The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  At daybreak Rainsford, lying near the swamp, was awakened by a sound that made him know that he had new things to learn about fear. It was a distant sound, faint and wavering, but he knew it. It was the baying of a pack of hounds.

  Rainsford knew he could do one of two things. He could stay where he was and wait. That was suicide. He could flee. That was postponing the inevitable. For a moment he stood there, thinking. An idea that held a wild chance came to him, and, tightening his belt, he headed away from the swamp.

  The baying of the hounds drew nearer, then still nearer, nearer, ever nearer. On a ridge Rainsford climbed a tree. Down a watercourse, not a quarter of a mile away, he could see the bush moving. Straining his eyes, he saw the lean figure of General Zaroff; just ahead of him Rainsford made out another figure whose wide shoulders surged through the tall jungle weeds; it was the giant Ivan, and he seemed pulled forward by some unseen force; Rainsford knew that Ivan must be holding the pack in leash.

  They would be on him any minute now. His mind worked frantically. He thought of a native trick he had learned in Uganda. He slid down the tree. He caught hold of a springy young sapling and to it he fastened his hunting knife, with the blade pointing down the trail; with a bit of wild grapevine he tied back the sapling. Then he ran for his life. The hounds raised their voices as they hit the fresh scent. Rainsford knew now how an animal at bay feels.

  He had to stop to get his breath. The baying of the hounds stopped abruptly, and Rainsford’s heart stopped too. They must have reached the knife.

  He shinned excitedly up a tree and looked back. His pursuers had stopped. But the hope that was in Rainsford’s brain when he climbed died, for he saw in the shallow valley that General Zaroff was still on his feet. But Ivan was not. The knife, driven by the recoil of the springing tree, had not wholly failed.

  Rainsford had hardly tumbled to the ground when the pack took up the cry again.

  “Nerve, nerve, nerve!” he panted, as he dashed along. A blue gap showed between the trees dead ahead. Ever nearer drew the hounds. Rainsford forced himself on toward that gap. He reached it. It was the shore of the sea. Across a cove he could see the gloomy gray stone of the chateau. Twenty feet below him the sea rumbled and hissed. Rainsford hesitated. He heard the hounds. Then he leaped for out into the sea. . . .

  When the general and his pack reached the place by the sea, the Cossack stopped. For some minutes he stood regarding the blue-green expanse of water. He shrugged his shoulders. Then be sat down, took a drink of brandy from a silver flask, lit a cigarette, and hummed a bit from Madame Butterfly.

  General Zaroff had an exceedingly good dinner in his great paneled dining hall that evening. With it he had a bottle of Pol Roger and half a bottle of Chambertin. Two slight annoyances kept him from perfect enjoyment. One was the thought that it would be difficult to replace Ivan; the other was that his quarry had escaped him; of course, the American hadn’t played the game— so thought the general as he tasted his after-dinner liqueur. In his library he read, to soothe himself, from the works of Marcus Aurelius. At ten he went up to his bedroom. He was deliciously tired, he said to himself, as he locked himself in. There was a little moonlight, so, before turning on his light, he went to the window and looked down at the courtyard. He could see the great hounds, and he called, “Better luck another time,” to them. Then he switched on the light.

  A man, who had been hiding in the curtains of the bed, was standing there.

  “Rainsford!” screamed the general. “How in God’s name did you get here?”

  “Swam,” said Rainsford. “I found it quicker than walking through the jungle.”

  The general sucked in his breath and smiled. “I congratulate you,” he said. “You have won the game.”

  Rainsford did not smile. “I am still a beast at bay,” he said, in a low, hoarse voice. “Get ready, General Zaroff.”

  The general made one of his deepest bows. “I see, “he said. “Splendid! One of us is to furnish a repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very excellent bed. On guard, Rainsford.” . . .

  He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided.

  A NIGHTMARE OF THE DOLDRUMS

  W. CLARK RUSSELL

  The Justitia was a smart little barque of 395 tons. I had viewed her with something of admiration as she lay in midstream in the Hooghly—somewhere off the Coolie Bazaar.

