It was the wholly unexpected shock appearance of the creature’s jaw that caused Jenine to give an involuntary gasp. The upper jaw was a fixed part of the skull, and lower jaw was slightly open; both consisted of rows of wicked teeth, each tooth the size of a forefinger. The gaping maw looked large enough to bite either of them in half had it been attached to a live owner. As they stared aghast at the apparition, water, mud and sand vomited from the grotesque mouth and oozed from a pair of equally terrifying eye sockets like macabre rivers of sluggish, obscene tears.
Jenine’s horrified gaze went from the skull to the sea. “Do you suppose it’s got relatives out there?”
“Sure to have,” Ewen replied. “This could be a baby that got lost.”
Jenine said nothing. She put her shoulder to the thing and rolled it into the sea. It wallowed back and forth in the surf, the action of the waves flushing it clean. She waded after it and discovered, to her astonishment that she could lift it out of the water with little effort. The bone walls had been worn thin over countless years by the abrasive action of the sand and the sea. In some places, where Ewen’s foot had gone through, the walls were virtually transparent. The sight of her carrying such a huge object with apparent ease amused Ewen. She dumped it near him and they contemplated it in silence and awe.
“Can you even begin to visualise the size of its original owner?” Ewen asked.
Jenine looked at the sea and shivered. Suddenly she didn’t find the idea of a raft so attractive.
She helped Ewen to his feet. To his relief, he found that he could stand without too much pain, and walk with the aid of a sapling that Jenine uprooted. Obviously it was only a minor sprain. Before they set off back to the camp, Jenine dumped the great pot-like skull well clear of the sea. It might prove a valuable source of material for making bone tools that she had in mind.
PART 9. Flight.
1.
The sound of distant thunder rolling around the sky woke Ewen before dawn. He sat up and watched the point of light that appeared to be climbing into the void. He seen it before but this time he was certain that the phenomenon was man-made. The light and sound faded. It was usually still at this time of night, before the coming of the sun, but a sharp wind had risen and had caused the fire to burn itself out. All that was left was a bed of glowing embers. The fire was their guardian angel while they slept. For it to go out during the hours of darkness could spell disaster. He hobbled to their fuel pile and returned with handfuls of dried streamer seaweed that he added to the hot ashes. Although the fuel was dry, nothing happened for several seconds. The seaweed merely hissed menacingly. He waited anxiously and brightened the embers by blowing on them. The streamers curled in the heat and suddenly flared up, burning with a brilliant blue flame. That the stuff seemed to release some sort of organic gas was interesting, but it was important to ensure that the fire was okay. He added some palm fronds to the blaze and made sure that it was well-established before settling down beside Jenine. He watched her serene face for some minutes by the light from the fire, drinking in her loveliness. He felt a pang of guilt, bringing her here. No - that was wrong; they had come together. Without Jenine he would never have succeeded. Here, despite the deprivations, life had a purpose - the most basic purpose of all and one which the people of Arama had been deprived of.
Survival.
His gaze travelled around the simple camp. They had come into this strange world with virtually nothing. A length of rope. Now they had warmth and a degree of comfort. Plates, bowls, eating implements made from bone, water bags, even a large, woven sunshade, the basic of design of which he had in mind to use to build a permanent home. They had taken the materials to hand and made things; created wealth. He had no sharp tools apart from pieces of worked flint, but tomorrow he planned to make some bellows and attempt smelting some ore-bearing rocks he had found. With one crude iron tool he could make more and better tools. They had even taken a few tentative steps on the path to an understanding of the stars, and had puzzled over the curious movements of some wandering stars. No doubt an answer to their mystery would come. First they had explore this world. And that meant escape.
Watching the smoke and sparks lifting into the night sky and being borne on the strong breeze towards the distant land gave him idea that brought him to full wakefulness. Suddenly everything dropped into place. His heart quickened with excitement; he wanted to wake Jenine and tell her. No… It could wait until morning. He closed his eyes, planning ahead, foreseeing difficulties and how they could be overcome. By the time he was drifting off to sleep, virtually every detail of the bold plan had crystallized into sharp reality in his remarkable mind. He wondered what Jenine would think of it. But she was desperate to escape from the island, and she was practical, therefore she was certain to be in favour.
2.
“I think,” said Jenine, biting into her third breakfast fruit, “that it’s the most lunatic, damn-fool scheme that I’ve ever heard. It’s crass, stupid, ill-conceived and… and…” She groped for insults.
“Impractical?” Ewen offered.
“Impractical…”
“Cretinous?”
“Cretinous,” Jenine agreed.
“Hopeless?”
“Hopeless.”
“Muddle-headed?”
“Muddle-Listen, Ewen. I’m quite capable of thinking up my own insults, thank you.”
“Dangerous?”
“That too. How about a lot of hot air?”
Ewen looked admiringly at her. “An insult and a joke rolled into one. You could also say that because the idea’s based on a kids’ toy, that by suggesting it, I’m reflecting my immature and juvenile thinking when confronted with a problem.”
