第 8 页

My companion promised circumspection, and, having completed our survey, we left the cove and were soon back in camp, where we found everything much as we had left it, except that Miss Anthea had developed a fit of ill-temper again, and at first flatly refused to accompany Miss Stroud on her bathing expedition. She relented, however, though somewhat sulkily, by the time that the boat was ready, and made one of the party; but it seemed that, as usual I was, in some unaccountable way, the cause of her ill-humour, for she simply ignored me when I addressed a chance remark to her, while she almost snapped Miss Stroud’s head off when the latter tried to engage her in conversation.

Arrived at the cove, we moored the boat in a secure spot; after which the two seamen and I set out upon our walk back, leaving the two girls to enjoy their swim, while the Doctor, armed with one of the rifles, mounted guard on the beach outside the cove.

It had been arranged that Oldroyd, Mason and I should devote the day to a preliminary exploration of the island, to be followed at an early date by one more thorough and detailed; our object being to gain in the first instance merely a general idea of the extent and principal features of our new home upon which to found a plan for a comprehensive survey, and it was agreed that, in order to carry out this first arrangement, the proper course to pursue would be to make our way to the summit of the peak, from which we expected to obtain a clear view of the whole of the island. In pursuance of this plan, the two Americans had employed the time of my absence in carefully overhauling their combined armoury, which consisted of six excellent rifles and two double-barrelled shot guns, cleaning them, oiling their mechanism, and generally preparing them for service, and they were just putting the finishing touches to this labour of love when I reached the camp; there remained, therefore, nothing to be done but for me to get my telescope, don the bandolier of cartridges and shoulder the rifle which they placed at my service, and for us to set out.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning when we made a start, and as we estimated the summit of the peak to be about three miles distant we calculated that we ought to reach our destination in about two hours, allowing for the fact that we had a stiff climb before us. Our outfit for the occasion consisted of my telescope, a pocket compass belonging to Mason, a shot gun, carried by the latter, the two rifles with which Oldroyd and I were armed, and a few biscuits in our pockets. We made no provision for the quenching of our thirst, trusting to luck that we should find water somewhere on our way.

At the spot where our camp was pitched, the trees stood pretty widely apart, with little or no undergrowth, the chief impediment to rapid progress therefore, at least at the outset of our journey, consisted of the long, tangled grass, through which we found some little difficulty in forcing our way. We began our journey by closely following the right bank of the brook by the side of which we had pitched our camp, and for the first half-mile or so we made fairly satisfactory progress without encountering serious difficulties, our walk being rendered interesting by the variety and beauty, both in form and colouring, of the foliage of the trees, shrubs and plants which we encountered.

The brilliant and beautiful hues of the foliage and flowers that everywhere met our gaze were not the only objects to charm the eye. Here and there, at pretty frequent intervals, we came upon fruit-bearing trees and bushes in great variety, a few of which were familiar to one or another of us, but many of which none of us were able to recognise. There were, among others, the bread fruit tree in rich abundance, the loquat, the custard apple, a small orange almost identical with the mandarin, a small but very delicious purple grape, a fruit almost identical with the nectarine but much finer, the alligator pear, and the mango. We sampled some of the varieties as we went along, and found them admirable as thirst-quenchers, particularly the grapes and oranges, and we filled our pockets with the latter as a stand-by in case we should fail to find water—a precaution for which we thanked our stars before the day was over.

The vegetable world, however, by no means absorbed our exclusive attention, nor did it claim our exclusive admiration; the woods were alive with birds, many varieties of which were of the most brilliant plumage imaginable. Lizards were the only four-footed creatures we encountered, and there were no snakes, so far as we could see.

