some tracks left by wandering rats. A stove, red with rust and warped
beyond recognition, stood on one side, supporting an old country metal
coffeepot, filmed with black. Cobwebs hung from the rude rafters
overhead. The round home-made rugs, once brave with gay colours, looked
like little mounds of earth. Beside the broken window stood a sagging
spinning wheel, so long unused that it drooped in utter dejection, one
spindle fallen down.
At first bewildered, utterly struck dumb, then filled with horror too
deep for words, the people looked around the room, its silent pathos
striking like icy hands across their consciousness.
“She has not--_lived_ here!” Kaisa found her voice first. She stooped
and picked up a rusty pan lying beside the stove, and hung it on a bent
nail, as though in this small act she found consolation.
“What--what is that--over there?” She pointed to a curtain drawn over an
object on one side.
There was a gasp. “Maybe--maybe she is--dead--behind----”
“Dead! You fools!” shrieked Black Eric. “Didn’t we just see her?” He
staggered to the curtain, grasped it roughly. It fell, a crumpled mass
of dust and decayed cloth, disclosing the two built-in bunks, now empty,
where Mary and her daughter had slept.
“There, you see! She must be living in the outhouse, the barn. She--she
kept the cow there. Let’s look for her there.” And he passed over what
had been the door, the rest following.
“The grave!” cried the old man. “I remember where it was. Let us look
for the grave!”
“Leave the grave alone!” choked Black Eric, his face twitching horribly.
“She is out in the barn, I tell you! See, I think she is there!” He
pointed a shaking finger to another broken-down hut between the trees.
“We will find the grave,” said Silent Sven. “You said it was between the
oaks.”
“I won’t go there!” gasped Black Eric. “Let us look----”
“You’ll come with us!” Silent Sven commanded, grasping Black Eric by the
shoulder and dragging him along. Silent and awed, the crowd proceeded
through the tangle of weeds and young trees to the side of the hut
between the two oaks. Some of the men began to poke around with their
sticks, but Olga stopped them.
The old man motioned silently to a depression in the ground. “It is long
ago,” he whispered. “The grave--is sunken.”
Olga fell on her knees, sobbing convulsively. She reached out her hands
and reverently brushed aside the leaves that lay upon the grave, then
started up, a cry of terror on her lips.
Within the depression, where she had scraped the leaves away, a human
skeleton lay bleaching, stained almost to the colour of brown twigs. As
they bent over they saw a skull, through the sockets of which rose the
slender spires of a plant, covering it mercifully with clusters of
purplish-blue flowers. A rusty iron cross lay beside it.
“That is--that is where she lay--when we came up,” quavered the old man.
“She lay there----”
The women began to sob unrestrainedly, Kaisa’s voice wailing above the
others. The men turned upon Black Eric, their sticks raised high, terror
forgotten in a mighty wave of revenge that swept its fire over them.
“It isn’t true!” he gasped, his teeth clicking together. “It isn’t, I
tell you! Haven’t we seen her--all these years? Didn’t we--see
her--this----”
Before the look in their faces he slunk away. He stumbled past the hut,
the thorny branches reaching out their hands, catching him, tearing his
clothes. On down the path, his terrified flight impeded by the gnarled
roots.
Behind him followed a human avalanche, great cries issuing from their
throats, sticks raised, ready to strike. Silent Sven fought his way to
the front, called them to silence. “Let him go!” His voice rang out.
“Let him go! His fear will punish him, far, far more than we could
punish him! It will follow him, as it has followed him all these years.
But never again will it affect us, and _she_ is at rest!”
Before him, in the gap left by the branches, lay the river, coiling and
twisting in the sun, a waiting, hungry look upon its face.
THE BAMBOO TRAP
BY ROBERT S. LEMMON
From _Short Stories_
“A letter, _patrón_.”
One corner of the mosquito bar that made of the tent fly an airy,
four-walled room was lifted and a brown hand thrust in the envelope with
its array of foreign postmarks and smudgy thumb-prints, all but
concealing the familiar American stamp. Outside, the steady roar of the
Chanchan River, softened by distance as it charged down the last pitches
of the Andes on its way to the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Pacific,
blended into a musical background for the messenger’s guttural voice.
