CHAPTER XVIITHE MIDNIGHT ASCENT AND FLIGHT
THE darkness at first set the whole sense of touch on the alert; it seemed black and solid as a prison wall. But the eyes soon focussed the sparse rays of starlight and massed objects into clots of night. The shadow of dreams still hung about my senses, as if sleep had not wholly fled. The trees and rocks we passed seemed rather to move past me. I was weary and languid, and every object and motion took feverish proportions. It was a world as strange and gruesome as if I had followed Dante into hell.
On I stumbled after my guide. I scarcely knew how or whither we went, nor cared I much. It was a life drugged with night that I was living. Between thick walls of darkness faintly parted overhead by a dim line of starshot grey we filed; ghosts we might have been but for the clang of stones beneath our feet, or the screech of some night-bird startled from his nest. There was little underlife in these islands to fear lurking in the shadows or thickets; they had too recently purged themselves of monstrous or snaky traces of the earlier features of the world in the all-cleansing bosom of the ocean. Only winged existence or human with its trans-elemental powers had found its way into these secluded survivals of an ancient world baptised and rebaptised in the obliterative sea.
Thoughts like these chased from sense to sense the dreamy fears of shapes and noises that formed and vanished in the night. Monsters crept back and forth out of the caverns of the blackness. Low yells and shrieks and groans just eluded the power of hearing; echoes of them faintly haunted the silences. Dim foreshadowings of horrors about to be born struck my senses with obscene wing; ghostly adumbrations of forms I had seen in dreams floated round me. Phantoms of the dead and of the unborn filled the hollows of my brain. I had no safety but in madly rushing on in the footsteps of my guide.
He doubtless heard the ringing echo of my advance, for he never turned to look, athirst though I was for a human word or the glance of an eye. He seemed to know every step of the labyrinthian path. Upwards did it climb at last; I grew giddy as it snaked and twisted and spiralled athwart the face of former landslips, along the edge of cliffs, beneath it Avernian gloom yawning, up the rugged bed of hissing streams, across the bouldered blackness of still pools, or the shifting gleam of a hoarse torrent, ever up with forests here and there or great walls of rock shouldering the starlight from them.
Sneekape never rested or stayed; ahead of me he darkened or vanished like a spirit of the night. My imaginary fears gave me speed and endurance and a lightning-swift instinct to shun real dangers. By day I should have been drunk with the dizzy steeps or black-hearted chasms we skirted.
Hours must have passed in this terror-goaded ascent, when suddenly we stood on a broad platform that overhung the sea. Far below us as it pulsed I could see the phosphoric shimmer of its discontent. In the shadow of a clump of trees we sat down to rest on a fallen giant of the woods. I was conscious of human life upon the level; the air was restless with sounds and motion it but half absorbed; and, when the eyes grew accustomed to the half-light of the stars hoarded between sea and sky, they discerned dark masses shift, and vanish against the stellar distance.
We had our backs to the cone of Klimarol, and by degrees I came to feel that there was other light in the air than that of the sky or sea. I looked up and saw the stars blotted out above the peak and in their place a lurid gleam that threw the unearthly glimmer, which I had been conscious of for some time, into the interjacent night. And up the slope between the broad ledge we sat on and the cloud reflector, there rushed like a funeral car a gloomy mass lit with the murky wind-sucked flame of a torch. I saw it reach the lip of the broken cone and disappear. This was the nocturnal incineration of Tirralarian débris and dead.
Sneekape gave a long, low, strident note thrice repeated, different only in the interval between the sounds from a night-bird’s cry I had heard. Again he gave it. And before long I could hear a step rustle in the fallen leaves and dead herbage; a short grace note as of another bird, and my companion darted forward under the shadow. A moment’s peering into the darkness, and I saw a human figure, half-naked, but with head enveloped in some helmet that looked like a diver’s. The two disappeared together through the gloom-clustered foliage. And I had time to look aloft at the gleaming slopes of the great cone, scarred with dark zones and the track of the cinerative sleds. Fire and frost were the artists that carved this wonder of sheen and gloom. And even as I gazed the lustre of the overhanging pall flashed, and a light dust fell upon my hands and face. Another dark encaustic lay along the slope of the argent cone. The cloud that canopied the peak was rent with fulminant volley and a thin veil suffused the landscape for a moment; again the stars etched the darkness with their keen light, and the upper slopes of Klimarol were coagulate gloom. Its pall rose after a time and revealed the alabaster of the cone sloping to the stars unblemished. The tesselation and veining of the snow had vanished into spotless marble.