  I—representing in those days a large Birmingham firm of dealers in the fal-lal industries—had wished to make my way from Calcutta to Capetown. I saw the Justitia and took a fancy to her; I admired the long, low, piratic run of her hull, as she lay with straining hawsepipes on the rushing stream of the Hooghly; upon which, as you watched, there might go by in the space of an hour some halfscore at least of dead natives made ghastly canoes of by huge birds, erect upon the corpses, burying their beaks as they sailed along.

  I called upon the agents, was told that the Justitia was not a passenger ship, but that I could hire a cabin for the run to Capetown if I chose; a sum in rupees, trifling compared with the cost of transit by steam, was named. I went on board, found the captain walking up and down under the awning, and agreeably killed an hour in a chat with as amiable a seaman as ever it was my good fortune to meet.

  We sailed in the middle of July. Nothing worth talking about happened during our run down the Bay of Bengal. The crew aforemast were all of them Englishmen; there were twelve, counting the cook and steward. The captain was a man named Cayzer; the only mate of the vessel was one William Perkins. The boatswain, a rough, short, hairy, immensely strong man, acted as second mate and kept a look-out when Perkins was below. But he was entirely ignorant of navigation, and owned to me that he read with difficulty words of one syllable, and could not write.

  I was the only passenger. My name, I may as well say here, is Thomas Barron. Our run to the south Ceylon parallels was slow and disappointing. The monsoon was light and treacherous, sometimes dying out in a sort of laughing, mocking gust till the whole ocean was a sheet-calm surface, as though the dependable trade wind was never again to blow.

  “Oh, yes,” said Captain Cayzer to me, “we’re used to the unexpected hereabouts. Monsoon or no monsoon, I’ll tell you what: you’re always safe in standing by for an Irishman’s hurricane down here.”

  “And what sort of breeze is that?” I asked.

  “An up-and-down calm,” said he; “as hard to know where it begins as to guess where it’ll end.”

  However, thanks to the frequent trade puffs and other winds, which tasted not like the monsoon, we crawled through those latitudes which Ceylon spans and fetched within a few degrees of the Equator.

  I left my cabin one morning some hours after the sun had risen, by which time the decks had been washed down, and were already dry, with a salt sparkle as of bright white sand on the face of the planks, so roasting was it. I went into the head to get a bath under the pump there.

  It was a true tropic morning. The courses swung to the swell without response to the breathings of the air; and on high the light cotton-white royals were scarcely curved by the delicate passage of the draught.

  Yet the barque had steerage way. When I looked through the grating at her metalled forefoot I saw the ripples plentiful as harpstrings threading aft, and whilst I dried myself I watched the slow approach of a piece of timber hoary with barnacles and venerable with long hairs of seaweed, amid and around which a thousand little fish were sporting, many-colored as though a rainbow had been shivered.

  I return to my cabin, dressed, and stepped on to the quarter-deck, where I found some men spreading the awning, and the captain viewing an object out upon the water through a telescope, and talking to the boatswain, who stood alongside.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “Something that resembles a raft,” answered the captain.

  The thing he looked at was about a mile distant, some three points on the starboard bow. On pointing the telescope, I distinctly made out the fabric of a ra
ft, fitted with a short mast, to which midway a bundle—it resembled a parcel—was attached. A portion of the raft was covered by a white sheet or cloth, whence dangled a short length of something chocolate-coloured, indistinguishable even with the glass, lifting and sinking as the raft rose and fell upon the flowing heave of the sea.

  “The ocean,” said the captain, taking the glass from me, “is a big volume of tragic stories, and the artist who illustrates the book does it in what fashion,” and he nodded in the direction of the raft.

  “What do you make of it, boatswain?” I asked.

  “It looks to me,” he answered in his strong, harsh, deep voice, “like a religious job—one of them rafts the Burma covies float away their dead on. I never see one afore, sir, but I’ve heard tell of such things.”

