15

The mountain path rose gently for about six hundred feet, then took off—incredibly steep with hairpin bends and sheer drops on the outside. But the reward was living nature. Slowly the steep slopes beside them became green with ferns, cedar, gorse. It spread upward. The greenery thickened around them until they were beneath a canopy of overhanging trees.

“Shade,” Thomas said. “When did you last feel that? Shade from a tree. You feel the climate start to change?” The air had become sweeter, cool and moist. Fleshy leaves dangled clusters of red flowers like miniature chandeliers, others like bright purple bells. “This is one of the most ambitious experiments on earth.”

The trees around them were eucalyptus, with pine in the distance and thick tangles of blackberries and raspberries lower down the slopes. There didn’t seem to be any logic to it, as if a collection had spilled and plants grew up randomly. Pairs of small blue butterflies appeared and disappeared.

“You know Darwin came here? It was part of his world tour. He said it was one of the most desolate places he’d seen. At that time there was nothing growing whatsoever. But he went back home and talked to his friend, Joseph Hooker, from the Royal Botanic Gardens. They thought if you could kickstart some foliage up here it might trap the moisture from the winds, let it drip down to ground level. Then you had the beginnings of something; a water supply at least. So they shipped plants from Argentina, Europe, South Africa: eucalyptus, bamboo, banana trees, scotch pines. And it worked. The water dripped down. You got soil, you got more plants; life began. You’re in the world’s largest artificial cloud farm.”

“Incredible.”

“People come here to see about terraforming other planets. If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a nightmare from an ecological point of view. It looks like paradise, right, but you scratch the surface and there’s none of the interrelationships you’d expect in a real forest. Meanwhile all of the species that were originally here are vanishing. Turns out it wasn’t desolate at all—it was just fine.”

They passed a gate set into moss-covered stone walls with an older building beyond it. Kane could just make out the crest of the Royal Marines engraved above the entrance. It stood high above a hillside with great clumps of bananas and bulbous mangoes ripening in the sun. Green Mountain, Kane remembered, was the legacy of the Marines as well. Military energy diverted into the creation of a farm and water supply.

“It would take thousands of years to get a fully functioning ecosystem here,” Thomas said. “At the moment it’s a completely unmanaged mess of invasive species. The whole island is.”

“Stunning, though.”