The mammoths diminished beneath them as the balloon ascended into a piece of the sky in which the wind, blowing hard, was dead opposite to what it had been a moment ago. They were swept around toward the distant curtain like a ship caught in a tide-race. The curtain itself was agitated. Fissures opened and closed in it, flecked with pale streaks like angry whitewater on a rocky coast. The entire thing, it seemed to St. Ives, was disintegrating, and the fog that drifted in front of it was forebodingly thin.
Far below them the stream ran its course, and through the telescope St. Ives watched as Fort’s men sent what appeared to be leaf-and-stick rafts downstream, heaped with a pale cargo of heaven knew what, playing out another of Fort’s little joke upon the world. The balloon was still rising in an ear-blocking rush, making an incredible amount of leeway despite its speed. St. Ives wondered whether some force generated by the curtain was interfering with their forward travel—whether they would simply be dragged futilely up the sky, unable to cross through the curtain at all. There was nothing, St. Ives realized, that they could do to save themselves from such a fate, and he compelled himself to attend to the words of the psalm that Hampson uttered, his voice calm and clear.
And then in a wild, capricious caper the balloon was yanked suddenly downward, throwing the men into a heap on the deck of the gondola. They sorted themselves out as the balloon began spiraling madly, the horizon passing round and round before their eyes—the vortex of wind again, but with wild energy. Abruptly the spinning stopped, and the balloon sailed straight toward the curtain, the elongated gas-bag drawing away before them, towing the gondola away behind it now, the deck tilting precariously. St. Ives consulted his compass, which once again had lost its mind—a great relief.
The curtain appeared to be in a state of collapse. White, foam-like runnels cascaded downward within it, and here and there unnerving fragments of blue sky became visible through suddenly-forming windows. But which sky, St. Ives wondered as he held onto the railing of the gondola with a death grip. The rubberized silk of their balloon rippled and chattered, and the wind whistled in his ears as they were swept headlong into the darkness, the sky-tides pushing them toward the opposite shore, thank God. In the grip of the agitated curtain, the gondola bucked and creaked like a living creature. The three men held on, St. Ives uneasily watching the straining joints where the basket was lashed together with pitifully thin line.
And then they passed into glorious daylight, and the three clambered to their feet and set up a wild cheering. Below them lay the North Downs. The soft wind blew out of the east, carrying them toward home, and although they could not make out the meadow where their friends awaited their return, they could see Boxley Abbey no great distance below.
For a moment St. Ives allowed his mind to wander. He imagined regaling the Royal Society with an account of what had come to pass on this strange day—the invisible island, the prehistoric creatures, the lost race of men, Fort’s house, the passage into the library, the as-yet-unwritten story that was in fact written by an unknown hand. It was a gaggle of lunatic conundrums to be sure, utterly ruinous to his reputation. The very notion of spinning out the tale was not to be countenanced.
He turned and looked back, seeing that the curtain had vanished from the sky. The world of the floating island had winked out of existence and would reside only in their memories evermore—or at least until he stepped into Fort’s study twenty years hence. He patted his coat pocket, where lay the copy of The Graphic, his only keepsake. But then he remembered the lungfish and the beer bottle full of water from a lost world. Who knew what microscopic things—perhaps eggs or even larvae—swam within that bottle?
They set their sights on a broad sheep pasture, the sheep looking up at them as the gondola descended, settling on the grass not thirty feet distant from the Pilgrims Road and a bare three miles from Aylesford Village.
Earthbound Things
ALICE LAY THE copy of The Graphic on the bench in the glasshouse next to the aquarium that housed the apparently happy lungfish. She stared at St. Ives for a time without speaking. She wore the well-washed linen trousers and blouse that served as her work clothes, and there was a dusting of potting soil on her blouse. She’d been propagating begonias, reproducing them from rhizomes and leaves. The lush smell of the greenhouse—the plants and soil and aquaria—reminded St. Ives of the smell of the jungle through which he had tramped just yesterday—a jungle that he might have the fabrication of a dream if it weren’t for the tangible truth of the magazine and the inarguable return of Roger Kryzanek.
