THE CAVE IN THE MOUNTAIN.
_Dr. Fabos Makes Himself Acquainted with the Villa San Jorge._
Joan had spoken of a Bluebeard’s cupboard in my bedroom. This I opened
the moment I went up to bed. It stood against the outer wall of the
room, and plainly led to some apartment or gallery above. The lock of
the inner door, I perceived, had a rude contrivance of wires attached to
it. A child would have read it for an ancient alarm set there to ring a
bell if the door were opened. I laughed at his simplicity, and said
that, after all, General Fordibras could not be a very formidable
antagonist. He wished to see how far my curiosity would carry me in his
house, and here was an infantile device to discover me. I took a second
glance at it, and dismissed it from my mind.
I had gone up to bed at twelve o’clock, I suppose, and it was now nearly
half an hour after midnight. A good fire of logs still burned in the
grate, a hand lamp with a crimson shade stood near by my bed. Setting
this so that I could cast a shadow out upon the verandah, I made those
brisk movements which a person watching without might have interpreted
as the act of undressing, and then, extinguishing the light and
screening the fire, I listened for the footsteps of my servant, Okyada.
No cat could tread as softly as he; no Indian upon a trail could step
with more cunning than this soft-eyed, devoted, priceless fellow. I had
told him to come to me at a quarter to one, and the hands of the watch
were still upon the figures when the door opened inch by inch, and he
appeared, a spectre almost invisible, a pair of glistening eyes, of
white laughing teeth—Okyada, the invincible, the uncorruptible.
“What news, Okyada?”
He whispered his answer, every word sounding as clearly in my ears as
the notes of a bell across a drowsy river.
“There is that which you should know, master. He is here, in this house.
I have seen him sleeping. Let us go together—the white foot upon the
wool. It would be dangerous to sleep, master.”
I thought that his manner was curiously anxious, for here was a servant
who feared nothing under heaven. To question him further, when I could
ascertain the facts for myself, would have been ridiculous; and merely
looking to my pistols and drawing a heavy pair of felt slippers over my
boots, I followed him from the room.
“Straight down the stairs, master,” he said; “they are watching the
corridors. One will not watch again to-night—I have killed him. Let us
pass where he should have been.”
I understood that he had dealt with one of the sentries as only a son of
Hiroshima could, and, nodding in answer, I followed him down the stairs
and so to the dining-room I had so recently quitted. The apartment was
almost as I had left it an hour ago. Plates and glasses were still upon
the table; the embers of a fire reddened upon the open hearth. I
observed, however, that a shutter of a window giving upon the verandah
had been opened to the extent of a hand’s-breadth, and by this window it
was plain that my servant meant to pass out. No sooner had we done so
than he dexterously closed the shutter behind him by the aid of a cord
and a little beeswax; and having left all to his satisfaction, he
beckoned me onward and began to tread a wide lawn of grass, and after
that, a pine-wood, so thickly planted that an artificial maze could not
have been more perplexing.
Now it came to me that the house itself did not contain the man I was
seeking nor the sights which Okyada had to show me. This woodland path
led to the wall of the mountain, to the foot of that high peak visible
to every ship that sails by Santa Maria. Here, apparently, the track
terminated. Okyada, crouching like a panther, bade me imitate him as we
drew near to the rock; and approaching it with infinite caution, he
raised his hand again and showed me, at the cliff’s foot, the dead body
of the sentinel who had watched the place, I made sure, not a full hour
ago.
“We met upon the ladder, master,” said my servant, unmoved. “I could not
go by. He fell, master—he fell from up yonder where you see the fires.
His friends are there; we are going to them.”
I shuddered at the spectacle—perhaps was unnerved by it. This instant
brought home to me as nothing else had done the nature of the quest I
had embarked upon and the price which it might be necessary to pay for
success. What was life or death to this criminal company my imagination
had placed upon the high seas and on such shores as this! They would
kill me, if my death could contribute to their safety, as readily as a
man crushes a fly that settles by his hand. All my best reasoned schemes
might not avail against such a sudden outbreak of anger and reproach as
discovery might bring upon me. This I had been a fool not to remember,
and it came to me in all its black nakedness as I stood at the foot of
the precipice and perceived that Okyada would have me mount. The venture
was as desperate as any a man could embark upon. I know not to this day
why I obeyed my servant.
Let me make the situation clear. The path through the wood had carried
us to a precipice of the mountain, black and stern and forbidding.
