CHAPTER XXXIV
THE COMING OF KAMROU
The storm, in fact, was now almost at an end, and when theengineer awoke next morning he found the rain had wholly ceased.Though the sea was still giving forth white vapors, yet these had notyet reached their usual density. From the fortifications he could see,by the reflected lights of the village and of the great flame, aconsiderable distance out across the dim, mysterious sea. He knew thetime was come to try for the recovery of the machine, if ever.
"If I don't make a go of it to-day," said he, "I might as well quitfor good. There'll never be a better opportunity. And if it's leftdown there very much longer, Heaven only knows what kind of shapeit'll be in. I make good to-day or it's all off."
Beatrice eagerly seconded his plans. The old man, too, was impatientas a child to learn more of this wonder of the upper world. And,translating to the Folk the directions that Stern gave him, he soonhad a great throng on the beach, where lay not only the Folk's canoes,but also many left by the slaughtered and dispersed Lanskaarn.
Two hours after the crude meal that must be called breakfast for wantof a better name, the expedition was ready to start.
Twenty-five of the largest boats, some holding twelve men, set out, tothe accompaniment of shouting and singing much like that when thecaptives had been brought in. Stern, Beatrice and the patriarch allsat in one canoe with eight paddlers. In the bottom lay Stern's heavygrapple with the ten long ropes, now twisted into a single cable,securely knotted to its ring.
To Stern it seemed impossible that any means existed for locating,even approximately, the spot where the machine had fallen. As theshore faded away and the village lights disappeared in the gloom andmist, all landmarks vanished. Everywhere about them the dim, oily seastretched black and gloomy, with here and there the torches of thelittle fleet casting strange blue-green lights that wavered likeghostly will-o'-the-wisps over the water.
The boatman's song wailed high, sank low, trembled and ceased; and fora while came silence, save for the dipping of the paddles, the purlingof the waters at the bow of the canoe. The engineer, despite hishard-headed practicality, shuddered a little and drew his mantlecloser round him.
Beatrice, too, felt the eerie mystery of the scene. Stern put an armabout her; she slid her hand into his, and thus in silence they satthinking while the boats drew on and on.
"They really know where they're going, father?" the engineer asked atlength. "It all looks alike to me. How can they tell?"
"Verily, I cannot explain that to you," the old man made answer. "Weknow, that is all."
"But--"
"Had I been always blind you could not expound sight to me. A deaf mancannot understand sound."
"You mean you've developed some new sense, some knowledge of directionand location that _we_ haven't got?"
"Yea, it must be so. In all these many centuries among the dark mistswe have to know. And this gloom, this night, are the same to us as youhave told me a lake on the surface would be to you in the brightnessof that sun which none of use have ever yet beheld."
"Is that so? Well, hanged if I get it! However, no matter about thatjust so they locate the place. Can they find the exact spot, father?"
"Perhaps not so. But they will come near to it, my son. Only havepatience; you shall see!"
Stern and the girl relapsed into silence again, and for perhaps aquarter-hour the boats moved steadily forward through the vapors in akind of crescent, the tips of which were hidden by the mist.
Then all at once a sharp cry rang from a boat off to the right, a crytaken up and echoed all along the line. The paddles ceased to ply; thecanoes now drifted idly forward, their wakes trailing out behind inlong "slicks" of greasy blackness flecked with sparkles from thereflected light of all those many torches.
Another word of command; the boatmen slowed their craft.
"Drop the iron here, son, and drag the bottom," said the patriarch.
"Good!" answered Stern, thrilled with excitement and wonder.
He pitched the dredge into the jetty sea. It sank silently as he payedout the cable. At a depth he estimated--from the amount of cable stillleft in the boat--as about thirty fathoms, it struck bottom.
He let out another five fathoms.
"All right, father!" he exclaimed sharply. "Tell our boatmen to giveway!"
The old man translated the order: "Ghaa vrouaad, m'yaun!" (Goforward, men.) The paddles dipped again and Stern's canoe movedsilently over the inky surface.
Every sense alert, the engineer at the gunwale held the cable. For afew seconds he felt nothing as the slack was taken up; then heperceived a tug and knew the grapple was dragging.
Now intense silence reigned, broken only by the sputter of the smokingtorches. The canoes, spaced over the foggy sea, seemed floating in avoid of nothingness; each reflected light quivered and danced withweird and tremulous patterns.
