Volume Two—Chapter Eighteen.New Formosa—Kangaroos.So soon as he was sure the jack had not noticed him, Mark drew softly back, and with some difficulty forced a way between the bramble thickets towards the stockade. He thus entered a part they had not before visited, for as the trees and bushes were not so thick by the water, their usual path followed the windings of the shore. Trampling over some and going round others, Mark managed to penetrate between the thickets, having taken his rod to pieces, as it constantly caught in the branches.Next he came to a place where scarcely anything grew, everything having been strangled by those Thugs of the wood, the wild hops, except a few scattered ash-poles, up which they wound, indenting the bark in spirals. The ground was covered with them, for, having slain their supports, they were forced to creep, so that he walked on hops; and from under a bower of them, where they were smothering a bramble bush, a nightingale “kurred” at him angrily.He came near the nightingale’s young brood, safely reared. “Sweet kur-r-r!” The bird did not like it. These wild hops are a favourite cover with nightingales. A damp furrow or natural ditch, now dry, but evidently a watercourse in rain, seemed to have stopped the march of this creeping, twining plant, for over it he entered among hazel-bushes; and then seeing daylight, fancied he was close to the stockade; but to his surprise, stepped out into an open glade with a green knoll on one side.The knoll did not rise quite so high as the trees, and there was a quantity of fern about the lower part, then an open lawn of grass, a little meadow in the midst of the wood. He saw a white tail disappear among the fern—there were then rabbits here.“Bevis!” said Mark aloud. In his surprise he called to Bevis, as he would have done had Bevis been present. He ran to the knoll, and as he ran, more white tails—little ones—raced into the fern, where he saw burries and sand-heaps thrown out.On the top of the knoll there were numerous signs of rabbits—places worn bare, and “runs,” or footpaths, leading down across the grass. He looked round, but could see nothing but trees, which hid the New Sea and the cliff at home.Eager to tell Bevis of the discovery, and especially of the rabbits, which would furnish them with food, and were, above all, something fresh to shoot at, he ran down the hill so fast that he could not stop himself, though he saw something white in the grass. He returned, and found it was mushrooms, and he gathered between twenty and thirty in a few minutes—“buttons,” full grown mushrooms, and overgrown ketchup ones. How to carry them he did not know, having used his handkerchief already, and left his coat at home, till he thought of his waistcoat, and took it off and made a rough bundle of them in it. Then he heard Bevis’s whistle, the well-known notes they always used to call each other, and shouted in reply, but the shout did not penetrate so far as the shrill sound had done.The whistle came from a different direction to that in which he supposed the cave to be, for in winding in and out the brambles he had lost the true course and had forgotten to look at the sun. He found he could not go straight home, for the brambles were succeeded by blackthorn, through which nothing human can move, and hardly a spaniel, when thick as it was here. He had to go all round by the opposite shore of the island, the weed-grown side, and so to the fire under the teak-tree.“Where’s the gun?” said Bevis, coming to meet him.“I left it at home.”“No, you had it.”“I put it back as you were not coming.”“I never saw it.”“It’s in the hut.”“Didn’t you really take it?”“No—really. We’ll both go with the gun—”“So we will.” Bevis regretted now that he had made any difficulty. “No, it’s your turn; you shall have it.”“I shan’t,” said Mark. “Look here,”—showing the mushrooms—“splendid for supper, and I’ve found some rabbits!”“Rabbits!”“And a little green hill, and a kingfisher, and a jack. Come and get the gun, and let’s shoot him. Quick.”Mark began to run for the matchlock, and they left the duck to itself. Bevis ran with him, and Mark told him all about it as they went.They talked so much by sign and mere monosyllables in this short run to the hut that I cannot transcribe it in words, though they understood each other better than had they used set speech. For two people always together know the exact meaning of a nod, the indication of a glance, and a motion of the lip means a page of conversation.Having got the gun as they came back, Mark said perhaps Pan would eat the duck. Bevis called him, but he did not need the call. Gluttonous epicure as he was, Pan, at a whistle from Bevis, would have left the most marrowy bone in the world; but Bevis with a gun! why, Polly with a broom-stick could not have stopped him.Before they got to the willow bush it had been settled that Mark should shoot at the jack, as the matchlock was loaded with shot, and Bevis wanted to shoot with ball, and reserved his turn for the time when he had made the new sight. Bevis held Pan while Mark went forward. The jack was there, but Mark could not get the rest in a position to take a steady aim, because the willow boughs interfered so.So Bevis knelt down, still holding Pan, and Mark rested the long heavy barrel on his shoulder. The shot plunged into the water, and the jack floated, blown a yard away, dead on his back; his head shattered, but the long body untouched. Pan fetched him out, and they laughed at the spaniel, he looked so odd with the fish in his mouth. Bevis wanted to see the glade and the rabbit’s burries, but Mark said, if the duck was done, it would burn to a cinder, so they went home to their dinner. By the time they reached the teak-tree, the duck was indeed burned one side.It was dry and hard for lack of basting, when they cut it up, but not unsavoury; and what made it nicer was, that every now and then they found shots—which their teeth had flattened—shots from their own gun. These they saved, and Mark put them in his purse; there were six altogether. Mark gloried in the number, as it was a long shot at the duck, and they showed that he had aimed straight. The ale in the wooden bottle was now stale, so they drank water, with a little sherry in it; and then started to see the discovery Mark had made. Pan went with them. The old spaniel had been there long before, for he found out the rabbits the first stroll he took after landing from the Pinta, but could not convey his knowledge to them.Bevis marked out a tree, behind which they could wait in ambush to shoot at the rabbits, as it was within easy range of their burries; and then, as they felt it was now afternoon, they returned to the stockade, got the telescope and went up on the cliff to watch for Charlie’s signal. The shadow of the gnomon on the dial had moved a good way since Bevis set it up. They had not the least idea of the hour, but somehow they felt that it was afternoon.Long habit makes us clocks, if we pause, or are forced to consult ourselves. Slow changes in the frame proceed till they are recognised by the mind, or rather by the subtle connexion between the mind and the body; for there seems a nexus, or medium, which conveys this kind of eighth sense from the flesh to the mental consciousness. Birds and animals know the time without a clock or dial, and the months or seasons almost to a day; and so, too, the human animal, if driven from the conveniences of civilisation, which save him the trouble of thinking soon reverts to these original and indefinable indications.For instance (though in a different way), you can set the clock of your senses to awake exactly at any hour you choose in the morning. If you put your watch aside, reversing the process, and listen to the senses, they will tell you when it is afternoon.The sandy summit of the cliff was very warm, and the bramble bushes were not high enough to give them any shade; so that, to escape the sun, they reclined on the ground in front of the young oak-tree, and between it and the edge. Bevis looked through the telescope, and could see the sand-martins going in and out of their holes in the distant quarry.Charlie was not on the hill, or, if so, he was behind a sycamore and out of sight; but they knew he had not yet made the signal, because the herd of cows was down by the hollow oak, some standing in the water. They had not yet been called by the milkers. Sweeping the shore of Fir-Tree Gulf, and down the Mozambique to the projecting bluff which prevented farther view, he saw a crow on the sand, and another perched on a rail; another sign that there was no one about.“Any savages?” said Mark.“Not one.”“Proas hauled up somewhere out of sight.”Mark carefully felt his way to the very verge, and there sat with his legs dangling over. He said the cliff was quite safe; and Bevis joined him. Underneath they could see deep into the water; but though so still, they could not distinguish the bottom. Clear at the surface, the water seemed to thicken to a dense shadow, which could not be seen through. It was deep there; they thought they should like a dive, only it was too far for them to plunge. There was a ball of thistledown on the surface, floating on the tips of its delicate threads; the spokes with which it flies as a wheel rolls.“How did the rabbits—I mean the kangaroos—get here?” said Bevis presently. “I don’t think they could swim so far.”“Savages might bring them,” said Mark. “But they don’t very often carry pets with them: they eat everything so.”“Nibbling men like goats nibbling hedges,” said Bevis. “We must take care: but how did the kangaroos get on the island?”“It is curious,” said Mark. “Perhaps it wasn’t always an island—joined to the mainland and the river cut a way through the isthmus.”“Or a volcano blew it up,” said Bevis. “We will see if we can find the volcano.”“But it will be gone out now.”“O! yes. All those sort of things happened when there was no one to see them.”“Before we lived.”“Or anybody else.”A large green dragon-fly darted to and fro now under their feet and between them and the water; now overhead, now up to the top of the oak, and now round the cliff and back again; weaving across and across a warp and weft in the air. As they sat still he came close, and they saw his wings revolving, and the sunlight reflected from the membrane. Every now and then there was a slight snap, as he seized a fly, and ate it as he flew: so eager was he that when a speck of wood-dust fell from the oak, though he was yards away, he rushed at it and intercepted it before it could reach the ground. It was rejected, and he had returned whence he started in a moment.“The buffaloes are moving,” said Mark. “They’re going up the hill. Get ready. Here, put it on my shoulder.”The herd had begun to ascend the green slope from the water’s edge, doubtless in response to the milker’s halloo which they could not hear on the island. Bevis rested the telescope on Mark’s shoulder, and watched. In point of fact it was not so far but that they could have seen any one by the quarry without a glass, but the telescope was proper.“There he is,” said Mark.Bevis, looking through the telescope, saw Charlie come out from behind a sycamore, where he had been lying in the shadow, and standing on the edge of the quarry, wave his white handkerchief three times, with an interval between.“It’s all right. White flag,” said Bevis. “He’s looking. He can’t see us, can he?”“No, there are bushes behind us. If we stood up against the sky perhaps he might.”“I’ll crawl to the dial,” said Bevis, and he went on hands and knees to the sundial, where he could stand up without being seen, as there were brambles and the oak between him and the cliff. He drew a line with his pencil where the shadow of the gnomon fell on the circle, that was four o’clock. Mark came after, creeping too.“We won’t sit there again,” said Mark, “when it’s signal-time. He keeps staring. You can see his face through the telescope. We will keep behind the tree.”“There ought to be a crow’s nest up in it,” said Bevis. “Suppose we make one. Lash a stout stick across two boughs, or tie cords across and half round, so as to be able to sit and watch up there nicely.”“So we will. Then we can see if the savages are prowling round.”“The sedges are very thick that side,” said Bevis, pointing to the eastern shore where they had had such a struggle through them. “They would hide five thousand savages.”They went down to the hut, and Bevis made the sight for the matchlock. The short spiral of copper wire answered perfectly, and he could now take accurate aim. But after he had put the powder in, and was just going to put a bullet, he recollected the kangaroos. If he shot off much at a target with bullets at that time in the afternoon it would alarm everything on the island, for the report would be heard all over it. Kangaroos and water-fowl are generally about more in the evening than the morning, so he put off the trial with ball and loaded with shot.It was of no use going into ambush till the shadows lengthened, so he set about getting the tea while Mark sawed off two posts, and drove them into the ground at one side of the doorway of the hut. Each post had a cross-piece at the top, and the two boards were placed on these, forming a table. Bevis made four dampers, and at Mark’s suggestion buried a number of potatoes in the embers of the fire, so as to have them baked for supper, and save more cooking.The mushrooms were saved for breakfast, and the jack, which was about two pounds’ weight, would do for dinner. When he had finished the table, Mark went to the teak-tree, and fetched the two poles that had been set up there for the awning. These he erected by the table, and stretched the rug from them over the table, fastening the other two edges to the posts of the hut.They had found the nights so warm that more than one rug was unnecessary, and the other could be spared for a permanent awning under which to sit at table. Some tea was put aside to be drunk cold, miner fashion, and it was then time to go shooting. Mark was to have the gun, but he would not go by himself, Bevis must accompany him.They had to go some distance round to get at the glade, and made so much noise pushing aside branches, and discussing as to whether they were going the right way, that when they reached it if any kangaroos had been out feeding, they had all disappeared.“I will bring the axe,” said Bevis, “and blaze the trees, then we shall know the way in a minute.”Fixing the rest so that he could command the burries on that side of the knoll, Mark sat down under the ash-tree they had previously selected, and leaned the heavy matchlock on the staff. They chose this tree because some brake fern grew in front of it and concealed them. Pan had now come to understand this manner of hunting, and he lay down at once, and needed no holding. Bevis extended himself at full length on his back just behind Mark, and looked up at the sky through the ash branches.The flies would run over his face, though Mark handed him a frond of fern to swish them with, so he partly covered himself with his handkerchief. The handkerchief was stretched across his ear like the top of a drum, and while he was lying so quiet a fly ran across the handkerchief there, and he distinctly heard the sound of its feet. It was a slight rustle, as if its feet caught a little of the surface of the handkerchief. This happened several times.The sun being now below the line of the tree-tops, the glade was in the shadow, except the top of the knoll, up which the shadow slowly rose like a tide as the sun declined. Now the edge of the shadow reached a sand-heap thrown out from a burrow; now a thicker bunch of grass; then a thistle; at last it slipped over the top in a second.Mark could see three pairs of tiny, sharp-pointed ears in the grass. He knew these were young rabbits, or kangaroos, too small for eating. They were a difficulty, they were of no use, but pricked up and listened, if he made the least movement, and if they ran in would stop larger ones from coming out. There was something moving in the hazel stoles across the glade which he could not make out, and he could not ask Bevis to look and see because of these minute kangaroos.Ten minutes afterwards a squirrel leaped out from the hazel, and began to dart hither and thither along the sward, drawing his red tail softly over the grass at each arching leap as lightly as Jack drew the tassel of his whip over his mare’s shoulder when he wished to caress and soothe her. Another followed, and the two played along the turf, often hidden by bunches of grass.Mark dared not touch Bevis or tell him, for he fancied a larger rabbit was sitting on his haunches at the mouth of a hole fringed with fern. Bevis under his handkerchief listened to Pan snapping his teeth at the flics, and looked up at the sky till four parrots (wood-pigeons) came over, and descended into an oak not far off. The oak was thick with ivy, and was their roost-tree, though they did not intend to retire yet.Presently he saw a heron floating over at an immense height. His wings moved so slowly he seemed to fly without pressure on the air—as slowly as a lady fans herself when there is no one to coquet with. The heron did not mean to descend to the New Sea, he was bound on a voyage which he did not wish to complete till the dusk began, hence his deliberation. From his flight you might know that there was a mainland somewhere in that direction.Bang! Mark ran to the knoll, but Pan was there before him, and just in time to seize a wounded kangaroo by the hindquarter as he was paddling into a hole by the fore paws. Mark had seen the rabbit behind the fringe of fern move, and so knew it really was one, and so gently had he got the matchlock into position, moving it the sixteenth of an inch at a time, that Bevis did not know he was aiming. By the new sight he brought the gun to bear on a spot where he thought the rabbit’s shoulder must be, for he could not see it, but the rabbit had moved, and was struck in the haunch, and would have struggled out of reach had not Pan had him.The squirrel had disappeared, and the four parrots had flown at the report.“This island is full of things,” said Bevis, when Mark told him about the squirrel. “You find something new every hour, and I don’t know what we shan’t find at last. But you have had all the shooting and killed everything.”“Well, so I have,” said Mark. “The duck, and the jack, and the kangaroo. Youmustshoot something next.”End of Volume Two.
