Atlantis and Other Places (3 page)

Audubon laughed once more. He tossed and twisted and yawned. Pretty soon, he was snoring again himself.

 

 

When he went out on deck the next morning, the
Maid of Orleans
might have been the only thing God ever made besides the sea. Terranova had vanished behind her; Atlantis still lay a thousand miles ahead. The steamship had entered the Hesperian Gulf, the wide arm of the North Atlantic that separated the enormous island and its smaller attendants from the continent to the west.

Audubon looked south and east. He’d been born on Santo Tomás, one of those lesser isles. He was brought to France three years later, and so escaped the convulsions that wracked the island when its colored slaves rose up against their masters in a war where neither side asked for quarter or gave it. Blacks ruled Santo Tomás to this day. Not many whites were left on the island. Audubon had only a few faded childhood memories of his first home. He’d never cared to go back, even if he could have without taking his life in his hands.

Edward Harris strolled out on deck. “Good morning,” he said. “I hope you slept well?”

“Well enough, thanks,” Audubon answered.
I would have done better without “Pretty Black Eyes,” but such is life
. “Yourself?”

“Not bad, not bad.” Harris eyed him. “You look . . . less greenish than you did yesterday. The bracing salt air, I suppose?”

“It could be. Or maybe I’m getting used to the motion.” As soon as Audubon said that, as soon as he thought about his stomach, he gulped. He pointed an accusing finger at his friend. “There—you see? Just asking was enough to jinx me.”

“Well, come have some breakfast, then. Nothing like a good mess of ham and eggs or something like that to get you ready for . . . Are you all right?”

“No,” Audubon gasped, leaning out over the rail.

He breakfasted lightly, on toasted ship’s biscuit and coffee and rum punch. He didn’t usually start the day with strong spirits, but he didn’t usually start the day with a bout of seasickness, either.
A good thing, too, or I’d have died years ago
, he thought.
I hope I would, anyhow
.

Beside him in the galley, Harris worked his way through fried eggs and ham and sausage and bacon and maizemeal mush. Blotting his lips with a snowy linen napkin, he said, “That was monstrous fine.” He patted his pot belly.

“So glad you enjoyed it,” Audubon said tonelessly.

Once or twice over the next three days, the
Maid of Orleans
came close enough to another ship to make out her sails or the smoke rising from her stack. A pod of whales came up to blow nearby before sounding again. Most of the time, though, the sidewheeler might have been alone on the ocean.

Audubon was on deck again the third afternoon, when the sea—suddenly, as those things went—changed from greenish gray to a deeper, richer blue. He looked around for Harris, and spotted him not far away, drinking rum punch and chatting with a personable young woman whose curls were the color of fire.

“Edward!” Audubon said. “We’ve entered the Bay Stream!”

“Have we?” The news didn’t seem to have the effect on Harris that Audubon wanted. His friend turned back to the redheaded woman—who also held a glass of punch—and said, “John is wild for nature in every way you can imagine.” Spoken in a different tone of voice, it would have been a compliment. Maybe it still was. Audubon hoped he only imagined Harris’ faintly condescending note.

“Is he?” The woman didn’t seem much interested in Audubon one way or the other. “What about you, Eddie?”

Eddie?
Audubon had trouble believing his ears. No one had ever called Harris such a thing in his hearing before. And Harris . . . smiled. “Well, Beth, I’ll tell you—I am, too. But some parts of nature interest me more than others.” He set his free hand on her arm. She smiled, too.

He was a widower. He could chase if that suited his fancy, not that Beth seemed to need much chasing. Audubon admired a pretty lady as much as anyone—more than most, for with his painter’s eye he saw more than most—but was a thoroughly married man, and didn’t slide from admiration to pursuit. He hoped Lucy was well.

