The Spanish Cave

by Geoffrey Household

  “How’s the wind, Pablo?” asked Hal.

  “North-west and steady. Gale’s going down,” replied Pablo.

  Hal repeated the information.

  “The plane will be at Villadonga in about two hours,” said the voice at the other end. “Don’t forget the fishing boats!”

  It might have been difficult to persuade the villagers to tidy up the estuary, but when Father Juan pointed out that whatever the plane hit would most certainly be smashed to atoms, the fairway was cleared of boats, mooring buoys, spars, fish-traps, and the miscellaneous floating possessions of the village within half an hour.

  Meanwhile Doña Mariquita had taken Hal and Pablo home with her. The three ate an early supper on the vine-covered terrace behind the house, while Lola slept the deep sleep of utter exhaustion. Doña Mariquita was touched by Hal’s courage and self-control, and grateful for them. Her eyes filled with tears till they looked like two dark pools, much too big for the little delicate face beneath them and the thin, jet-black line of her eyebrows above.

  “How good you are, Don Enrico!” she said gently. “And you too, Pablo. Neither of you have had a word of blame for Lola.”

  “But it wasn’t the kid’s fault,” answered Hal, who was always just. “It was wrong of her to take Pablo’s boat, but she really believed that Dick was in danger in the Cave of the Angels, and she meant to see him through it. Then the storm came, and Dick was out of luck.”

  “Luck, nothing!” exclaimed Pablo. “I should have told him what to expect on this coast when the dawn wind shifts from east to north-west. I, Pablo Candelas, am to blame!”

  He crashed his hairy fist on to the table.

  “Child!” said Doña Mariquita, smiling. “How could you teach him in two years all you have learned in forty?”

  The deep drone of the seaplane sounded overhead. The pilot shut off his motor and came spiralling down like a white gull on to the river. The propeller roared into life again as he hit the water and shot downstream between two clouds of spray. Then he taxied slowly back, and came to rest opposite the quay. All the boats in the village immediately put out, and circled round the plane at a respectful distance, as if it were a creature of uncertain temper which might suddenly take it into its head to scatter them.

  Hal and Pablo said good-bye to Doña Mariquita and amid the cheers of the whole population rowed out to the plane with Olazábal in the Erreguiña’s dinghy.

  “I don’t think I can fit in,” said Olazábal hopefully, looking at the light basket chairs in the cabin, which were certainly not built for a man of his proportions.

  He sat down, forcing his way between the arms of the chair, and strapped himself in with great caution.

  “This will end badly,” grumbled the captain, frowning at the slender wings with deep distrust.

  Meanwhile Pablo had made friends with the pilot. He clambered over the floats, examined the propeller, peered into the cockpit, and insisted on feeling and testing the controls.

  “Hombre! You’d make a grand airman!” said the pilot, impressed by his quick and steady hands.

  Pablo grinned.

  “Listen you!” he said to Olazábal. “I’m going to sail it to Bilbao. He has said so!”

  Olazábal, who feared this might be true, looked so appealingly at Hal that the Englishman burst into a roar of laughter. He hauled Pablo into the cabin, and shut the door behind him.

  The seaplane sped with a roar down the fairway, shot over Offering Key, and turned eastwards along the coast. For quarter of an hour the low cliffs and the long, narrow plain lay below them. Then the grey mountains sprawled across the end of the plain and fell sheer into the sea. They saw how completely Villadonga was cut off from the world.

  The air off the broken coast was bumpy. The plane dropped a hundred feet, with the sensation of a fast lift getting under way. Olazábal clutched the arms of his chair, and looked anxiously around him. They flew steadily for a bare minute, and then the supporting air again vanished from under them. Hal, who had got his air-legs long since, was hardly aware of the movement. Pablo seemed to enjoy it. But the face of the indomitable Olazábal, which usually looked as if it had been cut out of dark oak with rather blunt tools, turned a curious shade of olive green.

  Another air-pocket. … Again the feeling that the bottom had dropped out of the world !

  Olazábal, whose Erreguiña was capable of every possible movement except this, laid his head on one great paw and waved the other protestingly in the air. The plane danced up and down as carelessly as a fly on a summer evening.

