The White Waterfall
Page 30
of manilla we had luckily obtained. Allowing aboutfive yards of rope between each two persons, I tied it in turn aroundthe waist of Holman, Barbara, the Professor, Edith, and myself, andbeing thus prepared against a precipice in our path, Holman took thelead and we followed in single file as the tightening of the ropeinformed each one that the immediate leader was a safe distance infront.
"Is there any choice of direction?" asked Holman, pausing after he hadtaken half a dozen steps.
"I don't think so," I said. "Unless some one has an intuition regardingthe path to liberty."
"Please let me pick the route," murmured Edith. "I am stretching out myarm, Mr. Holman; will you come here to me and feel the direction I ampointing in?"
We clustered round the girl, each one feeling her outstretched arm andthen turning quickly toward the point indicated. I was glad that no onecould see my own face at that moment. It was pathetic to think of anyone choosing a route in that abyss of horror, and the trouble which thegirl took to make sure that Holman would move off in the direction shepointed brought tears to my eyes.
"I--I might be silly in thinking it," she stammered, "but I believe--oh,please, Mr. Holman, try and walk in the direction I pointed in!"
"I certainly will try," said the youngster. "If I go wrong, you put meright, will you? I believe somehow that we're going to find a way out. Idon't know the right path to it, but I've got a premonition we'll findit. Now we're off again."
We moved forward with anxious footsteps. Imagination furrowed the floorof that place with bottomless crevices, and the cold hand of feargripped our hearts. It required a mental effort to move one foot pastthe other, and whenever one of the girls stumbled, her little cry ofalarm brought untold agony to Holman and myself as we took a grip ofthe rope and braced ourselves against the happening which our excitedminds expected any moment. We were walking hand in hand with dread--adread that became greater when we thought that a false step of oursmight drag to death the two women that we loved.
On, and on, and on, we bored into the horrible night. With blindfootsteps we walked fearfully through the Stygian waves that rolledaround us. The place seemed to be of enormous size, and in the deadsilence that surrounded us our footsteps woke clattering echoes thatappeared to mock our efforts to escape.
The air in places had a strange odour that reminded us of camphor. Thispeculiar smell seemed to be in certain stratas of the atmosphere throughwhich we passed, and whenever our passage through these scented layerswas unduly prolonged, we experienced a sensation that I can only likento the near approach of seasickness. It made the girls sick and faint,but they walked on without complaining.
We struck the wall of the place after we had been walking for a periodthat we judged to be about three hours, and we decided to rest for awhile. We sat close together upon the cold floor and endeavoured tocheer each other's spirits by constantly asserting that the air of theplace made it reasonable to suppose that there must be some otherentrance besides the hole through which Leith had lowered the three, andthe fissure through which Holman and I had rolled down the gigantic ashpile. And the assertions seemed logical. The two entrances that we knewof opened into Leith's retreat, and it was hard to think that the airsupply of the enormous cavern in which we were wandering could comethrough those two openings. We combatted our fears with this argument aswe ate a morsel of the food we had received that morning, and feelingthat he who has the biggest stock of hope has the biggest grip uponlife, we endeavoured to make light of our misfortunes as we stumbled onagain after a short rest.
But that impenetrable night produced a depression that we could notshake off. Imagination sprang ahead of the moment and pictured our finalstruggles. We fought with the nightmares that entered our minds, andconversation languished. We couldn't speak while the mental canvaseswere being rapidly coloured with scenes depicting our end in thedarkness and the silence, where a grim fate would even deny one a lastlook at a dearly loved face. A silence came upon us that had the sameeffect as intense cold. Each in his own frozen husk of despair ploddedforward with the idea that the others were so engrossed in their ownthoughts that they were not inclined to answer when addressed. Thedarkness so completely isolated each person that after some hours ofsilence it required a tremendous effort to thoroughly convince the mindthat one was walking with living people and not with phantoms.
