a horse,” Enobbio said. “I, who am Enobbio, will serve you as to bread
and lodging for a year, without reward, should he not be there.”
“He will lend assuredly,” Camilla said, “to any señor such as the señor
whose need is as the señor’s.”
Sard felt in her speech the insincerity of one anxious to be rid of him:
he made up his mind at once.
“Can I reach the seashore by this path to the right?”
“Assuredly, señor. Miguel and the salt-pans are on the seashore.”
“I mean, can I come at once to the seashore?”
“Assuredly, señor.”
“It is not a good path, save where men have gone,” Enobbio said. “In
fact, it is no path, but what is opposite to path.”
“I must risk that.”
Sard thanked them both for their kindness and apologised for having
disturbed them at their supper. He set off at a fast trot along the path
towards the salt-pans. He meant to burst through the thickets to the
seashore and then run straight along the beach as hard as he could put
foot to it, to the water-front.
“It is a full three miles,” he thought, “even by the beach; but with
luck I can be there by half-past. The old man will give me some grace,
and the police-boat may be there; but I’ll do it somehow.”
In a couple of hundred yards from the clearing, he put his arm before
his eyes and thrust into the bushes towards the sea. He judged that the
sea beach would be about half a mile from him and that he would save at
least three-quarters of a mile by going by the beach. The thought of
passing right under the walls of Los Xicales helped in his decision.
He burst through his thicket into a sort of meadow of tussocks, over
which he made good time. Beyond the tussocks the woods began again,
shutting out all his bearings, but by taking a departure he kept a
straight course, as he thought, from the point where he left the track.
Just inside the woods, when he came into them, was a tangle of thorn
along which he had to run for a hundred yards before he could find a way
through. He came out on to a soft patch, which had harder ground beneath
it, though all was covered with the wreck of thorns which the bog had
killed. He floundered across it to the other side, which was a rise of
red earth covered with pines. He skirted the rise to a point where it
was split by a gully, which barred his progress.
Not more than a year or two before, some rains heavier than usual had
made all the upper ground a bog. This from its weight had at last torn
through the bank beyond it and gone in a torrent of mud and water into a
ravine below. All along the sides of this ravine were the rampikes of
trees, killed by the stuff brought down, but still standing, sometimes
with half their roots laid bare. Not less than fifty of these trees had
already been picked and sucked to their bones by the ravin of tropical
life. They now stood like a valley of bones come to life. They stood up
white in the dusk, waving their arms. Many of them glistened with decay
or with vermin shining from decay. On many of them fungus had seized
with a greed that seemed to have purpose and plan. One quite near to
Sard was a tree grey with death, barkless to the tips and swathed with a
sprawl of fungus that was scarlet at its fringes. It was as though the
fungus had sucked out all the blood from its victim, except these last
drops.
Many trees had fallen into the ruin of the bog and now lay there,
submerged or half submerged in mud. The antlers of their branches were
white. Rank things had sprouted out and hoisted themselves up by these
prongs. One bulk or stump of a tree which Sard saw in the swamp was
covered with xicales, all forward, in profuse blossom, a mass of blue
and white, crawled on by gorged flies.
Flowers like enormous flags shot up on firm fleshy stalks among the
morass. Some, which were very tall, had whitish blossoms as big as
faces, splotched with darkness like faces; these seemed to lean forward
and mow at Sard; they were like ghosts, lean and intense, but very
beautiful.
All that place of death, thick as death, sickly with the forms and the
smell of death, with that evil, low, over-abundant life which brings
death, had a sort of weltering chuckle as though it exulted in its
rottenness. The water in its pockets droned to puddle below, there was a
suck of noise like that of a beast trying to get out, but sinking back.
All this danger barred Sard’s path in the worst possible way: it shut
him from the beach and from the port: it ran north-west and south-east
across his course.
“I’ll get across,” he said: “I’m not going to lose my passage. Now that
I have come this way, I will go this way.”
The light was off the place and the sun was down, but it was daylight
still. He marked a place in the ravine, below the xicales flowers, where
he thought there would be a fairly easy crossing. A fallen tree lay
sloped there as a safe approach or step into a pool of water which might
be forded or swum. Beyond the pool two great trees lay locked together;
they were barkless, like the rest, yet so placed in the mud that Sard
judged that he could cross by them, or almost cross, to the further side
of the gully. The last two or three yards beyond the trees looked
dangerous, but not bad enough to stop him. It was quicker to cross than
to go round, whichever way he tried it.
