White Fire Part 47

"Captain Cathie is quite equal to that, I am sure, Mr. Blair. With your permission I will join you."

"Can you induce Nai to go with the ladies, Ha'o?"

"She will go," said Ha'o tersely.

He was in a gloomy frame of mind through all these strange happenings and the defection of his people.

"Then the sooner we get to it the better." And under Cathie's directions they all set to work on a raft. Timber and rope were not wanting.

"Take all you can, and especially what we can use for boat-building later on," said Blair. "We shall have to get out of our hole ourselves, and that, I think, is the way out."

The brown women and children he set to collecting for themselves all the food they could find along the sh.o.r.e. He also gave them some lengths of rope, and bade them untwist it for fishing-lines and then start fishing from the ledge with splinters for hooks.

"You will probably find the bottom of the valley scoured out, Cathie,"

he said; "but there should be both fruit and animals on the hillsides.

We may have to replenish the island from there."

When the work was well forward, he set out with his little band to cross the island by One-Tree Pa.s.s, and found the pa.s.sage extremely difficult. For the cloud seemed to have finally broken on the saddle of the hills, and in many places the road they had built with such labour and difficulty was washed completely away, and in other places it was buried deep under slides of broken rock.

They found their way over the ridge, however, and saw at once that the deluge had wrought heavily on the further side also. The long slope was deeply scored and furrowed, but there were houses and palm-trees still standing down below, and they went on quickly to see how the brown folk had fared.

The villagers welcomed them heartily and received their news with amazement. The storm above and the storm below had terrified them.

The water had come down the hill in cascades, but the long stretch had dissipated much of its force before it reached them. Then the great wave had swept across the beach and carried away all their boats.

Their palms and plantations had suffered heavily, and they had picked up a number of dead pigs and goats, but otherwise there had been no loss of life. They had not overmuch food, but what they had they were quite willing to share with the others who had none. And Blair's heart, still sore over the defection of the western men, was comforted somewhat by their simple kindliness.

They stayed the night, and Blair explained more fully the disasters on the other side of the island and the temporary aberration of Ha'o's people, and begged them, if there should be any attempt at raiding, to treat the others as reasonably as might be, remembering what they had gone through.

They set off again very early in the morning, carrying such burden of food as was possible on the rough road they had to travel, and reached the huts by the sea before midday. The brown men had taken possession and received them in sulky silence.

Blair gave the food to the women and children, and to the men some bits of his mind in his own special way. He acknowledged the direness of the catastrophe, but bade them remember that the white men had suffered equally and yet had not lost their heads or their heart. He told them to be grateful for their lives, and a.s.sured them that there was no need for despair.

Blair's high spirits in the face of all difficulties, his forethought and far-reaching grip of the necessities of the case, made a deep impression even on Captain Pym's habitual and official phlegm. Under stress of circ.u.mstance he found himself under the necessity of rearranging his preconceived ideas. He became decidedly more human, and perhaps more of a man, than he had been for many a year.

He sounded Blair as to his hopes and intentions, and they discussed matters freely. In furtherance of them, when they had rested, they all set to work making another raft, and if the _Bonita_ men could have seen their spick and span, stiff and starched captain, hauling and lashing, with his coat off and his trousers up to the knee, it is certain they would not have known him.

They paddled their raft across the lagoon to the place where the ships had lain before the storm, and after some searching found where the _Torch_ and _Jean Arnot_ were lying. The great wave had probably washed them insh.o.r.e but the return had carried them out again. The _Bonita_ had disappeared completely. She had probably been carried over the edge of the shelf and lay in unfathomable depths. They could see the other two dimly through the clear water, with the many-coloured fishes darting in and out of their battered sides and broken raffle, and Captain Pym's face pinched at the sight and at thought of it all.

Ha'o was the most expert swimmer of the party, and had long since shown that he could remain under water twice as long as any of the white men.

On him therefore the burden of discovery lay, and he appreciated with the rest how much depended on his efforts. They had timber in quant.i.ty from the broken boats and ships, but without tools they could turn it all to no account. There were tools below there in the ships. Ha'o was going down to find them. With tools in their hands the door of deliverance would be at all events ajar.

"You will most likely find them in the front part of our ship, Ha'o, underneath where the big gun was," Blair told him. "If the gun has fallen through, so much the better. It will help you," and Ha'o nodded, and shot down through the clear water like a brown streak.

He was up again presently and hung panting to the raft. The big gun had gone out of sight through the side and bottom of the ship. He would get inside next time.

But it took many visits before he discovered anything, and then a ringing cheer went up as he came to the surface with a saw in his hand, and flung it on to the raft.

"There are more things, but they are scattered," he told them, when he had got his breath, and next time he took down with him one end of a thin cord they had unravelled out of rope, and presently sent up by it a heavy hammer, and came up himself with a chisel. It took many hours'

hard work, but at last they had enough to go on with, and Ha'o lay panting on the raft, while the others paddled it slowly down the lagoon to the Happy Valley.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

SALT OF THE EARTH

The effect of the great wave in the Valley had been extraordinary.

When last they were there the whole place was a tangle of luxuriant undergrowth, ferns, mosses, lichens, panda.n.u.s, hibiscus, paw-paws, with stately palms waving gracefully above.

