6
Greer awoke to the late-afternoon sun filtering through the burlap curtains. She propped herself up against the headboard, knuckled sleep from her eyes. She looked around the dim room—wicker nightstands, cement walls. On the desk opposite her a stack of books rose in an unstable spiral—Plants of Polynesia. The Settlement of the Pacific. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Textbook of Pollen Analysis.Ah, she remembered, Rapa Nui.
She stepped out of the bed and pulled back the curtain. A warm glow bathed the courtyard, its eclectic vegetation reminding her of Rousseau’s paintings. Greer once spent a month investigating each floral image inThe Dream after reading a turn-of-the-century botanist’s paper that accused Rousseau of inventing his tropical flora. “Jungle Jousts and Botanical Brawls” claimed Rousseau concocted aesthetically pleasing plants: broad emerald stalks with giant fronds, white blossoms on velvet-black branches. InThe Dream , Greer had found a subtropical mimosa branch depicted at ten times its normal size, a Japanese clover blossom, and an agave native to the African desert. The plants were real but the proportions confused, and their biogeographic combination a greenhouse mishmash: a biota worthy of Dr. Frankenstein’s imagination. In fact, that was what she titled her article—“Frankenstein’s Jungle”—which she sent to several botany journals, all of which rejected the manuscript for its lack of scientific relevance. She then sent the article to a dozen art magazines, who likewise rejected it, this time for its inconsequence to art. It now sat in a drawer in Marblehead inside a folder bulging with other articles on hybrid, unpublishable subjects—subjects that, she now knew, once you were established in the scientific community would suggest to colleagues your robust intellectual appetite but, as a young post-doc, simply suggested a lack of focus, and imaginative, perhaps emotional, tendencies.
Greer pulled the curtain shut, lifted the books from her desk, and spilled them on the bed. She’d brought botany and pollen guides; her collections of Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, and Linnaeus; two contemporary volumes on the history of the island with excerpts from early European visitors. But she knew she would need their full accounts. Roggeveen’s or Cook’s journal might, after all, mention the island’s flora. Somewhere in their building, SAAS maintained a good library, but the materials were locked away, and access required paperwork. It would have to wait.
As Greer settled on the bed, her stomach grumbled—she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day’s banana. Now she threw on a cardigan and a long skirt, then stepped into her sandals. Grabbing some of her pollen texts andOn the Origin of Species —always a good dinner companion—she made her way to the room with the emerald globes. Mahina was nowhere in sight. Greer called her name, then pulled back a beaded curtain behind the desk that revealed an empty office. It was six forty-five, almost time for dinner, so Greer settled into one of the high-backed wicker chairs flanking the card table and reread Darwin’s famous passage:
No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us. Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world during the many past geological epochs in its history. Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous.
Deliberate study and dispassionate judgment, thought Greer. Darwin, who after twenty years of meticulous study rushed like a madman to publish his theory of natural selection before the young George Wallace beat him to the punch! It was a story Greer loved, one her father used to tell. Darwin, fearfully holed up in his house in Down, England, writing to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker for advice: Should he patiently compose his opus on evolution or slap together a makeshift theory before Wallace went public? His judgment, in the end, was entirely passionate. He moved quickly, garnered his fame, but not without the haunting question of the letters he received from Wallace that somehow disappeared, and of Wallace’s own natural selection manuscript, which Darwin received but claimed to have set aside, unread, as though the subject bored him. But was dispassion ever possible, Greer wondered, in a science that required decades of observation to grasp one fundamental principle? Natural selection—an idea so basic, sonatural , it would appear self-evident to every generation that followed. Above all else, science demanded passion. But what she admired in Darwin was his ability to sound as though his ideas were of no personal consequence; he could present himself as the clinical observer. That had always been Greer’s problem—she had difficulty masking her private interest, had trouble making her judgments seem detached.
The bells above the door chimed, and Mahina strode across the threshold with a look of concern. “Doctora! Hola, Doctora!You are well now? I come at noon to make up room, and you are sleep.”
Greer closed her book. “The travel must have worn me out,” she said. “Cansada?I feel fine now. But I haven’t eaten anything. If it’s not any trouble, could I get dinner a little early?”
“Yes. Dinner. We find you dinner.” Mahina closed the door behind her. She was wearing a white skirt and a bright pink blouse with seashell buttons. A hint of a lace brassiere showed through the fabric. “You come.” Without setting down her hat, she led Greer down a corridor and into a whitewashed room with four round tables draped with floral tablecloths, neatly laid with shining tracks of forks and knives. “Sit,Doctora, ” Mahina ordered, pulling a chair from the table by the window.
“Please don’t go to any trouble. Anything is fine. Maybe just some fruit. I can get it myself, even.”
“Pollo,” announced Mahina, glancing distractedly through the window. “Pescadotomorrow night. Tonight,pollo. Yes?”
“Perfect.”
“Ramon!” shouted Mahina, and soon Ramon was in the doorway, instructions were issued in Rapa Nui, and he disappeared into a backyard, where the sound of clucking and fluttering erupted.
“Uno momento,” Mahina said, then disappeared through a set of swinging wooden doors and reappeared outside. She waded through the garden, her hand expertly extracting two avocados and then a guava from the trees, setting them in the bib of her blouse. She knelt, grabbed hold of a stalk, and eased a carrot from the ground. She tapped the root against her thigh, loosening the soil. Soon there came the clanging of pots and pans from the kitchen, a sizzle, the sweet smell of browning butter. Greer inhaled deeply, basking in the scent. A home-cooked meal. The past few months, she’d been snacking on fruit, crackers and cheese, cold lasagna. She’d dined a few times with people from Thomas’s lab who had her over for meat loaf and casseroles. And once or twice she’d gone out alone, for the company of strangers. That was, after all, what people told her to do.Get back into the world. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
Greer turned to Darwin’s section on the inhabitants of oceanic islands, in which he explained patterns of island flora and fauna:
I have carefully searched the oldest voyages, but have not finished my search; as yet I have not found a single instance, free from doubt, of a terrestrial mammal (excluding domesticated animals kept by the natives) inhabiting an island situated above 300 miles from a continent or great continental island; and many islands situated at a much less distance are equally barren. The Falkland Islands, which are inhabited by a wolf-like fox, come nearest to an exception; but this group cannot be considered as oceanic, as it lies on a bank connected with the mainland; moreover, icebergs formerly brought boulders to its western shores, and they may have formerly transported foxes, as so frequently now happens in the arctic regions . . . Though terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, a?rial mammals do occur on almost every island . . . for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across. Bats have been seen wandering by day far over the Atlantic Ocean; and two North American species either regularly or occasionally visit Bermuda, at the distance of 600 miles from the mainland.
