We landed and Sekove bent down and picked up a piece of brown rock, one end broken, the other having a smooth black rock embedded in it.
“This was the dog’s nose,” he said. “But I don’t know where the head is now.” He pointed it at me. “Woof, woof.”
He started to laugh, and I smiled. You can laugh, mate, I thought to myself; but you would soon stop laughing if I told you about the Sea Devil’s treasure lying just offshore.
“This is the place all right,” I said. “I wish we’d been able to stay longer. My dad taught me to dive in this little bay. He’s dead now – passed away six months ago.”
I thought of the father who had died those many years ago, the father I had never really known, and hoped that if he was somewhere watching down on me, he wouldn’t take offence.
“I am very sorry, turaga,” Sekove said quietly, and the other two fell silent.
“That’s okay,” I replied, looking sad. “You guys wouldn’t mind if we anchored off here for a few days though, would you? I’d like to spend some time and try to remember my father as he was, before he got old and sick.”
“Yes, turaga. Stay as long as you like. We won’t disturb you; but please come to our village before you leave Wakaya. We will have some kava before you go.”
I thanked him again and we climbed back into the punt, knifing across the smooth sea to the trawler.
I looked back over my shoulder at the two arms of the bay as they reached out in a broad letter V, with the tips of those arms perhaps three hundred feet apart. It was almost exactly as Uncle Max had described it.
******
Henry was leaning against the bulwark like some expectant father when we roared up alongside and slid gently into the trawler’s hull as Sekove cut the motor. Rick was up in the wheelhouse, keeping his excitement private.
“Did you find it?” Henry asked, his face beaming with anticipation. He would give the game away if he wasn’t careful.
“Yes,” I answered as nonchalantly as the moment would allow. “But it’s just a pile of rocks now,” and then added: “What’s for lunch?”
I didn’t want him bursting out with any other questions about the rocks, or the bay. It was me that was supposed to have the sentimental attachment. I was the one who should be excited, not him.
“What’s it like?” he asked.
“It’s just a bay, Henry. I’d rather not talk about it at the moment, if you don’t mind.” I gave him an exaggerated wink, knowing the Fijians couldn’t see my face. “It brings back old memories.”
“Oh,” he nodded. “Oh, yes, well, ah, lunch?”
“Yes,” I replied, my lips stretched tight, almost a snarl. “Lunch!”
“Yes, okay, Andy. Just a minute. I want a word with Sekove about the crayfish.”
Before I could stop him he had climbed down into the punt and moved along to the stern. The idling motor blocked out the sound of their voices as they huddled together, but the conversation appeared animated: Sekove serious, nodding and then shaking his head, looking up at me, frowning and then nodding his head again and smiling.
“What was that all about?” I asked after he had climbed back on board.
“Oh, nothing really. Just something I wanted to know.”
With that he turned on his heel and headed off to the saloon. I wasn’t sure that I liked the smug look on his face. I walked back along the deck to lean down and thank Sekove, Malakai and Emori for their help.
“What did Henry want, Sekove?” I called above the sound of the outboard.
His eyes went to his feet, mumbling something I didn’t quite catch.
“Yes, okay,” I said, not wanting to ask him again. “Good fishing!”
He looked up and gave what I could only call a secret smile and revved the motor.
“You don’t forget to come to our village and drink some kava and eat some food with us before you leave, turaga!” he called as the punt started to drift away from the side.
“Don’t worry!” I yelled back. “We’ll be there. Thanks again. See you later!”
“Io. Sa moce, turaga!”
He waved as they got up speed, the bow lifting out of the water as they headed back towards the distant headland and their village around by the harbour.
Rick grabbed me by the shoulders. “It’s the one I picked out yesterday, isn’t it! The big pile of boulders!”
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s the bugger all right. Another rock-slide smashed the poor dog to pieces. Sekove showed me its nose. We might take it home for a souvenir if we can’t find anything else.”
“What about the scar in the rock-face that your uncle mentioned?”
“It’s still there, but you’ve got to look close. It’s weathered, and fairly well hidden by grass growing over the rocks.”
Henry was leaning against the table taking it all in, eyes wide, not quite believing me, but knowing that I wasn’t trying to fool him either. “It was all true then!” he said. “Your uncle wasn’t just telling you bedtime stories. The treasure’s really there!”
“Not quite, Henry,” I replied.
“What do you mean?”
“The dog rock is there, or what’s left of it; and the chest should be there, unless ...”
“Unless what?”
“Unless someone’s already beaten us to it, and caused that other rock-slide to cover their tracks.”
“Shit,” he groaned.
“But that’s only a maybe,” I added. “We won’t know until we check.”
I told them the story I had given to Sekove and his friends, and what they had said in return. We should have the place to ourselves.
“Right,” Rick said, moving quickly towards the wheelhouse. “Let’s get this show on the road. Stand by the anchor chain, Andy, and we’ll move her along to the bay.”
Fifteen minutes later we had the anchor down in one hundred feet of water, three hundred yards out from shore; and two hundred and fifty out from a line drawn across from the tip of one arm of the bay to the other. We stood on the back deck, grins on our faces, each one of us certain that the chest was still there, or hoping that it was.
