Free Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes Page A

the contagion of his anger swept her; and she was happy to be permitted a display of frustration.
    “They’re frightened fools, Professor Beazley. Not a single doctor in eighteen years has been able to explain what happened to Allie. Over twenty so-called professionals consulted, and none of them could say if she began this way; if she was injured in birth. The doctors can’t move one foot toward identifying the source of such differences, and so what do they want? They want all those different people to disappear, because their existence reminds the doctors of their own incompetence.”
    “It is a case of Britain’s sense of nationhood gone too far. This focus on the good of the political unit rather than the good of the individual. It’s an appalling feature of our culture. Among the Hoonai and the Mugundi of East Africa, those born with impediments or unusual features are seen as children of the gods given to humans to look after.”
    “Perhaps I should take Allie to East Africa.”
    “Don’t worry, Miss Pendleton. We won’t let anything happen to Alice.”
    Yes, Elsa thinks, even then he said “we.”
We won’t let anything happen
. . . Before he had proposed, as though anticipating Alice would be his concern. And how coldly she had behaved. Could she have known he would help her out of the very situation that made her act with such detachment?
    When he had spoken of this journey to the South Pacific, he spoke of Alice’s protection, of the safety of foreign shores. “Elsa, both you and your father have always made certain that Alice was cared for by the people who love her. This voyage—well, it most certainly won’t resemble England—but it will be with her family, with the people who care for her. It will be good for her.
Desideratum
. No risk of horrid legislation taking her from you, from us.”
    He was right.
    Only Elsa hopes the people of Easter Island are as forgiving as the Hoonai and the Mugundi.

    Evenings, they work in the ship’s lounge.
    “Before we even arrive we shall be experts,” says Edward, seated on the edge of a velvet sofa, sorting papers. He has boxes of correspondence from Royal Geographic Society members. Others, reading of the expedition in the papers, have written to offer services; thirty-two steward applications alone clutter his pile. Geologists have requested rock specimens from each port of call. Some correspondents have provided theories—
I must inform you, Professor Beazley, that your mystery island is part of the lost continent of Lemuria (see enclosed map), of which I am an original inhabitant;
others, warnings—“
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. And all the flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast and of every creeping thing, that creepeth upon the earth and every man.”
You venture thousands of miles when the answer to your “mystery” is right there in the Lord’s Scripture? Do not incite His wrath!
    Separating the letters of immediate use has fallen to Elsa. But it is like searching for a clover in a field of grass; theories and warnings obscure each relevant fact. Yet she soon finds herself reading on even after she has extracted the data.
I have always wanted to travel myself. I once dreamed of an island in the Pacific. My son, taken last year by the consumption, wanted to be an archaeologist.
This glimpse into lives she will never encounter—it is just one more door of novelty the expedition opens. So leisurely, to faint tango staccatos drifting from the ballroom below, she compiles a list of Polynesian phrases.
Hello, peace, horse, food, freshwater
—in Tahitian, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Tongan. She also details the island’s climate, its average rainfall and temperatures. Domestic plants and animals get their own list. And from this data her mind begins to form a picture of their mysterious destination: grassy slopes,