Cloud Atlas (3 page)

Henry’s stance was ambivalent, to say the least. “After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race’s agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages’ sufferings by
hastening
their extinction? Think on your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?”

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

Tuesday, 12th November
—

Our noble Cpt. Molyneux today graced the
Musket
to haggle over the price of five barrels of salt-horse with my landlord (the matter was settled by a rowdy game of
trentuno
won by the captain). Much to my surprise, ere he returned to inspect the progress in the shipyard, Cpt. Molyneux requested some confidential words with Henry in my companion’s room. The consultation continues as I write. My friend has been warned of the captain’s despotism, but still, I do not like it.

Later
—

Cpt. Molyneux, it transpires, suffers from a medical complaint which, if untreated, may impair those divers skills demanded of his station. The captain has therefore proposed to Henry that my friend voyage with us to Honolulu (victualing & private berth gratis), assuming the responsibilities both of Ship’s Doctor & personal physician to Cpt. Molyneux until our arrival. My friend explained he had intended to return to London, but Cpt. Molyneux was most insistent. Henry promised to think the matter over & come to a decision by Friday morning, the day now set for the
Prophetess’s
departure.

Henry did not name the captain’s illness, nor did I ask, though one needs not be an Aesculapian to glean Cpt. Molyneux is a slave to gout. My friend’s discretion does him much credit. Whatever eccentricities Henry Goose may exhibit as a collector of curios, I believe Dr. Goose is an exemplary healer & it is my zealous, if self-serving, hope that Henry returns a favorable answer to the captain’s proposal.

Wednesday, 13th November
—

I come to my journal as a Catholick to a confessor. My bruises insist these extraordinary past five hours were not a sickbed vision conjured by my Ailment, but real events. I shall describe what befell me this day, steering as close to the facts as is possible.

This morning, Henry paid Widow Bryden’s hut another call to adjust her splint & reapply poultice. Rather than submit to idleness, I resolved to scale a high hill to the north of Ocean Bay, known as Conical Tor, whose lofty elevation promises the best aspect of Chatham Isle’s “backcountry.” (Henry, a man of maturer years, has too much sense to tramp unsurveyed islands peopled by cannibals.) The tired creek who waters Ocean Bay guided me upstream through marshy pastures, stump-pocked slopes, into virgin forest so rotted, knotted & tangled, I was obliged to clamber aloft like an orang-utan! A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden. I spied a “Robin Black-Breast” whose plumage was tarry as night & whose tameness bordered on contempt. An unseen
tui
took to song, but my inflamed fancy awarded it powers of human speech:—”Eye for an eye!” it called ahead, flitting through its labyrinth of buds, twigs & thorns. “Eye for an eye!” After a grueling climb, I conquered the summit grievously torn & scratched at I know not What o’Clock, for I neglected to wind my pocket watch last night. The opaque mists that haunt these isles (the Aboriginal name Rēkohu, Mr. D’Arnoq informs us, signifies “Sun of Mists”) had descended as I ascended, so my cherished panorama was naught but treetops disappearing into drizzle. A miserly reward for my exertions, indeed.

The “summit” of Conical Tor was a crater, a stone’s throw in diameter, encircling a crag-walled depression whose floor lay unseen far beneath the funereal foliage of a gross or more
kopi
trees. I should not have cared to investigate its depths without the aid of ropes & a pickax. I was circumambulating the crater’s lip, seeking a clearer trail back to Ocean Bay, when a startling
hoo-roosh!
sent me diving to the ground:—the mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms, thus I glimpsed first a tusked hog charging, then a Maori warrior, spear held aloft, his face inscribed with the ancestral hatred of his race.

’Twas but a mollyhawk, wings “flupping” the air like a windjammer. I watched her disappear back into the diaphanous fog. I was a full yard shy of the crater’s lip, but to my horror, the turf beneath me disintegrated like suet crust—I stood on not solid ground but an overhang! I plunged to my midriff, grasping some grasses in desperation, but these broke in my fingers & down I plummeted, a mannikin tossed into a well! I recall spinning in space, yelling & twigs clawing my eyes, cartwheeling & my jacket snagging, tearing loose; loose earth; the anticipation of pain; an urgent, formless prayer for help; a bush slowing but not halting my descent & a hopeless attempt to regain balance—sliding—lastly terra firma careering upwards to meet me. The impact knocked my senses out of me.

