I had not gone twenty yards from the cottage door ere I knew I was
watched. I had left the shepherd still dozing, in the half-conscious
state of a dazed and broken man. All night the wind had wakened me at
intervals, and now in the half-light of morn the weather seemed more
vicious than ever. The wind cut my ears, the whole firmament was full of
the rendings and thunders of the storm. Rain fell in blinding sheets,
the heath was a marsh, and it was the most I could do to struggle
against the hurricane which stopped my breath. And all the while I knew
I was not alone in the desert.
All men know--in imagination or in experience--the sensation of being
spied on. The nerves tingle, the skin grows hot and prickly, and there
is a queer sinking of the heart. Intensify this common feeling a
hundredfold, and you get a tenth part of what I suffered. I am telling a
plain tale, and record bare physical facts. My lips stood out from my
teeth as I heard, or felt, a rustle in the heather, a scraping among
stones. Some subtle magnetic link seemed established between my body and
the mysterious world around. I became sick--acutely sick--with the
ceaseless apprehension.
My fright became so complete that when I turned a corner of rock, or
stepped in deep heather, I seemed to feel a body rub against mine. This
continued all the way up the Farawa water, and then up its feeder to the
little lonely loch. It kept me from looking forward; but it likewise
kept me in such a sweat of fright that I was ready to faint. Then the
motion came upon me to test this fancy of mine. If I was tracked thus
closely, clearly the trackers would bar my way if I turned back. So I
wheeled round and walked a dozen paces down the glen.
Nothing stopped me. I was about to turn again, when something made me
take six more paces. At the fourth something rustled in the heather, and
my neck was gripped as in a vice. I had already made up my mind on what
I would do. I would be perfectly still, I would conquer my fear, and let
them do as they pleased with me so long as they took me to their
dwelling. But at the touch of the hands my resolutions fled. I struggled
and screamed. Then something was clapped on my mouth, speech and
strength went from me, and once more I was back in the maudlin childhood
of terror.
* * * * * * *
In the cave it was always a dusky twilight. I seemed to be lying in the
same place, with the same dull glare of firelight far off, and the same
close stupefying smell. One of the creatures was standing silently at my
side, and I asked him some trivial question. He turned and shambled down
the passage, leaving me alone.
Then he returned with another, and they talked their guttural talk to
me. I scarcely listened till I remembered that in a sense I was here of
my own accord, and on a definite mission. The purport of their speech
seemed to be that, now I had returned, I must beware of a second flight.
Once I had been spared; a second time I should be killed without mercy.
I assented gladly. The Folk then, had some use for me. I felt my errand
prospering.
Then the old creature which I had seen before crept out of some corner
and squatted beside me. He put a claw on my shoulder, a horrible,
corrugated, skeleton thing, hairy to the finger-tips and nailless. He
grinned, too, with toothless gums, and his hideous old voice was like a
file on sandstone.
I asked questions, but he would only grin and jabber, looking now and
then furtively over his shoulder towards the fire.
I coaxed and humoured him, till he launched into a narrative of which I
could make nothing. It seemed a mere string of names, with certain words
repeated at fixed intervals. Then it flashed on me that this might be a
religious incantation. I had discovered remnants of a ritual and a
mythology among them. It was possible that these were sacred days, and
that I had stumbled upon some rude celebration.
I caught a word or two and repeated them. He looked at me curiously.
Then I asked him some leading question, and he replied with clearness.
My guess was right. The midsummer week was the holy season of the year,
when sacrifices were offered to the gods.
The notion of sacrifices disquieted me, and I would fain have asked
further. But the creature would speak no more. He hobbled off, and left
me alone in the rock-chamber to listen to a strange sound which hung
ceaselessly about me. It must be the storm without, like a park of
artillery rattling among the crags. A storm of storms surely, for the
place echoed and hummed, and to my unquiet eye the very rock of the roof
seemed to shake!