So soon as he was sure the jack had not noticed him, Mark drew softly back, and with some difficulty forced a way between the bramble thickets towards the stockade. He thus entered a part they had not before visited, for as the trees and bushes were not so thick by the water, their usual path followed the windings of the shore. Trampling over some and going round others, Mark managed to penetrate between the thickets, having taken his rod to pieces, as it constantly caught in the branches.
Next he came to a place where scarcely anything grew, everything having been strangled by those Thugs of the wood, the wild hops, except a few scattered ash-poles, up which they wound, indenting the bark in spirals. The ground was covered with them, for, having slain their supports, they were forced to creep, so that he walked on hops; and from under a bower of them, where they were smothering a bramble bush, a nightingale “kurred” at him angrily.
He came near the nightingale’s young brood, safely reared. “Sweet kur-r-r!” The bird did not like it. These wild hops are a favourite cover with nightingales. A damp furrow or natural ditch, now dry, but evidently a watercourse in rain, seemed to have stopped the march of this creeping, twining plant, for over it he entered among hazel-bushes; and then seeing daylight, fancied he was close to the stockade; but to his surprise, stepped out into an open glade with a green knoll on one side.
The knoll did not rise quite so high as the trees, and there was a quantity of fern about the lower part, then an open lawn of grass, a little meadow in the midst of the wood. He saw a white tail disappear among the fern—there were then rabbits here.
“Bevis!” said Mark aloud. In his surprise he called to Bevis, as he would have done had Bevis been present. He ran to the knoll, and as he ran, more white tails—little ones—raced into the fern, where he saw burries and sand-heaps thrown out.
On the top of the knoll there were numerous signs of rabbits—places worn bare, and “runs,” or footpaths, leading down across the grass. He looked round, but could see nothing but trees, which hid the New Sea and the cliff at home.
Eager to tell Bevis of the discovery, and especially of the rabbits, which would furnish them with food, and were, above all, something fresh to shoot at, he ran down the hill so fast that he could not stop himself, though he saw something white in the grass. He returned, and found it was mushrooms, and he gathered between twenty and thirty in a few minutes—“buttons,” full grown mushrooms, and overgrown ketchup ones. How to carry them he did not know, having used his handkerchief already, and left his coat at home, till he thought of his waistcoat, and took it off and made a rough bundle of them in it. Then he heard Bevis’s whistle, the well-known notes they always used to call each other, and shouted in reply, but the shout did not penetrate so far as the shrill sound had done.
The whistle came from a different direction to that in which he supposed the cave to be, for in winding in and out the brambles he had lost the true course and had forgotten to look at the sun. He found he could not go straight home, for the brambles were succeeded by blackthorn, through which nothing human can move, and hardly a spaniel, when thick as it was here. He had to go all round by the opposite shore of the island, the weed-grown side, and so to the fire under the teak-tree.
“Where’s the gun?” said Bevis, coming to meet him.
“I left it at home.”
“No, you had it.”
“I put it back as you were not coming.”
“I never saw it.”
“It’s in the hut.”
“Didn’t you really take it?”
“No—really. We’ll both go with the gun—”
“So we will.” Bevis regretted now that he had made any difficulty. “No, it’s your turn; you shall have it.”
“I shan’t,” said Mark. “Look here,”—showing the mushrooms—“splendid for supper, and I’ve found some rabbits!”
“Rabbits!”
“And a little green hill, and a kingfisher, and a jack. Come and get the gun, and let’s shoot him. Quick.”
Mark began to run for the matchlock, and they left the duck to itself. Bevis ran with him, and Mark told him all about it as they went.
They talked so much by sign and mere monosyllables in this short run to the hut that I cannot transcribe it in words, though they understood each other better than had they used set speech. For two people always together know the exact meaning of a nod, the indication of a glance, and a motion of the lip means a page of conversation.
Having got the gun as they came back, Mark said perhaps Pan would eat the duck. Bevis called him, but he did not need the call. Gluttonous epicure as he was, Pan, at a whistle from Bevis, would have left the most marrowy bone in the world; but Bevis with a gun! why, Polly with a broom-stick could not have stopped him.
Before they got to the willow bush it had been settled that Mark should shoot at the jack, as the matchlock was loaded with shot, and Bevis wanted to shoot with ball, and reserved his turn for the time when he had made the new sight. Bevis held Pan while Mark went forward. The jack was there, but Mark could not get the rest in a position to take a steady aim, because the willow boughs interfered so.
So Bevis knelt down, still holding Pan, and Mark rested the long heavy barrel on his shoulder. The shot plunged into the water, and the jack floated, blown a yard away, dead on his back; his head shattered, but the long body untouched. Pan fetched him out, and they laughed at the spaniel, he looked so odd with the fish in his mouth. Bevis wanted to see the glade and the rabbit’s burries, but Mark said, if the duck was done, it would burn to a cinder, so they went home to their dinner. By the time they reached the teak-tree, the duck was indeed burned one side.
It was dry and hard for lack of basting, when they cut it up, but not unsavoury; and what made it nicer was, that every now and then they found shots—which their teeth had flattened—shots from their own gun. These they saved, and Mark put them in his purse; there were six altogether. Mark gloried in the number, as it was a long shot at the duck, and they showed that he had aimed straight. The ale in the wooden bottle was now stale, so they drank water, with a little sherry in it; and then started to see the discovery Mark had made. Pan went with them. The old spaniel had been there long before, for he found out the rabbits the first stroll he took after landing from the Pinta, but could not convey his knowledge to them.
Bevis marked out a tree, behind which they could wait in ambush to shoot at the rabbits, as it was within easy range of their burries; and then, as they felt it was now afternoon, they returned to the stockade, got the telescope and went up on the cliff to watch for Charlie’s signal. The shadow of the gnomon on the dial had moved a good way since Bevis set it up. They had not the least idea of the hour, but somehow they felt that it was afternoon.
Long habit makes us clocks, if we pause, or are forced to consult ourselves. Slow changes in the frame proceed till they are recognised by the mind, or rather by the subtle connexion between the mind and the body; for there seems a nexus, or medium, which conveys this kind of eighth sense from the flesh to the mental consciousness. Birds and animals know the time without a clock or dial, and the months or seasons almost to a day; and so, too, the human animal, if driven from the conveniences of civilisation, which save him the trouble of thinking soon reverts to these original and indefinable indications.
For instance (though in a different way), you can set the clock of your senses to awake exactly at any hour you choose in the morning. If you put your watch aside, reversing the process, and listen to the senses, they will tell you when it is afternoon.
The sandy summit of the cliff was very warm, and the bramble bushes were not high enough to give them any shade; so that, to escape the sun, they reclined on the ground in front of the young oak-tree, and between it and the edge. Bevis looked through the telescope, and could see the sand-martins going in and out of their holes in the distant quarry.
Charlie was not on the hill, or, if so, he was behind a sycamore and out of sight; but they knew he had not yet made the signal, because the herd of cows was down by the hollow oak, some standing in the water. They had not yet been called by the milkers. Sweeping the shore of Fir-Tree Gulf, and down the Mozambique to the projecting bluff which prevented farther view, he saw a crow on the sand, and another perched on a rail; another sign that there was no one about.
“Any savages?” said Mark.
“Not one.”
“Proas hauled up somewhere out of sight.”
Mark carefully felt his way to the very verge, and there sat with his legs dangling over. He said the cliff was quite safe; and Bevis joined him. Underneath they could see deep into the water; but though so still, they could not distinguish the bottom. Clear at the surface, the water seemed to thicken to a dense shadow, which could not be seen through. It was deep there; they thought they should like a dive, only it was too far for them to plunge. There was a ball of thistledown on the surface, floating on the tips of its delicate threads; the spokes with which it flies as a wheel rolls.
“How did the rabbits—I mean the kangaroos—get here?” said Bevis presently. “I don’t think they could swim so far.”
“Savages might bring them,” said Mark. “But they don’t very often carry pets with them: they eat everything so.”
“Nibbling men like goats nibbling hedges,” said Bevis. “We must take care: but how did the kangaroos get on the island?”
“It is curious,” said Mark. “Perhaps it wasn’t always an island—joined to the mainland and the river cut a way through the isthmus.”
“Or a volcano blew it up,” said Bevis. “We will see if we can find the volcano.”
“But it will be gone out now.”
“O! yes. All those sort of things happened when there was no one to see them.”
“Before we lived.”
“Or anybody else.”
A large green dragon-fly darted to and fro now under their feet and between them and the water; now overhead, now up to the top of the oak, and now round the cliff and back again; weaving across and across a warp and weft in the air. As they sat still he came close, and they saw his wings revolving, and the sunlight reflected from the membrane. Every now and then there was a slight snap, as he seized a fly, and ate it as he flew: so eager was he that when a speck of wood-dust fell from the oak, though he was yards away, he rushed at it and intercepted it before it could reach the ground. It was rejected, and he had returned whence he started in a moment.
“The buffaloes are moving,” said Mark. “They’re going up the hill. Get ready. Here, put it on my shoulder.”
The herd had begun to ascend the green slope from the water’s edge, doubtless in response to the milker’s halloo which they could not hear on the island. Bevis rested the telescope on Mark’s shoulder, and watched. In point of fact it was not so far but that they could have seen any one by the quarry without a glass, but the telescope was proper.