  We sneaked stealthily towards the raft. It was seven bells—half-past seven—and the sailors at their breakfast on the forecastle, that they might view the strange contrivance. The mate, Mr. Perkins, came on deck to relieve the boatswain, and, after inspecting the raft through the telescope, gave it as his opinion that it was a Malay floating bier—“a Mussulman trick of ocean burial, anyhow,” said he. “There should be a jar of water aboard the raft, and cakes and fruit for the corpse to regale on, if he ha’n’t been dead long.”

  The steward announced breakfast; the captain told him to hold it back awhile. He was a curious as I to get a close view of the queer object, but the wind was nearly gone, the barque scarcely responded to the motion of her rudder, the thread-like lines at the cutwater had faded, and a roasting, oppressive calm was upon the water, whitening it out into a tingling sheen of quicksilver with a fiery shaft of blinding dazzle, solitary and splendid.

  The raft was about six cables’ lengths off us when the barque came to a dead stand, with a soft, universal hollowing in of her canvas from royal to course, as though, like something sentient, she delivered one final sigh before the swoon of the calm seized her. But now we were near enough to resolve the floating thing with the naked eye into details.

  It was a raft formed of bamboo canes. A mast about six feet tall was erected upon it; the dark thing over the edge proved a human leg, and, when the fabric lifted with the swell and raised the leg clear, we saw that the foot had been eaten away by fish, a number of which were swimming about the raft, sending little flashes of foam over the pale surface as they darted along with their back or dorsal fins exposed. They were all little fish; I saw no sharks. The body to which the leg belonged was covered by a white cloth. The captain called my attention to the parcel attached to the mast, and said that it possibly contained the food which the Malays leave beside their dead after burial.

  “But let’s go to breakfast now, Mr. Barron,” said he, with a slow, reproachful, impatient look round the breathless scene of ocean. “If there’s any amusement to be got out of that thing yonder there’s a precious long, quiet day before us, I fear, for the entertainment.”

  We breakfasted, and in due course returned on deck. The slewing of the barque had caused the raft to shift its bearings, otherwise its distance remained as it was when we went below.

  “Mr. Perkins,” said the captain, “lower a boat and bring aboard that parcel from the raft’s jury-mast, and likewise take a peep at the figure under the cloth, and report its sex and what it looks like.”

  I asked leave to go in the boat, and when she was lowered, with three men in her, I followed Mr. Perkins and we rowed over to the raft. All about the frail bamboo contrivance the water was beautiful with the colors and movements of innumerable fish. As we approached we were greeted by an evil smell. The raft seemed to have been afloat for a considerable period; its submerged portion was green with marine adhesions or growths. The fellow in the bows of the boat, maneuvering with the boathook, cleverly snicked the parcel from the jury-mast and handed it along to the mate, who put it beside him without opening it, for that was the captain’s privilege.

  “Off with that cloth,” said Mr. Perkins, “and then back water a bit out of this atmosphere.”

  The bowman jerked the cloth clear of the raft with his boathook; the white sheet floated like a snowflake upon the water for a few breaths, then slowly sank. The body exposed was stark-naked and tawny. It was a male. I saw nothing revolting in the thing; it would have been otherwise perhaps had it been white. The hair was long and black, the nose aquiline, the mouth puckered into the aspect of a harelip; the gleam of a few white teeth painted a ghastly contemptuous grim upon the dead face. The only shocking part was the footless leg.

  “Shall I hook him overboard, sir?” said the bowman.

  “No, let him take his ease as he lies,” answered the mate, and with that we returned to the barque.

  We climbed over the side, the boat was hoisted to the davits, and Mr. Perkins took the parcel out of the stem-sheets and handed it to the captain. The cover was a kind of fine canvas, very neatly stitched with white thread. Captain Cayzer ripped through the stitching with his knife and exposed a couple of books bound in some kind of skin or parchment. They were probably the Koran, but the characters none of us knew. The captain turned them about for a bit, and I stood by looking at them; he then replaced them in their canvas cover and put them down upon the skylight, and, by and by, on his leaving the deck, he took them below to his cabin.

