Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  It was getting hot. I wandered back to the beach, picking up my bag on the way from where I’d left it tucked under one of the spectacular tree ferns that grow along the west coast. I ran down the dunes, and walked through black sand that burned the soles of my bare feet, down to the sea’s edge. I went right on in, and little waves broke and lapped my ankles, then fell back, leaving their curled outlines etched across damp sand. I waded to my knees, where wavelets splashed my shorts and soaked me. I didn’t care. Three swans swam outside the pointed rocks that marked the entrance to the bay. I walked up and down just where the sea met the sand, in and out of the water as it came and went. When I turned south I had to pull my sunhat over my eyes against the light; when I turned north the heat beat through my cotton shirt like a weight I had to carry on my back.

  I ran across to the rocks where I’d left my bag. There wasn’t a soul about; the village was invisible behind the pine trees. It took me less than a minute to change, and then I was running back into the sea without stopping, right up to my bare middle. I stood there for a while, holding my tummy in as if that would help, so all my ribs stuck out like a skeleton until I couldn’t bear hovering any more, and I dived headfirst. The water sang chilly in my ears. I surfaced in a sparkling shower of drops, and swam fast for the rocks. Suddenly the sea wasn’t cold any more, just liquid and milky. The swans floated a few yards away. I came up to the rocks and seaweed brushed my skin. I sat in the sun, and saw my arms and legs winter-white against the golden weed. Then I plunged again and opened my eyes, and there was a waterscape of rock and weed and night-coloured sea over black sand. When I came up into the sun everything looked bleached. The smell of pine trees drifted over the water. I rolled over on my back and stared into a bottomless blue sky.

  In the end I stayed in too long, because when I came out I was shivering. Someone else was walking along the tideline, a man. I looked once, then twice. My first impression had been correct. He was wearing nothing at all. I hesitated. I too had very little on. Nakedness is not an offence in Hy Brasil, but I had been here long enough to know that it was unusual in public places. But he was already waving to me, so I could hardly rush away.

  ‘Hi-aye.’

  I’d already discovered that this is what they say for hello in Hy Brasil, so I said hello back, and stopped.

  It was Olly West. Last time we’d met he’d literally not noticed I was there. This time he was staring. He himself looked, as far as I could tell out of the corner of my eye, extremely fit, but in spite of his unclothed state there was an odd lack of physical presence about him. I could imagine he might have been the sort of boy one would avoid at school. ‘The water’s quite warm today,’ he remarked. ‘Sixty-seven degrees at the surface. It warms up when it comes in over hot sand.’

  ‘Is that what it is? I thought it was quite pleasant.’

  ‘It’s warm for the time of year. This time last year it didn’t go above sixty. There were upwellings from the deep.’

  ‘But not this year?’

  ‘No.’

  That seemed to end the conversation. I was shivering, but I didn’t quite like to turn my back on him and walk away. ‘You’ve been swimming too?’ I asked conversationally.

  ‘I swim every day.’

  ‘All year?’

  ‘Yes. Let me show you the breakwaters.’

  He led the way, and I followed nervously. I had vaguely noticed a couple of lines of stones jutting into the sea. I saw now that the sand was piled much higher on one side than the other. ‘Eighteen years’ work.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I came to Hy Brasil eighteen years ago. The tide flows round Brentness, you see, out of the sound, and sweeps the sand southward. You see where it’s eroded the grazings away at the top of the beach?’

  ‘Isn’t that above the high tide line?’

  ‘It is now. Eighteen years ago the spring tides used to flood the saltmarshes almost as far as the village. I observed the currents, you see, and decided on the two breakwaters. I build them by hand. Dry stone. They need constant maintenance, of course. All that sand’s piled up since I started. There’s a nice beach for the children now.’

  ‘Do you work on it every day?’

  ‘If I can.’ His gaze swept the horizon. I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but he spoke first. ‘Are you interested in volcanoes?’

  ‘Yes, I mean, one can hardly help being interested when one’s living next door to an active volcano, but I don’t know much about it.’

