Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures

by William Hope Hodgson

  “I saw somethin’, Sir, after you was gone,” began Pibby, interrupting. “It were a ’orrible thing….”

  “I saw the little Priestess tonight, down in the crater,” went on Captain Jat, without taking the least apparent notice of what the boy had begun to tell him. “I was at the top; It’s not all of twenty fathom deep. I whistled soft an’ gentle to her. She saw me, an’ near did faint, boy, by the look of her, an’ waved me to go away pretty quick. By the look of things down there, they’re in for one of their Devil-Festas. They’d big torches burning—you can seethe light of ’em now.” And Captain Jat nodded towards the island.

  The lad, Pibby, stared away through the darkness, and surely enough there was a faint loom of light in the night above the island.

  “I reck’n the festa’ll be pretty soon now, boy, at the dark of the moon, an’ like there’ll be Chiefs from the islands round for a thousand miles, and a sprinklin’ of rotten whites, I guess, and devil-work uncounted. I’m hopin’ them devil-priestesses didn’t see the little woman wavin’ me away, or maybe she’ll be in bad trouble. They come on me, just after she signed to me to clear out, an’ near finished me before I’d time to slew round. They’ve butcher’s knives, some on ’em , as long as your leg, boy, an’ one of ’em near ripped me up.” He opened his coat, and the lad saw dimly in the gloom that his shirt was all stained dark.

  “I settled four of the brutes,” Captain Jat continued, “and you outed two. That’s six gone to hell, where they come from….” He broke off, and puffed meditatively at his pipe for a time, leaning on his oar, which rested on the gunnels. Pibby had never heard him talk so much before when sober.

  “The native name for yon island means ‘The Island of the Devil,’ boy,” said Captain Jat, presently. “I heard that years gone from more than one; but none of ’em could tell me anythin’, or wouldn’t, ’cept it was an almighty unhealthy place for a white man… or a native either, for that matter, except, maybe, as I’m thinking, when there’s one of their big, secret, damn Ud-Festas on….” He broke off short, and slipped his pipe into his pocket.

  “Pull, boy, an’ break your damn back. There’s the ship!” he said.

  Ten minutes later they were safe aboard.

  All next day, Captain Jat kept the barque away to the Southward of the island; but he sent Pibby aloft, time and again, with his own telescope; and when the youth came down finally in the late afternoon, to report numbers of small craft on the horizon, steering North, he nodded his head, as if the news were what he had expected.

  “Native boats, boy,” he said. “Keep your mouth shut, an’ tell nothin’ to no one. They’ll hold that festa tonight, an’ they’ll have all their pearls strung up, an’ we’ll be there. You clean up all them big double-barr’lled pistols, an’ load ’em nice and careful, like I’ve showed you. Get a move on you now!”

  That night, with all lights dowsed, the barque stood again to the Northward, and dropped Captain Jat and the lad in the dingy, off the island. Captain Jat had four great pistols in his belt, and he had spent the dog-watches in mounting an old duck-gun on its swivel, in the bows of the boat. Pibby, the boy, had also two big heavy pistols tucked into his belt, not to mention his own small weapon which reposed snugly in its canvas pocket inside his trousers. They were quite heavily armed. Moreover, he had seen to it, this time, that the oars were properly muffled.

  In addition to those preparations, Captain Jat had been very particular concerning the depositing in the boat of a considerable length of chain, with two stout padlocks in the ends.

  Captain Jat took the boat round to the North of the island, and, presently, after pulling cautiously for an hour, he bid the lad ease up and lay on his oar a bit, and keep his eyes well skinned. For his part, the Captain lay down on his stomach on the thwarts, and spied along the surface of the quietly heaving sea, with his night-glass. And suddenly, he reached out and caught Pibby a clip with the glass.

  “Down under the gunnel, boy, or they’ll see you!” he muttered, and Pibby ducked and slid down under his oar, and stared away breathlessly through the darkness to the Northward.

