TEN MEN WITHOUT A BOAT

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky.

Every morning the clear, hot, inimitable iridescent canopy of heaven belies those strange coloured clouds ever existed. But we ten men without a boat know they will return. To the residents, we are but ten strange two legged animals living on iguana, coconut and cormorant. We share their daily struggle to survive on a narrow sandy corridor between sea and treacherous sheer mountain side. Against which, along with other cowering crepuscular animals, we vainly shelter from the regular fierce, lashing afternoon storms.

All animals except the iguana and the tortoise seek shelter. One is bullet proof. The other goes fishing. And afterwards defiantly snorts water from its nostrils like a ruptured spigot. The iguana appear immune to threat. Indifferent, even haughty when, before its eyes we snatch one of its mates for our dinner. The tortoise we leave alone. Their wet, dribbling, pleading eyes play upon our superstitious seafaring conscience as they lumber away grunting, bulldozing their way through the low ground cover, startling finch and pheasant into flight.

Though shipwrecked, there is not much left for us ten to fear except fear itself. Yet there is much to admire on our archipelago sanctuary.

The animals amaze us, as they amazed South Pacific seafarers since Magellan first found his way around the Horn through the Straits, named in his honour. Birds and animals that led Charles Darwin to write his critically acclaimed, The Evolution of Species, abound in every bush and shrub. One of the many islands that have appeared and vanished before being charted, and probably our downfall, now gives succour to an incredible variety of sea life.

The Frigate Birds with puffed up chests and fishing skills perfected over time unrecorded seem to know when we are watching them. They fly close by us, showing off, before diving at speed into the waves after a fish. The soaring Wandering Albatross with the widest wingspan on earth and its smaller Pacific cousins are the harbingers of fair weather to sailors and we never tire of watching them. For that is about all we can do. Watch and wait for chance to appear.

From our highest vantage point we study schools of sharks, sting rays and the porpoise, circling, surfing, communicating and feeding. It’s from up high where we watch. Up where we’d built a fireman’s castle of sticks and logs. Flotsam dragged up from the rocks. Our beacon of hope when the opportunity comes. And we have to think it will. We have to stay positive. That vantage point is never left unmanned. A little fire kept glowing nearby ready to light up our own Stromboli when sails appear on the horizon. Ours could not be the only ship to venture west, seeking to shelter in the baths where the Ancient Greeks thought the western stars dwelt at dawn on their flat earth.

Despite our seaward vigil, we are always distracted at night by the lively heavenly light seemingly anxious to dance with the magnificent midnight purple clouds. The same rose-coloured light that masks our fear and keeps Charon’s ferry anchored on the Styx, though he’s never far from our conscious thought. For us superstitious sailors, the clouds are our adopted omen of goodwill. Whist they give us hope, they also serve as a warning not to harm the tortoise.

Our ship’s navigator is the only officer among us ten survivors – if we are to survive. He alone is concerned by the strange purple phenomena. He was on deck watching it when we founded. It was as if we were sailing with Odysseus and being called by Penelope back to Ithaca. Her twenty years of waiting fulfilled by our arrival. How we might have wished. Helmsman, crow’s-nest and dog-watch all distracted when under full sail and we slammed into treacherous hidden reefs veiled by the purple wall of death.

That ten survived is thanks to our navigator. Now we must wait. We watch each night and wonder what causes the dancing clouds. The eerie crepuscular light. Our navigator shared his theory with only two of us, a’ feared his theory would be the precursor of heightening unrest.

He pointed out the gaseous volcanic clouds from an open cauldron on one of the many islands, warning against the methane contain therein - the mother of all the Galapagos and father of our potential destruction.

We are standing by our unlit beacon marvelling at the dancing midnight clouds, dreaming our dreams of our own Penelope. Ignoring our fire.

A shout of ‘ship-ahoy’ awakens us. Two square-riggers’ purple painted sails appear.

Time to act. But our forgotten fire is dead.