The waterfall day

Fish, before anything else

The first photograph of the day is timed at twenty-two minutes to ten and it is a blue crate on the deck with eight or nine golden fish lying in it, still wet. Somebody had been up early. Nothing else about the morning was recorded, which by now is the house style on this boat.

One waterfall, all day

By quarter past eleven the country has changed into something out of a brochure and, unusually, is better than one: a wide staircase of water coming down red rock in four or five separate falls into a green pool big enough to swim across. The whole company is at the rail in swimmers by 11.15, waving at whoever is holding the camera.

They are in the water by a quarter to one — six or seven of them, one on a pool noodle, somebody standing on the far rock watching. At five past one a man walks in under the fall itself and stands there while it lands on his head, and there are two photographs of that, a second apart, because it was worth two. At three minutes past one the helicopter comes up over the rim and away.

And then she came in and parked under it

At six minutes past two the Great Escape is at anchor in the pool with the falls behind her, which is the photograph the whole week has been walking towards. Half an hour later the tender is sitting at the base of the rock with one person standing up in it, and the scale of the thing finally reads: the boat is a toy and the tender is a speck, and the water has been coming down that wall the entire time.