He had no time nor very good light for survey. He made up his mind and
went at it within thirty seconds, quoting his sea-proverb of “the sooner
the quicker.” Blood-sucking water-midges were already at him in a swarm:
the drone of their horns called up their reserves: a faint smoke of them
was rising. He jumped like a cat from tussock to tussock, scrambled over
the roots of the tree on to the trunk, steadied himself, and then
balanced like a tight-rope walker down the bole to the water. He saw the
whiteness of the pilled boughs in the ink of that pond stretching deep
down. He was amazed at the depth of the water. “Better deep water than
mud,” he said; so in he went with a thrust which carried him across.
He edged along the nearer of the fallen trees, caught a good hold of a
bough, felt bottom with his feet, got one foot against the bole, gave a
great heave, and was instantly backwards in the water with the broken
bough on top of him. He came up with his eyes full of touchwood, and
felt something run along his head. He brushed it off into the water and
caught his tree again: something ran along his hand; he brushed it off,
fearing a scorpion; but instantly other things ran in its place. He
shook them off and backed away, till he saw that the things were
wood-eating beetles, whose colony he had disturbed. “A scorpion would be
a bore,” he said.
He trod water while he looked for a better place. He swam in, caught a
bough, swung himself up, and instantly went backwards into the water for
the second time with the bough in his hand.
He came up, somewhat troubled, for a third attempt. This time he dodged
in under the boughs, laid hold of the body of the tree and hove his
weight on to it.
With a sort of flounder of deliberation, the tree moved sideways to his
weight, then tilted suddenly as the heavy branches gave leverage, then
it rolled over into deeper water, carrying Sard down.
Sard had learned in a hard school to look out, to know when to let go
and when to stand-from-under. He went down with the tree as it rolled,
right under water, so that he never saw his hat again, but he kept above
the tree and emerged when it settled. Very cautiously he moved along its
bulk, as soon as it was firm, with the feeling that he was riding a
beast whose ways were not to be trusted. He felt it waver in front of
him and settle behind him as the submerged boughs went deeper into the
mud. There came a sudden crack and drop, as these gave way: the tree
soused him to his waist and then steadied. It was just then that he felt
vicious pricking bites in his legs as the leeches began.
He stood upon the bole and had “a look-see.” The second tree, which was
to be his gang-plank to the shore, was now further away than it had
been. He could no longer step to it from where he was. “A little more
swimming,” he muttered: so in he went to be done with it.
The second tree was steady in the mud, but as he neared it, he saw that
the yellow-tail bees had a nest in the bole. Away from the nest and
dangling from the boughs, there were strings of withered poison-ivy,
which he knew both by sight and from experience. He swam inshore as far
as he could to avoid these dangers, then scrambled up upon the bole and
slipped along it to the roots. A few bees came round him, to make sure,
but did not attack; he dodged the poison-plant. He scrambled up the
gabion of roots, all tangled and earthed, to look beyond at the banks.
As he stood up, the cloud of water-midges settled down upon him: ants
came from earth of the roots to bite him: the leeches of the pond bit
and sucked.
He had not liked the look of the banks from the other side, but he liked
their look much less from near at hand. They were nine feet from him
beyond a mud pond of unknown depth. They rose rather steeply from this
mud pond, in a bulge of wet, red, oozing mud, which shone and trickled.
A few blades of grass grew out of this mud, but not enough to give it
firmness. The mass looked to be bulging out to burst. A rain-storm more,
or the weight of a body trying to climb it, would bring it all down like
an avalanche out of which there would be no rising. The bank of mud was
eight or nine feet high: above it there was a shoot of reeds sheathed in
pale grey dangling and shining husks. “If I can get hold of the reeds,”
he said, “I’ll be out of this in half a minute; if I can’t, I may never
be heard of again. That mud looks evil; but the longer I look, the less
I shall see. There’s a star already.”
