into the depths or if the depths had slipped over it, but a moment later, when the fog cleared again briefly, there was no submarine to be seen, nothing but the black, undulating surface of the ocean.
Latzarel didn’t like the sound of it when Jim related the incident. Ashbless wrote it off to imagination — the fog and the silence, he said, could get hold of a man’s mind. Fog hallucinations were common on the sea: ghost ships, mermen, impossible sea creatures, faces among the dark floating gardens of kelp — all of them fog figments. Edward, who’d joined them on deck, pulled his peacoat around himself and lit his pipe. It was equally possible, he said, that sea monsters and ghost ships ventured out in the fog by choice, that fog was a cloak of invisibility, or perhaps the atmosphere of their phantom world, leaking into our own, carrying with it no end of night shades and mist creatures.
Jim insisted that he’d seen what he’d seen. Whether it was a phantom he couldn’t say, but there it was. He suddenly thought to himself that if his father were there, he’d find a more rational explanation. Then the thought struck him as peculiar, not because of his father’s inflation of almost every innocuous event, but because that very inflation had come to seem to Jim to be rational. He peered out into the foggy ocean, watching for something, he didn’t know what: the reappearance of the shadowy submarine, or the floating, ghostly, weed-hung skeletons of a crew of dead mariners wandering just below the surface of the gray ocean.
Latzarel said that he’d turn in, and Edward decided to do the same. Jim followed them, suddenly preferring the contrived and unlikely plots of Fu Manchu to the strange things that might — who could say? — be drifting toward them on the tide. And beyond that, he could smell the thick musty aroma of Roycroft Squires’ amazing coffee wafting through the galley vent, the antithesis of phantoms, of obscuring mists. William Ashbless decided to stay on deck, drawn, as he was, to the atmosphere. He’d “keep watch,” he said, yanking on a stocking cap and producing pen and paper from beneath his coat. When Jim drifted toward sleep forty-five minutes later, it was to the sound of the murmuring conversation of Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel. The words submarine and Pinion and mermen floated past his ear, but he fell away into sleep, the objects of the conversation metamorphosing into the murky figures of a dream.
When he awoke, the sun shone. Remnants of fog lay on the horizon, dissipating in the light of day. Catalina Island, rocky and green, thrust up out of the sea amazingly close to them, and Jim wondered whether it had been there all night long, or had risen with the sun. Ashbless had spent the night on deck, wrestling with poetry, and had fallen asleep before dawn, having seen nothing of phantom submarines. He made a point of laughing the whole thing off, perhaps to allay Jim’s suspicions of deviltry. They rowed ashore after breakfast, hauling along cans of water and boxes of food. There was nothing but a handful of surprised goats on shore to greet them. Roycroft Squires waved farewell late in the afternoon and motored noisily toward the distant mainland, promising to return in four days.
So the adventurers found themselves abandoned on the rocky, chaparral-covered west shore of the island, and Jim for one had no idea on earth what it was they expected to find.
Professor Latzarel, however, hadn’t any doubts. He was off in the rowboat an hour after camp had been set up, unreeling his weighted rope into suspiciously deep pools. Uncle Edward, looking like a gaunt seal in a neoprene wetsuit, snorkeled atop the chilly waters, gazing down into the depths through forests of sun-dappled kelp until after a half hour or so he developed such a violent headache that he splashed ashore and fell asleep in his tent, having discovered nothing in the way of bottomless pits.
Latzarel rowed seaward some hundred yards or so into deeper water, plunking out his line, hauling it in, and plunking it out once again, drifting out of sight around a little headland in the current.
Jim climbed the steep hills behind the camp, skirting thick stands of scrub oak and prickly pear and pushing along through knee-high grasses. The perfume of broken sage rose around him on the still, warm air, and once he routed a peccary out of a thicket, the foolish beast snuffling away on its skinny little legs, grunting anxiously. He half expected to crest a hill and see below a farmhouse with a dark-haired woman tending pigs. If he did, he told himself, he’d venture in that direction just for the wonder of it, and see if he could resist her enchantment. But by the time he got to the summit, the sun was dropping toward the sea in the west. Below him stretched a valley, but there was no farmhouse there, only a half-dozen goats tripping away down the rocky hillside, frightened by his approach. He followed the crest of the hill, wrapping around toward the seaward side until he found himself on a precipice overlooking the thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean that separated him from the islands of Japan. Several hundred feet below he could see Professor Latzarel in his rowboat, pulling for home. He stayed in as close to shore as he could in order to keep out of the same current that had swept him round the headland two hours earlier. Jim decided to sit on the precipice and watch the sun go down, wondering if he could hike the mile or two he’d come in the half hour of twilight he’d have left. An approaching wall of fog, however, way off over the ocean, changed his mind abruptly, and he decided to forego the sunset.
He took one last look at Latzarel, who would, if he could maintain the pace, beat him back to camp. The water along the shoreline was remarkably clear and green, the rocks and kelp beds and shallows standing out as clearly as if he gazed at a watercolor painting and the rippling surface of the sea was brush strokes, hazing the absolute clarity of it. There seemed to him to be, almost exactly beneath Latzarel’s tiny craft, a patch of black water that contrasted utterly with the blue-green shallows that surrounded it. At first he thought it was a rock reef or a patch of dense kelp, but it had an odd regularity to it and such a black, nightlike color that he suspected it was a deep hole. He wondered if the professor had sounded it, perhaps on his voyage up the island. Jim picked up a rock and threw it out over the precipice. The rock seemed to fall into the island, dropping in among the brush of the hillside. The cliff face, apparently, looked far steeper than it was. He picked up a second rock and realized, just as he was drawing his arm back to let it go, that it was a curious looking rock altogether — that there seemed to be a picture painted on it. Before the thought could register, however, he’d let go of the stone, and it arced out toward the sea, plunging a hundred yards down the cliffside before disappearing silently into the weeds. More such rocks lay about — any number of them. The cliff seemed to be built of them, as if some fabulous giant stonemason had built it of slices of stone, each one containing the dark imprint of a fossil, a sort of prehistoric fish graveyard.
Jim began jamming them into his pockets, pulling them out and throwing them away almost immediately as he found better ones. He edged his way down a crack in the wall of the cliff, holding onto twisted branches of mesquite, chipping out fossilized seashells, conical homes of conchs and nautili, until finally, at the same instant he realized that the entire end of the island was bathed in orange fire from the enormous sun, half sunk in the sea, he yanked out a flat slab of stone in the middle of which was a perfect fossil trilobite, a creature out of time’s abyss. He emptied the fish out of his pockets and shoved the trilobite in, climbing back up to the summit as if he had a pocketful of eggs, and in the dwindling light set off down the crest. He could just see Professor Latzarel, a dot on the sea, pulling around the headland.