THEN the Doctor asked Long Arrow if he knew what fire was, explaining
it to him by pictures drawn on the buckskin table-cloth. Long Arrow
said he had seen such a thing—coming out of the tops of volcanoes; but
that neither he nor any of the Popsipetels knew how it was made.
“Poor perishing heathens!” muttered Bumpo. “No wonder the old chief
died of cold!”
At that moment we heard a crying sound at the door. And turning round,
we saw a weeping Indian mother with a baby in her arms. She said
something to the Indians which we could not understand; and Long Arrow
told us the baby was sick and she wanted the white doctor to try and
cure it.
“Oh Lord!” groaned Polynesia in my ear—“Just like Puddleby: patients
arriving in the middle of dinner. Well, one thing: the food’s raw, so
nothing can get cold anyway.”
The Doctor examined the baby and found at once that it was thoroughly
chilled.
“Fire—_fire_! That’s what it needs,” he said turning to Long
Arrow—“That’s what you all need. This child will have pneumonia if it
isn’t kept warm.”
“Aye, truly. But how to make a fire,” said Long Arrow—“where to get it:
that is the difficulty. All the volcanoes in this land are dead.”
Then we fell to hunting through our pockets to see if any matches had
survived the shipwreck. The best we could muster were two whole ones
and a half—all with the heads soaked off them by salt water.
“Hark, Long Arrow,” said the Doctor: “divers ways there be of making
fire without the aid of matches. One: with a strong glass and the
rays of the sun. That however, since the sun has set, we cannot now
employ. Another is by grinding a hard stick into a soft log—Is the
daylight gone without?—Alas yes. Then I fear we must await the morrow;
for besides the different woods, we need an old squirrel’s nest for
fuel—And that without lamps you could not find in your forests at this
hour.”
“Great are your cunning and your skill, oh White Man,” Long Arrow
replied. “But in this you do us an injustice. Know you not that all
fireless peoples can see in the dark? Having no lamps we are forced to
train ourselves to travel through the blackest night, lightless. I will
despatch a messenger and you shall have your squirrel’s nest within the
hour.”
He gave an order to two of our boy-servants who promptly disappeared
running. And sure enough, in a very short space of time a squirrel’s
nest, together with hard and soft woods, was brought to our door.
The moon had not yet risen and within the house it was practically
pitch-black. I could feel and hear, however, that the Indians were
moving about comfortably as though it were daylight. The task of making
fire the Doctor had to perform almost entirely by the sense of touch,
asking Long Arrow and the Indians to hand him his tools when he mislaid
them in the dark. And then I made a curious discovery: now that I had
to, I found that I was beginning to see a little in the dark myself.
And for the first time I realized that of course there _is_ no such
thing as pitch-dark, so long as you have a door open or a sky above you.
Calling for the loan of a bow, the Doctor loosened the string, put the
hard stick into a loop and began grinding this stick into the soft wood
of the log. Soon I smelt that the log was smoking. Then he kept feeding
the part that was smoking with the inside lining of the squirrel’s
nest, and he asked me to blow upon it with my breath. He made the stick
drill faster and faster. More smoke filled the room. And at last the
darkness about us was suddenly lit up. The squirrel’s nest had burst
into flame.
The Indians murmured and grunted with astonishment. At first they were
all for falling on their knees and worshiping the fire. Then they
wanted to pick it up with their bare hands and play with it. We had to
teach them how it was to be used; and they were quite fascinated when
we laid our fish across it on sticks and cooked it. They sniffed the
air with relish as, for the first time in history, the smell of fried
fish passed through the village of Popsipetel.
Then we got them to bring us piles and stacks of dry wood; and we made
an enormous bonfire in the middle of the main street. Round this, when
they felt its warmth, the whole tribe gathered and smiled and wondered.
It was a striking sight, one of the pictures from our voyages that I
most frequently remember: that roaring jolly blaze beneath the black
night sky, and all about it a vast ring of Indians, the firelight
gleaming on bronze cheeks, white teeth and flashing eyes—a whole town
trying to get warm, giggling and pushing like school-children.
In a little, when we had got them more used to the handling of fire,
the Doctor showed them how it could be taken into their houses if a
hole were only made in the roof to let the smoke out. And before we
turned in after that long, long, tiring day, we had fires going in
every hut in the village.
The poor people were so glad to get really warm again that we thought
they’d never go to bed. Well on into the early hours of the morning
the little town fairly buzzed with a great low murmur: the Popsipetels
sitting up talking of their wonderful pale-faced visitor and this
strange good thing he had brought with him—_fire_!
_THE FOURTH CHAPTER_