Jenine started on her fourth fruit. “I could, but I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know what really annoys about this idea of yours, Ewen? Something that crawls right under my skin?”
“Do tell.”
“The nasty, nagging suspicion at the back of my mind that it might just work.”
“It will. It has to.”
Jenine finished off the fruit and jumped to her feet. “Well it never will if we just sit around talking about it.”
Getting the skull back to the camp took three hours. Although it weighed very little, it was large and unwieldy. Nor was the task helped by Ewen’s sprained ankle. He stood the skull on end so that the wide opening, which he presumed had been joined somehow to its original owner’s neck, was uppermost. Jenine packed some dried streamer seaweed into it and applied a torch. The brilliant blue flame was visible in the bright sunlight. It burned fiercely with a soft roaring noise. The jaw and the eye sockets acted as efficient air vents. The intense heat drove the couple back. They watched anxiously as incandescent flames seemed to engulf the entire bone shell. They were ready with bags of seawater in case the conflagration got out of hand. A ten-minute burn and the fuel was consumed. When the skull had cooled, Ewen scraped its interior with a flint. Although badly blackened, and weakened around the edges, the bone had not caught fire. To complete the experiment, they separated the rope into its five main strands and threw a short length onto the campfire. As expected, it resisted the flames satisfactorily.
“Progress,” said Ewen, pleased with their findings. “We have a fire basket and the means of suspending it. Now all we have to do is make something to suspend it from.”
3.
Jenine stood askance in the centre of the huge circle that Ewen had marked out on the beach with sticks pushed into the sand.
“Ewen, it’s colossal!”
Ewen nodded. “The diameter is as we agreed - my height multiplied by ten. Twenty paces.”
She shook her head in disbelief. They had worked hard on the mathematics of the hot air balloon’s size all morning to refine Ewen’s original rough estimate. She had double-checked and even triple-checked their figures, but the sheer size of the beach circle when thought of in three dimensions as a sphere was daunti
ng.
“You don’t think we could have made a mistake, Ewen?”
“No. There’s our combined weight, the weight of the fire basket, the rigging, and the fuel. Provided we can get a density reduction of ten per cent of the air in the envelope by heating it, then this is the displacement volume we need.”
Jenine said nothing. During their calculations they had rediscovered the hot air balloon’s law of diminishing returns. To increase the volume and therefore “lift” of a sphere by a relatively small percentage caused a doubling of its surface area and consequently its weight. There was an optimum size which they had found and were not happy with. She paced out the circle’s diameter. “The circumference will be over three times the diameter!” she said accusingly.
“That’s geometry for you.”
“And think of all the membrane leaves we’ll need! And where do we start? At the top? Bottom? Middle? And how do we fix the fire basket-”
Ewen silenced her objections with a kiss. This was followed by a suggestion that produced more objections.
“How can you think of that when we’ve got all these problems? Honestly, Ewen, there are times-”
He stopped her in mid-flow again with another kiss. “Listen. If we worry about everything at once, we’ll never get anything done. I’ve made three lists of problems: those that have to be solved now; those that we can think about; and those that we forget until later. Right now, you and your worrying puts you on the first list.”
Jenine put her arms around his neck and returned his kiss. “I like being on your first list. Okay. We’ll gather membrane leaves and think of nothing else, I promise.” She tried to push him away but he held onto her, enjoying the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest.
“It can wait five minutes,” he said.
“I do believe you’ve got something a little longer in mind,” she said mischievously.
The start of work on the hot air balloon was delayed for a delicious thirty minutes.
They spent the next three days foraging all over the island for membrane leaves which they took back to the camp and weighed down with round stones - exactly 500 leaves in each pile. It was slow, exhausting work. Jenine went on strike towards the end of the third day.
“It’s no good, Ewen. They’re getting harder to find.”
Ewen showed her one of the leaves that he had covered in preliminary calculations. “We need 40,000 minimum,” he pointed out.
Jenine considered. “Why don’t we make a start on cutting and trimming the leaves now? It’ll take us a week to use up this lot, by which time the trees will have grown new ones.”
It was a sensible idea so they went to work on the next stage which was cutting all the leaves to hexagon shapes using clay templates that Ewen had made. They sat cross-legged under a thatched shade. The work was simple but mind-numbingly boring. Each leaf had to be spread flat, the hexagonal template positioned in the centre of the leaf, and the surplus cut trimmed off with a napped flint blade. The only difficult part of the work was peeling each leaf off the cutting stone after trimming. The gossamer membranes had a tendency to cling to anything. The couple worked steadily through the hours of daylight, pausing only to eat and drink, and make love or swim when the sheer monotony of the massive task threatened their reason. Nevertheless, having a definite project to work on with a clear objective added a sense of purpose and expectancy to their lives and made the long days and the tedious work a little more bearable.
4.
The pebble Ewen tossed favoured Jenine.
