The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (85 page)

Susan looked up through her lashes, a glance that would have been flirtatious had her eyes not been dull with grief.

“What happened in Tierra del Fuego, Arthur?” she asked, pleading for an answer, a reason which might make her sorrow less through understanding.

I shook my head.

I couldn’t tell her.

But I remembered . . .

I flew from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia.

In the footsteps of Darwin, the modern speed seemed wrong and disappointing. Darwin had been there on HMS
Beagle
from 1826 to 1836, exploring the channel on which Ushuaia was situated. It was called, appropriately enough, the Beagle Channel. But I flew in from Buenos Aires in five hours, seated next to a middle-aged American tourist and disturbed by the thought that there could be nothing left for discovery in a town with an airport and the beginnings of a tourist trade.

The tourist wanted to talk, and nothing short of direct impoliteness would have silenced him.

“Going to Ushuaia?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Me too.”

That seemed obvious enough, since that was where the aeroplane was headed.

“Name’s Jones. Clyde Jones.”

He had a big, healthy face clamped around a huge cigar.

“Brookes.”

Jones extended a wide hand. He wore a ruby ring on his little finger and an expensive camera on a sling around his neck. His grip was very firm. I suppose he was a pleasant enough fellow.

“You a Limey? I’m a Yank.”

He hesitated, as though wondering if this required another handshake.

“You a tourist? I am. Travel a lot, you know. Since my wife died I travelled all over. Been in your country. Been all over Europe. Spent two months there last summer, saw it all. Except the communist parts, of course. I wouldn’t want to go there and give them any foreign exchange.”

“Quite right,” I said.

“Did you know this Ushuaia is one of the southernmost communities in the world? I want to see this Ushuaia. Don’t know why. ’Cause it’s there, I guess. Like mountain climbers, hah? Ha ha.”

I looked out the window. The flat tableland and glacial lakes of the north were behind, and the terrain was beginning to rise in rugged humps and twisting rivers, glimpsed through clouds as heavy and low as the smoke from Jones’s cigar. It was exciting land, but I was depressed. Jones did not seem interested. I suppose he saw nothing that was not framed in his camera’s lens. He chatted away amicably, and I was seized with a feeling that I had been born too late, that nothing new remained to be discovered, and that all one could do now was study the past.

And no man has ever been more wrong.

Everything seemed much brighter after we landed.

The airport was on the edge of the town, and Jones shared a taxi with me. He was staying at the Albatross, too. The taxi was a huge American model, as modern as a missile, but somehow this didn’t trouble me, now that I was in contact with the land. It was as if the motorcar were out of time and place, not that the land had changed. Jones may have felt something of this anachronism, as well, for he became quiet and almost apprehensive, perhaps sensing that he didn’t belong here, that the soul of this place had not yet been sucked into the tourists’ cameras. I looked from the window and became excited once more as we jolted through the streets.

Ushuaia looked like a Swiss mountain village set on a Norwegian fiord. Sharp-spined wooden chalets leaned on the steep hills and a glacier mounted the hill behind, impressive and impassive. Farther to the west the high peaks of Darwin and Larmeinto rose into the low clouds. The taxi slowed suddenly, throwing me forwards on the
seat. We had braked behind a man on horseback, sitting slumped in his poncho. The horse moved sedately up the middle of the road. The driver sounded the horn and the rider, if anything, slumped more and carried on at his own pace. The driver cursed, revving the monstrous engine in helpless frustration and moving his hands in wide gesticulation. I was pleased.

The taxi stopped at the Albatross and we got out. The wind was dipping and swirling through the streets. It was late afternoon. Jones insisted on paying the fare and waved away my protest, saying I could stand him a drink later. He was shivering in his Brooks Brothers suit. We had to carry our own bags in to the desk while we registered, and I walked up to my room while Jones looked about for a page boy or a lift. I was gratified for the chance to be alone, and pleased with my room. It was primitive and satisfying, although I don’t suppose Jones was too happy about such accommodation.

