The Darwin Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

flesh. He moved about the rocks with the graceless tread of a heavyset man. In the evening he liked nothing better than sitting around the fire after dinner, talking. Hugh, looking at Beth, wondered what she was thinking. At night, alone in his tent, he began masturbating again and took it as a sign of returning strength. Once, getting up in the dark to take a piss, he looked over and saw that she was in Nigel’s tent. A kerosene lantern threw their shadows onto the canvas; he saw an outline of their movements, an arm raising up, and heard a murmur of voices, and he quickly turned away.
    Nigel was getting on his nerves, but when it got to be too much Hugh would drift away and head for the north rim. There was refuge and solitude—the end of the earth, as he imagined it. He had discovered the spot four months before while trying to catch one of the elusive finches; it had led him on a chase between scraggy bushes and withered cacti that ended, between two large boulders, at the head of a natural trail down the cliff. By carefully negotiating footholds and handholds, he had found it possible to descend, and after some thirty feet, he had reached a rocky ledge about two yards wide. It overlooked a sheer drop; far below the ocean threw itself against the rocks, sending up fountains of sea spray.
    Beth had brought a stash of books and she chose one for him—a novel by W. G. Sebald. He took it with him to the ledge during the long afternoon hours when it was too hot to do any work. If there was a breeze, he could catch it there. At times he felt almost peaceful, reading and thinking, looking up every so often at the expanse of water and the way the clouds threw their shadows down on it, immense shifting pools of gray-green, deep blue, and black.
    On the morning of the first day of the third week, Beth asked Hugh if he would take her to his “hideaway.”
    Yes, he replied—a little too quickly, he thought a moment later. He was not sure he wanted to share it.
    “But—how did you find out about it?” he asked.
    “It’s a small island,” she responded. “No secrets here.”
    “Don’t be so sure.”
    For the remainder of the morning they worked side by side, taking a census of seeds. She had marked out a square yard of dirt with string  stretched around pegs and was sifting through it with a strainer, identifying the seeds by holding them up to a manual and then laying them out on a white cloth. Hugh worked on a plot nearby. For the most part they were silent—like an old married couple, he mused, puttering around in the backyard garden. The sun was pressing down, a piston of heat that slicked his torso with sweat. When he scratched his side with his thumb, it left a smudge of wet dirt. Beth stood up and stretched, then crouched down again, squatting with her back to him. The top lip of her shorts hung away and he could see sweat running toward the cleavage of her backside. He heard the blood ticking in his head under the hot sun.
    After lunch, they set out. Nigel remained in his tent, cleaning it. He had rigged up a small fan that ran on batteries and had the radio tuned to the BBC, which blared out news—about terrorism, politics, AIDS in Africa—that seemed from another world.
    Gulls flew overhead, cruising the thermals, but otherwise nothing moved in the stillness of the afternoon. They passed the boulders and came to the cliff, and as he started down, hugging the rock face, she stood above with her hands on her hips and watched him closely to see where he was putting his feet and hands. Then she came down, five feet directly above him, using the same footholds and handholds. It took a good five minutes to reach the ledge—he hadn’t realized before how arduous the climb was.
    Once there, she sat beside him against the rock, brushed her hair off her forehead, and smiled.
    “I was beginning to have second thoughts up there,” she said. He knew she didn’t mean it.
    She leaned forward to peer down at the sheer