Only a sound. A low wail or cry that seemed to follow them throughout an entire afternoon.
When they first heard it, it came from the underbrush beyond the dunes. They thought that perhaps it was an animal in pain. Or a small child in some horrible anguish, an agony that went beyond a child's tears.
In a very real sense, it was terrifying.
So the Jensens raced beyond the dunes into the underbrush, thrashing at the tangled foliage to find the source of the dreadful, frightening cry.
They had found nothing.
The animal or the child, or whatever it was, had fled.
Shortly thereafter - late in the same afternoon - James Ferguson came running down to the beach, his face an expression of bewildered panic. He had been tracing a giant mollusk fern to its root source; the trek had taken him up into a rocky precipice above the shore. He had been in the centre of the overhanging vines and maccafats when a vibration - at first a vibration - caused his whole body to tremble. There followed a wild, piercing screech, both high-pitched yet full, that pained his ears beyond - he said -endurance.
He had gripped the vines to keep from plummeting off the precipice.
Terrified, he had scrambled down hysterically to firmer ground and raced back to the others.
James had not been more than a few hundred yards away.
Yet none but he had heard the terrible thing.
Whitehall had another version of the madness. The black scholar had been walking along the shoreline, half sand, half forest, of Bengal Bay. It was an aimless morning constitutional; he had no destination other than the point, perhaps.
About a mile east of the motel's beach, he rested briefly on a large rock overlooking the water. He heard a noise from behind, and so he turned, expecting to see a bird or a mongoose fluttering or scampering in the woods.
There was nothing.
He turned back to the lapping water beneath him, when suddenly there was an explosion of sound - sustained, hollowlike, a dissonant cacophony of wind.
And then it stopped.
Whitehall had gripped the rock and stared into the forest. At nothing.
Aware only that he was afflicted with a terrible pain in his temples.
But Charles was a scholar, and a scholar was a sceptic. He had concluded that, somewhere in the forest, an enormous unseen tree had collapsed from the natural weight of ages. In its death fall, the tons of ripping, scraping wood-against-wood within the huge trunk had caused the phenomenon.
And none was convinced.
As Whitehall told his story, McAuliff watched him. He did not think Charles believed it himself.
Things not explicable had occurred, and they were all - if nothing else - scientists of the physical. The explainable.
Perhaps they all took comfort in Whitehall's theory of sonics. Alexander thought, so; they could not dwell on it. There was work to do.
Divided objectives.
Alison thought she had found something, and with Floyd's and Lawrence's help she made a series of deep bores arcing the beaches and coral jetties. Her samplings showed that there were strata of soft lignite interspersed throughout the limestone beds on the ocean floor. Geologically it was easily explained: Hundreds of thousands of years ago, volcanic disturbances swallowed whole land masses of wood and pulp. Regardless of explanations, however, if there were plans to sink pilings for piers or even extended docks, the construction firms were going to have to add to their base supports.
Alison's concentrations were a relief to McAuliff. She was absorbed, and so complained less about his restrictions, and, more important, he was able to observe Floyd and Lawrence as they went about the business of watching over her. The two blacks were extremely thorough. And gracefully subtle. Whenever Alison wandered along the beach or up into the shore grass, one or both had her flanked or preceded or followed. They were like stalking panthers prepared to spring, yet they did not in their tracking call attention to themselves. They seemed to become natural appendages, always carrying something - binoculars, sampling boxes, clipboards... whatever was handy - to divert any zeroing in on their real function.
And during the nights, McAuliff found a protective bonus he had neither asked for nor expected: Floyd and Lawrence alternated patrols around the lawns and in the corridors of the Bengal Court motel. Alex discovered this on the night of the eighth day, when he got up at four in the morning to get himself a plastic bucket of ice from the machine down the hall. He wanted ice