Part 17 (1/2)

We afterwards discovered that Billy's guess was very near the truth, and for the better understanding of my story, I deem it convenient to relate here what we only learnt at a later time. The seamen of the _Lovey Susan_, when they left us on the island the first time, went away to the south-east, and by and by came to a small island, uninhabited as ours was, but pretty well furnished with fruit trees, and there they took up their abode, and for many months lived in plenty, their fare, in addition to the fruits, being fish and birds--when they could catch them--and pigs, of which there were a few.

They made simple gra.s.s huts for themselves, not taking the trouble to build substantial houses, and when this was done, they being not at all diligent, did nothing else but quarrel among themselves, and their laziness and improvidence in due time found them out. They lived very comfortably while their supplies of food lasted, but they hunted down the pigs until one day they were astonished to find there were no more; and as to fish, that was very plentiful at certain seasons and scarce at others, and during the time of plenty they did not trouble about curing any--at least, only two or three men did, one of whom was Mr.

Bodger, and these gave up doing it when they found that the others expected to share with them. But their princ.i.p.al food at all times was bread-fruit, because they got less tired of this than of cocoa-nuts and other fruits; yet they were so reckless that they consumed the fruit when it was ripe without any thought for the morrow, having no notion of preserving it. The season of bread-fruit being over, they subsisted on cocoa-nuts, but they being a score of ravenous men, and the island small, they had well-nigh consumed all the cocoa-nuts before the next bread-fruit ripened; thus they had at one time more than they could eat, and at another very short commons, and at these times they became very sour in temper, and there were constant bickerings and recriminations amongst them.

One day a fleet of canoes filled with savage warriors came to their island, and the savages having landed, there was a sharp fight betwixt them and the mariners, in which the latter came off victors by virtue of their firearms, though not without suffering considerable loss, two of them being killed and nearly all wounded. When we heard of this fight, Billy and me, we guessed that the savages were those we had seen one day from our watch-tower, though, of course, we could never prove it. Saving for this fight, the mariners were unmolested on their island; but in course of time the scarcity of food drove them to make voyages in search of islands that would afford better sustenance, which, however, they failed to discover. Then it was that one of them proposed that they should return to our island, which they knew from what they had seen of it to be fertile--at least, in parts--but they had so clear a recollection of the terrors of the volcano, especially Wabberley, who had been scalded the worst by the boiling water, that they were some time in making up their minds to the voyage, but did so at last. This was the occasion of their first visit to our island, when they discovered our hut, and were driven to panic and flight by our invention of an eruption. The boat being leaky, they had not ventured to lengthen their voyage, lest they should not be able to get back to their own island, where there was at least present security, and where they had left some of their number. Thither they returned, and lived there as best they could until the pinch of want again compelled them to set forth. Having seen from the slopes of our island the dim line on the western horizon betokening other land, they determined to sail thither; for though they suspected that their enemies the savages might have come thence, the bolder spirits among them thought it better to risk sudden death at the hands of savages than slow starvation on their island prison, especially as there was a chance that they might find friendly savages on some island or another.

Accordingly they did what they could to patch up their boat for the voyage, and set forth, all of them this time, for four being dead--two slain by the savages and two by disease--the boat would hold them all.

Their design was to touch at our island on the way for rest and refreshment, and see, also, whether there were still signs that it was inhabited, for on their former visit they believed that we had been driven away by fear of the volcano, so that they did not think of settling on the island themselves. But when they landed, and Hoggett saw that, so far from being scared away, we had remained--or, at any rate, returned--and improved our settlement, he was for capturing our hut and entering into possession of the island, and was deterred from attempting this design only by finding that we could defend ourselves and by the overruling of his companions when they found, on roaming over the island, that it was not near so fertile as they had supposed.

They did not discover our yam plantation, and feared that their case here would very soon be no better than it had been on their own island.

Accordingly they sailed away, westward, as I have said, to accomplish the purpose with which they had set forth.

All this, I say, we did not learn till a good while afterwards, and having set it down for the better understanding of those that read, I will now return to the place where I left our own story--like a child standing in a drawn circle and forbid to move till he is told. We were greatly rejoiced to find that our visitors had quite left us, and went with cheerful hearts about our work, a part of it on this day being the gathering together of our swine which we had released. Some came back of themselves; others had struck up acquaintance with some of the wild pigs that were still on the island, and appeared to be indisposed to return to civilization, though one did indeed come in what I thought was a shamefaced way above a week after all the rest, and him I called the prodigal son.

”The what son?” says Billy.