Finding Harris temporarily distracted, Audubon went back to the rail himself. By then, the
Maid of Orleans
had left the cooler waters by the east coast of Terranova behind and fully entered the warm current coming up from the Bay of Mexico. Even the bits of seaweed floating in the ocean looked different now. Audubon’s main zoological interests did center on birds and viviparous quadrupeds. All the same, he wished he would have thought to net up some of the floating algae in the cool water and then some of these so he could properly compare them.

He turned around to say as much to Harris, only to discover that his friend and Beth were no longer on deck. Had Harris gone off to pursue his own zoological interests? Well, more power to him if he had. Audubon looked back into the ocean, and was rewarded with the sight of a young sea turtle, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, delicately nibbling a strand of the new seaweed. Next to the rewards Harris might be finding, it didn’t seem like much, but it was definitely better than nothing.

Like the sun, Atlantis, for Audubon, rose in the east. That blur on the horizon—for a little while, you could wonder if it was a distant cloudbank, but only for a little while. Before long, it took on the unmistakable solidity of land. To the Breton and Galician fishermen who’d found it first, almost four hundred years before, it would have sent the setting sun to bed early.

“Next port of call is New Marseille, sir,” the purser said, tipping his cap to Audubon as he went by.

“Yes, of course,” the artist replied, “but I’m bound for Avalon.”

“Even so, sir, you’ll have to clear customs at the first port of call in Atlantis,” the other man reminded him. “The States are fussy about these things. If you don’t have a New Marseille customs stamp on your passport, they won’t let you off the ship in Avalon.”

“It’s a nuisance, to open all my trunks for the sake of a stamp,” Audubon said. The purser shrugged the shrug of a man with right, or at least regulations, on his side. And he told the truth: the United States of Atlantis
were
fussy about who visited them.
Do as we do
, they might have said,
or stay away
.

Not that coming ashore at New Marseille was a hardship. On the contrary. Warmed by the Bay Stream, the city basked in an almost unending May. Farther north, in Avalon, it seemed to be April most of the time. And then the Bay Stream curled north and east around the top of Atlantis and delivered the rest of its warmth to the north of France, to the British Isles, and to Scandinavia. The east coast of Atlantis, where the winds swept across several hundred miles of mountains and lowlands before they finally arrived, was an altogether darker, harsher place.

But Audubon was in New Marseille, and if it wasn’t veritably May, it was the middle of April, which came close enough. A glance as he and Harris carted their cases to the customs shed sufficed to tell him he’d left Terranova behind. Oh, the magnolias that shaded some nearby streets weren’t much different from the ones he could have found near New Orleans. But the gingkoes on other thoroughfares . . . Only one other variety of ginkgo grew anyplace else in the world: in China. And the profusion of squat cycads with tufts of leaves sprouting from the tops of squat trunks also had few counterparts anywhere in the temperate zone.

The customs official, by contrast, seemed much like customs officials in every other kingdom and republic Audubon had ever visited. He frowned as he examined their declaration, and frowned even more as he opened up their baggage to confirm it. “You have a considerable quantity of spirits here,” he said. “A dutiable quantity, in fact.”

“They aren’t intended for drinking or for resale, sir,” Audubon said, “but for the preservation of scientific specimens.”

“John Audubon’s name and artistry are known throughout the civilized world,” Edward Harris said.

“I’ve heard of the gentleman myself. I admire his work, what I’ve seen of it,” the official replied. “But the law does not consider intent. It considers quantity. You will not tell me these strong spirits
cannot
be drunk?”

“No,” Audubon admitted reluctantly.

“Well, then,” the customs man said. “You owe the fisc of Atlantis . . . Let me see ...” He checked a table thumbtacked to the wall behind him. “You owe twenty-two eagles and, ah, fourteen cents.”

Fuming, Audubon paid. The customs official gave him a receipt, which he didn’t want, and the requisite stamp in his passport, which he did. As he and Harris trundled their chattels back to the
Maid of Orleans
, a small bird flew past them. “Look, John!” Harris said. “Wasn’t that a gray-throated green?”

