I tripped into a well in the glass beach and thought for a long suspended instant that I was going to fall, but it was an illusion. The dip itself was only a few inches deep, but the glass was clear for about twenty feet. The bottom was a frozen riverbed. There were fish caught mid-turn around weed caught mid-furl. None of it was burned. I leaned down, but the surface was warped into wave-shapes, and everything blurred and distorted. It sharpened again when I straightened.
Nearer the wharves, the smooth glass turned pebbly and green-blue shells lay heaped everywhere. Most of them were stuck to rocks just like ordinary shells would have been. The rocks themselves were all either obsidian entirely or half-vitrified, great chunks of glass and stone all twisted together. The granite made shapes like ink unwinding in water. The boat had been cold, but the beach was so warm now that I had to take off my coat. When I strayed into a stronger patch of sunlight, having drifted sideways trying to get out of one sleeve, I had to jerk away. The heat was fierce there. The glass stratum was about two hundred feet high in the stacks and up to that point the cliffs were pockmarked with black spots and burns, like another waterline where the light was magnified. Birds, little black coot things, had all made their nests well above it. Except for the places exactly beside the stacks, where they were glass, the cliffs were ordinary rock. The obsidian had poured down in its own narrow stream when it was first formed and drawn a great glass stripe across the land. One of the mountains must have been a volcano.
Once we were well out of the hot shadows and in ordinary sun, Raphael stopped and waited.
‘Right. Don’t come down here around midday if it’s sunny, you’ll catch fire. In the forest there is a border marked with salt and animal bones; don’t cross it. There are Indians in the woods and they do not like wandering foreigners. You’ll never see them but they’re there. Just stay away from them and they’ll stay away from you.’ He waited for us to nod. ‘This place is a hospital colony. Most people up there are sick or deformed, so don’t expect help carrying and lifting. You see to yourself, as much as you can. There are no servants.’
‘We didn’t expect to be waited on,’ Clem said.
Raphael made an unconvinced sound and turned away towards the last stack and the wharves there.
‘How quickly can we start out?’ Clem said. ‘For the coffee, I mean.’
‘I’m interested to know when you’re going to admit you’re lying about the coffee and ask me where the cinchona woods are,’ Raphael said over his shoulder. Like it often did, his voice came quiet at first and then strengthened. ‘You’re going to need to. This place is full of coffee but it isn’t full of cinchona. Look around.’
‘Now,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’
‘Merrick,’ Clem snapped.
Raphael looked back. ‘This was shut down as a supply region years ago. Everything that could be harvested has been. Anything left is in Chuncho territory. I can take you round on the road they used to use, but it’s old now and you might not find much even if it is passable. Why did you come here?’
‘We have reports from a few years ago that imply there’s something here worth going for,’ I said.
He frowned. ‘You’re talking about the Dutch. And Backhouse’s expedition. He brought an army battalion, and half those men were killed. You could have gone north. There’s boatloads of the stuff up there.’
I shook my head. ‘Those varieties have a two per cent quinine yield. What you have here is nine per cent at least. Look, we can pay. It will be worth your while, even if it is a trek.’
‘As I say, I’ll show you the path. But I don’t think you’ll find anything.’
‘And if we do?’
‘If you do – then there’s going to need to be some negotiation.’
‘Well, let’s have that out now,’ Clem said. ‘How much do you—’
‘We’re not talking about it now.’
‘Come on, man, a rough figure would be—’
‘I said,’ he interrupted, not loudly. He had never been loud. ‘Not today. It would be a long talk. I’m tired enough already.’
‘All right, all right,’ Clem said. His crossness had taken on an edge of alarm. I felt it too. I had to step back. Raphael was too sharp and too strong, and he was standing side on to us as if he meant to punch one of us in the face. It might only have been how he happened to stop, but I was nearly sure he knew exactly what it looked like, and whether or not he was really thinking of hitting someone, standing close to him had made my spine fuse up. The need to back off was there in the air, like negative magnetism.
‘Mr Martel will burn this place down if anything happens to you, and it’s not safe for you to go off by yourselves,’ he said quietly, more to me than to Clem, like I was an almost acceptable halfway mark. ‘Do you understand? You don’t go anywhere alone. I will take you round on the supply road in the morning. And you can see for yourselves that there’s nothing left, and then you can get out of here before anyone guesses why you came.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He didn’t look as if he believed me, but he started towards the wharves again. We had to rush through the blue shadows of the stacks in the shade of boulders. The smell of steam hung in those places. The air writhed and the water boiled as it came in over the glass beach.
Chiselled on all the wharves were notices to keep out of the sun in Spanish and that odd, Spanish-phonetic Quechua. There was a barnacle-rough ladder and a set of steps. When we reached the top, there were more steps, far more, spiralling up the stack. They were stone for only a few yards, then the stone crumbled and was replaced by weatherbeaten wood. I thought Raphael would start up them, but he stopped instead by what I thought at first was a cargo winch whose pulley was a dot hundreds of feet above us. There was a loop at the end, the knot cemented into place by age and run through a straight metal bar to make a flat step, broad enough for two or three people to stand on or one to sit down on it like a swing. He nodded us across.
‘On there and don’t fall off.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s higher than St Peter’s. Walk if you like.’
I stepped on and wrapped my arm around the rope. Clem followed me, more unsteadily. He had never been a rigging sort of sailor. Raphael kicked a lever. As we started to rise, he stepped up with us. His weight made almost no difference to the speed. His clothes smelled of burned honey now, from the wax he had used on the statue.
After a few seconds we were well above the docks and passing the great twists in the glass. The winch had been built just where the strongest sun never reached, but there were still intensely hot patches, as hot as open ovens, while snow still feathered only forty feet away downriver. When we rose up beside the falling counterweight, it was an old Spanish cannon stamped with a pomegranate sigil.
‘How big is the obsidian flow?’ Clem said. He was still shivering from the river. ‘If you ever stirred yourself to find out.’