“Okay,” I said to Rick. “Either you or I have to stay with the trawler. She’s in too close for Henry to manage on his own if the wind comes up like it did yesterday.” He nodded his agreement. “I’ll toss you for it,” I added.
“No, mate,” he replied. “Christ! If I won the toss you’d probably throttle me! No, you go. You’ve been waiting longer than I have.”
“Thanks, mate.”
We hauled two of the air bottles out of the storage hold, made sure that they were full, and loaded them into the dinghy with the rest of the diving gear.
“Henry,” I said. “See if you can find a marker buoy.”
“What for?” he asked.
“We’ll need something to mark the spot when we find the chest.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Rick asked.
“Why not?”
“Might look a little suspicious. Why would we need a marker buoy just to go diving?”
“Good point,” I conceded. “But how are we going to mark the spot?”
“Same way von Luckner did,” he replied. “Only we’ll do it a little better, and we’ll still use the buoy.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “As soon as you find the chest, send Henry back in the dinghy for me. The trawler should be all right for ten minutes or so.”
“Yes, okay,” I agreed.
“You wait until I’ve got myself out on the northern arm of the bay, then go down and find the chest again. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tie the buoy on and then come straight up and take a bearing on one of the rocks on shore and the bottom point of the scar in the cliff. It’s at least fifteen feet back from the pile so you should be able to get a fair bearing; and while you’re doing that, I’ll line myself up with your head and that egg-shaped rock on the southern t
ip of the bay and mark my position with a few small rocks.”
“Not bad,” I admitted. “All we have to do next time is line up the four points and we should be right over the chest.”
“Right; and tie the buoy off so that it’s a good fifteen to twenty feet below the water; deep enough so that no bastard can see it from the cliff-top. If you can line up the four points, you should have no problem finding the buoy, and that’ll take you straight down to the treasure.”
It made sense.
“The treasure,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Don’t know what we’d do without you, Rick. Where’s Henry got to?”
He climbed out of the storage hold carrying a small yellow buoy and about seventy feet of cord and yelled: “This ought to do!”
“Come on,” I urged. “Let’s get to it. Pieces of Eight, Henry! Pieces of Eight!”
There was a wicked gleam in his eye as he joined me in the dinghy and pulled the starter cord.
Fourteen
I pulled on my mask and flippers and rolled over the side of the dinghy, swimming several feet down into the cool clear water and then back up to the surface again.
There were no streams or watercourses running down to the sea along this short stretch of coastline. There were others to the north of Rocky Point that probably only ran after it had been raining, and as there had been none of that for the past week or so, no silt or mud had washed down from the peaks and valleys to upset the delicate balance. Unlike Suva harbour, and its dark obscurity, the currents running along this shore would sweep the plankton away before it could cloud the water and block out the sunlight.
Henry lowered my tank down to me. I looped the straps round my shoulders, tested the regulator, buckled on my weight-belt, and dived down to check that the small anchor was holding firm on the bottom.
“How deep is it?” he asked as I surfaced.
“Not too bad. About fifty to sixty feet at a guess. You’re the one with the depth gauge. We’ll check it as soon as we get down.”
I took the tank he passed down and held it for him as he rolled over the side and splashed into the water.
“Sixty feet!” he exclaimed, as though it had just sunk in. “How the hell was von Luckner hoping to get the chest up again?”
“Search me,” I replied. “One of them must have been a pretty good free-diver. They didn’t have aqualungs in those days.”
The dinghy had drifted off the line joining the two arms of the bay and we had to swim a short distance before we could position ourselves on the marks as we knew them.
“What do you reckon?” he asked from the side of his mouthpiece. “About here?”
“About as good a place as any. You ready?”
He gave the thumbs up and we dived. I tried to go straight for the bottom, knowing that if we went down at an angle we could finish up twenty or thirty feet away from the point we were aiming for. The current moving around the island was only slight, but enough to throw us off those extra few feet. Halfway down I spotted a tall pear-shaped rock sticking up out of the surrounding rubble and focussed on it as we swam the rest of the way.
It was ages since I had dived deeper than fifty feet. The area around Leleuvia had been around the forty-foot mark: deep enough to have fun but not too deep to be risky. Our only problem might come from repetitive dives; and at fifty feet we could probably do at least two or maybe even three of those a day without having to go into decompression, but if the chest was lying at seventy feet we might have to take things a little more carefully; but first we had to find it.
I turned to find Henry at my shoulder, his hand jutting out from the top of his mask, playing the fool and pretending to peer into the distance. He wouldn’t play the fool for long if one of those yellow and white-banded sea-snakes came prowling around.
I pulled the long piece of cord from my wet-suit jacket and tied it around the tip of the pear-shaped rock, then beckoned Henry across and checked his depth gauge: sixty-five feet. We had enough air for at least thirty minutes as long as we didn’t over-exert ourselves.
We moved out along the rocky bottom, broken here and there by small patches of coarse sand entangled with the fragmented pale shards of dead coral. I took hold of the cord some ten feet away from the rock and waited while Henry gripped it another ten feet further out. Then, first arranging four small rocks in a pile as a reference point, we swam around in a lazy circle, our eyes sweeping the bottom.
