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chapter 32
I awoke. High above I saw the starry sky and remembered where I was. The dream seemed as real as it always had, and just as eerie, but I'd gotten used to waking up from that moldy bunker and knowing it was just a dream world. I put more fuel on the dying embers and fanned them back to life. Soon they were casting their flickering light across the ground and out among the palms.
I sat there thinking about Major Benson, and remembered MacClayne verifying that there had indeed been an officer by that name.
I poked at the fire with a stick. The strange fact was that MacClayne's lost shipmates were haunting my dreams, and one of the officers had turned up to function as my inquisitor.
I glanced around. Cuauhtémoc was perched on a log nearby. I wanted to hold him in my arms, but no. Poor bird, let him sleep. It was a comfort just to see him there, and I returned to my thoughts.
Even back in Uruapan I'd had foreboding dreams about Apatzingán and the Valley of Infiernillo. Dreams in which I'd seen it as a cold and snowy Niflheim. But the bunker bar and the lost shipmates hadn't appeared in my dreams till MacClayne and I physically rode a bus down into the Valley and stayed that night in Buenavista. In a dream that night I went looking for MacClayne, and somehow crossed the bridge over the Gjallar River, and then descended into that drippy dungeon. That's where I first encountered the Royal Marines and found MacClayne, a lad of twenty, among them
It was almost a replay of a Norse myth: Balder dies, and his brother saddles up a horse and rides down into the cold valley of death in search of him. He crosses a bridge, and then arrives at a banquet hall which is a cold, miserable place. Niflheim. Balder is of course there, but he can't leave, and the brother is unable to bring him back.
There's nothing in the myth to suggest that the rescuer gets trapped there himself. Nevertheless, that's exactly what seemed to have happened to me in this recurring dream. The Marines were dead, they'd gone down with the ship that night off the coast of France. MacClayne wasn't dead, but some part of him was there, stuck in that hall of lost souls. And now some part of me also seemed to be stuck there.
MacClayne's ongoing failure to recognize me was disturbing. But of course he was a lad of twenty in those scenes; that was decades before we were to meet. He couldn't have known me. Did he wake up each morning wondering who that strange intruder might be? Me, that is--the one his shipmates so wrongly called a German and accused of being the torpedoman. My unexplained appearance must have puzzled him. Or maybe not. Perhaps the dream faded from his memory each morning when he awoke. He once told me that he never had dreams.
Anyway, whether he knew it or not, he seemed to be stuck in that hellish drinking hall, and that probably had something to do with his drinking. I tried to make sense of this, but by now my mind was tied up in knots.
A light among the palm trees caught my eye. As it approached I saw it was the shining cougar. The white light from his fur illuminated the trees as he passed near them, and shades of green and brown shone as though under an arc light. Cuauhtémoc flew to meet him, and, beak to nose, they exchanged greetings. Then the bird hopped onto the cat's back, and the feline strode up to me and licked my face with his rasp-like tongue. It felt like my skin was being scraped off, but I was glad to see him and I endured it as one endures the quirky predilections of an old friend. It had been months since his last appearance.
I put my arms around him and buried my face in his soft fur. It had a strong musty aroma which smelled pleasant to me. Then he lay down and curled himself around me like a warm blanket. The fearful feelings I'd been experiencing were gone, and so was the chill of the night. There was just the cat's contented purring in my ears, and I drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
This time I didn't wake up again till the morning sun was shining down through the palms. Cuauhtémoc was already up and around. So was MacClayne.
"¡Desayuno!" he called to me. "You want some breakfast?"
He'd found a couple of coconuts with juice and plenty of white meat. There was a thick outer husk to cut through, but inside that, they looked exactly like the ones you'd buy in a California supermarket. They tasted a lot better.
I sat there chewing bits of coconut, and soaking up the tropical atmosphere of this sunlit grove around me when my eye fell upon a shiny black twig at my side. It was nearly the length of my hand, and I was about to pick it up when I suddenly realized it was not a twig. Instantly, I jumped to my feet.
"What happened?" MacClayne was on his feet almost as quickly as I was.
"A scorpion," I said in a hushed voice and bent over to look more closely. It was dead.
"Here's another," said MacClayne.
As we looked around, we began to find others, and then still more. All of them dead.
"Maybe this," I said, after a moment of reflection, "is what Cuauhtémoc was doing last night when we saw him scratching and digging."
We looked at each other and at the bird, who was strutting about in his usual fashion. This was not the first time he'd saved me from a scorpion, and I had to admit that I should've remembered the danger when we chose this campsite which, with its abundance of decaying leaves and wood, presumably formed a favorite nesting ground for them. Chayo, as well as don Pablo and many others, had told me that repeatedly, and warned me to be careful. And I had been careful--around Uruapan that is. But it had somehow never occurred to me that scorpions might also inhabit this coastal lowland area. Thank goodness I had a chicken who knew what he was doing!
"How poisonous are these?" MacClayne asked.
"People have been known to die from the sting," I said. "Or at least that's what I'm told. Don Pablo was stung once. He survived, but he said it was a nasty sting, a lot worse than that of a wasp."