”The prodigal son,” said I; and then I told him the story, which he heard with the same eagerness and pleasure as he heard all my stories, whether out of the Bible or out of profane history. When I came to that part where the wretched young man ”would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” Billy interrupted me, saying it was clear they did not feed their pigs half so well in that country as we did, and he warranted that Wabberley and the other seamen would be pleased enough if they got as good food as our pigs, for he persisted in believing (which turned out to be true) that the men were famis.h.i.+ng, and he went on to declare that he was sure they would come back again.

”For why?” says he. ”Why, they know we've been here these ever so many years” (it was about four by my reckoning), ”and living comfortable, and wherever they go they'll either have to work, which they hate, or to fight, which will be worse, for their powder and shot won't last for ever, and I wonder they've any left at all. They must have been uncommon careful of it.”

I did not think that Billy's prediction would come true, for they had certainly found no great stores of food on our island, and if it was food they were seeking they would surely suppose that, though we were alive, we had no more than supplied our own needs. However, there is no folly in being prepared for anything that may befall, so Billy and I set ourselves to think very seriously again of what we should do if our hut were besieged closely for any considerable length of time. Our situation would not be pleasant, between exasperated besiegers on the one side and the terrible monsters on the other, and I set my wits to work very earnestly to see if I might devise some means whereby we might extirpate those hideous creatures and so clear a way to the sea.

To make an attack on them with our weapons held no great promise in it, for, as Billy said, they seemed to be terribly tough, and while we were disposing of one, others might cling around us and lug us to perdition.

Besides, the very sight of the monsters made our blood run cold, and Billy said he would sooner face a thousand stepmothers than one of them, though he thought he might prefer one monster to three Hoggetts.

[Sidenote: Experiments]

It was after the matter had been beating in my head for several days that the notion came to me to try how the fizzy rock would affect the creatures. We knew what dreadful choking fumes came from it when it was thrown into water, and it seemed to me not impossible that these fumes might dissolve in water and poison it, and 'twould then be only a question of getting a sufficient quant.i.ty to destroy the whole nest or lair of the monsters. Considering that it would be a very laborious matter to bring down to the cliffs enough of the rock for our purpose, we determined to make a trial of it first, and the creature we selected for the _vile corpus_ (which is pretty nearly all the Latin I remember) was one of those robber crabs which I think I have mentioned. We caught one on the sh.o.r.e, and put him into one of my pots, which we filled with water and then cast in one or two lumps of the rock. There was a great fizzing and spluttering, with dense and suffocating fumes, and when they had cleared off and it was safe for us to go to the pot, we found the crab perfectly black and quite dead, and when Billy took it out of the pot he declared that the water stung his hand. We were very well satisfied with this trial, and immediately set about collecting a great quant.i.ty of the poisonous stuff, bringing it down from the mountain in baskets which we slung at our backs, and heaping it up on the cliff just above the entrance to the cave. I proposed that we should carry it down to the sh.o.r.e, and convey it to the monsters' haunt in our canoe, but this Billy would not hear of for a moment, avouching that he would sooner be eaten by savages than hugged by the slimy arms of the beasts.

[Sidenote: Billy is Reflective]

We had been digging out the rock, and carrying it to the cliff, for a matter of two days when a terrible storm of rain came on in the night, and when we got up in the morning and went to the cliff, we saw that all the rock we had so toiled in collecting had spent itself, and left a black desolation all around the spot where it had lain. This gave us a great deal of annoyance, as much at our thoughtlessness as at the thing itself; but we did not give up our design, resolving rather to be the more careful in our preparations. It took us a very long time to a.s.semble as much material as we had before, because we had to dig deeper into the side of the mountain for it, and when we got it we covered it over very scrupulously, so that the rain could not touch it.

Billy remarked that of course, after our taking all that trouble, there would be no more rain for a month, and he was right; but I pointed out to him that we should have been very foolish if we had not taken these precautions, and he said it was a pity you could not tell things beforehand, adding, as if it had never struck him before, that you never could tell what might have been, because all we knew was what was. And then he was silent for a time, and when he spoke again, he said: ”Ain't it terrible, master, to think you never can catch a minute what's gone?” Billy so seldom said anything of a reflective nature that I looked at him in some alarm, with a kind of superst.i.tious fear that he was sickening for something; but I was relieved in a moment when, in the same breath, he said: ”It do make you eat hearty, though.”

