THE PIT
We were under way early on the morning after I joined the party. Leith
had the camp astir by daybreak, and after a hasty breakfast we trailed
off behind Soma and the carriers, heading directly toward the basalt
towers that rose up in the middle of the island.
I for one was not sorry that we were making an early start. All through
the night I lay awake expecting another member of the crew to rush into
camp with a message from Newmarch to Leith, and when we started on the
trail, I took particular care to lag behind the procession for the first
few hours so that I would be in a position to intercept any diligent
runner from _The Waif_. I took the first opportunity of telling Holman
of the manner in which the bilious Englishman had hastened my departure
with the Winchester, and the youngster's face wore a perplexed
expression.
"That precious captain is Leith's partner in villainy," he cried, "but
our hands are tied. The Professor is simply crazy with delight over the
things that the brute is going to guide him to, and all our suspicions
don't amount to much when you put them together. You see we've got
nothing definite to go on at present. All we can do is to watch and
wait, and be ready to act when the moment comes. Soma and his five mates
are Leith's pets, you can bet your life on that, but we have one ally in
your friend Kaipi."
The path of the preceding day was smooth compared to the ground we
climbed over that morning. There was no trail as far as we could see.
Soma, who was in the lead, found his way by occasional marks that could
only be visible to the eye of a native. Barbara Herndon remarked on one
occasion that there was danger of our getting lost, but Leith grinned at
the remark.
"Soma has been here more than once," he replied. "What he doesn't know
about this place isn't worth knowing."
The path continued to ascend, but the thick tropical growth did not
lessen during the tramp of the morning. Leith walked with the
Professor, who appeared to be in a state of joy bordering upon hysteria,
while Holman and I in the rear tried to assist the two girls over the
roughest sections of the road. I thought as we scrambled through
impenetrable scrub and crawled over rocky piles that it was the
strangest expedition that had ever set forth. If Leith was the wicked
devil that we suspected him to be, four persons were risking their lives
to gratify the whim of a half-crazy scientist who was dying for
notoriety. He would not be turned aside from his pursuit of the
specimens which Leith had told him of; his daughters would not desert
him, and their resolve had brought Holman and myself. We were blind
automatons that the fame-seeking archaeologist was dragging at his heels.
He did not consider the sufferings of the two girls; least of all did he
think that Holman or myself was doing anything to safeguard his life or
property. He was blind to everything but the natural curiosities around
him, and he made frequent entries in the notebook that was to be his
crutch to Olympus.
Leith did not allow me to remain long in the rear. He called me up to
the front, and very politely asked me to help in hustling along the
carriers who were inclined to dawdle as the way grew rougher, and,
although I would much rather have had the task of helping the two
girls, I had to accept the position without demur. Leith was in charge,
and Holman and I were only intruders who had on standing, and whose food
was paid for by the Professor.
We halted at midday in an ugly-looking spot far up the shoulder of the
mountain that we were climbing, and through a break in the trees we
caught a glimpse of the Pacific. The ocean seemed directly beneath us,
and yet, as Edith Herndon expressed it, we seemed to be a thousand
leagues away from it.
[Illustration: "We halted at midday in an ugly-looking spot far up
the shoulder of the mountain."]
"This horrible silence makes me long for the clean sound of the waves,"
she whispered, as I rolled a stone over to make her a seat. "This
stillness stops one from speaking. Do you know that Barbara and I
haven't spoken a word during the last hour? We simply hadn't the courage
to make the effort."
Under the watchful eye of Leith I endeavoured to cheer her up, while
inwardly I cursed the prattling old Professor who chattered of the
honours he expected as the rewards of his discoveries. The affair was
enough to bring tears to the eyes of a man with a heart of stone.
"I'm just thinking we should have stopped this business before it got
this far," muttered Holman, as he reached closer to get a light for his
cigarette.
"What should we have done?" I asked.
"I don't know," he growled. "We should have done something though. Pity
we didn't lose Leith overboard with your friend Toni."
"What's wrong now? Has anything happened?"
"No, nothing has happened," he replied. "I wish something would. This
silence is beginning to put my nerves on edge, but I'm afraid to yell
out for fear that I might wake something that has been dead for
centuries. Does it strike you that way?"
"Very much."
"Well, it's the same with the girls," muttered Holman. "The stillness of
the place has brought their ordinary conversational tone down to a
whisper."