Now the bed of the Valley was bare. The growths and the undergrowths had been torn off and swept away, and the newcomers were led wonderingly through the uncovered ruins of the city built by the men who set up the stone G.o.ds--along a wide street paved with stone blocks, which ran up the middle of the Valley with the stream flowing through it; past the foundations of great buildings; into an immense square where the denudation had been less complete. A certain amount of mud had silted down again on to the ruins. Nature was already at work covering up the scar of her latest wound. And the great stone G.o.ds sat gazing expectantly out to sea, as they had gazed when the city below still teemed with busy life; as they had gazed through all the long years since, while the ruins of the city slowly disappeared beneath the touch of the healing hand.

The first party had found strange quarters in the uncovered bas.e.m.e.nt of a building, which, from its size, had probably been a temple. It was a great quadrangle, and the head of the wide roadway that led from the sea ran right into it, and ended there. The upper end of the enclosure rose ten feet or more above the level, and was composed of great chiselled blocks of stone, and in this were cavernous square openings, the entrances of which now served as houses for these houseless strangers. They had appropriated four adjacent holes, and had made themselves as comfortable as circ.u.mstances permitted.

The whole place had been covered in with wild growth, but the great wave foaming up the valley had swept it all bare. The apartments were not uncomfortable except in one respect. They ran so far back into the hillside that the ends of them had not yet been discovered. "And,"

said Aunt Jannet, peering into the shadows which the firelight quickened into ghostly life, "I'm always expecting something will come out, and either frighten us to death or eat us alive."

Ha'o stood it for one night, with crumpled face and quick-glancing eyes, but next day he carried up some boards from the beach, and built a tiny lean-to outside for himself and Nai, and they found life more tolerable.

Nothing ever came out of those mysterious pa.s.sages for their undoing.

What dark uses they may have served in the bygone times they could only surmise. One pa.s.sage they followed till it issued in the cliffs behind the stone G.o.ds. The others ran straight into the heart of the mountain, with cross cuts leading round towards the city, and the uses they might have been put to in the hands of a priestly oligarchy were apparent.

Captain Pym was fired with thoughts of hidden treasure, and spent many odd hours searching for it. Blair laughed at the idea, and begged him to keep it to himself, lest the men should catch the infection, and waste on it valuable time which might be used to much better advantage.

"Treasure is unlikely," he said. "If, as we suppose, these pioneers were accidentally blown across, or fled for reasons, they would not be likely to bring much with them."

"All the same, they built mightily," argued Pym, and went on with his search. All that he ever found, however, was a few flat beaten plates of gold, and some golden ornaments, of no great value save as curiosities.

Captain Cathie reported a fair amount of fruit and palms still standing on the hillsides, and pigs and goats enough to re-stock the island, in time and with protection. Most of the other animals had disappeared completely.

"I'll take the men back to-morrow over the hill," said Cathie, in excellent spirits at the prospect of the opening door, "and we'll bring back another raft of timber. With the tools you've got we can make a start anyway, and we can fish up more by degrees. There's timber enough in the lagoon to build a new schooner."

"Build us something that will float as far as the Marquesas or Paumotus, and we'll soon have a new schooner, captain. But the first thing I want is to get to Kanele and Anape to see how Evans and Stuart have fared. If they came through pretty well we can get fresh stock from them, both animals and plants."

"I've got a lot of paw-paws for you on the beach, and some bananas and plantains. Where will you plant, Mr. Blair?"

"For the present in the mud of the old fields. It'll make splendid growing ground. Later on, when we rebuild, we must get higher up.

We're not likely to have another deluge just yet, but what has been may be, and we must take all precautions. When your boat is ready, and we've had a trip round the islands, my idea is for you to run across to the Marquesas and buy a schooner there, if you can lay hands on one, and send her back by Gregor for our use while you're away. Then you go on to Sydney and buy a new _Torch_ and everything we need, Long Tom, Winchesters and all"--with a quizzical glance at Pym. "You know just what we want, and you can have all the money you require."

Captain Pym listened with surprise. His ideas of missionaries were crystallising rapidly from the solution of scepticism into concrete beliefs and admirations. He was not a man given to admiration of other men, but he recognised in Kenneth Blair a master mind and an indomitable spirit. He said little but thought much.

Every one was at work soon after daylight. Cathie produced drowned meat from an adjacent pa.s.sage way, which he used as cold storage. Jean and Aunt Jannet prepared the morning meal. Blair had planted two rows of paw-paws and a number of bananas before breakfast, and Ha'o had built his lean-to for Nai and brought in some fruit.

Then Cathie built a small raft, and in due course Aunt Jannet Harvey was seated on it with many startled exclamations, and wafted herself uncouthly out into the lagoon. She was provided with two fishing lines and a supply of bait, and a rope to the sh.o.r.e lest she should disappear entirely from human ken, and she had instructions to catch all the fish she could for the amplification of the larder.

And Blair, when he had made sure of her safety, and turned to go up the valley to cross the hills, could hardly contain himself at sight of her face, in which determination to catch struggled desperately with horror at thought of pulling the hooks out of what she caught.

"This is a change from Kensington, Aunt Jannet, isn't it? You're quite sure you won't tumble overboard?" had been his jovial parting word.