Hippolyte's Island

  Hippolyte’s Island

  Barbara Hodgson

  TO MY FATHER

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part one

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Part four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Bibliograph

  Credits and Acknowledgments

  Footnote

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  HEAVY STEPS CRISSCROSSED OVERHEAD. From his prone position on a saggy old couch, Hippolyte tracked them, watching the ceiling tremble faintly with each footfall. A chunk of plaster fell on his face. He brushed the powder off his skin and grinned. More plaster fell, and the resulting patch became an intriguing dried-out lake bed. He caught his breath. Where in the world is that? he mused.

  This new feature was emerging in a ceilingscape that had already undergone much geological activity. Above stretched a coastline of stains, a three-dimensional terrain of bulges and flakes, charting years of slowly encroaching water damage. Beginning in the East, appropriately at the window, a voyage round this head-over-heels expanse followed a string of long fjords of dampness. Thin tentacles crept out from these inlets, the rivers that seemed to feed them. Continuing to the North, the eye navigated tufty patches of trial paints—spackley beige, rippled cream, stalactite eggshell—pigments applied by a previous owner who had reasoned that new color might disguise the damage, but who gave up, preferring, in the end, to suffer a loss rather than expend labor. Over to the West, the journey continued through the remains of the upstair tenant’s overflowing bathtub. A spectacular deluge, this event had produced craters, cauldrons even, of heaving beams and drywall that flowed down the wall and into the closet.

  The floor had its own geography—a splash of red wine here, a dent from the fall of a hammer there, the varnished golden wood rubbed rough and slivery white in paths of hard-booted heels and toes. Swollen and blackened tidal pools, ditches, and hummocks, legacies of the already-mentioned bath.

  Hippolyte saw in the ceiling and the floor reminders of places he yearned to visit, so over the two years he had owned the apartment he had added his hand to its evolving contours by vigorously writing in names and filling in missing details. All features were subjected to his labeling frenzies: a wide split above his head that was reminiscent of the Don just before it emptied into the Sea of Azov, green mold creeping out from the wall that exuded the humid Caspian marshlands, a staggering Gobi Desert where efforts to dry the damp had resulted in crackling, blistering paint.

  The small apartment was not as much of an anomaly in rain-soaked Vancouver as one might imagine. Plagued by shoddy building practices, the city was filled to the brim with inhabitants of such apartments who had no affinities with maps or movement, who despaired of similar features in their homes. Not so Hippolyte Webb. He had plastered nearly every available square inch of his walls with maps—maps with corners curling, fragments of maps reconstructed into mythical landscapes, maps adorned with precious cupids pink from the exertion of harnessing the winds. Of these his favorites were those with vast territories labeled Terra Incognita, unknown land, at least unknown at one time.

  His apartment—in its own way as lost and forgotten a corner of the world as any he could ever hope to find—was perpetually overwhelmed by piles of atlases and gazeteers stacked precariously on the floor and by others threatening to slide off the warped and groaning shelves too narrow to support their burdens. Perched on the edge of the ancient couch that he shared with heaps of yellowed and brittling newspapers, Hippolyte was consumed by the forests, deserts, and mountain ranges hidden between the covers of these cherished books, the urge to tear them open and fly directionless through their pages irresistible. Home barely long enough to change his clothes, here he was yearning to leave again.

  He loved this point in travel, the very beginning, the moment when the decision to go hit his heart and his gut, when the whirl of topography careening through his brain burned his feet, when the fine lines of maps tangled themselves around him like a net and drew him up and away, when his mind traveled the world before he even walked out the door.

  But which way should he go? It had gradually dawned on him that the world had gone all screwy, and, though he couldn’t put his finger on when it had happened or why, he knew that all of his certainties had been yanked out from under him. It was as if he had awakened from a deep sleep suddenly aware that the seasons had slipped unaccountably, giving way to the winter equinox, the vernal solstice. This was the year of warm spring rains in December, searing heat in April, falling leaves in June, and Arctic winds in September. Longing to find a land where the seasons had revolved to resemble those he remembered, he closed his eyes, and one by one, plucked the petals off that delicate compass rose, the rose round which navigators glide and sailors whisper. Round which even dolphins hold their breath. West, North, East, the cardinal petals fell.

  There had been a time when he had thought he could go only West. That had all changed overnight, and he remembered exactly when; it had been last winter, during a stay in Bukhara. It was his second visit to that city, and he had decided to go back simply because he couldn’t remember a thing about his visit made ten years earlier. On this trip he became disoriented—he blamed the inexplicable, suff ocating heat—and found himself standing in front of a familiar doorway. It was a heavy wooden barrier, ornately carved and adorned with a medieval lock, like any of hundreds of doors in the residential quarter. Lost in reverie, he raised his arm to pound on it, but the iron fist of recollection stopped him just in time and brought him to his senses. He remembered that the door gave passage to a house that he had been forever barred from entering, the house of a woman he had unwisely fallen in love with. Subsequent westward trips to other destinations prompted the similar disturbing sensation: that he had gone so far that he was doing no more than retracing his own steps and was mistaking old memories for new. And since he was resistant to North’s magnetic pull and was perpetually at cross purposes with East, there was no alternative; he decided right then and there to turn the world on its axis and head south to find his bearings.