I washed and shaved with cold water and went to the window to look out. It would soon be dark, and I thought it too late to call on Gardiner that afternoon. This didn’t displease me. I was far more anxious to pursue my own wanderings than Smyth’s theory, and although I was certainly anxious to meet Hodson it was more because he was an eminent and interesting theorist in my own field than because he might provide a link in the implausible chain of Smyth’s reasoning. I decided to spend what remained of the daylight in roaming about the town, getting the mood of Ushuaia as a fulcrum towards understanding the land.

I hoisted my suitcase to the bed and opened it, found a warmer coat and put it on, put a notepad and pencil in the pocket and left the room. I had to pass the entrance to the bar on the way out, and glanced in. Jones was already there, chatting in familiar tones with the barman. He didn’t notice me. It was cold and damp in the street and the vortex of wind had straightened and came more steadily from the south. I turned my collar up and lighted a cigarette in the shelter of the building, then walked out to the street. The wind fanned the cigarette until it burned like a fuse, bouncing sparks as I turned my head.

I had a street map of the town, but didn’t use it. I had no particular destination but walked in the general direction of the port, down steep streets lined with the trading companies that supplied the whole area, facing that powerful wind. Motorcars and horsecarts shared the streets with an assorted population of many nationalities and many backgrounds; English, Spanish, Yugoslavian, Italian, German – the racial mixture that invariably gathers at a frontier, colonialists and conquistadors, sailors and settlers, farmers and shepherds, the leftover dregs of the gold rush and the seepage
from the oil fields in the north, men who had come to seek and men who had come where they would not be sought – and, of course, the few tourists looking disgruntled and uncomfortable and wondering what had possessed them to come here. This was a rich lode indeed for a social anthropologist, but that was not my field, and I had only a mild interest in observing the men who had come here. I wanted the men who had been here long before anyone came, and there were only a few natives in the town. They had been drawn towards this outpost of civilization but had not been integrated into its core; they had stopped and clustered at the outskirts.

Standing on the quay, I looked into the hard water of the Beagle Channel and the deserted islands in the mist beyond. The water ran in jagged lines of black and white, and a solitary hawk circled effortlessly in the air currents above. A man, almost invisible inside an ancient leather coat, led a loaded llama straight towards me, forcing me back from the water. He didn’t notice me, although the beast turned a curious eye as he lumbered past.

I turned back up the incline. My heavy coat was proof against the cold, but the wind slid through the fabric and cascaded my hair over my brow. The sensation was not unpleasant, and I felt no urge to return to the hotel yet. I turned in the opposite direction and climbed away from the centre of the town.

Night was deepening the sky beneath the darkened clouds when I found myself at the end of the modern world – the outskirts of Ushuaia. I had a very concrete sense of standing at a barrier. Behind me electric and neon blanketed the town, the light confined within the limits. This was the point to which civilization had penetrated, although it lay in a thin veneer within the boundaries, its roots shallow and precarious, a transplant that had not yet taken a firm hold. Before me the land broke upwards and away, jagged and barren and dotted with clusters of sheet-metal shacks painted in the brightest tones, oranges and yellows and reds. The thin chimneys rattled bravely in the wind, and the smoke lay in thin, flat ribbons. Kerosene lamps cast futile pastel light in the doorways, and a few shadowed figures moved.

This, then, was where the natives lived. This was where they had been drawn, and then halted, those who had surrendered. And beyond this fringe, perhaps, were those who had refused to yield to the magnet of time.

I walked slowly back to the hotel, and slept well.

I awoke early in the sharp cold. The window framed a rectangle of bright and brittle light blocked on the opposite wall. I dressed quickly and went to the window, expecting to see the sun, but the light was filtered through a tissue of cloud, diffused throughout the sky. It left the streets strangely without shadow or contrast, and made the day seem even colder than it was. I put an extra sweater on before going down to the breakfast room. No one else was there yet. A fire had been lighted but hadn’t yet taken the chill from the room, and I didn’t dawdle over my coffee. I wanted to send a wire to Susan to let her know I had arrived safely, and then I had to contact Gardiner. I was just leaving when Jones came in, looking haggard and bleary. He smiled perfunctorily.

“You tried that pisco yet?” he asked.

I didn’t know what pisco was.