Amidst nebulous quilts & summery pillows I lay, in a bedroom in San Francisco similar to my own. A dwarfish servant said, “You’re a
very
silly boy, Adam.” Tilda & Jackson entered, but when I voiced my jubilation, not English but the guttural barkings of an Indian race burst from my mouth! My wife & son were shamed by me & mounted a carriage. I gave chase, striving to rectify this misunderstanding, but the carriage dwindled into the fleeing distance until I awoke in bosky twilight & a silence, booming & eternal. My bruises, cuts, muscles & extremities groaned like a courtroom of malcontent litigants.

A mattress of moss & mulch, lain down in that murky hollow since the second day of Creation, had preserved my life. Angels preserved my limbs, for if even a single arm or leg had been broken I should be lying there still, unable to extricate myself, awaiting death from the elements or the claws of beasts. Upon regaining my feet & seeing how far I had slid & fallen (the height of a foremast) with no worse damage to my person, I thanked our Lord for my deliverance, for indeed, “Thou calledst in trouble, & I delivered thee; I answered thee in the secret place of thunder.”

My eyes adjusted to the gloom & revealed a sight at once indelible, fearsome & sublime. First one, then ten, then hundreds of faces emerged from the perpetual dim, adzed by idolaters into bark, as if Sylvan spirits were frozen immobile by a cruel enchanter. No adjectives may properly delineate that basilisk tribe! Only the inanimate may be so alive. I traced my thumbs along their awful visages. I do not doubt, I was the first White in that mausoleum since its prehistoric inception. The youngest dendroglyph is, I suppose, ten years old, but the elders, grown distended as the trees matured, were incised by heathens whose very ghosts are long defunct. Such antiquity surely bespoke the hand of Mr. D’Arnoq’s Moriori.

Time passed in that bewitched place & I sought to effect my escape, encouraged by the knowledge that the artists of the “tree sculptures” must earn regular egress from that same pit. One wall looked less sheer than the others & fibrous creepers offered a “rigging” of sorts. I was readying myself for the climb when a puzzling “hum” came to my attention. “Who goes there?” I called (a rash act for an unarmed White trespasser in a heathen shrine). “Shew yourself!” The silence swallowed my words & their echo & mocked me. My Ailment stirred in my spleen. The “hum” I traced to a mass of flies orbiting a protuberance impaled on a broken-off branch. I poked the lump with a pine stick & nearly retched, for ’twas a piece of stinking offal. I turned to flee, but duty obliged me to dispel a black suspicion that a human heart hung on that tree. I concealed my nose & mouth in my ’kerchief & with my stick, touched a severed ventricle. The organ pulsed as if alive! & my scalding Ailment shot up my spine! As in a dream (but it was not!) a pellucid salamander emerged from its carrion dwelling & darted along the stick to my hand! I flung the stick away & saw not where that salamander disappeared. My blood was enriched by fright & I hastened to effect my escape. Easier written than done, for had I slipped & plunged anew from those vertiginous walls my luck may not have softened my fall a second time, but foot holes had been hewn into the rock & by God’s grace I gained the crater’s lip with no mishap.

Back in the dismal cloud, I craved the presence of men of my own hue, yes, even the rude sailors in the
Musket
, & began my descent on the nonce in what I hoped was a southerly direction. My initial resolve to report all I had seen (surely, Mr. Walker, the de facto if not de jure Consul, should be informed of the robbery of a human heart?) weakened as I approached Ocean Bay. I am still undecided what to report & to whom. The heart was most likely a hog’s, or sheep’s, surely. The prospect of Walker & his ilk felling the trees & selling the dendroglyphs to collectors offends my conscience. A sentimentalist I may be, but I do not wish to be the agent of the Moriori’s final violation.
*

Evening
—

The Southern Cross was bright in the sky ere Henry returned to the
Musket
, having been detained by more islanders seeking to consult “Widow Bryden’s Healer Man” on their rheums, yaws & dropsy. “If potatoes were dollars,” rued my friend, “I should be richer than Nebuchadnezzar!” He was concerned by my (much edited) misadventure on Conical Tor & insisted on examining my injuries. Earlier I had prevailed upon the Indian maid to fill my bath & emerged much recruited. Henry donated a pot of balm for my inflammations & refused to take a cent for it. Fearing this may be my last chance to consult with a gifted physician (Henry intends to refuse Cpt. Molyneux’s proposal), I unburdened my fears vis-à-vis my Ailment. He listened soberly & asked about the frequency & duration of my spells. Henry regretted he lacked the time & apparatus for a compleat diagnosis, but recommended, upon my return to San Francisco, I find a specialist in tropical parasites as a matter of urgency. (I could not bring myself to tell him there are none.)

