Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  Eleanor glanced back at the Big Hale as they whirred away down a narrow asphalt lane between the palms. The main hotel was dark; only a few rooms showed even the hint of lights behind curtains. Torches sputtered in the night wind. She could not imagine that there were many people there this night or that the Big Hale could ever be noisy.

  They whirred past lagoons, wound downhill through a garden that made her dizzy with its rich smells, across a bridge spanning a narrow lagoon, past a waterfall, across another bridge, around a small swimming pool, then in sight of a beach with white breakers crashing in with a flurry of phosphorescence, then back into a thicker stand of palm trees. Eleanor realized that there were little huts set back in these trees, the buildings raised six to ten feet above the level of the path they were humming along. Shielded electric lamps glowed inches from the ground, set deep in tropical foliage, but the torches set every few yards were not lighted here, perhaps they had been extinguished at some sane hour.

  Eleanor felt with a strange certainty that the vast majority of these expensive hales were empty this night, that the Mauna Pele was mostly empty—Big Hale and little hales—all several thousand acres of it mostly empty except for its support staff and night workers back there in the island of light that was the main lobby and atrium and terrace. They whirred around another rock-lined lagoon, turned left onto a little path, and stopped in front of a thatch-roofed hale set ten feet up stone stairs.

  “Tahitian twenty-nine,” said her guide. “Very nice.” He lifted her duffel out and bounded up the stairs, holding the door open for her.

  Eleanor entered the hale as if in a dream. It was very neat—a porch, a small entry foyer, a narrow hall leading to an open bath area, a sitting area and sleeping area beyond, the queen-sized bed covered by a bright quilt of some island design, two lamps burning on either side of the comfortable-looking bed, windows on each side with louvered shutters half drawn, a high ceiling with latticework at the gables, at least two fans slowly turning. Eleanor could see a private lanai beyond shuttered French doors and could hear the recycling pump on her private hot tub there.

  “Very nice,” repeated her guide with the slightest hint of question in his voice.

  “Very nice,” said Eleanor.

  The man smiled. “My name is Bobby. Please let me know if I or anyone else on the staff can make your stay more pleasant in any way. Breakfast is served on the terrace of the Big Hale and at the Shipwreck Lanai from seven to ten-thirty. It is all in here…” He tapped a thick sheaf of folders and service guides on her bedside table. “We do not have Do Not Disturb signs here, but when you wish to be left alone, just set this coconut on your front porch and no one will disturb you.” He lifted a coconut with the volcano symbol of the Mauna Pele painted on its side. “Aloha!”

  Tip, thought Eleanor through her fog of tiredness, and fumbled in her purse. She found only a ten, but when she turned around with it in her hand, Bobby was gone. She heard the whirr of the electric cart, but it was out of sight by the time she moved to the shuttered window.

  Eleanor explored the hale for a few minutes, switching on and off lights in different areas, then made sure the accordion doors in back and the single door in front were locked. She sat on the bed, too tired to unpack or undress.

  She was still sitting there, half dozing, dreaming of the Saddle Road and of huge metal beasts crashing around in the shrubs, when something or someone began to scream just outside her window.

  SIX

  As I prepare for sleep, a rich voice rises out of the still night, and, far as this ocean rock is toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar home air. But the words seem somewhat out of joint:

  “Waikiki lantoni oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo.” Translated, that means “When we were marching through Georgia.”

  —Mark Twain

  “Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands”

  June 7, 1866, Hilo, Hawaii—

  Our Mr. Clemens is becoming somewhat of an active annoyance.

  The two-day trip from Honolulu to the Island of Hawaii might be generously described as one of life’s least enjoyable experiences. We were no sooner out to sea when the ship, the Boomerang, an aging propeller of some 300 tons, began wallowing and slewing its way from trough to swell and then from swell to trough. Most of my fellow passengers had the good grace to retire to their bunks to retch in comparative privacy—although there was no privacy aboard that dreadful ship, nor segregation of the sexes, for everyone—Hawaiian native, Honolulu gentleman, British lady, Chinaman and paniolo cowboy—was thrown together in the most promiscuous circumstances, the stern “sleeping cabin” being merely an extension of the crude saloon where one eats, drinks, promenades, and plays cards.