Greer set the book down. Yes, oceanic islands hosted only plants and animals with that perfect combination of wanderlust and endurance. Most terrestrial mammals didn’t have a chance at cross-water dispersal. A few years earlier, though, she’d read about an elephant on Sober Island that simply walked into the ocean and swam to Ceylon—a distance of only a third of a mile but still an impressive feat. Several tourists had photographed the tired creature as she climbed onto the new shore and made her way inland. Other sightings of lone swimming elephants were later reported. So some terrestrial mammals did have cross-water dispersal abilities. Rats and mice were often seen riding across the ocean on bits of flotsam. Rodents and bats were the only mammals, in fact, that inhabited most islands.
But strange evolutionary fates awaited creatures that made it to distant shores. What Darwin referred to as “becoming slightly modified” was a gross understatement. Modifications could get outrageously out of hand. Islands nurtured eccentricity, producing a faunal carnival of dwarf mammoths, giant reptiles, and flightless birds. The worst of these were the insects—beetles and cockroaches whose bodies had swelled over generations to the size of small continental rodents. Fortunately, as their bodies grew, their wings, as Darwin noted, “shriveled,” and most of these arthropods were doomed to scurry across the floor of her room at night; no hope, thank goodness, of landing on her sleeping face. But for birds, flightlessness was tragic. The dodo, a bird whose ancient ancestor was strong enough to fly to Mauritius, a volcanic mass in the Indian Ocean four hundred miles east of Madagascar, found that after several generations its wings had withered. When humans imported pigs and monkeys, mammals that liked to eat dodo eggs, the birds had no escape. The last of these marooned birds had been observed in 1681.
“Bueno,” announced Mahina as she carried the plate across the room.
“Smells delicious.” Greer pushed her books to the side. “Thank you.”
Mahina set down an assortment of cooked vegetables. “Pollosoon,Doctora. For drink?”
“Agua, por favor.”
A moment later she brought a water glass, her eyes sweeping Greer’s books. “The pal-ee-nol-a-gi?”
“The study of pollen,” said Greer.
“Ah, sí,”said Mahina. “You study the pollen of Rapa Nui?”
“I’m going to take samples from the bottom of the lakes”—Greer mimed plunging a corer into the ground and twisting it out—“and then see what pollen is buried deep below. That way I can figure out what plants grew here years ago.”
“Bueno.I read the doctors study the pollen for the cloth forJesucristo! It is the pollen, yes, that tells it was for Christ.”
“You read about that? Most people have never heard of palynology. Most people spend their lifetimes never thinking about pollen, unless they’re allergic.”
Mahina shook her head with pride. “Me, no allergic. I read in our magazine for the Virgin Mary. It comes two times a year, from Spain. This one came very late, almost one year, but I read it all.”
“Were you convinced?”
“Con-vinced?”
“Do you believe what they said about the pollen?”
“I believe the cloth was for Christ, yes. But not because of the pollen. I not know enough about the pollen. I know enough ofJesucristo. ”
“Then you won’t be disappointed when I tell you the analysis done on the shroud was no good. The pollen on it matched plants from Palestine. But there are over seventy species of each of those flowers. A grain of your basic tumbleweed, supposedly from Jerusalem, looks identical to thousands of other daisy species. Also, people have always left flowers before holy relics; things get dusted with all sorts of pollen.” Greer forked a steaming carrot, blew on it, and took a bite.
A look of sympathy softened Mahina’s face. “Thedoctora, I think, believe very much in the science. Maybe not inJesucristo .” She raised an eyebrow. “And maybe she not like the science used forJesucristo ?”
Oh, no, thought Greer. Why had she opened the door to this? She wasn’t disputing the existence of God, she was disputing a study. She had no qualms with anyone believing anything: One God, ten gods, it made no difference. But piety had no place in science. And she couldn’t help feeling that Christianity, which had spent centuries contesting the greatest developments of human thought, had a lot of nerve using a microscope to prove an object sacred. But her Spanish wasn’t good enough to convey her points, and in English, her arguments would be lost on Mahina. She didn’t want Mahina to think she was dismissing her faith when, in truth, she respected it. Faith wasn’t easy to sustain.
“Let’s compromise, Mahina. We’ll say the pollen doesn’t prove the Shroud of Turin ever touched the body of Jesus Christ. Nor does it prove it didn’t.” That would have to wait for analysis of the fabric, a test that would determine the cloth’s age. Pollen grains on their own said nothing about time. Pollen never aged.
Mahina considered this. “Bueno, Doctora. Bueno.”
She disappeared into the kitchen again, leaving Greer to slowly eat the last of her carrots and onions, reemerging a while later with a plate of steaming chicken. “Now thepollo. Moa in Rapa Nui.”
She watched as Greer took her first bite. “Delicious,” said Greer.
Mahina smiled. “In Rapa Nui:kai ne ne. Delicious food.”
“Kai ne ne,” said Greer.
“Bueno. Now you work,Doctora . I walk about here but you will please not see me.” Mahina took the Darwin book, opened it in front of Greer where the page had been marked. “You are here for work. Important work. I not disturb you.”
“You haven’t disturbed me in the slightest.”
“Adoctora need the silence to work. To think. I can see.”
Mahina left and reappeared with four wineglasses of varying sizes dangling from her hands, the stems wedged between her fingers. With deft movements, she set each one to the right of a place setting and then disappeared for another set. After she had placed them on all the tables, she surveyed her work and rubbed her hands together.
Although the book was still open, Greer had watched all of this. “Really, Mahina, you’re welcome to sit with me.”