“There he is,” said Mark.
Bevis, looking through the telescope, saw Charlie come out from behind a sycamore, where he had been lying in the shadow, and standing on the edge of the quarry, wave his white handkerchief three times, with an interval between.
“It’s all right. White flag,” said Bevis. “He’s looking. He can’t see us, can he?”
“No, there are bushes behind us. If we stood up against the sky perhaps he might.”
“I’ll crawl to the dial,” said Bevis, and he went on hands and knees to the sundial, where he could stand up without being seen, as there were brambles and the oak between him and the cliff. He drew a line with his pencil where the shadow of the gnomon fell on the circle, that was four o’clock. Mark came after, creeping too.
“We won’t sit there again,” said Mark, “when it’s signal-time. He keeps staring. You can see his face through the telescope. We will keep behind the tree.”
“There ought to be a crow’s nest up in it,” said Bevis. “Suppose we make one. Lash a stout stick across two boughs, or tie cords across and half round, so as to be able to sit and watch up there nicely.”
“So we will. Then we can see if the savages are prowling round.”
“The sedges are very thick that side,” said Bevis, pointing to the eastern shore where they had had such a struggle through them. “They would hide five thousand savages.”
They went down to the hut, and Bevis made the sight for the matchlock. The short spiral of copper wire answered perfectly, and he could now take accurate aim. But after he had put the powder in, and was just going to put a bullet, he recollected the kangaroos. If he shot off much at a target with bullets at that time in the afternoon it would alarm everything on the island, for the report would be heard all over it. Kangaroos and water-fowl are generally about more in the evening than the morning, so he put off the trial with ball and loaded with shot.
It was of no use going into ambush till the shadows lengthened, so he set about getting the tea while Mark sawed off two posts, and drove them into the ground at one side of the doorway of the hut. Each post had a cross-piece at the top, and the two boards were placed on these, forming a table. Bevis made four dampers, and at Mark’s suggestion buried a number of potatoes in the embers of the fire, so as to have them baked for supper, and save more cooking.
The mushrooms were saved for breakfast, and the jack, which was about two pounds’ weight, would do for dinner. When he had finished the table, Mark went to the teak-tree, and fetched the two poles that had been set up there for the awning. These he erected by the table, and stretched the rug from them over the table, fastening the other two edges to the posts of the hut.
They had found the nights so warm that more than one rug was unnecessary, and the other could be spared for a permanent awning under which to sit at table. Some tea was put aside to be drunk cold, miner fashion, and it was then time to go shooting. Mark was to have the gun, but he would not go by himself, Bevis must accompany him.
They had to go some distance round to get at the glade, and made so much noise pushing aside branches, and discussing as to whether they were going the right way, that when they reached it if any kangaroos had been out feeding, they had all disappeared.
“I will bring the axe,” said Bevis, “and blaze the trees, then we shall know the way in a minute.”
Fixing the rest so that he could command the burries on that side of the knoll, Mark sat down under the ash-tree they had previously selected, and leaned the heavy matchlock on the staff. They chose this tree because some brake fern grew in front of it and concealed them. Pan had now come to understand this manner of hunting, and he lay down at once, and needed no holding. Bevis extended himself at full length on his back just behind Mark, and looked up at the sky through the ash branches.
The flies would run over his face, though Mark handed him a frond of fern to swish them with, so he partly covered himself with his handkerchief. The handkerchief was stretched across his ear like the top of a drum, and while he was lying so quiet a fly ran across the handkerchief there, and he distinctly heard the sound of its feet. It was a slight rustle, as if its feet caught a little of the surface of the handkerchief. This happened several times.
The sun being now below the line of the tree-tops, the glade was in the shadow, except the top of the knoll, up which the shadow slowly rose like a tide as the sun declined. Now the edge of the shadow reached a sand-heap thrown out from a burrow; now a thicker bunch of grass; then a thistle; at last it slipped over the top in a second.
Mark could see three pairs of tiny, sharp-pointed ears in the grass. He knew these were young rabbits, or kangaroos, too small for eating. They were a difficulty, they were of no use, but pricked up and listened, if he made the least movement, and if they ran in would stop larger ones from coming out. There was something moving in the hazel stoles across the glade which he could not make out, and he could not ask Bevis to look and see because of these minute kangaroos.
Ten minutes afterwards a squirrel leaped out from the hazel, and began to dart hither and thither along the sward, drawing his red tail softly over the grass at each arching leap as lightly as Jack drew the tassel of his whip over his mare’s shoulder when he wished to caress and soothe her. Another followed, and the two played along the turf, often hidden by bunches of grass.
Mark dared not touch Bevis or tell him, for he fancied a larger rabbit was sitting on his haunches at the mouth of a hole fringed with fern. Bevis under his handkerchief listened to Pan snapping his teeth at the flics, and looked up at the sky till four parrots (wood-pigeons) came over, and descended into an oak not far off. The oak was thick with ivy, and was their roost-tree, though they did not intend to retire yet.
Presently he saw a heron floating over at an immense height. His wings moved so slowly he seemed to fly without pressure on the air—as slowly as a lady fans herself when there is no one to coquet with. The heron did not mean to descend to the New Sea, he was bound on a voyage which he did not wish to complete till the dusk began, hence his deliberation. From his flight you might know that there was a mainland somewhere in that direction.
Bang! Mark ran to the knoll, but Pan was there before him, and just in time to seize a wounded kangaroo by the hindquarter as he was paddling into a hole by the fore paws. Mark had seen the rabbit behind the fringe of fern move, and so knew it really was one, and so gently had he got the matchlock into position, moving it the sixteenth of an inch at a time, that Bevis did not know he was aiming. By the new sight he brought the gun to bear on a spot where he thought the rabbit’s shoulder must be, for he could not see it, but the rabbit had moved, and was struck in the haunch, and would have struggled out of reach had not Pan had him.
The squirrel had disappeared, and the four parrots had flown at the report.
“This island is full of things,” said Bevis, when Mark told him about the squirrel. “You find something new every hour, and I don’t know what we shan’t find at last. But you have had all the shooting and killed everything.”
“Well, so I have,” said Mark. “The duck, and the jack, and the kangaroo. Youmustshoot something next.”
End of Volume Two.
Volume Three—Chapter One.New Formosa—Bevis’s Zodiac.They returned to the hut and prepared the kangaroo and the fish for boiling on the morrow; the fish was to be coiled up in the saucepan, and the kangaroo in the pot. Pan had the paunch, and with his great brown eyes glaring out of his head with gluttony, made off with it to his own private larder, where, after eating his full, he buried the rest. Pan had his own private den behind a thicket of bramble, where he kept some bones of a duck, a bacon bone, and now added this to his store. Here he retired occasionally from civilisation, like the king of the Polynesian island, to enjoy nature, away from the etiquette of his attendance at court on Bevis and Mark.Next, Mark with one of the old axes they had used to excavate the store-room, cut a notch in the edge of the cave, where it opened on the hut, large enough to stand the lantern in, as the chest would be required for the raft. They raked the potatoes out of the ashes, and had them for supper, with a damper, the last fragment of a duck, and cold tea, like gold-diggers.Bevis now recollected the journal he had proposed to keep, and got out the book, in which there was as yet only one entry, and that a single word, “Wednesday.” He set it on the table under the awning, with the lantern open before him. Outside the edge of the awning the moon filled the courtyard with her light.“Why, it’s only Thursday now,” said Mark. “We’ve only been here one full day, and it seems weeks.”“Months,” said Bevis. “Perhaps this means Wednesday last year.”“Of course: this is next year to that. How we must have altered! Our friends would not know us.”“Not even our mothers,” said Bevis.“Nor our jolly old mokes and governors.”“Shot a kangaroo,” said Bevis, writing; “shot a duck and a jack—No. Are they jacks? That’s such a common name?”“No; not jacks: jack-sharks.”“No; sun-fish: they’re always in the sun.”“Yes; sun-fish.”“Shot a sun-fish: saw two squirrels, and a heron, and four parrots—”“And a kingfisher—”“Halcyon,” said Bevis, writing it down—“a beautiful halcyon; made a table and a sun-dial. I must go up presently and mark the meridian by the north star.”“Saw one savage.”“Who was that?”“Why, Charlie.”“O yes, one savage; believe there are five thousand in the jungle on the mainland.”“Seven thousand miles from anywhere. Put it down,” said Mark.“Twenty degrees north latitude; right. There, look; half a page already!”“We ought to wash some sand to see if there’s any gold,” said Mark—“in a cradle, you know.”“So we did. We ought to have looked in the duck’s gizzard; tiny nuggets get in gizzards sometimes.”“Everything goes to the river beyond the weeds,” said Mark; “that ought to be written.”“Does everything go to the river?”“Everything. While I was fishing I saw them all come back to Serendib from it.”“We must make haste with the raft.”“Like lightning,” said Mark.“Let me see,” said Bevis, leaning his arm on the table and stroking his hair with the end of the penholder. “There are blue gum trees, and palms, and banyans.”“Reeds—they’re canes.”“Sedges are papyrus.”“The big bulrushes are bamboos.” He meant the reed-mace.“Yes, bamboos. I’ve put it down. There ought to be a list of everything that grows here—cedars of course; that’s something else. Huge butterflies—”“Very huge.”“Heaps of flies.”“And a tiger somewhere.”“Then there ought to be the names of all the fossils, and metals, and if there’s any coal,” said Bevis; “and when we have the raft we must dredge up the anemones and pearl oysters, and—”“And write down all the fish.”“And everything. The language of the natives will be a bother. I must make a new alphabet for it. Look! that will do for A,”—he made a tiny circle; “that’s B, two dots.”“They gurgle in their throats,” said Mark.“That’s a gurgle,” said Bevis, making a long stroke with a dot over and under it; “and they click with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths. No: it’s awkward to write clicks. I know: there, CK, that’s for click, and this curve under it means a tongue—the way you’re to put it to make a click.”“Click! Click!”“Guggle!”“Then there’s the names of the idols,” said Mark. “We’d better find some.”“You can cut some,” said Bevis; “cut them with your knife out of a stick, and say they’re models, as they wouldn’t let you take the real ones. The names; let’s see—Jog.”“Hick-kag.”“Hick-kag; I’ve put it down. Jog and Hick-kag are always quarrelling, and when they hit one another, that’s thunder. That’s what they say.”“Noodles.”“Natives are always noodles.”“But they can do one thing capital though.”“What’s that?”“Stick up together.”“How? Why?”“If you take a hatchet and chop a big notch in them, they stick up together again directly.”“Join up.”“Like glue.”“Then the thing is, how did the savages get here? Nobody has ever been here before us; now where did they come from? There are sure to be grand ruins in the jungle somewhere,” said Bevis, “all carved, and covered with inscriptions.”“Huge trees growing on the top.”“Magic signs chipped out on stones, and books made of string with knots instead of writing.”Kaak! kaak! A heron was descending. The unearthly noise made them look up.“Are there any tidal waves?” said Mark.“Sometimes—a hundred feet high. But the thing is how did they get here? How did anybody ever get anywhere?”“It’s very crooked,” said Mark, “very crooked: you can’t quite see it, can you? Suppose you go and do the sun-dial: I’m sleepy.”“Well, go to bed; I can do it.”“Good-night!” said Mark. “Lots of chopping to do to-morrow. We ought to have brought a grindstone for the axes. You have got the plan ready for the raft?”