  Now that he had his eyes nearer to the surface of the sea, he discovered the thing that Captain Jat had seen with the night-glass. There was a prodigious string of native boats, within two hundred fathoms of them, paddling through the night to the island. Pibby counted them, and numbered eighty; but probably missed some in the darkness.

  Captain Jat allowed these craft to get well inshore; then, taking his oar, he shoved it out through a steering-grommet, which he had fixed up in the stern, and began to scull steadily after them; but allowing nothing more than his hand and his forearm to rise above the gunnel of the boat. As the dingy crept into the wake of those silent craft ahead, the boy noticed suddenly that there had come again above the island the strange loom of light that he had seen the night before.

  Presently, the heave of the sea had almost died from under the boat, and it was plain that they had come under the lee of some out-jutting “lie” of rocks. The last of the craft ahead vanished into the shadow of the island; but Captain Jat had marked the place, and followed dead on. A minute later, they saw the shore directly ahead, not a score of fathoms away; but there was no beach; only the dark trees of bushes coming right down, apparently to the water’s edge. There was no heave at all now under the boat, so that they had evidently been piloted into a perfectly sheltered cove.

  Captain Jat kept the boat going straight ahead. He made no attempt to slacken her way, despite the fact that they seemed to be heading straight ashore into the middle of a heavy underwood. The bows of the dingy reached the dank bushes, where they hung out over the water, and Captain Jat took both hands to his oar, and forced her in among them.

  For a few moments the overgrowths seemed to smother the boat, all wet and slimy and rank. Then the boat had passed clean through, into open water beyond. Pibby, the lad, stared in front into the darkness; but could see nothing. He looked upward, and saw a narrow, winding ribbon of night-sky far above them, which told him that Capotain Jat had discovered the way into a deep-set tidal passage, the mouth of which was completely masked by the undergrowths and overhanging trees. It was, obviously, a huge crack through the side of the low crater, which the sea had turned into a creek.

  Very cautiously, Captain Jat sculled ahead. It was like sculling into a pitch-black night, so black that the far upward ribbon of night-sky seemed almost to shine, by comparison. As they went, little hollow sobbing sounds, of the water in the crannies of the unseen rocky sides, came to them, dankly and somehow drearily. But Captain Jat handled the sculling oar so softly that not once did the clinker-built entry of the boat “mutter” on the water. And this way quite half an hour passed; though it seemed much longer, going utterly slow and silent and cautious in that grim dark, and steering by the winding pattern of the night-sky above, and by the odd vague sense which told the Captain when they were come over near to one side or the other, in the darkness.

  Once, as they went so quiet and stealthy, there came to them indefinitely out of the night, a far howling, once and then again; and, later, an attenuated, incredibly shrill screaming, that died away and left the boy frightened and holding the stocks of his heavy pistols. But Captain Jat sculled steadily on.

  Abruptly, Captain Jat ceased sculling, and stood silent. It was plain to the lad that he was either listening or staring intently; and the boy peered round, every way, nervously. Suddenly, he saw an indefinite glow of light ahead, evidently beyond a bend in the narrow creek. The glow grew rapidly into a bright light, that danced and flickered, and, in the space of a minute, there came round the bend of the creek, upon the left side, two of those brutish things that had followed the Captain the night before. They were running through the stunted trees and bushes, parallel with the course of the creek, but about twenty feet above the level of the water, winding in and out, as they went, among the trees and great bushes that grew up in the steep lower slope of the creek-side. Their agi
lity was incredible; here and there they leaped like goats from rock to rock, their torches dripping and flaring as they ran, one behind the other.

  Captain Jat stood motionless in the stern of the dingy, with his oar in one hand, and one of his pistols in the other. He watched the two beastly creatures run by, and the boy—glancing at him swiftly in his fright—saw that his face was perfectly calm; but the lights from the torches seemed to glow in his eyes, so that they shone, almost like the eyes of a wild animal.