John Mather laid down the birdskin on which he was working and reached
eagerly for the missive. Any word from the outside world was a godsend
here in the jungle--doubly so when it came in the form of a letter whose
bulk proclaimed several pages of home news. He ripped open the flap with
dexterous, capable fingers and flattened the folded sheets on the camp
table before him among the litter of skinning tools, cotton, and
specimen labels.
For a space he read absorbedly, sensing behind the cold impersonality of
the typewritten words the analytical mind of the man who had dictated
them. Not until he came to the last page did his expression change and a
half frown pucker the corners of his eyes.
“Hell!” he growled. “Isn’t that the way of things? Just when I’m
finishing up my collections here, too, and planning to catch the next
steamer north. No Christmas at home this year! Let’s see--how many of
the damn things does he say he wants?” He re-read the final paragraphs
of the letter, mumbling them half aloud in the manner of one in whom
many years of living alone in the back of the world’s beyond have bred
the habit of self-conversation:
“The Department of Entomology is extremely desirous of securing
several specimens of the Cuabandan spider, to complete their
habitat group of insects from the high Andes. It seems that the
ones they intended to use proved to be rather poorly prepared and
could not be mounted satisfactorily.
“Also, I am in receipt of a letter from the International Museum in
Chicago offering to exchange a valuable collection of humming-bird
skins from Guatemala for a complete series of these same spiders.
You know how incomplete our Guatemalan material is, and therefore
how anxious I am to secure these specimens from Dr. Huston. He asks
that we furnish him with at least a dozen Cuabandans of both sexes,
and perhaps twice that number of immature ones.
“You will find the spiders inhabiting the slopes of the mountain
Chuquipata, probably between the 9,000-and 12,000-foot levels,
although reliable data on this point is impossible for me to
secure. The species is decidedly rare, and I can give you little
information to help you in your search. Beyond their appearance and
great size, with which you are perhaps familiar, and the fact that
they are carnivorous and often prey upon small birds, nothing is
really known of them. I shall depend upon you to remain in the
region long enough to gain at least an outline of their life
habits.
“I am sorry to have to give you this new assignment, Mather,
because I judge from your last letter that you have about finished
your field work on the west side of the mountains and are looking
forward to your return to New York. But I know that you will
appreciate my position and postpone sailing for the few additional
weeks which the Chuquipata expedition will entail.
“All good wishes to you from myself and the Staff.
“Sincerely yours,
“ELIOT A. RODGERS,
“_Curator of Ornithology_.”
Mather folded the letter thoughtfully and thrust it into the pocket of
his flannel shirt. With the buttoning down of the flap he seemed to
dismiss his irritation and become again the seasoned museum collector,
taking each task as it comes and subjugating all personal desires to the
duties of his calling. As he turned again to the half-skinned bird
before him he summoned his Indian guide and general assistant in the
terse Spanish fashion, “Pedro--_ven aquí!_”
“_Ahora sí, patrón_,” sing-songed the Quichua from the cooking lean-to
near by. “_Yo no más!_” In a moment he stood before the white man, a
squat, stolid figure with the humble eyes of a whipped dog.
Mather snipped the wing bones of the bird close to the body and stripped
the skin down the neck and over the skull to the eyes, turning it inside
out skilfully. A few crunching clips with his scissors separated head
from neck and exposed the base of the brain. He set the raw body aside
and commenced scooping out the clotted, grayish matter from the interior
of the skull.
As he worked he spoke pointedly. “You know Chuquipata, Pedro?”
A grunt and nod signified the Indian’s assent. In the presence of the
American his words were customarily few, a reticence inspired not so
much by awe of his employer as by inherited fear of the whites handed
down from the days of the first enslaving of his race by the Spanish
_conquistadores_ four centuries ago.
“Rough country, isn’t it? _Muchas quebradas--no?_”
Another affirmative, more vehement this time. Then, “You not go there,
_patrón_?”
Mather finished cleaning the birdskin, dusted its inner surface with
arsenic and alum powder to cure and preserve it, and turned it right
side out again.
“Yes, we go to Chuquipata in three days,” he answered as he shook the
ruffled feathers into place and began filling out the skin with cotton.
“You will go to the village to-morrow and get _cargadores_ to carry the
outfit. Four good men I will need, Pedro. Or, if you can find them, two
mules instead; pack animals are better than men, but there are not many
to be had. See what you can do.”
