Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [48]
Like a genuine home, with every necessity, every amenity made by his own hands.
During the first months of his island sojourn, Nemo had built a hut of branches and deadfall in the lowlands as a place to store supplies and sleep while he worked on the permanent and defensible home inside the cliff. The effort had taught him much about the practicalities of construction, which he applied to his more permanent cliff dwelling. Though the rock face looked sheer and solid, Nemo had found it to be riddled with passages and steam vents.
Though the volcano appeared dormant, the ground often trembled and the crater belched forth plumes of dark smoke in fits of geological indigestion. But Granite House seemed solid enough, and Nemo was quite proud of what he had accomplished during his years of isolation.
He had created a showcase of primitive technology that even Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson would have envied. Using charcoal on the cave floor, along with makeshift geometrical devices, he had drawn up plans for his complex ideas, much like the ones he had seen in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
He built a pulley-driven pair of wooden cages that served as elevators, taking him up and down the cliff. He piped in hot and cold water. He’d erected lookout towers so he could keep watch for any passing ship, though after so much time, Nemo began to lose hope.
He maintained mounds of tinder, grasses, and dry branches, ready to be set ablaze as signal bonfires. But so far he’d had no reason to do so, and the volcano smoke would be seen much farther away than any signal he could make himself.
His original clothes from the Coralie had tattered and split, and now he wore garments cut and stitched together from the bolts of cloth he’d salvaged from his crates or from hides he tanned using bark distillations. Moccasins made of cured seal hide protected his feet. Caroline’s old hair ribbon, long since fallen into threads, lay in a hollow in the rock wall, where he could look at it.
He confined eighteen goats within a crude stockade on the grassy plateau, using the animals mainly for milk or a thin cheese. Out of the goats’ reach, he had planted a vegetable garden with squash, wild onions, and other herbs and roots he’d transplanted from elsewhere on the island.
Now, after so much hard living, Nemo was more muscular and able to withstand the adversities of his solitary island. He ate fresh fish, mussels, and oysters from the sea, game and fowl that he hunted in the forests. A month’s supply of smoked meats hung in the cave-cooled alcoves.
Nemo diligently wrote down even the most monotonous events in his journal as he struggled with knowing that in all likelihood no one would ever read the account. Hardest of all was simply learning how to be alone.
v
During the breezy days of spring, Nemo worked up enough nerve to test his glider. Using scraps of old sailcloth stretched tight over a framework of lightweight bamboo, he had constructed a kitelike contraption, based on designs he’d seen in da Vinci’s sketchbooks, a lifetime ago in Captain Grant’s cabin.
The concept seemed simple enough. One time on Ile Feydeau, Nemo, Verne, and Caroline, all together, had flown kites up over the river. They’d run along the riverbank and watched their colorful paper constructions dance at the ends of their tethers, trying to keep them from becoming entangled.
But this enormous glider kite would have no tether, and Nemo could only hope it would hold his body aloft. He did not know his exact weight, since he had grown while stranded on the island; instead, he had constructed a clever balance on a fulcrum, using stones to approximate his weight. Then, using those same stones lashed together into a wicker framework to simulate his body, Nemo had tested his glider, making