“Quite ready.”Mark went into the hut, placed the lantern in the niche, and threw himself on the bed. In half a minute he was firm asleep. Bevis went out of the courtyard, round outside the fence, and up on the cliff to the sun-dial. The stars shone brighter than it is usually thought they do when there is no moon; but in fact it is not so much the moon as the state of the atmosphere. There was no haze in the dry air, and he could see the Pole Star distinctly.He sat down—as the post on which the dial was supported was low—on the southern side, with it between him and the north. He still had to stoop till he had got the tip of the gnomon to cover the North Star. Closing one eye, as if aiming, he then put his pencil on the dial in the circle or groove scratched by the compass. The long pencil was held upright in the groove, and moved round till it intercepted his view of the star. The tip of the gnomon, the pencil, and the Pole Star were in a direct line, in a row one behind the other.To make sure, he raised his head and looked over the gnomon and pencil to the star, when he found that he had not been holding the pencil upright; it leaned to the east, and made an error to the west in his meridian. “It ought to be a plumb-line,” he thought. “But I think it’s straight now.”He stooped again, and found the gnomon and pencil correct, and pressing on the pencil hard, drew it towards him out of the groove a little way. By the moonlight when he got up he could see the mark he had left, and which showed the exact north. To-morrow he would have to draw a line from that mark straight to the gnomon, and when the shadow fell on that line it would be noon. With the fixed point of noon and the fixed point of four o’clock, he thought he could make the divisions for the rest of the hours.The moonlight cast a shadow to the east of the noon-line, as she had crossed the meridian. Looking up, he saw the irregular circle of the moon high in the sky, so brilliant that the scored relievo work enchased upon her surface was obscured by the bright light reflected from it.Behind him numerous lights glittered in the still water, near at hand they were sharp clean points, far away they were short bands of light drawn towards him. Bevis went to the young oak and sat down under it. Cassiopeia fronted him, and Capella; the Northern Crown, was faint and low; but westward great Arcturus shone, though the moon had taken the redness from him. The cross of Cygnus was lying on its side as it was carried through the eastern sky; beneath it the Eagle’s central star hung over the Nile. Low in the south, over the unknown river Antares, too, had lost his redness.Up through the branches of the oak he saw Lyra, the purest star in the heavens, white as whitest and clearest light may be, gleaming at the zenith of the pale blue dome. But just above the horizon northwards there was a faint white light, the faintest aurora, as if another moon was rising there. By these he knew his position, and that he was looking the same way as if he had been gazing from the large northern window of the parlour at home, or if he had been lying on the green path by the strawberries, as he sometimes did in the summer evenings.Then the North Star, minute but clear—so small, and yet chosen for the axle and focus of the sky, instead of sun-like Sirius—the North Star always shone just over the group of elms by the orchard. Summer and winter, spring and autumn, it was always there, always over the elms—whether they were reddening with the buds and flowers of February, whether they were dull green now in the heats of August, whether they were yellow in October.Dick and his Team, whose waggon goes backwards, swung round it like a stone in a sling whirled about the shoulders. Sometimes the tail of the Bear, where Dick bestrides his second horse, hung down behind the elms into the vapour of the horizon. Sometimes the Pointers were nearly overhead. If they were hidden by a cloud, the Lesser Bear gave a point; or you could draw a line through Cassiopeia, and tell the North by her chair of stars.The comets seemed to come within the circle of Bootes—Arcturus you always know is some way beyond the tail of the Bear. The comets come inside the circle of the stars that never set. The governor had seen three or four appear there in his time, just over the elms under the Pole. Donati’s, which perhaps you can remember, came there—a tiny thing twelve inches long from nucleus to tail to look at, afterwards the weird sign the world stood amazed at. Then there was another not long after, which seemed to appear at once as a broad streak across the sky.Like the sketches in old star-maps, it did indeed cross the whole sky for a night or two, but went too quickly for the world to awake at midnight and wonder at. Lately two more have come in the enchanted circle of the stars that never set.All the stars from Arcturus to Capella came about the elms by the orchard; as Arcturus went down over the place of sunset in autumn, Capella began to shine over another group of elms—in the meadow to the north-east. Capella is sure to be seen, because it begins to become conspicuous just as people say the sky is star-lit as winter sends the first frost or two. But Capella is the brightest star in the northern sky in summer, and it always came up by the second or north-east group of elms.Between these two groups of tall trees—so tall and thick that they were generally visible even on dark nights—the streamers of the Aurora Borealis shot up in winter, and between them in summer the faint reflection of the midnight sun, like the lunar dawn which precedes the rising of the moon always appeared. The real day-dawn—the white foot of Aurora—came through the sky-curtain a little to the right of the second group, and about over a young oak in the hedge across the road, opposite the garden wall.When the few leaves left on this young oak were brown, and rustled in the frosty night, the massy shoulder of Orion came heaving up through it—first one bright star, then another; then the gleaming girdle, and the less definite scabbard; then the great constellation stretched across the east. At the first sight of Orion’s shoulder Bevis always felt suddenly stronger, as if a breath of the mighty hunter’s had come down and entered into him.He stood upright; his frame enlarged; his instep lifted him as he walked, as if he too could swing the vast club and chase the lion from his lair. The sparkle of Orion’s stars brought to him a remnant of the immense vigour of the young world, the frosty air braced his sinews, and power came into his arms.As the constellation rose, so presently new vigour too entered into the trees, the sap moved, the buds thrust forth, the new leaf came, and the nightingale travelling up from the south sang in the musical April nights. But this was when Orion was south, and Sirius flared like a night-sun over the great oak at the top of the Home Field.Sirius rose through the young oak opposite the garden wall, passed through a third group of elms, by the rick-yard, gleaming through the branches—hung in the spring above the great oak at the top of the Home Field, and lowered by degrees westwards behind the ashes growing at that end of the New Sea by the harbour. After it Arcturus came, and lorded the Midsummer zenith, where now lucent Lyra looked down upon him.Up, too, through the little oak came Aldebaran the red Bull’s-Eye, the bent rod of Aries, and the cluster of the Pleiades. The Pleiades he loved most, for they were the first constellation he learned to know. The flickering Pleiades, the star-dusted spot in Cancer, and Leo, came in succession. Antares, the harvest-star, scarcely cleared the great oak southwards in summer. He got them all from a movable planisphere, the very best star-maps ever made, proceeding step by step, drawing imaginary lines from one to the other, as through the Pointers to the Pole, and so knew the designs on our northern dome.He transferred them from the map to the trees. The north group of elms, the north-east group, the east oak, the south-east elms, the southern great oak, the westward ashes, the orchard itself north-west,—through these like a zodiac the stars moved, all east to west, except the enchanted circle about the Pole. For the Bear and the Lesser Bear sometimes seemed to move from west to east when they were returning, swinging under to what would have been their place of rising.Fixing them thus by night, he knew where many were by day; the Pole Star was always over the north elms—when the starlings stayed and whistled there before they flew to the housetop, when the rooks called there before the sun set on their way home to the jungle, when the fieldfares in the gloomy winter noon perched up there. The Pole Star was always over the elms.In the summer mornings the sun rose north of east, between the second group of elms and the little oak—so far to the north that he came up over the vale instead of the downs. The morning beams then lit up the northern or outer side of the garden wall, and fell aslant through the narrow kitchen window, under the beam of the ceiling. In the evening the sun set again northwards of the orchard, between it and the north elms, having come round towards the place of rising, and shining again on the outside of the garden wall, so that there seemed but a few miles between. He did not sink, but only dipped, and the dawn that travelled above him indicated his place, moving between the north and north-east elms, and overcoming the night by the little oak. The sun did not rise and sink; he travelled round an immense circle.In the winter mornings the sun rose between the young oak and the third group of elms, red and vapour hung, and his beams presently shot through the window to the logs on the kitchen hearth. He sank then between the south-westerly ashes and the orchard, rising from the wall of the Downs, and sinking again behind it. At noon he was just over, only a little higher than the great southern oak. All day long the outer side of the garden wall was in shadow, and at night the northern sky was black to the horizon. The travelling dawn was not visible: the sun rose and sank, and was only visible through half of the great circle. The cocks crowed at four in the afternoon, and the rooks hastened to the jungle.But by-and-by, when the giant Orion shone with his full width grasping all the sky, then in the mornings the sun’s rising began to shift backwards—first to the edge of the third group of elms, then straight up the road, then to the little oak. In the afternoon, the place of setting likewise shifted backwards to the north, and came behind the orchard. At noon he was twice as high as the southern oak, and every day at noontide the shadows gradually shortened. The nightingale sang in the musical April night, the cowslips opened, and the bees hummed over the meadows.Last of all, the sweet turtle-doves cooed and wooed; beauteous June wearing her roses came, and the sun shone at the highest point of his great circle. Then you could not look at him unless up through the boughs of a tree. Round the zodiac of the elms, and the little oak, the great oak, the ashes, and the orchard, the sun revolved; and the house, and the garden path by the strawberries—the best place to see—were in the centre of his golden ring.The sward on the path on which Bevis used to lie and gaze up in the summer evening, was real, and tangible; the earth under was real; and so too the elms, the oak, the ash-trees, were real and tangible—things to be touched, and known to be. Now like these, the mind, stepping from the one to the other, knew and almost felt the stars to be real and not mere specks of light, but things that were there by day over the elms as well as by night, and not apparitions of the evening departing at the twittering of the swallows. They were real, and the touch of his mind felt to them.He could not, as he reclined on the garden path by the strawberries, physically reach to and feel the oak; but he could feel the oak in his mind, and so from the oak, stepping beyond it, he felt the stars. They were always there by day as well as by night. The Bear did not sink, the sun in summer only dipped, and his reflection—the travelling dawn—shone above him, and so from these unravelling out the enlarging sky, he felt as well as knew that neither the stars nor the sun ever rose or set. The heavens were always around and with him. The strawberries and the sward of the garden path, he himself reclining there, were moving through, among, and between the stars; they were as much by him as the strawberry leaves.By day the sun, as he sat down under the oak, was as much by him as the boughs of the great tree. It was by him like the swallows.The heavens were as much a part of life as the elms, the oak, the house, the garden and orchard, the meadow and the brook. They were no more separated than the furniture of the parlour, than the old oak chair where he sat, and saw the new moon shine over the mulberry-tree. They were neither above nor beneath, they were in the same place with him; just as when you walk in a wood the trees are all about you, on a plane with you, so he felt the constellations and the sun on a plane with him, and that he was moving among them as the earth rolled on, like them, with them, in the stream of space.The day did not shut off the stars, the night did not shut off the sun; they were always there. Not that he always thought of them, but they were never dismissed. When he listened to the greenfinches sweetly calling in the hawthorn, or when he read his books, poring over the Odyssey, with the sunshine on the wall, they were always there; there was no severance. Bevis lived not only out to the finches and the swallows, to the far-away hills, but he lived out and felt out to the sky.It was living, not thinking. He lived it, never thinking, as the finches live their sunny life in the happy days of June. There was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground.The green path by the strawberries was the centre of the world, and round about it by dayandnight the sun circled in a magical golden ring.Under the oak on New Formosa that warm summer night, Bevis looked up as he reclined at the white pure light of Lyra, and forgot everything but the consciousness of living, feeling up to and beyond it. The earth and the water, the oak, went away; he himself went away: his mind joined itself and was linked up through ethereal space to its beauty.Bevis, as you know did not think: we have done the thinking, the analysis for him. He felt and was lost in the larger consciousness of the heavens.The moon moved, and with it the shadow of the cliff on the water beneath, a planet rose eastwards over their new Nile, water-fowl clucked as they flew over.Kaak! Kaak! Another heron called and his discordant piercing yell sounded over the water, seeming to penetrate to the distant and shadowy shores. The noise awoke him, and he went down to the hut. Mark was firm asleep, the lantern burned in the niche; Pan had been curled up by the bedside, but lifted his head and wagged his tail, thumping the floor as he entered. Bevis let down the curtain closing the doorway, put out the lantern, and in three minutes was as firm as Mark. After some time, Pan rose quietly and went out, slipping under the curtain, which fell back into its place when he had passed.
They returned to the hut and prepared the kangaroo and the fish for boiling on the morrow; the fish was to be coiled up in the saucepan, and the kangaroo in the pot. Pan had the paunch, and with his great brown eyes glaring out of his head with gluttony, made off with it to his own private larder, where, after eating his full, he buried the rest. Pan had his own private den behind a thicket of bramble, where he kept some bones of a duck, a bacon bone, and now added this to his store. Here he retired occasionally from civilisation, like the king of the Polynesian island, to enjoy nature, away from the etiquette of his attendance at court on Bevis and Mark.
Next, Mark with one of the old axes they had used to excavate the store-room, cut a notch in the edge of the cave, where it opened on the hut, large enough to stand the lantern in, as the chest would be required for the raft. They raked the potatoes out of the ashes, and had them for supper, with a damper, the last fragment of a duck, and cold tea, like gold-diggers.