As I have already remarked, for the first half-mile of our journey the only obstacle we encountered was that caused by the long, tangled grass, through which at times it was a little difficult to force our way. But at the end of that half-mile we found the trees suddenly becoming set much closer together, while between them the grass gave way to a thick undergrowth of parasitic scrub which speedily became so dense that it was impossible for us to force our way through, unless we chose to hack a passage with our knives. We tried this, but the lianas proved to be so strong and tough that we had to abandon the attempt, for the two-fold reason that we feared we should break our blades and because we recognised that, even if we escaped that misfortune, it would cost us days, instead of hours, of labour to reach the peak. We therefore retraced our steps a few yards, until we reached the brook, up the rocky bed of which we made our way with comparative ease. But it was fearfully hot work; for we were hemmed in on either hand by steep banks, the sides of which we could reach with our outstretched hands, while overhead the foliage arched us in, screening us from the sun’s rays, it is true, but also shutting out the breeze, so that we seemed to be toiling and scrambling up an ever-winding course in the atmosphere of an oven, heavily charged with the all-pervading odour of rank, and sometimes decaying, vegetation.

After more than two hours’ strenuous labour, we emerged, drenched with perspiration, from the intricacies of the wood to find ourselves in a vast open space, devoid of every vestige of vegetation, in the midst of which rose the flat-topped cone forming the summit of the peak. The ground was black rock, the surface shaped into curious folds and creases, giving one the impression that it had once been a thick liquid which had congealed in the act of flowing. And such an impression pretty nearly hit the mark, for Oldroyd, who generally knew what he was talking about, pronounced the rock to be lava, and the cone before us the crater of the volcano—extinct for ages, if one might judge by appearances. The bare lava extended sloping upward, for about a quarter of a mile, and then we came to a bed of scoriae forming the sides of the cone. These scoriae consisted mostly of masses of once incandescent rock that had been vomited forth by the volcano, mingled with pumice-stone and ashes. They formed a steep slope, and we soon discovered that they stood so insecurely that any attempt to climb the slope must be accompanied by great risk; for it was evident that the displacing of a single fragment might produce a veritable avalanche of débris; indeed the whole hillside seemed to be alive, falls of greater or lesser magnitude taking place at frequent intervals. Walking round the base of the cone, however, and keeping at a respectful distance from it, to avoid injury from a sudden fall, we at length found a spot where all the loose débris seemed to have come down, leaving the rock of the cone bare. The surface of the bared rock was very steep and smooth, but there were, nevertheless, projections enough here and there to render it climbable, we thought, and after considering it awhile we determined at least to make the attempt. We proceeded to clamber over the mound of fallen débris which lay at the foot of the slope—itself a task of considerable difficulty involving frequent risks of a sprained ankle, not to say a broken limb—and after an arduous climb which consumed more than an hour, we found ourselves triumphantly occupying the summit.

The cone proved to be, indeed, as Oldroyd had asserted, the crater of a volcano; and a ghastly looking place it was. Its interior was, roughly, oval in shape, about a mile and three-quarters long by about half a mile wide. The flat, encircling crest upon which we stood averaged perhaps thirty yards in width, though there were places where it shrank to a tenth of that. Its surface was, in places, very crumbly and treacherous, so much so that at one spot Mason, who was rather a venturesome beggar, narrowly escaped being precipitated to the bottom of the interior—down into which he was gazing—through the soil crumbling away beneath his feet. That interior was at least two hundred feet deep, with smooth, precipitous walls, and had he gone down, nothing could have saved him.

However, we were not up there to gaze into the crater of an extinct volcano, but to get some idea of the general characteristics of our island kingdom, which we proceeded to survey.

We were at this time standing on the south rim of the crater; and the whole of the southern part of the island was open to our view. It had been a whim of mine to make of my telescope a sort of range-finder by focussing it accurately upon various objects at different known distances, and then to scratch those distances on the slide, and I now—as often aforetime—found my scale of distances useful. I discovered that the southern extremity of the island was just ten and a quarter miles from where I stood, while the eastern side was four and three-quarter miles, and the western side exactly six miles away. There was not very much to see on this southern side of the island, except that the land undulated gently upward everywhere toward the peak. The lagoon was of course the principal object in the picture, and a magnificent expanse of water it looked from that height, the whole of it being in sight. But I could find no sign or trace of inhabitants to the southward, though I scanned every bit of it in search of smoke; nor could I descry even so much as the loom of land anywhere along the southern half of the horizon.

