Читать книгу In the Secret Sea - William Edward Cule - Страница 5

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The John Duncan lay at rest in Sandy Bay, to the right of the narrow entrance and only some thirty yards from the shore. She was big in the little bay, for it was only about three hundred yards across, but she was small indeed under the shadow of the mighty cliffs that rose a thousand feet behind her. And right across the bay lay the Maud Muller of New Orleans.

She was an object of interest of course, but there was nothing in her looks to excite remark. She was smaller than our old tub, but there was a neatness about her that spoke very favourably of her owners and officers. No one could have mistaken her for an ocean tramp, anyway. Half an hour after we had anchored, her Captain came over to call, bringing a friend with him; and as I was with my uncle on the afterdeck at this time I was able to make a few mental notes of the meeting.

Captain Stuart Jackson was a lithe little man of the Captain Kettle build, but much milder in air and in countenance than that famous mariner, and notably spruce and neat in his clothing. He was hearty and full of goodwill, but his keen blue eyes took proper stock of everything that came before them, and also of some things that another person might easily have missed. His companion offered a much more remarkable figure, but it was plain that he was no sailor. He was an older man, something near sixty, perhaps, and he wore a rough tweed suit with a thick, dark, shoregoing overcoat and a soft felt hat. He was big, clean-shaven, with iron-grey hair, a heavy-jawed, rather forbidding face, and sharp, peering eyes sheltered by heavy brows and gold-rimmed spectacles. But from the first that ordinary-looking landsman caught my attention. There was something about him that gave a curious impression of power.

Captain Jackson was cordial enough. “I won’t exactly say I’m glad to see you, sir,” he said cheerily. “It would almost seem to be like chuckling over your ill-fortune. But I do say that I shall be glad to do anything I can to help you.”

The two Captains shook hands warmly. “I don’t know that we shall want help,” said my uncle. “We have everything we need, and my chief engineer says he can do it all in twelve hours. But I shan’t hesitate to draw upon you, Captain Jackson, if I see the need; and anyway it is good to find friends in this God-forsaken spot. My first officer tells me that you have been here some time.”

“Near a month,” said the other, “and mean to stay another if we see the call. But that reminds me—let me introduce Professor Delling, of the Rio University. He is the head of our party.”

Professor Delling bowed and shook hands, but he was evidently a man of silence. “We’re out on a geological survey,” went on Captain Jackson pleasantly. “The University has given the Professor six months to do some of the islands in the South Atlantic, and has chartered the Maud Muller and your obedient servant to take him about, under exploration licences from the Governments of Argentina and Brazil. Do you know anything of geology, Captain James?”

My uncle smiled as he shook his head.

“Nor do I,” said Captain Jackson. “But I’m sure it’s very interesting. Get the Professor to talk about it—if you can. And I need hardly say, sir, that Stuart Jackson is honoured by being employed in the Sacred Cause of Science. I guess we’ll have a big book about these islands some day, and my boat and I will be in it. Isn’t that so, Professor?”

For the first time the Professor spoke, and he spoke with a dry little smile. His voice was deep but pleasant.

“I have promised it, Captain Jackson,” he said. “I will give you all the immortality I can give. You certainly deserve it.”

They all laughed, and directly afterwards went down to my uncle’s cabin to celebrate the meeting in a little refreshment. Ten minutes later, however, the visitors departed, Captain Jackson declaring that he had no intention of delaying our repairs by any neighbourly attentions. He would feel honoured, however, if Captain James or any of his officers could find time to visit the Maud Muller before they left the island. And with that invitation, to which my uncle made a cordial response, the visitors went down the ladder and were rowed back to their ship. A very interesting pair they had proved, and obviously full of kindness and goodwill.

Repairs had begun on the John Duncan, however, before they left, and nobody had time or inclination to think further of our chance neighbours. “Give me twelve hours,” the chief engineer had said, but those hours must be crowded with work. There were other things wrong besides the engine gear, and soon the ship rang with the voice of the saw and the hammer.

While all this was going forward the Captain saw to it that a supply of fresh water was taken on board, Tawell and myself being told off to help, under the eye of the third officer. The cascade mentioned in the Navigator came down the face of the cliff not a hundred yards from the beach, and I had heard it through my dreams all night.

It was hardly possible to imagine a more dreary prospect. That narrow strip of beach was not common sea sand, but a minute dust mixed with dark, smooth pebbles. At the back of this the cliffs rose in a sheer wall some fifty feet to a broad ledge, with another stretch of cliff wall above. And so it rose for something like a thousand feet to a top that stood against the sky like the teeth of a gigantic saw. Over all brooded a silence unbroken even by the cry of a sea-bird.

“All the other islands in this region are smothered with sea-fowl,” said Oliver. “Here we haven’t a single feather. The place is uncanny.”

“They wouldn’t find much to eat here,” grumbled Johnny, under his breath.

“No,” said the third officer, “and that’s curious, too. The place is as bare as a billiard-ball. I only hope the water’s all right.”

The water, however, seemed to be very good, and long before noon our task had been ended. It was just before we finished that Johnny made a suggestion.

“I say, Frank, how would you like a run ashore? It would be a change to get up those cliffs. Anyway, anything’s better than work.”

“Good,” I said. “Go and ask Smerdon.”

Tawell grinned, for the first officer was poison to him. “You ask Big Brother,” he said mockingly. “Do, now—and I’ll give you something—some day.”