"Cuauhtémoc saved us," MacClayne said, looking at the bird with newfound reverence and respect. "Had it not been for him."
"What can I say to you?" I said to the bird. "You rescued the both of us."
The bird flapped his wings and crowed loudly.
"Cuauhtémoc," I said. "You should know that when being praised, it's good form to show modesty."
He crowed again, and I took him in my arms and gave him a hug.
"Let me give him a hug too," said MacClayne.
I passed him to MacClayne who held him affectionately, gratefully; it was one of the few times that MacClayne had held him.
Though slightly shaken by our discovery, the incident put us in tremendously good spirits. MacClayne was especially cheerful, and, as always, his geniality was infectious. I wished he could remain forever in a mood like this.
"Shall we have a look at the beach?" MacClayne said after we'd spent some time discussing the scorpions.
"Sure!" I said.
We squeezed through the fence onto a beach shingled with cobble-sized stones and strewn with driftwood. There was even the log of a giant tree, skinned of bark and smoothened by the waves--I wondered if it could've been washed up by the recent storm. But today there was hardly a breeze, and no whitecaps out on the water; from where we stood the ocean looked calm. The breakers crashed loudly below us, but we couldn't see them because huge dunes cut off our view of the lower part of the beach.
The cobbles and pebbles of the upper beach soon gave way to soft sand as we strolled down towards the water, making our way through small hollows between the dunes. These dunes were taller than ourselves, and when we emerged from between them and saw the surf, we were practically stepping in it.
"I just want to get my feet wet," MacClayne said, and, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, he approached the water, not appreciating the size of an incoming wave. Suddenly he was in water up to his waist, struggling to keep his footing as it swirled about him, first pushing him towards the beach, then reversing itself and trying to drag him out to sea.
Having concluded that this beach was not meant for wading, he went to sit on the upper part where he would presumably hang his trousers out to dry. I stayed on, but decided to be more wary.
I wanted to go swimming, but I wasn't sure if it was safe. Here on the lower beach, the dunes were perpendicular to the ocean with hollows between them where the surf traveled up and then receded. The wave that caught MacClayne had been relatively small; some were larger and rose to several meters, even washing over the tops of the tall dunes.
After the last large wave began to recede, I sat in a hollow. Water was still pouring down the flanks on both sides of me, and met in the low place where I sat. There it became a small but torrential stream which dragged me towards the sea. By the time it was spent, I was near the water's edge, looking up at the next huge incoming wave--another wall of water charging in from the ocean and straight at me with malicious intent: to engulf me, seize me, pull me out, in and under.
I clambered to my feet and rushed back up the beach just barely ahead of the crest. I'd never seen such huge waves before; they were like the ones depicted in the Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai.
The incoming surge reached its high point, hesitated for a moment or two, and then began its return to the ocean. The torrent was again forming in the hollow, and I was about to run back and repeat the whole breathtaking encounter, when something jabbed me in the leg.
It was Cuauhtémoc. He flapped his wings, squawking and scolding me at the top of his voice, which was nearly drowned out by the din of the sea.
"You don't want me to do that again, do you?" I said. The bird himself had come dangerously close to the edge of the surge in order to express his warning.
I gathered him up in my arms and climbed to a higher place at the top of the hollow where I stood and watched the surf in relative safety. But even up to here there came an extra-huge wave which washed up and nearly reached my feet before receding. The bird was right, this ocean was not to be toyed with.
Cuauhtémoc and I walked back up towards the palm grove. My feet sank into the soft sand at each step and made me aware that the beach was much steeper and higher than I had thought. The upper part must have stood at least ten meters above the surf.
I found MacClayne sitting with a comfortable log for a backrest, soaking up the tropical sun and reading Shackleton's Voyage to Antarctica. There was something endearingly perverse about MacClayne; I recalled that night in Tancítaro when the cold rain turned to snow and we were reading Sunny Days in the Tropics.
The roar of the ocean made conversation difficult. We had some more of the coconut, and I gave the bird some of the oats I'd brought along for him. He then went to scratch among the rocks. MacClayne returned to his book.
Out on the water where the sky met the sea, a cargo ship was cruising down the coast. I watched it for a while, then took out my journal and started bringing it up to date. Events of the last couple of days were still fresh in my mind, and the details came back to me as I wrote, but it was my encounters with Major Benson which remained the most vivid. Those disturbing interviews seemed like memories of things that had actually happened--not just something I'd dreamed in the night.
Verstehen Sie?--As I recorded those words in my notebook, they once again rang through my mind and I thought I glimpsed the major's shadow out of the corner of my eye. Cautiously, I looked up. Driftwood. It was the stump of a tree, nothing more.
Why did I keep dreaming this strange story? I wished Chayo were here so I could ask her. She seemed to understand such things.
The cargo ship was still out there on the horizon, far to the left of where I'd last seen it. It didn't seem to be moving, but I knew it had to be. I thought about Chayo as I idly watched the ship, following its progress as it slowly moved west. Eventually I returned to my journal. When I looked up again, the ship was gone.
