A WHITE POOL--AND AFTERWARDS
We must have been a third of a mile from the shore when the doctor
spoke, and three hundred yards, perhaps, from the pool in the glens. It
is true that the storm seemed to clear the air; but not as we had
expected, nor as fair argument led us to hope. Wind there was, hot and
burning on the face; but it brought no cool breath in its path, and did
but roll up the fog in banks of grey and dirty cloud. While at one
minute you would see the wood, green and grassy, as in the evening
light, at another you could scarce distinguish your neighbour or mark
his steps. To me, it appeared that the island dealt out life and death
on either hand; first making a man leap with joy because he could
breathe again; then sending him gasping to the earth with all his
senses reeling and his brain on fire. Any shelter, I said, would be
paradise to men in the bond of that death-grip. Sleep itself, the
island's sleep, could have been no worse than the agony we suffered.
"Doctor," I cried, as I ran panting up to him, "Edmond Czerny's house
or another--show us the way, here and now! We cannot fare worse; you
know that. Lead on and we follow, wherever it is."
The others said, "Aye, aye, lead on and we follow." Desperation was
their lot now; the madman's haste, the driven man's hope. There, in
that fearful hollow, lives were ebbing away like the sea on a shallow
beach. They fought for air, for breath, for light, for life. I can see
Peter Bligh to this day as he staggers to his feet and cries, wildly:
"The mouth of blazes would be a Sunday parlour to this! Lead on,
doctor, I am dying here!"
So he spoke; and, the others lurching up again, we began to race
through the wood to a place where the fog lay lighter and the mists had
left. Wonderful sights met our eyes--aye, more wonderful than any words
of mine could picture for you. In the air above flocks of birds wheeled
dizzily as though the very sky was on fire. Round and round, round and
round, they darkened the heaven like some great wheel revolving; while,
ever and anon, a beautiful creature would close its wings and swoop to
death upon the dewy grass. Other animals, terrified cattle, wild dogs,
creatures from the heights and creatures from the valleys, all huddled
together in their fear, raised doleful cries which no ear could shut
out. The trees themselves were burnt and blackened by the storm, the
glens as dark as night, the heaven above one canopy of fiery cloud and
stagnant vapour.
Now, I knew no more than the dead what Duncan Gray meant when he said
that he would lead us to Czerny's house. A boat I felt sure he did not
possess, or he would have spoken of it; nor did he mean that we should
swim, for no man could have lived in the surf about the reefs. His
steps, moreover, were not carrying him towards the beach, but to that
vile pool in the ravine wherein a man had died on the night we came to
Ken's Island. This pool I saw again as we ran on towards the headland;
and so still and quiet it seemed, such a pretty lake among the hills,
that no man would have guessed the terror below its waters or named the
secret of it. Nevertheless, it recalled to me our first night's work,
and how little we could hope from any man in Czerny's house; and this I
had in my mind when the doctor halted at last before the mouth of an
open pit at the very foot of the giant headland. He was blown with
running, and the sweat dropped from his forehead like water. The place
itself was the most awesome I have ever entered. On either hand, so
close to us that the arms outstretched could have touched them, were
two mighty walls, which towered up as though to the very sky beyond the
vapour. A black pit lay before us; the fog and the burning wind in the
woods we had left. Silence was here--the awful silence of night and
solitude. No eye could fathom the depths or search the heights. What
lay beyond, I might not say. The doctor had led us to this wilderness,
and he must speak.
"See here," he cried, mopping the sweat from his face and rolling up
his shirt-sleeves, like a man who has good work to do, "the road's down
yonder, and we need a light to strike it. Give me your hand, one of
you, while I fetch up the lantern. A Dutchman didn't write of Ken's
Island for nothing. I guess he knew we were coming his way."
He stretched out a hand to me with the words, and I held it surely
while he bent over the pit and groped for the lantern he spoke of.
"Three days ago," said he, "I ran a picnic here all to myself. It is as
well to find new lodgings if the old don't suit. I left my lantern
behind me, and this it is, I reckon."
He pulled up from the depths a gauze lantern such as miners use, and,
lighting it, he showed us the heart of the pit. It was a deep hole, 30
feet down, perhaps, and strewn with rubbish and fragments of the iron
rocks. But what was worth more to us, aye, than a barrel of gold, was
the sweet, fresh air which came to us through a tunnel's mouth as by a
siphon from the open sea herself; and, blowing freshly on our faces,
sent us quickly down towards it with glad cries and the spirits of men
who have broken a prison gate.
"The sea, the sea, by all that's holy!" cries Peter Bligh. "Oh, doctor,
I breathe, I breathe, as I am a Christian man, I breathe!"
We tumbled down into the pit headlong and sat there for many minutes
wondering if, indeed, the death were passed or if we must face it again
in the minutes to come. There before us, once we had passed the
tunnel's mouth, stood a vast, domed hall which, I declare, men might
have cut and not Nature in the depths of that strange cavern.