He dismissed the man with a wave of the hand, and tied an identifying
label to the crossed feet of his specimen. As carefully as if it were of
the most fragile and costly porcelain he wrapped the tiny green and
yellow effigy of the bird in cotton to hold it in shape until feathers
and skin should dry, and added it to the rows of similar mummies in the
tray of his collector’s trunk.
“That makes eight hundred from this region,” he commented as he made the
entry in a record book. “Not bad for three months’ work, considering the
weather I’ve had. It brings the total up to nearly two thousand for the
whole trip, and several of the species are new to science, too. Well, I
suppose I’ll have to let it go at that and begin to get ready for this
Chuquipata hike. It’ll take nearly a day just to pick up my small mammal
traps in the jungle around here.”
* * * * *
Toward the southward end of that semi-arid plateau which stretches for
three hundred rolling miles between the East and West Cordillera of the
Ecuadorian Andes lies a land that God forgot. High in the air it is, as
men measure such things--a matter of two vertical miles above the slow
lift of the Pacific out beyond the sunset. Tumbled and stark too, a
dumping ground of the Titans, a scrap heap from the furnaces in which
the world was made. For in ages far beyond the memory of man, volcanic
peaks whose summits have long been smoothed by the erosion of the
centuries belched forth their hot lava and ash and laid a blight upon
the land. Ravine, hillock, mountain, wind-swept, gaunt, and all but
uninhabited, magnificent in the splendour of their distances--such is
the setting of Chuquipata to-day, and such will it remain until Vulcan
kindles his forge anew.
Up into this sky-top world John Mather rode on a day as glittering and
telescopically clear overhead as it was harsh and dusty underfoot--up
out of the green rankness of the coast jungles into a land of
illimitable space. To the condor swinging a thousand feet in air, his
pack-train seemed like ants crawling in single file across a rugged
boulder.
Where a ravine gashed the side of Chuquipata he pitched camp on a little
grassy flat protected on three sides by the crumbly walls of the cut,
and braced his tent pegs with rocks against the tugging of a wind that
pounced down in unexpected gusts. Scrubby brush and the stunted, gnarly
trees of the high altitudes straggled here and there, promising firewood
in limited and smoky quantities. A score of feet from the tent door a
brooklet tinkled under overhanging wire grass, ice-cold and
diamond-clear. And above it all, stupendous in miles of waving,
yellowish _páramo_, dwarfing men and camp to pigmy size, the mountain
swept up and up into a cap of clouds.
When the equipment was unloaded, Mather dismissed his packers and their
two mules, for he had no way of telling how long his search for the
giant spiders might last, and there was no point in feeding idle mouths
week after week. Only Pedro he retained, to do the camp chores and leave
him entirely free for his collecting work. Besides, the Indian would be
useful when, at the end of the stay, new carriers would have to be
secured from one of the villages a day’s march away.
It was mid-afternoon before the camp was fully arranged and Mather set
out for his first survey of the area he might have to cover as with a
fine tooth comb. Hopeless enough it seemed, as he looked up at it from
the ravine head, an appallingly vast and rugged haystack in which to
search for one small needle. Were his quarry a bird that flew or an
animal that ran, the task would not have looked so hopeless. But a
spider, a crawling creature of the grass and brush, probably never
coming into fair view--that was different.
He set to work methodically, covering every type of ground that lay
between the points which his aneroid told him were eight and twelve
thousand feet above the sea. Bunch grass, scrub, rocks, volcanic ash--he
went over them all with keen and patient thoroughness but no success.
Inquiries of Pedro and the occasional mountain Quichuas whom he met
elicited no information of value; either his attempts to describe the
creatures he sought were not understood, or the spiders were so rare
that even the natives were unfamiliar with them. Evening after evening
he returned wearily to camp, empty-handed save for a brace of mountain
partridges or a few wild pigeons which he had shot for food, or the
half-dozen smaller birds of which his collection stood in need.
“If I had only had some line on the habits of the beasts it would be
easier,” he mused as he ate his cornbread lunch one day beside a stream
that plunged down the mountain far to the north of where his camp lay.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know even whether they’re day or night
feeders. About the only thing I’m sure of is that they’re not to be
found on the south slope where I’ve been working. Pedro and I will have
to move the outfit around to this side, I guess; the vegetation is quite
different here--thicker and not so dried, as though it got more rain.
