by James Morrow
The rocket whooshed skyward, attaining an altitude of at least a hundred feet. Within five seconds the fire consumed the propellant, then ignited the map fragment, so that the nose cone exploded in a brilliant shower of sparks. A spontaneous cheer went up from all nine miners.
“Not the Star of Bethlehem,” said Mr. Chadwick, “nor even Halley’s Comet, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”
“Mon Capitaine, I congratulate you,” said Chloe to Léourier. “Between your airship and your rocket, I have never known a man so adept at defying gravity.”
* * *
The instant Léourier got them back home to Hood’s Isle, landing the Lamarck on the southern shore, the miners burst out of the carriage and plunged into the surf, washing away the encrusted filth of the day’s labors. Not since her immersion in the copper washtub at the Hotel da Borboleta Azul in Manáos (the three Arauaki women dissolving the residue of her voyage up the Rio Amazonas) had Chloe taken such pleasure in the act of bathing. Although the sea lions did not appreciate this invasion of their private beach by human beings, they made no attempt to shoulder the intruders aside but instead confined their hostility to irate stares and roars of annoyance.
The following morning the miners returned to Chatham Isle and resumed their troglodytic agenda. Despite the sweltering heat and the sporadic bat attacks, they extracted from the cavern enough guano to fill a second slopeback shell. As evening came to the Encantadas, Léourier declared that by his calculation they’d reaped the necessary ten pounds.
Back on Hood, Chloe realized that the forthcoming spectacle required a carefully wrought scenario. Given the success of her Lost Thirteenth Tribe masquerade, the task of structuring the eruption must obviously fall to her—and so that night she drifted off to sleep imagining an ineluctable progression from act one, “The Smoldering Summit,” to act two, “The Exploding Pumice,” to act three, “The Flying Stones.”
Wednesday found the vulcaneers boarding the Lamarck and flying to Indefatigable Isle on a threefold mission. Whilst Chloe wandered through the lowlands, harvesting bamboo shoots with the help of Cuniche, Nitopari, and Pirohua, the other Indians searched for supplementary guano in the cliff-side caves, even as Mr. Chadwick and Léourier attempted to persuade the Governor of his Christian obligation to reprieve the convicted defendants. Each initiative played out as Chloe had anticipated, her own team leaving Indefatigable toting a sack of rocket bodies, the guano party carrying off a full bucket of explosive material, and the vicar and the aeronaut bearing away distasteful memories of their encounter with Stopsack.
“He insists that clemency is out of the question,” Mr. Chadwick told Chloe as the flying-machine carried them home.
“I wonder if he’ll dare show his face at the executions.”
“Not only does he plan to attend, he claims he’ll do so with a clear conscience,” said the vicar. “As he puts it, ‘If Christians forbear to excise the cancer of blasphemy here in Galápagos, the tumor will spread throughout the Empire.’”
The vulcaneers devoted Thursday to assembling their ordnance. Owing to the Huancabambas’ skillful hands, a pyrotechnic cottage industry soon emerged on Hood’s Isle. To produce each bomb, Léourier required the Indians to stuff a prickly-pear cactus pad with a presumably optimum quantity of guano—enough to heave a boulder towards Mephistropolis, though not so much as to endanger anyone in the exercise yard—and by the noon hour thirty such devices filled a vacant shack.
Skyrocket production proceeded less efficiently. At one point the vulcaneers ran short of nose-cone material, the Lamarck having but a half-dozen maps on board and the leaves from Chloe’s Bible being too flimsy to hold scoops of guano. But then Mr. Chadwick observed that the thick and creamy pages of “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” might accomplish the job.
Although there was no question that the treatise must be sacrificed, Chloe regarded this prospect with bittersweet emotions. Watching the Huancabambas smothering shite in evolutionary theory, she recalled the anxious night she’d copied the sketch by candlelight at Down House, back when Miss Annie was a healthy child and the Albion Transmutationist Club not yet born.
Friday was given to strategizing. The team agreed that Mr. Chadwick should station himself atop Mount Pajas, the perfect vantage from which to orchestrate the illusion. As the volcano erupted, Chloe and Léourier would exploit the pandemonium, piloting the Lamarck towards the scaffold and spiriting away Ralph and Solange.