  After my previously recorded verbal victory over the tiresome Mr. Clemens, I had taken myself down to my bunk in this abysmal cabin, but immediately upon entering the darkened confines of the long common room, I was confronted with two cockroaches on my appointed berth. While I have oft recorded how I detest and fear cockroaches more than grizzly bears or Rocky Mountain panthers, it needs to be added that these were no ordinary cockroaches. These monsters were the size of lobsters with red eyes and antennae on which one could have hung one’s hat and parasol.

  Besides the indelicate sounds of our more delicate passengers bringing up the celebratory luncheons they had enjoyed before departure at Honolulu, there were the snores of the indifferent sleepers who had stacked themselves like firewood around the periphery of this common room. I noticed that Mrs. Windwood was using a dozing gentleman’s head for a footstool and later discovered that the gentleman in question was the Governor of Maui.

  Keeping a careful eye on the cockroaches, which appeared to be plumping my pillow in preparation for a long nap of their own, I retreated to the upper deck once again and accepted the “berth” of a mattress near the transom. It seemed that Mr. Clemens also had planned to spend much of the voyage “out here where the air has only been breathed once” and so we were thrown upon each other for conversation once again. For several hours before exhaustion drove us to our respective “berths” on the deck, Mr. Clemens and I spoke of irrelevant and often irreverent things. I believe that the correspondent was surprised to find a lady who enjoyed banter and telling amusing anecdotes as much as did he. His youthful boorishness never quite departed, nor did his terrible habit of lighting up a cheap cigar without so much as a “by-your-leave,” but having toured the Rocky Mountain wilderness and the Wild West between there and San Francisco, I was almost used to such a lack of manners. I do admit that the garrulous correspondent kept my mind and stomach off the pitching of the Boomerang and the possibility of being assassinated by cockroaches.

  When I mentioned my disgust at the sight of these creatures,

  Mr. Clemens agreed that they were “a fair share” of the reason he had come up on deck. “My resident cockroaches were as big as peach leaves,” he said, “with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They grated their teeth like tobacco worms and appeared dissatisfied about something.”

  I described the lobster-sized vermin who had laid claim to my pillow. “I tried to prod one with my parasol,” I said, “but the smaller of the two cockroaches appropriated the instrument and used it as a sort of tent.”

  “It is best that you declined to do further battle,” suggested Mr. Clemens. “I have it on good authority that these reptile-sized insects are in the habit of eating off a sleeping sailor’s toenails down to the quick. This thought is what gave me an overwhelming hankering to come up and sleep in the rain.”

  And so it was in this vein of nonsense that we passed a good portion of that evening.

  At five in the morning the ship put into Lahaina, the largest village on the green isle of Maui, and Mr. Clemens seemed very keen to go ashore. Unfortunately for both him and your interlocutor—welcoming as I would have a respite from his talkative presence—the captain of the Boomerang sent nothing ashore but longboats of mail and various provisions,
receiving like in return, and Mr. Clemens had to stand at the rail, inhale the sandalwood scent of this southern isle, and regale me with stories of his visit to those green hills earlier in his three-month sojourn in the islands.

  We departed Maui in early afternoon, and the channel between that isle and its larger sister to the south was a more restless bit of water than any we had encountered so far. The crossing itself took a mere six hours, but it must have seemed longer to the majority of our fellow travelers, some of whom were praying for death as deliverance from their mal de mer before we reached the coastal waters of Hawaii itself. Mr. Clemens continued to be unaffected by all of the tossing and rolling—the ship’s, that is, he did seem somewhat put off by the tossing and rolling of the afflicted passengers—and when I commented about his resistance to such pitchings, he confided in me that he had “served his time” as a riverboat pilot before the War.

  I asked him why he had traded such a profession for that of correspondent. Mr. Clemens leaned on the railing, lighted another of his detestable cigars, and said with a bit of glint in his eye, “I hated to do it, Miss Stewart. Join the literary life, I mean. I tried to find honest work, may Providence turn me into a Methodist if I did not. I tried, and failed, and succumbed to the temptation of making my living without having to work.”