  He swallowed violently; he heaved; he uttered one curse that could be heard above the deafening roar of the motor; then, for the first and only time in his life, Captain Olazábal gave up his recently eaten dinner to the fishes.

  They shot past the crags of Montaña, and the caves decorated by artists of the stone age with pictures of prehistoric animals. They raced over the lights and liners in the harbour of Santander. They roared into the Basque country at Castro Urdiales, and the dancers on the village green stopped to look heavenwards at the white plane. Then they saw the huge, bare hills of iron ore that surround Bilbao, the glare of the blast furnaces, and the scattered ships and warehouses stretching ten miles up the river from the outer harbour to the town.

  The seaplane whooshed into the water of the harbour, where the mythical porpoise came to fetch the Echegarays, and taxied up to the river mouth. It was a Saturday evening, warm, and with the velvet dusk turning to night. There was no noise of industry; only the music of the bands playing in the faintly lit plazas on either bank of the river, and the laughter and happy voices of girls and men.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HAL and Pablo climbed down into the motor-boat which met the seaplane. Olazábal, feeling like a man sentenced to death who has been reprieved and can’t believe it, stared stupidly at his beloved element, the sea. Greeting it with his whole body, he plunged in and rolled kicking and snorting about the harbour. At last, looking once more like the captain of the Erreguiña, he clambered aboard the boat.

  “Friend,” he said to the boatman in Basque, “have you got some other clothes at home?”

  “Surely—and at your service,” answered the boatman.

  He took Olazábal to his cottage, while Hal and Pablo waited at the railway station. The seamen of the Basque coast did not feel that there was anything personal about their clothes. The parts of their dress were interchangeable, like the spare parts of Ford cars. In less than ten minutes the captain was at the station, wearing the regulation blue trousers, much too tight for him, rope sandals on his feet, blue beret on his head, an orange shirt, and, as it was Saturday night, a coat. The three took the electric train to Bilbao, and twenty minutes later were strolling through the broad but crowded streets to the Harbour Café.

  Of all the men sitting at little tables on the pavement outside the café, Hal had no doubt at all which was Ramon Echegaray. Stout and compact, his beret cocked rakishly over one ear, his hands resting on the handle of a long stick, he sat with his knees wide apart, gazing genially at the passers-by. He was well dressed in solid cloth but, as was the custom among Basques of the middle class, he wore no tie round his smart collar. He had a powerful nose which twisted in all directions before arriving at its tip. His freshly-shaven cheeks were full and kindly, and puckered with odd little holes and wrinkles. His square chin jutted forwards and upward like the bowsprit of a ship.

  He looked straight at Olazábal without showing a sign of surprise. Echegaray believed his own eyes and believed what he was told. That was why the Basque fishermen came to him with their troubles, and why Basque officers of naval and merchant ships sent him extracts from their logs whenever there was anything curious in them. The result was that wild and weird tales of the sea found their way into Echegaray’s notebooks. In his storehouse of knowledge there were many errors and false observations, but there were also solid facts which had never been noted on any chart nor in any handbook of navigat
ion.

  So now Echegaray did not doubt the evidence of his senses, and calmly accepted the sudden appearance of Captain Olazábal.

  “Good!” he said. “Good! So the Erreguiña has grown wings!”

  “She has more sense!” answered Olazábal. “We came in a machine.”

  He introduced Hal and Pablo to Echegaray, and the three sat down at the table.

  “I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” said Echegaray to Hal in slow but correct English. “If there is anything I can do for you while you are our guest in Spain, you have only to call on me.”

  “Man! How many languages do you speak?” exclaimed Pablo, who considered anybody who spoke more than one as marvellous a creature as a person with twelve fingers instead of ten.

  Echegaray grinned at him like an old sorcerer, and replied in the almost unintelligible dialect that the villagers in remote parts of Asturias spoke among themselves:

  “I have built boats for every fishing people. I have received writings from every fishing people. I talk the talk of every fishing people.”

  “And that, señores, is true,” said the white-aproned waiter proudly. “I have heard him with these ears.”