Mahina clapped. “Ah. Mahina is here only for work.” And with that she made her way back toward the common room. Greer finished her meal in silence, folding down pages of interest, then carried her plates into the spotless kitchen and left them in the sink.
When Greer returned to her room, she saw that her bed had been made, her shoes lined neatly against the wall, and her black duffel bags piled in the corner. The books she had left on the mattress were neatly arranged on one of the wicker nightstands with the help of a bookend that had not been there before. Above the bed, the plaque of the Virgin Mary had been restored to its watchful position. Beside it now hung a small crucifix.
Greer laughed. This was going to be an interesting few months.
She threw Darwin’s book on the bed, leaving him to do battle with religion, and grabbed a jacket and her flashlight from her duffel.
The SAAS building was again dark and deserted, and Greer was thankful the other researchers kept such normal hours. Years ago, in graduate school, as one of five women in her department, she’d been given access to the botany lab only late at night, when nobody else had wanted to work. She’d grown so accustomed to the quiet, to the darkness and the solitude, she found it a hard habit to break even when she had access to equipment during daylight hours.
Her crates sat beside the door exactly where she’d left them, but this time she had a lever with her. On her knees, she gently pried the splintery top off the first one, then carried her collection of chemicals to the metal table nearest the sink, arranging the bottles in their usual order—potassium hydroxide, acetic anhydride, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, silicon oil—making sure the labels faced out.
She was meticulous about arranging her equipment, a trait she’d inherited from her father, a high-school biology teacher. In the basement of their house in Wisconsin he had set up a complete research station: carefully labeled jars of chemicals, color-coded drawers of slates and sandstones and seashells, shelves of alphabetized reference books, and a beautiful brass microscope he’d brought from Hungary that looked to Greer, the first time she saw it, like an ancient treasure.
Almost every night after dinner, her father retreated downstairs with a new sample to examine: a butterfly or a pressed flower he’d collected, sometimes a dead housefly or ladybug that arrived in an envelope from California or Maine; he often wrote to teachers around the country, asking them to send local organic materials. Dandelion seeds, pouches of soil, and dried redwood needles all made their way to their house in Mercer; and once, from a teacher in Tennessee, he received a package with a note that said:This plant was grown not twenty miles from our school. Enjoy. The box held a pack of cigarettes.
As a young child, Greer was mesmerized by his secret downstairs world, by the mysterious paraphernalia with which he was surrounded. And for years, because he didn’t want his organization disturbed, Greer wasn’t permitted to touch any of it. This only fueled her curiosity. She imagined he must be some sort of genius. A few times, when she persuaded her mother to let her follow her downstairs when she was dusting, Greer was able to examine the brass knobs and cylinders of his microscope, the beautiful glass bottles of his private alchemy.
Her mother treated his laboratory with less seriousness. Test tubes and slides held little fascination for her. They could have been pieces of a model ship, the fragments of a suitable hobby any husband might have. She preferred fiction to fact; she spent her evenings sitting on the porch with a novel in her lap. For her, the natural world was a canvas for narrative, a place of myth and legend. At bedtime, she told Greer stories of souls who lived in trees—lost lovers turned into wood, mischievous children turned into saplings—and these were secrets between them. “Papa only sees through his microscope,” her mother said, the sweet scent of cold cream on her skin mingling with the smell of cigarettes. “You and I, we seeeverything .”
Those were Greer’s strongest memories of her mother: her smell, her bedtime whispers, and the way she had of making everything—I’m going to the store for butter—sound like a secret. Greer was nine when her mother died of a ruptured aneurysm.
This was when her father, in an effort to console Greer, finally let her use his lab.
Two months after her mother’s death, Greer came back to the house one afternoon with a frog she’d caught in a creek. She cupped it in her palms and walked into the kitchen. “I caught a frog,” she announced, “and I’m going to name it Harvey.”
Her father took off his reading glasses and folded his newspaper. “Let’s have a look.”
Greer held it in front of his face, the wet, slick creature pulsing in her hands.
“That is not a Harvey,” he said. He took the frog from her and told her to get a bowl. Greer then watched as he dangled her frog above a cereal bowl and squeezed its abdomen. Soon a cascade of small black pods dropped into the bowl. “Eggs,” he said. “Do you want to look at them?”
She could hardly believe what he was suggesting. She followed him down the dark cellar steps, and with a tug of the rusted chain, the light clicked on. The disarray of the place startled her. Dirty beakers crowded the sink; the table was covered with dust. Her father pulled forward his microscope, grabbed a slide, then removed a tweezers and a dropper from a canister of utensils. “Take a few eggs, add three drops of water, then place the slide cover on top. Now gently slide the mount into the microscope. Right here. Slow, Lily Pad. You do not want to break it. Now wait one moment.”
He put his eye to the ocular, adjusted the focus. “There we are. You try.”
Greer strained onto her toes and pressed her eye to the brass eyepiece. Three swollen circles appeared before her.
“What do you see?”
“Circles,” she said.
“What else?”
“Puffy circles, big puffy circles with thick edges, like they were drawn with a Magic Marker.”
“But what do yousee , Lily Pad?” His voice was edgy; there was a right answer. “What are you looking at?”
“Life?” she asked.
“Ah, Lily Pad.” She felt his hand, firm and proud, settle on her back. “You and me.”
Just as she began to feel the happiness of her achievement, the bulb above them sputtered, and Greer heard a drip from the corner. She looked over and saw a leak in the ceiling. She felt her throat tighten. The place she had waited so long to make use of had vanished, the threshold she had waited to cross now held nothing but disorder.
Now, years later, she understood the danger of letting grief enter your sanctuary.
Greer opened the crate that held her distiller—tap water contained pollen and had to be purified—and carefully assembled the pieces. She unpacked her centrifuge and set it on one of the tables, then lifted the lid, checked the eight empty buckets arranged in a circle, and made sure nothing had been broken in transit. She removed her plant press, wiped down all the pieces, and set it nearby.
The final crate, which held her microscope, proved harder to open. She gave the lever a gentle kick downward, but this sent the lever clanging to the floor. Greer then wedged the tool deeper and stomped hard. The wood splintered open, the lever dislodged, cartwheeling into her shin.
