Читать книгу Biggles Breaks the Silence - W E Johns - Страница 5

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Captain Grimes stared at Biggles as if he doubted his sanity. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stated, with some asperity. “How could a gold crown——”

“I’m not talking about a gold crown,” interposed Biggles quickly. “There isn’t a gold crown in the Antarctic, and there never was. Your assumption that there is one, or was one, is natural enough; but it was, after all, only surmise on your part. I suspect that the crown that Lavinsky found was a wooden one.” Biggles paused to smile at the expression on the seaman’s face. “You see, skipper,” he continued, “unless I’ve missed my guess, what Lavinsky blundered on was the remains of an old schooner named the Starry Crown.”

Captain Grimes drew a deep breath. He looked crestfallen. “Never heard of her,” he muttered.

“Very few people have, I imagine,” returned Biggles. “I happen to have done so because unsolved mysteries have always interested me, and I pay a press-cutting agency to keep me informed about them or any subsequent developments. The Starry Crown sailed the seas in another generation. If my memory isn’t at fault, she disappeared from sight about seventy years ago, on a voyage from Australia to London.”

“Well, knock me down with a marlinespike,” exclaimed the old man disconsolately. “Here am I kidding myself I’m on the track of a fortune.”

Biggles smiled again at the sailor’s frank expression of chagrin. “I didn’t say you weren’t,” he corrected. “In fact, you probably are.”

The sailor looked up sharply, his shrewd eyes narrowing. “Ah! Then there is something.”

“There was, and in view of what you now tell us, I’d say there still is. When the Starry Crown set sail she had on board about a ton of Australian gold, although how much of it remains under her hatches is another matter. Just a moment while I turn up my scrap-book; we might as well get our facts right.” Biggles went over to his files and put on the table a bulky album, from which the edges of newspaper clippings projected at all angles. He turned the pages slowly, and then apparently found what he was looking for, for he opened the book wide and read for some minutes in silence. “Yes,” he said at last. “I wasn’t far wrong. The Starry Crown was a queer business altogether. She was a schooner of fifteen hundred tons. With a ton of gold on board she disappeared on a voyage from Melbourne to London. She was reported lost with all hands, and eventually the insurance money was paid. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Twenty years later a whaler named Swordfish spotted the Starry Crown stuck fast in the polar ice-pack. The Swordfish herself was in a bad way. She had been driven south by northerly gales and her crew was down with scurvy. In fact, there was only one survivor, the mate, a man named Last. He died in Australia some years ago. It seems that after he got home he took into his confidence a man named Manton, presumably because he was the owner of a schooner, a vessel named Black Dog. The upshot was, naturally enough, that Last and Manton went off in the Black Dog to recover the Starry Crown’s gold. Things went wrong, as they usually do in treasure hunting. The Black Dog was caught between two bergs and crushed flat. The only two men to get ashore were Last and Manton. They may have been on the ice at the time. At any rate, after the Black Dog had gone down they were able to walk across the ice to the Starry Crown. They found things just the same as when the ship had been abandoned. The gold was intact, not that it was much use to the wretched fellows, who now found themselves prisoners on the Antarctic ice with mighty little hope of ever getting away. There was still a good supply of canned stores in the hulk, and other food which had been preserved by the intense cold, so they were in no immediate danger of starvation; but winter was setting in and their chances of being picked up were nil. To pass the time they amused themselves by dividing the gold between them. After some months the solitude drove Manton out of his mind, and he tried to murder Last. There was a fight, and it ended by Last shooting Manton dead. He buried him in the ice, built a cairn of ice blocks over his grave, and topped it with a board with the dead man’s name on it. This done, to save himself being driven insane by the loneliness, he repaired the one small boat that remained on the Starry Crown. He then built a sledge, loaded the boat with some stores, and in the spring, when the ice began to break up, dragged the whole thing to the edge of the open water. All this occupied eight months. But his luck was in, for shortly afterwards he was picked up by an American whaler named Spray. He told the skipper some cock-and-bull story about losing his ship and being cast away, and eventually got home. But he never fully recovered and he died shortly afterwards. Before he died, however, he told the story of his adventures to a relation, who might well have wondered how much of it was true. Later on, apparently, this man told some friends about it, and the story got out, which is how we know what I’m telling you now. Of course, how much truth there is in it we don’t know. Most people would probably take Last’s story with a ladleful of salt. He may have tried to cover up some unsavoury event in his career. He may have gone really mad, like Manton, and imagined things. Anyway, as far as I know, no attempt has ever been made to check up on his story, presumably because nobody thought it worth while; but now, skipper, in view of what you tell us, it begins to look as though there was something in it. If the Starry Crown is still there, then the gold is probably there, too.”