I stood up and stretched my arms.
"Maybe we should move on?" I suggested to MacClayne.
"To where?"
"On down the coast."
"The road seemed to end at that creek last night." He said, speaking loudly. Both of us were practically shouting to be heard over the roar of the ocean.
"I think we need to go look again," I said. "My guess is that our road will continue on the other side of that arroyo. There's got to be a way to get through."
"If you want we could take a look at it," he said. "But if there's no road, I don't want to spend six weeks tramping through this jungle on some cow path."
We retraced our steps back along the path till we reached the road. There, the asphalt ended at the arroyo, but tire tracks went off into the dirt and down the embankment. It wasn't high, a meter or so; the bottom was flat and broad, about thirty meters across. In the middle of the arroyo was a disproportionately small creek which only days before must've been a raging torrent. Recent tire tracks continued on towards the opposite bank.
After fording the stream, which was only ankle deep, MacClayne had to put his shoes back on. He fumbled with his shoelaces, apparently quite irritated. I hoped it would make him less inclined to turn back if the road wasn't all he hoped for. But I was pretty sure we'd find a passable trail; by now several people had told me that pickups did make it through.
The rest of the way across was dry, and, on ascending the opposite bank, we found a continuation of the same pristine asphalt road we'd left behind.
"Fancy that!" MacClayne remarked, and we set off.
In the wake of all the negative aspersions about the alleged non-continuation of our road, I really hated to let him get by with a trivial comment like "fancy that," but the alternative would've been a non-stop battle of innuendo which would've done much to undermine the unity of our expedition. As co-leader of this project I felt obliged to rise above petty bickering.
After walking for a while, we got a short ride in the back of a battered old Ford pickup, then walked some more. Eventually we came to a turnoff where a dusty trail led off into the brush. There was nothing particularly remarkable to distinguish it from other trails that had branched off along the way, and we were about to continue on past when we saw a campesino with a burro. Out of curiosity I asked him where the trail went.
"Faro," the man replied.
"Did he say Faro?" MacClayne asked me.
Just to make sure, I asked the campesino again. And yes, we had both heard him right.
"How far is it?" I asked the fellow.
"A five minute walk."
We thanked him for the information, then stood there for a moment of awed silence. Faro was the destination on the bus we'd missed back in Tecomán and had later seen parked in La Placita.
"Shall we have a look?"
"Our journey to the fabled city would not be complete without it."
We set off down the dirt road, which was almost like a tunnel through the dense, thorny mesquite and acacia, and after some twenty minutes we emerged on a sandy beach which sparkled in the sunshine. Gigantic waves crashed violently, dissolving in white foam. But for all their beauty, these waves looked every bit as dangerous as the ones below our campsite of the previous night.
Off to our left, at the far end of the beach, a tall promontory jutted out into the ocean, and, at its end, high above the sea, stood a lighthouse. On seeing it, I recalled that's what Faro meant in Spanish--lighthouse. A semicircle of huge rocks extended out from the promontory to form a small protected cove. It was less than a kilometer away and looked like a place where we might be able to go swimming. At last!
MacClayne took off his shoes, and I my sandals. Strolling barefoot in the sand, we headed towards it. Along the way we passed several oversized rowboats which had been drawn high up on the beach. They were made of fiberglass and equipped with outboard motors. Fishing launches, no doubt. On this remote beach I would've expected to see dugout canoes.
There was also a row of wooden tables under sunshades of thatched palms. They reminded me of picnic tables, and the fishermen probably ate their lunches there, but today there were only a few people around. The place seemed practically deserted.
At length we reached the cove. Here, the water rose and fell gently in the protection of the megaliths. The bottom was sandy, and perhaps no more than a couple meters at its deepest part. For us it was perfect.
"This must be granite," said MacClayne, pausing to look at a lower part of the promontory which bounded the cove.
I studied the rock for some moments. "Actually it's diorite, and if I were really up on my igneous petrology I could give you a whole paragraph on it," I said with a grin. "But, yes, for practical purposes, it's granite."
"I'll go with the layman's term," he said. "I believe it's an igneous rock that forms somewhere under the earth's surface? What do you call it?"
"Plutonic."
"Yes, I remember now, it was after Pluto, god of the underworld," he said. "But why do we find it here?"
"It's been uplifted, and the overlying shales and other relatively soft sedimentary materials got eroded away, leaving this really hard stuff. The uplift is caused by a subducting plate. It's like when you slide one rug under another, you get a bulge. This coastal range is one of those bulges."
We got into the water and continued our conversation as we swam about. There were times like this when MacClayne took an interest in everything around him including geology, botany, folklore and you name it. At other times he didn't want to hear it.
I wondered if Cuauhtémoc would be disturbed to see me enter the water, as he had been earlier, but here it didn't seem to bother him, though he kept a close eye on us. To him it must've seemed strange to see us humans swimming like a couple of water birds. He perhaps thought we were chickens like him.
Half a dozen teen-agers arrived shortly after us. I figured they were from the nearby village. The boys swam in their underwear shorts; the girls entered the water almost fully dressed.
