Kate reached out the window and let her fingertips skim along the side of the water-tunnel. A big blue blunt-headed fish a yard long floated past, nibbling at rocks, trailing a cloud of smaller fish that clung close to its sides. The Silver Arrow steamed along deeper and deeper under the sea till the water around them was almost black and the air got cold enough that Kate put on her heavy coat.
The last thing they saw before the light faded completely was the enormous shadowy bulk of a sperm whale gliding slowly and majestically overhead like a blimp. Then the water was as black as night, broken only by the starry lights of a few phosphorescent fish.
At some point—Kate couldn’t have said exactly when—the tracks ran down under the ocean floor itself, and the blackness became the blackness of an underground tunnel. She turned on the lights. The tunnel lasted for a good half hour before they came back up into dark water, then deep blue, then green, brighter and brighter till finally they burst out into a world of hot sunlight and white sand. It was so beautiful that Kate throttled down and hit the brakes even though they weren’t at a station.
They were on a low sandy island in the middle of a glittering blue sea.
Most of Kate’s experiences of beaches hadn’t been at the ocean; they’d been at Lake Michigan, and they’d been a bit of a letdown. To save money, her family usually went in the off-season, when it wasn’t really warm enough, and the beaches were narrow and gray and not very clean.
This was nothing like that. The sand here was fine and soft as flour and almost as white. It stretched up into a graceful, grassy-topped dune.
“This is practically my natural habitat!” the fishing cat said, and she bounded off into the water. The heron strode after her, and they proceeded to have a fishing contest, though it was hard to tell who won because they both kept eating their fish.
The mamba sunned himself in the sand.
“You warm-blooded creatures can have no idea what this feels like,” he said. “Literally none. It’s what ice must feel like when it’s melting.”
“I think I have some idea,” Kate said. “I was a tree for while.”
Kate and Tom took off their shoes and raced each other to the top of the dune, kicking up sprays of sand as they ran. From there they could see almost the whole island: an oval of white sand all by itself in the middle of an infinite ocean. We must be the only people around for hundreds of miles, Kate thought.
They fetched food from a dining car and borrowed a blanket from the sleeper car and had a picnic.