“Did you see him under there?” asked Ashbless, taking a nip from his flask. He offered it to Latzarel who waved him off, declining to respond to his question.
“I must communicate with him!” said Latzarel, comparatively dry and sucking down coffee a half hour later. Ashbless laughed and started to say something facetious regarding Latzarel’s plunge into the deep, but the professor cut him short with a look.
“But what’s the submarine doing out there?” asked Edward, poking at the fire with a stick. “What’s it hovering offshore for? How do we know this merman wasn’t off the submarine? Some sort of reconnaissance mission.”
“If they’ve got submarines,” asked Ashbless, “why bother bringing mermen? Seems redundant.” He smiled at Edward.
“I’m sure it was Giles,” Jim put in. “There was more than just my seeing him. I think he called my name.”
Professor Latzarel nodded theatrically. “I suppose it might have been,” he said. “But it’s far more likely a common merman, one of the crowd that’s been putting in an appearance. What sort of wild coincidence would it be if Giles had, somehow, slipped off into the sea — we know his father went in for it there toward the end — and, with a million square miles of ocean to swim in, he turned up here on the same weekend as us? It just won’t wash.”
“Unless he was aboard the submarine,” said Edward. “This is more than just casual mermen. I might have been carried away by the fog, but I distinctly felt that something strange was in the air tonight, something …” He paused and squinted at Latzarel as if hoping that his friend would supply the missing phrase as William had once before. Ashbless beat him to it.
“Something fishy,” he said.
“Well, yes, rather.” Edward packed tobacco into his pipe. “I’m not sure you’ve caught my meaning yet. For a moment there I could have sworn I was underwater myself. It was uncanny.”
“Hmm,” said Latzarel, staring at the fire. “I think I follow you …”
“It’s a matter of fog, gentlemen,” said Ashbless. “I’m telling you that it does things to a man. It’s like darkness — exactly like darkness. We’ve got to be able to see. That’s it in a nutshell. If we can’t see we’ll people the darkness with hobgoblins — dream things. It’s a simple business. We’re always twice as frightened of what might be there as of what is. Now a poet, mind you, has harnessed his imagination. He has to, if he wants it to work for him. Poetry isn’t a matter of letting go, it’s a matter of taking hold of the reins. What we have tonight, gentlemen, is an easily explained scientific phenomenon — a combination of warm air and cold ocean water. Fog. Humidity to such a degree that water precipitates out of the air. Simple business, really, that generates neither ghost ships nor lost friends.” He smiled at Jim in a fatherly way, as if to assure him that the seeming hallucinations were entirely normal, given his age and his not yet having reined in his imagination.
Jim was struck with distrust for him — a distrust that reminded him at once of John Pinion and that generated a sudden rush of suspicion, a certainty almost, that Ashbless was having them on, playing them false. Uncle Edward wasn’t satisfied either. He winked at Jim and shook his head minutely. Professor Latzarel, however, could see sense in the poet’s rationality. He far preferred the condensation of moisture to ghost ships. And the thought of a real submarine, floating off the tip of the island, watching them, complicated an already strange pursuit beyond his ability to deal with it so late on a cold night with his shirt scratchy from the dried salt on his skin and his hair seeming to grow wetter by the moment in the fog. Tomorrow would be time enough to think of ghost ships.
Chapter 11
The night passed without further adventure; and the morning dawned clear. By eight, Edward and Professor Latzarel were skimming round the headland in the rowboat while Jim clambered up into the hills again to explore. Ashbless stayed in camp to sleep, having been up all night pursuing the arts.
Winter rains had soaked the cliffside and tumbled rock and brush down toward the ocean, piling it up like a little vertical delta above the high-tide line. The jagged ends of rocks jutted out into the air, threatening to crumble and slide, cascading no end of Paleozoic cephalopods and fossilized seaweeds into a dusty heap. Edward searched the face of the cliff with binoculars, while Professor Latzarel played out rope tied to a lead ball that sank deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Edward swept the binoculars along, peering past long shadows thrown by the morning sun that lay out over the sea. What he expected to find, he couldn’t say. Perhaps nothing. It reminded him of a time when he was a lad of thirteen and had gone out searching for stones in the desert — rubies, emeralds, he didn’t know what — and found among a tumble of black and gray rock a clump of quartz crystals as big as his hand.
He began to fancy that he could see, among the shadows of ridges of the hillside, shapes that suggested the bones of prehistoric beasts — the cocked hat of a peering tricerotops, the shark-toothed back of a stegosaurus — but it was likely that he was merely being tricked by shadows cast by a scattering of clouds that drifted across the sun, deepening the patches of dark, suddenly veiling formations that had stood out clearly moments before in the long lines of strata.
It occurred to him that the cliff face, falling away into the sea to unguessed depths, might well be a sort of vertical road that wound into the earth on the one hand and angled into the stars on the other, along which he could descend into the past, wandering past a fragile layer of Cenozoic debris and into the Mesozoic, an age of winged reptiles and vast cycad jungles that had sprung from 300 million years of fern marshes and misty Paleozoic seas teeming with fish lizards and toothed whales. Deeper into the earth, well along toward the hollow core, would come the age of fishes, of weird, jawless, armored creatures that crept sluggishly along the weedy bottoms of Silurian seas, disappearing into the Cambrian age of algae and trilobites and brachiopods, scurrying pointlessly, like bugs, for a hundred million years that followed a billion years of nothing at all, of black ooze and unicellular plants, traces of which lie buried deep beneath the seas, lost in geologic antiquity.
Edward realized that he was staring at nothing through his binoculars. He focused on a wave-washed grotto at the base of the cliff, hung with rubbery seaweed that would be under three or four feet of water in an hour’s time. It reminded him immediately of the grotto at Lourdes, and he half expected to see the Virgin appear in a halo of sea mist. What he saw instead was a corpse — pale and bent double at the waist, deposited on the rocks by the previous tide. He nudged Latzarel, who was ecstatic over just having played out the last of a thousand feet of line.
“What is it?” asked Latzarel. “This is monumental. We’ll need the bell. We’ve got … “
But Edward shut him up, handed him the glasses, and pointed toward the grotto. Latzarel took a quick look, shouted, and scrambled for the oars. A moment later their little rowboat bobbed in among the rocks, rising and falling on the swell. Edward clung to heavy stalks of seaweed, trying to steady the boat. The air smelled of salt spray and barnacles and of a deep putrescent odor that rose off the pale body. It looked as if ocean water had filtered in between layers of skin, separating them and swelling them out until the thing was puffy and bloated and threatened to bubble apart. Edward half expected it simply to disintegrate in a swirl of rotted bits. He was indifferent to it as a scientific discovery; it was as a signpost that the decayed merman interested him most, an indicator that the dark ocean water heaving beneath them was the mouth of a river to Pellucidar.