Looking up from where he was, he saw a blackness of trees above and
beyond the reeds. Against the blackness, the pale fluffy flowers of the
reeds stood out like gun sponges, with white moths, as big as humming
birds, wavering over them: above them a star appeared in a sky changing
from greenish to violet. It grew rapidly darker: or, rather, objects
became less distinct and the pilled branches more uncanny.
“Come along,” he said. He clambered over the roots, hung on by a root
which stood his test, and edged out along submerged roots till he
touched the mud. It was soft, bulging, full of evil, with neither foot
nor hand-hold. “If that should come down,” he said, “I shall be gulfed,
like that man in the _Venturer_ who got under the wheat-tip in the hold
and wasn’t heard of till we got the hatches off in Hamburg five months
later. But with this difference: I shall never be heard of again. The
way to get up that mud is to drive in stakes to climb by.”
There were many branches ready to hand. He tore a stake and thrust it
into the mud. It sank in for three feet as easily as if the mud were
something softer than butter. With a sobbing noise, followed by a
gurgle, some reddish water, rapidly turning to something black,
iridescent and semi-solid, exuded from about it. Sard drove in a second
stake above it, with a third above that: at each thrust the bank quaked
and water or liquid mud exuded: there was also an ominous sag in the
body of the bank. “Neck or nothing,” Sard said. He drove in a fourth
stake and instantly swung himself up on to the gabion or fan of the
roots by which he held. He was only just in time. The fourth stake broke
the last strength of the barrier: it gave outwards: a shoot of water
spurted it outwards: a swirl of running mud followed the shoot: then it
all came down with a crash, which picked up Sard’s tree, canted it out
to mid-gully, and dashed it against a dam of other trees, on to which
Sard was pitched.
He picked himself up and slipped along a tree bole to a hand-hold by
which he swung himself up to safety, just as the dam gave way. He was
back almost at his starting-point, wet to the skin, mud to the thigh,
bitten, sucked and foiled. The long pent-up seepings of the rains poured
down from the burst bank before him. “I’m well out of that,” he thought,
“but I’m going to cross this gully; for it is the short way and I still
have time.”
He trotted up the gully for a few yards, wondering at the increase in
the darkness since he stood there before. It had seemed to him that his
crossing had only taken a minute, yet here it was sensibly darker; there
were now five stars in the heaven where before was one. He broke a stake
and sounded some of the going. It was like sounding the vale of Siddim.
Then lifting his eyes from the mud, he started, for there in the gully
was the mound covered with xicale flowers. “There,” he said, “I will try
it there. I believe that the xicale flowers are a sign. I shall get
across there.”
At his feet, almost as though prepared for him, was a heap of what had
once been a tree, but was now a sodden log easy to break into lengths.
He picked up pieces of this and laid or tossed them one by one as steps
before him in the marsh; then very swiftly, holding his stick as a
balancing pole, he ran across them to the stump covered by the xicales.
To his astonishment, it proved not to be a tree at all, but a rock or
sarsen, thrusting from a patch of firm earth in which the xicales were
rooted. He edged round it carefully to the gully beyond.
The first two steps from the xicales were over his shoes; his third and
fourth, being parts of the same flounder, took him over his knees, but
brought him to the pikes of a tree on which he could tread. Branches of
this tree served as treads to his going for the next six yards, but
beyond those six yards lay ten yards of bog, which he could not clearly
distinguish nor test. Here, for the first time, he began to wish that he
had not tried his short cut across country to the beach. “All the same,”
he said, “if I can get to the beach in five minutes, or even ten, I’ll
do it yet.”
He took a swift survey of the bog ahead of him: it did not look easy;
but he always held that it is better to be in a difficulty than
expecting to be in one. He took a note of possible tussocks in a line,
drew a breath, and set off in a hop, skip and jump.
The hop took him to firmish tussock which squelched, but gave him some
support for his skip. The skip took him to something very soft with a
log about a foot beneath the surface, from which he made his jump. The
jump took him into what had looked like grass, but which proved to be
weed-covered water: he went into it over his head. He came out again,
thinking fiercely of the _Pathfinder’s_ fo’c’sle-head and of that iron
rail over which he ought at that moment to be peering. The soft green
grasses gave before him; they stroked his face gently, they closed in at
the back of his neck, he felt them caress his body and tremble along his
legs and lay enfoldments about his feet. When he thrust out his hands to
swim, they sped from him, for they were frail grass and he a strong man;
but before his stroke was made, they were back again: he felt them at
his chest; they touched his chin: they rose from the water and touched
his face. He swam six strokes and then felt for bottom. There was bottom
at five feet: he touched it, but it went over his foot; he wrenched the
foot clear, but it went over his other foot; he wrenched that foot
clear, and, lo, all those soft little frail grasses seemed to come all
about him with a whisper, and they were as heavy as lead and as strong
as sailmaker’s twine.
