Chapter 11

A CHANGE OF PLANS.

The morning of the tenth day of his residence upon the island Frank rowed around to the grotto--as he called his new-found giant's causeway--taking with him his fishing-tackle and a substantial luncheon of bread and cheese and dried beef.

Fish of various kinds abounded in the quiet waters of the inlet, and in an hour he had caught as many as he wished to carry "home."

He had seen no sharks anywhere near the reef, and so, when he saw a beautiful pearly-white shell lying at the bottom of the water, which was not more than five feet deep under any part of the natural arch of soft porous stone, he threw off his clothes and unhesitatingly made a dive for it.

He got the shell, and made a very important discovery at one and the same time. Happening to glance upward as he came to the surface, his quick eye saw a low, narrow opening leading directly into what seemed to be the solid rock.

The mouth of the cavern was slightly shelving, and situated a little less than mid-way of the centre of the arch.

Frank lost no time in climbing into it, and was surprised to find himself in a semi-dark, sea-scented cavern, in shape something like an old-fashioned Dutch oven and fully seven feet in height.

There was sufficient light to enable him to see that the floor of the cave was thickly strewn with fragments of shells and gray-white coral, the stone itself being so soft that he could easily penetrate it with his jack-knife.

These submarine caves or grottos are numerous in the Bermudas, and the limestone rock of which they are mainly formed so extremely impressionable as to be readily cut into blocks for building purposes with a common saw.

Frank remembered having heard Captain Thorne speak of them, but he little thought at the time that he would ever be the discoverer of one on an island in the midst of the Caribbean Sea.

Solitude, and having to look out for himself, as the saying goes, if it had done nothing else, had sharpened his wits, and he was not long in coming to the conclusion that, by enlarging the cave inland, he could make an opening quite near his tent, and thus have both a dry and wet-weather habitation.

He returned to the beach, where the Sea Eagle was daily sinking deeper and deeper in the sand, full of his new plans. He could hardly prepare his supper, so eager was he to begin work on his latest project and have his stores securely housed before the rainy season set in.

He went to bed early, but was up with the dawn, ate his breakfast while yet the rays of the rising sun were but faintly illumining the east, and then, with hatchet and hammer and saw, some coils of stout rope and a plentiful supply of food, set out for the cave.

He was not long in reaching it, and by noon had cut through five feet of the calcareous stone, piling up the portion cut away in a kind of wall on the lower side, where the rocky floor sloped somewhat precipitously, forming a channel, through which a considerable rivulet stole silently along, to join and lose itself in the great ocean that for miles and miles surrounded it on every hand.

For four whole days he worked like a Trojan, cutting away and piling up the soft, limy stone, and on the fifth was rewarded by a glimmer of sunlight shining through the aperture he had made in the landward part of the rock.

From the small opening he could see the tent, the tall palm trees that sheltered it from the fierce rays of the meridian sun and the tapering masts of the old schooner as she lay fast aground on the blistering strand, and the landwash lazily undulating against her stern.

A little way beyond, some gulls and a blue heron were watching for flying-fish, great numbers of which would every once in awhile skim like so many silver leaves over the surface of the water, coming up and going down at short intervals, more in fear than play, for no doubt their relentless enemies, the dolphins, were after them, with a view to making a meal off as many as were so unfortunate as to come within their reach.

Frank could not repress a shout of delight, in which there was mingled a good deal of pardonable triumph, when he nimbly scrambled through the narrow aperture he had made with so much patient toil, and stood on the firm, warm earth without the gray, damp cavern.

All about his feet grew luxuriant ferns, soft mosses and trailing vines, the vegetation gradually lessening as it met the base of the dark rock forming the roof of the cave, and disappearing altogether before it reached the summit, or what Frank judged would be the summit if one were to approach it from the direction of the tent.

The next three days Frank spent in removing the most perishable part of his goods to the cave, and this he did none too soon, for the afternoon of the third day a dense black cloud suddenly arose in the northwest, accompanied with ominous rumblings of thunder and quivering flashes of lightning.

There was no fresh water on the island, so far as he had been able to discover, and the patter of the big rain-drops on the broad leaves of the palms was not only a pleasant sound, but one that assured Frank that for a time, at least, he was not likely to die of thirst.

This warning foretaste of what he might expect for the next three months, if he stayed so long on the island, admonished Frank to make himself as comfortable as possible in the cave, and from its snug shelter defy wind and wave.

He had heard Dunham say that these sudden storms were diurnal in their nature, and frequently of great fury and destructiveness, so the following morning he moved all his belongings into the grotto, as he liked best to call the cave, and set up housekeeping in a manner that no hurricane, however severe, could interfere with.

"Nobody can say I am in the way here," he said--for he had gotten into the habit of talking to himself--surveying, as he spoke, his rocky home, and smiling sadly. "I am neither a bother nor a burden to any one now. I'm alone on an uninhabited island, and may die here, for all I can tell to the contrary; but I don't know but what that is better than being nagged by Aunt Susan, or driven about on the ocean, with nothing but an old schooner between one and the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. It's just eighteen days since I landed on this island, and I was five days on the schooner--that makes twenty-three--and I'm alive yet. If I have to stay here a year, that will not be very long. I've provision enough to last that length of time, and it will give me an opportunity to grow and to think. I'll read all Captain Thorne's books, and there's a good many of them, including works on navigation, history and science. I'll fish and row when the weather is fine, and when it isn't I'll amuse myself in enlarging the grotto. I'll make a collection of all the plants and flowers I find on the land and all the shells and seaweeds I find in the sea, or that may drift on the shore. I've a whole island that I may honestly call my own, a box of candles, plenty of matches, four cans of oil, a lamp and a lantern, a good boat, and lots of other things besides; so I am pretty well off, after all, and ought not to grumble at the hard luck which has befallen me."

And Frank _did_ try hard not to grumble; but, with the sea beating eternally around his rocky home, and no change anywhere, day after day, save in the scudding clouds and the waning of the old and the rising of the new moon, he grew very weary of his utter loneliness, and there came a time when he would have given his life to hear again a human voice and see again a human face.