She knelt in front of the smooth, flat slab of rock that was her work table. She took two of the membrane hexagons and laid them edge to edge with a small overlap. She picked up a rounded stone and scored it along the overlap. The two six-sided shapes bonded immediately. She bonded another hexagon into the resulting vee above the join and repeated the process with the lower vee. The result was four membrane leaves joined together to form an even larger leaf whose outer edges were ready-shaped to receive more leaves. The simple geometric tessellating pattern meant that the sheet could be extended in any direction to create a sheet as large as one wished.
“It works!” said Jenine delightedly, holding up the deceptively delicate-looking membrane.
Ewen smiled, took it from her and draped it over his hand. In the shade his body heat was enough to make the pale green panel lift into the air, twisting and tumbling as though it were alive. He caught it and spread it out. “Exactly the same pattern as those paving blocks in Steyning. Remember Steyning?”
They laughed at the memory of Steyning’s indignant chief of police, and settled happily to their monumental task.
The construction of the balloon’s envelope had been carefully planned. To make the balloon’s voluminous envelope easier to handle, they decided to build it in two hemispheres starting with the girth - the equatorial belt. This would be a broad ribbon of membrane whose length was equal to the envelope’s circumference. They worked at opposite ends, weighing down the steadily lengthening belt of delicate green material with small rocks wrapped in seaweed.
The centre section was finished on the sixth day and the ends joined together to form a giant band. They then worked their way along the upper edge of the band, adding occasional five-sided pentagon-shaped membranes at predetermined intervals. These had the effect of gradually reducing the envelope’s diameter as they progressed towards the top so that it became dome-shaped.
Ewen scored the last hexagon into place at the hemisphere’s exact apex and beamed at Jenine. “Halfway, Jenine! Halfway!”
They rested for two days to give their aching, blistered hands a chance to recover, and spent the following three days foraging for membrane leaves and trimming them. Two days of storms delayed a fresh start on the envelope. Then the skies cleared and the sun shone brightly. They resumed work on the envelope with renewed spirits and vigour. By late afternoon on the fourth day since the storms, they had completed the main envelope and were scoring the hexagons into place that formed the balloon’s neck. The final task was rolling a length of reinforcing rope into the neck so that it was trapped and sealed beneath several layers of membrane.
Tired, but happy, they spread the huge envelope out on the beach, weighted it with seaweed-wrapped rocks, and stood for a long time with their arms around each other, contemplating their handiwork.
“Perfectly symmetrical,” said Ewen with pride. “Absolutely and amazingly perfect.” He looked up at the darkening sky. There were a few clouds which the ever-reliable prevailing wind was blowing towards their unseen destination. “If these conditions hold, we’ll be on our way within two days.”
Jenine hugged him. “Isn’t that a problem on the third list?”
“They’ve all moved up one now. You have my permission to think about the third list problems.”
Jenine fell remained silent. Ewen sensed that something was worrying her.
“Oh, just me being silly,” she said in answer to his inquiry. “A fourth list problem.”
“There is no fourth list.”
“Isn’t there?”
He drew her close. She was trembling. “Tell me,” he said.
“If we make it to that land…”
“We will.”
“…how will they treat us?”
“How should they treat us?”
Jenine hesitated. “Well… There’s been others who’ve escaped… Simo Belan.”
“According to Father Dadley - yes - several.”
“Then why is it that they’ve never returned to Arama, Ewen? Have you ever thought about that?”
5.
Jenine solved the third list problem of how to store the balloon’s fuel in a compact form. She made a round, fist-size hole through a large block of clay. When dried, it made an excellent mould for compressing the streamer seaweed and ejecting it in the form of easy-to-handle plugs. She busied herself making fuel plugs while Ewen secured the fire basket to the neck of the balloon using unpicked stra
nds of the rope. The balloon’s neck was three times the diameter of the suspended fire basket to minimize the risk of the envelope catching fire. The membrane material was fire resistant but not fireproof.
The next problem on the third list was the passenger basket. Their first experiment with woven vines was a net-like bag that proved too big and lacked strength.
“It only has to big enough for the two of us,” Jenine reasoned. “The fuel plugs can be carried in membrane bags slung over the side.”
Ewen agreed that it was a good idea. The second basket was woven from the reeds which grew in profusion around the freshwater pools. They were easy to split, bend and twist when green, and dried quickly and became rigid in the sun. The basket was light, and there was just enough room in it for them to stand. They made the open sides waist high for safety. It seemed an ideal solution but it had to scrapped when an experimental burn with the fire basket suspended from a tree resulted in the passenger basket beneath catching fire from a cascade of hot ashes that fell through the fire basket’s air vents.
They doused the flames with water bags and sat on the beach, disconsolately staring at the burnt out remains of the passenger basket that had taken them two days to make.
“Two baskets!” said Jenine suddenly. “We could have a small one each. We suspend them directly from the throat’s reinforcing ring. That way we’ll be level with the fire basket - not under it - and it’ll be easy for both of us to feed it with fuel without getting in each other’s way.”
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