He had seen the future, had seen his own and Alice’s apparent happiness together, and he wondered now whether that happiness was assured or was simply one of an infinitude of possible futures—a future that might yet blink out of existence if he failed to give Jack the copy of the magazine that Alice had just been reading. It came to him that he had not had the presence of mind, there in Fort’s study, to ask her about Eddie and Cleo, how they fared, what sort of people they had grown up to be. But he knew in the next moment that such questions must easily lead to poisonous answers, to the accumulation of regret for things that had not yet come to pass, or things that had. Still, he wondered what the answers would have been.
Alice pushed a wild strand of dark hair from her face with the back of her hand and picked up a porcelain doll’s head from a large basket of such heads that sat next to the magazine, some of the heads cracked or broken, most of them whole. After looking at it for a moment, she said, “What you tell me makes no earthly sense. They clap people into Colney Hatch for asserting things far more mundane. If I didn’t know you well, I’d send for the mad-doctor.”
“Earthly sense? No, it makes not a bit of it. Fort has a regard for unearthly sense.”
“What can this man Fort possibly gain by his eccentric behavior?”
“He has the theory that humankind must be awakened from their torpor now and then—that they dwell behind a veil, their time and their thoughts mortgaged to what they understand to be necessity. And so he causes it to rain limpets or frogs or porcelain heads in order to give people something startling to dwell on, and to watch the learned men of science deny the limpets and heads. He’s either an artist or a madman, I can’t make up my mind.”
“Given how things fell out, I believe I rather like him.”
“Tell me,” St. Ives said. “If when I saw you come through that door, I had asked you about our future together, would you have told me?”
“No,” Alice said. “Certainly not. I can conceive of nothing more ruinous to our happiness and the happiness of our family. Here’s Cleo and Eddie, coming to feed the lungfish.” She opened the door of the glasshouse and waved at the children, who dashed in out of breath. Cleo held a doll’s head in each hand. Eddie opened his fist to show them a big earthworm.
“Can we try this fellow on old Kryzanek?” Eddie asked, boosting himself up onto the broad wooden workbench and kneeling so as to see down into the aquarium. “He’s a fat worm. I’ve rinsed him clean.” He dangled it over the water and then let it drop, the worm wiggling as it fell. The lungfish, newly named Kryzanek, darted forward and gobbled it down, then retreated to its hiding place. “I’ll dig out more of them!” Eddie shouted, running out again.
“Poor worm,” Cleo said. “Does Kryzanek want a doll’s head, Father?”
“Not to eat, Cleo.”
“I mean to play with, silly.”
“Then, yes, almost certainly.”
“Lift me up.”
Alice lifted her, and Cleo dropped one of the heads into the tank. Bubbles rushed out of it as it sank, landing upright on the gravel so that it was peering out from behind a water plant. The lungfish swam over to have a look but was moderately indifferent, or so it seemed to St. Ives. Cleo plucked a fresh head out of the basket, and Alice set her on the ground again. She ran out shouting, “Eddie, come look!”
“I’m happy that Finn brought home a basket of these heads,” Alice said, watching Cleo run
across the meadow, “but no right-minded person would understand a rain of porcelain heads to be evidence of anything, even if they trekked out to your meadow to see the litter for themselves.”
“Yes. None of this can be passed off as truth, although every word of is true. The three of us have agreed to keep silent. Think what would happen to Hampson’s reputation as a sensible, Godly man if he were to say anything at all about our adventure. We would become the laughingstocks of the world.”
“I cannot imagine what Mr. Kryzanek will say to his wife.”
“He intends to say that his memory was shattered by a knock on the head. He’s certain his wife will welcome him home without any sort of inquisition.”
“Will you give the magazine to Jack?”
“I believe so,” St. Ives said. “Jack will have no difficulty believing, but he might scruple at putting his name to story that he didn’t write.”
“But his name is already on it,” Alice said. “Who did write it if not Jack?”
“There you have me,” St. Ives said. “And here’s something else. Happy birthday, dear heart. You can see that it’s necessary, perhaps vitally necessary, that we take ship to New York City twenty years from now. That’s my birthday present to you—a holiday in America and a night at the opera. What do you say to that?”
“I say that it’s an odd thing to receive one’s birthday present twenty years late.”
“Then what would you like today? Anything you wish for is yours.”
“I wish for you to pack a picnic basket. We’ll gather up Cleo, Eddie, and Finn and spend the afternoon at the weir fishing. We’ll eat deviled ham on toast and speak of sensible, earthbound things.”
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Ebb Tide
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
The Adventure of the Ring of Stones
The Here-and-Thereians
Earthbound Things
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 37