Part 6 (1/2)

There's a long promontory, that the coasters see on the West Coast of South America near the Line, with a square white tower on a bit of high rock at the head of it. The promontory is called Mituas, and the point, Punta Ananias. That may be because some one ran aground sometime on the sand-bar off the end, and thought it deceitful. Some people say the tower was built as an outlook against pirates long ago, but I judge the facts are everybody has forgotten who built it or what he did it for.

It's a lighthouse now. If a man doesn't mind a curve in his view and a few pin-head islands, there's nothing particular to interrupt his view half round the world. The Andes make a jagged line on the east, and ten of them are volcanoes. Those snow mountains and two or three ocean currents got together, and arranged it with the equator that one part of the year should be a good deal like another there, and all the months behave respectful, and the Tower of Ananias have a breeze. It's a handsome position with a picked climate.

The scurvy is a disease not so common now, but it used to act as if all the bad salt pork you'd eaten were coming out through the skin, till you looked like a Stilton cheese, and what you wanted was to be fed on vegetables, and put ash.o.r.e so as to get the bilge-water dried out.

Probably that wouldn't be possible, and you'd be sewed up in canvas, and resemble an exclamation point, and be dropped overboard to punctuate the end of the story. Chunk! you goes, and that's the end of you.

s.h.i.+p's fever is a nautical brand of typhoid, due to bad conditions aboard. The best thing for it is to get out of those conditions. Craney had the scurvy, and I had s.h.i.+p's fever. Sometimes I was out of my head.

But when we sighted Punta Ananias, I was clear enough to tell Captain Rickhart he'd have a burial shortly, or put me on sh.o.r.e.

”I've got no fancy for that,” he says, and took a look at me. I didn't suppose he'd haul up, but he did. He'd buried two men already down the coast, and the thing must have got on his nerves, for he anch.o.r.ed overnight, and sent Craney and me to the lighthouse in a boat.

”You forfeit your pa.s.sage money,” he says, and told the mate to buy what truck he could, and tell the Dago in the lighthouse he could keep our remains.

Rickhart was a rough man, and his s.h.i.+p was a rotten s.h.i.+p. I never knew a meaner s.h.i.+p, though I've known meaner men than Rickhart on the whole.

Stevey Todd said he was going with us, and there Rickhart disagreed with him again, and his argument was the same as before.

”You ain't,” he says, and seemed to prove it, though Stevey Todd claimed he wasn't convinced.

CHAPTER VI.

TORRE ANANIAS. WHY CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM DID NOT GO BACK TO GREENOUGH.

When we got under the lee of the lighthouse, the keeper came stalking down the rocks to meet us. He was a tall man with a long moustache, and a narrow grey beard, and a black coat and sombrero.

I heard the mate say:

”Here's the King of Castile come to Craney's funeral. Blamed if he ain't a whole hea.r.s.e!”

”Without doubt” says the keeper, grave and deep, being asked about the fruit. Regarding sick boarders, he broke out sharp, ”Since when has my house----But I ask your pardon! You are strange to me. No more. The gentlemen will do me the honour to be my guests.”

n.o.body appeared to have anything to say to that, but he looked too lean to recommend his board. His Spanish wasn't the kind I was used to. It was neither West Coast nor Mexican. I judged it was just Spanish.

They left us in canvas hammocks on the ground floor of the Tower of Ananias. It was three stories high, the top story opened to seaward, with its lanterns and tin reflectors.

The darkness came on, as its habits are in the tropics, like a lamp blown out. I could see the stars through the square seaward window of the tower, and heard the keeper go softly up the stairs, and I went to sleep, very weak and faint.

When morning came, and I pulled myself up to look through the square window, and saw the s.h.i.+p making sail, it seemed to me I was some sick and far away from everybody. I rubbed my eyes and looked around.

The door and stairway filled one side of the room. There were two wooden benches and a pile of earthen and tin ware on one of them. The hammocks hung between the windows, and in one of them lay Craney, looking like mouldy cheese, for his hair, eyebrows, and complexion were yellowish by nature, and he was some spotted at that time.

Beyond the door was a banana tree, with ten-foot leaves, and a little black monkey loping around under it, sort of indifferent. Beyond the banana tree came thick woods. A woman came out of them with a basket on her head, up the path to the tower. The monkey yelped and went up the banana tree. ”Dios!” says the woman, when she came to the door, and she put down the basket and ran. The keeper came down the stone stairs and ran silently after her. The little black monkey dropped from his tree and loped after the keeper, and the woods swallowed them all. A sea-breeze was blowing into the tower, and below I could hear the pound of the surf. Craney slept as innocent as if he'd been fresh cheese, and I felt better.

Then the keeper came back with the woman, who appeared to be a scared Indian and screeched some. He said her name was t.i.tiaca, and she would look after us, but otherwise had no culture. Craney woke up and took a look at things.

”I have already,” the keeper says very solemn, ”the advantage of your honourable names. My own is Gaspero Raphael de Avila y Mituas.” He stated it so, and went up the stairs. I dropped one leg out of the hammock, and I says thoughtful:

”I always had hard luck. They just named me Tom and chucked me.”

t.i.tiaca knocked her head on the floor and screeched, but at that time I didn't see what for. She appeared to think the keeper was displeased.

It was monotonous lying all day in the tower, seeing only t.i.tiaca, and now and then the black-cloaked keeper, stiff, silent, and solemn, and polite. But the days went by, and by-and-by we began to crawl out and lie in the seaward shadow, and sometimes under the banana tree, where the little black monkey loped around melancholy. We grew better. t.i.tiaca gossiped, and told us the keeper was a magician, and master of the winds, and probably the bestower of rain and suns.h.i.+ne, and certain his light in the tower was connected underground with one of the volcanoes, so that he could tap different grades of earthquakes, graded as ”motors, trembloritos, and tremblors,” according to size.