A TERRIBLE DANGER
Next day whilst the hands were cutting grass, Bobby, who had come on
shore with them and who was not wanted for the work, started on an
expedition of his own.
Hyalos from far at sea, to the west looks like a single rock washed by
the waves, closer and to the north you can see a high down by the peak,
and the beach seems just a strip of foreshore, but when you land it is
different, the beach is broad and the high lands are broken showing two
cañons on this the northern side.
You can in fact cross the island from north to south by taking either
of these cañons which run east and west of the main peak.
Lestrange, having helped to pull the boat up, and whilst the hands were
getting to work, took his seat on a rock for a moment to look at the
view. The island looked nothing from the sea, but the sea seen from the
island was a vision of pure enchantment. It is like that amongst the
Greek islands. One world when you are on board ship, another world when
you land.
The sea brimming in to the beach, the diamond-clear green-blue sea,
showed scarcely a ruffle; smooth as a satin sheet, under-blown by a
gentle wind it raised and let fall the _Lorna_ mirroring her and
passing on to break on the beach in foot-high waves.
Then, from the cliff foot and from the cañons cutting inland a faint
fragrance filled the air, the warm smell of lavender and thyme and all
sorts of low-growing herbs trodden on by the sun, a bouquet sweet as
that of the Corsican maquis, the incense of a hundred humble plants
that in some subtle way brought back the past. It was strange to think
that when Hyalos was a town standing in the sunlight and not in the
sea those plants were as fragrant as to-day, the thyme just as curious
in its speech and the wild lavender just as sweet. Strange, were they
not denizens of a world where flesh is more enduring than the Alps and
the daisy a million years older than the pyramid, and where a song may
outlive a people and a story a civilisation.
Here on the north beach of Hyalos or over at Naxos or Milo, if you
get by yourself with no companions but the sun and blue sea and the
sky above and the perfume of the shore, a trireme coming in with the
black bearded rowers keeping time to a flute would be perfectly in the
picture. Nothing has altered since the change in the land level that
has submerged a city and the attrition that has made the peak a shade
less high than the peak observed by the Argo or the wool ships of
Amorgos.
Leaving the beach and the grass cutters at their work, Lestrange came
up the eastern-most cañon treading the sweet herbs under foot and
avoiding the vast rocks that the course of ages had tumbled from the
peak and higher lands.
A turn of the valley brought him to a place where it widened out and
spread into a vast down, like the downlands above Freshwater in the
Isle of Wight. It was steep climbing, yet easy compared with the
stair-steep cañon, and worth the trouble, for here on the shoulder when
he reached it, he found himself in a new world, a world of silence and
high clear air, where the turf and thyme bushes spread to the edge of
the southern cliffs and beyond the cliff edge the southern sea sailless
to the remote and sharp-cut sea-line. The down sweep had only one break
in it, a broad and cup-like hollow where, sheltered from the sea winds,
grew a few distorted trees; near the trees something was moving--a wild
goat cropping the herbage.
He sat down amidst the thyme to rest and smoke a pipe. It was
delightful, just as if a door had been closed shutting out the ship and
Sam and the voyage, and the hunt after hidden treasure, ambition, the
past, everything he had ever known--even Martia. That was the strange
thing. He never once thought of her; in this feeling of release that
had come upon him there was no place for the past.
The cry of a bird from far above made him turn as he lay on his elbow
and look up. An eagle that had left its eerie on the peak was wheeling
in the blue, it passed away and he turned again on his side watching
the goat that had left the zone of the trees and was browsing now on
the grass beyond. Something lying on the turf in the centre of the
depression caught his eye, it looked at first like a small tree trunk,
ash-coloured and fluted--then he saw that it was part of a broken
pillar. Some old temple had once been there no doubt, of which it was
the sole remains.
The warmth of the sun had brought out more than the perfume of the
herbage, the tiny song of innumerable insects filled the air; he only
noticed it now when resting and close to the earth; occasionally the
chanting of gulls came from the southern cliffs, sounds that had
ringed and filled this place for ages and ages, sharing to-day in the
terrible antiquity of the grass, of the thyme bushes and the hidden
wild hyacinth bulbs that later would flower in the face of Spring with
a shameless pretence of newness.
He was, perhaps, the first man to visit that spot since--when? The
reef-strewn sea that guarded Hyalos alone could tell, and one might
have fancied that all those vague scents and tiny sounds of nature so
long unsampled by man had gained potency by reason of man's abstention
from them. They were of the essence and nature of slumber, a drug in
the air that gathered force till presently, turning from his side to
his back and with his hat over his eyes, he fell asleep.
He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder; someone was shaking him and
calling on him to wake up. It was Sam.