There remained the task of rigging the mountain in accordance with the scenario. Under cover of twilight Chloe and her friends took off for Charles Isle in the Lamarck, accompanied by Cuniche, Nitopari, Pirohua, and Ascumiche, the gondola jammed with thirty bamboo skyrockets, as many cactus-pad bombs, and two pots of guano for the fuses. Léourier skillfully guided the overburdened flying-machine across Villamil Quay, touching down in a wooded area, its soaring palms and palo santo trees presumably shielding the balloon from the scrutiny of prison guards and Minor Zionists.
After gathering together bundles of dry sticks and mounds of wet seaweed, the vulcaneers made a series of moonlit ascents, bearing the ordnance up the north face of Mount Pajas. Once the rockets and bombs were deposited at the peak, Léourier and the four Huancabambas set the stage for act one, “The Smoldering Summit,” ringing the crater with twenty stacks of kindling, each topped with enough sodden kelp to guarantee an ominous quantity of smoke. Léourier next turned his attention to act three, “The Flying Stones.” Descending a dozen paces to a broad outcropping of hardened lava, he decorated the ropy terrain with guano fuses, the white lines traversing the shelf like frosting on a hot-cross bun. At each intersection he and the Indians placed a cactus bomb surmounted by a boulder, so that when the axial fuse was lit the mountain would seem to disintegrate, hurtling pieces of itself towards the penal colony.
Whilst the aeronaut and the Huancabambas labored on the slopes, Chloe and Mr. Chadwick took up turtle-oil lanterns and climbed into the crater. The stench of sulphur suffused the cavity: the Devil’s anteroom, mused Chloe—the foyer of the Inferno. Gingerly they moved along the jutting ledges of frozen lava, securing the bamboo projectiles with tuff and cinders, the nose cones all pointed towards the mouth of the volcano and the starry sky beyond. The vicar ran a stripe of guano from each rocket engine to the master fuse, which the scenario required him to ignite at the beginning of act two, “The Exploding Pumice.”
Considering the bleakness of their surroundings, this pit of ashen air and black rock, the last thing Chloe expected just then was an evocation of a sun-drenched and amorous moment from Siren of the Nile—Antony sauntering through an outdoor market in Alexandria, composing a love poem aloud. But soon it became clear that Mr. Chadwick would not leave the crater ere its walls resounded with his heart’s deepest longings. “Might we return to the night you endorsed Stopsack’s scheme for winning the Byssheans’ gold?” he asked. “Responding to your question about Miss Bathurst’s fate, I averred that her death had caused me considerable grief. That sentiment was utterly sincere. The simple fact, dear lady, is that I am smitten with you.”
“There was indeed a time when I believed that taking the ark to Oxford would serve humankind’s best interests,” said Chloe, sidestepping the vicar’s protestation.
“Once we are back in England, I hope you will become my lifelong companion,” Mr. Chadwick persisted. “True, my future is hardly auspicious. No income, no property, no prospects. And yet, were you to marry me, my dear Chloe—may I call you ‘my dear Chloe’?—I should count myself the happiest of men, sworn to making you the happiest of women.”
Her tongue grew palsied. No word of reply gained access to her lips. She found Mr. Chadwick’s proposal at once poignant and ridiculous, touching and bumptious, but to share any of those adjectives with him just then would be to start a conversation she did not wish to have. She merely said, “You may call me ‘Chloe’ but not ‘my dear Chloe.’”
“Am I to infer you are spurning my proposa
l? You will not become my bride?”
“I am gratified by your attentions, Reverend,” she replied, scanning the web of guano fuses for fractures, “but at present I can think only of my friends’ predicament.”
“Should tomorrow’s escapade cause you harm, I shall take solace in knowing that tonight I spoke my mind.”
“What is your meaning, Mr. Chadwick?” she snapped. “If you find yourself attending my funeral service ere long, you’ll imagine it’s really our wedding? That’s not a very romantic thought.”
“Obviously I picked the wrong time and place to raise this subject. You are preoccupied.”
At last he’d made a sensible remark. She was preoccupied—and she remained so when, shortly after two o’clock in the morning, the mountain being primed and ready, the vulcaneers descended to sea level.