Stern played the cable as though it were a fish-line. All his sensescentered on interpreting the message it conveyed. Now he felt that itwas dragging over sand; now came rocks--and once it caught, held, thenjerked free. His heart leaped wildly. Oh, had it only been theaeroplane!
The tension grew. Out, far out from the drifting line of boats thecanoe went forward; it turned at a word from the patriarch and draggedalong the front of the line. It criss-crossed on its path; Stern hadto admire the skill and thoroughness with which the boatmen coveredthe area where their mysterious sixth sense of location told them themachine must lie.
All at once a tug, different from all others, yielding, yet firm, sethis pulses hammering again.
"Got it!" he shouted, for he knew the truth. "Hold fast, there--_she'shooked!_"
"You've got it, Allan? Really got it?" cried the girl, starting up."Oh--"
"Feel this!" he answered. "Grab hold and pull!"
She obeyed, trembling with eagerness.
"It's caught through one of the ailerons, or some yielding part, Ithink," he said. "Here, help me hold it tight, now; we mustn't let thehook slip out again!" To the patriarch he added: "Tell 'em to back up,there--easy--easy!"
The canoe backed, while Stern took up the slack again. When the pullfrom below was vertical he ordered the boat stopped.
"Now get nine other boats close in here," commanded he.
The old man gave the order. And presently nine canoes stood in near athand, while all the rest lay irregularly grouped about them.
Now Stern's plan of the tenfold cable developed itself. Already he wasuntwisting the thick rope. One by one he passed the separate cords tomen in the other boats. And in a few minutes he and nine other menheld the ropes, which, all attached to the big iron ring below, spreadupward like the ribs of an inverted umbrella.
The engineer's scheme was working to perfection. Well he had realizedthat no one boat could have sufficed to lift the great weight of themachine. Even the largest canoe would have been capsized and sunk longbefore a single portion of the Pauillac and its engine had been somuch as stirred from the sandy bottom.
But with the buoyant power of ten canoes and twenty or thirty men allapplied simultaneously, Stern figured he had a reasonable chance ofraising the sunken aeroplane. The fact that it was submerged, togetherwith the diminished gravitation of the Abyss, also worked in hisfavor. And as he saw the Folk-men grip the cords with muscular hands,awaiting his command, he thrilled with pride and with the sense ofreal achievement.
"Come, now, boys!" he cried. "Pull! Heave-ho, there! Altogether, lifther! _Pull!_"
He strained at the rope which he and two others held; the rest--eachrope now held by three or four men--bent their back to the labor. Asthe ropes drew tense, the canoes crowded and jostled together. Thosemen who were not at the ropes, worked with the paddles to keep theboats apart, so that the ropes should not foul or bind. And in anirregular ring, all round the active canoes, the others drew. Lightedby so many torches, the misty waters glittered as broken waves, thrownout by the agitation of the canoes, radiated in all directions.
"Pull, boys, pull!" shouted the engineer again. "Up she comes! Now,all together!"
Came a jerk, a long and dragging resistance, then a terrific strainingon the many cords. The score and a half of men breathed hard; on theirnaked arms the veins and muscles swelled; the torchlight gleamed blueon their sweating faces and bodies.
And spontaneously, as at all times of great endeavor among the Folk, awailing song arose; it echoed through the gloom; it grew, taken up bythe outlying boats; and in the eternal dark of the Abyss it rose,uncanny, soul-shaking, weird beyond all telling.
Stern felt the shuddering chills chase each other up and down hisspine, playing a nervous accompaniment to their chant.
"Gad!" he muttered, shivering, "what a situation for a hard-headed,practical man like me! It's more like a scene from some weirdpipe-dream magazine story of the remote past than solid reality!"
Again the Folk strained at the ropes, Stern with them; and now thegreat weight below was surely rising, inch by inch, up, up, toward theblack and gleaming surface of the abysmal sea.
Stern's heart was pounding wildly. If only--incredible as itseemed--the Pauillac really were there at the end of the convergingropes; and if it were still in condition to be repaired again! If onlythe hook and the hard-taxed ropes held!
"Up, boys! Heave 'er!" he shouted, pulling till his muscles hardenedlike steel, and the canoe--balanced, though it was by five oarsmen andthe patriarch all at the other gunwale--tipped crazily. "Pull!_Pull!_"
Beatrice sprang to the rope. Unable to restrain herself, she, too,laid hold on the taut, dripping cord; and her white hands, firm,muscular, shapely, gripped with a strength one could never haveguessed lay in them.