Open to the day through great apertures high up in the face of the
cliff, a soft glow like the light which comes through the windows of a
church streamed upon the rocky floor and showed us the wonders of that
awesome place. Room upon room, we saw, cave upon cave; some round like
the mosques a Turk can build, others lofty and grand as any cathedral;
some pretty as women's dens, all decked with jewels and ornament of
jasper and walls of the blackest jet. These things I saw; these rooms I
passed through. A magician might have conjured them up; and yet he was
no magician, but only Duncan Gray, the man I knew for the first time
yesterday, but already called a comrade.
"Doctor," I said, "it is a house of miracles, truly! But where to
now--aye, that's the question; where to?"
He sat upon a stone, and we grouped ourselves about him. Peter Bligh
took out a pipe from his pocket and was not forbidden to light it.
There was a distant sound in the cave like that of water rushing, and
once another sound to which I could give no meaning. The doctor himself
was still thinking deeply, as though hazarding a guess as to our
position.
"Boys," he said, "I'll tell you the whole story. This place was
discovered by Hoyt, a Dutchman. If Czerny had read his book, he would
know of it; but he hasn't. I took the trouble to walk in because I
thought it might be useful when he turned nasty. It is going to be
that, as you can see. Follow through to the end of it, and you are in
Czerny's house. Will you go there or hold back? It's for you to say."
I filled my pipe, as Peter had done, and, breathing free for the first
time for some hours, I tried to speak up for the others.
"A sailor's head tells me that there is a road from here to the reef;
is that true?" asked I at last; "is it true, doctor?"
He put on his glasses and looked at me with those queer, clever eyes of
his. I believe to this day that our dilemma almost pleased him.
"A sailor's head guesses right first time," was his answer. "There is a
road under the sea from here to Czerny's doorstep. I'm waiting to know
if it's on or back. You know the risks and are not children. Say that
you turn it up and we'll all go back together, or stay here as wisdom
dictates. But it's for you to speak----"
We answered him all together, though Peter Bligh was the first he
heard.
"The lodgings here being free and no charge for extras," said Peter,
sagely.
And Dolly Venn, he said:
"We are five, at any rate. I don't suppose they would murder us. After
all, Edmond Czerny is a gentleman."
"Who shoots the poor sailormen that's wrecked on his shore;" put in
Seth Barker, doggedly.
"He'd be of the upper classes, no doubt;" added Peter Bligh; "he'll see
that we don't sleep in damp sheets! Aye, 'tis the devil of a man,
surely!"
Doctor Gray heard them patiently--more patiently than I did--and then
went on again:
"If you stop here, you starve; if you go on--well, you take your luck.
Should the fog lift up yonder, you'll be having Czerny back again. It's
a rule-of-three sum, gentlemen. For my part, I say 'go on and take your
luck,' but I won't speak for you unless you are willing."
"None more willing," cried I, coming to a resolution on the spot.
"Forward let it be, and luck go with us. We'd be fools to die like rats
in a trap when there's light and food not a mile away. And cowards,
too, boys--cowards!" I added.
The others said: "Aye, aye, we're no cowards!" And all being of one
mind we set out together through that home of wonders. Edmond Czerny's
house we sought, and thither this iron road would carry us. A path more
beautiful no man has trodden. From this time the great, church-like
grottos gave place to lower roofs and often black-dark openings. By
here and there we dived into tunnels wondrously cut by some forgotten
river of fire in the ages long ago, and, emerging again, we entered a
wilderness of ravines wherefrom even the sky was to be seen and the
cliffs towering majestically above us. Then, at last, we left the
daylight altogether, and going downward as to the heart of the earth I
knew that the land lay behind us and that the sea flowed above our
heads.
Reader of a plain seaman's story, can you come with me on such a
journey as I and four stout hearts made on that unforgotten day? Can
you picture, as I picture now, that dark and lonesome cavern, with the
sea beating upon its roof and the air coming salt and humid to the
tongue, and the echo of distant breakers in your ears, and always the
night and the doubt of it? Can you follow me from grotto to grotto and
labyrinth to labyrinth, stumbling often by the way, catching at the
lantern's dancing rays, calling one to the other, "All's well--lead
on"? Aye, I doubt that you can. These things must be seen with a man's
own eyes, heard with his own ears, to be understood and made real to
him. To me that scene lives as though yesterday had brought it. I see
the doctor with his impatient step. I see Peter Bligh stumbling after
him. I hear little Dolly Venn's manly voice; I help Seth Barker over
the rocks. And these four stand side by side with me on the white
pool's edge. The danger comes again. The fear, the loathing, are
unforgotten.