  Hal instantly loved the powerful old shipwright. He could well understand how legends had grown up about him. Not only had Echegaray the miraculous art of building stout launches of the finest timber that were yet within the reach of a fisherman’s purse, and slim racing yachts that seemed to find wind where no wind was, but he had the magic of wisdom and kindliness. Men could and did confess the inmost secrets of their hearts to Echegaray.

  Hal told him shortly the story of Dick’s disappearance. Don Ramon listened, from time to time asking a keen question which showed that he saw in his imagination, as clearly as if he had been present, the battle against wind and tide and cliff.

  “It’s a strange thing that you couldn’t find the wrecked boat,” said Echegaray when Hal had finished. “If ever we were to see your brother alive,”—he looked at Hal with deep pity in his wrinkled grey eyes, as much as to say that he believed Dick to be dead—“I think he could tell us what happened to the San José.”

  “The San José was nowhere near the cliffs, Don Ramon,” said Pablo.

  “She was not. But your coast is a mysterious coast, my Asturian friend, and it must do its work no longer.”

  “Carajo! Has it done it before?” exclaimed Olazábal.

  Echegaray rolled a cigarette between his long, gnarled fingers.

  “Remember the Flor de Mayo?” he asked.

  “Sunk off Llanes in March, 1910,” answered the captain. “Loss unexplained, and no survivors.”

  “And the launch Santa Maria?”

  “Sunk by a German submarine in March, 1917, off Villaviciosa,” Pablo replied.

  “So it was said—but no submarine would waste torpedoes on a fishing boat. Then there was the yacht Daphne—I designed her, the sweet ship—found floating bottom up off the Cabo de Lastres in September, 1930. And now the San José”.

  “What’s the connection between them?” asked Olazábal.

  “This. All four were lost in calm weather a few hours after the highest spring tide of March or September.”

  “And all on the night tide,” Pablo remarked.

  “All on the night tide,” agreed Echegaray. “I never noticed the coincidence until I looked through my records to see if I could solve the mystery of the San José. Then I wired Olazábal, and he replied that the San José had been lost only half an hour after the turn of the tide. That suggested an idea.”

  Echegaray drew a rough map of the coast on the marble-topped table.

  “Here is where the San José sank—ten miles from Villadonga, and half an hour after the turn.

  “Here the Flor de Mayo—twenty miles from Villadonga, and an hour after the turn.

  “Here the Daphne was lost—about forty miles from Villadonga, and two hours after the turn.

  “And here the Santa Maria—fifty miles, and, so far as we can tell, two and a half hours after the turn.

  “Of course we don’t know the exact time and place that any of them went down, and I’ve made these figures look a lot more simple than they actually are. But they do fit the few facts that came up at the official enquiries. What do you make of it, Olazábal?”

  “A plague on your mathematics!” said Olazábal, whose glass had been steadily refilled by the waiter. “It’s a volcano on the bottom.”

  “I thought of that,” replied Echegaray quite seriously. “But if it were, the effect would be felt on land—and it isn’t. Don Enrico, have you any theory?”

  “I’m no seaman!” said Hal, shaking his head.

  “And you, Señor Candelas?”

  “To me,” answered Pablo, mopping his brow after a struggle with simple arithmetic, “it seems that something starts from Villadonga at the top of the tide and moves out to sea at twenty miles an hour. But there’s no such thing.”

  “Friend,” said Echegaray, “there is such a thing, because it does move away from Villadonga at twenty miles an hour. And now, what is it?”

  “Whatever it is,” Hal remarked, “it can’t happen every March and every September, or Pablo would know about it.”

  “He might not,” Echegaray answered, “for the fishermen of that coast don’t stay out much after dark— especially at the equinoxes when the weather is nearly always bad.”

  “We don’t,” Pablo confirmed. “Many a good man and boat have been lost in March and September.”

  “And how many of them were really sunk by storm, we can’t tell,” Echegaray pointed out. “I’ll bet you that your coast goes mad twice a year as regularly as clockwork. Seventy times out of a hundred there are no boats in the way and nobody suffers. Twenty-five times out of a hundred somebody does suffer, but the loss is put down to the equinoctial gales. Five times out of hundred—say, once every ten years—there’s a disaster in a dead calm, and the loss cannot be explained.”