  Not to be distracted by his childish badinage, I said, “But do you miss piloting, Mr. Clemens?”

  Instead of another awkward half-witticism, the red-haired correspondent looked out over the ocean as if seeing something quite removed from the scene before us. It was the first time I had seen him serious. “I loved the profession of piloting as I may never love another thing or another person,” he said, his voice and dialect less exaggerated than I had previously heard. “My time on the river was as entirely free as I could imagine a human being’s life to be. I consulted no one, received commands from no one, and was as unfettered as any soul could aspire to be in this life.”

  Somewhat surprised by this serious answer, I said, “And was your river as beautiful as this not-so-pacific ocean?”

  Mr. Clemens took a moment to inhale his poisonous smoke. “My early days on the river were as seductive as wandering through the Louvre, Miss Stewart. There was unexpected beauty everywhere. It took me, as the cowboy said upon finding a snake in his boot, a bit unprepared. But as I became more proficient as a pilot, that beauty faded.”

  “Due to familiarity?” I suggested.

  “No,” said Mr. Clemens, tossing the remains of his cigar into the sea, “from my mastery of the language of the river.”

  I looked at him without understanding and rotated my parasol.

  The correspondent smiled that boyish smile again. “The river was like a book, Miss Stewart. The face of the water—traveling both upriver and down—was like some ancient but recently discovered scroll written in a dead language. As I learned that language—the language of treacherous floating logs and hidden bluff reefs and wooded shores memorized now not for their beauty but for their reminder to seek the safe channel—as this marvelous book surrendered its secrets to me, so too did the natural beauty of the river—its silences at sunrise, its hushed twilight stirrings—so too did all these recede, as if their beauty was bound by their mystery.”

  I admit that the gentleman’s sudden transformation from boorish scribbler to frustrated poet made me silent for a moment. Perhaps Mr. Clemens noticed this, or was embarrassed by his flight of fancy, for he fished out another cigar and waved it like a wand. “At any rate, Miss Stewart, a riverboat might kill you—the boiler can blow, the hull be torn out in a second by one of those lovely bluff reefs—but it never makes the human body want to turn itself inside out the way this ocean-going raft has succeeded with our poor fellow passengers.”

  I left Mr. Clemens then and fell into an animated conversation with Thomas Lyman, Mr. Wendt, and the elderly Rev. Haymark about the “pros” and “antis” of missionaries and their effect on the islands. Mr. Wendt and Mr. Lyman held the currently fashionable views that the missionaries have been disastrous for the islands’ economy, health, and autonomy, while the snuff-taking Reverend held the more traditional view that the natives had been baby-sacrificing heathens before his father and friends brought the Good News and civilization to them a generation ago. I admit that as the conversation followed its inescapable trajectory, I found myself wondering what irrelevancy Mr. Clemens might inject into the topic. But Mr. Clemens had claimed a mattress under a canvas awning and was sleeping away the hottest part of the tropical day.

  We came in sight of Hawaii late in the afternoon, but clouds obscured all but the summits of two mighty volcanoes that appeared to gleam white with snow. The mere thought of snow in such latitudes was enough to make me giddy, and I decided at that moment to break my vows to all of my missionary friends in Honolulu who had made me swear that I would not attempt to reach the summit of Mauna Loa or its sister volcano.

  It was already dark when we put in at Kawaihae on the northwest coast of Hawaii. Again there was the briefest exchange of mail and cargo and we set out again, steaming through the channel which separated Maui from the northernmost point of Hawaii. Here, although the skies were free of clouds and the stars brighter than I had ever seen them save for my excursions into the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the sea was rougher than before, turning the common room below into a pitching repository of suffering humanity. There was no railside conversation with Mr. Clemens or any of the other passengers on this night; I gratefully accepted my “mattress” under the awning near the ventilator and spent much of the next seven hours hanging on to guy wires and brass brackets to keep from rolling bodily off the deck. Sometimes, when I slipped off to sleep and surrendered my grasp, the mattress would slide downhill toward the railing, only to slide back and deposit me in the place I began against the ventilator funnel as the ship rolled the opposite direction. I began to understand why they called the boat the Boomerang.