Leith lurched across and interrupted our conversation. "Get the boys
going, Mr. Verslun," he said. "We want to cross the Vermilion Pit while
the light is good, and it is hard going from here on."
We started forward up the boulder-strewn slope, and with each step the
difficulties of the ascent became greater. I took an axe and helped Soma
chop a path which would make it easier for the two sisters, but no
matter what amount of trouble we took, they found it a difficult matter
to follow. Once, goaded into fury by Leith's attempts to hurry the girls
when Holman was assisting them over a particularly rough stretch, I
turned upon the old scientist who was puffing along with the natives in
the lead.
The half-insane ancient heard my outburst to the end, staring at me
through the thick lenses of his glasses as if I was some new kind of a
bug whose appearance he wished to implant firmly within his mind.
"Science calls for sacrifices," he squeaked. "If my daughters are
heroines who wish to share my hardships in the pursuit of information
that will be of great benefit to the world, I fail to see what it has to
do with you, sir!"
"But they have no interest in your silly discoveries," I cried. "They
are doing this infernal tramp to look after you. Do you hear?"
"Confound you, sir!" he screamed. "Mind your own business and don't
interfere with mine!"
I choked down my wrath as Leith came crashing through from the rear, and
the old egoist, flushed and ruffled, dropped back to meet him, evidently
convinced of my insanity through my inability to appreciate his efforts
to prove that the skulls of long-dead Polynesians possessed peculiar
formations they were foreign to the islanders of the present day.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when we began to draw near
the Vermilion Pit which Leith had mentioned when he had urged haste at
the midday luncheon. The surroundings became more strange and mysterious
with each step we took. The basalt peaks that we had noticed from the
deck of _The Waif_ were now quite close to us, and they seemed to move
in upon us from both sides. The trees and lianas became less numerous,
and the black rocks came toward us in a sinister manner that conjured up
thoughts of a dead something toward which the encircling ridges were
guiding us like the arms of a corral. The place was fear-inspiring. It
had the unearthly appearance that made the imaginative minds of the
ancients people the silent woods with devils and dryads. The soft
moaning of the Pacific was barred out by the leafy barriers, and we
walked in a silence that was tremendous. The ticking of our watches
sounded to our strained ears like the blows of a hammer, and once, when
the Professor sneezed mightily, Miss Barbara gave a scream of fear
before she realized what had caused the noise.
The ascent became still more difficult. The natives puffed under their
loads, and Holman rushed angrily to the front and demanded a halt on
behalf of the girls struggling in the rear. During the few minutes that
Leith grudgingly allowed them in which to recover their breath, the
youngster hurried up to the spot where I was busy fixing the loads of
the natives, and in a nervous whisper he asked my opinion of the route.
"Where the dickens are we going?" he cried.
"This is the most eerie-looking patch of country that I have ever seen
in my life."
"Leith said that we had to reach the Vermilion Pit before the sun went
down," I replied. "I guess it is somewhere at the end of this staircase
that we are trying to climb."
"Oh, Gee!" cried the boy. "Say, this game has got those two girls scared
to death. There's something wrong with the place, Verslun. My skin feels
it. The island looks as if it has been left too long by itself, and I'm
beginning to think that all those rocks and trees are watching us and
wondering what we want here."
That was how it felt to me from the moment I had left _The Waif_, and I
had tried vainly to overcome the feeling. The island seemed to resent
the appearance of human beings. It possessed a personality through being
too long by itself. It had wrapped itself round a dead past, and we were
filled with the awe which suddenly strikes the unimaginative globe
trotter who wanders into the cool recesses of a Hindu temple. And I was
of the same opinion as Holman regarding the trees and rocks. Traders in
the lonely spots of the Pacific have gone insane through becoming
convinced that the mountains and the trees were watching their
movements, and the trees and rocks upon the Isle of Tears struck me as
possessing a watchfulness that smacked of the supernatural. I thought
of the story which the sailor told in the café chantant at Papeete just
then, and I was inclined to give it more credence than I had at the
moment he narrated it.
But I tried to rally Holman so that he would cheer up Edith Herndon and
her sister.
"You're like an old woman," I growled. "Go back to the girls and make
them laugh over some funny stories instead of getting nightmares about
the scenery. Why, this place reminds me of a real pretty bit of scenery
near my home town in Maine."