"Like fifty years ago," MacClayne remarked.
That was the way most people dressed to swim in the pools in the Stone Gardens too, except for Chayo of course. She'd worn a bikini, one she'd brought back from California. At times she seemed to delight in shocking people, and maybe that was why some people called her a witch. I smiled dreamily as I thought of her.
One of the ironies here was that while these women would have seemed incredibly prudish on any California beach, the boys could have been arrested for swimming in their underwear. Laws, morality and customs concerning decency are strange in the way they vary from country to country. MacClayne and I were of course swimming in our shorts, like everybody else around here.
The village where these people lived wasn't visible from the beach, but it apparently wasn't far away. After finishing our swim, we walked back to the tables under the thatched palm sunshades. Like the dining establishment in La Placita, they were built with charming simplicity.
We had it almost to ourselves except for three or four fellows at a table down at the other end. I guessed them to be fishermen taking a break from working on their nets and gear. They seemed to be eating a meal, and, on looking more closely we saw that at a table near them was a person who seemed to be running a mini-kiosk. So we went over and bought some tamales for our lunch, and washed it down with a couple of soft drinks.
It was about the only time I ever saw MacClayne drink soda pop, but today was different. We sat in the shade of the palm-leaf structure, admiring the sand, the sun, the foam and the tall coconut palms. The boom of the surf was just far enough away to create a pleasant background effect without drowning out our conversation.
"The waves make this seem like we're really on some tropical beach," I said.
"Like somewhere in the South Seas!"
Cuauhtémoc scratched around in the sand. The unlimited quantities of it on these beaches was a new experience for him, and he too seemed overwhelmed by the uniqueness of our surroundings.
At the upper edge of the beach grew a thicket of sticker bushes. Their foliage was a lush, inviting green that seemed to belie the array of vicious thorns. Above the thicket rose tall spindly coconut palms, all part of the tropical scene.
Off the shore stood isolated rocks, presenting a danger to approaching ships. "I think those must be what Spanish navigators used to call farallones," I said. "Maybe the word comes from faro, implying a need for lighthouses."
"The coasts of Scotland are strewn with rocks like that. We called them skerries."
"Skerries?" I'd seen the word, but never heard it used till now. I paused to take out my journal and note it down. When I looked up, MacClayne was also writing something, perhaps lines for an ode to his lifelong effort to escape the cold rain and fog of Scotland and find his way to the tropics where the sun always shone.
I finished my soda, then had a second and even a third. One was enough for MacClayne. He'd put his notebook away.
"I could see Robinson Crusoe walking down this beach," I said.
"Or maybe Ben Gunn."
I detected a sly grin and guessed that MacClayne was testing me to see if I remembered who old Ben Gunn was. "He could be here," I said. "But if he were, he might prefer to remain hidden in the bushes."
MacClayne nodded with apparent approval. "Yes, we might not see him."
"I loved Treasure Island as a teen-ager," I said. "I read it again last spring."
We recalled the sea stories we'd grown up on. I mentioned one and MacClayne added another; soon we had a reading list for a future midshipman:
Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Voyages of Sinbad, Two Years Before the Mast, The Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, The Sea Wolf, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. There seemed to be no end to the titles that popped into our minds.
MacClayne and I came from very different worlds. We were born oceans apart and also a full generation apart. But in our boyhoods we'd read many of the same books and dreamed the same dreams of faraway places. It had been a decade before I was even born that MacClayne went to sea, in 1941:
"So there I was," he recalled, "seventeen and very concerned that I was born too late for true adventure and that a huge amount of my life had already passed by. The lads in stories who ran away to sea as cabin boys were veterans of much voyaging by the time they reached my age. And me, only then setting forth. . . ."
What followed was five years in His Majesty's Royal Marines. Two ships were sunk from under him, one in the Mediterranean, and one at Normandy, but he rarely said anything about his war experiences, and he didn't talk about them now. Maybe it was too painful. Instead, he abruptly changed the subject and began to tell about movies he'd enjoyed decades ago.
He recalled an old melodrama, one so awful that he still remembered it with a smile. Then he stood up and delivered a scene, playing the part of the hero dying in the arms of his beloved--after having of course killed the villain. MacClayne laid it on thick. He should have been an actor.
I applauded, and, not to be outdone, Cuauhtémoc jumped upon the table, flapped his wings and crowed enthusiastically.
Then it was my turn on stage. I glanced around, saw the skerries out in the water, and the lighthouse high on the cliff overlooking the sea. I remembered a song about a lighthouse keeper and sang it loudly over the sand and sea.
"I've never heard you sing like that before. I didn't know you even could," said MacClayne. "There must be some potent stuff in those orange sodas you're drinking."
"It's the tropical sunshine," I said. "You don't suppose it's addictive, do you?"
"Oh it's absolutely addictive! I was hooked on it long ago, at first sight!" He grinned and glanced at the page he'd been writing.
"A poem?"