I’ll take a look down this spur and then work back around the base.
There may be a good camp site down that way.”
He picked up his gun and started to descend the ridge that dropped
sharply toward a valley so far below that its brush and trees blended to
a uniform sage-green carpet of marvellous softness. Rocks and beds of
loose pumice that broke and slid treacherously as he crossed them
covered the slope. He edged his way down cautiously, grasping the rare
handholds of bush or tough grass, above him the blue spaces of the sky,
the patchwork quilt of the world far-flung below.
A half-hour of this, and then the knife edge fanned out into a broader,
easier descent across which trailing bamboo had spread an unbroken mat.
As far as Mather could see on either side, and forward to the last steep
pitch that dropped to the valley floor, that tangle of interlacing stems
and offshoots extended, three feet or so above the ground and in some
places strong enough to support a man’s full weight. Had a leafy cloth
been woven to cover the mountain’s bareness it could not have more
perfectly concealed what lay beneath.
“I’m not very keen to tackle that,” Mather muttered, halting at the edge
of the tangle. “Too tough to smash through, and not quite tough enough
to walk on--I’ve tried ground cane before.”
He looked back at the pitch he had just descended and shook his head.
“About six of one and half a dozen of the other, I guess. Damned if I’ll
shin up that ridge again. Can’t work around the edge of this bamboo,
either--those cliffs block me off. Well, here goes for a bad two hours’
work.”
He took the shells out of his gun, slung the weapon on his back so as to
leave both hands free, and started down, choosing what appeared to be
the least rugged part of the slope.
It was rough going. On hands and knees he would crawl along for a few
yards over the bamboo, then strike a weak spot and smash through to the
ground in a smother of leaves and hampering tendrils, scramble out and
go on. By the time he was half way to the bottom of the valley he was
soaked with perspiration and nearly fagged out. Only his indomitable
will and the knowledge that to turn back now would be doubly impossible
kept him going.
It was nearly sunset when he reached a comparatively level stretch
beyond which the mountain dropped away suddenly as though to make up for
lost time. Across this place the cane was unusually thick, and he was
getting along quite well, when, a few yards short of the steep slope the
supporting mat broke with a ripping, tearing noise and he slithered down
sickeningly into hot, pitchy darkness. Then a crunching jar, red lights
flickering before his eyes, and unconsciousness.
How long he lay insensible he could not tell. It must have been many
hours, for when he came to he was stiff and sore and the blood from a
long scratch across his wrist had dried. A thousand tiny hammers seemed
beating on his brain, each stroke an ache that quivered through a nerve.
Dazedly he tried to sit up, failed, and lay flat on his back, hands
clutching at the ground as he fought for control of his twitching eyes.
Gradually things steadied, and he saw that he was in a sort of
pear-shaped cave perhaps a dozen yards in diameter and half as high.
Daylight filtered through a ragged hole at its apex, pitifully weak, but
enough to disclose the mingled rocks and earth that formed the walls of
the enclosure and the whitish, diseased-looking vines that twined up
them to the opening.
“That’s where I fell through--that hole,” Mather croaked. “Yes--that
hole--fell through--yes, _fell through_. I’ve got to--get out--up
there.”
He wavered to his knees and waited grimly for the whirling in his head
to abate.
“Now, let’s--see,” he whispered hoarsely, creeping toward the wall.
Twice he made the circuit of the cave, groping his way over boulders and
loose débris that gave out a dank, nauseous odour. His hands pawed
uncertainly at the walls, seeking firm holds, but finding nothing except
the mass of vine stems, clammy and breaking at the first hard pull.
“Fool!” he growled at last. “I couldn’t get up there anyway. It slopes
in. A man can’t climb on a ceiling. God!”
He slumped back and tried to think rationally.