Of course I lied when I said that. You couldn't find any scenery like
that outside the tropics. That place was queer; there wasn't the
slightest doubt about that. I recalled as I stumbled along how a trader
at Metalanim in the Caroline Islands had swam out to our schooner when
we were down there the previous year, and how the poor devil had told
old Hergoff, the captain, that a chatak tree at the back of his hut had
begun to make faces at him, and I began to understand the complaint that
had gripped that trader as I climbed along by the side of the puffing
islanders. He had been jammed up too close against a personality. When a
place has been too long by itself, as Holman had remarked, it cultivates
a strength that tries the nerves of an explorer, more especially if it
is situated near the equator. Places like Papua, the Caroline Islands,
parts of Borneo, and the Never Never country in inland Australia seem
to possess a fist that attempts to push you off when you endeavour to
bring the atmosphere of civilization into a silence that has been
unbroken for centuries.
Holman went back to the sisters, and we moved slowly forward. The basalt
rocks came closer, showing plainly through the breaks in the lianas that
grew less thickly on the higher slopes. The creepers fell away slowly,
as if they had done the work they were required to do, and before we
realized it we were walking between two natural walls of rock about
eighteen feet high, above which the sky looked like a strip of blue
paper that rested upon the marvellously even tops of the barriers.
The Professor was gurgling joyfully as we tramped through that miniature
cañon. He was bumping up against new wonders at every footstep, and he
stumbled continuously as he endeavoured to jot down his impressions in
the fat notebook. The Professor felt nothing mysterious about the place.
He had the bullet-proof skin of your cold analyst who yearns eternally
for facts.
"Wonderful geological formation!" he chattered. "My friend Professor
Hanlaw of Oakland would enjoy a glimpse of this spot. A geologist could
spend a lifetime here."
Leith's sallow face was disturbed by a grin as he listened to the old
science-crazed ancient disbursing information regarding the formation of
the rock. It troubled me little at that moment whether feldspar and
augite were the two largest components, and I knew that Holman and the
two girls were not interested. We knew that the place was ugly and
sinister, but feldspar and augite didn't give it that look.
The height of the walls increased as we advanced. We were in a narrow
roadway scarcely more than twelve feet across, while on each side rose
the nearly perpendicular rocks that blocked our view of the country
immediately beyond. The ground beneath our feet was covered with small
bits of lava from the crevices of which the moist flabby leaves of the
nupu plant stuck up like fat green fingers.
As we stared ahead we noted that the road seemed to dip suddenly as if
the highest point of the island was reached at that spot, and the
prospects of a walk upon a down grade were cheering after the stiff
climbs. As we neared the place, Soma, who was walking about ten paces in
front of the carriers, slackened speed, and the islanders dropped back
till Leith and the Professor led the procession.
Leith halted and beckoned to the two girls and Holman, who were some
distance in the rear. "Hurry up!" he cried. "You'll get the sight of
your lives in a few moments."
"What is it?" gurgled the Professor.
Leith grinned as the scientist dipped his lead pencil into his open
mouth so that he would be able to dab down first impressions the moment
he turned his thick lenses upon the wonders.
"You'll see in a moment," replied the big brute, as he walked slowly
forward, and just as he spoke, we did see.
A ridge of bright vermilion came up suddenly about one hundred feet from
the point where the road seemed to dip, and we walked forward wondering
what lay between the spot where the track ended and the bright barrier
of rock that appeared to rise higher as we approached the end of the
trail. We seemed to sense the approach of something that chilled and yet
attracted. The place possessed a devilish fascination. It seemed to
repel with its very uncanniness, and yet I was aware that I was
imitating Holman in thrusting forward my head in an endeavour to see
what filled the space that was hidden from our eyes.
The desire was soon satisfied. Fifteen paces brought us to a point that
left the strange curiosity naked to our eyes. The vermilion walls,
thirty yards in front of us, formed part of the sides of an enormous
circular crater, and we stood spellbound as we pulled up within a few
feet of the ledge and looked into the fearsome depths beneath.
"Ladies and gentlemen," drawled Leith, looking around at us with the
air of a cheap showman springing a novelty upon a gaping mob, "you are
on the edge of the Vermilion Pit, the greatest wonder between Penang and
the Paumotus."
[Illustration]