  Echegaray cleared his throat, and looked around the café with a fiercely challenging stare.

  “They said the Daphne——” he began, and then stopped as if the words stuck in his throat. “They said the Daphne turned turtle because no yacht of fifty tons could possibly carry so much canvas. They had the darned impudence”—he blew out his cheeks and pounded on the table so that the glasses jumped like live things— “they had the darned impudence to say that her designer didn’t know his job!”

  A shocked silence fell on the Harbour Café for fully ten seconds. Waiters and customers alike were well aware that only one subject could draw such fury from their beloved Don Ramon. “The Daphne” they whispered, “he’s talking of the Daphne”.

  Olazábal chuckled to himself—he knew that Echegaray would never rest until he had solved the mystery of the San José now that he had decided it was connected with the loss of the Daphne.

  “I saw a whirlpool in the Orkneys once,” said Olazábal, apparently changing the subject.

  “You told me,” grunted Echegaray.

  Then he recovered his geniality and turned to Hal and Pablo.

  “Olazábal’s whirlpool was about a ship’s length in diameter and moved rapidly across the water, like one of those whirls of leaves and dust you see on land. It might be something of that sort which is causing the trouble on the Asturian coast. Isn’t there any tradition in your village which could help us, Señor Candelas?”

  Pablo hesitated.

  “I don’t say no,” he answered at last.

  “What?”

  “Man, it’s nothing!”—Pablo was ashamed of having his superstitions dragged out in public—“A children’s tale! We have a cave, the Cave of the Angels. It’s supposed to be unlucky.”

  “Ah! Now I remember!” exclaimed Echegaray. “There’s a sort of ship’s graveyard below it, isn’t there? Well, many coasts have those places, so it needn’t mean much. But that is where we’ll start our investigation.”

  “Are you coming back with us?” ask
ed Hal eagerly.

  “I certainly am,” said Ramon Echegaray. “We’ll take the machine you came in.”

  “No!” cried Olazábal with a wail like a wounded bull elephant.

  Echegaray smote him between the shoulder blades.

  “Sit here and drink, then, till the Erreguiña comes to fetch you!”

  “That,” Olazábal said, “is just what I’m going to do.”

  The three left him there. They sent a wire to Father Juan, asking him to have some flares set on the banks of the Villadonga river to light the fairway, and then took a taxi down to the outer harbour. Half an hour later the white seaplane was roaring through the night westwards to Villadonga.

  Dick’s first thought as he swam blindly forwards on the smooth, heaving water was one of vague surprise that he was alive at all. He was not yet quite conscious, and was swimming just because it was second nature to him to swim. He could not see his arms. He could not see the water. The swell swung him up and swung him down again, and rumbled away into the darkness with little splashes and sucking noises and deep moans. His second thought was a strange sadness. He felt more lonely than he had ever felt in his life. He felt as if he had died.

  After a while he bumped his head against a rock. The slight shock woke him up. He swam along the barrier, following its course with groping hands, and came to a little ledge. He hauled himself out of the water and sat on the ledge, limp and weary. Two bulky objects inside his shirt felt cold against his skin; they were his flash-light and the sausage. Dick felt comforted. Here was something belonging to the sunlit, outside world which he seemed to have left for years and years, and had actually left ten minutes before.

  He switched on the flash-light. The shaft of light went a very little way, and made the darkness seem larger and even more unfriendly. He could see that he was in a cavern. The damp and slimy rock wall against which he leaned curved forward over his head, but the light was not strong enough to show him how high the roof was, nor how far away was the opposite wall. He turned the beam on to the water, which heaved sullenly up and down, covering his knees at the top of the swell, and at the bottom leaving his feet dangling in the air. At the very limit of the beam he saw something which looked like a great back sticking out of the water—a grey shape in the darkness. The grey shape wallowed in the swell and came a little nearer. Then he recognised it. It was his boat, or rather Pablo’s, floating upside down.