It was after one of these intervals of silence that Barbara Herndon madea discovery that chilled our blood. She made some commonplace remark toher sister and received no reply. She repeated the observation, but itbrought no comment. The happening seemed to drag the rest of us from thestrange torpor, and we stopped. We sensed that Barbara Herndon wasfeeling her way toward her sister, and presently the younger girl gave ashriek of alarm that stirred a million echoes in that place of terror.
"Edith!" she shrieked. "Edith! Edith! Where are you?"
Holman and I clawed fiercely upon the rope, moving toward each other inan effort to find a quick solution for the mystery. We collidedviolently as we reached the spot where the rope had circled EdithHerndon's waist, and we stood, stunned and speechless, as we fingeredthe cord. In some manner, probably severed by a knifelike projection ofrock, the loop which I had knotted around her body had been cut through,and the rope had fallen unnoticed from the waist of the weary girl!
"Great God!" I cried. "Where did we lose her? What way did we come?"
The questions were ridiculous. The numbing influence of the place hadmade us walk for an hour or so in complete silence, and it wasimpossible to say when she had lost her position in the line. And now,as we moved round and round, endeavouring to peer into the blackness, welost all sense of direction. Each had a different notion about the waywe had come. While we were moving forward, our combined efforts to walkstraight ahead made it impossible for one to turn and go in an oppositedirection, but in the few moments of our excitement as we turned andtwisted in clawing for the loop where Edith had been tied, we becamebewildered. We didn't know in which direction to turn in searching forthe lost one!
"What'll we do?" cried the Professor. "Do something! Quick! Find her!Find her!"
I took a great breath and yelled her name into the darkness. The soundthundered through the place like the noise made by a freight train.Again and again I screamed it, and the million devils in the placeshrieked the name in mockery. I exhausted myself in my mad efforts tosend my voice to her ears.
Holman gripped my arm when I had worked myself into an insane frenzy,and he begged me to be quiet.
"Barbara thought she heard an answer," he cried. "Listen! There it isagain!"
It was Edith! Her voice came to us like a thread of silver, and with nothought of the bottomless crevices that might be in our path, we chargedblindly toward the spot from which her cry had come.
It seemed ages before we met her. The sounds puzzled us, but at last wegripped her hands, and the Professor and Barbara, hysterical with joy,sobbed their thanks into the gloom.
"I don't know how the rope became undone," cried Edith. "I didn't findout that I had become separated from the rest of you till I attempted todraw your attention to the waterfall."
"To the what?" I questioned.
"To the waterfall," repeated the girl. "Did you pass it? It is abeautiful little waterfall, and the water flows over a white limestonerock that makes it sparkle like so many fireflies in the dark."
I cannot explain what happened to me at that moment. Some veil within mymind was torn away by the few words that the girl had uttered. I wasback upon Levuka wharf, lying under the copra bag where Holman had foundme, and for a moment I could not speak as the subconscious mind flung ascore of half-forgotten incidents into my conscious area.
_"It is the White Waterfall!"_ I yelled. "It is the White Waterfallthat the Maori sang of on the wharf at Levuka! He was warning Toni, andToni was killed by Soma because he knew! It is the way out! We're saved!We're saved! It is on the road to heaven out of Black Fernando's hell!"
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WIZ
ARDS' SEAT
As we stumbled toward the spot from which came the sounds of runningwater, the incidents of the preceding ten days seemed to be droppinginto their places within my brain like the pieces of a picture puzzlethat has suddenly become plain to the eye of the child who is putting ittogether. I understood! My brain seemed bursting within my skull. Itappeared to me that God, in his own way, had made me a blind instrumentto do his work. The big Maori on the wharf at Levuka knew of the hellupon the Isle of Tears. The Maori had warned Toni, the little Fijian,but fear of what might happen to any one possessing the knowledge hadmade Toni deny that he was the companion of the Maori when he wasquestioned before and after he had reached _The Waif_. In a burst ofconfidence he had confessed the truth to me on the