  The sun rose in a glory of showers and rainbows and the sea calmed as if smoothed by an invisible hand. The northeast coast of Hawaii came into clear view, and it could not have been more different than the surprisingly brown and parched hills and black lava fields we had glimpsed of the northwest shore at dusk the night before. Here all was verdant—a thousand shades of green ranging from radiant emerald to the subtlest hues of muted celery—and the northern coast was a South Seas magic lantern show of dramatic cliffs, still perfectly green with vegetation although none of us could imagine how flora could thrive on such verticality, punctuated with sheer canyons opening to verdant valleys, decorated with the occasional small beach, gleaming white or black beneath the green cliff faces, and accentuated by a seemingly endless series of waterfalls that fell quite freely for a thousand feet and more from the jungles at the top of the unassailable bluffs to the rock pools and pounding spray beneath.

  And everywhere along this impressive stretch of coastline crashed the surf, sounding—the Reverend Haymark assured me—just like artillery in the recent war. In places the rolling combers exploded into cliffside caves and clefts, and everywhere they sent tall trailers of spray into the ferns that rioted along the grey rock faces.

  For almost thirty miles or more along this north coast did we feast our eyes on this grandeur, seeing no sign of man’s puny habitations save for a few native churches made of grass set in clearings near the cliff’s edges, but ten miles or so from Hilo we caught glimpses of the first sugar plantations, their sweet fields an even more amazing green than the verdure our eyes had grown almost accustomed to, the white boiling houses and chimney stacks adding a pleasant contrast to all this mindless vegetable matter. And then there were more houses, more valleys, a profusion of grass shacks, more plantations, the bluffs and cliffs lining the coastline dropped until they reminded me of New England’s more forgiving shore, and then we reached our destination at Hilo.

  Even from the first moment of our entry into the crescent-shaped bay that served and protected this community, I
could see that Hilo was the true paradise of the Pacific—the paradise that pretender-cities such as Honolulu could only gaze at with envy. Because of the wet climate and perfect growing conditions in air and soil, the city itself was more suggested than seen. Everywhere the tall coconut palms, candlenut trees, breadfruit trees, and a thousand other tropical blooms, ferns, and trailing vine hid all but the briefest glimpse of white wood or steeple from our direct view.

  Here the sound of the surf was not artillery but more a soft chorus of children’s voices, to which the entire canopy of greenery over the stately homes and grass huts alike seemed to sway in rhythm to Nature’s music. It was as if our ship—so infected with illness and vermin during the two-day crossing—had transmogrified itself into a stately celestial vessel bearing its lucky pilgrims to this Eden-like anteroom to Paradise.

  It was a sublime moment. It would have been a perfect moment—if Mr. Clemens had not scraped a Lucifer match along his boot sole, lit one of his unmentionable cigars, and said drily, “Those trees look sort of like a collection of feather-dusters struck by lightning, don’t they?”

  “Not in the least,” I said as coldly as I could, still retaining the glow of sublimity that our entry had offered any truly sensitive soul.

  “And those grass cabins—” continued Mr. Clemens, “look so furry that they might be made of bear skins, don’t you think?”

  I said nothing to this, hoping that my silence would act as reproof.

  Oblivious to my disdain, the red-haired fool sent a cloud of exhaled cigar smoke between me and the view. “I don’t see any skulls or skull-hunters,” he said, “but it hasn’t been that long since old Kamehameha and his boys were decorating these beaches with the heads of their victims and human sacrifices stuck on poles along the walls of their temples.”

  I opened my parasol and turned away, refusing to hear more of this offensive banter. But before I could retreat to the bow, where my real traveling companions were clustered, I heard the boorish correspondent mutter, as if to himself, “It’s a darned shame—the damage that being saved and civilized does to a place. What a disappointment it means in terms of what a tourist gets to see.”