Chapter 20: The Graveyard

She went to the seamount the following spring. Not to dive — she wasn't a diver, and the seamount was forty meters below the surface in any case, inaccessible without equipment she didn't have. She went on a research vessel that Joost had arranged, with a small submersible that could reach the seamount's peak and give her a visual. Katrin came. So did Ferreira, who had insisted and who Nadia had found impossible to argue with. The submersible's camera showed them the seamount's surface: flat volcanic rock, covered with marine growth, the shapes of what might once have been structures barely visible under the accumulation of four centuries. The settlement had been small and low-built, and the sea and time had been comprehensive. But at the southwestern edge, in the position the chart had shown, there was a concentration of shaped stone that was not geological. 'The graveyard,' Katrin said. The shaped stones were headstones — partially collapsed, covered in growth, but unmistakably worked and placed deliberately. The submersible's camera wasn't sharp enough to read inscriptions, but the number of headstones was consistent with a settlement of the size the journal described. Nadia watched the monitor for twenty minutes. She thought about Maria Sousa at forty meters below the Atlantic, in a graveyard that had been underwater for four hundred years. A cartographer's daughter, buried on a cartographer's island, in a place that now existed only in a chart and a journal and a set of lead containers on a promontory in the Azores. 'She's down there,' Ferreira said. 'She's everywhere,' Nadia said. 'That's the whole point of what she built.'