“No heroics,” I had agreed.
Now, six hundred feet above Stormchild and beneath a lowering gunmetal sky, I paused to catch my breath. The ground was uneven, tussocked and burrowed by nesting birds, while the rifle seemed to weigh a ton. I glanced up at the sky, wondering when the rain would come. The wind had suddenly sprung cold and fierce. If I had not known this to be the southern hemisphere’s summer I would have thought a fall of snow was imminent.
It took me another half hour to reach the crest of the ridge. Once there I stopped, panting and sweating, and took out the small handheld radio. The set was tuned to channel 37, a VHF frequency that had once been used for contacting marinas and boatyards in British waters, and which I doubted anyone other than David would be monitoring. “I’m on your skyline,” I told him.
David answered immediately. “Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild, Stormchild. Took your time strolling up that hill, didn’t you? Can you see anything. Over.”
“Nothing.” Facing me was not, as I had hoped, a long, shallow slope leading down to the mine workings, but rather a wide bleak saddle that looked suspiciously marshy. I took the binoculars from my bag and searched the high plateau, but nothing moved there except the long grasses that rippled under the wind’s cold touch. “What’s the glass doing?” I asked David.
“Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild. The barometer is still dropping. It is now showing thirty and a half inches. I say again. Three zero point five inches. Over.”
“You mean a thousand and thirty-three millibars?” I teased him.
“I mean thirty and one half English inches, and not some ridiculous French standard of measurement.” David was incorrigibly old-fashioned in such matters. “Over.”
The glass had read 1042 millibars when I woke, which meant that it was dropping more steeply than I had hoped. That drop indicated that a depression threatened us, a threat heralded by the freshness of the wind that I thought was probably stiffening. “If the glass goes on falling at this rate,” I advised David, “then you’d better think of making it to sea.”
“Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild. I agree. I’ll read the glass again in one hour and then decide. May I now suggest you conserve your battery power? Out.”
I dutifully switched off the little radio, shoved it deep into my bag, and marched on. From now on I would be out of sight of Stormchild, which meant that the VHF radios, which worked only on line of sight, would be blanketed into silence.
The upland saddle proved to be more than just marshland; it was a stretch of ice-cold bog land that sucked at my boots and sapped what little strength I had left. At times, missing my footing on the firmer tussocks, I would plunge up to a thigh in the wet, peaty mess. It had begun to drizzle, but soon that drizzle turned into a chill rain that thickened into a miserable downpour that blotted out the horizon like sea fog. I had not thought to bring one of my old prismatic compasses, but I doubted I would get lost, for if the charts were right then the dead end of the Desolate Straits, where Berenice assured me the limestone workings were built, lay just beyond the saddle’s eastern ridge, which, in turn, was no more than a mile away, yet already the marshland had consumed over two hours of painful, wet, slow struggle. I tried to console myself that some people paid small fortunes to be just so discomfited as they stalked deer on the Scottish hills, but the consolation did not help.
At last the going became firmer and the upward slope steeper, evidence that I was reaching the far side of the saddle. Rain was dripping from my hat and my boots squelched with every step. The cold was seeping into my bones, while my heels had been rubbed into painful blisters. Off to my left I could see a rocky peak which looked uncannily like one of the granite tors on Dartmoor, while directly ahead of me the skyline seemed to be crowned with a rampart of ice blocks. It was not until I was within a few paces of the blocks that I saw they were actually pale limestone boulders that were scattered along the ridge line above the quarry and where, winded, sore, and tired, I collapsed onto the wet turf and stared eastward.
Far off, dim through the smearing rain, were the slopes of the Andes, while nearer, though still watered into obscurity, was the labyrinth of islands and twisting channels that made this coast so tangled and broken. It was, despite the rain, a magnificent view, yet beneath me was something that interested me far more — the limestone workings. I had come, at last, to Genesis’s inner citadel.
The most obvious, and the ugliest, evidence of the old limestone workings was the quarry itself — a vast open scar that must have been a full half mile across and six hundred feet deep, and which had been ripped out of the hillside to leave a curving artificial cliff that faced toward the headwaters of the Desolate Straits. Trickles of peaty-brown water made miniature falls over the cliff; falls that tumbled hundreds of feet to the quarry floor which was cut into vast terraces so that it looked like an amphitheater for giants, littered with jagged boulders, dotted with pools, and strewn with shale and the detritus of the explosions that had once ripped the limestone out of the hill’s belly. Dark holes in the quarry’s sides betrayed where mine shafts had been driven horizontally into the mountain. To my left, beyond the big quarry, I could see a second and much smaller quarry, which appeared to face directly onto the straits.
At the seaward side of the larger quarry’s floor, where the amphitheater spilled its dark, wet litter of shale toward the sea, was a group of rusting and ugly buildings. The buildings were dwarfed by the quarry’s size, yet when I examined them through the binoculars and counted the flights of iron steps that zigzagged up the flank of the largest structure, I realized just how huge the old sheds were. The largest one, a great gaunt structure, seemed big enough to house an airship. The buildings were grouped together, sloping roof touching sloping roof, presumably so that the men who had once lived and worked in this god-awful place would never have needed to expose themselves to Patagonia’s merciless weather. I raised the glasses a fraction to see a covered loading ramp sloping down from the large building toward the stone pier that jutted into the Desolate Straits. The profits from limestone must have been huge to have made it worthwhile to bring in all that corrugated iron and timber and machinery.
I could see no one moving around the buildings, or on the hugely stepped floor of the quarry. No boats broke the wind-chopped surface of the straits beyond, though the lip of the quarry hid the closest stretch of water from my high viewpoint. The limestone works seemed deserted; indeed, they looked as though they had been deserted for years, and I felt a twinge of anxiety that Berenice might have invented her story of Nicole using the mine as her sanctuary.
There was only one way to find the truth, and that was to descend into the quarry. I meant to keep my promise to David, so, before making any move, I used the binoculars to search the lip of the small quarry, then to painstakingly investigate the larger quarry and all its buildings again. I stared hard at every door and window, yet I saw nothing threatening, and the only movement in the quarry was the rippling of the rain-speckled pools under the wind’s lash.