“Didn’t Last take any of it away with him?” asked Ginger.

“Apparently not. Would you, in such circumstances, load yourself up with a lot of useless weight? The man had plenty to haul over the ice as it was. His one concern, I imagine, was to save his life, and his hopes of that must have looked pretty thin.” Biggles closed the book. “Well, that’s all—so far. I say so far, because it looks as if the final chapter has still to be told, assuming that the Starry Crown is still there.” He turned to Captain Grimes. “Did you make a note of her position?”

“Of course.”

“Did you tell Lavinsky?”

“No.”

“But he could have got your own position from the log?”

“He may have done that later, but, even so, as we were drifting all the time the position he got when we were near the Starry Crown would only be approximate.”

“Was the ice moving? I ask that because, if it was, the Starry Crown would naturally move with it. I understand that in the spring enormous fields of ice on the edge of the main pack break off and shift about.”

“That’s right enough,” agreed the captain. “It’s the big danger any ship has to face—getting caught between two floes. The weight would crush any ship as flat as a pancake. There’s no doubt the outer ice was on the move when I was there, but such movements are naturally slow. What you’ve got to watch, when you’re close in, is that a piece doesn’t get between you and the open sea and shut you in. That’s what must have happened to the Starry Crown. It very nearly caught me.”

Biggles lit another cigarette. “Well, there it is,” he murmured. “It looks as if the gold is still there—provided Lavinsky and Co. haven’t slipped back and lifted it. What are you going to do about it?”

The sailor looked helpless. “What can I do? I reckon Lavinsky will be after it all right.”

“No doubt of that. Most men are ready to take risks when the prize is gold.”

“The gold isn’t his.”

“It isn’t yours, if it comes to that,” Biggles pointed out. “What puzzles me is, why didn’t Lavinsky lift it when he was there?”

“There wasn’t time, or mebbe they would have done,” stated the sailor. “The ice was closing in on me and they only just got aboard in time, as it was; but, of course, they’ll go back. And they won’t waste any time, either, I’ll bet my sea-boots.”

“And you had an idea that you might beat them to it—by flying down, eh,” murmured Biggles. “Was that what brought you here?”

The sailor looked uncomfortable. “You’ve about hit the nail on the head,” he admitted.

“But before you, or anyone, could do anything, it would be necessary to determine the ownership of the gold,” averred Biggles.

“I reckon the stuff would belong to the underwriters who insured the ship, unless they sold the salvage,” opined Captain Grimes. “The salvage wouldn’t be much at the time, as the ship was reckoned to be at the bottom of the sea.”

“Quite so. But if the owners of the salvage knew that the ship was still afloat, so to speak, with the gold on board, it would be a very different matter. Have you told anyone else about this?”

“Not a soul. After all, I didn’t know about the Starry Crown until you just told me. All I reported was the seal-poaching.”

“Then the first thing to do is to ascertain the ownership of the salvage and find out if it is for sale. If it is, you must buy it. You ought to get it for a mere song. After that all you have to do is to go down and collect the bullion.”