  Accustomed to crossing meridians and marking his existence by degrees of longitude, Hippolyte was enthralled by turning perpendicular and confronting latitude. This simple 90-degree shift, dismissed without thought in the past, was now seductive, tantalizing. South beckoned with the promise of places he’d never before heard of, places with names resonating isolation, places long ago forgotten. But it couldn’t be just any South. Too many other explorers had already been, and he had sworn long ago to never give in and follow them.

  He stood up suddenly. Newspapers slipped to the floor, joining others that had fallen some time previously. Two long steps took him over to the far wall where an old globe hung from the ceiling. He unhooked it and flung himself back on the couch, unleashing another cascade of papers. As he wiped its dust
y surface with his sleeve, he discovered that it had dried out and was threatening to come apart at the equator. Ignoring the damage, he drew a bold, black line straight south, adhering strictly to his chosen direction. From Vancouver, the line made its way down to San Francisco and out into the Pacific Ocean, where it ran its watery course uninterrupted—except for the equatorial split, at which point he paused and seriously contemplated the possibilities of falling through—until it hit the polar shores of the Antarctic.

  On this particular globe the snowy terrain of the South Pole was colored an optimistically warm and sunny yellow, though Hippolyte doubted that it would ever be anything other than cold and bleak. But as formidable and distant as it was, it had attracted more than its share of men who sought to lose themselves in the process of finding the undiscoverable.

  In addition to the Antarctic, there were the Pacific islands on either side of the line: Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Pitcairn to the west; Easter, Juan Fernández, and the Galápagos to the east, respectively tempting visions of white sands and palm trees or isolated pockets of myth and adventure. But which one of these famous isles hadn’t already been trampled upon or rhapsodized over?

  West had been so easy. When he first began traveling sixteen years ago—he rapidly counted the time on his fingers—West had literally pitched him through Russia, Northern China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Poland, Germany, France, and back home to Canada. Those three years spent circumperambulating the globe at the 49th parallel merely whetted his appetite for travel, but destitution threatened to stop him in his tracks. Then two employed but restless pals who had money in their bank accounts and were ignited by his stories proposed launching a travel magazine. The result was 50° North. Because travel was hot yet underexploited, the concept caught fire, and the three of them reaped a considerable profit when they sold out a few years later to a large San Francisco publisher. It was this money that had since allowed Hippolyte the luxury of choosing when and where to travel, though he’d lately sunk too much of it into the apartment that did little more than serve as storage for his maps and books.

  He thought of his life since that first momentous trip. An explorer by instinct and a self-taught natural historian by profession, but by no means by discipline, he had worked as a travel consultant, a botanist, and a linguist, but most of all he wrote. From his pen flowed detail and curiosity for a world full of contradiction. He was enticed by the emptiest of lands, the ones that lacked any signs of human presence, and was equally seduced by those so densely packed with life that they were the very hearts of humanity.

  Hippolyte whirled his globe, watching the pinks, greens, yellows, and blues blur into a palate of erratic colonialism. Each spin further jeopardized North’s increasingly fragile hold on the Southern Hemisphere, which was now hanging by a small paper hinge straddling Sumatra and Borneo. After halting its demented wobbling, he cradled the Antarctic in his left hand and tore at the seam with his right, liberating both halves from each other. In its newfound freedom, the world offered endless possibilities for a traverse directly south. He shifted South America to the west and redrew the line. It skimmed the Amazon, then sped through the South Atlantic. At 50° South it passed over three barely noticeable dots located midway between the Falklands and the island of South Georgia, then slammed once more into the Antarctic.

  What was South offering him? A hell of a lot of water and ice, for all he could see. At least, West was land, terra firma. He rotated the bottom half again and again, then flipped the globe over so that the South Pole was now at the top. This reversed aspect gave the appealing illusion that the area he was considering was somewhat south of Antarctica. He carefully retraced his second line back towards the equator, pausing at the three unidentified spots. Why not try for a place that didn’t even warrant a label? Why weren’t they labeled?