My companion returned, and, to overcome my fear of the volcanic showers, he told me that never was there so good an opportunity of seeing behind the scenes. The overseers had taken refuge in some caves lower down the slopes; the outburst had alarmed them, and the slaves had encouraged their fears, though they knew from long experience of the mountain that such an ejection relieved the tension of its heart, and none would follow for at least twenty-four hours. Thus they got rid of their repulsive work and the lash for a few brief breathing-spaces. He was in league with them and could get them to throw off the yoke at any time. They would lay down their lives for him; he alone gave them a consolatory future.
I rose and followed him, and our feet were clogged with the fresh mud of the mingled ash dust and rain. A few moments more and we were seated in a sled full of fallen branches and leaves and shooting over the snow at great speed, a pine torch flaring at our rear and bronzing the unsmirched gleam on either side of our track. To look down into the snow-lit gloom of the abyss we were deepening every moment appalled me. I crept to the front of the car and found a great chain attached that cut by the fire of its swiftness a black line through the pallor of the slope. Half-way up there shot out of the gloom and into it again a sled like our own laden to the lip and guided by half-naked cresset-headed slaves; and behind it in the snow-gleam I could trace a dark line parallel to that made by our chain.
Almost before I could withdraw my thoughts from the new subject, we had surmounted the edge of the mountain cup and in a few minutes were landed on the sulphurous platform that fringed it within. A foul stench was in our nostrils that gave Avernian shapings to my inward fears. Down into the pit of everlasting fire I seemed to look; a breath of wind fitfully lifted the turban of steam and smoke that hid the central furnace, and I could catch suggestive glimpses of a molten lake clogged with ever-thickening ever-cracking congelation of liquid rock. Only for a moment, and then all was grey steam again lit from within with fire that seemed to threaten conflagration.
It was long before my eyes could find their way amid the mingled gloom and flash and twilight. But at last I could discern inside the lips of the fiery mouth the desolation of a great city. The cyclopean blocks of lava that made its walls were heaved and split as if they had been the missiles of giants. Yet amid their rupture and dissilience and beneath the sulphurous spume that streaked and sicklied their sombre outlines with lichened yellow, I could discern the features of the magnificent past. Here and there the fragments of great domes still stood propped by their own ruins or soldered by new streams of molten rock. Mighty walls rose up above the now solid torrents of lava that had flowed along their base. It was the strangest sight; vast sculptured figures standing to their necks in new rock, like mammoths from their graves of century-vanishing ice. Mythic animals or monsters from a long-buried past, some with half-human faces, looked out untroubled from their bed of stone upon the seething hell beneath them, whence had issued sea on sea of terrene fire to curd in massy base around their feet. Tall columns lay imbedded in sulphurous ash; others stood broken and vitrified by the dash of some fiery billow. Statues rested half sunk in a shallow inlet of once-molten stone. Great temples still showed the tracery of their mullioned windows and the marvellous fretwork of their walls and roof beneath the glassy yellow of their incrustation. It was as if a city of noble giants had been crushed into fragments and then preserved in amber. Even beside the tremendous forces of this mighty vent of subterraneous passion the ruins showed immense.
Amid them skulked large-headed human figures that with their oily nakedness gleamed bronze at times in the palpitant light of the central furnace. But for these I could have wished to explore the cyclopean fragments of a great civilisation of the past. But I feared the iron-barred eyes that flashed so savagely from beneath the huge visors. I knew that these headpieces were to protect the eyes and tender parts of the slaves from the fall of ashes and other red-hot ejections from the bowels of the mountain. Yet in the darkness and lurid gleamings they showed like gnomes or monsters of the earth, and I could not rid my mind of shrinking.
The emotion rose into terror when I heard sullen cries and shrieks rise on every side from the petrified fragments of the past. Over the rim of the mountain cup shot another of their funeral sleds filled with figures that showed sombre against the heaven beyond; and in the hand of each was a huge thong with knotted end. My companion started, and seizing me by the elbow pulled me in under the shadow of a tower that still rose gigantic out of the new rock. I could see by the occasional flash from the upper cloud what consternation had taken him. For a time he could scarcely command breath to speak—a striking thing in this superfine master of language. I crouched with him for a few minutes in the darkness, and at last he hoarsely whispered in my ear, “It is the overseers, and we shall be caught!”
