Lost Worlds (30 page)

But I knew Peter was anxious to get farther south, away from the treacherous currents and fickle storms of the gulf and down into the naturally formed canals between the fjords and the Pacific islands, down the Mesier, Inocentes and Smyth channels, past the Archipiélago de la Reina Adelaida, and on into the Strait of Magellan.

So I became content just to watch the mountains and the deep shadowy cliffs of the fjords and the shimmering waterfalls that plunged in steps, thousands of feet down from the ice caps to the forests and the roiling ocean.

And the albatrosses. How I loved their flight, stretching their great six-foot wingspans and skimming only inches above the water, rarely flapping, allowing the air to cushion them effortlessly. The slightest adjustment to their wing profiles enabled them to soar gracefully or turn slowly to follow us, watching us with indifference in their dark eyes.

Closer into shore were the steamer ducks with their bright lemon-orange bills, floating in small clusters of a dozen or so and then vanishing together in unison below the waves, where they propelled themselves with their stubby wings as rapidly as cormorants. When it comes to flying, though, they’re useless creatures. Their wings don’t seem designed for liftoff and when alarmed they flail away at the water and vanish in rainbowing sprays, half running, half kayaking across the waves.

On the rocky shoals close to shore I spotted seals, scores of them, basking in the brilliant morning sun. In such a desolate setting, two hundred miles now from the nearest village or fishing camp, it was reassuring to see such amiable creatures who seemed curious about, but in no way alarmed by, our intrusion into their secret world.

As the day slowly eased into late afternoon, Peter decided we should put in early so he could perform some technical tasks on our battered craft. He selected as our anchorage a calm broad fjord, edged by dense rain forest, and was soon working away at the steering gear again.

“Sure you don’t need any help?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.

He said no and suggested I might want to go ashore for a while.

“Bring back some mussels if you find any. They’re supposed to be the best in the world.”

We were anchored only fifty feet offshore, so I jumped into the water….

I’d never thought the ocean could be so cold. Somehow, as we’d battered the tempests over the past few days, the waves that soaked us had always remained on the tepid side. But this particular cove contained water on the verge of turning into ice. By the time I struggled over the slippery rocks and onto the shore, I was blotched blue and shivering, my teeth chattering like a woodchuck. I started flailing my arms about to jump-start the blood circulation and promptly collapsed on the pebbly beach. I stood up again and found I had almost no sense of balance. My body had become so used to being bounced around on the always-moving deck of the boat that it had apparently forgotten how to deal with the solidity and stability of terra firma.

For a while movement was limited to crashing around on all fours. I could hear Peter laughing back on the boat.

“What are you, some kind of bloody bear?” he shouted.

All I could manage was a distinctly explicit finger gesture as I wobbled about trying to find some way to stand on my feet for a few seconds.

“Just sit down for a while—you’ll be okay in a while,” he bawled, still laughing.

Peter’s advice was sound, but I could do without all the levity at my expense.

I decided to rest and enjoy the scene.

Late afternoon shadows were moving into the fjord—the ice-capped ridges thousands of feet above me were turning a burnished gold, edged with pink. A short distance from the rocky beach strewn with driftwood were enormous mounds of moss, like rich green lava. Beyond I could see patches of brilliantly colored wildflowers, none of which I could recognize from this distance—orange, vermilion, turquoise, crimson, and white. And behind these, the shaggy, moss-coated mass of stubby trees rising from a tangle of roots to a height of twenty feet or so. It was at once tempting and eerie. The openings between ferns and dead tree trunks and twisted branches beckoned, but the sinister gloom beyond made me hesitate. It was so black in there. No light seemed to penetrate the thick green canopy overhead. But c’mon, I told myself, you’re perfectly safe. The boat’s only a few yards offshore. All you’ve got to do is get across the mossy fringes here and you’ll be able to see how safe it really is.

Two emerald hummingbirds flashed by, hovered for a while over tiny flowers in the moss, and vanished. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of hare-sized pudu—the world’s tiniest deer—which I’d read was a resident of these moist forested places. And maybe a guanaco, cousin to the llama, although I associated these creatures with higher, drier Andean mountainsides.