  ‘You should come up to the Pele Volcano Observatory. Let me give you my card.’

  I wondered a little hysterically where he was going to produce it from, but then he said, ‘You’ll have to come back to my bicycle. Do you know that we receive half-a-dozen minor eruptions or earth tremors a year, sometimes as high as five on the Richter scale?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. I know Mount Brasil is an active volcano though.’

  ‘You must come and have a tour of the Pele Centre. The activities of the Centre will obviously be one of the main features of your book. I’ve finished down here for the present. We can go up there now. You’re fortunate that I’m able to spare the time this morning. It’s barely forty minutes’ walk up the mountain.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, wondering if Colombo had been gossiping to this man as well, ‘I really would like to come and have a look. Truly I would. But just now I’m getting very cold.’

  ‘Do you want me to give you a rub down?’

  ‘No! I mean no, thank you. I think I should get dressed.’

  I’d thought the hint was fairly obvious, but he didn’t move. ‘You are the young English lady that’s writing the book?’

  I thought this made me sound positively Edwardian, which, with dripping hair and dressed in a wet bikini, I was far from feeling. I tried to sound like a character out of E.M.Forster who has been studying her Baedeker to good effect. ‘Yes. I came to Ogg’s Cove today to look at the dig. The Viking farm. I don’t know if anyone’s working on it just now.’

  He smiled and held out his hand to me. ‘Olly West,’ he said. I put my clammy hand in his, and he shook it for a long time. ‘There’s not a lot to see, everything’s still under turf, but the diggers’ll be back next week. I can show you as much as there is to see now if you want.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to stop my teeth chattering. ‘You work on the dig?’

  ‘Oh, no. As I say, I’m a volcanologist.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I really have to put some clothes on.’ I started up the beach, and Olly began to follow me. ‘Please,’ I said rather desperately. ‘I’d rather get dressed on my own.’

  ‘Oh, certainly, certainly. I’ll wait for you here, and then we can get the card from my bicycle.’

  He left the beach, but when I climbed up the dunes on to the path he was waiting on the path to the village. He’d put on a pair of jeans and some Biblical-looking sandals, and I saw as I came closer that he was flourishing a business card in my direction. ‘Though, as I say, we could go straight up to the unit now. What are you doing this afternoon?’

  ‘Lucy will expect me back before too long.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’re staying at Ravnscar. I can telephone Lucy and tell her you’ll be late.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No, no, it’s no trouble at all. You don’t mind walking uphill for a mile or two? I can’t very well offer you a lift.’ He mounted his bicycle and began to ride off along the road north. ‘I’ll telephone Lucy for you while I’m waiting for you to catch up,’ he called as he disappeared ahead.

  I spent about five minutes making up my mind whether to follow him or not. I’d heard about the Pele Centre, of course, and it occurred to me that if I offended this man now, I might never get another invitation. And I did need to find out about the volcano. I was here to do a job, and that meant carrying on regardless. I skirted the top of the beach, and began to climb the dusty track into the foothills of Mount Prosper.

  On th
e outside the Pele Centre was an unassuming L-shaped one-storey building set into a flat terrace hollowed out of the mountainside. The inside was like walking into the inside of a spaceship, and, apart from the pointed ears, there was an unnerving resemblance between Olly West and Mr Spock.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Olly. ‘Welcome to our humble abode.’

  The humble abode was an airy office with windows all down one side looking over the sound to Despair, and an impressive array of computers on the work benches which lined three walls. The monitor nearest me was displaying a list of seismic magnitudes, at least, so Olly told me. Above every work station was a noticeboard overflowing with pinned-up graphs and tables of figures. The board nearest the door had posters, obviously done by primary school children, with messages like, EARTHQUAKES DON’T KILL: BUILDINGS DO; FIRE: THE REAL DANGER and DROP, COVER, HOLD, with a graphic illustration of a person under a table clinging on to one of the legs.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Olly, seeing the direction of my gaze. ‘We had Lyonsness Elementary School up here doing a project. Earth shocks are often associated with volcanic activity. Most adults in this country will have experienced at least one minor quake. Education is a crucial factor in eliminating casualties.’