“Oh, bloody shit!” she shouted, hopping on her unharmed leg. A sharp pain shot through her, and for a moment she felt tears, but as she swung around she saw a young man in the doorway. It was the man from the airplane—the cake man.
He raised his index finger. “We have a medicine kit.” He disappeared, his footsteps fading along the hallway, and Greer composed herself. When he returned with a wad of gauze in one fist and a glass bottle in the other, she had mustered a decent show of stoicism.
“I’m all right.”
“It is important to disinfect. To avoid tetanus.”
Greer was still hunched over, her hand pressed firmly to her shin, but the initial wave of pain was subsiding. She tried to straighten herself. “It’s fine. Really.”
“Do you meanoh-bloody-shit fine?”
“In theory.”
He crouched beside her. “Well, yes. Of course it is fine,” he said. “Only, it should be clean as well, no?”
He opened the bottle, doused the gauze, and handed it to her. The sharp smell of rubbing alcohol tickled her nose.
“It’s fine,” she said, dabbing at the cut. A thread of blood had risen in the crevasse of the wound. “Really.”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Fine. Hmmnn. My English is not so good. Forgive me, but I don’t think I know this word.” A smile pinched the corners of his mouth. “I must look for understanding in the language of the body. The blood, the body bent over, the face tightened with pain. I think perhaps that this wordfine must mean the same as awful.”
“No,” sighed Greer. “It means really awful. Aching awful.”
“English is a fascinating language. There is much you can teach me.” He stood. “Once, and this was many many years ago, I fell in a broken hang glider, just after I had taken off from a peak to the north of Santiago. I landed on my leg. A clean break. The danger, of course, was not the bone but the mountain dust. The doctor said I was very fortunate I had cleaned my wounds quickly.” He gestured once again to the bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“Vicente Portales?”
“Would that be fine for you?”
“The most fine kind of embarrassment.” She lifted the gauze from her leg and saw that the bleeding had stopped.
“See? Almost like new,” he said. “Well, at least I have seen here tonight that you are, in fact, very busy settling in. Of course, you do not have to come to dinner. I wanted only to say hello to our new guest, who I now know is Doctor Greer Farraday. I am indeed Vicente Portales. A cryptographer. And I welcome you to Rapa Nui and to our colleagues—Doctor Sven Urstedt and Doctor Randolph Burke-Jones, who would also like to meet you. And I will offer you this small piece of advice: If a person would like to avoid the whole world, it is an excellent choice to come to Rapa Nui. There is perhaps no better place. But if a person would like to avoid people on Rapa Nui, that person will have very little success, because, you see, it is a very, very small island.” At this, he crouched down, removed from his pocket an elaborate Swiss army knife, flicked up a thick blade, and in four quick movements eased the lid off her final crate. “To help you settle in a little faster,” he said, returning the knife to his pocket. “Iorana,Greer.”
She listened as his footsteps faded leisurely down the hall.
“Thanks,” she called, though she did not think he could hear her. Only the echo of her own voice returned.
The next morning, Greer awoke at dawn, put a fresh Band-Aid on her wound, and prepared a day pack: sample bags, cutters, field notebook, camera, a change of clothes. She lathered sunblock on her arms and neck, then walked through the just-waking streets of Hanga Roa to find Mahina’s cousin Chico, whom she’d been told could rent her a horse. It seemed news of her plan had spread quickly—the short man with an unruly gray mustache stood in the middle of the street, holding the reins of a brown and somewhat emaciated horse, waving as she approached. After arranging a price, he gave her a boost on and handed her a worn map of the island with severalmoai drawn in.
“Bestmoai here.” He pointed to a spot on the island’s western side. “Ahu Tahai. Fifteen minute. No more. And here”—his finger tapped a stretch of sand on the northern coast—“is good for swim. Anakena. Maybe two, three hours.”
She thanked him, and gave a slight kick to the beast’s flank. It had been years since she’d been on a horse, not since she went riding as a child, and she liked the roll of her torso over the animal’s back, the light trapezing of her feet. Often she had ridden alone across fields, watching her parents’ house fade to a white speck in the distance, to collect minnows and newts from the creek. Her father had raised her from infancy on a diet of science. He filled her with stories of natural wonders: century plants that grew for decades, waiting to finally flower and fruit for one brief moment; an Asian orchid that could bloom for nine months. But her favorite was the story of the small heart-shaped seeds that fell from tropical vines, washed by rains into the sea. Millions of sea hearts were riding the world’s oceans at any given time, drifting for months, years, eventually washing ashore on the beaches of distant lands to begin a new life. Sea hearts were such good travelers, her father said, that sailors stuffed them in their pockets for luck.
While her friends gathered after school to trade Ginny dolls and baseball cards, Greer went exploring in the woods, upturning rocks and rotten logs to see what miniature worlds lay beneath, hovering for hours above mildewy civilizations of spiders, slugs, and millipedes. Or she went riding across the fields, collecting wildflowers, sometimes dismounting and following a bee as it pranced from flower to flower, trying to see if she could discern a pattern in its preferences. She had long ago grown accustomed to solitude, to a quiet alliance with nature.
Greer continued slowly along the road out of the town, the ocean on her left a forget-me-not blue. Soon, cluttered rows of white crosses sprouted from the grass. Her map marked this as the local cemetery—started after the missionaries arrived and began preaching Christian burial. Before that, burials had been in the caves, or under theahu , the long stone platforms on which themoai originally stood.
The path was lined with ferns, which Greer suspected had been on Rapa Nui a long time. Fern spores were among the lightest in the plant kingdom, no heavier than the average grain of pollen, and could be carried by wind for hundreds of miles. Ferns had been among the first flora to regenerate on Krakatoa; three years after the eruption on the Indonesian island, they made up over half of the island’s plants, far above their usual fifteen percent. Greer liked to think of ferns as the floral Polynesians—itinerant, adventurous, adaptable—settling every landfall across entire oceans.