I speak of fear and loathing and of dread white pool, and you will ask
me why and how we came thereto. And so I say that the water lay,
may-be, a third of a mile from the land, in a clear, transparent basin
of some quartz or mica, or other shining mineral, so that it gave out
crystal lights even to the darkness, and the arched grotto which held
it was all aglow, as though with hidden fires. A silent pool it was, we
said, and our path seemed to end upon its brink; but even as we stood
asking for a road, all the still water began to heave and foam, and, a
great creature rising up from the depths, the lantern showed us a
monster devil-fish, and we fell back one upon the other with affrighted
cries. Nor let any man charge us with that. A situation more perilous I
have never been in, and never shall. The fish's terrible suckers
searching all the rocks, the frightful eye of the brute, the rushing
water, the half-light worse than darkness, might well have driven back
a stronger man than I. And upon the top of that was the thought that by
such lay the road to safety. We must pass the grotto, or perish of
starvation.
Now, the first fright of this encounter was done with in a minute or
two, and when it was plain to us that the devil-fish was stuck in the
pool which some tide of the sea fed, perhaps, and that his suckers
could not reach the higher part of the rock, we began to speak of it
rationally, and to plan a way of going over. I was for emptying our
revolvers into the fish straight away; but the doctor would have none
of it, fearing the report, and, remembering what he had read in the
Dutchman's book, he came out with another notion.
"Hoyt went over the rocks," said he, calmly, while we still drew back
from the pool affrighted, our hearts in our boots I make sure, and not
one of us that did not begin to think of the fog again when he saw the
devil-fish struggling to be free. "It's not a sweet road, but better
than none at all. Keep behind me, boys, and mind you don't slip or
you'll find something worse than sharks. Now for it, and luck go with
us."
With this he began to clamber round the edge of the pool, but so high
up that it did not seem possible for the fish to touch him. There was
good foothold on the jagged hunks of rock, and a man might have gone
across safely enough but for the thought of that which was below him.
For my part, I say that my eyes followed him as you may follow a walker
on a tight-wire. One false step would send him flying down to a death I
would not name, and that false step he appeared to make. My God! I see
it all so clearly now. The slip, the frantic clutch at the rocks, the
great tentacle which shot out and gripped his leg, and then the flash
of my own revolver fired five times at the terrible eyes below me.
There were loud cries in the cave, the wild shouts of terrified men,
the smoke of pistols, the foaming and splashing of water, all the signs
of panic which may follow a fellow-creature about to die. That the
devil-fish had caught the doctor with one of his tentacles you could
not doubt; that he would drag him down into that horrid stomach, I
myself surely believed. Never was a fight for life a more awful thing
to see. On the one hand a brave man gripping the rocks with hands and
foot until the crags cut his very flesh; on the other that ghoul-like
horror seeking to wind other claws about its prey and to drag it
towards its gaping mouth. What miracle could save him, God alone knew;
and yet he was saved. A swift act of his own, brave and wonderful,
struck the sucker from the limb and set him free. Aye, what a mind to
think of it! What other man, I ask, would have let go his hold of the
rocks when hold meant so much to him and that fish swam below?
Nevertheless, the doctor did so. I see it now--the quick turn--the
knife drawn from its sheath--the severed tentacle cut clean as a cork,
the devil-fish itself drawing back to the depths of the crimson pool.
And then once more I am asking the doctor if he is hurt; and he is
answering me, cheerily, "Not much, captain, not much," and we four are
following after him as white as women, I do believe, our nerves
unstrung, our hearts quaking as we crossed the dreadful pit.
Well, we went over well enough, shirk it as we might. The bullets which
sent the devil-fish to the bottom sent him there to die, for all I
knew. The pool itself was red with blood by this time, and the waters
settling down again. I could see nothing of the fish as I crossed over;
and Seth Barker, who came last and, like a true seaman, had forgotten
his fear already, swung the lantern down to the water's edge, but
discovered nothing. The doctor himself, excited as you might expect,
and limping with his hurt, simply said, "Well over, lads, well over";
and then, taking the lantern from Seth Barker's hands, he would not
wait to answer our curiosity, but pushed on through the tunnel.
"It's not every man who has a back-door with a watch-dog like that,"
said he, as he went; "Edmond Czerny, may-be, does not know his luck;
I'll tell him of it when we're through. It won't be a long while now,
boys, and I'm glad of it. My foot informs me it's there, and I shall
have to leave a card on it just now."
"Then the sooner you let us look at it the better, doctor," said I.
"Aye, but you were nearly gone. My heart was in my throat all the time
you stood there."
"Which is no place for a man's heart to be," said he, brightly;
"especially at the door of Edmond Czerny's house."
He stood a moment and bade me listen. We were in an open place of the
tunnel then, and a ray of light striking down from some lamp above us
revealed an iron ladder and a wooden trap above it. The sea I could
hear beating loudly upon the reef; but with the sea's voice came
others, and they were human.
"Yes," said the doctor, quietly, "we are in the house all right, and
God knows when we shall get out of it again!"
And then, with a cry of pain, he fell fainting at my feet.