Luvia came bounding up and, dropping Synolda on her feet, bent down, his hands planted on his knees.
‘Up you go,’ he panted. ‘Quick, for God’s sake!’
Basil scrambled on to his back. A second swift movement brought him astride the palisade between two of the great spikes. Synolda had followed him on to Juhani’s wide shoulders. Basil seized her hands and drew her up beside him. Lifting her right clear of the spike in front of him he dropped her down on the other side.
With feverish haste he stooped for Unity. She gave a spring and landed in his arms; her face on a level with his own. He pressed one fierce, swift kiss on her mouth and, tilting her over, let her drop beside Synolda.
The girls had hardly picked themselves up when their men thudded down almost on to them. Basil realised only then that in the excitement they had lost their sense of direction and, instead of heading for the western side of the compound, they had come out to its south. The error had brought them a good two hundred yards nearer to De Brissac but, on the other hand, they were no more than a hundred yards from the nearest native hutments and in plain sight of any of the savages round the fire who chanced to glance in their direction.
Up on his hill of rock, at the foot of the landslide, De Brissac was still peering anxiously through his night-glasses. In dismay he had witnessed the war-dance come to an end with a final mock charge right up to the very faces of the onlookers, and heard the last wild cry that heralded an almost complete silence. To his relief the sweating dancers sank down on the ground and young Negresses moved out from among the crowd bringing them earthenware pitchers from which they drank. There seemed a chance that the warriors’ visit to the Marriage House still might be postponed a little longer.
In the new silence that had fallen over the great gathering fresh sounds now became perceptible to him. A single scream echoed from the Marriage House and then the shrill falsetto of many women’s upraised voices. At any moment he feared the big Negro under the canopy might send somebody to investigate the trouble but none of the crowd in the clearing appeared to take any notice. Probably they were used to quarrelling among their concubines.
He focused his glasses on the compound, wondering if Basil and Juhani had managed to get inside or if the excitement there was caused by some ordinary upset. It was too dark for him to see anything but the faint glimmer from some of the curtained doorways, and in the valley beyond, to the west, all was darkness and silence.
For two minutes he peered through his night-glasses; then he fancied that he could make out a vague movement down there by the south side of the stockade, which was nearest to him. A moment later he was certain of it and his heart bounded joyfully. Four figures bunched together were moving cautiously up towards the cliff. It could only be Basil and Juhani, with the two girls; but why in the name of thunder, he wondered, had they taken the risk of passing so horribly near the great gathering of Negroes? As he watched he could see the pale blur of the girls’ light-coloured dresses even at that distance.
Suddenly a shout went up from one of the blacks on the edge of the crowd. The whole body of natives seemed to turn as one. The white women and their rescuers had been spotted. Instantly the warriors were upon their feet shrieking madly. The tightly packed mass broke out of its circle; those farthest away, streaming across the open space, silhouetted plainly against the blazing fire while those nearest the compound rushed forward to head off the little party that was coming up the hill.
De Brissac’s machine-gun was aimed and sighted. At the same instant that Juhani and Basil fired their pistols into the oncoming crowd De Brissac pressed down the lever and a stream of lead streaked from his gun. The night became hideous with its clatter and the screams of the wounded as the first burst took its victims among the witch-doctors and elders who surrounded the big Negro chief.
Shrieks, yells and curses came up from the valley and echoed back from the cliff-face. Utter confusion reigned in the lighted circle. A score of dead and dying lay writhing upon the ground. The chief himself had been hit in the groin and was howling frantically with the pain of his wound.
The unexpected attack momentarily halted the natives nearest to the little party of whites. Taking advantage of it, the four of them began to run, but after a moment, the nearest savages charged towards them again.
De Brissac swivelled his machine-gun and fired another burst, doing deadly execution among the Negroes who were nearest to his friends, but hordes of them seemed to be sweeping up the hillside from every direction. He kept the lever of the gun down and traversed it swiftly from side to side. The blacks were so numerous and crowded together that practically every bullet found a mark; the night became a horrid din of wailing, flesh-torn humans.