In the distance ahead, several giant stone figures lay fallen in the grass—moai—the statues that had etched Easter Island into the world’s consciousness. According to Chico’s map, this was Tahai, the group ofmoai closest to the village. Much more depressing, she thought, than impressive. Long noses pressed to the ground, backs bared to the sun. They looked like debris. Greer tried to imagine them standing, the way Roggeveen had seen them in 1722: a row of towering human forms. But that majesty was long gone. Greer didn’t dismount; themoai weren’t her purpose for being there.
She cut inland to look at the old leper colony, where the land was supposedly the most fertile on the island, and had been used by the lepers to grow fruits and vegetables; the produce had been difficult to sell at first, but people eventually overcame their fear. After a few minutes, Greer found herself before the scattering of abandoned huts in which almost twenty lepers had lived at one time. The last leper had died a few years earlier. Since then, the huts had been left to the violence of wind and rain. She circled the settlement until she found what looked to be a field for cultivation, dismounted, and took a soil sample. She then headed back toward the shore.
Dozens more toppledmoai littered the coast below. From a distance, some simply looked like rocks. Through her binoculars, though, the slope of the shoulders and the indentation of the eyes fixed to the ground became clear. The twenty-foot statues of volcanic tuff had all been carved with identical features—they looked like slender giants with huge rectangular heads. They were neither lifelike nor ornate, but the size of them and the sheer number were impressive. She could see why they had captured the imaginations of Roggeveen, González, Cook, and La Pérouse. This was more than art, this was industry. Carving hundreds of stone giants, then positioning them along the island’s coast—impossible to imagine.
The sun, now high in the sky, beat steadily on Greer’s arms and legs, and she put on her sunglasses. For another hour she urged her horse along the rock-clogged path, stopping once at a cluster of low shrubs speckled with red berries. GenusLycium, she guessed. This was the only wild plant among the grasses, and she clipped a branch and eased it into a sample bag. Dozens of horses and sheep grazed on the slopes. She passed two cattle ranches, where she had to lead her horse inland to bypass the fences, and saw several partridges jumping in the grass.
By noon she had reached Anakena, a crescent of white sand hosting several picnics. The American couple from the day before were sunbathing on a plaid blanket, a small radio propped between them. Farther down, several women in bikinis tossed a beach ball. A cluster of palm trees shaded the edges of the beach—these, she’d read, had been planted just a few years before—and three elderly women had propped themselves beneath one of the thick, scalloped trunks, fanning themselves with pamphlets. They were reveling in this minute patch of shade, the first Greer had seen all morning. It astounded her, really, how completely the island bared itself to the sun. Almost as if shadows, too, had become extinct. The island’s sole oasis was this slim beach with its canopy of palm fronds. This was where Hotu Matua, the island’s first settler, had landed his canoe, and where the famous lost British expedition had made its camp. Greer had planned to have lunch here, in a bit of shade, but now changed her mind. Too many tourists. She wasn’t here to take photographs, to say to friends back home:I went to Easter Island . She was here, in some significant way, to understand.
She rode away from the beach, following the steep rise of the coast. For another hour she stuck to the shoreline, then veered off the trail into a tangle of grass and rocks. The horse stepped slowly. A strong, salty wind rose from the water, battering her face. This, and the sound of the waves below, briefly muted the thump of the horse’s hooves. Seabirds swooped overhead in eerie silence. But soon the wind subsided and she heard a hollowwhoosh. On the rocks below, a spout of water shot straight into the sky: a blowhole. According to her map, this was almost halfway back to Hanga Roa—a good place to stop for lunch. A worn track led down toward the water, so she dismounted and tethered her horse to the broken head of amoai .
Fastening the straps of her backpack, she eased herself down the cliff, carefully placing each foot on the loose rocks. Finally on flat ground, she had just shrugged her pack off, when she heard the faint sound of footsteps against the rough basalt. She looked around the cliff’s face to see an old man in loose brown chinos and a beige sweater climbing the rocks toward the path, his footholds fast and light, noticeably more confident than her own. An islander. His hair was thick and gray, his eyebrows unruly. Nervously glancing at Greer, he passed out of sight. Just then a breeze carried the smell of food: roasted meat, the sweet smell of yams. On the rocks about twenty yards from her, she spotted a plate covered with a metal lid, a halo of steam curling from its edges. It was odd, this abandoned meal, but then again, the island seemed governed by its own rules and rituals.
Greer sat and pulled out the lunch Mahina had packed—two bananas, a cheese sandwich, and a warm bottle of cola. In the distance, a small jetty stretched into the water, frayed ropes hanging from its rocks. Beneath her, the sea splashed the cliff and she listened, with surprising contentment, to the rhythm of the waves. Greer had always liked the ocean, and in Marblehead those past few months, when the confusion of mourning Thomas seemed overwhelming, it was the ocean that had calmed her. But here, above this endless sea, in this place so far away, she felt more than calmness: She felt the first small hint of joy returning. She’d made it to Easter Island, and she was doing her first solo field research. Greer pulled out her notebook and began to write:
Day 1:Initial survey of current vegetation of northwest coast of island: extensive Gramineae and ferns, without apparent shrubbery or ground cover. One sample (A1) of possible Lycium taken two miles beyond village of Hanga Roa. (Are berries edible to humans? What are the other possible faunal predators of fruit? Means of dispersal?)
Soil eroded and dry. Approximately two dozen coconut palms grow at Anakena beach on the island’s northern coast, but beyond that there is no—
The blowhole released another whistle, a spray of seawater fell over her, and when Greer looked up, above the steaming plate stood a ghostly figure. An old woman, pale and slender, barefoot, in a soiled smock. The wind stirred her long white hair. Her legs bent gingerly as she lifted the plate. Then she turned to Greer.
“Iorana!” Greer shouted. “Windy.Viento! Fuerte! ” You never knew what difference a friendly word might make. “The view,” Greer said, her arms sweeping out to the ocean, “. . .el mar, hermoso .”
The old woman scanned the horizon.
“Hermoso!” Greer repeated.
“Vai kava nehe nehe,”the woman said, her voice low and brittle, almost lost in the rumble of the water. She turned toward the cliff and disappeared.
