Hippolyte's Island by Barbara Hodgson

Author:Barbara Hodgson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452116297
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

Thirteen

AN INEVITABLE DEPARTURE WAS DELAYED; the first time for a spell of brilliant weather too miraculous to waste on the open seas; the second due to northwesterlies at force 6, foolhardy and futile to attempt; and a third and final time, because of the last-minute fear that some corner lay unmapped or some plant remained unsampled. Then there were no more excuses, and he had to depart.

Hippolyte, a man who dispensed sentimentality grudgingly, if at all, wept the day he finally left the islands that bore his footprints—and his alone, now that others from long ago had been washed away—the islands that had satisfied his desire to find the unfindable.

The boat was loaded. The temporary camp, the emergency stashes of food and water cached here and there, had been retrieved. His traces had been obliterated. He could think of a hundred reasons to stay, but none, indeed the sum total of them all, could not match the one good reason to leave: the deterioration of the weather. He’d been noting with dismay not only the falling temperatures and the increasingly consistent strong winds but also the corresponding and rapid drop in hours of daylight. Darkness was closing in, squeezing dawn and dusk together at a rate of four to five minutes a day.

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