Juhani was half-way up the hill, dragging Synolda by the arm; Basil and Unity were running level, only a few yards behind them. A group of burly warriors was less than a dozen yards away, racing to cut them off. One flung a spear that sailed within two inches of Synolda’s shoulder; a flight of spears followed and Basil was pierced by one in the fleshy part of his thigh. He wrenched it out and, whipping round, pistolled the man who had thrown it.
Luvia shot down two more of the nearest Negroes, but the others would have overwhelmed them had not De Brissac concentrated his fire on their aggressors. Mown down by the blast of lead the blacks pitched and tumbled as they were hit, toppling backwards down the hillside.
The four whites raced on. Another moment brought them to the foot of the rocks, Juhani took a flying leap and landed half on the ledge beside De Brissac. Wriggling round he stretched out his long arms and, grabbing each of the girls by a hand, hauled them up beside him. Gasping and cursing, Basil stumbled up the broken, jagged slope and flinging himself down beside De Brissac snatched up a rifle. Luvia seized another and, as fresh hordes of savages charged yelling up the hill, the three white men commenced the grim fight for their lives and those of the girls they had rescued.
21
Under the Cliff
Bright moonlight lit the prospect of the whole low valley. From the natural fort, formed by the great jagged rocks at the base of the landslide, its defenders could see the dense mass of native hutments away in the dip to their right front; before them, six hundred yards away, the great bonfire still burned in the clearing, its light a little subdued by the cold silver of the moonbeams. To its left the Marriage House compound was now full of screaming, running figures.
In a great semi-circle, from cliff-face to cliff-face on either side of them, countless dark forms were racing up the gentle rise. It seemed utterly impossible that the whites could withstand such numbers and there was no possibility of retreat. Behind them, at an angle of forty-five degrees, there rose a fifty-foot gradient of loose earth and shale which had come down from the mountain mass with the great rocks amongst which they crouched. Above it loomed a black cavity. The moonlit landscape and the towering cliff behind them had no cloud, only degrees of shade and darkness, with here and there a silvery edge of jutting rock.
De Brissac had fitted a new belt of ammunition to his machine-gun. As the howling crowd of natives surged up the slope he pressed down its lever. The gun spat flame like an acetylene blowlamp and the staccato rat-tat-tat of its automatic explosions drowned the dull trampling of the advancing savages on the matted earth.
Standing out from the cliff the natural fort formed a semi-circle and could be attacked on its sides as well as its front. Luvia was crouched between two large boulders with Synolda beside him to De Brissac’s right while Basil lay prone upon the flat slab of rock, with Unity to the Frenchman’s left. The two girls had hardly recovered from their desperate effort to escape being cut off but they did their best to help their men by loading the three spare Winchesters and placing ammunition ready to hand for the machine-gun.
Traversing the gun slowly from side to side De Brissac took a terrible toll of the black attackers, mowing them down by the score before they were near enough to throw their spears, but along each c
liff-face the Negroes were able to advance without exposing themselves to the decimating fire. Basil and Luvia found themselves faced by a mob of warriors who came pounding up towards them. Both the white men used their rifles until the magazines were exhausted then snatched the ready-loaded spares from the girls.
On each side of the redoubt their bullets dealt death and destruction among the foremost of their aggressors but the others came hurtling on, and the spears they flung came clattering down among the rocks. Unity screamed as one pierced the soft flesh of her arm. Basil turned quickly, but she made a desperate gesture which he knew at once meant that she was not seriously wounded and that he must not relax, for a second, in his efforts to drive off the howling band who were now scrambling up the lower rocks.