Sliding forward, Greer saw a small crack in the face of the rock, a sliver of an opening. Of course, a cave. The whole island was perforated with relics of its volcanic past: lava tubes left by the magma that flowed thousands of years earlier. Beneath the yellow grass, beneath the basalt, these caves formed a subterranean world of elaborate passageways hidden from view, littered with the skeletons of ancient islanders. According to oral history, the caves had served as shelters and hideouts during turbulent times; in them, families had slept and cooked and waited, and, when needed, had buried their dead. The early Christians, too, thought Greer, understood the benefit of underground networks, digging burial chambers beneath ancient Rome, then, during times of religious persecution, taking refuge belowground, beside the dead. Strange how mausoleums often became sanctuaries.
Many of the island’s caves were still thought undiscovered. The one before her, though, seemed to serve as the old woman’s home. How many more, she wondered, were still inhabited?
Greer quickly finished her lunch—it was getting late—and resumed writing her morning’s observations. She detailed the path she’d taken, the weather, the number of horses she’d seen. She had promised herself to take extensive notes, to document each step of her research as though she were, in fact, responsible for turning the notes over to the nonexistent society that funded her research. But now, at the bottom of the page, Greer added a small note inappropriate for an official log, the kind of note at which Thomas would have shaken his head.
An old woman who lives in one of the caves fetched a plate of hot food that had been left outside by an elderly man. She seems some sort of hermit. Interesting. She is pale, with white hair. One of the oho-tea race.
Vai kava nehe nehe—translate.
Smiling Greer closed her notebook, packed up the remains of her lunch, and made her way back toward the village as the sun fell in the sky.
After returning her horse, Greer walked through the streets of Hanga Roa toward theresidencial. It was eightP .M., and the few shops along AvenidaPolicarpo Toro had closed. On the corner, a small restaurant seemed to be coming to life. A man in a brown button-down shirt carried chairs and tables to the dusty street, shook checkered cotton cloths across the tabletops, clinked down salt and pepper shakers. A few tourists had already been seated, extricating themselves from their visors and camera straps, piling guidebooks on the tables. Snatches of Spanish and German and English mingled in the street. This was the only life in sight. As she turned onto Te Pito O Te Henua Street, she spotted Vicente Portales walking with a newspaper tucked in the crook of his arm. Greer noticed the precision of his posture. He wasn’t tall, but the way he held his shoulders made him seem so. He waved and approached her with an easy confidence.
“You see? A small island.”
“Apparently.”
His eyes took in her bulging backpack. “It seems you’ve had a busy day of exploring. Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Yes,” said Greer, but she couldn’t very well say she had preferred a long stare at the ocean to the world-famousmoai. “It’s an interesting place.”
“Good word: interesting. Beautiful, no. But yes, very, very interesting. Perhaps the most interesting place I have ever been.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A difficult question. For work five months. But I take trips to the mainland, on the Lan Chile flight, as you know. Well, I would very much like to hear about your work, what you are studying. Thesociedad seems to know little about the people they host and yet if we share our knowledge we will all enhance the work of each other. Will you join me for a pisco sour?”
Greer had amassed enough questions about the island that talking to someone who knew the terrain appealed to her. And as he’d said, the town was small. She glanced at her watch. Mahina had said dinner was at nine tonight; she had an hour.
“So what exactly is a pisco sour?”
“It is one of the typical drinks of Chile, Doctor Farraday! You must try one. Unfortunately, we have no bars here. Vittorio over there”—he pointed to the man carrying tables and chairs—“is trying to start the first restaurant. But it is for tourists. We will have a drink Rapa Nui–style. Okay?”
“A Chilean drink, then,” she said.
They walked down the street to the place where she’d bought her groceries. The door was now closed, but Vicente knocked. “Iorana!Mario? Vicenteaqui! ” Soon Mario emerged with a groggy smile. “Ah! Marblehead!Iorana! Hola, Vicente!”
“Una botella de pisco sour?”asked Vicente.
“Sí, sí.”Mario disappeared into the dark store, returning a moment later with a bottle and two tin cups.
“Maururu,”said Vicente.
They wandered downhill to thecaleta, where a dozen small fishing boats fanned out from the docks, and seated themselves on the low stone wall overlooking the harbor. Vicente spread his newspaper between them, flipping through the pages, until an article caught his eye. “This one I’ve read.” He flattened the paper and set the bottle and two cups on it.
“You see?” He pointed to the paper’s date. “Only three days old. Quite a valuable item on Rapa Nui. We shall try not to spill.” He twisted open the bottle. “Now, I know only that you are here for core samples. You caused thesociedad quite some trouble asking for a refrigerator. One of their bureaucrats thought it was for your food.” As he spoke, he pulled a bandana from his pocket and wiped off both cups. “Many accusations were made about the luxuries required by American researchers. Of course, they soon had one of their experts explain that cores must remain cold.”
“Well, I’m here to study fossil pollen records. I’d like to find out what plants were here, how long ago, what happened to them. A decent lake core will contain pollen from several thousand years.”
“Plants, yes,” he said, pouring the cloudy liquid into each cup. “An important piece of the mystery. It will bring us one step closer to understanding this island.”
“And you?”
“I am trying to decipher therongorongo. ”
“The mysterious tablets.”
“No one has yet been able to decipher the writing. But to understand what’s written on those pieces of wood would very much enhance our understanding of what happened on this island.”
“What kind of wood are they made of?”
“Ah, a botanist’s question! We believe some are thetoromiro tree. Others are laurel, or myrtle. I believe there is one of ash. Of course, there are only twenty-one left. The nineteenth-century missionaries made the islanders burn them. Many, it is said, were hidden in caves, but they’ve never been found.”
“I’d love to look at them. To look at the wood.”
“Next time you are in Europe, perhaps. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Leningrad. They are in museums there. Only three remain in this hemisphere. Two in Santiago and one in Concepción. I first saw them in Santiago, many many years ago, and that is what ignited my interest in decipherment. I was young, and their mystery lured me. But now . . .” He handed her a cup. “Your pisco sour, se?ora.”
“Gracias.”
Vicente watched her lift the cup to her mouth. The liquid was tart and strong, like a margarita with lemon juice.
“It’s good,” she rasped.