Bevis now recollected the journal he had proposed to keep, and got out the book, in which there was as yet only one entry, and that a single word, “Wednesday.” He set it on the table under the awning, with the lantern open before him. Outside the edge of the awning the moon filled the courtyard with her light.
“Why, it’s only Thursday now,” said Mark. “We’ve only been here one full day, and it seems weeks.”
“Months,” said Bevis. “Perhaps this means Wednesday last year.”
“Of course: this is next year to that. How we must have altered! Our friends would not know us.”
“Not even our mothers,” said Bevis.
“Nor our jolly old mokes and governors.”
“Shot a kangaroo,” said Bevis, writing; “shot a duck and a jack—No. Are they jacks? That’s such a common name?”
“No; not jacks: jack-sharks.”
“No; sun-fish: they’re always in the sun.”
“Yes; sun-fish.”
“Shot a sun-fish: saw two squirrels, and a heron, and four parrots—”
“And a kingfisher—”
“Halcyon,” said Bevis, writing it down—“a beautiful halcyon; made a table and a sun-dial. I must go up presently and mark the meridian by the north star.”
“Saw one savage.”
“Who was that?”
“Why, Charlie.”
“O yes, one savage; believe there are five thousand in the jungle on the mainland.”
“Seven thousand miles from anywhere. Put it down,” said Mark.
“Twenty degrees north latitude; right. There, look; half a page already!”
“We ought to wash some sand to see if there’s any gold,” said Mark—“in a cradle, you know.”
“So we did. We ought to have looked in the duck’s gizzard; tiny nuggets get in gizzards sometimes.”
“Everything goes to the river beyond the weeds,” said Mark; “that ought to be written.”
“Does everything go to the river?”
“Everything. While I was fishing I saw them all come back to Serendib from it.”
“We must make haste with the raft.”
“Like lightning,” said Mark.
“Let me see,” said Bevis, leaning his arm on the table and stroking his hair with the end of the penholder. “There are blue gum trees, and palms, and banyans.”
“Reeds—they’re canes.”
“Sedges are papyrus.”
“The big bulrushes are bamboos.” He meant the reed-mace.
“Yes, bamboos. I’ve put it down. There ought to be a list of everything that grows here—cedars of course; that’s something else. Huge butterflies—”
“Very huge.”
“Heaps of flies.”
“And a tiger somewhere.”
“Then there ought to be the names of all the fossils, and metals, and if there’s any coal,” said Bevis; “and when we have the raft we must dredge up the anemones and pearl oysters, and—”
“And write down all the fish.”
“And everything. The language of the natives will be a bother. I must make a new alphabet for it. Look! that will do for A,”—he made a tiny circle; “that’s B, two dots.”
“They gurgle in their throats,” said Mark.
“That’s a gurgle,” said Bevis, making a long stroke with a dot over and under it; “and they click with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths. No: it’s awkward to write clicks. I know: there, CK, that’s for click, and this curve under it means a tongue—the way you’re to put it to make a click.”
“Click! Click!”
“Guggle!”
“Then there’s the names of the idols,” said Mark. “We’d better find some.”
“You can cut some,” said Bevis; “cut them with your knife out of a stick, and say they’re models, as they wouldn’t let you take the real ones. The names; let’s see—Jog.”
“Hick-kag.”
“Hick-kag; I’ve put it down. Jog and Hick-kag are always quarrelling, and when they hit one another, that’s thunder. That’s what they say.”
“Noodles.”
“Natives are always noodles.”
“But they can do one thing capital though.”
“What’s that?”
“Stick up together.”
“How? Why?”
“If you take a hatchet and chop a big notch in them, they stick up together again directly.”
“Join up.”
“Like glue.”
“Then the thing is, how did the savages get here? Nobody has ever been here before us; now where did they come from? There are sure to be grand ruins in the jungle somewhere,” said Bevis, “all carved, and covered with inscriptions.”
“Huge trees growing on the top.”
“Magic signs chipped out on stones, and books made of string with knots instead of writing.”
Kaak! kaak! A heron was descending. The unearthly noise made them look up.
“Are there any tidal waves?” said Mark.
“Sometimes—a hundred feet high. But the thing is how did they get here? How did anybody ever get anywhere?”
“It’s very crooked,” said Mark, “very crooked: you can’t quite see it, can you? Suppose you go and do the sun-dial: I’m sleepy.”
“Well, go to bed; I can do it.”
“Good-night!” said Mark. “Lots of chopping to do to-morrow. We ought to have brought a grindstone for the axes. You have got the plan ready for the raft?”
“Quite ready.”
Mark went into the hut, placed the lantern in the niche, and threw himself on the bed. In half a minute he was firm asleep. Bevis went out of the courtyard, round outside the fence, and up on the cliff to the sun-dial. The stars shone brighter than it is usually thought they do when there is no moon; but in fact it is not so much the moon as the state of the atmosphere. There was no haze in the dry air, and he could see the Pole Star distinctly.
He sat down—as the post on which the dial was supported was low—on the southern side, with it between him and the north. He still had to stoop till he had got the tip of the gnomon to cover the North Star. Closing one eye, as if aiming, he then put his pencil on the dial in the circle or groove scratched by the compass. The long pencil was held upright in the groove, and moved round till it intercepted his view of the star. The tip of the gnomon, the pencil, and the Pole Star were in a direct line, in a row one behind the other.
To make sure, he raised his head and looked over the gnomon and pencil to the star, when he found that he had not been holding the pencil upright; it leaned to the east, and made an error to the west in his meridian. “It ought to be a plumb-line,” he thought. “But I think it’s straight now.”
He stooped again, and found the gnomon and pencil correct, and pressing on the pencil hard, drew it towards him out of the groove a little way. By the moonlight when he got up he could see the mark he had left, and which showed the exact north. To-morrow he would have to draw a line from that mark straight to the gnomon, and when the shadow fell on that line it would be noon. With the fixed point of noon and the fixed point of four o’clock, he thought he could make the divisions for the rest of the hours.
The moonlight cast a shadow to the east of the noon-line, as she had crossed the meridian. Looking up, he saw the irregular circle of the moon high in the sky, so brilliant that the scored relievo work enchased upon her surface was obscured by the bright light reflected from it.
Behind him numerous lights glittered in the still water, near at hand they were sharp clean points, far away they were short bands of light drawn towards him. Bevis went to the young oak and sat down under it. Cassiopeia fronted him, and Capella; the Northern Crown, was faint and low; but westward great Arcturus shone, though the moon had taken the redness from him. The cross of Cygnus was lying on its side as it was carried through the eastern sky; beneath it the Eagle’s central star hung over the Nile. Low in the south, over the unknown river Antares, too, had lost his redness.
Up through the branches of the oak he saw Lyra, the purest star in the heavens, white as whitest and clearest light may be, gleaming at the zenith of the pale blue dome. But just above the horizon northwards there was a faint white light, the faintest aurora, as if another moon was rising there. By these he knew his position, and that he was looking the same way as if he had been gazing from the large northern window of the parlour at home, or if he had been lying on the green path by the strawberries, as he sometimes did in the summer evenings.
Then the North Star, minute but clear—so small, and yet chosen for the axle and focus of the sky, instead of sun-like Sirius—the North Star always shone just over the group of elms by the orchard. Summer and winter, spring and autumn, it was always there, always over the elms—whether they were reddening with the buds and flowers of February, whether they were dull green now in the heats of August, whether they were yellow in October.
Dick and his Team, whose waggon goes backwards, swung round it like a stone in a sling whirled about the shoulders. Sometimes the tail of the Bear, where Dick bestrides his second horse, hung down behind the elms into the vapour of the horizon. Sometimes the Pointers were nearly overhead. If they were hidden by a cloud, the Lesser Bear gave a point; or you could draw a line through Cassiopeia, and tell the North by her chair of stars.
The comets seemed to come within the circle of Bootes—Arcturus you always know is some way beyond the tail of the Bear. The comets come inside the circle of the stars that never set. The governor had seen three or four appear there in his time, just over the elms under the Pole. Donati’s, which perhaps you can remember, came there—a tiny thing twelve inches long from nucleus to tail to look at, afterwards the weird sign the world stood amazed at. Then there was another not long after, which seemed to appear at once as a broad streak across the sky.
Like the sketches in old star-maps, it did indeed cross the whole sky for a night or two, but went too quickly for the world to awake at midnight and wonder at. Lately two more have come in the enchanted circle of the stars that never set.
All the stars from Arcturus to Capella came about the elms by the orchard; as Arcturus went down over the place of sunset in autumn, Capella began to shine over another group of elms—in the meadow to the north-east. Capella is sure to be seen, because it begins to become conspicuous just as people say the sky is star-lit as winter sends the first frost or two. But Capella is the brightest star in the northern sky in summer, and it always came up by the second or north-east group of elms.
Between these two groups of tall trees—so tall and thick that they were generally visible even on dark nights—the streamers of the Aurora Borealis shot up in winter, and between them in summer the faint reflection of the midnight sun, like the lunar dawn which precedes the rising of the moon always appeared. The real day-dawn—the white foot of Aurora—came through the sky-curtain a little to the right of the second group, and about over a young oak in the hedge across the road, opposite the garden wall.
When the few leaves left on this young oak were brown, and rustled in the frosty night, the massy shoulder of Orion came heaving up through it—first one bright star, then another; then the gleaming girdle, and the less definite scabbard; then the great constellation stretched across the east. At the first sight of Orion’s shoulder Bevis always felt suddenly stronger, as if a breath of the mighty hunter’s had come down and entered into him.
He stood upright; his frame enlarged; his instep lifted him as he walked, as if he too could swing the vast club and chase the lion from his lair. The sparkle of Orion’s stars brought to him a remnant of the immense vigour of the young world, the frosty air braced his sinews, and power came into his arms.
As the constellation rose, so presently new vigour too entered into the trees, the sap moved, the buds thrust forth, the new leaf came, and the nightingale travelling up from the south sang in the musical April nights. But this was when Orion was south, and Sirius flared like a night-sun over the great oak at the top of the Home Field.
Sirius rose through the young oak opposite the garden wall, passed through a third group of elms, by the rick-yard, gleaming through the branches—hung in the spring above the great oak at the top of the Home Field, and lowered by degrees westwards behind the ashes growing at that end of the New Sea by the harbour. After it Arcturus came, and lorded the Midsummer zenith, where now lucent Lyra looked down upon him.
Up, too, through the little oak came Aldebaran the red Bull’s-Eye, the bent rod of Aries, and the cluster of the Pleiades. The Pleiades he loved most, for they were the first constellation he learned to know. The flickering Pleiades, the star-dusted spot in Cancer, and Leo, came in succession. Antares, the harvest-star, scarcely cleared the great oak southwards in summer. He got them all from a movable planisphere, the very best star-maps ever made, proceeding step by step, drawing imaginary lines from one to the other, as through the Pointers to the Pole, and so knew the designs on our northern dome.
He transferred them from the map to the trees. The north group of elms, the north-east group, the east oak, the south-east elms, the southern great oak, the westward ashes, the orchard itself north-west,—through these like a zodiac the stars moved, all east to west, except the enchanted circle about the Pole. For the Bear and the Lesser Bear sometimes seemed to move from west to east when they were returning, swinging under to what would have been their place of rising.
Fixing them thus by night, he knew where many were by day; the Pole Star was always over the north elms—when the starlings stayed and whistled there before they flew to the housetop, when the rooks called there before the sun set on their way home to the jungle, when the fieldfares in the gloomy winter noon perched up there. The Pole Star was always over the elms.
In the summer mornings the sun rose north of east, between the second group of elms and the little oak—so far to the north that he came up over the vale instead of the downs. The morning beams then lit up the northern or outer side of the garden wall, and fell aslant through the narrow kitchen window, under the beam of the ceiling. In the evening the sun set again northwards of the orchard, between it and the north elms, having come round towards the place of rising, and shining again on the outside of the garden wall, so that there seemed but a few miles between. He did not sink, but only dipped, and the dawn that travelled above him indicated his place, moving between the north and north-east elms, and overcoming the night by the little oak. The sun did not rise and sink; he travelled round an immense circle.