The sailor looked doubtful. “I couldn’t do it—not alone. I couldn’t afford such a trip. Anyway, to go by ship would take too long. I should probably find that Lavinsky had been there and gone. He’ll be on his way there by now.”

Biggles nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right. Lavinsky would soon be on the job.”

“He’d have to find a better ship than the Svelt. She was dropping to bits and the engines were about done. But there, no doubt he’d soon find another ship.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” returned Biggles. “Ships are expensive things. I doubt if such a man would have enough money to buy one.”

“He’d soon borrow one.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because when Lavinsky went looking for a ship the owner would want to know what he wanted it for. Would Lavinsky tell him? I think it’s unlikely, because as soon as he mentioned treasure the owner would want a finger in the pie. Remember, on these jaunts it’s the man who puts up the money who calls the tune. Lavinsky would jib at taking second place, and from what you tell me of him, he isn’t the sort of man to hand over half the profits. No; if he’s gone after the gold, rather than divulge what he knows to a stranger he’d use his old ship, with the same crew. At least, that’s my opinion.” Biggles tossed his cigarette end into the fire. “And that, I’m afraid, is about as far as I can go in the matter of advice.”

The seaman drew a deep breath. “Then it looks as if that’s the end of it. I couldn’t do a trip like that on my own.”

“And that’s why you came to see me?”

“I thought we might do a deal.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I thought if you’d fix up a trip to fly there we could go shares in what we got. That would be fair enough, wouldn’t it?”

“Certainly it would, if I could do it.” Biggles shook his head. “But I’m afraid, Mr. Grimes, putting the ownership of the gold on one side, the undertaking would be too big for me, even if I could get time off from my job to do it. I couldn’t afford such an expedition as would be necessary—unless, of course, I was willing to take the most outrageous chances of losing my life, which I’m not. I don’t mind reasonable risks, but I draw the line at suicide on the off-chance of getting a lump of gold, which may, or may not, be there.”

“Would it be as difficult as all that?” asked the sailor, in surprise. “I mean, I thought aeroplanes could go pretty well anywhere.”

“A lot of people think that, and up to a point they are right,” agreed Biggles. “But there are limits. Even though you’ve been to the Antarctic I don’t think you quite realise what sort of place it is. We’re talking about the most inaccessible place on earth. To go in a well-found ship would be a hazardous operation. To go in an aeroplane not properly equipped for the job would be asking for it. At least two planes would be needed, big planes—and aeroplanes are very expensive things.”

The sailor gazed at the floor. “It didn’t strike me as being as bad as all that.”

“Mebbe not, but you had firm planks under your feet. Let me try to make things a bit clearer. My business is flying, so I have to keep up to date with what’s going on. Several Governments have an eye on the South Pole, and that’s nothing to wonder at. You may say, why the South Pole more than the North? The answer is, the North Polar regions are mostly frozen seas, no use to anybody except as a meteorological station or military base. They were always easier to reach than the South Pole, which is land, a new continent, six million square miles of mighty mountain ranges without a living creature on them. The old scientists always asserted that as nearly all the known land masses are in the Northern Hemispheres, there must be a continent somewhere in the far south to balance them, otherwise the earth wouldn’t rotate evenly on its axis. Well, the continent was there, although it took a bit of finding. They call it the White Continent, because it’s in the grip of eternal ice and snow; but nobody knows what metals, coal and oil there may be in that ground for the first nation to tame it. Only one or two expeditions have seen it, but even they could hardly scratch the surface. The last expedition was American, and you can judge the sort of difficulties they expected by the size of the show. I won’t bore you with the details, but these fellows had a rough time, although their planes were equipped with every modern appliance, regardless of cost. There were casualties, too, due to conditions outside all human knowledge or experience.”

“Such as?” asked Ginger curiously.