Okay, up and off. My balance seemed to be recovering. I was ready to explore the forest.

Only it wasn’t that easy. The maze of mossy mounds into which I stepped were not mere coverings of piled rocks and boulders as I’d thought, but enormous independent entities, three or four feet deep, and covering the thickest, blackest, stickiest goo that it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. Far worse than the peat bogs in Scotland, which at least gave off a pleasing earthy aroma when punctured by boots, this stuff reeked of dead fish and rotting matter, eons old. And the more I struggled forward, the deeper and smellier it got. I was soon up to my thighs in the mess. As I tried to press down with my arms to move forward, they too sank beyond the elbows and were difficult to extract. The moss seemed to suck them in and if I moved too quickly my whole body sank deeper. I could feel no rock base under the moss; it was obviously a much thicker covering than I’d thought and I gave up all attempts at trying to move any farther through it. The primary challenge now was to get back to where I’d begun at the pebble beach, and the only way to do that was to literally lie on the stuff and pull myself across its gelatinous surface using hunks of the green and ocher-colored moss as handholds.

What emerged from this morass much later was a mud-covered Paleozoic monster, stinking and miserable. Peter’s laughter from the boat was now reaching the point of wild hysteria. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

I daren’t shout anything back in case some of the goo dribbled down from my caked forehead and into my mouth. Another extremely vulgar finger sign sufficed as a response as I lumbered across the beach and flung myself into the ocean to scour my body of the odious slime.

I would not be defeated. There had to be another way into the forest.

I walked farther up the beach, keeping well away from the moss mounds, until I came to a spine of smooth gray rock that rose up from the morass like the back of an enormous hippo and ended a couple of hundred feet away at the treeline. That would do it. And it did. I strolled easily along its arched profile and at last eased between wind-broken trees into the darkness of the forest.

All was silence. Even after just a few yards in, the splash of the waves and seething of breezes along the shore vanished as if I’d closed a door behind me. But as I moved farther into the gloom I became aware of a sound I’d rarely heard before. As if something were breathing. Something large that seemed to be all around me among the twisted trunks and tangled branches of this strange place.

I eased deeper in. The forest floor was a pulpy carpet of moss-shrouded limbs and decayed trunks from which new growth emerged in tendriled profusion. Broken branches writhed like pythons, sheened in moisture from the mists that constantly crept under the canopy, wraithlike, from the fjord. Vines and tentacled fronds brushed and clutched at me like living things; roots wound out of the damp earth in tortured convulsions before disappearing between cracked boulders; rare strands of sunlight at first glowed green and then broody-bronze through the tall ferns. I walked deeper into the gloomy hollowness under the thick roof of leaves. Within minutes I was scoured with branch scratches and tacky with torn spiders’ webs. It was warm—a thick and porridgey heat—and glints of dim light flared in swampy patches.

But for all the discomfort, I sensed a pleasure, a rich joy somewhere deep inside. I felt I had entered a sanctuary—a throbbing place full of life and that endless cycle of re-creation. I moved more easily now as if in a sacred place, burying my feet in the softness of the forest floor, touching the moist branches and feeling their life and—hardest to explain of all—feeling them somehow touching me back, embracing me, welcoming me as a distinct entity in their quiet place. I was not alone here. I was part of its mystery, having come with no intention other than to look, to touch, and to sense its wonder. And that breathing came again. That slow steady rhythm which I now realized must be collective movement of the canopy high above in breezes I couldn’t feel. But it felt like much more than that. It was the primeval forest itself—growing, dying, changing, and yet hardly changing at all. Just being. Alive and eternal in this remotest of remote places barely known to man. Complete and whole within itself. Needing nothing other than what it had always possessed among the icebound peaks and shadowed ravines of these fjords.

After an hour or so of slow walking uphill through the forest, the trees thinned out and I emerged on grass-and rock-strewn slopes with the black granite walls of the mountains towering above me. Thankfully the only moss I found now was mere delicate ground cover between lichen-flecked boulders. The goo was gone and I was happy as I found a sheltered ledge and paused to look around at the immensity of the vista.