Against this a frail iron ladder had been raised and hooked to the rock
by the ordinary clamps which steeplejacks employ. How far this ladder
had been reared, I could not clearly see. Its thread-like shell
disappeared and was quickly lost in the shadows of the heights; while
far above, beyond a space of blackness, a glow of warm light radiated
from time to time from some orifice of the rock, and spoke both of human
presence and human activities. That the ladder had been closely watched,
Okyada had already told me. Did I need a further witness, the dead body
at the cliff’s foot must have answered for my servant’s veracity.
Somewhere in that tremendous haze of light and shadow the two men had
met upon a foothold terrible to contemplate; their arms had been locked
together; they had uttered no cries, but silently, grimly fighting, they
had decided the issue, and one had fallen horribly to the rocks below.
This man’s absence must presently be discovered. How if discovery came
while we were still upon the ladder from which he had been hurled? Such
a thought, I reflected, was the refuge of a coward. I would consider it
no more, and bidding Okyada lead, I hastened to follow him to the
unknown.
We mounted swiftly, the felt upon our shoes deadening all sounds. I am
an old Alpine climber, and the height had no terrors for me. Under other
circumstances, the fresh bracing air above the wood, the superb panorama
of land and sea would have delighted me. Down yonder to the left lay
Villa do Porto. The anchor-light of my own yacht shone brightly across
the still sea, as though telling me that my friends were near. The Villa
San Jorge itself was just a black shape below us, lightless and
apparently deserted. I say “apparently,” for a second glance at it
showed me, as moving shadows upon a moonlit path, the figures of the
sentinels who had been posted at its doors. These, had their eyes been
prepared, must certainly have discovered us. It may be that they named
us for the guardian of the ladder itself; it may be that they held their
peace deliberately. That fact does not concern me. I am merely to record
the circumstance that, after weary climbing, we reached a gallery of the
rock and stood together, master and servant, upon a rude bridle-path,
thirty inches wide, perhaps, and without defence against the terrible
precipice it bordered. Here, as in the wood, Okyada crept apace, but
with infinite caution, following the path round the mountain for nearly
a quarter of a mile, and so bringing me without warning to an open
plateau with a great orifice, in shape neither more nor less than the
entrance to a cave within the mountain itself. I perceived that we had
come to our journey’s end, and falling prone at a signal from my guide,
I lay without word or movement for many minutes together.
Now, there were two men keeping guard at the entrance to the cave, and
we lay, perhaps, within fifty yards of them. The light by which we saw
the men was that which escaped from the orifice itself—a fierce,
glowing, red light, shining at intervals as though a furnace door had
been opened and immediately shut again. The effect of this I found weird
and menacing beyond all experience; for while at one moment the darkness
of ultimate night hid all things from our view, at the next the figures
were outstanding in a fiery aureole, as clearly silhouetted in crimson
as though incarnadined in a shadowgraph. To these strange sights, the
accompaniment of odd sounds was added—the blast as of wind from a
mighty bellows, the clanging of hammers upon anvils of steel, the low
humming voices of men who sang, bare-armed, as they worked. In my own
country, upon another scene, a listener would have said these were
honest smiths pursuing their calling while other men slept. I knew too
much of the truth to permit myself any delusion. These men worked gold,
I said. There could be no other employment for them.
So with me shall my friends watch upon the mountain and share both the
surprise and the wonder of this surpassing discovery. My own feelings
are scarcely to be declared. The night promised to justify me beyond all
hope; and yet, until I could witness the thing for myself, justification
lay as far off as ever. Indeed, our position was perilous beyond all
words to tell. There, not fifty paces from us, the sentries lounged in
talk, revolvers in their belts, and rifles about their shoulders. A sigh
might have betrayed us. We did not dare to exchange a monosyllable or
lift a hand. Cramped almost beyond endurance, I, myself, would have
withdrawn and gone down to the house again but for the immovable Okyada,
who lay as a stone upon the path, and by his very stillness betrayed
some subtler purpose. To him it had occurred that the sentries would go
upon their patrol presently. I knew that it might be so, had thought of
it myself; but a full twenty minutes passed before they gave us a sign,
and then hardly the sign I looked for. One of them, rousing himself
lazily, entered the cave and became lost to our view. The other,
slinging his rifle about his shoulders, came deliberately towards us,
stealthily, furtively, for all the world as though he were fully aware
of our presence and about to make it known. This, be it said, was but an
idea of my awakened imagination. Whatever had been designed against us
by the master of the Villa San Jorge, an open assault upon the mountain
side certainly had not been contemplated. The watchman must, in plain
truth, have been about to visit the ladder’s head to ascertain if all
were well with his comrade there. Such a journey he did not complete.