Apparently my existence was forgotten, for I lay long before any one
returned. Then it was merely one who brought food, the same strange meal
as before, and left hastily. When I had eaten I rose and stretched
myself. My hands and knees still quivered nervously; but I was strong
and perfectly well in body. The empty, desolate, tomb-like place was
eerie enough to scare any one; but its emptiness was comfort when I
thought of its inmates. Then I wandered down the passage towards the
fire which was burning in loneliness. Where had the Folk gone? I
puzzled over their disappearance.
Suddenly sounds began to break on my ear, coming from some inner chamber
at the end of that in which the fire burned. I could scarcely see for
the smoke; but I began to make my way towards the noise, feeling along
the sides of rock. Then a second gleam of light seemed to rise before
me, and I came to an aperture in the wall which gave entrance to another
room.
This in turn was full of smoke and glow--a murky orange glow, as if from
some strange flame of roots. There were the squat moving figures,
running in wild antics round the fire. I crouched in the entrance,
terrified and yet curious, till I saw something beyond the blaze which
held me dumb. Apart from the others and tied to some stake in the wall
was a woman's figure, and the face was the face of the shepherd's
sister.
My first impulse was flight. I must get away and think,--plan, achieve
some desperate way of escape. I sped back to the silent chamber as if
the gang were at my heels. It was still empty, and I stood helplessly in
the centre, looking at the impassable walls of rock as a wearied beast
may look at the walls of its cage. I bethought me of the way I had
escaped before and rushed thither, only to find it blocked by a huge
contrivance of stone. Yards and yards of solid rock were between me and
the upper air, and yet through it all came the crash and whistle of the
storm. If I were at my wits' end in this inner darkness, there was also
high commotion among the powers of the air in that upper world.
As I stood I heard the soft steps of my tormentors. They seemed to think
I was meditating escape, for they flung themselves on me and bore me to
the ground. I did not struggle, and when they saw me quiet, they
squatted round and began to speak. They told me of the holy season and
its sacrifices. At first I could not follow them; then when I caught
familiar words I found some clue, and they became intelligible. They
spoke of a woman, and I asked, "What woman?" With all frankness they
told me of the custom which prevailed--how every twentieth summer a
woman was sacrificed to some devilish god, and by the hand of one of the
stranger race. I said nothing, but my whitening face must have told them
a tale, though I strove hard to keep my composure. I asked if they had
found the victims. "She is in this place," they said; "and as for the
man, thou art he." And with this they left me.
I had still some hours; so much I gathered from their talk, for the
sacrifice was at sunset. Escape was cut off for ever. I have always been
something of a fatalist, and at the prospect of the irrevocable end my
cheerfulness returned. I had my pistol, for they had taken nothing from
me. I took out the little weapon and fingered it lovingly. Hope of the
lost, refuge of the vanquished, ease to the coward,--blessed be he who
first conceived it!
The time dragged on, the minutes grew to hours, and still I was left
solitary. Only the mad violence of the storm broke the quiet. It had
increased in fury, for the stones at the mouth of the exit by which I
had formerly escaped seemed to rock with some external pressure, and
cutting shafts of wind slipped past and cleft the heat of the passage.
What a sight the ravine outside must be, I thought, set in the forehead
of a great hill, and swept clean by every breeze! Then came a crashing,
and the long hollow echo of a fall. The rocks are splitting, said I; the
road down the corrie will be impassable now and for evermore.
I began to grow weak with the nervousness of the waiting, and by-and-by
I lay down and fell into a sort of doze. When I next knew consciousness
I was being roused by two of the Folk, and bidden get ready. I stumbled
to my feet, felt for the pistol in the hollow of my sleeve, and prepared
to follow.
When we came out into the wider chamber the noise of the storm was
deafening. The roof rang like a shield which has been struck. I noticed,
perturbed as I was, that my guards cast anxious eyes around them,
alarmed, like myself, at the murderous din. Nor was the world quieter
when we entered the last chamber, where the fire burned and the remnant
of the Folk waited. Wind had found an entrance from somewhere or other,
and the flames blew here and there, and the smoke gyrated in odd
circles. At the back, and apart from the rest, I saw the dazed eyes and
the white old drawn face of the woman.
