"This is October," she replied. "This is the Aleutians.

This kind of weather doesn't happen in October in the Aleutians. From what I've heard and read, this kind of weather hardly ever happens here at all, during any time of the year. You should hear fishermen talking about the Aleutians when they're back home. The winds alone, the williwaws-they call this place the Cradle of the Winds, did you know that? All my life, listening to those guys' stories, I've thought this place was some kind of hellhole. But look at it," she said with a sweep of her hand, her tone caught between astonishment and awe. "Just look at it."

The islands strung out before them, as far as they could see, in a long, slow, southwesterly curve. The white peaks glowed against the deep blue of the sea, like a string of pearls draped across a shell of blue-tinted mother-of-pearl in a jeweler's window. Each island had its own volcano, rising steeply to tickle at the belly of the sky, and most of them were smoking or steaming or both. The cones were smoothed over with termination dust, which began near the summit of each mountain in a heavy layer of frozen icing, thinning out to a scant layer of vanilla frosting nearer the shoreline. The snow did not so much soften the islands' rugged outlines as it emphasized them. Beneath it, in dramatic shifts of shadow and sunlight, every island was a rough and tumble surge of magmatic rock, thrust violently up from the bowels of mother earth to plunge four and five and six thousand feet and more straight down into the sea.

In those topographical entrails could be read the history of the planet.

"It's like watching the earth being born," Kate said softly. "I've never seen anything like it."

Jack looked as satisfied as if he'd arranged for the Aleutians to be where they were, the day to be as clear as it was and for the Avilda to break down just when it did, all to get Kate in the air at this place, at this time, in his company. For the next two hours they forgot they were on their way to the scene of the mysterious disappearance of two ship's crewmen, and played at sight-seeing and rubber-necking in the best tradition of the American tourist. They flew low over a brief stretch of sand littered with the green glass balls Japanese fishermen use for net floats. They annoyed a herd of walrus sunbathing on another beach, until a bull in the crowd, a magnificent old beast with tusks two feet long, reared up and roared at them, daring them to come on down. Off the shore of still another island they found a stand of sea stacks, weird towers of rock sculpted by sand and wind and engulfed in flocks of gulls and cormorants, and as they banked for another look, Kate saw three bald eagles take wing. Hot springs steamed up from cupped valleys, the tall Aleutian rye grass clustering thick and still green around them.