“Pisco is made from muscat grapes from the Elqui Valley, what we call the Zona Pisquera, north of Santiago. A beautiful region for hiking or hang gliding, where the water from the Andes comes down. In Chile we all drink pisco. But most foreigners don’t like the pisco without the sour mix—it is too sweet for them. And too strong.Pisquo is an aboriginal word which means ‘flying bird.’ We believe it was used to explain the feeling of one’s head when one is drunk. In a few moments you’ll see.” He smiled and took a sip, his eyes lingering on the cup. “Do you like our little Rapa Nui tavern here?”
“Very nice.”
There was something in the pleasure he took in this moment—sitting on a stone wall pouring drinks into tin cups—that made Greer think he came from wealth. As though all things simple or archaic were, for him, the true luxuries.
“But if there are no tablets left on the island, why do you stay?”
“You mean the place doesn’t strike you as the kind of island on which to remain indefinitely? Yes, an excellent question.” It seemed he had asked himself this many times. “Of course, at first I did hope to find more tablets here. But I have given up on that. You see, if the script is not alphabetic, if it is symbolic, then it is likely the symbols originated as representations of the objects relevant to the early Rapa Nui. The best way, of course, to determine any relationships between the characters and real-world things is to examine the real-world things. Language relates to life. It emerges from life. For example, the Rapa Nui now have a new phrase:peti etahi . It means ‘peach one,’ or, as you say in English, ‘peachy.‘Peti has entered the language just recently because the Chilean supply boat brought a new product to the island—canned peaches. Before, there were no peaches on the island. But now they are everywhere, and the people love them! Anything that is good, anything they like, ispeti etahi. ”
“Have you found any correlations?”
“Many symbols appear to be birds, or part bird, part man. Some appear to be fish. And many, in fact, look like trees.”
“Trees? That’s surprising.”
“It is my interpretation, though. Therongorongo is a great mystery, the most spectacular achievement of this island. Themoai bring the tourists. But therongorongo , well . . . we are speaking of something that has occurred only five times in the history of the world.” Vicente held his fist in the air, and with each name lifted a finger. “Mesopotamia, Mexico, Egypt, and China. These are the only places where a written language wasinvented . Every other instance of writing has been borrowed, or revised, from those four. Four spontaneous inventions of writing. Plus here, on my favorite island”—his thumb went up—“number five. And the only script not yet deciphered.”
“Your task,” she said.
“Yes, my task.”
“Sounds like convergent evolution,” said Greer.
“Biology talk?”
“The same developments turn up in different species on separate continents, even in different epochs. The American cactus and the African spurge—oceans apart, but you’d swear they were related. Same swollen stems, same aureoles. Or the milkwort and the sweet pea. Entirely different families, but nine out of ten botanists couldn’t tell their flowers apart. Even those helicopter seeds of maple and ash and tipu trees. Different species, different places, but they all come up with the propeller shape. Some developments just make sense.”
“Like the creation of writing.”
“Exactly.”
“And it evolved in only five places. One of them right here,” he said, patting the stone wall. “Quite something.”
“It is,” said Greer. “Only I hope the tablets don’t turn out to be like some of the cuneiform. Ancient grocery lists, ledgers. It would be great if they really said something.” She tapped her cup to his, took a long sip, and felt the alcohol rise to her temples. She ran her fingers through her hair. “‘Romeo loves Juliet,’ at the very least. ‘Antony loves Cleopatra.’ Something juicy.”
“Not ‘Romeo gave Juliet fourteen chickens.’ ”
“Combine the two—‘Romeo gave Juliet fourteen chickens because he loves her’—and then you’ve got something. The beginning of an epic.”
Vicente laughed. Greer could feel him watching her, and leaned away. She didn’t mean to be flirting. She was just a little tipsy.
“The decipherment sounds like an excellent project,” she said, setting her cup down. “Challenging.”
“It would be very good to know what they say.” Vicente, too, seemed content to let the brief awkwardness pass. “But even when we decipher the script, there are very few left we can read. So much has disappeared from this island. Do you want to know why all thesemoai are still here? Because they are too heavy to move off the island.”
Greer laughed.
“All of the early visitors here left with valuables. The islanders traded their artifacts for hats and bandanas. It’s tragic. Who knows what is still out there? Right now I am at work obtaining records that may locate some more tablets. You’ve heard of the German fleet that anchored here during the First World War?”
“Admiral von Spee. Actually, he was a naturalist as well. Kept botanical records of the ports he visited.”
“I’ve not read those accounts. I’ve focused primarily on his naval correspondence, his ship’s log. The details of his cargo. A naturalist, yes. He was an interesting man. He sailed on the first German colonizing mission to West Africa. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1912, posted to Tsingtao, which is where he found himself when war broke out. A gallant man. Of course, he was sunk with his whole fleet at the Falkland Islands. He made a horrible mistake—tried to run for it. No one knows why.”
“Fear isn’t a good enough reason? If I recall correctly, there was a whole British fleet after him.”
“And French and Russian and Japanese. But he was a great admiral, Doctor Farraday. Truly great. Men like that do not become afraid so easily.”
“Sure they do.”
“In all accounts by his officers, even by his adversaries, von Spee was a fearless man.”
But fearlessness, thought Greer, was a feeling, not a temperament. No one, no matter how accomplished, could avoid fear. Who would have imagined Thomas Farraday would be scared of failing?
“Anyway, he was here,” Greer said—she was having fun and didn’t want to spoil it—“the gallant, fearless, botanically inclined admiral. At Easter Island. How does this relate to therongorongo ?”
“It is believed, and I am hoping these records will confirm, that the fleet made off with valuables from the island. Local legends tell of things disappearing from the island with the warships. It’s my hope that the valuables—tablets, I am convinced—were sent ahead to Germany.”
Greer looked up; the stars were beginning to shine in the night sky. A cool breeze rolled off the ocean. This was all she wanted—a nice conversation, in a new place with a new person. She pulled her legs up and arranged them Indian-style. “Will the Germans admit it if they have them?”
“No,” said Vicente. “They will not, I think, want to admit to hiding the artifacts. But if I have documents to prove they do have them, that is a different situation.”
“And you want to return them to the island?”