“Whatever I do,” Sard said, “I must not fight these things, but go where
they will let me go.”
He was not afraid, but very cautious, knowing the power of his enemy. He
had once known a boy who had been drowned by waterweed. “He was caught
deep down, where they are strong: at the surface they yield.”
When he yielded they also yielded; he floated clear; the little soft
grasses, fine as flax, unclasped their hands, they whispered about him
and let him go. Little moths floated about the water and a bird
somewhere in the thickets made a plaintive cry. All that Sard could see
was what the bull-frog sees: gleams of water, little starry blossoms on
the grasses, ripples like steel, bubbles.
He turned upon his back and swam thus for a few strokes till he slid on
to the mud in which the grasses were thickly rooted. He gripped handfuls
of the grass and pulled himself forward, but they came from the mud into
his hand. When he pressed his foot down, the mud went over it like
softness’ self. Great bubbles gurgled up and burst about him with the
smell of decay.
Sard reached forward till he could lay a hand upon something ahead which
looked like earth. It was firmer than anything there; he drew himself to
it, and pressed himself up upon it. It gave beneath him, being very
sponge, but it did not collapse, it did not try to swallow him.
“Not much further,” Sard said. “A few feet more, and I will be there.”
He said these words aloud, for the comfort of hearing a voice.
Instantly, from in front of him, came a splash and scutter: things were
swimming away from something dark in the water; he could not see what
the things were nor the thing from which they swam. “They are snakes,”
he said, “and here is one of them coming at me.”
He struck at it. To his great relief, it gave a squeal and dived from
him. “Rats,” he said. “They have a carcase here. I’ll get out of this.”
He saw that the dark thing was a body. His first thought was that it was
a man, but groping forward, he was reassured: it was one of the
half-wild razor-back hogs which the negroes allowed to stray in the
woods there. It had been drowned there some hours before and now the
rats were at it.
Sard had his hand upon it as he floundered forward, when the texture of
the stuff beneath his feet changed suddenly from mush to something
vicious. His feet, sinking into it, were held: the stuff closed over his
feet and fastened them: he sank lower down: the stuff caught him round
the ankles. He knew on the instant that he had met his match: he was
gripped to his death as the hog had been. If he did not get out of that
quag in the next minute, while he had his strength, the rats would eat
him there before dawn.
He put both hands on the hog’s back, pressing it down and himself up. He
dragged his right foot up, then slipped sideways to his left, giving
himself a nasty wrench. The bubbles gurgled up all about him: they
popped with a flapping noise. He hove again, pressing with all his power
on the carcase; he got his right knee on to the body, and urged it down
into the mud; his left foot came out of the mud; he stood up, balancing,
on the corpse, for the next leap.
“If I get into a place like that,” he said, “without anybody to give me
a purchase, I shall be posted as missing.”
He peered ahead; but there was nothing to guide him; all before him was
bog: there were pools of water, juttings of mud and grasses growing out
of water.
“If I step into that,” he said, “I may never step back to this pig nor
forward to the bank, but be caught right there. My best chance is a
standing leap, to get as near to the bank as may be.”
He measured it roughly as nine feet to hand-hold on the bank. He
gathered himself for it, swinging his arms, above the unstable corpse
which squeezed out the bubbles. He launched himself violently forward
into a mess which gulfed him to the waist. He urged himself through this
for a foot of two, felt it drag him quietly back, made a greater effort,
got a purchase on some grasses, which helped him for another two feet;
then he floundered, trampling on stuff which gave beneath him yet came
back folding over him. He thrust forward, but his feet were fast; he
fell on his face, the stuff surged up over his back. He kept his head up
and thrust with his hands and wrenched with his feet. All the fat,
weltering, bubbling bog seemed to chuckle at having got him. The bubbles
burst in his face: they were as big as inverted saucers and came from
the heart of corruption.
