CHAPTER XXXII.HELL SHORE.
Butthe dread geyser gave no light, and the darkness about me was black. I could see neither the Doctor nor Ambrose; and, when I called to them, there came no answer.
Suddenly something leapt forth from the thicket and seized hold on me. It was a man; it was Thalass.
“Quickly! Quickly!” cried he. “I keep you safe! I have boat!”
Hereupon he began to hurry me along faster and faster.
The air became sulphurous and laden with heated dust and ashes. A rumbling, low and ominous, sounded intermittently from the region of the volcan. The woods were full of the crying of terrified beasts; and presently, from afar, came the voices of men.
The darkness became tinged with a ruddy glow. A fierce roaring sound arose. I looked up, to see that all about the volcan, which continued to belch forth fire, the woods were kindled and roaring in a holocaust.
Scouring hard behind the Indian, I presently descended with him a gully of the cliff, coming safe to the shore. There he led me to a cave, wherein lay housed a little, stout cockle-boat,hewn all out of a great tree-trunk. In the stern was a leathern sack full of bread, and a jar of water. I helped him to hale her down the narrow strip of shore. The breakers foamed and gnashed like things possessed.
And now began the island to quake and to be shaken to pieces: the cliffs split in flaws and fissures, with stupendous sounds; the roar that came to us from the woodland bespoke a deluge of fire, over which, no doubt, the volcan reared high its infernal plume.
“Quickly! Quickly!” cried Thalass, when the boat was gotten down. “Get ’e in! Get ’e in! Her good fine boat! No sink! no break! I made ’e, fine! beautiful!”
“But you?” said I; “there’s no room.”
For I perceived that the little boat would hold but one.
But there came a dreadful thundering of the cliff, and fragments of rock fell about us like hail. Lifting me bodily into the boat, Thalass launched her forth, running out through the breakers, and giving her at the last a mighty impulse. I beheld for a moment his stern, hard-favoured face shining like bronze in the livid light—and saw it no more for ever!
Tossed in the turmoil of the boiling sea, the boat blundered out beyond the breakers, vaulting nimbly over the surges. I clutched her sides, seared and scalded and near stifled with the smoke and fiery spume and dust that blew whirling down upon me from the erupting and burning island. A giddiness came over me. Ifought against it hard, with shut eyes, bringing the whole force of my will on the resolve to endure and live.
There came the sound of singing.
The roar of the holocaust in the woods was abated, the wind coming about from the sea; the cliffs, for a space, had ceased to thunder; and, faint and small, but clear and serene and bewitching sweet, there sounded that phantom voice singing.
Struck out of myself with amazement, I forgot all my peril as I listened.
And thus it was:
Stay not in the land of sighing,Stay not in the vale of tears;Where the phantom of the yearsHaunts the weary and the dying:Lo! the Island of the Holy;Hie you hither presently,From a land of melancholy,From a land of misery.
Stay not in the land of sighing,Stay not in the vale of tears;Where the phantom of the yearsHaunts the weary and the dying:Lo! the Island of the Holy;Hie you hither presently,From a land of melancholy,From a land of misery.
Stay not in the land of sighing,
Stay not in the vale of tears;
Where the phantom of the years
Haunts the weary and the dying:
Lo! the Island of the Holy;
Hie you hither presently,
From a land of melancholy,
From a land of misery.
Straining my eyes upon the livid-looming cliffs vaulted with fire, I made out a meagre form standing upon the shore.
As the singing ceased, there came a sheet of light, a tongue of flame, that, serpent-like, wound coiling down; and then I saw the singer.’Twas the skeleton antic lad!
For a moment, the lull in the Inferno-storm continued. Then, on a sudden, there came a stupendous loud report; and, wave upon wave, and sheet upon sheet, a sulphurous blue flame swept, coiling and writhing, down the face of the cliff, down upon the little lad!
It leapt upon him; it lapt him round in clinging, entwining wraiths; it encircled his floating hair with tongues of flame. Thus, for a moment, he stood transfigured; and then came the end!
A giant boulder crashed from the summit of the lofty cliff headlong down; and, rebounding upon a spur of rock that projected almost to the place where the lad stood, it took him upon the head, and on the instant killed him.
But this was a merciful thing. For, hard upon the falling boulder, there came an avalanche, an avalanche of molten stone!
It roared down the cliff; it swept over the shore. At its touch, the sea reared madly up in an appalling great wave, hissing out clouds of steam that veiled the livid light.
And upon me then there had fallen a dreadful fate: to be whelmed in burning lava!
I saw it coming, the wave of torment and of death. I gazed with a horrid fascination on its livid front, livid and black and shimmering like silver slime; and that instant was swollen thousandfold with agony.
In the next, by a sudden strong rebuff of the clashing seas, my boat was jerked slanting up, and cast upon the beakhead of the pirate barque!
She had lasked away from her moorings; and, unchecked by her drunken and amazed custodians, had blundered round to save me.
THE END.