The Jap sprang upon him suddenly, at the very moment he threatened
almost to tread upon us, and he fell without a single word at my feet as
though stricken by some fell disease which forbade him to move a limb or
utter a single cry.
Okyada had caught him with one arm about his throat and a clever hand
behind his knees. As he lay prone upon the rock, he was gagged and bound
with a speed and dexterity I have never seen imitated. Fear, it may be,
was my servant’s ally. The wretched man’s eyes seemed to start almost
out of his head when he found himself thus outwitted, an arm of iron
choking him, and lithe limbs of incomparable strength roping his body as
with bonds of steel. Certainly, he made no visible effort of resistance,
rather consenting to his predicament than fighting against it; and no
sooner was the last knot of the cord tied than Okyada sprang up and
pointed dramatically to the open door no longer watched by sentries. To
gain this was the work of a moment. I drew my revolver, and, crossing
the open space, looked down deliberately into the pit. The story of the
Villa San Jorge lay at my feet. General Fordibras, I said, had no longer
a secret to conceal from me.
I will not dwell upon those emotions of exultation, perhaps of vanity,
which came to me in that amazing moment. All that I had sacrificed to
this dangerous quest, the perils encountered and still awaiting me—what
were they when measured in the balance of this instant revelation, the
swift and glowing vision with which the night rewarded me? I knew not
the price I would have paid for the knowledge thus instantly come to my
possession.
Something akin to a trance of reflection fell upon me. I watched the
scene almost as a man intoxicated by the very atmosphere of it. A sense
of time and place and personality was lost to me. The great book of the
unknown had been opened before me, and I read on entranced. This, I say,
was the personal note of it. Let me put it aside to speak more
intimately of reality and of that to which reality conducted me.
Now, the cave of the mountain, I judge, had a depth of some third of a
mile. It was in aspect not unlike what one might have imagined a mighty
subterranean cathedral to have been. Of vast height, the limestone vault
above showed me stalactites of such great size and infinite variety that
they surpassed all ideas I had conceived of Nature and her wonders.
Depending in a thousand forms, here as foliated corbels, there as
vaulting shafts whose walls had fallen and left them standing, now as
quatrefoils and cusps, sometimes seeming to suggest monster gargoyles,
the beauty, the number, and the magnificence of them could scarcely have
been surpassed by any wonders of limestone in all the world. That there
were but few corresponding stalagmites rising up from the rocky ground
must be set down to the use made of this vast chamber and the work then
being undertaken in it. No fewer than nine furnaces I counted at a first
glance—glowing furnaces through whose doors the dazzling whiteness of
unspeakable fires blinded the eyes and illuminated the scene as though
by unearthly lanterns.
And there were men everywhere, half-naked men, leather-aproned and
shining as though water had been poured upon their bodies. These
fascinated me as no mere natural beauty of the scene or the surprise of
it had done. They were the servants of the men to whom I had thrown down
the glove so recklessly. They were the servants of those who, armed and
unknown, sailed the high seas in their flight from cities and from
justice. This much I had known from the first. Their numbers remained to
astonish me beyond all measure.
And of what nature was their task at the furnaces? I had assumed at the
first thought that they were workers in precious metals, in the gold and
silver which the cleverest thieves of Europe shipped here to their
hands. Not a little to my astonishment, the facts did not at the moment
bear out my supposition. Much of the work seemed shipwright’s business
or such casting as might be done at any Sheffield blast furnace. Forging
there was, and shaping and planing—not a sign of any criminal
occupation, or one that would bear witness against them. The
circumstance, however, did not deceive me. It fitted perfectly into the
plan I had prepared against my coming to Santa Maria, and General
Fordibras’s discovery of my journey. Of course, these men would not be
working precious metals—not at least to-night. This I had said when
recollection of my own situation came back to me suddenly; and realising
the folly of further espionage, I turned about to find Okyada and quit
the spot.
Then I discovered that my servant had left the plateau, and that I stood
face to face with the ugliest and most revolting figure of a Jew it has
ever been my misfortune to look upon.