  Someone with cropped orange hair and a heavy-metal t-shirt was working at one of the computers. He didn’t look round when we came in, which in Hy Brasil struck me as unusual. The fourth wall was given over to filing cabinets and untidy bookshelves full of unbound journals. Above them was the whole of the one-inch map of Hy Brasil, all five sheets put together. It had yellow marker pins scattered across the mountainous areas. I made straight for it, as being, after the posters, the most comprehensible and attractive object in the room.

  The young man at the computer turned round when I walked past him, and I recognised him at once, in spite of his changed hair. ‘Peterkin,’ I said, and after a moment I took the hand he held out to me. I still don’t expect anyone younger than me to shake my hand. ‘But weren’t you working at the Tourist Office?’

  ‘Finished there last week. This is more interesting, and I can live at home.’ He winked at me, and added, `Money’s better too.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. I suppose tremors are more exciting than tourists really.’

  ‘There aren’t any tourists. And until someone puts on an excursion fare there won’t be.’

  ‘So you’re waiting for the volcano to erupt instead?’

  Peterkin touched wood, I noticed, but before he could speak again a hand was laid on my shoulder and I jumped. ‘Let me show you round,’ said Olly.

  I don’t know what it is about Olly West’s style of delivery that makes everything he tries to describe increasingly obscure the more he goes on talking about it. Luckily, after the first five minutes, Peterkin got up and joined us, and from his sotto voce interpolations I did begin to make some kind of sense of the place.

  Peterkin says that I need to go up Mount Brasil to see the monitoring stations for myself. They’re around the crater and on ledges inside it. They put them in oil drums, he said, and seal them against the weather, and fix them on concrete bases so unless there’s a really violent earth movement they remain stable. Inside each one there’s a computer, powered by a solar panel, and connected to a radio transmitter. Peterkin showed me pinned-up printouts on his noticeboard of signal amplitude measurements which looked to me like an irregular heartbeat, which he explained to me were previous eruptions. He and Olly explained quite a lot about a possible eruption. Apparently Mount Brasil has a history of sending out very fluid lava flows. He showed me another map of Hy Brasil, a smaller scale black and white chart-like map, with contours both above and under water. The existing lava flows were marked in diagonal grey lines, and projected ones in grey spots.

  ‘But that’s the whole of Dorrado!’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Olly. ‘You see it’s the southern aspect of the mountain that’s most unstable. We’ve monitored half a dozen tremors there this year already. What’s more, they’ve been getting stronger and more frequent just in the last few weeks. Nothing you’d notice, even if you were there, but there’s definitely something going on underneath. But then it’s been doing that since records began in 1858, and probably for a thousand years or so before that.’

  ‘But Mount Prosper erupted only two hundred years ago,’ I said. ‘You’ve hardly drawn any projected lava there.’

  ‘Mount Prosper’s kind of quiet these days,’ said Peterkin. ‘Mind you, that could be partly because we haven’t got the monitors up there, so we might not know.’

  ‘That’s not very comforting. Would they have time to get out of Dorrado, or would it be like Pompeii?’

  ‘No, not like Pompeii,’ said Peterkin. ‘Like I say, we don’t get that sort of chemistry. When it erupts – which it does in a minor way quite often – we get a gradual build-up of pressure inside the mountain. A lava lake starts to rise inside the crater. Then suddenly the pressure inside makes the surface crack open along a fissure. Then we have a line of lava fountains followed by a liquid flow like a slow river. Here, look, these are photos from just below the crater in 1989. See, quite pretty really, like fireworks. And you notice the sky is still almost blue. I was just a kid, but Ican remember we could see the glow from Lyonsness for about a week. For us it was exciting, but I’d be nervous if I lived on the west side. In fact there is a plan, if it were flowing towards Dorrado, to try to divert the flow down the Dorrado river bed. It might or might not be possible. But what they’d do first is evacuate the place. The Emergency Services have a strategy ready for that.’