They led me up beside her to a place where there was a rude flat stone,
hollowed in the centre, and on it a rusty iron knife, which seemed once
to have formed part of a scythe-blade. Then I saw the ceremonial which
was marked out for me. It was the very rite which I had dimly figured as
current among a rude people, and even in that moment of horror I had
something of the scholar's satisfaction.
The oldest of the Folk, who seemed to be a sort of priest, came to my
side and mumbled a form of words. His fetid breath sickened me; his dull
eyes, glassy like a brute's with age, brought my knees together. He put
the knife in my hands, dragged the terror-stricken woman forward to the
altar, and bade me begin.
I began by sawing her bonds through. When she felt herself free she
would have fled back, but stopped when I bade her. At that moment there
came a noise of rending and crashing as if the hills were falling, and
for one second the eyes of the Folk were averted from the frustrated
sacrifice.
Only for a moment. The next they saw what I had done, and with one
impulse rushed towards me. Then began the last scene in the play. I sent
a bullet through the right eye of the first thing that came on. The
second shot went wide; but the third shattered the hand of an elderly
ruffian with a club. Never for an instant did they stop, and now they
were clutching at me. I pushed the woman behind, and fired three rapid
shots in blind panic, and then, clutching the scythe, I struck right and
left like a madman.
Suddenly I saw the foreground sink before my eyes. The roof sloped down,
and with a sickening hiss a mountain of rock and earth seemed to
precipitate itself on the foremost of my assailants. One, nipped in the
middle by a rock, caught my eye by his hideous writhings. Two only
remained in what was now a little suffocating chamber, with embers from
the fire still smoking on the floor.
The woman caught me by the hand and drew me with her, while the two
seemed mute with fear. "There's a road at the back," she screamed. "I
ken it. I fand it out." And she pulled me up a narrow hole in the rock.
* * * * * * *
How long we climbed I do not know. We were both fighting for air, with
the tightness of throat and chest, and the craziness of limb which mean
suffocation. I cannot tell when we first came to the surface, but I
remember the woman, who seemed to have the strength of extreme terror,
pulling me from the edge of a crevasse and laying me on a flat rock. It
seemed to be the depth of winter, with sheer-falling rain and a wind
that shook the hills.
Then I was once more myself and could look about me. From my feet yawned
a sheer abyss, where once had been a hill-shoulder. Some great mass of
rock on the brow of the mountain had been loosened by the storm, and in
its fall had caught the lips of the ravine and blocked the upper outlet
from the nest of dwellings. For a moment, I feared that all had been
destroyed.
My feeling--Heaven help me!--was not thankfulness for God's mercy and my
escape, but a bitter mad regret. I rushed frantically to the edge, and
when I saw only the blackness of darkness I wept weak tears. All the
time the storm was tearing at my body, and I had to grip hard by hand
and foot to keep my place.
Suddenly on the brink of the ravine I saw a third figure. We two were
not the only fugitives. One of the Folk had escaped.
I ran to it, and to my surprise the thing as soon as it saw me rushed to
meet me. At first I thought it was with some instinct of
self-preservation, but when I saw its eyes I knew the purpose of fight.
Clearly one or other should go no more from the place.
We were some ten yards from the brink when I grappled with it. Dimly I
heard the woman scream with fright, and saw her scramble across the
hillside. Then we were tugging in a death-throe, the hideous smell of
the thing in my face, its red eyes burning into mine, and its hoarse
voice muttering. Its strength seemed incredible; but I, too, am no
weakling. We tugged and strained, its nails biting into my flesh, while
I choked its throat unsparingly. Every second I dreaded lest we should
plunge together over the ledge, for it was thither my adversary tried to
draw me. I caught my heel in a nick of rock, and pulled madly against
it.
And then, while I was beginning to glory with the pride of conquest, my
hope was dashed in pieces. The thing seemed to break from my arms, and,
as if in despair, cast itself headlong into the impenetrable darkness. I
stumbled blindly after it, saved myself on the brink, and fell back,
sick and ill, into a merciful swoon.
* * * * * * *