ON FRIENDLY SHORES
"How shall I ever thank you for saving my life?"
"Very easily. If you know anything about this part of the island you
can yust lead us out of here. If we don't find something to eat to-day
we shall be sorry we didn't drown. I'd rather drown than starve any
time. It don't last so long, and isn't so painful."
The two speakers were Michali and the Lieutenant. They were standing,
together with the American, beside a fire of driftwood which the vestas
in Curtis' metal matchbox had enabled them to light. A bit of sand,
sheltered from the waves by a projecting rock, had made it easy for
them to land. It is true that Michali's strength had soon given out,
but his friends, both being powerful swimmers, had brought him to the
shore in safety. After scrambling for a way blindly up the side of a
hill, actuated by an instinctive, though perhaps groundless, fear of
capture, they had paused and looked down upon the sea. There were two
of the sailors hanging to the arm of a gallows frame planted in the
sea. The torn canvas fluttered helpless in the wind. The captain
clung to the arm of another gallows a few feet distant, and the third
sailor was floating about over the submerged caique on the cabin roof.
The gunboat shied out into deeper water, and brought the filibusters
in. Then the three comrades crouched behind a rock, while the
Cyclopean eye of the monster that hurls deadlier missiles than old
Homer ever dreamed of searched hill and shore.
"They'll never try to catch us," said Lindbohm, as the gunboat sailed
away. "They couldn't if they wanted to, and they've no particular
business with us anyhow."
So they built a fire and kept themselves warm as much by the exercise
of bringing and breaking up wood as by the flames themselves. When
morning finally peeped at the pallid sea and kissed its face to ruddy
life and laughter, the Cretan, the Swede and the American looked one
another over and took an inventory of their condition. They were dry,
but hungry. Curtis and Michali had lost their hats. Michali had tied
a handkerchief about his own head in peasant fashion, and had performed
the same office for Curtis. Lindbohm's straw had not escaped from the
tether, and he still wore it, glistening with salt and hanging down on
one side like the wing of a wounded duck. His long coat had shrunk
until the tails parted in the middle of his back as though the space
between them had been cut out with a triangular stamp. He alone of the
three had removed his shoes after reaching the shore. Not being able
to put them on again, he cut away the uppers, and tied the remnant on
with strings, which he passed through the holes slashed in the sides.
A resourceful and courageous man was the Lieutenant.
"Now, we are ready," he said, to Michali; "lead on to breakfast."
"I think," replied Michali, "that we must to the sea go down, and pass
around the shore to where the caique wished to come up. There we shall
find Greeks waiting. _Embros!_" (forward.)
But, alas, when they arrived at the beach again they found that the
little stretch of sand which had been their salvation ended against an
abrupt wall of rock.
"We must go around the hill the other way," said Curtis.
"We may happen on a shepherd or see a village," suggested Michali,
cheerfully. "Many people live along this northern coast of the island."
So they returned again to the bit of sandy beach where they had landed.
By this time it was ten o'clock.
"Hello! What's this?" cried Curtis, who was walking nearer the sea
than the others. They looked. He was holding between his finger and
thumb a small, spherical object, that looked like a bluish-black apple,
stuck full of pins of the same color.
"Bravo!" shouted Michali. "Bravo! I think it will be our breakfast.
It is an _achinoos_."
"Eat that?" asked Lindbohm, regarding the object doubtfully. "I would
yust as soon bite into a live hedgehog."
Michali produced a large pocket knife and cut the creature in two. It
contained about a spoonful of yellow eggs and a quantity of dark, muddy
substance. Carefully collecting the contents upon the point of his
knife, he offered the dainty morsel to Lindbohm and Curtis, who each
took a little on the tip of his finger and tasted.
"Tastes like salt mud," said the Swede.
"Nevertheless, if it will sustain life, and if more of them can be
found"--suggested the American.
Removing their shoes and arming themselves with sticks, the three
adventurers waded out a little way from shore and began to poke among
the rocks for sea urchins.
In a short time a pile of living pincushions rewarded their efforts.
The spines moved continually, as though rooted in loose skin, and
occasionally one of the queer creatures rolled slowly seaward, walking
on the tips.
"Kind of a globular centipede, with the legs sticking in all
directions, isn't he?" observed Curtis, regarding one in motion.
"You would have thought so had you on one stepped!" replied Michali;
"the spines are sometimes--what you call him, poisonous. You would not
have put on your boot for many days."
"They are slow eating," said the Swede, sucking the contents from the
half of one noisily, as though it were a teacup.
"Nevertheless, with bread they are delicious," persisted Michali.
"Anything would be delicious with bread yust now," observed the
Lieutenant.
At the end of the sandy beach a steep, rocky hill uprose. By the time
the three comrades reached the top of this, the sun was pouring down
his fiercest rays upon them, and the _echini_ were tormenting their
vitals with an avenging thirst. At their right soared the majestic and
inaccessible mountains of Crete, at the left and far below stretched
the winsome sea, strewn with islands and flecked with flitting sails.
