Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [13]
An hour after midnight, the Ti’at were slicing toward the unknown shore. Paddles trailed eerie swirls of phosphorescence, and the men silently pondered legends of sea demons and giant squid that could pull a canoe to the depths with the sweep of a tentacle. Just ahead a ghostly green tornado of schooling sardine appeared. Moments later, a giant shape exploded from the glow, casting a hissing wake over the bows of the Ti’at. A feeding humpback whale had nearly sunk them all. Perhaps the very God who created these tribes lived on the approaching island. Perhaps this was a warning.
There were subtle changes in air and water, marking new currents. A whisper of breeze put the slightest ripple on the surface, the light slaps pattered against the boats like rain. The ocean cooled suddenly and noticeably as they left the southerly countercurrent and crossed into the vast, swirling river that swept from north to south. They were now paddling downstream, at a combined pace of nearly five knots. A thin haze formed at the ocean’s surface as the shadowy peak of the next island began to obscure the stars on the horizon.
An hour later, a cold fog folded over the Ti’at like a burial shroud. Still, the elder navigator had a solid bead on the hilltop—yet a few miles distant. Simple, straight paddling would bring the party within earshot of breaking surf in an hour at sunrise. Yet five minutes on, all heard the crack of a breaking wave—a wave that shouldn’t exist in the open ocean. The air carried the dank scent of rotting kelp, and the swells seemed to suddenly come from several directions. They couldn’t see below, but clearly the water beneath them was unexpectedly shallow. In a bigger swell, perhaps dangerously so. They were above another island, this one already beaten just beneath the sea by the waves. To their west, the ocean dropped off to unknowable depths. Any swell of substantial size would career along this depthless seafloor with terrifying force. They were running over what we now know as the Cortes Bank’s northern plateau.
The navigator ordered the boats to swing around toward the east and follow what seemed to be the shoal’s deeper, kelp-free perimeter. The occasional cracks faded over their shoulders at roughly the same time another sound materialized in the fog—the low, steady rumble of surf breaking on a beach. The first hints of gray daylight offered little comfort, and the men dug with grim purpose.
The two boats passed a few strands of bull kelp and again found shoal water. Current led them along an undersea ridgeline that ran toward the sound of breaking waves. It was in the deeper expanse to the east that the Ti’at crossed a series of eddies that marked a sudden return to the warmer southerly countercurrent and the abrupt edge of the curtain of fog. A dark summit loomed dead ahead. They freed the raven and paddled beneath the rising sun.
The men beheld yet another alien world—what is now known as Bishop Rock lay directly ahead. The outline immediately reminded the elder navigator of the shaggy mammoths that roamed the island hills to the north. The three-hundred-foot-high peak possessed nearly sheer sides and a dark, domelike summit whose updrafts were ridden by circling cormorants. From a half mile’s distance, it became evident that the dome was not actually smooth, but a tortured, gothic landscape of vertical spires and canyons. The peak held scores of moving white dots, which on closer examination proved to be the heads of nesting bald eagles. At its base, a series of caves burped, steamed, and burbled in the swell.