In the winter mornings the sun rose between the young oak and the third group of elms, red and vapour hung, and his beams presently shot through the window to the logs on the kitchen hearth. He sank then between the south-westerly ashes and the orchard, rising from the wall of the Downs, and sinking again behind it. At noon he was just over, only a little higher than the great southern oak. All day long the outer side of the garden wall was in shadow, and at night the northern sky was black to the horizon. The travelling dawn was not visible: the sun rose and sank, and was only visible through half of the great circle. The cocks crowed at four in the afternoon, and the rooks hastened to the jungle.
But by-and-by, when the giant Orion shone with his full width grasping all the sky, then in the mornings the sun’s rising began to shift backwards—first to the edge of the third group of elms, then straight up the road, then to the little oak. In the afternoon, the place of setting likewise shifted backwards to the north, and came behind the orchard. At noon he was twice as high as the southern oak, and every day at noontide the shadows gradually shortened. The nightingale sang in the musical April night, the cowslips opened, and the bees hummed over the meadows.
Last of all, the sweet turtle-doves cooed and wooed; beauteous June wearing her roses came, and the sun shone at the highest point of his great circle. Then you could not look at him unless up through the boughs of a tree. Round the zodiac of the elms, and the little oak, the great oak, the ashes, and the orchard, the sun revolved; and the house, and the garden path by the strawberries—the best place to see—were in the centre of his golden ring.
The sward on the path on which Bevis used to lie and gaze up in the summer evening, was real, and tangible; the earth under was real; and so too the elms, the oak, the ash-trees, were real and tangible—things to be touched, and known to be. Now like these, the mind, stepping from the one to the other, knew and almost felt the stars to be real and not mere specks of light, but things that were there by day over the elms as well as by night, and not apparitions of the evening departing at the twittering of the swallows. They were real, and the touch of his mind felt to them.
He could not, as he reclined on the garden path by the strawberries, physically reach to and feel the oak; but he could feel the oak in his mind, and so from the oak, stepping beyond it, he felt the stars. They were always there by day as well as by night. The Bear did not sink, the sun in summer only dipped, and his reflection—the travelling dawn—shone above him, and so from these unravelling out the enlarging sky, he felt as well as knew that neither the stars nor the sun ever rose or set. The heavens were always around and with him. The strawberries and the sward of the garden path, he himself reclining there, were moving through, among, and between the stars; they were as much by him as the strawberry leaves.
By day the sun, as he sat down under the oak, was as much by him as the boughs of the great tree. It was by him like the swallows.
The heavens were as much a part of life as the elms, the oak, the house, the garden and orchard, the meadow and the brook. They were no more separated than the furniture of the parlour, than the old oak chair where he sat, and saw the new moon shine over the mulberry-tree. They were neither above nor beneath, they were in the same place with him; just as when you walk in a wood the trees are all about you, on a plane with you, so he felt the constellations and the sun on a plane with him, and that he was moving among them as the earth rolled on, like them, with them, in the stream of space.
The day did not shut off the stars, the night did not shut off the sun; they were always there. Not that he always thought of them, but they were never dismissed. When he listened to the greenfinches sweetly calling in the hawthorn, or when he read his books, poring over the Odyssey, with the sunshine on the wall, they were always there; there was no severance. Bevis lived not only out to the finches and the swallows, to the far-away hills, but he lived out and felt out to the sky.
It was living, not thinking. He lived it, never thinking, as the finches live their sunny life in the happy days of June. There was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground.
The green path by the strawberries was the centre of the world, and round about it by dayandnight the sun circled in a magical golden ring.
Under the oak on New Formosa that warm summer night, Bevis looked up as he reclined at the white pure light of Lyra, and forgot everything but the consciousness of living, feeling up to and beyond it. The earth and the water, the oak, went away; he himself went away: his mind joined itself and was linked up through ethereal space to its beauty.
Bevis, as you know did not think: we have done the thinking, the analysis for him. He felt and was lost in the larger consciousness of the heavens.
The moon moved, and with it the shadow of the cliff on the water beneath, a planet rose eastwards over their new Nile, water-fowl clucked as they flew over.
Kaak! Kaak! Another heron called and his discordant piercing yell sounded over the water, seeming to penetrate to the distant and shadowy shores. The noise awoke him, and he went down to the hut. Mark was firm asleep, the lantern burned in the niche; Pan had been curled up by the bedside, but lifted his head and wagged his tail, thumping the floor as he entered. Bevis let down the curtain closing the doorway, put out the lantern, and in three minutes was as firm as Mark. After some time, Pan rose quietly and went out, slipping under the curtain, which fell back into its place when he had passed.
Volume Three—Chapter Two.New Formosa—The Raft.They did not get up till the sun was high, and when Mark lifted the curtain a robin flew from the table just outside, where he had been picking up the crumbs, across to the gate-post in the stockade. The gate had not been shut—Pan was lying by it under the fence, which cast a shadow in the morning and evening.“Pan!” said Mark; the lazy spaniel wagged his tail, but did not come.“I shall go and finish the sun-dial while you get the breakfast,” said Bevis. It was Mark’s turn to-day, and as he went out at the gate he stooped and patted Pan, who looked up with speaking affection in his eyes, and stretched himself to his full length in utter lassitude.Bevis drew the line from the gnomon to the mark he had made the night before, this was the noon or meridian. Then he drew another from the mark where the shadow had fallen at four o’clock in the afternoon. The space between the two he divided into four equal divisions and drew lines for one, two, and three o’clock. They were nearly two inches apart, and having measured them exactly he added four more beyond, up to eight o’clock, as he thought the sun set about eight; and then seven more on the other side where the shadow would fall in the morning, as he supposed the sun rose about five.His hours, therefore, ranged from five till eight, and he added half lines to show the half-hours. When it was done the shadow of the gnomon touched the nine, so he shouted to Mark that it was nine o’clock. He knew that his dial was not correct, because the hour lines ought to be drawn so as to show the time every day of the year, and his would only show it for a short while.How often he had drawn a pencil-mark along the edge of the shadow on the window-frame in the south window of the parlour! In the early spring, while the bitter east wind raged, he used to sit in the old oak chair at the south window, where every now and then the warm sunshine fell from a break in the ranks of the marching clouds. Out of the wind the March sun was warm and pleasant, and while it lasted he dreamed over his books, his Odyssey, his Faust, his Quixote, his Shakespeare’s poems.About eleven the sunshine generally came, and he drew a line on the frame to mark the hour. But in two days the verge of the shadow had gone on, and at eleven left the pencil-mark behind. He marked it again and again, it went on as the sun, coming up higher and higher, described a larger ring. So with his pencil-lines on the window-frame he measured the spring and graduated the coming of summer, till the eggs in the goldfinch’s nest in the apple-tree were hard set. From this he knew that his sun-dial was not correct, for as the sun now each day described a circle slightly less than before, the shadow too would change and the error increase. Still the dial would divide the day for them, and they could work and arrange their plans by it.Had they had the best chronometer ever made it would have been of no further use. All time is artificial, and their time was correct to them.Mark shouted that breakfast was ready, so he went down, and they sat at the table under the awning.“Pan’s been thieving,” said Mark. “There was half a damper on the table last night, and it was gone this morning, and two potatoes which we left, and I put the skin of the kangaroo on the fence, and that’s gone—”“He couldn’t eat the skin, could he?” said Bevis. “Pan, come here, sir.”“Look at him,” said Mark, “he’s stuffed so full he can hardly crawl—if he was hungry he would come quick.”“So he would. Pan, you old rascal! What have you done with the kangaroo skin, sir?”Pan wagged his tail and looked from one to the other; the sound of their voices was stern, but he detected the goodwill in it, and that they were not really angry.“And the damper?”“And the potatoes? And just as if you could eat leather and fur, sir!”Pan put his fore-paws on Bevis’s knee, and looked up as if he had done something very clever.“Pooh! Get away,” said Bevis, “you’re a false old rascal. Mark, cut him some of that piece of bacon presently.”“So I will—and I’ll put the things higher up,” said Mark. “I’ll drive some nails into the posts and make a shelf, then you’ll be done, sir.”Pan, finding there was nothing more for him to eat, walked slowly back to the fence and let himself fall down.“Too lazy to lie down properly,” said Bevis.After breakfast they put up the shelf, and placed the eatables on it out of Pan’s reach, and then taking their towels started for their bath.“It might have been a rat,” said Mark; “that looks gnawn.” He kicked the jack’s head which had been cut off, being shattered with the shot, and thrown down outside the gate. “But Pan’s very full, else he would come,” for the spaniel did not follow as usual. So soon as they had gone the robin returned to the table, took what he liked, ventured into the hut for a minute, and then perched on the fence above Pan before returning to the wood.Bevis and Mark swam and waded to Serendib again. There was a light ripple this morning from the south-east, and a gentle breeze which cooled the day. They said they would hasten to construct the raft, so as to be able to shoot the water-fowl, but Bevis wanted first to try the matchlock with ball now he had fitted it with a sight. He fired three times at the teak-tree, to which Mark pinned a small piece of paper as a bull’s-eye, and at thirty yards he hit the tree very well, but not the paper. The bullets were all below, the nearest about four inches from the bull’s-eye. Still it was much better shooting.He then loaded the gun with shot, and took it and a hatchet—the two were a good load—intending to look in the wood for suitable timber, and keep the gun by him for a possible shot at something. But just as he had got ready, and Pan shaking himself together began to drag his idle body after him, he thought Mark looked dull. It was Mark’s turn to cook, and he had already got the fire alight under the teak.“I won’t go,” he said; “I’ll stop and help you. Things are stupid by yourself.”“Fishing is very stupid, by yourself,” said Mark.“Let’s make a rule,” said Bevis. “Everybody helps everybody instead of going by themselves.”“So we will,” said Mark, only too glad, and the new rule was agreed to, but as they could not both shoot at once, it was understood that in this the former contract was to stand, and each was to have the matchlock a day to himself. The pot and the saucepan, with the kangaroo and the jack were soon on, and they found that boiling had one great advantage over roasting, they could pile on sticks and go away for some time, instead of having to watch and turn the roast.They found a good many small trees and poles such as they wanted not far from home, and among the rest three dead larches which had been snapped by a tornado. These dry trees were lighter and would float better than green timber. For the larger beams, or foundation of the raft, they chose aspen and poplar, and for the cross-joists firs, and by dinner-time they had collected nearly enough.It was half-past one by the sun-dial when Mark began to prepare the table; Bevis had gone to haul the catamaran planks up to the place where the raft was to be built. Under one of the planks, as he turned it over, there was a little lizard; the creature at first remained still as if dead, then not being touched ran off quickly, grasping the grass sideways with its claws as a monkey grasps a branch. With the end of a plank under each arm Bevis hauled these across to the other materials.This time they had a nicer meal than any they had prepared: fish and game; the kangaroo was white and juicy, almost as white as a chicken, as a young summer rabbit is if cooked soon after it is shot. It is the only time indeed when a rabbit does not taste like a rabbit. If you tasted a young one fresh shot in summer, you would not care to eat them in winter, and discover that the frost improvement theory is an invention of poulterers who cannot keep their stock unless it is bitterly cold. There was sufficient left for supper, and a bone or two for Pan. The chopping they had done made them idle, and they agreed not to work again till the evening; they lounged about like Pan till the time appointed to look for Charlie’s signal.When they went up on the cliff it was a quarter-past three by the dial, so they sat down in the shade of the oak where the brambles behind would prevent their being seen against the sky line. After awhile Mark crept on all fours to the sun-dial, and said it was half-past three, and suddenly exclaimed that the time was going backwards.The shadow of the gnomon slipped the wrong way; he looked up and saw a light cloud passing over the sun. Bevis had often seen the same thing in March, sitting by the southern window, when the shadow ran back from his pencil-line on the window-frame as the clouds began again to cover up the blue roof. Charlie was rather late to-day, but he gave the signal according to promise: they saw him look a long while and then move away.Presently, while Mark was preparing the tea, Bevis got the matchlock to practise