  The lad’s gaze jumped back to the two running brutes. He could not see their hideous flat faces; for their great manes, all loose and wild, hung over them, damp and black and matted, as if they were fresh come up out of the sea; and indeed there was rank, wet weed, all entangled in their hair; for he saw it glisten in the blaze of the torches. Yet, though he could not see their faces, he saw their arms from their naked shoulders downward. The arms of the foremost woman ended in two monstrous claws; but the boy saw plainly that they were no more than cast-off shells of some huge sea reptile, if I may so describe it. He saw where they ended, rough and rude, just below her elbows, and that her right hand came through a hole between the mandibles of the claw, to hold her great torch.

  But the second woman gave him a horrible feeling; he could not see where her arms ended and the claws began. He remembered what the little priestess had told Captain Jat. And even as he stared, frightened and horrified, the two creatures were gone past. He saw then that the foremost one had an ugly great knife, stuck naked into the back of a kind of broad belt; and the belt was all stitched with what at first he took to be big shining beads. Then, he realised that perhaps they were not beads, put pearls, as the Captain had told him. Yet it was less of that possible fortune in pearls that Pibby Tawles, the boy, thought in that tense moment, than of the fact he could not see where the arms of the second woman ended and the claws began.

  Then the two running, leaping bestial things were gone away down the creek; and a minute after, they were out of sight round one of the rocky bends, and all was dark again about the boat.

  The dingy began to move ahead once more in the darkness, as Captain Jat took up work again with the sculling-oar. A matter of some ten minutes of silence passed, with the water of the creek making odd gurglings and echoes on either hand among the crannies and holes in the rocks, when Pibby realised that the enormous, steep sides of the creek had joined overhead, and that they were moving forward through the complete blackness of an invisible cavern.

  And then, even as he realised the fact uneasily, there showed far ahead a small, bright spot of light. The boat began to sway, and a little murmur broke out under her bows, as Captain Jat increased the speed; but he eased it at once, for the faint noise of the water under her entrance made a strangely loud sound in that silence. But still they moved ahead steadily, and that speck of light grew, until the lad saw that it was an inner mouth to the cavern, and beyond it some bright flaring light.

  The boat approached, unseen in the darkness of the cavern, to within a dozen fathoms of this newly discovered entrance, and for the last minute, Pibby had been staring with a fixed and astounded interest at what he saw. The arch of the cave mouth must have been fully thirty feet high, and the width of it a little less. And through this great opening, Pibby was looking into a big circular space, apparently several hundred feet across, the walls of which went up out of his sight into the darkness above.

  But what fixed both his and Captain Jat’s attention was the centre portion of this extraordinary natural amphitheater; for in the centre was a small lake of sea-water, maybe about sixty feet across, and out of the centre of the lake there rose a weed-hung hump of rack, and from the centre of the hump of rock there rose a great pole, maybe fifty feet in height, black through all its length, and polished so highly that it reflected brilliantly the light of six enormous torches that burned on the tops of six great piles that stood up out of the rock all round the central pool or lake. And this pole, from its grotesquely carved head, flat-faced and repulsive, to its base, where it had been cut into the shape of a bunch of huge claws, was banded every few feet with strings of countless beads, that glimmered in a semi-luminous fashion in the flare of the torch-lights. And every bead was a pearl.

  The water from the cavern in which the dingy floated, ran in a perfectly straight channel into the central pool or lake, and the weeded floor of the ancient crater rose a foot or so on each side, spreading away then in one level, brown, weed-covered reach to the great walls of the inside of the low mountain.

  The torches showed that the bottom parts of the mountain walls were all grown with weed, to a height of about six feet above the bottom of the crater, so that it was plain that the sea, entering through the creek and the cavern, rose at high tide to at least that height, in which case there would be only the six great torches and the lofty polished black pole in the centre, with its profusion of strings of pearls, visible when the tide was up. It must have been a strange sight then, even stranger than when Captain Jat and Pibby looked out from the cavern.

