As it happened, every vestige of the Cosmological Society remained, though more as museum or recital hall than as center of scientific inquiry. A bulletin board in a small entrance hall featured posters promoting upcoming concerts and art lectures. VISIT THE LIBRARY, suggested a sign in English, its hand-drawn arrow pointing up a narrow flight of wooden stairs. O’Malley took the sign’s suggestion and creaked up the stairs. She emerged into a high-ceiling, raftered room paneled in dark wood. Tall, wide windows at the far end offered a panoramic view of the harbor, where a cruise ship was just then docking, its arrival announced by a long blast of its deep horn.
Bookcases lined most of the library’s walnut walls, with the exception of a large, framed relief map, which was dated 1877. The most prominent feature of the yellowing map, apart from the immense volcanic caldera, which the observatory now inhabited, and the island’s high north-south ridgeline, was an improbably straight line—solid at each end, dashed in the center—transecting the ridge from east to west. Thin, spidery script identified the line as a túnel de agua: water tunnel. A typed and fading card tucked behind a corner of the glass informed O’Malley in both Spanish and English that the tunnel project was designed to transport water from the abundant streams of the east to the dry slopes of the west. Construction began in 1867 with teams digging from both sides, aiming to meet in the middle, but work ceased ten years later, when insurmountable problems—financial, engineering, and geological—forced the abandonment of the project. She felt a flash of schadenfreude—a moment of misery-loves-company comfort—in knowing that her cosmic quest was not the first scientific undertaking to be foiled by the island’s difficult and unpredictable nature.
Scanning the bookshelves, she saw a wildly varied collection of leather-bound books, many of them in English: Don Quixote. David Copperfield. United States Laws. A small, slim volume titled Brown’s Madeira, Canary Islands, and Azores, by A. Samler Brown, intrigued her, so she extricated it from between two tall, thick tomes. The book’s subtitle filled half the cover: A Practical and Complete Guide for the Use of Tourists and Invalids, with Twenty Coloured Maps and Plans and Numerous Sectional and Other Diagrams.
The book’s opening pages were crammed, magazine-style, with advertisements touting steamship lines, hotels, travel agents, photographers, wine merchants, bankers, and dentists—even suppliers of “chemical manure,” whatever that was. Tucked amid the ads, she found the copyright information (seventh edition, London, 1903) and table of contents. The book appeared to be equal parts travel guide, textbook, and encyclopedia, with sections on history, geography, geology, meteorology, industry, agriculture, and commerce. Much to her surprise, O’Malley found herself mesmerized by an account of the cochineal boom of the mid-1800s: a sort of agricultural and entomological gold rush, one fueled by cochineal bugs, cactus-loving insects that yielded blood-red dye when dried and ground into powder. In the 1830s the Canaries had gone crazy for cochineal and carmine. Investors and small-scale farmers planted cactus on every acre of flat ground, and once the flat acreage was claimed, they terraced and planted dizzyingly steep slopes, too. Land prices soared, but mortgages were easy to get, given the high profit margins. Production skyrocketed, from a mere eight pounds of cochineal in 1831 to more than six hundred thousand pounds in 1869. Canarians made money hand over fist. “The landed gentry ordered expensive furniture, silver-mounted saddlery and other costly goods from Europe,” Brown wrote, “or spent their time in general dissipation.”
Eventually, inevitably, the bubble burst, as a result of the invention of synthetic dyes, which were cheaper and easier to produce. “Retribution was swift, sudden, and universal,” Brown wrote. The cochineal market imploded. Landowners went bankrupt. So did water tunnel investors, O’Malley intuited, casting another glance at the yellowed map on the wall.
Her excursion into La Palma’s boom-and-bust past was interrupted by the sound of knuckles rapping on wood. “Excuse me,” said a voice in Spanish-accented English. O’Malley whirled and saw a frowning woman at the top of the stairs. “This room is closed.”
O’Malley flushed. “But the sign downstairs says ‘visit the library.’ I thought it was open.”