again. They were always ready for tea, and it is a curious fact that those who live much out of doors and work hard, like gold-diggers abroad, and our own reapers at home labouring among the golden wheat, prefer it to anything while actually engaged and in the midst of their toil; but not afterwards.Bevis set up the rest in the gateway of the stockade, and took aim at the piece of paper pinned on the teak-tree, which was between fifty and sixty yards distant. Twice he fired and missed the teak: then he let Mark try, and Mark also missed; and a third time he fired himself. None of the four bullets struck either the tree or the branches; so, though they could hit it at thirty yards, they could not rely on their gun at sixty.Directly after tea they began to work again at the preparations for the raft, cutting some more poles and sawing up those they had already into the proper lengths. Sawing is very hard work, causing a continual strain upon the same muscles, with no change of position as possible while chopping, and they were obliged to do it by shifts, one working so long and then the other. The raft was to be twelve feet long and five wide. The beams for the foundation gave them most trouble to procure, being largest, and not every tree was exactly the size they wished.They laboured on into the moonlight, which grew brighter every night as the moon increased, and did not cease till all the materials were ready; the long beams of aspen and poplar placed side by side (on rollers) and near these short cross-pieces of fir with holes bored for the nails, then a row of long fir poles, and the short lengths of plank to form the deck. Everything was just ready for fitting together. It cost them some self-denial to wait till all was thus prepared instead of at once beginning to nail the frame together.There is something in driving in a nail tempting to the wrist; when the board is ready, the gimlet-hole made, and the hammer at hand, the physical mind desires to complete the design. They resisted it, because they knew that they should really complete the raft much quicker by getting every portion of the frame ready before commencing to fix it. They did not recognise how tired they were till they started for the hut; their backs, so long bent over the sawing, had stiffened in that position, and pained them as they straightened the sinews to stand upright; their fingers were crooked from continually grasping the handles; they staggered about as they walked, for their stiff limbs were not certain of foothold, and jerked them where the ground was uneven.Mark sat down to light the fire in the courtyard, for they wanted some more tea; Bevis sat by him. They were dog-tired. Looking in the larder to lay out the supper, Mark saw the mushrooms which had been forgotten; he hunted out the gridiron, and put two handsful of them on. Now the sight of these savoury mushrooms raised their fainting spirits more than the most solid food, and they began to talk again. While these were doing, Bevis cut Pan a slice of the cooked bacon on the shelf; it was rather fat, and pampered Pan, after mumbling it over in his chops, carried it just outside the fence, and came back trying to look as if he had eaten it.With the mushrooms they made a capital supper, but they were still very tired. Bevis got out his journal, but he only wrote down “Friday,” and then put it away, remarking that he must soon write a letter home. Even cards could not amuse them, they were so tired; but the cry of a heron roused Bevis a little, and he took the matchlock and loaded it with shot, to see if he could shoot it and get the plumes.“Heron’s plumes were thought a good deal of in our day where we lived, you know. Didn’t the knights use to wear them?” he said. “Herons are very hard to shoot.”Mark came with him and the spaniel, and they walked softly down the path, now well-worn, and peered over the moonlit water, but the heron was not on the island, nor in sight. He was probably on some of the lesser islets among the shallows, so they returned home and immediately went to bed, quite knocked up. Pan curled round by the bedside for about an hour, then he got up and slipped out under the curtain into the moonlight.In the morning when they went to bathe there was a mist over the water, which curled along and gathered thicker in places, once quite hiding Serendib, and then clearing away and drawing towards the unknown river. The water was very warm.They then began to nail the raft together. On the long thick beams they placed short cross-pieces of fir close together and touching; over these long poles of fir lengthways, also touching; lastly, short planks across making the deck. There were thus four layers, for they knew that rafts sink a good deal and float deep, especially when the wood is green, as you may see a bough, or a tree-trunk in the brook quite half immersed as it goes by on the current. It was built on rollers, because Bevis, consulting his book, read how Ulysses rigged his vessel:—And roll’d on levers, launch’d her in the deep.And, reflecting, he foresaw that the raft being so heavy would be otherwise difficult to move.The spot where they had built her was a little below where Bevis leaped on shore on the evening of the battle. The ground sloped to the water, which was rather deep. By noon the raft was ready—for they had decided to complete the rigging, bulwarks, and fittings when she was afloat—and with levers they began to heave her down.She moved slowly, rumbling and crushing the rollers into the sward. By degrees with a “Yeo! Heave-ho!” at which Pan set up a barking, the raft approached the water, and the forward part entered it. The weight of the rest prevented the front from floating, forcing it straight under the surface till the water rose a third of the way along the deck.“Yeo! Heave-ho!”Yow-wow-wow! Pan, who had been idle all the morning lying on the ground, jumped round and joined the chorus.“Now! Heave-ho! She’s going! Now!”“Stop!”“Why?”“She’ll slip away—right out!”“So she will.”“Run for a rope.”“All right.”Mark ran for a piece of cord from the hut. The raft as it were hung on the edge more than half in and heaving up as the water began to float her, and they saw that if they gave another push she would go out and the impetus of her weight would carry her away from the shore out of reach. Mark soon returned with the cord, which was fastened to two stout nails.“Ready?”“Go!”One strong heave with the levers and the raft slid off the last roller, rose to the surface, the water slipping off the deck each side, and floated. Seizing the cord as it ran out, they brought her to, and Mark instantly jumped on board. He danced and kicked up his heels—Pan followed him and ran round the edge of the raft, sniffing over at the water. The raft floated first-rate, and the deck, owing to the three layers under it, was high above the surface. These layers, too, gave the advantage that they could walk to the very verge without depressing it to the water. Mark got off and held the cord while Bevis got on, then they both shouted, “Serendib!”They pushed off with long poles, like punting, Pan swam out so soon as they had started, and was hauled on board. A short way from shore the channel was so deep the poles would not reach the bottom, but the raft had way on her and continued to move, and paddling with the poles they kept up the slow movement till they reached the shallows. Thence to Serendib they poled along, one each side. The end of the raft crashed in among the willow boughs, and the jerk as it grounded almost threw them down. Pan leaped off directly, and they followed, fastening the raft by the cord or painter to the willows.“Nothing but blue gums,” said Mark, who led the way. “What are these?” pointing to the wild parsnips or “gix” which rose as high as their heads, with hollow-jointed stalks and broad heads of minute white flowers.“It’s a new kind of bamboo,” said Bevis. “Listen! Pan’s hunting out the moorhens again. This is some kind of spice—you sniff—the air is heavy with the scent, just as it always is in the tropics.”As they pushed along they shook the meadowsweet flowers which grew very thickly, and the heavy perfume rose up. In a willow stole or blue gum Mark found the nest of a sedge bird, but empty, the young birds hatched long since.“Mind you don’t step on a crocodile,” said Mark, “you can’t see a bit.”The ground was so matted with vegetation that their feet never touched the earth at all, they trampled on grasses, rushes, meadowsweet, and triangular fluted carex sedges. Sometimes they approached the shore and saw several empty nests of moorhens and coots, but just above the level of the water. Sometimes their uncertain course led them in the interior to avoid thickets of elder. If they paused a moment they could hear the rustling as water-fowl rushed away. Pan had gone beyond hearing now. Presently they came on a small pool surrounded with sedges—a black-headed bunting watched them from a branch opposite.“No fish,” said Bevis: they could see the bottom of the shallow water. “Herons and kingfishers have had them of course.”Crashing through the new bamboos they at last reached the southern extremity of the island, where the shallow sea was covered with the floating leaves of weeds, over which blue dragon-flies flew to and fro.“Everything’s gone to the river again,” said Mark; “and where’s Pan? He’s gone too, I dare say.”A short bark in that direction in a few minutes made them look at an islet round which reed-mace rose in a tall fringe, and there was Pan creeping up out of the weeds, dragging his body after him on to the firm ground. He set up a great yelping on the islet.“Something’s been there,” said Bevis. “Perhaps it’s the thing that makes the curious wave. Pan! Pan!”—whistling. Pan would not come: he was too excited. “We must come here in the evening,” said Bevis, “and make an ambush. There’s heaps of moorhens.”As there was nothing else to see on Serendib they worked a way between the blue gums back to the raft, and re-embarked for New Formosa. Just before they landed Pan dashed into the water from Serendib and swam to them. He did not seem quite himself, he looked as if he had done something out of the common and could not tell them.“Was it a crocodile?” said Mark, stroking him. Pan whined, as much as to say, “I wish I could tell you,” and then to give vent to his excitement he rushed into the wood.
They did not get up till the sun was high, and when Mark lifted the curtain a robin flew from the table just outside, where he had been picking up the crumbs, across to the gate-post in the stockade. The gate had not been shut—Pan was lying by it under the fence, which cast a shadow in the morning and evening.
“Pan!” said Mark; the lazy spaniel wagged his tail, but did not come.
“I shall go and finish the sun-dial while you get the breakfast,” said Bevis. It was Mark’s turn to-day, and as he went out at the gate he stooped and patted Pan, who looked up with speaking affection in his eyes, and stretched himself to his full length in utter lassitude.
Bevis drew the line from the gnomon to the mark he had made the night before, this was the noon or meridian. Then he drew another from the mark where the shadow had fallen at four o’clock in the afternoon. The space between the two he divided into four equal divisions and drew lines for one, two, and three o’clock. They were nearly two inches apart, and having measured them exactly he added four more beyond, up to eight o’clock, as he thought the sun set about eight; and then seven more on the other side where the shadow would fall in the morning, as he supposed the sun rose about five.
His hours, therefore, ranged from five till eight, and he added half lines to show the half-hours. When it was done the shadow of the gnomon touched the nine, so he shouted to Mark that it was nine o’clock. He knew that his dial was not correct, because the hour lines ought to be drawn so as to show the time every day of the year, and his would only show it for a short while.
How often he had drawn a pencil-mark along the edge of the shadow on the window-frame in the south window of the parlour! In the early spring, while the bitter east wind raged, he used to sit in the old oak chair at the south window, where every now and then the warm sunshine fell from a break in the ranks of the marching clouds. Out of the wind the March sun was warm and pleasant, and while it lasted he dreamed over his books, his Odyssey, his Faust, his Quixote, his Shakespeare’s poems.
About eleven the sunshine generally came, and he drew a line on the frame to mark the hour. But in two days the verge of the shadow had gone on, and at eleven left the pencil-mark behind. He marked it again and again, it went on as the sun, coming up higher and higher, described a larger ring. So with his pencil-lines on the window-frame he measured the spring and graduated the coming of summer, till the eggs in the goldfinch’s nest in the apple-tree were hard set. From this he knew that his sun-dial was not correct, for as the sun now each day described a circle slightly less than before, the shadow too would change and the error increase. Still the dial would divide the day for them, and they could work and arrange their plans by it.
Had they had the best chronometer ever made it would have been of no further use. All time is artificial, and their time was correct to them.
Mark shouted that breakfast was ready, so he went down, and they sat at the table under the awning.
“Pan’s been thieving,” said Mark. “There was half a damper on the table last night, and it was gone this morning, and two potatoes which we left, and I put the skin of the kangaroo on the fence, and that’s gone—”
“He couldn’t eat the skin, could he?” said Bevis. “Pan, come here, sir.”
“Look at him,” said Mark, “he’s stuffed so full he can hardly crawl—if he was hungry he would come quick.”
“So he would. Pan, you old rascal! What have you done with the kangaroo skin, sir?”
Pan wagged his tail and looked from one to the other; the sound of their voices was stern, but he detected the goodwill in it, and that they were not really angry.
“And the damper?”
“And the potatoes? And just as if you could eat leather and fur, sir!”
Pan put his fore-paws on Bevis’s knee, and looked up as if he had done something very clever.
“Pooh! Get away,” said Bevis, “you’re a false old rascal. Mark, cut him some of that piece of bacon presently.”
“So I will—and I’ll put the things higher up,” said Mark. “I’ll drive some nails into the posts and make a shelf, then you’ll be done, sir.”
Pan, finding there was nothing more for him to eat, walked slowly back to the fence and let himself fall down.
“Too lazy to lie down properly,” said Bevis.
After breakfast they put up the shelf, and placed the eatables on it out of Pan’s reach, and then taking their towels started for their bath.