Sam had seen him go up the cañon and had come to look for him and
fetch him. It was dinner time; he must have been asleep for hours.
"Wake up, you old fool," said Sam, "going to sleep in the sun like
that!"
The sleeper roused himself, propped himself on his elbow and stared at
the other. Then he yawned, rubbed his eyes and sat up.
Sam had wakened him from a most delightful dream; he could not remember
a single detail of it, yet the after-taste was heavenly.
It seemed to him that he had been with a number of people who had been
leading him to some place more beautiful than earth, that he had almost
clasped an impossible happiness, the rays of which still clung to him.
"Here's your pipe and hat," said Sam. "I found them away over
there--What you want fooling about and going to sleep in the sun
without a hat for?"
Bobby, fully awake now, saw that he was not in the place where he
had fallen asleep. He must have got up in his sleep and crossed the
depression in the ground and lain down again here--led, perhaps, by
those delightful people of his dream. It was well that they had led him
no further for the cliff edge was only a few yards away.
"I must have been doing a sleep walk," said Bobby, quite unconcerned,
"sit down a moment, there's no hurry--What you say? Rot, there was no
danger. It's not the first time I've done it."
"I know," said Sam, who remembered this peculiarity of the other in
Oxford days, "but it's been darned near the last time. This stuff is
slippery and you stopped just where it begins to shelve. Get up, you
old fool, and come on. I want my dinner."
He got him up at last, and they recrossed the hollow and got back to
the beach where the men who had knocked off work for dinner were seated
about with the grass they had cut that morning lying in a pile near the
boat landing place.
After dinner this stuff had to be dealt with. It would have been easy
enough to get it into the boat in armfuls, but the real problem was how
to get it from the boat on the _Lorna_. It would have to be lifted.
They solved the problem by making it into bundles, this took time--it
took them till four o'clock, when by common consent they knocked off
work for the day.
It was curious how this alien business had tired the hands and put them
out of temper, even Bowler the proposer of it was short in manner and
Sam was not too sweet about it.
The skipper of the _Lorna_, though he had fallen in with Bowler's
suggestion, before the accomplished fact resented his ship being turned
into a hay barge; that the hay was to be used to pack antiques, not to
feed horses, was a fact that made no difference to him--he objected to
the hay. Sailors are queer things, especially small-yacht sailors, and
at supper when the question was touched on he refused to take it as a
joke.
"I'm sure I don't know what is wrong with the place," said Martia.
"You're all come back in such a bad temper--all except you," she
finished, turning to Bobby.
"No reason to," said Sam. "He's had the whole morning off snoozing on
top of that blessed downs...."
"It was such a relief to get rid of you," replied the other. "It's a
wonder I didn't stick there."
"You'd have stuck there right enough," grumbled Sam, "if you'd tumbled
over that cliff." Then lighting his pipe, off he went on deck, leaving
the others to finish their meal.
"What cliff?" asked Martia.
"Oh, Sam's an idiot," replied Bobby, "there wasn't any danger. I
climbed up to the top there and went to sleep on the grass, and I must
have got up and walked a bit in my sleep--I've done it before, and I
expect it was finding myself on land and able to use my legs that made
me do it. You must come up there to-morrow and see that place, it's
just like the Sussex downs when you get there."
"The Sussex downs?"
"Yes, you'd never believe it from here, the land goes rolling away to
the cliffs on the south side and there are wild goats and there's a
temple."
"A temple?"
Bobby paused for a moment. "No, what was I saying, a temple, there's
just a bit of an old pillar lying on the ground--I remember now, I
dreamt something about a temple being there, I suppose it was the sight
of that pillar started the idea in my mind. I had a most awfully jolly
dream. I can't remember a bit of it except that temple which has just
cropped up in my mind." He paused and fell into a frowning reverie as
though trying to recapture other parts of that jolly dream and failing.
"No, it's gone--clean."
"Maybe," said Martia, "you saw what once had been there."
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, I don't know--things leave photographs of themselves, at least
I believe they do. I was told some time ago by a person who said the
story was absolutely true, that an old farmer was coming home one night
over the downs somewhere on the south coast, where there had been a
Roman camp. When he got home he said he had seen the funniest sight on
the way--a race between a lot of milk carts."
"Milk carts?"
"That's what he said. What he did see without any doubt was a chariot
race."
"A chariot race?"
"What else could it have been? A Roman chariot would at once recall a
milk-cart to a farmer's mind."
"But surely," said Bobby, "you don't believe that nonsense?"
"Why not? We know very little about this world and its
possibilities--and now if you have done, I'll clear up. Yes, I'll go
and see that place with you, to-morrow. I'd love to."