Finally, the rain softened and slowed to a drip. George guessed it was now maybe late afternoon, but the clouds above the trees were still black and heavy. Sara knew they ought to keep searching while they had the chance, but beyond exhausted, she lay down in the first clear area and wondered how they’d survived.
“We’re going to be fine,” George said. “The important thing is we’re not hurt.”
Sara tried to take comfort in this, but to her the important thing seemed more to be that they were still very lost. She couldn’t imagine getting up now and starting to look for the trail. If they were missing for a long time, she imagined, it might be in the news. At least locally, back home — which meant 7News Boston now, not NBC 4 New York. She looked over at George, lying on the wet ground beside her, staring up at the edge of the great, gauzy sun, now beginning to beat through the clouds. She could tell it was soon going to be brutally hot. George looked completely shot. And she was sure he hadn’t the faintest clue where they were now.
“For fuck’s sake,” she heard him saying. “Irene!”
Sara looked over, in the half-hope that Irene was actually there, that she had appeared in the midst of all this madness to lead them out. But George was pointing not to some ghost but to his backpack. It was up ahead, half sticking out of a bush, nowhere near where they had left it. There was no pebble beach or stream anywhere nearby. Someone had found it and tried to walk off with it, then realized it was much too heavy and tossed it into the bush. George’s dry clothes, the liquor bottles, and all his other supplies were gone, but Irene, or her urn at any rate, was still there. Sara dug around in the pack and found two granola bars that had fallen to the bottom. They ate them without speaking. The thief had also — thank God — left behind the guidebook, the little gift shop compass and the very soggy map from the chalet. As she shook these carefully to dry them out, George smacked at the compass, which had gotten water inside and was now cloudy. Inside, the needle seemed to spin freely. He paced around as if he were looking for cell reception, then gave up and began studying the map.
“Any idea where we’ve gotten to?” she asked.
George laid a finger down on a small bend in the river marked “Bettes,” a little ways off the marked path. “This was where we left our stuff. On the pebbly beach. Then we walked this way a little while and came back along here…” He traced the path with his thumbnail.
“What time is it?” Sara asked.
“I have no idea. How long were we walking?”
“We couldn’t have been going that long,” she repeated, looking again at the map.
They peered around at the rocky cliffside, hoping to spot one of the red and white trail markers.
“Let’s say at most we were walking around for an hour. Moving maybe two or three miles an hour, given the conditions?”
As Sara watched, he cautiously spread his fingers out to measure three miles. Then he set his thumb down on the pebble beach and rotated his hand around this point. It was a huge area, filled with all kinds of strange squiggles and shapes that she couldn’t identify on the map key.
“So… basically, we could be anywhere in here?” Sara said.
“Basically.”
George climbed up on some nearby rocks to get a better view, but he couldn’t make out any significant features. The sun had come out from the clouds between two barren cliffs along the horizon, but neither had any houses or roads that he could see — only some old, falling-down link fences along the white rock shores and the occasional cluster of sun-baked trash.
“I think this way is the best option,” George said. “Where there’s litter, there’s bound to be a path, or people.”
But there were no people, and there was no path. By the third cliff, Sara was beginning to doubt they could even find their way back to the stream. The next set of rocks turned out to be an extension of the previous one, and still there were no signs of civilization.
“I don’t understand,” she cried. “There were dozens of hikers out here with us this morning. Now nobody?”
George took out the map again, and scrutinized it. “None of this adds up at all,” he shouted.
He tried tracing little circles on the map representing the distance to the horizon, as far as the eye could see before the earth curved away. Wherever he saw a clump of rocks, he traced a circle, until it was covered with possibilities. He began to feel dizzy. They had not had their lunch and he could only assume their cheese, the wine, and Sara’s pack were all long gone.
“Sara, what’s left in the canteen?” he shouted.
“It’s about half full,” she said. “Goddammit. We should have refilled it at the stream.”
George shook his head. “I think we’re cursed.” He was dying for a real drink. Usually by now he’d have had at least his first of the day, and this had been a far more stressful day than most. He kissed Sara on her sunburned forehead and continued studying the map.
There was no key, and he wondered what any of it meant. The small purple triangles marked what he presumed were mountains: la Blache and Clau and Mandarom, with numbers next to them. 1725, 1549, 1667. At first he thought these were dates, but no, more likely altitudes. Only standing where they were, all the mountains loomed equally huge. And there were dozens of them! Some had no names at all, only numbers.
“What are you doing?” Sara called from where she was resting.
“This goddamn map doesn’t make sense! Nothing’s where it should be.”
“How can things not be where they should be?”
“They can’t. But they aren’t.”
Then Sara was screaming. She had spotted someone in a white shirt, moving through the woods down below them, maybe a mile away. George joined her as she hurtled down the slope, trying to get to the only person she’d seen in an hour before they somehow disappeared. It was a person — she was sure of it — a pale, angry man with a voluminous white beard, who as he became aware that they were bearing down on him, rushed quickly in the other direction.
George called out to him to “stop, slow down, wait!” When at last they got within a hundred yards of the old man, Sara waved her floppy white hat at him. “Sir! Sir! S’il vous plaît. Please! Could you help us? Help… um. George, what’s the French word for ‘help’? How do I say, Which way is it to”—she paused, not sure where they even wanted to get to anymore—“town. La ville! Am I saying that right? Is it ‘vil’ or ‘veal’?”
George had no idea, and the little man was yammering in French so quickly that she couldn’t even tell when one word ended and the next began. From the way his face pinched up at them, she could guess that he was in no mood to help them. He continued to duck around the trees and scowl.
“Allez-vous en!” he shouted, terrified. “Je veux être laissé seul.”
“Help!” George yelled at him, waving both hands. “We’re… WE ARE LOST!”
“He doesn’t understand,” Sara shouted. “George! The guidebook has travel phrases. On the back cover. Back cover.”
As George dug inside the pack to find the guidebook, Sara tried to beg the little man, who shouted at her in French as he tried to get away.
“Please. We’re Americans. We’re lost! Americans? Lost!”
The man picked up a rock and hurled it at her, and it fell halfway between them.
She screamed and hid behind a tree. “We don’t want to hurt you!” she shouted. “We need to find Point Sublime!”