We skulked from pillar to wall, from wall to buried figure, ever in the shadow, till we had reached a deep fissure in the hardened lava, out of which streamed a sulphurous vapour. We were glad to lie there panting for a time; and, as we looked out over the steaming abyss, we saw the visored slaves flying with groans and yells to their work. Some thrust bars into gleaming lava, and then taking great hammers smote the metal into shape upon clanking anvils. Some melted the snow from the rim of the crater and poured it into channels between beds of well-dug earth that showed green buds just shooting above the surface; others gathered fruit from plants that had matured in this immense forcing-house; whilst others laid mould deeply over the warm rocks and mixed with it the débris from below. Here it was that the lazzaroni of Tirralaria had their luxuries produced; this was the huge workshop of the island; without it the lapses of nature left to herself would long before this have let the race fall into the inane. It was slave labour, and that under the most cruelrégime, that kept this anarchic society alive. Here the rigours of the law had gathered into one great clot of blood, leaving the masters in idleness and lawlessness.
We were not long left to conjecture how the thongs stimulated the products of nature. Across the abyss I heard a wild shriek, and a stalwart overseer stood in the glow of the red-hot lava with lash again uplifted. But the slave had evaded it before it fell. We saw the wretch speed to the lip of the fire-lake, the knout-holder following, though at a distance. Something exceptional was about to occur, for all the rest, slaves as well as overseers, raised their heads and let their instruments fall to the ground. Their gaze followed the swift feet of the refugee. Nearer and nearer he came to the crag that overlooked the lake of fire. Still the pursuer shouted to him threats. A flash from the hidden fires lit up the cracked and seamed edges of the chasm, whilst a wind moved aside the curtain of steam and let the canopy above gleam luridly. When the sulphurous cliffs and the upper clouds seemed to glow with the light, the hurrying figure came to the edge of a yellow precipice, and with the impetus of the rush hurled itself far over the molten lake; we saw it turn head over heels and then vanish. It was the work of a moment, and my guide clutched me and drew me on with a whisper hoarsened by alarm: “Flee for your life.” I rushed after him as he made for the lip of the crater towards the eye of the wind, for I heard a low thunder beneath our feet, and a louder rumbling behind us. Wearied though I had been by my night’s climb I felt my limbs light as thistledown. The wind was rising against us, yet we seemed to leap from fragment to fragment, from rock to rock heedless of its force. The thunder grew behind us, and seemed to quicken the pace of my guide. We reached the rim in safety and crouched in the snow underneath it. And looking up we saw the whole heavens lit, and away in the direction of the ruined city a fire outlined on sepulchral black. It was the passion of the mountain finding new vent. We crept down over the snow, sometimes sliding hundreds of feet in a moment over its smooth and glistering surfaces, till we reached the vegetation. The morning had begun to break, so my guide quickened his pace and hid in the densest of the thicket.
Once safely covered, he seemed to get the command of his terror. He lay for a time panting and unable to speak. But, when his throat had recovered enough from its parched state to be the channel of sound, he whispered: “We must get out of this; they know that we are on the crater, and they will pursue us as soon as the eruption is over; they will track us in the snow with ease. We must double back through the forest and then downwards to the shore. We must defeat their scent.” He fell again panting to the ground, his face pallid and drawn. It must have been exceptional consternation that had so dread an effect. I let him recover again, and then asked him what it all meant. In a low, hoarse tone he whispered: “It was the slave’s vengeance. They know that if they plunge a body of some mass into a certain boiling caldron of liquid lava, the mountain will regurgitate it. This wretch knew in any case that he would die in taking revenge for the lash, and he felt perhaps that a plunge into the boiling fire would be the quickest and the fullest vengeance. His pursuer would perish before he turned and reached the rim of the crater. The rest who were nearer it would run the risk of being overwhelmed, for the wind would carry the ash cloud directly over their heads.”
