Free Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin

convoy was just leaving. The Sikh had been guarding when the message came over the radio on his jeep. It had come from the fort. They had heard by telephone from the Army Command in Haifa. The Army Command had heard by telephone from the Naval Command, which had heard from Suez, which had heard from Crete that another illegal immigrant ship was making its way to the Palestine coast, as straight as an arrow. Turning his back on the blue and white water, Keslake quickly dressed, holstered his pistol, and set out with dispatch for Haifa port.
11
    O NE MORNING the passengers of the
Lindos Transit
awoke to find themselves in a dreamlike new land. The sea was azure and alert as they had never seen before, the winds warm and fresh. To the south were the mountains of Crete in steadfast order, swept back into a line of peaks which billowed like cloud, so white were they, a blinding white. Many of the passengers had seen the Alps, the Urals, the Appenines, but never had they seen mountains rising from the sea. Preparations had been completed: Levy’s plan allowed several days of rest before the landing. The musicians were silent. Gulls wheeled and turned in smooth waves around the ship. The passengers were transfixed. They felt it possible that the gray mists of their lives, their dark cold histories, could be cured from them, lifted out of them by the sun. They looked at themselves—sunburnt faces, golden and dark hair, eyes green, blue, gray, brown, and black. Perhaps in such a place they could again make themselves whole. They had nothing. They were no one. Their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers, sons, daughters, and friends had been slaughtered like animals, their homes looted and burned. The things they had had on their bodies had been taken, their hair cut, their health stolen. But suddenly this landscape had arisen from the sea. Levy had deliberately turned his ship and taken it close to Crete. His charges fell in love with the abstract air above the mountains. They were resolute. A curtain of strength fell around them. No warship was going to take them to camps on Cyprus. They would die first—willingly.
    But matching the artistry of their determination was that of the British. From the depth of the encouraging mountains they peered at the
Lindos Transit
through a telescope twenty feet long. The great elevation and clear air enabled a strange little detachment of Welshmen to scan a hundred miles of sea. Levy had held his vessel within a few miles of the coast. The Welshmen were able to see the ships name, and the white banner with the blue Star of David flying briskly from the mainmast. All seemed normal. The passengers were still and passive as they always were. The ships were invariably in shambles, and so was the
Lindos Transit.
Panels were missing, pieces of metalwork hung over the sides, and the windows were a crazy orange. The sergeant in charge of the post casually reported to his headquarters that the ship was in poor condition, overloaded, making only about ten knots. There were, to the surprise of the observers, quite a few sheep on board, standing on deck crowded up near the forecastle. Paul Levy had intended to slaughter them, but a delegation from the passengers had insisted that they be left alive, even were it to mean less food. And so it was that these Italian sheep were destined for Palestine, and they passed the time dreaming of the olive groves and bare meadows where they had been born.
    Katrina Perlé slept on a hatch cover, the one on which the band had played in the more carefree days farther from the point of contact with the English. It was not the most comfortable place to sleep: the vibrations of the engines worked their way up hard and steady, and very often when the wind curled or backed, the stack exhaust settled amidships. A suffocating oily smell and taste in the air, familiar to mariners, was unwelcome to the twenty or so sleepers and sprawlers on the hatch cover, for its