They walked for half an hour over volcanic rock, through spiteful,
thorny shrubs that clutched at their ankles and tore their clothing,
and came at last to the brink of a ravine whose walls were as
perpendicular as though they had been cut with a giant saw. In the
bed, far below, a mountain torrent dashed eagerly to sea, making sheer
leaps over smoothly worn rocks or swirling about in hollow basins.
The three looked down on it and their thirst grew.
"I could drink it all," said Curtis.
A swallow drifted by on slanting wings, darted to the brim of the
water-fall and leaped again skyward.
"How is a bird superior to a man!" exclaimed Michali.
"The wings of a man are his mind," replied the Swede. "The hedgehogs
are on fire inside of me. We must reach that water to quench them. It
would take the whole stream to put out the ones that I ate."
After another hour they came upon a goat trail that, leading from
above, ended abruptly and zigzagged from ledge to ledge down the side
of the cliff into the stream. Michali's delight was unbounded.
"Follow this trail," he cried, "and we shall a shepherd find with
water, or may be a village, who knows?"
"How far is it?" asked Lindbohm.
"How do I know? Perhaps one mile--perhaps ten."
"If it is two, the hedgehogs will burn through before I get there,"
replied Curtis. "I'm going down."
"It is very dangerous," replied Michali.
"We must yust take our chances," asserted Lindbohm.
The descent was not so difficult as it appeared. Within twelve feet of
the bottom they found themselves on the edge of a rock. Below them the
stream gurgled enticingly between banks of snowy sand.
"And now?" asked Curtis.
"We must yust yump and take our chances," replied Lindbohm.
Instinctively seizing the tails of his coat he held them out like wings
and sprang into the air.
"Hurrah!" he cried, looking up. "It's all right," and throwing himself
flat on his stomach, he sucked up long drafts of the cool, refreshing
water. In a moment Michali and Curtis were lying beside him.
"How do the goats get out of here?" asked Curtis, looking at the face
of the rock down which he had just made a flying leap.
"O, a goat is like a fly; he can skip up a pane of glass," replied
Lindbohm.
"We must now follow the stream up," said Michali. "We shall surely
find somebody. In Greece, where there is water, men are not far away."
"But we are not in Greece," objected Lindbohm. The Cretan's eyes
blazed.
"Do not say that when you are among my countrymen--it would not be
safe."
Lindbohm seized him by the hand.
"I beg your pardon," he cried. "You are right. We are in the very
heart of Greece, and we are here to shoot down anybody who says the
contrary."
For some distance up the ravine the path was over fine sand and easy.
Then they came to a long stretch tumbled full of round, smooth
bowlders. Twice they were obliged to climb steep rocks that extended
from one wall to the other like the face of a dam. They pulled
themselves up the end of these by means of the vines growing in the
ravine, whose sides still rose sheer above them to such a height that
they seemed almost to meet at the top. Finally, when Michali had
clambered before the others to the top of a rocky dam, higher and
steeper than usual, he gave a loud shout of joy and pointed
dramatically upstream. Lindbohm followed agilely, and Curtis with more
difficulty. There, perhaps a mile away, was a white village, sitting
in an amphitheater, like an audience of an ancient stadium. Behind and
at either side, patches of terraced vineyards lay smiling in the sun,
and a flock of goats was grazing on a mountain side, at the edge of a
pine forest. The mountain stream, broken into half a dozen rivulets,
wandered through the streets, and then slid and leaped, like a bevy of
children, down a tremendous, steeply slanting ledge, on the edge of
which the hither houses perilously stood.
"How do you know it's not Turkish?" asked Lindbohm.
"There are no minarets," replied Michali.
"Why, of course! Any one can tell a Greek from a Turkish village as
soon as he sees it. Come on, then!"
Michali and the Lieutenant sprang gayly forward, but soon they stopped
and looked around.
"Are you not coming?" asked Michali.
Curtis arose and sank down again. His companions ran back.
"What's the matter?" they asked in chorus.
"I can go no farther," replied Curtis. "I scratched my foot on a stone
when we were gathering those sea urchins, and it's swelling up in my
shoe."
"Why didn't you say something?" asked Lindbohm.
"A man doesn't like to squeal about a scratch, you know," replied the
American. "Pull the blamed shoe off for me, will you? Hold on! hold
on, I tell you! Holy Moses, how that hurts!"
"You'll just have to cut the shoe off," suggested the Lieutenant.
"I don't like to do that. What'll I do without shoes?"
"Ah, you will wear the beautiful Cretan boots!" cried Michali
enthusiastically. "The yellow, soft, strong boots. There is no such
leather in the world. Do you not know how Crete is famous for the
boots?"
"That settles it, then," exclaimed Curtis. "I won't stand this torture
any longer. Here, Lindbohm, old man, just slit that shoe right open,
will you?"
The foot was badly swollen, and, being released from the confining
shoe, it straightway puffed up to double the normal size. Lindbohm and
Michali each took one of the lame man's arms, and thus they proceeded
quite rapidly. Curtis held tightly to the shoe.
"They cost me eight dollars," he said, "and it's a shame to throw it
away."