The front was clear. Not a single black had succeeded in getting to within two hundred yards. The ground beyond was littered with dead and dying. The unwounded were beating a precipitate retreat; rushing in panic to save themselves from a further rain of death-dealing lead. In the nick of time De Brissac abandoned his gun and came to Basil’s assistance with his automatic; shooting the foremost savage through the head. His intervention enabled Basil to grab up the fifth rifle. He plugged another two Negroes at close range; the rest scuttled back in terror and made off into the darkness.
On his side Luvia had been more fortunate as he had better cover and the rocks in front of him were more difficult to scale. He had succeeded in shooting down five of the natives and the others had abandoned any further attempt to rush him for the moment.
In the lull that followed they sorted themselves out and attended to the casualties. Basil’s thigh-wound was not serious as the spear had caught him in the fleshy part on the outer side of the leg and only ripped away a piece of skin. By tearing out one of his shirtsleeves he was able to make a bandage for it which De Brissac adjusted with practised skill. The spear-wound in Unity’s arm was more serious as the point had pierced the muscle above the elbow and it was bleeding freely. They applied a tourniquet and bound up the wound to stop the bleeding while Synolda made a sling out of a scarf she was wearing, to keep the arm in place.
‘I’ll say we came out of that mighty well,’ Juhani remarked gruffly. ‘Take a look at all those stiffs in the valley there. That ought to teach ’em.’
‘I hope to God it does,’ Basil murmured. ‘It was touch and go. We may not be so lucky next time.’
‘I doubt if there’ll be a next time,’ Juhani said more cheerfully. ‘They’ve had a bellyful, and they know what’s coming to them if they try the same stuff again.’
De Brissac said nothing; having no wish to depress the others. Now that the natives had learnt what they were up against, after their first mad, unplanned onslaught, he did not think they would make any further attack while the moonlight lasted; but a dark patch in the sky to the north-eastward told him clouds there were blotting out the stars and he feared that in another ten minutes or so they might obscure the moon.
For a little time they sat, almost in silence. The terrible experience which the girls had been through was too recent for them to speak of with any uneasiness yet; the men were all tired after their long forced march and knew that they must conserve their remaining strength in case they had to face fresh fighting.
Basil sat with his back against a rock and Unity lay in the crook of his arm. Juhani and Synolda were perched side by side upon a ledge but a strange shyness seemed to have come between them now that they were suddenly reunited. They had not spoken more than a dozen words to each other since their bitter quarrel and the shooting of old Jansen. Both of them sat awkwardly silent with their eyes cast down; not daring to catch each other’s glance in the soft moonlight.
After a period of quietness, broken only by the groaning of the wounded Negroes, Basil spoke: ‘Deveril and his people ought to be well on their way by now and we’ll be able to chip in with good effect when they start setting light to the kraals.’
De Brissac shook his head. ‘We’ve got a long time to go before we can hope for that. A lot has happened since we reached here but it’s surprising how much action can be crammed into a single minute. It’s barely half an hour yet since we reached the shelter of these rocks and then, if you remember, we reckoned that the islanders would be a good three hours before they could come up with us.’
As he spoke he was studying the low ground of the valley through his night-glasses. The bonfire still burned brightly in the open space but the savages had vanished to a man. Not a tremor of movement showed among the dark hutments and the Marriage House compound was now empty. During the fight he had glimpsed the half-caste concubines streaming out of the great gates in the palisade and round its north-eastern corner into the patchy blackness of the maize-fields. Evidently they had succeeded in overcoming their gaolers and, by this time, had probably taken to the forest. He wondered how Li Foo was faring, and judged that if he had followed their old track he should, by now, be reaching the higher ground on the far side of the valley where he could take up some advantageous position from which to watch the whole line of the woods for the approach of Sir Deveril and his company.
A film passed across the moon. The silver vanished from the crags and bulging overhang above them. Their range of vision was curtailed, so that the native village was now only a blur in the shadows, and none of the houses could be seen distinctly except those near the big fire. An unbroken hush hung over the darkened sweep of country before them. Not a shadow moved giving the least indication of the place to which the savages had retreated. The minutes crawled by. Gradually the film across the moon thickened until a big bank of cloud blotted it out entirely. They were now dependent on the faint starlight by which they could just make out each other’s faces vaguely, but they could not see more than fifty feet from their redoubt into the surrounding murk.