Biggles lit another cigarette. “Apparently the first difficulty is to know where the water ends and the land begins. It’s all a sheet of ice, and the outer edge of the ice-pack is always breaking off and floating away, so that the coastline is never the same. Consider landing. True, most of the ice is flat, but it is covered with finely-powdered snow about a foot deep. It never rains, of course, but it often snows, and when the wind blows it flings the snow about in swirling whirlpools, so that it’s impossible to see the surface of the ice. It isn’t only a matter of landing. If you get down you’ve got to get off again—some time. On fine days, apparently, you can get visibility up to a hundred and fifty miles in every direction, due to the absolute absence of humidity in the atmosphere. For the same reason the sky is purple, not blue, and although you get sub-zero temperatures the sun may burn the skin off you. If the weather clouds up, or you get a change of temperature, you get mist, and then you’ve had it. You get a phenomenon which the airmen of the last expedition called a white-out. You’ve heard of a black-out. Well, this is the same thing in reverse. Whichever way you look, up or down, it’s always the same—just a white, phantom world. The light comes from every direction, so there isn’t even a shadow to help you. You can fly into the ground without even seeing it. Your altimeter is useless because you don’t know the altitude of the ground below you. You may be flying over a plateau ten thousand feet high without knowing it. The mere thought of flying in such conditions is enough to give one a nervous breakdown. Navigation must be a nightmare. Remember, when you’re at the South Pole, whichever way you face, you’re looking north. You can’t travel in any direction but north. Did you realise that? And if you happen to fly across the Pole, east immediately becomes west, and west, east. Silly, isn’t it? I’ve never been, but I’ve read the reports of fellows who have, and if half of what they say is true I shan’t burst into tears if I never see it. The nearest we’ve been is Kerguelen Island, and that’s still a long way north of the Pole, but what with icebergs and fog, the going there wasn’t exactly a joy ride^[A]. Well, I needn’t say any more; I’ve said enough, I think, to make it clear that not even the most optimistic pilot would hardly expect to fly down to the Starry Crown, pick up the bullion and come home—just like that. I could get there, I’ve no doubt. It’s the thought of getting stuck there that I don’t like.”

[A]	See ‘Biggles Second Case.’

“No, by Jove! I’m with you there, old boy,” put in Bertie, polishing his monocle.

“I see what you mean,” said Captain Grimes sadly.

“Of course, with time and unlimited money for equipment, there’s no reason why the trip shouldn’t be made; but you’ll understand why I’m not keen to take a chance on my own account,” went on Biggles. He thought for a moment. “There might be one way out of the difficulty,” he said pensively. “The Government needs gold. Governments always do, but at this moment ours needs it more than ever before. If I put the thing up to them there’s just a chance that they might sanction and finance an expedition, although in that case they’d want the gold, naturally. They might give us a rake-off—say, ten per cent.—for our part in the undertaking. But even that would be better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick. All we should have to lose then would be our lives. If you’re agreeable, skipper, we could try it. The Government can only say no. If that’s their answer, then as far as I’m concerned I’m afraid it’s the end.”

“Aye, I’m agreeable,” answered the sailor. “Will you do that?”

“I’ll see about it right away,” promised Biggles.

Captain Grimes got up. “All right, sir, let’s leave it like that.”

Biggles, too, stood up. “Very well. Leave me your address so that I can get in touch with you. If the trip comes off I’ll make arrangements for both of you to come. I should need you, captain, anyhow, to guide us to the schooner. This boy of yours could act as mechanic and radio operator.”

“Right you are, sir. That’s good enough for me,” decided Captain Grimes. “Good day, sir.”

“Good-bye for now,” answered Biggles, seeing his visitors to the door.

“If this jaunt comes off, I shall need my winter woollies, by gad,” said Bertie.

“You certainly will, by gad,” returned Biggles grimly.

See page 12.

“Mercantile Marine, sir. Jumbo Grimes they call me.”

See page 49.

Ginger realised that without the skis the machine would have finished up on its nose.