And now the ropes were sliding up out of the water, faster, everfaster; and higher rose the song of all those laboring Folk and allwho watched from the outlying ring of boats.
"Up with it, men! _Up!_" panted the engineer.
Even as he spoke the waters beneath them began to boil and bubblestrangely, as though with the rising of a monstrous fish; and all atonce, with a heave, a sloshing splatter, a huge, weed-covered,winglike object, sluicing brine, wallowed sharply out into thetorchlight.
A great triumphal howl rose from the waiting Folk--a howl that drownedStern's cheer and that of Beatrice, and for a moment all wasconfusion. The wing rose, fell, slid back; into the water and againdipped upward. The canoes canted; some took water; all were thrownagainst each other in the central group; and cries, shouts, orders anda wild fencing off with paddles followed.
Stern yelled in vain orders that the old man could not even hear totranslate; orders which would not, even though heard, have beenobeyed. But after a moment or two comparative order was restored, andthe engineer, veins standing out on his temples, eyes ablaze,bellowed:
"Hold fast, you! No more, nor more--don't pull up any more, damn you!Hey, stop that--you'll rip the hook clean out and lose it again!
"You, father--here--tell 'em to let it down a little, now--about sixfeet, so. Easy--does it--_easy!_"
Now the Pauillac, sodden with water, hanging thickly with theluxuriant weed clusters which even in a fortnight had grown in thatwarm sea, was suspended at the end of the ten cords about six or eightfeet below the keels of the canoes.
"Tell 'em to let it stay that way now," continued the engineer. "Tell'em all to hold fast, those that have the ropes. The others paddle forthe shore as fast as they can--and damn the man that loafs _now!_"
The patriarch conveyed the essence of these instructions to theoarsmen, and now, convoyed by the outlying boats, the ten canoes movedvery slowly toward the village.
Retarded by the vast, birdlike bulk that trailed below, they seemedhardly to make any progress at all. Stern ordered the free boats tohitch on and help by towing. Lines were passed, and after a while alltwenty-five canoes, driven by the power of two hundred and fifty pairsof sinewy arms, were dragging the Pauillac shoreward.
Stern's excitement--now that the machine was really almost in hisgrasp again--far from diminishing, was every minute growing keener.
The delay until he could examine it and see its condition and itschances of repair, seemed interminable. Continually he urged thepatriarch--himself profoundly moved--to force the rowers to stillgreater exertion. At a paddle he labored, throwing every ounce ofstrength into the toil. Each moment seemed an hour.
"Gad! If it's only possible to make it fly again!" thought he.
Half an hour passed, and now at length the dim and clustered lights ofthe village began to show vaguely through the mist.
"Come on, boys; now for it!" shouted Stern. "Land her for me and I'llshow you wonders you never even dreamed of!"
They drew near the shore. Already Stern was formulating his plans forlanding the machine without injuring it, when out from the beach along and swift canoe put rapidly, driven by twenty men.
At sight of it the rowing in Stern's boats weakened, then stopped.Confused cries arose, altercations and strange shouts; then a hush ofexpectancy, of fear, seemed to possess the boat crews.
And ever nearer, larger, drew the long canoe, a two-pronged, blazingcresset at its bows.
Across the waters drifted a word.
"Go on, you! Row!" cried Stern. "Land the machine, I tell you! Say,father, what's the matter _now?_ What are my men on strike for all ofa sudden? Why don't they finish the job?"
The old man, perplexed, listened intently.
Between the group of canoes and the shore the single boat had stopped.A man was standing upright in it. Now came a clear hail, and now twoor three sentences, peremptory, angry, harsh.
At sound of them consternation seized certain of the men. A numberdropped the ropes, while others reached for the slings and spears thatalways lay in the bottoms of the canoes.
"What the devil _now?_" shouted Stern. "You all gone crazy, or what?"
He turned appealingly to the old man.
"For Heaven's sake, what's up?" he cried. "Tell me, can't you, beforethe idiots drop my machine and ruin the whole thing? What--"
"Misfortune, O my son!" cried the patriarch in a strange, tremblingvoice. "The worst that could befall! In our absence _he_ has comeback--_he_, Kamrou! And under pain of death he bids all men abandonevery task and haste to homage. _Kamrou the Terrible is here!_"
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