I slumber not.

Thursday, 14th November
—

We make sail with the morning tide. I am once more aboard the
Prophetess
, but I cannot pretend it is good to be back. My coffin now stores three great coils of hawser, which I must scale to attain my bunk, for not one inch of floor is visible. Mr. D’Arnoq sold half a dozen barrels of sundry provisions to the quartermaster & a bolt of sailcloth (much to Walker’s disgust). He came aboard to supervise their delivery & collect payment himself & bid me Godspeed. In my coffin we were squeezed like two men in a pothole, so we repaired to the deck for it is a pleasant evening. After discussing divers matters we shook hands & he climbed down to his waiting ketch, ably crewed by two young manservants of mongrel race.

Mr. Roderick has little sympathy with my petition to have the offending hawser removed elsewhere, for he is obliged to quit his private cabin (for the reason stated below) & move to the fo’c’sle with the common sailors, whose number has swollen with five Castilians “poached” from the Spaniard at anchor in the Bay. Their captain was the portrait of a Fury, yet short of declaring war on the
Prophetess
—a battle sure to bloody his nose, for he pilots the leakiest tub—he can do little but thank his stars Cpt. Molyneux required no more deserters. The very words “California Bound” are dusted in gold & beckon all men thitherwards like moths to a lantern. These five replace the two deserters at the Bay of Islands & the hands lost in the tempest, but we are still several men short of a full crew. Finbar tells me the men grumble over the new arrangements, for with Mr. Roderick lodged in their fo’c’sle, they cannot yarn freely over a bottle.

Fate has dealt me a fine compensation. After paying Walker’s usurous bill (nor did I tip that scoundrel a cent), I was packing my jackwood trunk when Henry entered, greeting me thus:—”Good morning, Shipmate!” God has answered my prayers! Henry has accepted the post of Ship’s Doctor & I am no longer friendless in this floating farmyard. So ornery a mule is the common sailor that, instead of gratitude that a doctor shall be on hand to splint their breakages & treat their infections, one o’erhears them moaning, “What are we, to carry a Ship’s Doctor who can’t walk a bowsprit? A Royal Barge?”

I must confess to a touch of pique that Cpt. Molyneux afforded a fare-paying gentleman such as myself only my lamentable berth, when a more commodious cabin lay at his disposal all along. Of far greater consequence, however, is Henry’s promise to turn his formidable talents to a diagnosis of my Ailment as soon as we are at sea. My relief is indescribable.

Friday, 15th November
—

We got under weigh at daybreak, notwithstanding Friday is a Jonah amongst sailors. (Cpt. Molyneux growls, “Superstitions, Saints’ Days & other blasted fripperies are fine sport for Popish fishwives but
I
am in the business of turning a profit!”) Henry & I did not venture on deck, for all hands were busy with rigging & a southerly blows very fresh with a heavy sea; the ship was troublesome last night & is not less so today. We passed half the day arranging Henry’s apothecary. Besides the appurtenances of the modern physician, my friend owns several learned volumes, in English, Latin & German. A case holds “spectra” of powders in stoppered bottles labeled in Greek. These he compounds to make various pills & unguents. We peered through the steerage hatch towards noon & the Chathams were ink stains on the leaden horizon, but the rolling & pitching are unsafe for those whose sea legs have vacationed the week ashore.

Afternoon
—

Torgny the Swede knocked on my coffin door. Surprized & intrigued by his furtive manner, I bade him enter. He seated himself upon a “pyramid” of hawser & whispered that he bore a proposal from a ring of shipmates. “Tell us where the best veins are, the secret ones you locals are keeping for yourselves. Me ‘n’ my fellows’ll do the pack work. You’ll just sit pretty & we’ll cut you in a tenth share.”