“No. Closed,” said the woman. “You cannot be here.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.” She pushed back from the table, closed the book, and descended the stairs in embarrassed exile from the Sociedad Cosmológica. But the bright, beckoning day made it impossible to remain gloomy, so she cast about for her next adventure.
She found it a few blocks away, down on the waterfront near the cruise ship dock. A storefront car rental agency—not the agency whose car O’Malley had lost—was offering vehicles for just five euros a day. Five bucks? How can they do that? she wondered. She tugged open the door and walked inside. It wasn’t only the bargain—wasn’t even mainly the bargain—that enticed her. What enticed her was the giant poster in the window: an aerial view of spectacular volcanic craters lined up one after another along a ridgeline trail. What was it David had called the Canaries—very young and active, full of volcanoes and fault lines? Judging by the acnelike swellings and pockmarks shown in the photo, the Canaries were in the throes of geologic puberty. “Hike the World Famous Ruta de los Volcanes!” the poster urged. “30 minutes by car!”
The five-euro rate was a bait-and-switch scam, she soon learned—that car had already been rented, the clerk told her regretfully. The only car available would cost thirty euros—but O’Malley didn’t actually mind. Fifteen minutes later, she was behind the wheel of another Toyota Yaris, pulling onto the waterfront highway.
This time, she had sprung—an additional ten euros—for the comprehensive insurance.
One hour after renting the car, O’Malley eased to a stop in a gravel parking lot in a spectacular pine forest. The hilly highway had taken her through two tunnels, one of them quite long, boring straight through the heart of the island’s mountain range; apparently twentieth-century highway tunnels were easier to complete than nineteenth-century water tunnels. Smoke wafted from barbecue grills, and children played on monkey bars and swings at a wooded park tucked just below the island’s ridgeline. Refugio El Pilar, the park was named. “Refuge of the Pillar”—a reference to some Catholic miracle or other, she suspected, perhaps one wrought by the Virgin of the Light.
She locked the car and found the trail, which began on the far side of the playground. The path ascended steeply, winding up through widely spaced pines, some of them towering a hundred feet or higher. After two miles of climbing, the trail leveled off, undulating along the mountain’s western flank, occasionally crossing a saddle. At one point she glanced to her left and saw what appeared to be a pair of stone walls, set six feet apart, angling up the mountainside in perfect parallel. Virgin of the Masonry, she thought, smiling at the irreverence. She was hungry, she realized, and decided to eat her lunch—bread and cheese she’d bought at a roadside grocery on the outskirts of Santa Cruz—sitting on one of the walls. The warmth of the sunny ledge was like a bath for her aching thighs. The parallel rock walls weren’t actually walls, she noticed; rather, they were a neat fissure in the mountainside, angling uphill for as far as she could see.
She was three bites into the cheese—a good smoked Gouda—when she caught a flicker of movement to her left. She turned to look, and as she watched, a lizard skittered toward her, pausing occasionally to rear up, raising its front legs like cactus arms, splaying the digits wide. She stared, mesmerized by the odd display, which the lizard repeated several times as it skittered closer. Did lizards have scent organs on the feet—was he stopping to sniff the cheese? Or was the odd, yogalike pose meant to be intimidating? O’Malley wasn’t intimidated; she was amused—at first. Then she noticed other flickers of movement, other lizards, skittering toward her: a few at first, then a dozen, then a hundred or more. She shooed them, stamping her feet, and they backed away, but after a few seconds they resumed their advance. “Scram,” she said. “Scoot!” She scooped sand with one han
d and flung it at them. They flinched and dodged, but still they advanced, pausing and rearing up, their ranks steadily growing, their leaders almost upon her. O’Malley bit off a final chunk of cheese, then mumbled, “Fine—take the damn cheese.” She flung it away and scurried back to the trail, glancing behind her occasionally to make sure she wasn’t being followed by the swarming reptiles.