Upon her return to Villamil Quay, Chloe considered inhaling epená to hasten her passage to Morpheus’s domain, then decided against it, having consumed such extravagant quantities during the final hours of Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn. Instead she harvested a dozen palm fronds and spread them across the gondola floor to create a luxurious mattress. Stretching out along her new bed, she soon found herself astride a winged dragon as it wheeled above Léourier’s lost city, melting the golden spires with its volcanic breath, a dream that needed no interpretation.
* * *
The Reverend Granville Heathway was a pigeon priest in both senses of the term. He was a priest who happened to raise pigeons—and he was gifted in ministering to a rock dove’s deepest spiritual needs. The soul of a pigeon was for Granville as accessible as its feet. Thus it happened that Heathway’s Columbine Carnival proved a great success, an awesome spectacle of birds walking on tightropes, diving into pails of water, pirouetting in pairs as their teacher whistled a waltz, and playing cricket using a grape for the ball and a paintbrush for the bat.
Amongst the carnival’s patrons was Dr. Earwicker, who afterwards asked Granville to conduct bird-training classes for the other inmates. Though flattered by this invitation, he declined, being loath to abandon the security of his immediate accommodations. For it happened that the scarecrows were on the march again, sweeping westward from Wellingborough and Ecton, and there was no safe haven in Warwickshire except the cell he called home.
Against the odds, Charlemagne returned. Somehow the indomitable courier had slipped past enemy lines and found his way to the dovecote. In light of Bertram’s previous missive, with its woeful account of the Diluvian League’s loss and Miss Franklin’s death, Granville steeled himself for sorrowful tidings—and yet Charlemagne had brought an uplifting message.
Dearest Father,
I am writing to you from Paestum on the southern coast of Italy. Shortly after we departed Constantinople, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple decided that, rather than sailing directly for England, we should spend a day rambling about the ruins of this Greco-Roman city, famous for its archeological treasures. Such a respite would do us a world of good, he insisted, salving the pain of our failure to procure the ark.
“In recent weeks,” Mr. Dalrymple told the Paragon’s assembled company, “I have searched my soul as extensively as we scoured the slopes of Ararat, asking myself, ‘Why did we not find the Relic of Relics?’ Now I see the answer. Over the years God has favored Mankind with three incomparable gifts: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a disposition to believe that both are true. For Him to have proved His existence through the ark would be tantamount to His taking away that third great blessing, faith. Our recent disappointment is in fact a species of gospel, good news. It merely seemed to be malspel, bad news—or, rather, it was malspel only for those unworthy of following our Savior in the first place.”
We began our explorations with the Temple of Neptune, a remarkably well-preserved structure in the Doric style, the architraves and pediments still in situ. Our group then strolled to the adjacent Basilica, another Doric tour de force—though I cannot fathom how a name indicating a Roman secular building became attached to a Greek temple.
I now abandoned our party and hiked on my own to the isolated Temple of Ceres, the city’s third Doric masterpiece, where I enjoyed an extraordinary encounter with a German philosopher. As a young man, Herr Doktor Schopenhauer had traveled throughout Italy, and now at age sixty-three he was pleased to find himself in Paestum again.
Upon inquiring about my own journey, Schopenhauer became greatly excited to hear that my Paragon companions were Shelley Prize contestants who’d hoped to find and exhibit Noah’s ark. Pulling a manuscript from his valise, he explained that, having read of the Great God Contest in a German-language newspaper, he’d recently composed a short essay for Lord Woolfenden’s eyes.
“As the world’s greatest living philosopher, I felt obligated to inform the Byssheans that their competition is misguided,” Schopenhauer explained. “Personally, I’ve never had much use for the God hypothesis, unless by ‘God’ we mean Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover or Spinoza’s inscrutable pantheist entity, which is hardly the quarry your Oxford flâneurs are after. Sift through my writings, and you’ll find definitive rejoinders to the Ontological Proof and the Cosmological Proof. Evidently your Mr. Dalrymple was pinning his hopes on the Argument from Relics, but of course he failed to find the necessary artifact, the Deluge story being utterly fanciful.”