“It might have been a rat,” said Mark; “that looks gnawn.” He kicked the jack’s head which had been cut off, being shattered with the shot, and thrown down outside the gate. “But Pan’s very full, else he would come,” for the spaniel did not follow as usual. So soon as they had gone the robin returned to the table, took what he liked, ventured into the hut for a minute, and then perched on the fence above Pan before returning to the wood.
Bevis and Mark swam and waded to Serendib again. There was a light ripple this morning from the south-east, and a gentle breeze which cooled the day. They said they would hasten to construct the raft, so as to be able to shoot the water-fowl, but Bevis wanted first to try the matchlock with ball now he had fitted it with a sight. He fired three times at the teak-tree, to which Mark pinned a small piece of paper as a bull’s-eye, and at thirty yards he hit the tree very well, but not the paper. The bullets were all below, the nearest about four inches from the bull’s-eye. Still it was much better shooting.
He then loaded the gun with shot, and took it and a hatchet—the two were a good load—intending to look in the wood for suitable timber, and keep the gun by him for a possible shot at something. But just as he had got ready, and Pan shaking himself together began to drag his idle body after him, he thought Mark looked dull. It was Mark’s turn to cook, and he had already got the fire alight under the teak.
“I won’t go,” he said; “I’ll stop and help you. Things are stupid by yourself.”
“Fishing is very stupid, by yourself,” said Mark.
“Let’s make a rule,” said Bevis. “Everybody helps everybody instead of going by themselves.”
“So we will,” said Mark, only too glad, and the new rule was agreed to, but as they could not both shoot at once, it was understood that in this the former contract was to stand, and each was to have the matchlock a day to himself. The pot and the saucepan, with the kangaroo and the jack were soon on, and they found that boiling had one great advantage over roasting, they could pile on sticks and go away for some time, instead of having to watch and turn the roast.
They found a good many small trees and poles such as they wanted not far from home, and among the rest three dead larches which had been snapped by a tornado. These dry trees were lighter and would float better than green timber. For the larger beams, or foundation of the raft, they chose aspen and poplar, and for the cross-joists firs, and by dinner-time they had collected nearly enough.
It was half-past one by the sun-dial when Mark began to prepare the table; Bevis had gone to haul the catamaran planks up to the place where the raft was to be built. Under one of the planks, as he turned it over, there was a little lizard; the creature at first remained still as if dead, then not being touched ran off quickly, grasping the grass sideways with its claws as a monkey grasps a branch. With the end of a plank under each arm Bevis hauled these across to the other materials.
This time they had a nicer meal than any they had prepared: fish and game; the kangaroo was white and juicy, almost as white as a chicken, as a young summer rabbit is if cooked soon after it is shot. It is the only time indeed when a rabbit does not taste like a rabbit. If you tasted a young one fresh shot in summer, you would not care to eat them in winter, and discover that the frost improvement theory is an invention of poulterers who cannot keep their stock unless it is bitterly cold. There was sufficient left for supper, and a bone or two for Pan. The chopping they had done made them idle, and they agreed not to work again till the evening; they lounged about like Pan till the time appointed to look for Charlie’s signal.
When they went up on the cliff it was a quarter-past three by the dial, so they sat down in the shade of the oak where the brambles behind would prevent their being seen against the sky line. After awhile Mark crept on all fours to the sun-dial, and said it was half-past three, and suddenly exclaimed that the time was going backwards.
The shadow of the gnomon slipped the wrong way; he looked up and saw a light cloud passing over the sun. Bevis had often seen the same thing in March, sitting by the southern window, when the shadow ran back from his pencil-line on the window-frame as the clouds began again to cover up the blue roof. Charlie was rather late to-day, but he gave the signal according to promise: they saw him look a long while and then move away.
Presently, while Mark was preparing the tea, Bevis got the matchlock to practise again. They were always ready for tea, and it is a curious fact that those who live much out of doors and work hard, like gold-diggers abroad, and our own reapers at home labouring among the golden wheat, prefer it to anything while actually engaged and in the midst of their toil; but not afterwards.
Bevis set up the rest in the gateway of the stockade, and took aim at the piece of paper pinned on the teak-tree, which was between fifty and sixty yards distant. Twice he fired and missed the teak: then he let Mark try, and Mark also missed; and a third time he fired himself. None of the four bullets struck either the tree or the branches; so, though they could hit it at thirty yards, they could not rely on their gun at sixty.
Directly after tea they began to work again at the preparations for the raft, cutting some more poles and sawing up those they had already into the proper lengths. Sawing is very hard work, causing a continual strain upon the same muscles, with no change of position as possible while chopping, and they were obliged to do it by shifts, one working so long and then the other. The raft was to be twelve feet long and five wide. The beams for the foundation gave them most trouble to procure, being largest, and not every tree was exactly the size they wished.
They laboured on into the moonlight, which grew brighter every night as the moon increased, and did not cease till all the materials were ready; the long beams of aspen and poplar placed side by side (on rollers) and near these short cross-pieces of fir with holes bored for the nails, then a row of long fir poles, and the short lengths of plank to form the deck. Everything was just ready for fitting together. It cost them some self-denial to wait till all was thus prepared instead of at once beginning to nail the frame together.
There is something in driving in a nail tempting to the wrist; when the board is ready, the gimlet-hole made, and the hammer at hand, the physical mind desires to complete the design. They resisted it, because they knew that they should really complete the raft much quicker by getting every portion of the frame ready before commencing to fix it. They did not recognise how tired they were till they started for the hut; their backs, so long bent over the sawing, had stiffened in that position, and pained them as they straightened the sinews to stand upright; their fingers were crooked from continually grasping the handles; they staggered about as they walked, for their stiff limbs were not certain of foothold, and jerked them where the ground was uneven.
Mark sat down to light the fire in the courtyard, for they wanted some more tea; Bevis sat by him. They were dog-tired. Looking in the larder to lay out the supper, Mark saw the mushrooms which had been forgotten; he hunted out the gridiron, and put two handsful of them on. Now the sight of these savoury mushrooms raised their fainting spirits more than the most solid food, and they began to talk again. While these were doing, Bevis cut Pan a slice of the cooked bacon on the shelf; it was rather fat, and pampered Pan, after mumbling it over in his chops, carried it just outside the fence, and came back trying to look as if he had eaten it.
With the mushrooms they made a capital supper, but they were still very tired. Bevis got out his journal, but he only wrote down “Friday,” and then put it away, remarking that he must soon write a letter home. Even cards could not amuse them, they were so tired; but the cry of a heron roused Bevis a little, and he took the matchlock and loaded it with shot, to see if he could shoot it and get the plumes.
“Heron’s plumes were thought a good deal of in our day where we lived, you know. Didn’t the knights use to wear them?” he said. “Herons are very hard to shoot.”
Mark came with him and the spaniel, and they walked softly down the path, now well-worn, and peered over the moonlit water, but the heron was not on the island, nor in sight. He was probably on some of the lesser islets among the shallows, so they returned home and immediately went to bed, quite knocked up. Pan curled round by the bedside for about an hour, then he got up and slipped out under the curtain into the moonlight.
In the morning when they went to bathe there was a mist over the water, which curled along and gathered thicker in places, once quite hiding Serendib, and then clearing away and drawing towards the unknown river. The water was very warm.
They then began to nail the raft together. On the long thick beams they placed short cross-pieces of fir close together and touching; over these long poles of fir lengthways, also touching; lastly, short planks across making the deck. There were thus four layers, for they knew that rafts sink a good deal and float deep, especially when the wood is green, as you may see a bough, or a tree-trunk in the brook quite half immersed as it goes by on the current. It was built on rollers, because Bevis, consulting his book, read how Ulysses rigged his vessel:—
And roll’d on levers, launch’d her in the deep.
And roll’d on levers, launch’d her in the deep.
And, reflecting, he foresaw that the raft being so heavy would be otherwise difficult to move.
The spot where they had built her was a little below where Bevis leaped on shore on the evening of the battle. The ground sloped to the water, which was rather deep. By noon the raft was ready—for they had decided to complete the rigging, bulwarks, and fittings when she was afloat—and with levers they began to heave her down.
She moved slowly, rumbling and crushing the rollers into the sward. By degrees with a “Yeo! Heave-ho!” at which Pan set up a barking, the raft approached the water, and the forward part entered it. The weight of the rest prevented the front from floating, forcing it straight under the surface till the water rose a third of the way along the deck.
“Yeo! Heave-ho!”
Yow-wow-wow! Pan, who had been idle all the morning lying on the ground, jumped round and joined the chorus.
“Now! Heave-ho! She’s going! Now!”
“Stop!”
“Why?”
“She’ll slip away—right out!”
“So she will.”
“Run for a rope.”
“All right.”
Mark ran for a piece of cord from the hut. The raft as it were hung on the edge more than half in and heaving up as the water began to float her, and they saw that if they gave another push she would go out and the impetus of her weight would carry her away from the shore out of reach. Mark soon returned with the cord, which was fastened to two stout nails.
“Ready?”
“Go!”
One strong heave with the levers and the raft slid off the last roller, rose to the surface, the water slipping off the deck each side, and floated. Seizing the cord as it ran out, they brought her to, and Mark instantly jumped on board. He danced and kicked up his heels—Pan followed him and ran round the edge of the raft, sniffing over at the water. The raft floated first-rate, and the deck, owing to the three layers under it, was high above the surface. These layers, too, gave the advantage that they could walk to the very verge without depressing it to the water. Mark got off and held the cord while Bevis got on, then they both shouted, “Serendib!”
They pushed off with long poles, like punting, Pan swam out so soon as they had started, and was hauled on board. A short way from shore the channel was so deep the poles would not reach the bottom, but the raft had way on her and continued to move, and paddling with the poles they kept up the slow movement till they reached the shallows. Thence to Serendib they poled along, one each side. The end of the raft crashed in among the willow boughs, and the jerk as it grounded almost threw them down. Pan leaped off directly, and they followed, fastening the raft by the cord or painter to the willows.
“Nothing but blue gums,” said Mark, who led the way. “What are these?” pointing to the wild parsnips or “gix” which rose as high as their heads, with hollow-jointed stalks and broad heads of minute white flowers.
“It’s a new kind of bamboo,” said Bevis. “Listen! Pan’s hunting out the moorhens again. This is some kind of spice—you sniff—the air is heavy with the scent, just as it always is in the tropics.”
As they pushed along they shook the meadowsweet flowers which grew very thickly, and the heavy perfume rose up. In a willow stole or blue gum Mark found the nest of a sedge bird, but empty, the young birds hatched long since.
“Mind you don’t step on a crocodile,” said Mark, “you can’t see a bit.”
The ground was so matted with vegetation that their feet never touched the earth at all, they trampled on grasses, rushes, meadowsweet, and triangular fluted carex sedges. Sometimes they approached the shore and saw several empty nests of moorhens and coots, but just above the level of the water. Sometimes their uncertain course led them in the interior to avoid thickets of elder. If they paused a moment they could hear the rustling as water-fowl rushed away. Pan had gone beyond hearing now. Presently they came on a small pool surrounded with sedges—a black-headed bunting watched them from a branch opposite.
“No fish,” said Bevis: they could see the bottom of the shallow water. “Herons and kingfishers have had them of course.”
Crashing through the new bamboos they at last reached the southern extremity of the island, where the shallow sea was covered with the floating leaves of weeds, over which blue dragon-flies flew to and fro.
“Everything’s gone to the river again,” said Mark; “and where’s Pan? He’s gone too, I dare say.”
A short bark in that direction in a few minutes made them look at an islet round which reed-mace rose in a tall fringe, and there was Pan creeping up out of the weeds, dragging his body after him on to the firm ground. He set up a great yelping on the islet.
“Something’s been there,” said Bevis. “Perhaps it’s the thing that makes the curious wave. Pan! Pan!”—whistling. Pan would not come: he was too excited. “We must come here in the evening,” said Bevis, “and make an ambush. There’s heaps of moorhens.”
As there was nothing else to see on Serendib they worked a way between the blue gums back to the raft, and re-embarked for New Formosa. Just before they landed Pan dashed into the water from Serendib and swam to them. He did not seem quite himself, he looked as if he had done something out of the common and could not tell them.
“Was it a crocodile?” said Mark, stroking him. Pan whined, as much as to say, “I wish I could tell you,” and then to give vent to his excitement he rushed into the wood.