WHERE THE DEVIL LIVED.
Caius did not know how long he slept. He woke with a sudden start and a
presentiment of evil. It was quite dark, as black as starlight night
could be; for the foam of the waves hardly glimmered to sight, except
here and there where some phosphorescent jelly was tossed among them
like a blue death-light. What had wakened Caius was the sound of voices
talking ahead of the cart, and the jerk of the cart as it was evidently
being driven off the smooth beach on to a very rough and steep incline.
He sat up and strove to pierce the darkness by sight. They had come to
no end of their journey. The long beach, with its walls of foam and of
dune, stretched on without change. But upon this beach they were no
longer travelling; the horse was headed, as it were, to the dune, and
now began to climb its almost upright side.
With an imprecation he threw himself out of the cart at a bound into
sand so soft that he sank up to the knees and stumbled against the
upright side of the hill. The lower voice he had heard was silent
instantly. O'Shea stopped the pony with a sharp word of interrogation.
"Where are you going?" shouted Caius. "What are you going to do?"
He need not have shouted, for the wind was swift to carry all sounds
from his lips to O'Shea; but the latter's voice, as it came back to him,
seemed to stagger against the force of the wind and almost to fail.
"Where are we going? Well, we're going roight up towards the sky at
present, but in a minute we'll be going roight down towards the other
place. If ye just keep on at that side of the cart ye'll get into a
place where we'll have a bit of shelter and rest till the moon rises."
"What is the matter? What are you turning off the road for?" Caius
shouted again, half dazed by his sleep and sudden awakening, and wholly
angry at the disagreeable situation. He was cold, his limbs almost numb,
and to his sleepy brain came the sudden remembrance of the round valleys
in the dune of which he had heard, and the person who lived in them.
His voice was inadequately loud. The ebullition of his rage evidently
amused O'Shea, for he laughed; and while Caius listened to his laughter
and succeeding words, it seemed to him that some spirit, not diabolic,
hovered near them in the air, for among the sounds of the rushing of the
wind and of the sea came the soft sound of another sort of laughter,
suppressed, but breaking forth, as if in spite of itself, with
irresistible amusement; and although Caius felt that it was indulged at
his own expense, yet he loved it, and would fain have joined in its
persuasive merriment. While the poetical part of him listened, trying to
catch this illusive sound, his more commonplace faculties were engaged
by the answer of O'Shea:
"It's just as ye loike, Mr. Doctor. You can go on towards The Cloud by
the beach if you've got cat's eyes, or if you can feel with your toes
where the quicksands loy; but the pony and me are going to take shelter
till the moon's up."
"Well, where are you going?" asked Caius. "Can't you tell me plainly? I
never heard of a horse that could climb a wall."
"And if the little beast is good-natured enough to do it for ye, it's as
shabby a trick as I know to keep him half-way up with the cart at his
back. He's a cliver little pony, but he's not a floy; and I never knew
that even a floy could stand on a wall with a cart and doctor's medicine
bags a-hanging on to it. G'tup!"
This last sound was addressed to the pony, which in the darkness began
once more its astonishing progress up the sand-hill.
The plea for mercy to the horse entered Caius' reason. The spirit-like
laughter had in some mysterious way soothed his heart. He stood still,
detaining O'Shea no longer, and dimly saw the horse and cart climb up
above him. O'Shea climbed first, for his tones were heard caressing and
coaxing the pony, which he led. Caius saw the cart, a black mass,
disappear over the top of the hill, which was here not more than twenty
feet high. When it was gone he could dimly descry a dark figure, which
he supposed to be the boy, standing on the top, as if waiting to see
what he would do; so, after holding short counsel with himself, he, too,
began to stagger upward, marvelling more and more at the feat of the
pony as he went, for though the precipice was not perpendicular, it had
this added difficulty, that all its particles shifted as they were
touched. There was, however, some solid substance underneath, for,
catching at the sand grasses, clambering rather than walking, he soon
found himself at the top, and would have fallen headlong if he had not
perceived that there was no level space by seeing the boy already
half-way down a descent, which, if it was unexpected, was less
precipitous, and composed of firmer ground. He heard O'Shea and the cart
a good way further on, and fancied he saw them moving. The boy, at
least, just kept within his sight; and so he followed down into a
hollow, where he felt crisp, low-growing herbage beneath his feet, and
by looking up at the stars he could observe that its sandy walls rose
all around him like a cup. On the side farthest from the sea the walls
of the hollow rose so high that in the darkness they looked like a
mountainous region.
They had gone down out of the reach of the gale; and although light airs
still blew about them, here the lull was so great that it seemed like
going out of winter into a softer clime.
When Caius came up with the cart he found that the traces had already
been unfastened and the pony set loose to graze.
"Is there anything for him to eat?" asked Caius curiously, glad also to
establish some friendly interchange of thought.
"One doesn't travel on these sands," said O'Shea, "with a horse that
can't feed itself on the things that grow in the sand. It's the first
necessary quality for a horse in these parts."
"What sort of things grow here?" asked Caius, pawing the ground with his
foot.
He could not quite get over the inward impression that the
mountainous-looking region of the dune over against them was towered
with infernal palaces, so weird was the place.