Our inspection of the southern part being complete, we walked round the rim of the crater to take a peep at the northern part, and here we found considerably more to occupy our attention.

In the first place we immediately noticed that at the north-western extremity—distant exactly ten and a half miles—there was another lagoon, much smaller than the southern one, being about three and a half miles long by about a mile and a half wide. Unfortunately, the inequalities of the ground shut out our view of the greater part of the beach, but I saw no canoes on that portion of it which was visible, nor were any to be seen on the lagoon; yet I felt convinced that if indeed there were savages on the island, that lagoon would be the place at which to look for them. With the help of my telescope I searched the neighbourhood of the second lagoon for smoke, indicating the presence of natives, and once or twice I almost believed I could detect such signs; but the wavering of the air, due to rarefaction, was so great that I could not be at all sure; and when my companions in turn, using the telescope, examined the spot, they could not find such appearances as I described.

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Chapter Six: The Mysterious Tower.

The existence of a second lagoon was not the only discovery which we made that day.

Looking down upon that portion of the island which lay to the northward and north-westward of the crater, our gaze was arrested by the appearance of a sheet of water—a lake, in fact—the nearer extremity of which, according to the scale of distances scratched upon the draw tube of my telescope, was just two miles and a quarter from the spot upon which I stood. This lake was an irregular oblong in shape, its trend being in a north-westerly direction, and I made its length to be, as nearly as might be, two miles, with an extreme width of about a mile and a quarter. It appeared to have no beach, properly speaking, the only semblance of such a thing being a narrow strip of bare soil, here and there, which I estimated could not be more than a couple of yards wide, while, generally speaking, the margin, thickly clad with vegetation, sloped quite steeply down to the water’s edge, from which I deduced that the lake would probably be fairly deep. Oldroyd suggested the idea that it might have been at one time a subsidiary crater to that upon the lip of which we were then standing; but I rather doubted this, as the telescope revealed no signs of lava or scoriae anywhere near it. There seemed to be no outlet or overflow of any kind for its waters, so far as we could see; on the other hand we caught glimpses, here and there, of a small stream, the general trend of which seemed to suggest that it probably discharged into the lake.

It was while Mason was scrutinising the country generally through my telescope that the second and most important discovery of the day was made.

Dropping the instrument from his eye suddenly and turning to me in some excitement, he remarked—

“Say, Massey, you see that lake? Well, I want you to look down the slope towards it and concentrate your gaze upon a point about half-way between here and the near end of the lake, and then tell me if you see anything at all remarkable.”

I looked in the direction indicated, and presently caught a glimpse of something that caused me to rub my eyes and stare in amazement.

“Yes,” I said, “I see something that looks very much like—but no, of course it cannot possibly be. Let me have the glass for a second or two, please.”

Mason handed over the instrument, and there, quite clearly, sharply, and unmistakably defined by the lenses, I caught the object to which my attention had been directed. Rising just clear of the tops of the trees by which it appeared to be hemmed in was a circular mass of masonry of perhaps some twenty feet in diameter. Only a short length of about four feet of the structure revealed itself, but, viewed through the telescope, there could be no doubt as to its character; it was, beyond all question, the timeworn and dilapidated summit of a circular tower, for not only was the regularity of its shape clearly revealed but I could even distinguish the irregular forms of some of the larger stones of which it was built. That it was a structure of some antiquity was suggested by the fact that tufts of grass and small bushes showed here and there growing from the joints of the masonry.

“Well, I’ll be shot if this isn’t the limit!” I exclaimed. “An old but well-built masonry tower, in the middle of an uncharted Pacific island! What next, I wonder!”

“Here, go slow! What is that you say?” cut in Oldroyd, who had been regarding Mason and myself with amazement. “Masonry tower—your grandmother! Let me have a look.”

“Ay,” said I, as I handed him the telescope. “Look for yourself, and welcome. And if, after you have looked, you don’t agree with me, I’ll give you leave to kick me into this crater.”