"I call it To the Beach," he said, and read it aloud:
To the beach
where I kicked off my shoes
threw down my shirt
ran like a wild man
to the ocean
and when the waves
were up to my knees
I threw my hands in the air
glared at the sky--took a great breath
and hollered:
"I am here!"
continued in Chapter 33
I sat there thinking about Major Benson, and remembered MacClayne verifying that there had indeed been an officer by that name.
I poked at the fire with a stick. The strange fact was that MacClayne's lost shipmates were haunting my dreams, and one of the officers had turned up to function as my inquisitor.
I glanced around. Cuauhtémoc was perched on a log nearby. I wanted to hold him in my arms, but no. Poor bird, let him sleep. It was a comfort just to see him there, and I returned to my thoughts.
Even back in Uruapan I'd had foreboding dreams about Apatzingán and the Valley of Infiernillo. Dreams in which I'd seen it as a cold and snowy Niflheim. But the bunker bar and the lost shipmates hadn't appeared in my dreams till MacClayne and I physically rode a bus down into the Valley and stayed that night in Buenavista. In a dream that night I went looking for MacClayne, and somehow crossed the bridge over the Gjallar River, and then descended into that drippy dungeon. That's where I first encountered the Royal Marines and found MacClayne, a lad of twenty, among them
It was almost a replay of a Norse myth: Balder dies, and his brother saddles up a horse and rides down into the cold valley of death in search of him. He crosses a bridge, and then arrives at a banquet hall which is a cold, miserable place. Niflheim. Balder is of course there, but he can't leave, and the brother is unable to bring him back.
There's nothing in the myth to suggest that the rescuer gets trapped there himself. Nevertheless, that's exactly what seemed to have happened to me in this recurring dream. The Marines were dead, they'd gone down with the ship that night off the coast of France. MacClayne wasn't dead, but some part of him was there, stuck in that hall of lost souls. And now some part of me also seemed to be stuck there.
MacClayne's ongoing failure to recognize me was disturbing. But of course he was a lad of twenty in those scenes; that was decades before we were to meet. He couldn't have known me. Did he wake up each morning wondering who that strange intruder might be? Me, that is--the one his shipmates so wrongly called a German and accused of being the torpedoman. My unexplained appearance must have puzzled him. Or maybe not. Perhaps the dream faded from his memory each morning when he awoke. He once told me that he never had dreams.
Anyway, whether he knew it or not, he seemed to be stuck in that hellish drinking hall, and that probably had something to do with his drinking. I tried to make sense of this, but by now my mind was tied up in knots.
A light among the palm trees caught my eye. As it approached I saw it was the shining cougar. The white light from his fur illuminated the trees as he passed near them, and shades of green and brown shone as though under an arc light. Cuauhtémoc flew to meet him, and, beak to nose, they exchanged greetings. Then the bird hopped onto the cat's back, and the feline strode up to me and licked my face with his rasp-like tongue. It felt like my skin was being scraped off, but I was glad to see him and I endured it as one endures the quirky predilections of an old friend. It had been months since his last appearance.
I put my arms around him and buried my face in his soft fur. It had a strong musty aroma which smelled pleasant to me. Then he lay down and curled himself around me like a warm blanket. The fearful feelings I'd been experiencing were gone, and so was the chill of the night. There was just the cat's contented purring in my ears, and I drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
This time I didn't wake up again till the morning sun was shining down through the palms. Cuauhtémoc was already up and around. So was MacClayne.
"¡Desayuno!" he called to me. "You want some breakfast?"
He'd found a couple of coconuts with juice and plenty of white meat. There was a thick outer husk to cut through, but inside that, they looked exactly like the ones you'd buy in a California supermarket. They tasted a lot better.
I sat there chewing bits of coconut, and soaking up the tropical atmosphere of this sunlit grove around me when my eye fell upon a shiny black twig at my side. It was nearly the length of my hand, and I was about to pick it up when I suddenly realized it was not a twig. Instantly, I jumped to my feet.
"What happened?" MacClayne was on his feet almost as quickly as I was.
"A scorpion," I said in a hushed voice and bent over to look more closely. It was dead.
"Here's another," said MacClayne.
As we looked around, we began to find others, and then still more. All of them dead.
"Maybe this," I said, after a moment of reflection, "is what Cuauhtémoc was doing last night when we saw him scratching and digging."
We looked at each other and at the bird, who was strutting about in his usual fashion. This was not the first time he'd saved me from a scorpion, and I had to admit that I should've remembered the danger when we chose this campsite which, with its abundance of decaying leaves and wood, presumably formed a favorite nesting ground for them. Chayo, as well as don Pablo and many others, had told me that repeatedly, and warned me to be careful. And I had been careful--around Uruapan that is. But it had somehow never occurred to me that scorpions might also inhabit this coastal lowland area. Thank goodness I had a chicken who knew what he was doing!
"How poisonous are these?" MacClayne asked.
"People have been known to die from the sting," I said. "Or at least that's what I'm told. Don Pablo was stung once. He survived, but he said it was a nasty sting, a lot worse than that of a wasp."
"Cuauhtémoc saved us," MacClayne said, looking at the bird with newfound reverence and respect. "Had it not been for him."