O'Shea's voice came out of the darkness; his form was hardly to be seen.
"Sit yourself down, Mr. Doctor, and have some bread and cheese--that is,
if ye've sufficiently forgotten the poies of the old maids. The things
that grow here are good enough to sit on, and that's all we want of
them, not being ponies."
The answer was once more an insult in its allusion to the pies (Caius
was again hungry), and in its refusal of simple information; but the
tone was more cheerful, and O'Shea had relaxed from his extreme brevity.
Caius sat down, and felt almost convivial when he found that a parcel of
bread and cheese and a huge bottle of cold tea were to be shared between
them. Either the food was perfect of its kind or his appetite good
sauce, for never had anything tasted sweeter than the meal. They all
three squatted in the darkness round the contents of the ample parcel,
and if they said little it was because they ate much.
Caius found by the light of a match that his watch told it was the hour
of seven; they had been at hard travel for more than four hours, and had
come to a bit of the beach which could not be traversed without more
light. In another hour the moon would be up and the horse rested.
When the meal was finished, each rested in his own way. O'Shea laid
himself flat upon his back, with a blanket over his feet. The boy
slipped away, and was not seen until the waving grass on the tops of the
highest dunes became a fringe of silver. Until then Caius paced the
valley, coming occasionally in contact with the browsing pony; but
neither his walk nor meditation was interrupted by more formidable
presence.
"Ay--ee--ho--ee--ho!" It was a rallying call, a shrill cry, from O'Shea.
It broke the silence the instant that the moon's first ray had touched
the dune. The man must have been lying looking at the highest head, for
when Caius heard the unexpected sound he looked round more than once
before he discovered its cause, and then knew that while he had been
walking the whole heaven and earth had become lighter by imperceptible
degrees. As he watched now, the momentary brightening was very
perceptible. The heights and shadows of the sand-hills stood out to
sight; he could see the line where the low herbage stopped and the
waving bent began. In the sky the stars faded in a pallid gulf of violet
light. The mystery of the place was less, its beauty a thousandfold
greater: and the beauty was still of the dream-exciting kind that made
him long to climb all its hills and seek in all its hollows, for there
are some scenes that, by their very contour, suggest more than they
display, and in which the human mind cannot rid itself of the notion
that the physical aspect is not all that there is to be seen. But
whatever the charm of the place, now that light had revealed it Caius
must leave it.
The party put themselves in line of march once more. The boy had gone on
up where the wall of the dell was lowest, and Caius tramped beside
O'Shea, who led the pony.
Once up from the hollow, their eyes were dazzled at first with the flash
of the moonlight upon the water. From the top of the sand ridge they
could see the sea out beyond the surf--a measureless purple waste on
which far breakers rose and blossomed for a moment like a hedge of
whitethorn in May, and sank again with a glint of black in the shadow of
the next uprising.
They went down once more where they could see nothing but the surf and
the sand-hills. The boy had walked far on; they saw his coated and
cowled figure swaying with the motion of his walk on the shining beach
in front. The tide was at its lowest. What the fishermen had said of it
was true: with the wind beating it up it had gone down but a third of
its rightful distance; and now the strip that it had to traverse to be
full again seemed alarmingly narrow, for a great part of their journey
was still to be made. The two men got up on the cart; the boy leaped up
when they reached him, before O'Shea could bring it to full stop for
him, and on they went. Even the pony seemed to realize that there was
need of haste.
They had travelled about two miles more when, in front of them, a cape
of rock was seen jutting across the beach, its rocky headland stretching
far into the sea. Caius believed that the end of their journey was near;
he looked eagerly at the new land, and saw that there were houses upon
the top of the cliff. It seemed unnecessary even to ask if this was
their destination. Secure in his belief, he willingly got off the cart
at the base of the cliff, and trudged behind it, while O'Shea drove up a
track in the sand which had the similitude of a road; rough, soft,
precipitous as it was, it still bore tracks of wheels and feet, where
too far inland to be washed by the waves. The sight of them was like the
sight of shore to one who has been long at sea. They went up to the back
of the cliff, and came upon its high grassy top; the road led through
where small houses were thickly clustered on either side. Caius looked
for candle, or fire, or human being, and saw none, and they had not
travelled far along the street of this lifeless village when he saw that
the road led on down the other side of the headland, and that the beach
and the dune stretched ahead of them exactly as they stretched behind.
"Is this a village of the dead?" he asked O'Shea.
The man O'Shea seemed to have in him some freak of perverseness which
made it hard for him to answer the simplest question. It was almost by
force that Caius got from him the explanation that the village was only
used during certain fishing seasons, and abandoned during the
winter--unless, indeed, its houses were broken into by shipwrecked
sailors, whose lives depended upon finding means of warmth.
The cart descended from the cliff by the same sandy road, and the pony
again trotted upon the beach; its trot was deceptive, for it had the
appearance of making more way than it did. On they went--on, on, over
this wonderful burnished highroad which the sea and the moonlight had
laid for their travel. Behind and before, look as they would, they could
see only the weird white hills of sand, treeless, almost shadowless now,
the seahorses foaming and plunging in endless line, and between them the
road, whose apparent narrowing in the far perspective was but an emblem
of the truth that the waves were encroaching upon it inch by inch.