De Brissac took up his position behind his gun again. Without a word Basil and Juhani picked up their rifles and, posting themselves on his flanks, stood straining their eyes into the darkness. Their muscles tensed, they listened anxiously for the least sound which might indicate a renewal of hostilities. At last it came; the sharp tinkle of a stone as it glanced on a piece of rock and rattled down the slope away to the left in front of Basil.
‘Hold your fire!’ whispered De Brissac. ‘Keep calm and take them one by one. Shoot for their bodies once you can see them.’
‘O.K.’ muttered Luvia, and suddenly his rifle cracked.
A second later the other two came into action as their eyes focused on black humps of deeper shadow stealthily moving up towards them.
Instantly the rifles and machine-gun flashed the blacks leaped to their feet and launched themselves at the redoubt. The blast of fire from De Brissac’s gun checked the advance in front even more quickly than before but, once again, the two sides of the rocky fort became points of peril. A score of blacks reached the lower boulders in spite of Basil’s and Luvia’s good marksmanship, but De Brissac was equal to the occasion. He stood up, with his machine-gun in his arms, and poured a stream of bullets across Luvia’s front, annihilating the yelling savages there. Swinging round, he brought it to bear on the other group with equal fatal effect.
One huge Negro escaped his fire and was already up on the land-slide behind them, but Synolda snatched up a loose slab of rock and hurled it at him, catching him in the midriff. With a grunt he doubled up and, slipping, somersaulted down the rocks on top of his dead and wounded comrades.
The attack was over and they sat back again; mopping their perspiring faces before hastily setting about the reloading of their weapons. De Brissac frowned anxiously as he fitted a new belt of ammunition to his machine-gun. With it he had done enormous execution but he was down to his last belt and once that had been fired any further attack would render their situation desperate. To his relief the shadows lightened just then and the moon came out from behind the bank of clouds, but another bank shut out the stars further to the north and was drifting slowly towards it.
> For a few minutes they sat there, resting their tired limbs and praying fervently that the moonlight might endure a little longer. All too soon the moon was veiled again and the shadows crept forward, like living things, out of the valley, hiding its landmarks in a cloak of inky blackness.
The third attack developed very shortly after the disappearance of the moon; the enemy had evidently been waiting for it and preparing to make a new assault directly they could count on darkness to cover their activities.
Again for breathless seconds the flashes stabbed the murk; the machine-gun chattered and the acrid fumes of cordite were strong in their nostrils; but the tattoo of the gun ceased abruptly. De Brissac’s last belt of ammunition was finished and all that remained from the heavy cases they had humped so laboriously were the chains of miniature brass shell-cases which tinkled as they knocked against each other. Yet for the third time the gun had done its work. The horde was flying down the hill leaving their dead and dying piled high upon the earth at the edge of the nearest boulders.
‘I’ll say you’ve got guts,’ Luvia panted. ‘They must be stark crazy to charge that gun of yours the way they do.’
‘It won’t help us next time,’ De Brissac said grimly. ‘The ammunition’s run out.’
Their new peril caused them acute anxiety as they tried to pierce the surrounding gloom for signs of a further assault. There was silence no longer. In the last two attacks many of the natives had got right up to the rocks on either side before being shot down and their groans of agony now wrung their heart-strings.
‘Here they come!’ cried Juhani raising his rifle and aiming for a dark figure no more than twenty feet away.
Basil stood ready on his side but their front was now totally unprotected. De Brissac could only clutch a spare rifle that Unity thrust towards him and empty its magazine into the advancing mass. They all felt that their last hour had come. In a few moments they must be borne down by sheer weight of numbers and massacred, but before the attack had a chance to develop fully relief came from an unexpected quarter.
Uncharted Seas Page 31