  There had not been a stir of wind all day; not the faintest breathing of breeze has tarnished the sea down to the hour of midnight when, feeling weary, I withdrew to my cabin. I slept well, spite of the heat and the cockroaches, and rose at seven. I found the steward in the cabin. His face wore a look of concern; and on seeing me he instantly exclaimed:

  “The captain seems very ill, sir. Might you know anything of physic? Neither Mr. Perkins nor me can make out what’s the matter.”

  “I know nothing of physic,” I answered, “but I’ll look in on him.”

  I stepped to the door, knocked and entered. Captain Cayzer lay in a bunk under a middling-sized porthole; the cabin was full of the morning light. I started and stood at gaze, scarce crediting my sight, so shocked and astounded was I by the dreadful change which had happened in the night in the poor man’s appearance.

  His face was blue, and I remarked a cadaverous sinking in of the eyeballs; the lips were livid, the hands likewise blue, but strangely wrinkled like a washerwoman’s. On seeing me he asked in a husky whispering voice for a drink of water. I handed him a full pannikin, which he drained feverishly, and then began to moan and cry out, making some weak, miserable efforts to rub first one arm, then the other, then his legs.

  The steward stood in the doorway. I turned to him, sensible that my face was ashen, and asked some questions. I then said, “Where is Mr. Perkins?”

  He was on deck. I bade the steward attend to the captain, and passed through the hatch to the quarterdeck, where I found the mate.

  “Do you know that the captain is very ill?” said I.

  “Do I know it, sir? Why, yes. I’ve been sitting by him chafing his limbs and giving him water to drink, and attending to him in other ways. What is it, d’ye know, sir?”

  “Cholera!” said I.

  “Oh, my God, I hope not!” he exclaimed. “How could it be cholera? How could cholera come aboard?”

  “A friend of mine died of cholera at Rangoon when I was there,” said I. “I recognize the looks and will swear to the symptoms”

  “But how could it have come aboard?” he exclaimed in a voice low but agitated.

  My eyes, as he asked the question, were upon the raft. I started and cried, “Is that thing still there?”

  “Ay,” said the mate, “we haven’t budged a foot all night.”

  The suspicion rushed upon me whilst I looked at the raft and ran my eyes over the bright, hot morning sky and the burnished surface of sea, sheeting into dimness in the misty junction of heaven and water.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” said I, “to discover that we brought the cholera aboard with us yesterday from that dead man’s raft yonder.”

>   “How is cholera to be caught in that fashion?” exclaimed Mr. Perkins, pale and a bit wild in his way of staring at me.

  “We may have brought the poison aboard in the parcel of books.”

  “Is cholera to be caught so?”

  “Undoubtedly. The disease may be propagated by human intercourse. Why not then by books which have been handled by cholera-poisoned people, or by the atmosphere of a body dead of the plague?” I added, pointing at the raft.

  “No man amongst us is safe, then, now?” cried the mate.

  “I’m no doctor,” said I; “but I know this, that contagious poisons such as scarlet fever, glanders, and so on may retain their properties in a dormant state for years. I’ve heard tell of scores of instances of cholera being propagated through articles of dress. Depend upon it,” said I, “that we brought the poison aboard with us yesterday from that accursed death-raft yonder.”

  “Aren’t the books in the captain’s cabin?” said the mate.

  “Are they?”

  “He took them below yesterday, sir.”

  “The sooner they’re overboard the better,” I exclaimed, and returned to the cabin.

  I went to the captain and found the steward rubbing him. The disease appeared to be doing its work with horrible rapidity; the eyes were deeply sunk and red; every feature had grown sharp and pinched as after a long wasting disease; the complexion was thick and muddy. Those who have watched beside cholera know that terrific changes may take place in a few minutes. I cast my eyes about for the parcel of books, and, spying it, took a stick from a corner of the berth, hooked up the parcel, and, passing it through the open porthole, shook it overboard.

  The captain lived till the evening, and seldom spoke save to call upon God to release him. I had found an opportunity to tell him that he was ill of the cholera, and explained how it happened that the horrible distemper was on board, for I was absolutely sure we had brought it with us in that parcel of books; but his anguish was so keen, his death so close then, that I cannot be sure he understood me. He died shortly after seven o’clock, and I have since learned that that time is one of the critical hours in cholera.