To be inside a miracle, to have it surround him from horizon to horizon, made him feel as if the floor of the world had opened under his feet. He couldn’t sleep more than a pinch. He was red-eyed and pale in the shaving mirror the next morning, and the razor trembled in his hand. He had to steady himself with a mixture of black coffee and flask whiskey before he lowered a launch from the davits, per Captain Davies’ orders, and steered a party of nervous seamen toward the pebbly beach of what had once been Great Island. A wind was rising, the water was choppy, and rain clouds came raggedly from the north. Chill, nasty weather.

Captain Davies wanted to know whether it might be practical to bring passengers ashore if the necessity arose. Buckley had doubted it to begin with; today he doubted it more than ever. He helped secure the launch above the tide, then walked a few paces up the margin of the island, his feet wet, his topcoat, hair, and moustache rimed with saltwater spray. Five grim bearded White Line sailors trudged up the gravel behind him, all speechless. This might be the place where the port of Queenstown had once stood; but Buckley felt uncomfortably like Columbus or Pizarro, alone on a new continent, the forest primeval looming before him with all its immensity and lure and threat. He called halt well before he reached the trees.

The sort-of trees. Buckley called them trees in the privacy of his mind. But it had been obvious even from the bridge of the Oregon that they were like no trees he had ever imagined, enormous blue or rust-red stalks from which needles arose in dense, bushy clusters.