“I’m not going to die in a place like this,” he said. “Come out of it,
port main; up with her!”
The old rallying cry timed his efforts: it was like one man standing the
scrimmage of a pack of forwards in football. The bog gave an ounch of
release, like a beast smacking its lips. He got hold of something on the
bank. It had prickles on it, but it was solid and grew in dryness. Then
as he put his weight upon it, it came out of the ground by the roots: a
little avalanche of earth and stones came over his head, blinding him
for the moment with grit in his eyes.
He could not see; he could only flounder forward with spread arms which
availed nothing: the bog had him fast for all his effort.
Then his hand touched a liane brought down by the bush. It was a double
liane, tough as flax and as thick as honeysuckle. He caught it and
pulled on it, and instantly a great flowering spray of xicale flowers
came floundering down from above, into his face. He saw them for what
they were. “Xicale flowers,” he said, “xicales. I’m going to be saved.”
He got both hands deeply into the lianes of the xicales and pulled as he
had never pulled, never, on any yard or on any rope. Digging forward
into the squash of the bog he found something hard for one foot. “Oh,
heave,” he cried, as he had so often cried to his watch. “Oh, heave,
son, heave; oh, heave and start her; heave for glory.”
He found himself half out, with his right knee and side on hard earth
and his left leg stuck in the bog. He drew deep breath for a minute, as
once he had stopped to breathe when beaten dead by a sail five years
before. Then gathering all his powers, he hove “all together,” and
emerged erect on sound earth, shaking with the strain, and without his
left shoe.
“Xicales,” he said, “you’ve saved my life. I knew that you were mixed up
somehow with my life; and I’ll carry some of you with me in gratitude
till I’m laid in my grave.”
He picked both flowers and leaves for his soaking pocket-book. His hands
shook: he was cold to the marrow and filthy beyond description.
“I’ll do it yet,” he said. “But first I must make a shoe of sorts, or I
shall be lamed.”
He cut off his trouser-legs at the knees, with his knife. With one of
the pieces, folded fourfold, he made a shoe, and with the other he made
thongs which secured it as a sandal to his foot. It was a rough and
ready sandal, but it stayed on when put. It was good enough to run on.
He did not think of what the time might be. He roughly judged that he
could reach Las Palomas in twenty minutes or twenty-five minutes by
running along the beach with all his might. Any waterman on the front
would put him aboard: the police-launch would take him. “I can’t miss my
passage,” he said, “I must be on board. I told the old man I would be on
board.” For the first time he said to himself, “And the old man will
give me an hour’s grace.”
He set off over the headland of the gully under the clump of pines whose
blackness he had seen from the mud. It was soft but firm going on the
pine-needles; the trees over his head made a sighing which merged as he
ran into the sterner sighing of the water on the beach. At the foot of
the spur over which he had run, he came to the outcrops of the springs
all overgrown with azaleas. They ran all along the foot of the spur, so
thick with blossoms that they looked like an unbursting wave which was
yet foaming at the crest. Over all the foam of blossom the fireflies
glowed and went out, now as many as stars, now few, now like sparks, but
always beautiful. Just beyond them was the broad sea-beach, with the
breakers only fifty yards away. The sea was coming in, as it will in a
shallow bay, in half-a-dozen long lines, each glowing with mild fire,
shining as it neared the sand, then flashing like the moonlight, as the
wave burst, then gleaming greenish, and showing the globes of the stars,
as it wasted and died out upon the sand.
Sard burst through the azaleas to the sands, which stretched along for a
great distance right and left. To his right (seemingly quite near) was a
shining, which he knew to be the river near Los Xicales; beyond it, in
the darkness of trees, was the house of his dream with one light
burning. All a vast expanse of night, the sea-beach, the forest, and
muttering water lay behind him. He rushed down to the sea and let three
breakers go over him to cleanse him from the swamp and the leeches.
“Now, Sard Harker,” he said, “come on, port main, up with her!” He broke
into a steady run facing to the Los Xicales light. The pine trees on the
spit shut away a view of the anchorage so that he could not see the
_Pathfinder_; he could only hope and put his best leg foremost. “Upon
them that _hope_,” he thought, “is His mercy.” He ran at his steady pace
which, as he knew, he could keep for miles.