“Let’s see, now. I was coming down the mountain, headed west. The
steepest part was just ahead of me when I fell--forty-five-degree slope,
about. Not more than twenty feet or so away. This hole, now--yes, it’s
close to forty feet wide at the bottom--maybe five feet through to the
face of the slant----”
He started up eagerly, the realization that he could burrow his way out
clearing his brain and putting new life in his racked body. He reached
for the sheath knife at his belt, the only digging tool he had. As he
stood there with it in his hand a thought flashed over him that drove
all the zest from his face.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he muttered. “_Which is the west side?_”
He looked about helplessly at the prison that hemmed him in. Somewhere,
to right or left, ahead or behind, that mass of earth and rock must be
comparatively thin, hardly more than a shell separating him from freedom
and the broad reaches of the sky. If he could find that spot, strike
that downhill side, he might be able to dig through to the outer world
in a few hours. If he missed it, started work on the wrong side, his
burrowing would only lead him deeper into the mountain, wasting his
strength and the precious element of time. And between those two
extremes, the heart-warming right and the hopelessly wrong, was no
faintest clue to guide him to a decision. Yes, there was one--his
compass, of course! Stupid not to have thought of that before; the
surest possible proof. Everything was all right now.
He fumbled in the side pocket of his coat and drew out the instrument, a
watchlike affair in a heavy nickel case. His first glance showed the
needle bent crazily beneath the shattered glass, twisted and utterly
ruined by the crash of his fall.
Mather’s face went hard as he tilted the broken thing in his hand,
testing its uselessness with a sort of grim irony.
“So-o,” he said bitterly. “You’re about as much good to me as a piece of
cheese, aren’t you? Or a chunk of lead--because I could eat the cheese.
Well, I guess I’ll have to depend on Old Lady Luck to help me out. I may
as well pick out a place that looks like easy digging, anyhow.”
He stumbled across the cave and began to pick a way at the wall where
the earth was crumbly and yielded readily to knife and hands. A few
inches in he struck rock. Working along it, he came finally to loose
rubble, but the mass was too large for him to dislodge without starting
a disastrous cave-in from above. He would have to try another place. And
an hour had been wasted.
A second location was even less promising, but the third gave him hope.
He burrowed on stubbornly, his fingers torn and bleeding from the sharp
fragments of rock embedded in the soil like chips of glass, his muscles
aching from their exertions in the cramped space which his progress
created. Two feet, a yard--at this rate he ought to break through in a
few more hours, unless he were working in the wrong direction. At
thought of that contingency he redoubled his efforts, determined to end
the uncertainty as soon as possible. And a few inches farther on he came
squarely up against another boulder that defied every attempt to move
it.
Exhausted and reeking with perspiration, he backed out of the hole and
stretched full length on the floor of the cave. In a little while, when
the cramps had left his back and shoulders, he would start in again.
Yes, just a few minutes rest, and then--then he was roused from uneasy
half-sleep by a slow, insistent rustling like a snake crawling through
grass. He listened tensely, eyes closed in concentration, striving to
locate its direction. The sound came closer, louder, on all sides of
him, filling the cave with eerie whispers. Then suddenly it seemed to
reach a focus close by, and a creeping hairy body brushed against his
neck. With a leap he gained his feet, his eyes wide with horror.
The light in the cave had dimmed, but he could see that the walls were
alive with huge spiders, thick-legged and hideous, their bodies as large
as a sparrow’s and covered with straggly fuzz. Some were blackish in
colour, others were a sort of cherry red. They were crawling sluggishly,
as though gorged with food, down the vines that reached the opening
above his head. A dozen had gained the floor; others were nearly there.
Hundreds more were creeping in at the hole and groping for convenient
stems down which to clamber.
With a shudder Mather knew--knew that here, in this dark prison, was the
night shelter, the universal rendezvous, of the beasts he had come so
far to catch. By day they hunted through the cane tangle that covered
the mountainside, perfectly concealed and safe from all detection, and
as night approached they convened here from all directions to take
refuge from the rains which each night spilled across the land. They
were gathering now, crawling, crawling with that infernal rustling
sound----
“God!” he muttered. “And he said they were rare!” Full darkness came,
bringing to John Mather the torture of eternal nightmare. With hands,
coat, hat, he beat and crushed the furry hordes that swarmed over him.
But for every one killed two more were ready to take its place; there
seemed no end to their numbers. Their curved jaws clipped into him
wherever his skin was exposed. Though he could see nothing in the pitchy
darkness, an odour of decay told him that shreds of flesh from their
victims of days before still clung to them, and the dread of
blood-poisoning obsessed him. In a quiver of loathing and fear he fought
on bitterly hour after hour, dropping into snatches of exhausted sleep
only to struggle up again when the writhing burden on his face
threatened to choke off his breath.