Bright Air - Barry Maitland [71]
He joined us and pointed to an area halfway up the sheer wall, where white birds flitted in and out of the shadows. ‘That’s where they were working. I put them ashore on that narrow beach over there.’
I scanned the cliffs with my camera, then with the binoculars, hoping to see some sign of the protection they might have used to anchor themselves up there, but it was too dark and too high up to make out any details, and the image swayed with the movement of the boat. The idea of working unsecured in such a place seemed unthinkable, and I blurted out, ‘I can’t believe she wouldn’t have had a rope.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘Where did she come down?’
He pointed to a spot where waves broke against the base of the cliff, sending spume high up the rock face. ‘Reckon that was it. Don’t want to get any closer. The currents are treacherous down this southern tip of the island.’
Anna gave a little sob and reached into the bag for the flowers. She was looking very pale. She leaned over the side and dropped the blooms over. They drifted away, tiny white petals against the dark water. Then she suddenly gave a retch and ducked her head, being sick.
As Bob went to her, I backed away towards the wheel-house and began fiddling with the GPS controls. One thing I had managed to do the previous night was memorise the coordinates of Luce’s last entry, but first I had to convert the instrument to UTM readings.
‘What’re you up to?’
I stiffened at Bob’s voice at my shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry, just seeing if I can work this thing. How is she?’
‘She’ll feel better in a minute.’
I nodded, looked up and froze. ‘Holy shit!’
Ahead of us, glowing in the haze that obscured the southern horizon, I had seen for the first time what looked like the spire of a drowned cathedral rising out of the ocean depths.
When Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, captain of HMS Supply and then aged thirty, discovered Lord Howe Island, he was careful to do the right thing. He named it after Admiral Lord Richard ‘Black Dick’ Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he named its highest peak after Rear Admiral John Leveson-Gower, also an Admiralty Lord. The cluster of offshore islands to the north he called the Admiralty Islands, and even named a small island at the edge of the lagoon after his ship’s master, David Blackburn. He gave the second highest peak, rather coyly perhaps, his own middle name. But his surname he reserved for an extraordinary spike of rock lying off to the south. When I first saw it through the boat’s windshield I guessed it might be a kilometre away and perhaps eighty or a hundred metres high. Bob corrected me—it was twenty-three kilometres off and rose an astonishing five hundred and fifty-one metres, the tallest sea stack in the world, a third higher than Frenchmans Cap and one and a half times the height of the Empire State Building—my measures of terrifying altitude since my night on the mountain with Luce. There is a portrait of Henry Ball in the National Library of Australia, one of those little black-and-white Georgian silhouettes, with a rather dandyish quiff of hair standing up on his forehead and what might be either an arrogant or determined set to his lips and the push of his chin. I like to imagine his crew running to the rail as they caught sight of the amazing volcanic fang rearing out of the ocean in that remote place and crying, ‘Bleedin’ heck, what’s that?’ and Henry, studying this vision of Nature Sublime through his telescope, replying, ‘Gentlemen, that is Balls Pyramid.’
It shook me, I have to admit. Not just the thing itself, but also the absolute certainty that I knew its UTM coordinates. Later in the trip, in calmer water, Anna managed to distract Bob for a couple of minutes while I checked it out on his GPS set, but I already knew I was right.
‘Can we go and see it?’ I asked.
Bob shook his head dubiously. ‘Sea’s a bit rough out there, Josh.’
‘But it’s amazing. Can we at least try?’
He didn’t seem to want to make an issue of it,