Echegaray took the bearings of the rift, and roughly calculated its angle with the meridian.
“Due south,” he said. “We’ll see the mid-day sun through that cleft in a minute. It must shine directly through for about a quarter of an hour every day, except for a few months in winter.”
The shaft of light was uncanny. The walls and floor of the cave merged into a grey darkness. The entrance was in black night, except where the beam of their headlight glanced off the upper edge of the mud-bank. As they examined the bed of algæ, the sun swung into line with the cleft, and the ray changed from white to gold. It seemed as deliberate as a searchlight, so exactly did it pick out the bed.
Under the direct rays of the sun the patches of jelly quivered and spread. At the sudden movement, the three jumped back, startled. Then they watched the rapid multiplication of the jelly with fascinated eyes. The edges of each patch expanded and broke off, forming islands around the mother patch. Each of these islands expanded and threw off colonies in turn. Some clung to the rock and continued to grow, but most slid down into the water, thickening the scum on its surface.
“Help me, St. Andrew!” exclaimed Pablo. “They’d cover all the ocean in a year!”
“Yes,” agreed Echegaray, “if they could breed at this pace anywhere else, and if the fish didn’t eat them.”
“Are they breeding?” asked Dick, amazed.
“Must be!” answered Don Ramon. “Each of these patches is made of hundreds of thousands of individual cells, and each cell is splitting in two. Then those two split into four, the four into eight, and so on.”
“Man! Another legend!” said Pablo sceptically.
“No—fact!” Don Ramon replied. “That’s the way they breed. The astonishing thing is that they seem to do it only during the minutes of sunshine, and then very fast. But they have such favourable surroundings. Slimy rock. Water full of minerals and salts. Lord knows what gases. And this blast of sunshine once a day. It’s enough to create life itself, let alone make blue algæ get out of control!”
“Are they what the beast eats?” asked Dick.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Don Ramon. “The fish eat the algæ, and the beast eats the fish. And so, just because of the accidental meeting of a shaft of light and some chemicals, there’s enough food to keep a great carnivorous animal in luxury.”
“We’d better get out of this,” suggested Pablo. “If your luxurious one should take a fancy to come fishing, he’d make short work of our boat down there.”
They splashed back to the edge of the mud-bank through the soupy water. Dick, exploring for an easier way down, discovered that close to the wall of the cave the slope descended in a series of little ledges of mud, like a faintly outlined flight of steps. He sat on the edge and cautiously felt the first step with his feet. It was quite hard under the coating of slime.
“Hola, Pablo! Don Ramon!” he called. “Here’s something hard under the mud!”
He scrambled down to the bottom, sploshed along the foot of the bank to the boat, and swivelled the headlight so that the other two could see their way down. Echegaray descended carefully with Pablo a step behind him. On the fifth ledge the Basque stopped for an instant to feel the mud ahead. Pablo came pounding down alongside him.
“Mind!” yelled Echegaray, feeling the support bend under their combined weight.
Pablo floundered desperately. There was a sharp crack. Smoothly and swiftly the two vanished into the mud up to their waists, while Dick howled with laughter.
“Silence, chico!” commanded Pablo, gazing at him reproachfully. “Have you no shame?”
Dick had not. He sat on the locker and roared.
“That boy wouldn’t lose his sense of humour in the middle of a nightmare,” said Echegaray. “I like him.”
The wrinkles of his face opened and shut with amusement. He gathered a compact handful of slime, and slung it at Dick with deadly aim. It took him on the side of the head with a satisfying smack.
“If I can throw as well as that later,” said Echegaray, wiping his hands, “we’ll bag our rabbit!”
“Ugh!” gasped Dick. “It’s going down my back. Sorry, Don Ramon! You looked so funny.”
“Never mind about that, young man,” said Echegaray with a twinkle in his eye. “You get us out of here!”
Dick threw them a coil of rope and started the motor. The boat shot down channel away from the mud-bank. The rope snapped taut. Don Ramon and Pablo came out of the mud with a plop, like a couple of plump corks coming out of a bottle.
Echegaray ruefully rubbed his shoulders, which felt as if they had been nearly dislocated by the jerk. Pablo offered to help him, but Don Ramon waved him hastily away.