Not even the sight of the Atlantean warbler could cheer Audubon. “Well, what if it was?” he said, still mourning the money he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to spend.

His friend knew what ailed him. “When we get to Avalon, paint a portrait or two,” Harris suggested. “You’ll make it up, and more besides.”

Audubon shook his head. “I don’t
want
to do that, dammit.” When thwarted, he could act petulant as a child. “I grudge the time I’d have to spend. Every moment counts. I have not so many days left myself, and the upland honkers . . . Well, who can say if they have any left at all?”

“They’ll be there.” As usual, Harris radiated confidence.

“Will they?” Audubon, by contrast, careened from optimism to the slough of despond on no known schedule. At the moment, not least because of the customs man, he was mired in gloom. “When fishermen first found this land, a dozen species of honkers filled it—filled it as buffalo fill the plains of Terranova. Now . . . Now a few may be left in the wildest parts of Atlantis. Or, even as we speak, the last ones may be dying—may already have died!—under an eagle’s claws or the jaws of a pack of wild dogs or to some rude trapper’s shotgun.”

“The buffalo are starting to go, too,” Harris remarked.

That only agitated Audubon more. “I must hurry! Hurry, do you hear me?”

“Well, you can’t go anywhere till the
Maid of Orleans
sails,” Harris said reasonably.

“One day soon, a railroad will run from New Marseille to Avalon,” Audubon said. Atlantis was building railroads almost as fast as England: faster than France, faster than any of the new Terranovan republics. But soon was not yet, and he
did
have to wait for the steamship to head north.

Passengers left the
Maid of Orleans
. Beth got off, which made Harris glum. Others came aboard. Longshoremen carried crates and boxes and barrels and bags ashore. Others brought fresh cargo onto the ship. Passengers and longshoremen alike moved too slowly to suit Audubon. Again, he could only fume and pace the mercifully motionless deck. At last, late the next afternoon, the
Maid of Orleans
steamed towards Avalon.

She stayed close to shore on the two-and-a-half-day journey. It was one of the most beautiful routes anywhere in the world. Titanic redwoods and sequoias grew almost down to the shore. They rose so tall and straight, they might almost have been the columns of a colossal outdoor cathedral.

But that cathedral could have been dedicated to puzzlement and confusion. The only trees like the enormous evergreens of Atlantis were those on the Pacific coast of Terranova, far, far away. Why did they thrive here, survive there, and exist nowhere else? Audubon had no more answer than any other naturalist, though he dearly wished for one.
That
would crown a career! He feared it was a crown he was unlikely to wear.

The
Maid of Orleans
passed a small fishing town called Newquay without stopping. Having identified the place on his map, Audubon was pleased when the purser confirmed he’d done it right. “If anything happens to the navigator, sir, I’m sure we’d be in good hands with you,” the man said, and winked to show he didn’t aim to be taken too seriously.

Audubon gave him a dutiful smile and went back to eyeing the map. Atlantis’ west coast and the east coast of North Terranova a thousand miles away put him in mind of two pieces of a world-sized jigsaw puzzle: their outlines almost fit together. The same was true for the bulge of Brazil in South Terranova and the indentation in West Africa’s coastline on the other side of the Atlantic. And the shape of Atlantis’ eastern coast corresponded to that of western Europe in a more general way.

What did that mean? Audubon knew he was far from the first to wonder. How could anyone who looked at a map help but wonder? Had Atlantis and Terranova been joined once upon a time? Had Africa and Brazil? How could they have been, with so much sea between? He saw no way it could be possible. Neither did anyone else. But when you looked at the map . . .

“Coincidence,” Harris said when he mentioned it at supper.

“Maybe so.” Audubon cut meat from a goose drumstick. His stomach was behaving better these days—and the seas stayed mild. “But if it is a coincidence, don’t you think it’s a large one?”