I gave him something on the spot, but I spoke to Oliver all the same. And, as it turned out, Oliver had had his mind working in the same direction.

“I should like a turn myself,” he said. “I’ll see if we can be spared. But I shouldn’t let you two young rapscallions go alone.”

The Captain raised no objection, but gave a word of warning. “If you go up there,” he growled, “keep a sharp eye for holes and crevices. The Honeycomb didn’t get its name without a reason. And see that you come back by sunset. If you get astray you mustn’t expect us to wait for you. We’ve lost too much time already. We leave at dawn.”

Ten minutes later, after a quick lunch in the cook’s galley, we went ashore in the water boat; and I, for one, found it good to be free, even on such a bleak and barren strand as that. It was like an unexpected half-holiday in the lost days of school, when Charlie Cornwall and I would slip off together to the beach at Leigh and hunt around for some kind of craft in which we might get out upon the water. Indeed, for a moment I could almost have fancied that the footsteps coming close behind me on that slippery beach were those of my old chum, and that if I turned suddenly I should see the brown face I knew so well. But when I did turn, it was Johnny Tawell that stood at my elbow.

“What were you grinning over?” he asked suspiciously.

“I was thinking of something.”

“What was it?”

“An old chum of mine.”

“Oh! And I suppose you were wishing him here instead of me?”

“Rather!” I said flatly; for when I thought of Charlie Cornwall it was impossible to be civil to the melancholy Johnny. But he took it in good part.

“All right,” he said, with a grin. “But as he isn’t here you’ll have to put up with me.”

Oliver’s idea was to ascend the cliff, ledge by ledge, until we reached the summit and got a view of the prospect beyond; but it was some little time before we found a track to carry us even to the first ledge. We found one at last at the extreme western end of the bay, and from the first ledge a similar track led us to the second. So we proceeded, with very little conversation, until we came to a halt for rest, some six hundred feet up. There we looked down upon a dwarfed John Duncan and Maud Muller lying in a fountain basin, with small men creeping busily about the former, and tapping here and there with tinkling hammers. Above us still rose the gaunt wall of cliff, and out beyond the rocky entrance to the bay we could see the unending dreariness of the immense Atlantic, stretching away, league after league, to the ice regions of the Pole.

So we moved on, slowly climbing higher. The mountain walls were as hard and black as iron, but I noticed at last that the ledges were caked with some substance that was neither rock nor sand.

“Why, this is guano,” I said. “There must have been millions of sea-birds here at one time. And now there isn’t one!”

“They got sick of it,” said Johnny. “But if you want to know why, ask a policeman. Look, now, here’s a new path for a change. Are we going to take it?”

That question put the guano mystery out of our minds for the time. We were now about eight hundred feet up the cliff, and this was the first break we had found in that immense barrier. It was just a narrow entrance which from the bay below would have been quite invisible; but it widened as it went inwards and upwards.

“It seems to be a way,” said Oliver, half doubtfully. “It’s not quite so steep, and it’s bound to get to the top somewhere. We’ll try it. But I wish we had got a word with that Professor person before we started. No doubt he’s explored this part and could give us a few hints. Perhaps we’ll compare notes with him afterwards.”

Accordingly we entered the cleft and began to follow its uneven course round and round, but moving gently upward all the while. Presently we were wandering about in a maze of rocky pathways running between the peaks and crags whose outline gave the island that sawlike, jagged effect which we had noticed from the sea. But there was no hope of climbing these, for in most cases they rose sheer from their base without foothold for man or beast. We could only follow the most promising tracks between, taking care that they always tended upwards. It seemed that they must bring us presently to the base of a great cliff some quarter of a mile away over the rocks—a cliff which rose so steeply and towered so high that it seemed to say “No farther!” And we calculated that by the time we reached it we should just have to turn and get back again.

It was in that way that we arrived at disaster. We had not forgotten the Captain’s warning, and had kept a good lookout for holes and pitfalls. Had we not done this, we should never have noticed the place at all, but have passed it unhurt. As it was, a sudden fall in the ground to the right of the track caught my eye, and we turned to examine it more closely; and presently we were all standing on the brink of the Great Pit.

For a pit it seemed to be—a pit which giants might have drilled through the solid rock before mankind had come upon the scene. It was roughly oval, the edge darkened by a few coarse bushes; but we had no sooner looked at the place than we fell silent.

“My word!” said Johnny at last. “That’s the most awful hole I’ve ever seen.”

He found a large fragment of rock, and hurled it over. We stood in breathless silence; and at last there came up to us, faintly, a sound. It was a hollow, ominous reverberation, with the faint splash of water in it.

I went nearer to the edge of the well to peer downwards. I wondered whether I should see anything.

To this day I cannot tell how it happened. Perhaps I was unduly confident, or perhaps I had miscalculated my distance. Then the ground, instead of being solid rock, was probably just a thick layer of guano, and the great fragment on which I tried to stand, at the very brink of the well, was simply embedded in this, instead of being part of the immovable mountain. So when my foothold really began to move I did not realise it, refused to credit my senses, and stayed there just one second too long; and before I understood my danger, that fragment was slipping over the brink.

I gave a gasping cry and threw out my hands. Oliver instinctively moved to grip me, and could not recover his balance. Then my gasp became a brief, strangled shriek as I caught a last glimpse of Johnny Tawell’s long face, with the blue eyes bulging from their sockets in sheer terror. And he, poor fellow, could only answer my shriek with one of his own as both Oliver and I vanished from his sight.