"What can I say to you?" I said to the bird. "You rescued the both of us."
The bird flapped his wings and crowed loudly.
"Cuauhtémoc," I said. "You should know that when being praised, it's good form to show modesty."
He crowed again, and I took him in my arms and gave him a hug.
"Let me give him a hug too," said MacClayne.
I passed him to MacClayne who held him affectionately, gratefully; it was one of the few times that MacClayne had held him.
Though slightly shaken by our discovery, the incident put us in tremendously good spirits. MacClayne was especially cheerful, and, as always, his geniality was infectious. I wished he could remain forever in a mood like this.
"Shall we have a look at the beach?" MacClayne said after we'd spent some time discussing the scorpions.
"Sure!" I said.
We squeezed through the fence onto a beach shingled with cobble-sized stones and strewn with driftwood. There was even the log of a giant tree, skinned of bark and smoothened by the waves--I wondered if it could've been washed up by the recent storm. But today there was hardly a breeze, and no whitecaps out on the water; from where we stood the ocean looked calm. The breakers crashed loudly below us, but we couldn't see them because huge dunes cut off our view of the lower part of the beach.
The cobbles and pebbles of the upper beach soon gave way to soft sand as we strolled down towards the water, making our way through small hollows between the dunes. These dunes were taller than ourselves, and when we emerged from between them and saw the surf, we were practically stepping in it.
"I just want to get my feet wet," MacClayne said, and, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, he approached the water, not appreciating the size of an incoming wave. Suddenly he was in water up to his waist, struggling to keep his footing as it swirled about him, first pushing him towards the beach, then reversing itself and trying to drag him out to sea.
Having concluded that this beach was not meant for wading, he went to sit on the upper part where he would presumably hang his trousers out to dry. I stayed on, but decided to be more wary.
I wanted to go swimming, but I wasn't sure if it was safe. Here on the lower beach, the dunes were perpendicular to the ocean with hollows between them where the surf traveled up and then receded. The wave that caught MacClayne had been relatively small; some were larger and rose to several meters, even washing over the tops of the tall dunes.
After the last large wave began to recede, I sat in a hollow. Water was still pouring down the flanks on both sides of me, and met in the low place where I sat. There it became a small but torrential stream which dragged me towards the sea. By the time it was spent, I was near the water's edge, looking up at the next huge incoming wave--another wall of water charging in from the ocean and straight at me with malicious intent: to engulf me, seize me, pull me out, in and under.
I clambered to my feet and rushed back up the beach just barely ahead of the crest. I'd never seen such huge waves before; they were like the ones depicted in the Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai.
The incoming surge reached its high point, hesitated for a moment or two, and then began its return to the ocean. The torrent was again forming in the hollow, and I was about to run back and repeat the whole breathtaking encounter, when something jabbed me in the leg.
It was Cuauhtémoc. He flapped his wings, squawking and scolding me at the top of his voice, which was nearly drowned out by the din of the sea.
"You don't want me to do that again, do you?" I said. The bird himself had come dangerously close to the edge of the surge in order to express his warning.
I gathered him up in my arms and climbed to a higher place at the top of the hollow where I stood and watched the surf in relative safety. But even up to here there came an extra-huge wave which washed up and nearly reached my feet before receding. The bird was right, this ocean was not to be toyed with.
Cuauhtémoc and I walked back up towards the palm grove. My feet sank into the soft sand at each step and made me aware that the beach was much steeper and higher than I had thought. The upper part must have stood at least ten meters above the surf.
I found MacClayne sitting with a comfortable log for a backrest, soaking up the tropical sun and reading Shackleton's Voyage to Antarctica. There was something endearingly perverse about MacClayne; I recalled that night in Tancítaro when the cold rain turned to snow and we were reading Sunny Days in the Tropics.
The roar of the ocean made conversation difficult. We had some more of the coconut, and I gave the bird some of the oats I'd brought along for him. He then went to scratch among the rocks. MacClayne returned to his book.
Out on the water where the sky met the sea, a cargo ship was cruising down the coast. I watched it for a while, then took out my journal and started bringing it up to date. Events of the last couple of days were still fresh in my mind, and the details came back to me as I wrote, but it was my encounters with Major Benson which remained the most vivid. Those disturbing interviews seemed like memories of things that had actually happened--not just something I'd dreamed in the night.
Verstehen Sie?--As I recorded those words in my notebook, they once again rang through my mind and I thought I glimpsed the major's shadow out of the corner of my eye. Cautiously, I looked up. Driftwood. It was the stump of a tree, nothing more.
Why did I keep dreaming this strange story? I wished Chayo were here so I could ask her. She seemed to understand such things.
The cargo ship was still out there on the horizon, far to the left of where I'd last seen it. It didn't seem to be moving, but I knew it had to be. I thought about Chayo as I idly watched the ship, following its progress as it slowly moved west. Eventually I returned to my journal. When I looked up again, the ship was gone.
I stood up and stretched my arms.
"Maybe we should move on?" I suggested to MacClayne.
"To where?"
"On down the coast."