Another half hour of brisk hiking brought her above the tree line and onto bare rock, stark and windswept. One blasted, stunted tree, no taller than O’Malley, huddled beside the trail, the wind seething through its shuddering branches. The sound was as haunting as the MAGIC telescope’s moaning wires, but more ominous, somehow: more a hiss than a song. Still, stubbornly, she pressed on. She topped a slight rise, then nearly tumbled head over heels. Directly ahead the earth dropped away, opening into a deep crater with steep, sloping sides made of small black cinders. Instinctively she backed away from the edge. She had intended to hike another mile of the trail, to see the next two craters, but this crater, and the suddenness with which it had opened directly at her feet, unsettled her. The wind was growing fiercer, too. What had Antonio said the forecast predicted? “Gusts of a hundred!” He was talking kilometers—one hundred of which translated to “only” sixty miles an hour—but a gust that strong would be more than enough, she reckoned, to blow her off the trail and over the edge.
She turned back, her pace and her pulse fast, until she was safely below the tree line once more. There, sheltered from the wind, back among the pines, she finally felt herself relaxing.
Ahead, a clearing caught her eye, and she stepped off the trail, over an ankle-high border of stones, for a closer look. The clearing wasn’t actually a clearing but instead a flat layer of exposed stone, the plane of its surface dotted with a few wobbly-looking cairns, waist high, and thousands of fist-size rocks. “How cool is that,” she said as she took in the pattern: laid out on the smooth slab was a labyrinth—a perfect spiral, fifty feet in diameter, outlined by individual stones. “Incredibly, magically cool!”
She found the spiral’s opening and stepped into it, winding her way toward the center—walking at first, then running, her arms stretched out like wings. By the time she reached the middle, she was dizzy from exertion, exuberance, and the ever-tightening turn. Panting and laughing, she sat down at the very center. Then she lay back, her right arm crooked beneath her head. The sun angling onto her face was warm and comforting, like balm to her jangled spirits. She closed her eyes, her left hand resting on her belly, rising and falling as her breathing slowed and deepened, and she felt herself drifting—spiraling—into sleep.
She woke with a gasp, her skin soaked with a sudden bloom of sweat. She lay motionless, stone-still on the rock, her eyes scanning the surroundings to see what had awakened her. Another dream of falling? An onslaught of lizards? She saw only blue sky, pine trees angling upward, the stacked cairns and spiraling labyrinth. No lizards. What a wuss, she scolded herself. She drew a deep breath, puffed it out, sucked in another.
Just as she was about to exhale again, she felt it: the ground beneath her was pulsing. Almost imperceptibly, but undeniably, the earth was trembling. The instant the movement registered, she recognized it: she had felt that same trembling a few moments before, in her sleep. It had been enough to wake her then; it was enough to send shivers down her spine now. Suddenly, with a clatter, one of the rickety cairns collapsed.
She scrambled to her feet, her gaze darting from the fallen marker to the center of the spiral, as if that were the epicenter of the quake. Then she began to run. She ran all the way back to the car, her feet churning in a headlong descent that was never more than a hairsbreadth from a fall.
“Bullshit,” she snapped into the phone. “The ground was shaking, David. Swear to God. It shook hard enough to wake me up, and then it shook again.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Megan,” said her ex. She had called him as soon as she’d gotten back to Santa Cruz and found a hotel for the night. “I’m looking at the data. Nothing happened. I see quakes today in Montenegro and the Caribbean and all around the Pacific Rim, but nothing within a thousand miles of La Palma.”
“Dammit, David, you’re pissing me off.”
“Story of my life, babe. I know you’re telling your truth, but I’m sitting here in Berkeley, looking at readings from a hundred fifty seismometers, all of ’em telling their truth. I’m a datahead, Megs. If I throw out the data, I got nothing. And the data says all’s quiet on the western front in La Palma.”
“There’s something going on here, David. I don’t know what, but I know that much. It fucked with my work, and now it’s fucking with my mind. If you can’t help me, I’ll just have to . . . well, hell, I don’t know what, but I have to do something.”
“You could consider letting it go,” he said. “You could stop picking at it.”
“I can’t stop picking at it, David. I’m no good at that. Never was, never will be.”
“Ha—tell me something I don’t know, honey.” He paused. “You could put a few dragon bowls around the island. See if they know something the seismic stations don’t.”
“Dragon bowls? What the hell’s a dragon bowl?”
