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"Nothing like the feel of terra firma to rejuvenate one's soul."
Pitt sat down and rested, too tired to dance for joy at being off the water. He slowly rose to his knees before standing up. For a few moments he had to hold onto the ground to steady himself. The motion of nearly two weeks bobbing about in a small boat had affected his balance. The world spun, and the entire island rocked as if it floated on the sea. Maeve immediately sat back down, while Giordino planted both feet firmly on the rock and clutched a nearby tree with thick foliage. After a few minutes, Pitt rose shakily to his feet and made a few faltering steps. Not having walked since the abduction in Wellington, he found his legs and ankles were unfeeling and stiff. Only after he'd staggered about twenty meters and back did his joints begin to loosen and operate as they should.
They hauled the boat farther onto the rocks and rested for a few hours before dining on their dried fish, washed down by rainwater they found standing in several concave impressions in the rock. Their energies restored, they began to survey the island. There was precious little to see. The whole island and its neighbor across the channel had the appearance of solid piles of lava rock that had exploded from the ocean floor, building over the eons until reaching the surface before being eroded into low mounds. If the water had been fully transparent and the islands viewed down to their base on the seafloor
, they might have been compared to the great dramatic spires of Monument Valley, Arizona, rising like island, in a desert sea.
Giordino paced off the width from shore to shore and announced that their refuge was only 130
meters across, The highest point was a flattened plateau no more than 10 meters in height. The landmass curved into a tear shape that stretched north and south, with the windward arc facing the west. From rounded end to spiked point, the length was no more than a kilometer. Surrounded by natural seawalls that defied the swells, the island had the appearance of a fortress under constant attack.
A short distance away, they discovered the shattered remains of a boat that lay high and dry in a small inlet that was carved out of the rock by the sea, evidently driven there by large storm waves. She was a fair-sized sailboat, rolled over on her port side, half her hull and keel torn away from an obvious collision with rocks. She must have been a pretty boat at one time, Pitt imagined, Her upperworks had been painted light blue with orange undersides. Though the masts were gone, the deckhouse looked undamaged and intact. The three of them approached and studied it before peering inside.
"A grand, seaworthy little boat," observed Pitt, "about twelve meters, well built, with a teak hull."
"A Bermuda ketch," said Maeve, running her hands over the worn and sunbleached teak planking. "A fellow student at the marine lab on Saint Croix had one. We used to island-hop with it. She sailed remarkably well."
Giordino stared at the paint and caulking on the hull appraisingly. "Been here twenty, maybe thirty years, judging by her condition."
"I hope whoever became marooned on this desolate spot was rescued," Maeve said quietly.
Pitt swept a hand around the barrenness. "Certainly no sane sailor would go out of his way to visit here."
Maeve's eyes brightened, and she snapped her fingers as if something deep in her memory had surfaced. "They're called the Tits."
Pitt and Giordino glanced at each other as if not believing what they had heard. "You did say `tits'?"
Giordino inquired.
"An old Australian tale about a pair of islands that look like a woman's breasts. They're said to disappear and reappear, like Brigadoon."
"I hate to be a debunker of Down Under myths," said Pitt facetiously, "but this rock pile hasn't gone anywhere for the last million years."
"They're not shaped like any mammary glands I've ever seen," muttered Giordino.
She gave both men a gouty look. "I only know what I heard, about a pair of legendary islands south of the Tasman Sea."
Hoisted by Giordino, Pitt climbed aboard the canted hull and crawled through the hatch into the deckhouse. "She's been stripped clean," he called out from the inside. "Everything that wasn't screwed down has been removed. Check the transom and see if she has a name."
Maeve walked around to the stern and stared up at the faded letters that were barely readable.
"Dancing Dorothy. Her name was Dancing Dorothy."
Pitt climbed down from the yacht's cockpit. "A search is in order to locate the supplies taken from the boat. The crew may have left behind articles we can put to use."
Resuming their exploration, it took little more than half an hour to skirt the entire coast of the tear-shaped little island. Then they worked their way inland. They separated and strung out in a loose line to cover more territory. Maeve was the first to spot an axe half buried in the rotting trunk of a grotesquely shaped tree.
Giordino pulled it loose and held it up. "This should come in handy."
"Odd-looking tree," said Pitt, eyeing its trunk. "I wonder what it's called."
"Tasmanian myrtle," Maeve clarified. "Actually, it's a species of false beech. They can grow as high as sixty meters, but there isn't enough sandy loam here to support their root system, so all the trees we see on the island look like they've been dwarfed."
They continued to search around carefully. A few minutes later Pitt stumbled onto a small ravine that opened onto a flat ledge on the lee side of the island. Lodged in one side of a rock wall, he spied the head of a brass gaff for landing fish. A few meters beyond, they came to a jumbled stack of logs in the form of a hut, with a boat's mast standing beside it. The structure was about three meters wide by four meters long. The roof of logs intermixed with branches was undamaged by the elements. The unknown builder had raised a sound dwelling.
Outside the hut was a wealth of abandoned supplies and equipment. A battery and the corroded remains of a radio-telephone, a direction-finding set, a wireless receiver for obtaining weather bulletins and time signals for rating a chronometer, a pile of rusty food cans that had been opened and emptied, an intact teakwood dingy equipped with a small outboard motor and miscellaneous nautical hardware, dishes and eating utensils, a few pots and pans, a propane stove and other various and sundry items from the wrecked boat. Strewn around the stove, still discernible, were bones of fish.
"The former tenants left a messy campground," said Giordino, kneeling to examine a small gas-driven generator for charging the boat's batteries, which had operated the electronic navigational instruments and radio equipment scattered about the campsite.