“You keep above me or below me, Pablo,” he said. My weight is a lot more than it ought to be, and quite enough for whatever we’re standing on. By the way, what are we standing on?”
He bent down and began to scoop away the mud with his hands. Meanwhile Dick turned the boat around and came back to pick them up.
Don Ramon quickly cleared the little ledge on which he stood. The glare of the headlight showed a strip of hard yellowish-white matter. He cleared the mud from the ledges above and below and found two more strips of the same stuff.
“Mother of Heaven! It’s one of our rabbit’s ancestors!” exclaimed Don Ramon.
“Go on!” said Pablo with disbelief.
“It is. These are ribs.”
“Ribs?”
“Yes,” answered Don Ramon. “Ribs. One of the beasts died here canted up against the mud-bank, and the steps are its ribs.”
He worked his way to the wall of the cave, and cleared away some more mud. There was the backbone—a line of gaunt, giant vertebrae, from which the ribs curved out and down.
Dick and Pablo were silent. Both of them knew that some monster was sharing with them the dank, underground channel, but they had not realised its size. Dick should not have been surprised, for, from what he had already glimpsed, he could imagine the huge bulk of the beast they hunted. But not the most vivid imagination was equal to the stark fact of those enormous ribs which he had used as a flight of steps.
“This is luck,” remarked Don Ramon unperturbed. “Now we can know what our rabbit looks like before we actually see him. I hope he’s not so big as his late grandmother.”
He struggled up the vertebræ to the top of the mud-bank in the hope of finding the skull, but the long neck burrowed deep into the mud, and there was no way of reaching the far end of it.
“All aboard!” ordered Echegaray. “Let’s go back to that cave where we lost our way—the right hole must be one of those which lead off it. And for the lord’s sake keep your eyes skinned!”
They chugged slowly back along the channel.
Meanwhile Hal and Father Juan had become thoroughly alarmed at the continued silence. They tried to entertain each other, but every attempt at conversation ended in a silence while each stared into the darkness and strained his ears to catch the least sound. Father Juan at last took out his breviary and settled down to compose his thoughts. Hal achieved the same result by setting himself problems in trigonometry.
At length the cable spoke:
Bzzzz—bz—bz—bzzzz.
Hal leant eagerly over the buzzer. That faint sound was all he might ever hear of Dick.
“Are returning to cross-roads,” came the message. “All well. Please reel in.”
Hal and Father Juan wound up the wet cable. No message came through for some minutes. Then the buzzer talked again:
“This looks like it. Low wide passage. Can hardly get boat underneath. Pablo sounding.”
After a short silence Dick reported:
“Thirty feet of water. Rabbit could get in and out though we find it difficult. Have to lie down to get under. Echegaray thinks this connects with first cleft we passed where we heard waterfall. If so we are pretty close to you.”
“What does he say?” asked Father Juan.
“They thin
k they have reached the creature’s hiding place,” answered Hal, “and it sounds as if they might never get out again once they are in.”
The two sat on the edge of the rock, listening eagerly for any sounds of the party’s progress.
Suddenly a great wave came rolling down the passage, and thudded against the foot of the rock. It was followed by another and another until the whole cave was filled with the splash and rumble of water. The cable whizzed madly off the drum.
Hal jumped to the telegraph.
“Heavy wash breaking on rock,” he tapped. “Look out. Something on the move.”
The first three words of Hal’s message were all that got through. At the moment Dick was lying back in the stern with his hand on the tiller. They had dismounted the headlight for it stuck up too high to pass under the roof. Consequently they did not dare to proceed under power. Echegaray and Pablo lay flat in the bows, pushing the boat forwards into the darkness by running their hands along the roof above them. All three had handkerchiefs tied over their noses and mouths, for the stench was nearly unbearable.
“Don Ramon,” whispered Dick, “Hal says there’s a heavy wash breaking. I’ve tried to reply but the line’s dead. I think the cable has broken.”
“Full speed, Ricardito,” said Echegaray. “We don’t want to be caught in here. And keep your head down!”
Dick opened the throttle and the boat shot forwards. Echegaray and Pablo lay on the bottom and prayed. For the moment they were not so concerned with what had caused the swell as with the swell itself. Any wave more than a foot high would jam the boat against the roof, fill, and sink it.
