This Thing Of Darkness (72 page)

By rights, such a furnace should have supported little in the way of life. The pitiless vertical sun, the stifling climate and the rocks that glowed like a cast-iron stove should have been no more hospitable than the infernal regions of Pandemonium itself. But it was not so: every square foot of land was dotted with shuffling, scaly, primordial creatures, while the surf teemed with darting, flashing shapes. The sea creatures were, for the most part, those of the polar regions - penguins, sealions and the like — whereas the cacti and lizards ashore were similar to those of the arid lands near the equator. Huge, crimson-chested frigate birds sailed overhead, puffed up with self-importance, arrowing down towards the surface of the sea where they would deftly pluck out a fish without even getting their feet wet. Little mockingbirds ran up and pecked at the explorers’ boots. Bright vermilion Sally Lightfoot crabs swarmed across the glossy ebony rocks of the shore, shuttling backwards and forwards with aimless determination. It was an extraordinary panorama, the like of which none of them had ever seen.

The most commonplace denizen of Chatham Island was a fat, sluggish, sooty-coloured iguana, some three feet in length, clumsy of movement, with a horny mane, long webbed claws and a slack pouch hanging beneath its slack mouth. These imps of darkness lined the beaches, basking in the infernal heat, yet never straying more than ten yards from the sea. Occasionally one would lumber into the water, where it would be transformed into a sleek obsidian dart, its normally splayed legs tucked out of sight, its tail propelling it deftly through the water like a miniature crocodile. In common with the other land creatures of the Galapagos, these reptiles were extraordinarily tame, and utterly receptive to being poked and prodded. By way of an experiment, Darwin grasped one of the beasts by the tail, whirled it about his head and flung it into a tidal pool.

‘What larks!’ shouted Midshipman King, while Covington stared at his master with what looked like disapproval.

Really, it was good to be romping about the country with King once more; he was not much use as a naturalist’s assistant, it was true, but he was much jollier than the servant. Covington, to be fair, was fast making himself indispensable - the horse-butcher’s son was learning so quickly, he had even started his own limited sub-collection - but he remained curiously unapproachable. He was not, after all, a gentleman. King was putting the fun back into collecting.

‘Look, Philos, it’s coming back.’

The iguana had indeed crawled laboriously back to its former spot at Darwin’s feet. As it arrived, he picked it up by the tail once more, and flung it back into the pool. Again, the beast attained the shore, and again disdainfully marched back to its place. A third time it was returned to the water, and a third time, pompously, patiently, it regained its former situation.

‘Hereditary instinct is telling it that the shore is a place of safety,’ concluded Darwin. ‘I could kill it in an instant, yet it does not fear me.

‘Not very bright, is it, Philos?’ said King cheerily.

‘Lizards in Europe know to fear man,’ Darwin mused aloud. ‘It is a knowledge they possess from birth. Yet reptiles do not rear their young - indeed, they may never encounter them. They cannot teach their young anything. The knowledge is inherited. Were these iguanas to learn to fear man, how would that knowledge pass to their descendants?’

‘Well... I suppose it wouldn’t,’ said King, by now somewhat baffled.

‘He’s talking about transmutation,’ jabbed Covington, catching Darwin’s eye and holding it for a telling second.

‘Transmutation ... That’s a load of Godless gammon, isn’t it?’ said King, unhappily aware that he was not party to some shared knowledge.

‘Yes. Yes it is,’ said Darwin bluntly, and moved purposefully away across the corrugated ground.

 

They ascended the island’s central cone by way of a series of paths through the undergrowth that seemed to be converging on some unknown central point. The mystery of who or what had made these tracks was solved when they came upon two huge tortoises, each as high as a man’s chest, snuffling up the hill in front of them. The latter beast had the numerals ‘1806’ carved into its shell. As the collecting party marched up behind, the animals took no notice; but when Darwin moved into the eyeline of the rear tortoise, it hissed at him, sat down, and withdrew its head and legs into its carapace.

‘It seems they are quite deaf,’ he deduced.