  And now, but not very distinctly in that light, Pibby saw where all that great line of boats had gone to; for there, so far as he could see all around the bottom of the great natural amphitheatre, were the boats, where they had been drawn up, head to stern upon the weed, and scarcely seen above the weed, out of which they rose only a little, except for their lofty head and stern timbers, which, however, had been so draped with weed as to blend with the weed-grown walls behind.

  Over the sides of all these boats, and there were vastly more than the flotilla that they had followed in (for they lay side by side, apparently three or four deep), Captain Jat and the lad saw the heads of hundreds and hundreds of natives; but all vague and indistinct; both because of the uncertain flarings of the great torches, and because each native had dressed her head with a mass of weed. Indeed, it would have been easy to have entered the crater under the impression that there was no more life in it than the blaze of the huge torches.

  As Pibby strained his eyes to make out the boats, wondering whether it had been hard to drag them up out of the creek and across the weed, he felt the dingy beginning to move silently back into the cavern; and, turning, he saw that Captain Jat was using his oar noiselessly, as an Indian uses his paddle, and so fetching the boat gently astern.

  In this way they progressed for about a hundred yards, and then Captain Jat set the dingy in to the side, and began to grope along. Presently, he gave out a little grunt of satisfaction, and pushed the boat across to the other side; but was evidently unable to find what he wanted; for he continued to punt the boat astern with his hands, until the great opening of the cave appeared no more than a distant speck of light. Then he grunted again, and immediately sent the boat across once more to the other side. A minute later, he gave out a further note of satisfaction, and suddenly Pibby heard his voice muttering to him to pass up one end of the chain, and one of the padlocks.

  He heard the Captain fumbling for a time, and the odd, slight chinking of the chain; then the dingy was thrust out again, and Captain Jat was bidding him pay out the chain gently without a sound, whilst he paddled the boat once more across. They reached the other side; and Pibby grasped his master’s idea, which was obviously to put a chain boom across, slickly, so that if they had to retreat in a hurry, they would pass over it; then tauten it up, and padlock it in position, and so get away easily, whilst all of the boats of the pursuers ran foul of the boom.

  The boy ran his hands in along the chain, where the Captain was working, and found that he was “anchoring” it round a huge boulder. Pibby had no doubt but that the other end was quite as efficiently secured, and he began to feel comfortable again in his mind; it was such an efficient retreat. Then, as he sat in the darkness, he fell to wondering just what those natives were waiting for, all hid with weed like they were… and the great torches… and the huge, carved and polished pole with the fortune of splendid pearls strung around it.

  And then, as he worr
ied the thought over nervously in his mind, he thrilled suddenly; for Captain Jat was once more sculling the boat ahead towards the brightly shining arch of the cavern’s entrance into the arena.

  Abruptly, as the boat forged ahead, there came a queer swirl deep down in the dark water, somewhere astern of the boat, that sent little waves into the sides of the gloomy cavern, breaking in the darkness with a multitudinous chattering of liquid sounds. Something huge passed under the boat, which was now approaching the entrance at a fair speed. They felt the great thing pass under them, deep below the surface, but drawing after it a wave that humped the boat up, stern first, and then the bows.

  “My God!” said Captain Jat huskily, aloud…. “The UD!” His voice came back, husky and dreadful, from a thousand places in the darkness:— “My God!… The Ud! My God!… The Ud!” And in the same moment, Pibby felt the dingy begin to sway heavily, and heard Captain Jat gasp as he began sculling with a kind of mad violence, whispering:— “The Little Priestess! The Little Priestess! My God! They saw her waving! My…”

  Pibby never heard any more; for they had come sufficiently near the arch now for him to be able to see again into the crater with some clearness. He stared in complete and dreadful amazement; for though the whole of the great amphitheatre was as silent as when they left it, there was now a little, naked brown woman, lashed by her neck, her waist and her ankles to the great, pearl-stringed central pole that came up out of the hump of rock in the pool. She had been brought there and made fast during the time in which they had been fixing up the chain boom. That was why the weed-hidden boats waited…. She was the sacrifice… The thing that had passed under the boat…! She had been seen waving to the Captain…. She….