The swell arrived, caught, and lifted them. They waited in agony for the crash, but it didn’t come. The boat shot purring through the darkness, pitching and scattering foam from the bows. By the echo of the motor they could tell that they had passed out into some cavern bigger than any they had seen.
“That will do,” ordered Echegaray. “Throw her into reverse, Ricardito, to take the way off! Lord knows what we may hit in a minute.”
The propeller churned up the water, and the boat slowly came to a standstill. Then Dick shut off the motor.
“Phew!” whistled Don Ramon. “That’s the closest shave I ever had in my life. If Hal hadn’t warned us, we should have been smashed to splinters. And now let’s get that headlight going, and see where we are.”
By the light of a candle he and Pablo rigged the headlamp on its swivel, working with quick fingers and now and again glancing over their shoulders into the threatening darkness. The ferret was without its eyes and defenceless. And evidently the rabbit, as Echegaray euphemistically called it, had discovered that it was being hunted.
At last the white beam shot out across the water. It was greeted by a whirring, hissing roar; the sound that Dick had heard when he kept his watch in the Cave of the Angels. Gathering force, it quivered and pulsated and finally broke into the siren shriek on a note so high that Pablo could not longer hear it. He looked wonderingly at Dick and Echegaray, who had their hands over their ears and were shuddering as the thin sound tore through them. They turned the headlight in the direction of the sound. It died away. There was nothing to be seen but a black, jagged hole, from which ripples and waves were rolling as something within lashed the water.
Turning the beam around and overhead, they saw that they were in a roughly circular cavern, so vast that it seemed like the inside of a hollow mountain. A waterfall plashed down from an unseen height. There were only two entrances; the low one through which they had come, and the other where lurked their quarry.
“That hole must lead straight through to the main channel close to the rock,” remarked Echegaray. “I expect the beast stuck his head out, and got tangled up in the cable.”
“I’m glad we didn’t take that turning when we started out,” Dick said.
“Yes. We need plenty of sea room to fight a brute which can make that much noise. And we’ve got it,” said Echegaray, looking round him appreciatively. “We’ll wait here and hope that our friend will attack. I feel he’s working up his courage.”
The old Basque stood in the bows, with one foot on the gunwale and a bomb poised ready in his right hand.
A single big wave left the dark passage, and then the motion of the water died down. Echegaray and Pablo exchanged glances. Neither said a word, for they did not want to alarm Dick; but both suspected that the creature was advancing on them, not storming across the surface as Echegaray assumed it would, but silently and under water.
Pablo turned the headlight in slow circles. It showed nothing but the still, inky water. The only sound was the plashing of the waterfall. The minutes passed.
“Carajo!” hissed Pablo. “Look!”
The beam was reflected in three glittering surfaces just below the water. Two of them were undoubtedly eyes, bulbous and glaring. The third, which lay between them, looked somewhat like the pearly eye of a blind man. It had no power of movement and no sort of intelligence in it. It was a small, flat disc, alive with faint and changing shades of mauve, red and green. The three organs silently submerged as the light fell on them.
“Open up the motor, Ricardito,” ordered Echegaray. “We’d better keep moving.”
They knew that they had changed from the hunters to the hunted. It was not a pleasant thought.
The first sign of the beast’s attack was the stench that rose from the water behind them like a solid thing. Pablo swung the beam across the stern. Towering over them was a vast, slimy stomach with two huge flippers outspread like wings. The neck and head were far above the field of the light. The whole bulk was poised in the act of plunging down upon them. With one instantaneous movement Echegaray hurled his bomb and flung himself across Dick’s body.
The darkness split open with a flash and a shattering explosion that filled the air with flying flesh and metal. Dick felt Echegaray’s protecting body jump and palpitate, and a stream of warm blood trickled over his head. The stern was lifted high in the air and the boat shot sickeningly down a slope of water. He heard the motor roar open, as Pablo jumped for the tiller and backed against the wall of the cavern. It stopped. He was relieved of smothering weight, and knew that Pablo had disentangled himself from the heap and was lifting Echegaray’s body off him. Dick struggled to his feet, coughing and choking in the acrid fumes of the explosion. He saw that the Basque’s arm and shoulder had been shattered by a fragment of the bomb. Pablo’s clothes were hanging in ribbons; his skin was burnt and bleeding from several flesh wounds.