King took a run at the lead tortoise and leaped aboard. Even with the weight of a sturdy youth on its back, the vast reptile seemed unaware that anyone was behind or even upon it. Darwin jumped aboard too, but still the animal did not slacken its pace, keeping to a speed that — he calculated with the aid of his pocket-watch - would amount to about four miles per day.

‘Giddy up!’ yelled King, and thrashed the animal’s hind-quarters with a switch. ‘What about a race? We could be at the summit by the end of the week!’

Both men laughed, while Covington brought up the rear in respectful and possibly reproachful silence.

They lunched soon afterwards, watched by a large hawk that perched upon a low branch. Darwin approached the bird with his gun, and placed the barrel squarely in the centre of its face. The hawk remaining entirely unmoved, he nudged the nozzle against its beak, before finally shoving the bird to the ground. With an indignant flap of its feathers, it dusted itself down and climbed back to its perch as before.

‘Extraordinary,’ he murmured.

Covington, he noticed, was writing something in a small notebook. ‘What is that, Covington?’

‘It is nothing, sir,’ mumbled the manservant.

‘What is it?’

‘It is my journal.’

‘You keep
a journal ?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Give it here.’

Covington complied, slowly and reluctantly. Darwin flicked through the pages. In a large, rounded, deliberate hand were entries - some of exceeding brevity — going back to the start of the voyage. Capital letters and underlined words mingled freely with those in lower case; on occasion, Spanish happily cohabited with English. Darwin stopped at the entry detailing their expedition northwards from the Rio Negro, in the company of Esteban and his gauchos.

Darwin shut the journal and handed it back to its owner. ‘Upon my soul, Covington, I never had you down as an author.’

‘No sir,’ muttered the big youth.

‘Just so long as you remember that you are my servant, and that all important observations are to be shared. I am, if you recall, to be the author of the official natural history of the voyage.’

‘Aye aye sir. Shall I do well not to write any more, sir?’

As you will. It is up to you. Just so long as you remember.’

‘Aye aye sir.’

After lunch, they pushed on to the principal crater, the floor of which was taken up by a grand assembly of blue-footed boobies. These preposterously earnest birds, white-bodied, black-winged, with bright turquoise beaks and feet, seemed to treat the business of guarding their nests rather casually. Darwin lobbed a few experimental stones at the nesting females, which bounced off their backs harmlessly, the victims looking no more than confused. King walked up and broke one’s neck with his hat. The other birds around merely stared up at him with expectant faces.

‘I suppose we had better shoot one to take with us,’ said Darwin, loading his rifle with the mustard shot which would make a cleaner job than King’s hat-brim. He levelled the barrel at the nearest booby. It gazed back at him, curious and uncomprehending. He tensed his finger on the trigger, and paused.

‘Everything all right, Philos?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine. Do you know, King - I’m not sure I can actually do this.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, I am all for the chase, but this - this is ridiculous.’
And what is a love of the chase but a relic of an instinctive passion? It is like the pleasure of living with the sky for a roof
—
it is no more than the pleasure of a savage returning to his wild and native habits.

The bird continued to gaze stupidly up at him.

He handed the gun to Covington.

‘Covington, shoot this bird, would you?’

‘Aye aye sir.’

Covington brought the gun up to his shoulder, took aim and fired. There was a deafening explosion, and he fell back with a scream, blood pouring from his shattered ear. The flame from the flash-pan had escaped into the magazine and detonated the loose powder within: one side of the weapon lay ripped open, where the explosion had torn the gunmetal apart from the inside.

‘Covington? Are you all right, man?’

Darwin and King, their ears ringing, knelt on either side of the writhing manservant, who appeared not to hear their urgent entreaties.

‘Covington! Are you all right?’

One hand pressed to the side of his head, fresh, bright blood streaming between his fingers, Covington rolled on to his back, his frightened eyes attempting to focus on his would-be rescuers.

‘I cannot hear you,’ he whimpered. ‘Whatever it is you are saying, sirs, I cannot hear you.’