When we had heaped up on the cliff a good many hundredweights of the rock, we waited for the flow of the tide, and then, choosing a place where the cliff ran down very steep and straight to the mouth of the cave, we flung the stuff into the water between the mouth and the rocks where we first encountered the shoal of monsters. We watched eagerly to see what happened, and saw a vast number of bubbles come to the surface, and a certain quant.i.ty of smoke that floated away on the breeze, but not near such a smother as we had experience of, which made us hope that there was all the more poison in the water. There was a slight current at the foot of the cliffs, setting past the cl.u.s.ter of rocks towards the channel between Red Rock and the island. We walked along for a little s.p.a.ce, in the same direction as this current, to see if there was any sign on the surface of the water of our experiment having had any effect. For some little while we saw nothing, and had begun to believe that the monsters were proof against what we had fondly hoped was poison, when we observed some tentacles appearing above the water by the rocks, and also at the base of the cliffs, and by and by the palpitating bodies of the monsters themselves, crawling up as if the water did not very well agree with them. We pelted these creatures very hard with stones and lumps of the strange rock, and though we missed pretty often, yet we hit them pretty often too, and had lively satisfaction when we saw them loose their hold and tumble back into the water as soon as the rock began to fizz. But we could not see that any of them were killed, and had to conclude that the water about the rocks was too deep, and the current moved too fast, for our poisonous substance to work its full effect, and so we went back disappointed, with the problem of making a safe way through the tunnel to the sea as far from solution as ever it was.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

OF THE END OF THE SEA MONSTERS; AND OF THE EVENTS THAT LED US TO RECEIVE THE CREW AS OUR GUESTS

We had failed to destroy the monsters from the cliff top, and I concluded that we must still fail, unless we could, find some means of attacking them in an enclosed s.p.a.ce, where there was no current to carry away the water as soon as it was rendered poisonous. It was Billy who suggested the plan which we ultimately found successful.

Though he had refused point blank to approach the cave in our canoe, he would not mind, he said, ”having a go” at the monsters from the tunnel, for there at least we had dry land to run back to, whereas if the canoe were caught in the embrace of one of the large creatures there would be little chance for us. And since we had already learnt that the monsters came into the cave, as well as haunting the rocks outside, I agreed, when Billy suggested it, that even if we could not kill them outright we might make the water in the cave so exceeding noisome that they would depart thence and seek more savorous quarters. We saw great difficulties in the way, first, to the conveying a sufficiently great quant.i.ty of the rock to the cave; then the possibility of heavy rains falling before we had accomplished our task, with the consequent rise of the water in the lake and the flooding of the tunnel, which would not only render it a perilous place for us ourselves, but would use up, or decompose, as they say, the material we had collected before we got it to the proper place. As to the first difficulty, we were already so well accustomed to hard work of various kinds that we thought nothing of it; while for the matter of the rain we could only take our chance and resolve to be as philosophical as possible if all our labour was undone. With this in mind, we determined to collect the lumps of rock first of all in our hut, and not to begin to convey them through the tunnel until we had as much as we wanted: which accordingly we did, going backwards and forwards for many days between the hut and the spot on the mountain-side where we found an inexhaustible supply of the rock. When we had got together a sufficient quant.i.ty, we carried above two-thirds of it in baskets to the entrance of the cave, and very laborious it was, because the way was so rough and in places so narrow, and we barked our s.h.i.+ns and elbows pretty often. But it was done at last, and then we laid up a similar heap on the cliff, at the same spot as we had put it before.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Our Baskets]

[Sidenote: End of the Monsters]

When all things were in readiness, we went along the tunnel one day, carrying torches in our hands, until we came to the place where we had put our heap of rock, at the brink of the pool. Now that the moment for our great enterprise was come, we were in a fever, I a.s.sure you, both from the importance of what we had taken in hand to do, and from our shuddering horror of the monsters. We held our torches above our heads, searching the cave for signs of them, expecting every moment to see the hideous tentacles emerge from the black water at our feet, and fancying we saw these dreadful enemies on all the rocks that strewed the floor of the cave. ”What are we waiting for?” says Billy in an awful whisper, and seeing that certainly nothing was to be gained by delay, we stuck our torches into crevices in the wall, and then with two great heaves cast the pieces of rock into the water, and retreated instantly into the tunnel to escape the choking fumes that arose. We had to go a good way before we felt ourselves to be in safety from them, and indeed it promised to be so long before we could venture to go down to the cave again that we thought we might as well return to our hut and run down to the cliff, to see if any of the creatures had been driven forth. Accordingly we made great haste, and when we came to the cliff and looked over, we saw first several of the smaller creatures floating at the mouth of the cave, and quite dead as far as we could tell; but immediately afterwards there came slowly swimming out a huge monster that far exceeded in size and ugliness that which had seized me on that day when we climbed down the cliff for eggs.

Whether it was the same that had nearly caught Billy I know not, because we never saw that clearly; but we were perfectly amazed at the hugeness of it, being as big round as my aunt's round table in the parlour, and its tentacles stretching on all sides like the roots of an immense oak. Though we were far above it, and in safety, we shuddered when we beheld it, and our cheeks became pale; I saw that Billy's did, and he told me afterwards that I was as white as a ghost. We both felt beyond measure thankful that we had been so mercifully preserved from falling a prey to this terrible giant, which could have crushed the life out of us in a few minutes.