“Get forward, Ricardito,” Pablo whispered, “and keep the light circling. Try a long distance shot if you see the thing again. I must patch up Don Ramon.”
Dick obeyed instantly. Then he asked:
“What happened?”
“I spit in the milk! The brute was so close that the bomb meant almost certain death for us. Thank God you’re not hurt, boy!”
“And Don Ramon?” asked Dick with a catch in his voice.
“He’ll pull through,” murmured Echegaray shakily, “if you can close that artery, Pablo. Don’t look back, Ricardito! Our lives depend on your eyes. That devil isn’t dead yet.”
Pablo cut away what was left of Don Ramon’s jersey, and twisted a cord tightly around his arm above the severed artery. Then he bound up arm and shoulder with the long red sash from his waist. Meanwhile Dick swung the light in a semicircle, peering steadily along the beam.
The beast did not leave them long in doubt. Its head, supported by a long, serpentine neck, rose twenty feet above the water and moved towards the boat. The head was not unlike that of an alligator, but broader and deeper. It was very small in comparison to the enormous barrel-shaped body. In the middle of the forehead was the motionless disc of jelly. Dick pulled the wire of a bomb, and, aiming at that unnatural organ, tossed it in a long, slow curve.
It fell short, but in the blast of yellow light Dick saw the creature’s head jerk back. Then a column of white water reared up, and hung for an instan
t like a broad, shady tree of foam. The beam of the headlight waved in dizzy circles as the boat pitched and rocked on the swell. Now and again it fell on the great neck coiling and recoiling. The neck was no longer smooth and slimy. The explosion had ripped off rows of the heavy scales. They hung like broken leaves, dripping blood.
Dick did not give the beast time to recover. It was impossible to throw straight, almost impossible to stand, for the waves reverberated from every direction. The wash from the two explosions was still leaping back and forth between the walls of the cavern. Rocks loosened by the blast slithered and plunged into the water, setting up new turmoil. The boat heaved as madly as a toy boat in a swimming pool when a score of men are diving into the tank around it. Choosing his moment when a charging slope of water flung the boat upwards, Dick let fly a second bomb. A cross wave spoilt his direction and nearly threw him overboard, but again the bomb fell close to the target, and the horrible head was enveloped in flame and water.
This time the beast had had enough. Great shreds and festoons of torn flesh hung from its chest. Dropping its head on the surface, it bolted into the black tunnel out of which it had come. They caught a glimpse of its full length—twenty feet of neck, fifty feet of barrel-shaped body, and a tail that might have been fifteen or twenty feet more.
“After him!” murmured Echegaray. “After him!”
Dick returned to his post at the motor, and cut away the useless telegraph cable. Pablo worked his way to the bows, and stood crouching over the locker like a massive figurehead, with his stocky legs firmly jammed against the ribs of the boat. They plunged across the cave through the jumping water, and shot into the black hole beyond. Pablo stared along the beam of the light, snapping out rapid changes of course.
“Hard a port!” came the final order.
Dick put the helm over. They skidded round a corner, and out into the main channel. There was the giant reptile a little ahead of them, churning through the water towards the rock. Hal and Father Juan saw the savage head driving down channel like a torpedo. They were ready, for they had heard the screams of the beast and the distant roar of the explosions. Hal grasped a bomb, but before he could throw it the boat flashed into sight hard on the beast’s tail, and he heard Pablo’s warning shout. Slamming the water with outspread flippers, the beast made a leap for the rock. At the same moment Pablo planted a bomb close under its tail. The reptile seemed to hang for an instant on a pillar of fire and foam. Its tail lashed in and out of the darkness. Its body seemed vast and formless in the writhing fumes of the explosion. Then it flopped on to the rock, and struck at the two men with a vicious sidelong lunge of its neck. Accustomed to darkness, it miscalculated the distance in the dim light. The head struck Hal and Father Juan like a battering ram, but the mouth was not open to seize them. They were shot head over heels into the hollow where Dick had once spent the night. The reptile slithered over the rock and dropped with a thunderous plunge into the channel that led to the open sea.
The Spanish Cave Page 9
