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20.
Alex began to think of the cliff top as his sky island or fortress.
The cliff top was a rectangle about 500 feet on its long sides (including the edge overlooking the sea) and 200 feet across the beaches it overlooked on the two shorter sides. Though it was a tower tilting away from a ridge of hills, its top gently sloped down on its seaward side, lower by about 50 feet from its landward side.
From the movement of the sun (shining from the south, and apparently moving east to west, Alex figured out that the sea was south of him.
The north side overlooked the rift below, full of trees and bushes and ferns, in which the rippers prowled. Beyond that lay a wall of brownish-red cliffs topped by the same sparse woods as his tower. He could plainly see the hole in the top of the cave system, and the overturned tree whose torn roots waved at the sky. As he climbed up here to explore, he spied the fearful face of a ripper looking hungrily his way. Alex and the animal looked at each other across a distance of less than 100 feet, and he could read the merciless calculations in its bright eyes and hear the flick of its tail amid sun-dappled ferns.
To the east and west was a sheer drop of about 300 feet into impenetrable deciduous forest and sandy beach front.
There was a high spot on his island in the sky, about fifty feet higher than the rest of the little plateau. Up here were one or two trees and a mass of lush ferns populated by butterflies. From here, he could see over the ridge opposite. He looked past the hole in the ground where the tree lay, exposing the caves below. He looked beyond the ridge and saw a valley about a mile wide basking in late sunshine. He could see another wall of reddish cliffs glowing beyond. As best he could tell, the cliffs enclosed an alluvial plain, for he saw a waterfall pouring from the hills in a mass of foam, throwing out a small rainbow. He cupped his hands and stared through them, wishing he had binoculars (another memory from Alex). Through dense forest, he spied a series of small cascades dropping down the stepped sides of a 1,000-foot high mountain. He could only catch glimpses of silvery water from his vantage point, but to the southwest he saw evidence of a strong current emptying into the ocean, so he guessed that a river flowed through the valley.
There was no source of fresh running water. The largest four or so boulders were weathered on top, however, and he found small puddles of condensed water there. Alex Kirk had been a Boy Scout, and he immediately began to think of schemes for building a solar still. With no materials like plastic or metal, however, that might prove very difficult.
The central part of his cliff was a slope covered with grass and flowers—in some areas high grass full of dandelions, their wispy gray balls shedding flyers into the fresh wind. In some areas, small carpets of yellow and red flowers covered the ground. There were a few large boulders, but other than that, there were no surprises in the topography. Birds and butterflies abounded. There was a clean, healthy silence except for the rustle of wind in his ears.
Climbing down, he was reasonably satisfied that it would be hard, if not impossible, for the rippers to climb up the sheer cliff to get him, though he realized they were resourceful and relentless, and all it would take was one success on their part to spell the end of him. Every waking moment, every sleeping nightmare, he would live in constant fear that he was about to have his neck torn open in an attack from behind. Trembling and feeling puny, he picked up a stout stick as he crossed back to the ocean-side of his fortress.
He stood overlooking a spectacular vista of the sea that stretched to the horizon. There was a beach about 250 feet below—flat, just as he remembered beaches from Alex’s time. To the east, flat beach sand gave way to dark marshy soil, and in the marshes he saw grazing cattle sort of like small buffalo—they had very small manes and not the huge hump that buffalo and bison had had. He stared as hard as he could, and determined that some had udders, which meant milk. But they were a long way off, and he would probably die getting there, for his friends the rippers were never far away.
On rocks offshore, he saw gatherings of sea birds and otters sunning themselves, and he envied the otters their shiny coats and fat sides. They appeared well-provisioned, while his stomach continuously rumbled with fear and hunger. He watched an otter slid down into the sea with a splash and emerge a minute later with a fish. Clearly, there was fishing to be done—and somehow he must overcome his dread of the rippers to get at that rich source of food.
He had not yet discovered a single shred of evidence that mankind had ever existed. He stood in the afternoon heat, which bathed him with a delightful pinkish-yellow glow, and he leaned on a long, sturdy stick, surveying the world. He remembered that book—a childhood favorite of Alex Kirk—titled Robinson Crusoe. He remembered a picture of Robinson: a bearded man dressed in furs, with a parrot on his shoulder, a pipe in his mouth, and a musket over his shoulder. He had several muzzle-loading pistols in his belt, and a coconut canteen of water. How silly that all seemed, he thought, reflecting on his own situation. Robinson Crusoe had had a shipwreck to which he swam and brought back raftsful of gunpowder, food, supplies, even a Bible, until the ship was washed away in another storm.
Alex had no ship, no gunpowder, nothing. He would have given anything to have an axe or a knife.
He must make everything from scratch, and hope to remain safe from the rippers long enough to succeed.
There was also the lurking question: why bother? If there were no other humans in this world, then why not just throw himself off the cliff, or let the rippers finish him off? Surely he was the loneliest human being who had ever lived, isolated in time eons after the last of his kind had perished, if they had ever existed. He suffered not only from fear and hunger. He suffered from a terrible, incurable loneliness. He had no hope of rescue, for there was nobody to rescue him. The last of his kind had died a million years ago—so his instincts told him, and he accepted their wisdom. If he could find a shred of evidence that the world in his head had ever existed, he’d be at least a slightly happier man—anything; some small artifact like a spoon, a piece of glass, a shred of paper, a fragment of a wall; anything at all. But there wasn’t even that.
He drank judiciously from his meager water supply. He had found several sheets of broken slate with suitably smooth faces, and stood them up on edge in the niche. During the day, warm moist air would drift in from over the sea. When it brushed against the cool slate, its temperature would drop, and the moisture in the air touching the slate would run off, dripping into the trough. This way, he might collect as much as a quart on a good day. Leaning in to carefully slurp a few mouthfuls without draining all of it at once, he smelled earth and watched spiders dancing around his head. Now he had a source of drinking water.
On his cliff there were several kinds of birds, ranging from those that fluttered in the tree tops to a kind of wild hen that strutted about. He are wild berries, and chewed small wads of wild wheat. He looked carefully for plants whose roots might be edible.
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