"The road seemed to end at that creek last night." He said, speaking loudly. Both of us were practically shouting to be heard over the roar of the ocean.
"I think we need to go look again," I said. "My guess is that our road will continue on the other side of that arroyo. There's got to be a way to get through."
"If you want we could take a look at it," he said. "But if there's no road, I don't want to spend six weeks tramping through this jungle on some cow path."
We retraced our steps back along the path till we reached the road. There, the asphalt ended at the arroyo, but tire tracks went off into the dirt and down the embankment. It wasn't high, a meter or so; the bottom was flat and broad, about thirty meters across. In the middle of the arroyo was a disproportionately small creek which only days before must've been a raging torrent. Recent tire tracks continued on towards the opposite bank.
After fording the stream, which was only ankle deep, MacClayne had to put his shoes back on. He fumbled with his shoelaces, apparently quite irritated. I hoped it would make him less inclined to turn back if the road wasn't all he hoped for. But I was pretty sure we'd find a passable trail; by now several people had told me that pickups did make it through.
The rest of the way across was dry, and, on ascending the opposite bank, we found a continuation of the same pristine asphalt road we'd left behind.
"Fancy that!" MacClayne remarked, and we set off.
In the wake of all the negative aspersions about the alleged non-continuation of our road, I really hated to let him get by with a trivial comment like "fancy that," but the alternative would've been a non-stop battle of innuendo which would've done much to undermine the unity of our expedition. As co-leader of this project I felt obliged to rise above petty bickering.
After walking for a while, we got a short ride in the back of a battered old Ford pickup, then walked some more. Eventually we came to a turnoff where a dusty trail led off into the brush. There was nothing particularly remarkable to distinguish it from other trails that had branched off along the way, and we were about to continue on past when we saw a campesino with a burro. Out of curiosity I asked him where the trail went.
"Faro," the man replied.
"Did he say Faro?" MacClayne asked me.
Just to make sure, I asked the campesino again. And yes, we had both heard him right.
"How far is it?" I asked the fellow.
"A five minute walk."
We thanked him for the information, then stood there for a moment of awed silence. Faro was the destination on the bus we'd missed back in Tecomán and had later seen parked in La Placita.
"Shall we have a look?"
"Our journey to the fabled city would not be complete without it."
We set off down the dirt road, which was almost like a tunnel through the dense, thorny mesquite and acacia, and after some twenty minutes we emerged on a sandy beach which sparkled in the sunshine. Gigantic waves crashed violently, dissolving in white foam. But for all their beauty, these waves looked every bit as dangerous as the ones below our campsite of the previous night.
Off to our left, at the far end of the beach, a tall promontory jutted out into the ocean, and, at its end, high above the sea, stood a lighthouse. On seeing it, I recalled that's what Faro meant in Spanish--lighthouse. A semicircle of huge rocks extended out from the promontory to form a small protected cove. It was less than a kilometer away and looked like a place where we might be able to go swimming. At last!
MacClayne took off his shoes, and I my sandals. Strolling barefoot in the sand, we headed towards it. Along the way we passed several oversized rowboats which had been drawn high up on the beach. They were made of fiberglass and equipped with outboard motors. Fishing launches, no doubt. On this remote beach I would've expected to see dugout canoes.
There was also a row of wooden tables under sunshades of thatched palms. They reminded me of picnic tables, and the fishermen probably ate their lunches there, but today there were only a few people around. The place seemed practically deserted.
At length we reached the cove. Here, the water rose and fell gently in the protection of the megaliths. The bottom was sandy, and perhaps no more than a couple meters at its deepest part. For us it was perfect.
"This must be granite," said MacClayne, pausing to look at a lower part of the promontory which bounded the cove.
I studied the rock for some moments. "Actually it's diorite, and if I were really up on my igneous petrology I could give you a whole paragraph on it," I said with a grin. "But, yes, for practical purposes, it's granite."
"I'll go with the layman's term," he said. "I believe it's an igneous rock that forms somewhere under the earth's surface? What do you call it?"
"Plutonic."
"Yes, I remember now, it was after Pluto, god of the underworld," he said. "But why do we find it here?"
"It's been uplifted, and the overlying shales and other relatively soft sedimentary materials got eroded away, leaving this really hard stuff. The uplift is caused by a subducting plate. It's like when you slide one rug under another, you get a bulge. This coastal range is one of those bulges."
We got into the water and continued our conversation as we swam about. There were times like this when MacClayne took an interest in everything around him including geology, botany, folklore and you name it. At other times he didn't want to hear it.
I wondered if Cuauhtémoc would be disturbed to see me enter the water, as he had been earlier, but here it didn't seem to bother him, though he kept a close eye on us. To him it must've seemed strange to see us humans swimming like a couple of water birds. He perhaps thought we were chickens like him.
Half a dozen teen-agers arrived shortly after us. I figured they were from the nearby village. The boys swam in their underwear shorts; the girls entered the water almost fully dressed.
"Like fifty years ago," MacClayne remarked.