  Eager to find out more about them, he tossed aside the mutilated globe in favor of a dog-eared school atlas dated 1892. In his possession since he found it languishing in a garbage bin some twenty years earlier, the atlas still reeked of decaying vegetables and damp cigarette butts. Laboriously inscribed on the flyleaf—possibly at the behest of some prissy schoolmarm—was “March 12th, 1895, Perfection comes from small, daily sacrifices,” a sentiment that provoked his impatience. Many of its cheap, thin pages had been torn, then crudely repaired with strips of Scotch tape that flaunted the fingerprints of whoever had tried to mend it. Bits of the tape—no doubt shriveled and desiccated long before Hippolyte was born—fell out each time it was opened. Other pages were forcefully scribbled upon in soft black pencil: nonsense names like Pindobar, Tunafed, and Bruzistan replaced Arabia, the Yukon, and the Urals. Vehement, random lines made by sharp pen nibs plowed haphazardly through the pages yet managed to convey the idea of the bombing of a crudely drawn Christmas tree or a house or the moon. Whole topographical features had been effaced by the constant pointing and rubbing from the tip of some grubby child’s finger as he was doing whatever it is children do with maps. Hippolyte liked to think that the boy—and it was no doubt a boy, judging from the drawings of things being blown up scattered throughout—was trying to get a fix on where he was, as that’s what Hippolyte himself had been doing at the age when he too drew pictures of explosions.

  Overlying the destruction wreaked by the anonymous child were Hippolyte’s own scrawls. He never planned trips with current maps since their landscapes were stained by huge cities and bisected by too many roads. Arrows, exclamation marks, circles, dates, mileages, all the specifics that he needed in order to devise yet another getaway could be found on the pages of the atlas. Now turning to South America, he realized that for all these years, his travels had favored the regions ravaged by the child’s hand, that they’d both left the Southern Hemisphere unexplored. The map of the South Atlantic was so pristine that Hippolyte was prepared to regard the flawless page an omen and to get the hell back to familiar territory when he noticed smooth sailing between the Falklands and South Georgia, with not a hint of the three islands so enticingly speckled onto his globe.

  He opened another atlas, this one from 1924. Again there were no traces of the islands. The maps papering the walls were no help, either; those bearing any semblance of reality were of only northern lands. Hippolyte dragged from behind a bookcase portfolio cases bursting with loose maps. The first yielded India, China, Russia; another, Africa, the Middle East; another, pre-WWI Europe. Finally he found the folio he was looking for. It was stuffed full of maps of South America, bought—found?—so long ago he couldn’t even remember where they came from.

  The real treasure here, the 1676 John Speed map of the Americas, lacked even the Falklands. The sight of this map swept Hippolyte up in an obsession of eclipses and heavens, of coastlines rendered delirious by the imaginative mapmaker, of rivers that had no sources, of islands that faded offinto infinity. The danger of maps possessed him now; he caressed the rag paper, thick between his fingers and still bloated with the earthly colors daubed onto its landforms. Hippolyte recalled buying this map in a moment of intoxication with the sheer extravagance of its creation. Lacking sufficient cash, he’d offered to top off the contents of his wallet with his walking boots and watch. He’d left the shop, the precious map snugly rolled up in its cardboard tube, oblivious to the absurdity of his stockinged feet.

  An 1851 Tallis map of South America, with its delicate coloring and charming vignettes, showed the Falklands and South Georgia but ignored the space in between. It reminded him of another in the series, a map of North Africa, and a wild goose chase that had taken him as far south as he had ever been. Someone, perhaps the engraver, perhaps the mapmaker, had marked “P. Hilsborough” onto Morocco’s coastline, a short distance south of the city of Agadir. Finding no trace of this feature either in the country itself or on any other map, he had tried to uncover the secret of Hilsborough: had he been a self-aggrandizing apprentice in Tallis’s company, or was the name—ludicrous considering the country to which it was appended—a
means of trying to catch out would-be map plagiarists? His lack of success still rankled. Enough of this, move on! he cried out, dropping the maps at his feet. The next sheet, a pre-1850s Black’s General Atlas South America map, also failed to provide the necessary detail; however, its corresponding “Chart of Magnetic Curves” of the world showed three unmarked dots.

  “Magnetic Curves” gave him an idea. He turned to the opening pages of the school atlas and its double-page Mercator’s projection of the world. Here he found not only the presence of the islands but, at last, their name: Aurora Islands. He’d had no doubt he’d find a name, but it gave him a jolt all the same.

  Aurora.

  The Auroras.

  That he’d never heard of them was no surprise; there must be hundreds of islands that have slipped from public consciousness. He looked for them in the index. They weren’t listed.

  Further sifting through the South America folder produced a small but exciting Italian map from 1833 with I. dell’ Aurora inscribed next to five rather significant islands and an 1877 French map with three distinct islands labeled Is. de l’Aurore.

  In twenty minutes he’d sifted through a total of twenty-five maps: three from the 1800s with the islands named, four from the same time period with the islands located but unidentified, and eighteen, spanning three centuries, that ignored them completely.

  Hippolyte swept more papers off the couch and stretched out again. Wouldn’t it be amazing, he mused, to discover a forgotten island? Or even better, as it was in this case, a bunch of them. When was the last time an opportunity came along to actually find something that had slipped out of existence?

  He gazed at nothing in particular, lost in his imagination, until a hole in his sock caught his eye. The sight of his toe sticking through the frayed wool was an unwelcome reminder of the general cloud of neglect engulfing him. It was always like this, when he was between travels, between lovers. He really ought to live with someone, he thought. Then he might feel inclined to spruce himself up and keep the place tidy.