I reached the pile of rocks again and gave a tug on the cord to bring Henry to a stop, then swam back to the pear-shaped rock and unlooped the single turn we had wound about the top. I moved ten feet on the other side of Henry, piled up more rocks, and we went around again - still nothing.
We repeated the process, leap-frogging each other, the minute hand on my watch moving steadily around the dial.
I must have been sixty feet away from the pear-shaped rock when I spotted the chest. There was only another five feet left on the cord and I was beginning to believe that someone had beaten us to it; but there was no mistaking the square block of coral some twenty feet further out, wedged between the crowns of two huge boulders rising up from the bottom, the whole thing resembling some sacrificial stone altar roughhewn from primitive rock.
I jerked the cord sideways from Henry’s grasp as he began to tow me sideways, pointing wildly when his questioning eyes met mine. There was a double thumbs-up. He thrashed violently with his flippers and headed for the chest, swimming around it, patting it gently, smiling and making strange high-pitched noises: underwater yells of delight. I stretched the cord out as far as it would go, tied it to an outcrop of coral, and swam across to join him. Grabbing his right wrist, I checked the depth again – sixty feet.
I signaled to him, motioning him to stay where he was, yet knowing that there was no way he would have left in any case, and swam over to where I had tied the cord to the coral outcrop. I followed it back to the pear-shaped rock, released it, then let it lead me back the way I had come, handing the end to Henry while I yanked the other one free from the coral.
He tied it tightly around the chest, pointing to the sharp coral, letting me know that we would have to bring a piece of wire down. The cord would fray through in a matter of hours with a buoy bobbing and pulling at the other end. I nodded my understanding and pointed up towards the underside of the dinghy rocking gently on the surface. It was time to go.
Keeping well within the standard ascent rate of sixty feet a minute, we slowly kicked to the surface, the cord running loosely through my fingers. The gauge swinging at my waist told me that I still had over two hundred pounds of air.
I surfaced well away from the dinghy, probably a good thirty yards. Henry was already there, the dinghy tilted sideways down to the water, his arms hooked over the gunwale as he felt round for the buoy. I waved a hand and he swam across, the buoy held under his stomach in a belated attempt to hide it from anyone who might be interested enough to be watching us.
“How much air have you got left?” I asked.
He looked at his gauge. “Just over four hundred.”
“Okay, you tie the bloody thing on then. I’m down to two. Make sure it’s at least twenty feet below the surface.”
I floated on top of the water and watched through my face-mask as he pulled himself down with the cord, looking at his depth gauge at least four times before finally tying the buoy on. He let the loose line drift back up to me so that I would have something to hang on to while he went back to the trawler for Rick. Afterwards I would bundle it up and tie the end to the buoy so that it wouldn’t float to the surface and give us away.
The buoy was fairly easy to see through the face-mask, but I reckoned it would be nearly impossible to spot from the top of the cliff. It had been white once, but was now faded, with sun-dried weed clinging to its lower half.
“That’s great,” I said. “Now go and get Rick.”
“Why bother?” he asked. “Another dive and we could have it up, and be out of here b
efore it gets dark.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”
“Why not?”
“Did you have a good look at the coral stuck to that thing?”
“Not really,” he replied.
“Well, next time you’re down there, take a look. Now move! Go get Rick.”
“All right, I’m going. Don’t panic.” He went to swim and then turned to me, spat out his mouthpiece, grinned from ear to ear, and yelled: “Shit, mate. We found it!”
“Yes. Now get in the bloody dinghy and go and get Rick before I get water-logged!”
The current was starting to build, but nothing that I couldn’t handle; as long as I held on to the end of the cord.
Henry seemed to take an age hauling in the anchor before finally shooting back to the trawler for Rick. Five minutes later he had dropped him on the rocky beach.
Rick ambled along the rocks to the end of the promontory, looking as though he had all the time in the world. I pulled hard on the cord, hoping it wasn’t already fraying through against the rough coral, and dragged myself another foot or so towards the northern arm of the bay.
Uncle Max had been right; or I suppose that he had been right, for the dog was no longer there to prove it one way or the other. The lowest part of the original scar in the cliff lined up almost exactly with a large rock which must have formed part of the dog’s haunches. It might have been a few inches to the right of it, but not enough to make any difference. With those bearings taken, I turned back to Rick.
Something caught my eye on the cliff-top a quarter of a mile away to the north: a momentary shimmer of light, the sun’s reflection bouncing off broken glass or perhaps a piece of polished rock like the one which had formed the dog’s nose. I snatched the mask off, looked again, and waited, but the shimmer had gone.
There was a yell from Rick. I looked over to see him hefting a large rock over to the water’s edge; fifteen feet in from the end of the promontory; and dropping it on top of another, making the fourth of our reference points.
Uncle Max had been almost spot on. The only thing he hadn’t done was to make an allowance for the current pulling the chest sideways as they had lowered it down, or if he had, he had forgotten about it over the years.
The Stone Dog Page 18