“The local booze. Grape alcohol. Gives a man a wicked hangover, I’ll tell you.”

He shook his head and sank into a chair. He was calling for black coffee as I left. I wondered if he’d ever managed to get out of the hotel bar the night before. And yet, in his fashion, he would learn things about this town that I would never know.

I walked to the telegraph office and sent the wire to Susan, lighted my first cigarette of the day and started back toward the hotel. Three hawks were perched, evenly spaced, on the telegraph wires, and I wondered, whimsically, if they would be aware of my message darting beneath their talons. A taxi had pulled up at the hotel to let a passenger out, and I asked the driver if he knew where Gardiner lived. He did, and I got in the back seat, smoking and looking out of the windows. We drove out past the ancient Indian cemetery on the crisp morning road, with crackling tyres and white exhaust, on a day that made me feel very much alive.

Gardiner’s big house was stuck against the glacier in two-dimensional silhouette. I walked up from the road and Gardiner opened the door before I had knocked. He wore a red wool dressing gown and held a gin and tonic.

“You must be Brookes.”

I nodded.

“Smyth wired me to expect you. Thought you’d be here last night.”

“I got in rather late.”

He stepped back and let me in. He hadn’t shaved yet, and had vaguely waved the gin in lieu of a handshake. We went into a large
room curiously devoid of furnishings. A beautifully engraved shotgun hung on the wall and there was a sheepskin rug by the fire.

“I hope I’m no trouble,” I said.

“Not at all. Glad to help if I can. Glad to have some company. Gin or brandy?”

“It’s rather early.”

“Nonsense.”

He gave me gin and we sat by the fire.

“Smyth said you’ve been very helpful to us in the past,” I said.

“I’m no scientist, but I expect I know as much about this place as anyone. Been here thirty-odd years. Not much to do here now. A little shooting and a lot of drinking. Used to be different in the old days, before the land reforms whittled the company away.” He shook his head, not necessarily in disapproval. “But that won’t interest you.”

“Well, I’m more interested in the natives.”

“Of course.” He looked thoughtful, shaking his head again. “There were three tribes when the white man came here. The Alacalufs, the Yahgans, and the Onas.” I knew all this, but was content to listen. “They were absolutely prehistoric, stark naked savages. Probably very happy, too. They didn’t understand the white man and they didn’t trust him. Good judges. They were even rash enough to steal a few of the white man’s sheep, and the white man shot a few of them, of course. Did them a little harm. But then the enlightened white men came. The missionaries. They came burning with the fever of reform and saw these unfortunate lambs of God running about naked and indecent and, in the fashion of their kind, gave them blankets for warmth and modesty. The blankets hadn’t been disinfected, so they also gave them plague. Killed off all the Onas and most of the others. But, oh well, we couldn’t have them trotting about naked, could we?”

Gardiner sighed and poured another gin.

“Will you stay here?” he asked.

“I’m already at the hotel.”

“Ah.” I think he would have welcomed a guest. “Well, how can I help you, then?”

I told him about the rumours and reports, and what Smyth thought possible. Gardiner nodded. He’d heard them himself, of course.

“Would you think there was anything in it?” I asked.

“There must be something. All rumours have some basis in fact. But I doubt if it’s anything very interesting. Nothing like Smyth suggests. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that before, and if something did exist it surely would have been discovered before. Left some evidence of its existence, at least.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I should think perhaps a wild dog, or possibly a man – maybe even an escapee from the penal colony, living wild.”

“That would account for the dead sheep. But what about this man who claims to have seen it? The one Smyth queried you about?”

“Gregorio. Yes. Of course, when I answered Smyth’s wire, I didn’t know what he was interested in Gregorio for. I thought he might be contemplating using him for a guide perhaps, and he’s reliable enough for that sort of thing. But as far as his account of this strange creature – ” he paused, as if giving it every consideration. “Well, I suppose he did see something that frightened the hell out of him, but I’m sure it wasn’t what he thought it was. He’s a superstitious, imaginative sort of fellow, and he certainly hasn’t tried to capitalize on the story so I expect we can discount the possibility that he made it up. He hasn’t said anything about it for some time.”