“World’s first seismoscope,” he said. “Very cool, actually. Invented almost two thousand years ago in China. By a guy named Chang Heng. A regular Renaissance man, but fifteen centuries before the Renaissance. He was an inventor. A poet. An artist. Oh, and an astronomer, of course. Like all the cool kids.”
“Of course.” O’Malley almost allowed herself a smile. Despite the divorce, and despite her frustration, part of her could still appreciate David’s smarts and humor. “How come it’s called a dragon bowl?”
“Ah, glasshopper, risten and rearn,” he said. His fake Chinese accent was even worse than his Spanish one.
“Stop talking like that, or I’m hanging up now.”
“Promises, promises. The dragon bowl was six feet across, and—”
“Six feet?” she interrupted. “That’s not a bowl—that’s a bathtub.”
He sighed. “Honey, I love it when you play Story Helper.”
“All right, all right, this is me shutting up. I’m all ears. Tell me about this six-foot bowl.”
“So, first, it doesn’t look like a bowl. More like a giant water heater. Or a Bronze Age R2-D2.”
“R2-D2? The Star Wars robot?”
“Correct you are. Tell you I will, if listen you can. It was a big copper cylinder, six feet wide, ten feet high, with a dome on top. It had eight dragons mounted around the outside—”
“Hence the name?”
“Hence the name. Each dragon faced a different compass direction. Inside the mouth of each dragon was a ball, and—”
“A ball? What kind of ball?”
“Aarrgghh. A round ball. A ball carved from the finest jade. A ball made from a golden turd shat out by the Buddha. A ball. Christ, O’Malley, I know toddlers who listen better than you do.”
“I don’t doubt it. But can those sheeplike toddlers tell you the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
He took the bait, as she knew he would. “African or European swallow?” It was an old, comfortable routine for them, racing through entire scenes of dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail or their other shared favorite, The Princess Bride. But before she could volley back the next line—“I don’t know that!”—he cut her off. “Anyhow, the cool thing, the brilliant thing, about the dragon bowl was this. There was a pendulum inside, hanging down from the center of the dome. If an earthquake hit, the pendulum would skew sideways.”
“Equal and opposite reaction?”
“Law of inertia, actually. Technically, the pendulum itself would hang motionless, while the bowl moved. When it did, the pendulum would touch a lever on one side of the bowl—a trigger mechanism—opening the mouth of the nearest dragon. Ptui—the dragon would spit out the ball.”
“Sounds like that kid’s game, whatchamacallit. Mousetrap
. That, or a Rube Goldberg invention.”
“A bit. So the ball would drop out of the dragon’s mouth and plop into the open mouth of a frog sitting underneath.”
“A frog? A live frog?”
David groaned. “Yes,” he snarked. “A highly trained, exceedingly patient frog. No, doofus, a copper frog. Part of the gizmo. Eight dragons, eight balls, eight frogs, their eight mouths open wide in perpetual readiness to swallow a ball.”
“Ah so. And did it work, whatshisname’s handy-dandy Rube Goldberg Earthquake Detector?”
“I’m glad you asked. When our hero, Chang Heng, presented it to the emperor, people thought he’d lost his marbles.”
“So that’s where the balls came from!”
“God, you never give up, do you? Anyhow, the gizmo sat there, gathering dust in the imperial palace, for two years. Then one day—ptui—one of the dragons spit out a ball. People made fun all over again, because nobody’d felt the slightest tremor. Two days later, though, a messenger came riding in, hell for leather, from three hundred miles away. There’d been a massive earthquake, in exactly the direction the dragon bowl pointed. Heng’s genius was vindicated.”
“How nice for him,” said O’Malley. “The dragon bowl sounds like just the ticket. How many of these things do I need? And can I buy ’em online? And is Amazon doing drone deliveries to La Palma?”
“You could get by with two, but three would triangulate—get it, tri-angulate?—with better accuracy. But, no, you can’t get them from Amazon. Not even from eBay. There’s only a handful of these things in the whole world. All replicas. All in museums. And only one of them actually works. The others are just for show.”
“Well that sucks. You got me all worked up for nothing. Just like when we were married.”
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