  ‘You mean it’s expected?’

  ‘No, I mean it might happen, and it’s as well to be ready.’

  Olly West kept on talking through all this. He seemed unaware that Peterkin was with us at all. He pressed graphs and figures into my hand so by this time I was carrying quite a sheaf of printouts. It was very kind of him to bother.

  ‘And this is my office.’ Olly led me out of the main room through a chilly-looking kitchen area and into a small office at the other end. My first impression was of a huge screen across which the faint heartbeat of a catatonic patient was slowly pulsating, screeds of computer paper spilling over the floor like an unwound toilet roll, and shelves full of files and what looked like the leftover remnants of several jumble sales.

  ‘I don’t know how I’d behave in an eruption,’ I told him. ‘I’d be terrified, I know, but as long as I wasn’t actually about to die I think I’d be very interested at the same time. But then the most interesting things often involve a certain amount of fear, don’t you find?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But then I’m a man.’

  ‘You don’t mean nothing ever scares you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, with what I reckoned was a smirk. ‘Why should it?’

  This, coming from one who confronted the utter insignificance of humanity at every moment of every day of his working life, reduced me to unaccustomed silence, which Olly instantly misinterpreted. ‘I’d be happy to take you on to the volcano,’ he said. ‘I can’t spare the time this week; I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until I’ve got a space in my diary. But then I’ll certainly explain it all to you, and you needn’t be frightened with me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think I’d be more comfortable with someone who knew how to be afraid.’

  He opened his mouth, and I knew, with a slightly sick feeling, that he was going to offer me the kind of reassurance you’d give to a pet poodle on its way to the vet’s for a lethal injection, when suddenly the fax machine bleeped and churned into action.

  ‘Ah,’ said Olly. ‘Excuse me one moment.’

  Out of the window I could see where the slopes of Mount Prosper cascaded down to an azure sea. To the east the double peak of Despair rose out of rainbow-coloured vapour into clear blue air. It was impossible to imagine how the scene could ever be different, but when I looked to the left there were the fanged lava ridges of Brentness r
eaching almost to a whitewashed house which I knew from my map must be Ferdy’s Landing. From here one could see where the lava stopped as a pencil-sharp line between green pasture and grey rock. Another hundred yards and Ferdy’s Landing would have vanished forever in 1783. That, I knew from my research in the library, would have been a pity. According to F. Baskerville’s Architecture of Hy Brasil parts of the house at Ferdy’s Landing dated back to the early seventeenth century. It had originally been built as a fortified house, similar to the tower houses on the Scottish borders, by Nicholas Hawkins, one of the first of the Pirate Kings who had made Hy Brasil their secret base. The house had been rebuilt after a fire in 1688, and then remained relatively untouched, according to Baskerville, until modern times. At the time the book was written (1972) the building was in a state of neglect and disrepair, and the account ended with the recommendation that it merited careful restoration, as nearly as was possible, to its original state.

  It was a beautiful day outside. I wondered if I should signal my thanks to Olly and creep away. He had his back to me, though, and was typing rapidly away at the keyboard with two fingers. I looked at the shelves, and took down a couple of glossy pamphlets from the US Geological Survey and looked at awe-inspiring photographs of eruptions in Washington and Hawaii. I found another coloured bulletin, all about the Western Wrangell mountains in Alaska. Now there’s a place I’d like to go, maybe second on my list after Hawaii. I looked at all the pictures, put the pamphlets back, and surveyed the rest of the shelves. The journals of the USGS and the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union I was content to take as read. There were piles of computer printouts which couldn’t be of much use to anyone, I thought, without some kind of filing system. Instead they were all mixed in with sundry trifles such as a miner’s lamp, half a dozen glass fishing floats, a beach ball, some scraps of whitened driftwood, a car battery, an old green wine glass with a crack in it, a coil of climbers’ rope and a school satchel. It was the first place in Hy Brasil, apart from Kidd’s Hotel, where I’d seen dust. The air is so clear here that only serious accumulation produces any.