But Sneekape did not care to waste time over talk. He knew from the experience of former deputies from his island how prompt and complete was the punishment for being caught in the workshop of Tirralaria. So we set out again and doubled on our path; he kept his eye on the cloud over the peak, and ever and again put aside the foliage to have a look at the sea. He clearly knew every district of the island. Once or twice he stopped and listened intently. He thought he heard the far-off cry of the pursuers. He seemed satisfied, and took advantage of the pause to search for wild fruit; we both ate eagerly from several trees and bushes. But he was not at ease. The success of the pursuit depended on whether they knew that his falla lay off shore for him. He had kept the fact from them, but they might have seen her from the mountain. He had also a canoe from her lying in the shelter of a cave on the least frequented shore. If he could put his pursuers on a false trail and then gain this means of escape, there would be no danger for us. All day we lay in a thicket some hundreds of feet above the beach waiting the protection of twilight and night. We sated our appetites with the berries and nuts around us and put a small store away in one of our loose and unnecessary rags. He kept his eye on the sea through a crevice in the foliage, and once as the sun began to wester he started with alarm; he saw the blistered track of some boat that had crept close to the shore bronzing in the yellow light. Whether it was the enemy or his own men it was difficult to say. He crept, still under cover, to the point of a promontory that shot sheer down into the ocean; and looking over he saw the rags of the Tirralarians flutter in the wind as they bent to the oars. Almost at the same moment he noticed his own falla tacking far on the horizon, evidently waiting some emergency.
He returned and told me the result of his reconnaissance. He conjectured that the overseers had communicated with the capital and that a boat had been immediately dispatched along shore to cut off our embarkation on the falla. Our best chance lay in its keeping on its course to his usual place of departure. It was likely that his falla would lie off that spot and that the Tirralarian boat would remain all night between it and the shore. We would then make for the canoe which lay farther to the west, if the night favoured us.
Happily the gloom was profound, for the sky was moonless, and the starlight was drenched with moisture and shone with lustreless and dull edge. As soon as twilight had shuttled its pall for the dead sun we took our little store of fruits and started down the hill with extreme caution. If either of us snapped a twig or dry stick, we stood with beating hearts, all ears. Then on again with slow pacing. It must have been midnight when we reached the rocky shore. Sneekape felt his way till he found a tree of singular growth, all bent and gnarled by the beat of the waves and the salt spray. Then he doffed his rags and dived from the edge of the rock. Within a few minutes he had found his canoe in the cave, unmoored it, and paddled his way to an easy descent. I carried down his rags and our stores, and embarked.
Cautiously we stole out from the shelter of the cliffs; he shot his paddle into the water with such care that not a ripple could be heard, and I aided with my hands over the side. About three or four hundred yards from the shore we opened out a bay behind a far out-jutting promontory; and as I looked back I saw a dark object close inshore break the faint gleam of starlight on the water. Sneekape raised his eyes and fell into his former panic. His paddle would have fallen into the sea had I not caught it. The movement seemed to awaken the distant shadow, and the sound of oars soon broke the still night air. Our pursuers were on our track.
Sneekape immediately recovered his presence of mind. Our only chance of escape lay in what he took to be the position of the falla. We were quite two miles away from our would-be captors. We strained every nerve. Yet they gained on us. The two miles were rapidly reducing to one. We could hear the muffled beat of their oars.
My companion seemed, however, less excited than he had been. He even seemed to relieve the tension of his paddle in its stroke. Was he losing his senses? I dared not break in upon his work lest it should lapse altogether. I felt a shiver run through me as if a cold wind had blown. I looked behind, and the island had vanished in mist. And even as I gazed, the dim veil enveloped the dark shadow on the water that was straining after us. I could feel our canoe jerk into another direction, almost at right angles to our previous path. The beat of the pursuing oars was swallowed up in silence. In about half an hour my companion laid his paddle down and threw himself down on the bottom of our canoe and laughed a long, low laugh. The fog had outwitted the revenge of the advisers of the people.
We were so wearied with the long strain that in spite of our rags and the chill of the night we stretched ourselves and fell asleep. When morning broke the thick veil was still over the sea, and where we were we knew not. We relieved the pangs of hunger and waited. It seemed as if we had got into some current, for either we were moving with considerable swiftness through the mist, or the mist was driving over us.
As the sun rose towards the zenith the dense veil grew more transparent, and then rent in twain. We saw the blue sky above; and soon the whole envelopment of the world had melted into the azure. Klimarol was a white phantom on the horizon with a thin blossom of cloud above it. Nothing else broke the outlook in that direction; but in the opposite, whither we were rapidly drifting, a low coast lay like a thin nebulous stratum.
Sneekape, when he looked round at my gesture, gave a cry of surprise. He had expected to be near his falla. But it was not to be seen; and he had not yet made out what island it was that we were bearing down on. This consolation we had, that we had enough fruit with us to serve the day’s wants, and the new land seemed less than a day’s journey from where we were.