That was the way most people dressed to swim in the pools in the Stone Gardens too, except for Chayo of course. She'd worn a bikini, one she'd brought back from California. At times she seemed to delight in shocking people, and maybe that was why some people called her a witch. I smiled dreamily as I thought of her.
One of the ironies here was that while these women would have seemed incredibly prudish on any California beach, the boys could have been arrested for swimming in their underwear. Laws, morality and customs concerning decency are strange in the way they vary from country to country. MacClayne and I were of course swimming in our shorts, like everybody else around here.
The village where these people lived wasn't visible from the beach, but it apparently wasn't far away. After finishing our swim, we walked back to the tables under the thatched palm sunshades. Like the dining establishment in La Placita, they were built with charming simplicity.
We had it almost to ourselves except for three or four fellows at a table down at the other end. I guessed them to be fishermen taking a break from working on their nets and gear. They seemed to be eating a meal, and, on looking more closely we saw that at a table near them was a person who seemed to be running a mini-kiosk. So we went over and bought some tamales for our lunch, and washed it down with a couple of soft drinks.
It was about the only time I ever saw MacClayne drink soda pop, but today was different. We sat in the shade of the palm-leaf structure, admiring the sand, the sun, the foam and the tall coconut palms. The boom of the surf was just far enough away to create a pleasant background effect without drowning out our conversation.
"The waves make this seem like we're really on some tropical beach," I said.
"Like somewhere in the South Seas!"
Cuauhtémoc scratched around in the sand. The unlimited quantities of it on these beaches was a new experience for him, and he too seemed overwhelmed by the uniqueness of our surroundings.
At the upper edge of the beach grew a thicket of sticker bushes. Their foliage was a lush, inviting green that seemed to belie the array of vicious thorns. Above the thicket rose tall spindly coconut palms, all part of the tropical scene.
Off the shore stood isolated rocks, presenting a danger to approaching ships. "I think those must be what Spanish navigators used to call farallones," I said. "Maybe the word comes from faro, implying a need for lighthouses."
"The coasts of Scotland are strewn with rocks like that. We called them skerries."
"Skerries?" I'd seen the word, but never heard it used till now. I paused to take out my journal and note it down. When I looked up, MacClayne was also writing something, perhaps lines for an ode to his lifelong effort to escape the cold rain and fog of Scotland and find his way to the tropics where the sun always shone.
I finished my soda, then had a second and even a third. One was enough for MacClayne. He'd put his notebook away.
"I could see Robinson Crusoe walking down this beach," I said.
"Or maybe Ben Gunn."
I detected a sly grin and guessed that MacClayne was testing me to see if I remembered who old Ben Gunn was. "He could be here," I said. "But if he were, he might prefer to remain hidden in the bushes."
MacClayne nodded with apparent approval. "Yes, we might not see him."
"I loved Treasure Island as a teen-ager," I said. "I read it again last spring."
We recalled the sea stories we'd grown up on. I mentioned one and MacClayne added another; soon we had a reading list for a future midshipman:
Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Voyages of Sinbad, Two Years Before the Mast, The Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, The Sea Wolf, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. There seemed to be no end to the titles that popped into our minds.
MacClayne and I came from very different worlds. We were born oceans apart and also a full generation apart. But in our boyhoods we'd read many of the same books and dreamed the same dreams of faraway places. It had been a decade before I was even born that MacClayne went to sea, in 1941:
"So there I was," he recalled, "seventeen and very concerned that I was born too late for true adventure and that a huge amount of my life had already passed by. The lads in stories who ran away to sea as cabin boys were veterans of much voyaging by the time they reached my age. And me, only then setting forth. . . ."
What followed was five years in His Majesty's Royal Marines. Two ships were sunk from under him, one in the Mediterranean, and one at Normandy, but he rarely said anything about his war experiences, and he didn't talk about them now. Maybe it was too painful. Instead, he abruptly changed the subject and began to tell about movies he'd enjoyed decades ago.
He recalled an old melodrama, one so awful that he still remembered it with a smile. Then he stood up and delivered a scene, playing the part of the hero dying in the arms of his beloved--after having of course killed the villain. MacClayne laid it on thick. He should have been an actor.
I applauded, and, not to be outdone, Cuauhtémoc jumped upon the table, flapped his wings and crowed enthusiastically.
Then it was my turn on stage. I glanced around, saw the skerries out in the water, and the lighthouse high on the cliff overlooking the sea. I remembered a song about a lighthouse keeper and sang it loudly over the sand and sea.
"I've never heard you sing like that before. I didn't know you even could," said MacClayne. "There must be some potent stuff in those orange sodas you're drinking."
"It's the tropical sunshine," I said. "You don't suppose it's addictive, do you?"
"Oh it's absolutely addictive! I was hooked on it long ago, at first sight!" He grinned and glanced at the page he'd been writing.
"A poem?"
"I call it To the Beach," he said, and read it aloud:
To the beach
where I kicked off my shoes
threw down my shirt
ran like a wild man
to the ocean
and when the waves
were up to my knees
I threw my hands in the air
glared at the sky--took a great breath
and hollered:
"I am here!"
continued in Chapter 33
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