Far, far below was little
Christine
reflected in the still purple water of the fjord. She looked fragile and delicate, such a vulnerable thing against the rigors of the williwaws and waves of the Gulf of Penas.

Across the narrow cleft of fjord the striated forest-strewn slopes rose into an enormous rock bowl edged by jagged ridges and laced with a filigree of waterfalls. And higher up, the crisp white cliffs of ice and blue-sheened glaciers culminated in sparkling peaks and domes against a cloud-flecked evening sky.

I wished I’d brought my sleeping bag to spend a night up here. It was too beautiful and majestic to leave—it seemed to be inviting me to stay and, once again, I sensed a silent communion with this place that was revealing more of itself to me with every minute I spent here.

When I finally returned slowly through the forest to the pebbly beach, it was almost dark. Peter had turned on the lights in the galley; reflections of gold dazzled across the rippling water of our cove. At first I heard nothing; then came the occasional clink and clang of pans.

Oh, God! He’s cooking!

Now Peter had left most of the cooking to me (when it was possible to do any) because he was, as he’d explained at the start, the world’s worst chef, hardly capable—no, correction—incapable of boiling a pot of beans without reducing them to popping cinders.

I swam back to the boat, dreading the worst. He heard me hoisting myself up the side and appeared at the top of the galley steps looking very morose, with grease stains across his arms and forehead.

“Listen, Pete,” I began. “I told you I’d do the cooking—”

“David,” he replied in his “Now, let’s be real serious” tone. “I’ve got bad news and I’ve got badder news.”

“Okay. Bad news first.”

“The bad news is that dinner is ruined.”

“You surprise me!”

“There’s no need to get all pommish!” (He’d recognized my British accent back in Puerto Montt and reminded me every once in a while that the British were occasionally known as “pommiebastards” back in Aussieland.)

“And the badder news?”

“The badder news is that we aren’t going to make it down to Punta Arenas. It’s another five hundred miles and the steering gear’s a mess, plus there’s a crack in the—”

“We’ve got to go back? To Puerto Montt?”

“’Fraid so, mate. And even that’s going to be a bugger if we get much more of that williwaw crap.”

There was a long silence. At first I felt angry, even betrayed. But then I realized he must be feeling much worse. His planned sail of the Strait of Magellan was to be one of the grand climaxes of his around-the-world voyage.

“Hell, Pete—I’m sorry. That’s lousy luck for you.”

“And for you too, mate.”

“Well—at least I’ve seen some of this country. I can always come back.”

“Maybe when I get it all fixed—shouldn’t take more’n a week or so, with luck—maybe you want to try again?”

“Maybe. Let’s just make sure we get back to Montt first!”

“Yeah. It’ll be tricky. No bull.”

More silence. We were both feeling very dejected.

“Pete, listen—you’re in no rush, right? A day or two doesn’t make any difference?”

“Heck—no. I’ve got no cash, not much of a boat at the moment. But time I’ve got. What d’you want to do?”

“I want to stay here, if the weather holds.”

“Here?”

“Yes. I think there’re a few more things I can learn. Y’know, just walking around and watching?”

I could tell he was uncertain. The weather was good and he seemed anxious to make it back before his poor
Christine
got battered again by those coastal storms.

I think he was about to say no, but then something very odd happened. An old albatross with the broadest wingspan I’d seen yet circled us slowly, then gently landed on the bow and stood looking at the two of us with quizzical eyes.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Isn’t that an omen or something?”

Peter chuckled. He was a hard-nosed Aussie. He didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. But then he started looking around—staring at the forests and the dark granite walls of the fjords, the blue-purple glint of the high ice fields, and the crimson-tinged tips of the Andean peaks, and that vast evening sky. The whole wonderful totality of this magic place.

“One day do you?” he asked.

“One day’s fine,” I said. “Just fine.”

We made it back to Puerto Montt without any more dramatic incidents or major storms. We were lucky too. His boat was in worse shape than I’d realized—it was going to take much longer than a week to fix. I decided to continue on in search of my next lost world, vowing to return one day soon to this amazing region. The last I heard from Peter, he’d postponed his journey through the Strait of Magellan and gone off sailing with a girl through the Galapagos Islands.