 

The drizzle having cleared, the party took their dinner out of doors, at a table set up on the governor’s lawn.

‘More turpin?’ said Lawson. ‘It is the breast meat — the most capital cut.’ He indicated the bowl of fatty, primrose-coloured meat that occupied pride of place in the centre of the table. ‘The rest of the animal is of indifferent flavour, except when employed in soup. The calipash is thrown away altogether.’

‘This is a local tortoise, I presume?’ asked FitzRoy, taking an elegant bite.

‘Oh no - we have them brought across from James, or Hood, or Albemarle,’ said the governor cheerfully. ‘Here on Charles Island, they have been hunted to extinction.’

The discovery of Lawson’s existence had been both a stroke of luck and a surprise, in that FitzRoy and his officers had been unaware that the Galapagos Islands - previously the province of buccaneers and whalers - even possessed a governor. Stopping at the postbox on Charles Island, they had come across Nicholas Lawson astride his horse, collecting his mail. Lawson was able to inform them that the islands had recently been annexed by the newly established Republic of the Equator, and that the Ecuadorians had not only constructed a prison for some three hundred black convicts on Charles Island, but had appointed him - as an Englishman of standing - their governor. The penal settlement was situated one thousand feet up and four and a half miles inland, where sodden, hanging clouds buffeted the highlands each year between June and November, creating a temperate zone of ferns, grasses and woodlands. There the prisoners cultivated plantain, banana, sugar cane, Indian corn and sweet potato, and hunted the pigs and goats that were permitted to run wild between the trees. Lawson had promised FitzRoy and the officers of his service, and had invited them to visit his domain later that day to enjoy, a dinner of succulent roast tortoise with home-grown vegetables.

‘It would appear that there was once a prodigious number of tortoises here,’ said FitzRoy, gesturing across Lawson’s precisely manicured lawn. Arranged at geometric intervals around the neat green rectangle, upturned tortoise carapaces served as pots for a colourful assortment of woodland flowers.

‘Ah, the flowerpots,’ said Lawson, smoothing the angles of his clipped, triangular beard. ‘We live something of a Robinson Crusoe existence here, Captain FitzRoy: happily self-sufficient in our necessities, but absolutely devoid of the merest luxury, and therefore forced to improvise. In answer to your question, there were indeed a great many turpin here, not ten years back. Some of the bigger frigates were taking away seven hundred at a time, to consume while crossing the Pacific. I myself once saw two hundred loaded in a day. Those that were too big to lift had the date engraved upon their carapaces: 1786 is the oldest I have yet witnessed. We killed those larger beasts ourselves where they stood, and carried the meat here, until every turpin on the island was gone. The other islands’ populations are headed the same way. During the dry months they are killed for the water reserves in their bladders. The species shall be extinct, I believe, in another twenty years. Now our turpin must be brought from a variety of different islands, in an attempt to preserve the supply for as long as possible. Once they are gone, I dare say we shall consume the sea turtles.’

‘It is an uncommon pity to see one of the Lord’s creatures made extinct in this fashion,’ offered a troubled Sulivan.

‘But did the Lord not place the turpin here for man’s benefit in the first instance?’ said Lawson, carefully adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘One might reasonably propose it, Lieutenant.’

‘Indeed one might.’ Sulivan smiled politely.

‘Forgive me,’ said FitzRoy, who had been casting a scientific eye at the upturned tortoise-shells, ‘but are there not some considerable differences between these several carapaces? Did you not say they originated in different islands?’

‘You are most observant, Captain FitzRoy. The turpin of each island do not assort with each other at all. Those from Hood Island have a thick ridge of shell in front, turned up in the manner of a Spanish saddle, like that one there. The one to the left is from James Island - do you see? It is rounder and blacker, and its meat is incidentally more flavoursome.’ He held up his loaded fork and smiled. ‘Generally, the turpin of the lower islands have longer necks, whereas those of the high country are dome-shaped with shorter necks. You will find such variations in all the wildlife hereabouts, safe enough.’