“Now see here, sir—”
“Which is not to say the atheists will win the day. Both sides in this wearisome debate make the same logical error.”
Schopenhauer proceeded to teach me about Modus ponens, the rule of inference that underlies so many philosophical proofs and disproofs. It takes the following form, with P the antecedent and Q the consequent:
If P, then Q.
P.
Therefore, Q.
When it comes to verifying the Almighty, with Q standing for “God exists,” the religious man has hundreds of P’s at his disposal, such as “There must be a First Cause” and “Nature has obviously been intelligently designed” and “Morality does not admit of a secular explanation.” The problem is that atheists will grant believers none of these antecedents, and so we never get to the consequent.
When disbelievers take the field, Q now stands for “God does not exist,” with P ranging from “Innocent people suffer” to “Scripture contains internal contradictions” to “Science provides reliable information about the physical universe.” But of course no sane believer would grant veto power to such assertions, and so the disproof works only for those who are already atheists.
Leaning on his walking-stick, Schopenhauer gestured towards the medieval burial vaults embedded in the temple floor. “I have always disdained the Christian mania for imposing churches on pagan places of worship. Your Byssheans may be idiots, but I understand their desire for classical conviviality: drinking wine, reciting verse, playing with ideas—what could be more sublime? Let me ask a favor, Herr Heathway. The Italian postal system being what it is, might I prevail upon you to bear my message to Lord Woolfenden in person?”
“I should be pleased to do so.”
“I am grateful beyond words,” said the philosopher, placing the manuscript in my hands. “When you get to Oxford, tell them that in Doktor Schopenhauer’s view our brutal and irrational world has no need of Western religion’s brutal and irrational Deity. Give me rather our aesthetic accomplishments and ethical attainments. Give me art and pity. Your Mr. Dalrymple has every right to keep chasing after his nonexistent ark, though for me there is but one worthy quest, its objects being beauty, truth, and love.”
And with that rousing speech (so reminiscent, Father, of your better sermons) Schopenhauer took leave of me, being much in need of sleep.
Your loving son,
Bertram
Smiling broadly, Granville secreted the message in his nightstand. As he returned Charlemagne to the dovecote, another sort of bird, the lark of joy, built a nest in his heart. Paestum to Sardinia to Gibraltar to Plymouth: a voyage of perhaps two thous
and miles, easily completed within twenty days by a sailor of Captain Deardon’s experience. Before the month was out, Bertram would be standing in this very cell, entertaining Granville with Oriental adventures.
Whistling a festive air, he sauntered to the barred window and surveyed the pasture, bathed in muted lunar light. The legions of stuffed men had arrived in force, pouring across the hills and swarming towards Coventry. He considered summoning Dr. Earwicker and insisting that he alert the County Council—but what would be the point? If the world regards you as sane and pious, you can torture foxes (as did Samson) or arrange the death of your mistress’s husband (as had David), and no one will think the worse of you. But if you’ve been pronounced a lunatic, you can testify to an imminent scarecrow invasion from now until Michaelmas, and all you’ll get for your trouble is a room in a madhouse.
* * *
Sweat assailing his eyes, pumice scratching his hands, Malcolm Chadwick led his Indian vulcaneers—Cuniche, Nitopari, Pirohua, Ascumiche—up the north face of Mount Pajas. Slowly but inexorably, the darkness lost its substance, like a bottle of ink poured into a lake. Reaching the array of boulders sitting atop cactus bombs, he paused to catch his breath. Briefly he imagined himself as a vulture lying in wait above a killing field, though his intention this morning was not to consume carrion but to prevent its creation.
From his rucksack he removed the Lamarck’s spyglass and three boxes of lucifer matches. He checked his pocket watch. Eight o’clock. In a mere sixty minutes the hangman was due to practice his profession on Dartworthy and Miss Kirsop.
Lifting the glass to his eye, he peered towards Mephistropolis. In the center of the exercise yard rose the scaffold, a ramshackle affair suggesting a decrepit footbridge leading to an impoverished village. A brawny guard ripped a worm-eaten board from the platform and nailed a fresh one in its place. Oscillating in the sea breeze, two nooses hung from the crossbeam, empty and ominous, like eye sockets in a skull, each swaying above its own trapdoor.