“Yes,” said Vicente. “But it is a difficult situation with Chile. Chile, you see, will want them. Chile will consider them their own.”
“The islanders might not like that.”
“I am Chilean. Many people on Rapa Nui are Chilean, or have one Chilean parent. There is no antagonism now between Rapa Nui and Chile. Not yet. But there is a growing feeling from the islanders that we should not be here. We are calledmauku, or, in Spanish,pasto . You know that word? It means ‘weed.’ It means we ruin good things.”
“There are a lot of weeds here. The plant kind. And remember,” she said, “one person’s weed is another’s flower.”
“Well, even though there is little on the land, the islanders would still like the land for themselves. It is theirs, after all. During the fifties and sixties, the government forbade the islanders from traveling. So some of the Rapa Nui stole rowboats from the Chilean Navy, some even made sailboats and canoes, and they sailed for Tahiti, but they had no navigation equipment. It was an awful scene, you can imagine, when at dawn the village awoke to find so many of its men gone.” Vicente shook his head. “Some men had not even told their families for fear of being stopped. Most of these boats were lost at sea. It was another horrible chapter for the islanders. Good men, men who might have been leaders, lost.”
“You don’t sound very pro-Chilean.”
“I love Rapa Nui. I am at heart a Rapa Nui. This is the truth, what I feel inside of me.” He touched his chest. “And I would like to see the people in possession of their island. But even if I am able to unravel therongorongo , there will be resentment. I am not an islander. I will still be apasto .”
“Do you really think you can? Decipher it?”
“I suppose I must think so, or else I wouldn’t try. But I’m waiting for something new to work with. I am hoping for my own Rosetta stone.”
“The Rosetta stone was made of basalt, you know. This island is basalt. A good omen.”
“Let us hope,” said Vicente, sipping the last of his drink.
The sky above them was black now, the stars so bright they seemed to spill from the sky. A distant streetlamp cast a soft glow over them, but Vicente had faded to shadow. Greer pulled her flashlight from her backpack, clicked it on, and laid it on the rocks between them. “Better,” she said.
He laughed. “Ah, Doctor Farraday, you’ll soon get accustomed to the darkness here. I don’t even own one.” He held the flashlight up and examined it. “And you? You will be taking core samples? That seems like work which can produce good, definite results.”
“Once you get past the messy and tiring part of the core taking.”
“An intellectual pursuit with physical labor. I like that.”
“I do too, until I’m up to my knees in a swamp.”
“Well, no swamps here.”
“The crater lakes will be plenty of trouble, I’m sure.”
”Crater lakes?”
“The samples need to be taken from a damp area. Pollen can be preserved in water for thousands of years.”
“Ah, yes. In the craters there is fresh water. But everywhere else is dry. And do you know what it is you want to find?”
“I try not to think about that, so as not to bias my analysis. But I’m interested in why there are no native trees here, no shrubs. Something happened—an eruption, an earthquake—something wiped out all the vegetation.”
“It is as I have said: Everything here disappears. Plants as well.”
“It seems so. I’ll have to look at a core. Extract pollen at various depths, count the grains, analyze the assemblages. From that I can start to determine what the island used to look like.”
“It is an excellent project,” said Vicente. “I am a great fan of the botany sciences. When one’s work is at an impasse, the work of others always seems much more exciting, much more important, does it not?”
Greer laughed. “The Gramineae always have more chlorophyll . . .”
Vicente raised his eyebrows.
“Botany talk: The grass is always greener.”
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard this saying. On the other side of the fence . . . it is true. I cannot help but become fascinated by the German fleet. Why they came here. What they did. It happens to you as well? This distraction?”
Greer nodded. “I like to tell myself it’s not a distraction. That the mind needs to look to the side sometimes to make sense of what’s in front of it.”
“Yes, well, perhaps you’ll want to spend some time looking at the photos of therongorongo, and I will want to spend some time taking a core sample. I have always been interested in that work. I was, as you know, a fan of Thomas Farraday.” Vicente looked at her. “He was your husband?”
“Yes.”
“I read much about his work.”
Not enough, she wanted to say, to know he had died.
“I am sorry I mistook you for him. Of course, they wrote only ‘Doctor Farraday.’ I made an assumption. I hope you will forgive me.”
“Of course,” Greer said. He couldn’t know it was the same assumption everyone made. But the mention of Thomas suddenly darkened her mood. She looked at her watch. “I hope you’ll excuse me. Dinner’s at nine. And I need to sort through my notes from today.”
“You must not be late for one of Mahina’sumu feasts.”
“You know Mahina?”
“Ah, Doctor Farraday. Everybody knows Mahina. An extraordinary woman. Like I said, this is a very small island.”
“Well, thanks for the drink.” Greer tapped her cup to his. “And the conversation.” As she stood and slipped her backpack over her shoulders, she felt a little dizzy. A strong drink on an empty stomach after a long day—a poor combination. “I’m sure I’ll see you at the lab. And elsewhere.”
“Now, Doctor Farraday, I would just like for you to know that I am still sitting here on the wall because I am guessing that you would prefer to walk alone.”
“A fair translation,” she said.
“Next to therongorongo , everything else is easy.”
He was charming, she had to admit. And at another time, she might have wanted him to walk with her.
“I’m just in a solitary mood,” she said.
“That is allowed. But you must know this is hard for me. Chilean men are not accustomed to allowing women to walk home alone.”
“Well, this American is very accustomed to walking home alone.”
“Fair enough. For now. But when in Rome, Doctor Farraday . . .”
“Well, that’s an entirely different story.” She grinned. “Then we’re dealing withItalian men.”
“You have abandoned me, insulted my country and my manhood, Doctor Farraday, all in the course of less than a minute. What on earth is left for the next few months?”
“Work.”
“I can see you will be an extremely good influence on me. Very well.” Vicente poured himself another drink, and he turned the page of his newspaper, squinting. “Ah, there was an election yesterday and we will not know who won until the plane arrives next week. You see how everything here can become a mystery?”
“Good night, Vicente.”
He raised his cup. “Salud, mi amiga.I am very curious what you will find under your microscope.”
“Me too,” said Greer. “Me too.”
And she followed the narrow beam of her flashlight up the road.