Part 22

Indeed, having leisure now to observe the mariners more carefully than it had been possible to do before, I saw that they were all very woebegone in appearance, and not at all equal to what they had been. They talked together for some time, and there did not seem to be perfect agreement among them, for they grew very heady, and their gestures began to be so violent that we looked for them to come to blows, and Billy was delighted at the prospect of seeing them fight. The chief parts in their discourse were taken by Wabberley and Hoggett, and I saw the former point more than once towards the mountain, which, as I have said, was clear that day. We could not even guess at the subject of their deliberation, but presently the group broke up, and the men went severally in different directions, and quite disappeared from our view. We durst not leave the hut to follow them, lest they were practising a trick on us, to entice us forth; and so we remained for the rest of that day in a miserable state of uncertainty, not knowing whether they had sailed away, or what they were doing. However, when it began to be dark, we saw through the trees towards the cliffs the glow of a fire, and guessed that they were camping; and not long afterwards Little John growled, and then we heard the squeal of a pig, by which we guessed that some of the pigs we had turned a-loose had come back to their sty, and one had fallen a victim, which we were quite unable to prevent. But as soon as it was full dark I thought it pretty safe to go forth and spy out what they were doing, so I straitly charged Billy to keep a good watch, and went out, creeping along very stealthily by the edge of the wood as long as I could, until I came to a place where I could easily see the men. They were, as I expected, sitting around the fire eating their supper, and there came to my nostrils the savorous odour of roast pork. I wished I could draw near enough to them to hear what they said, but this I durst not do, because the top of the cliff here was pretty open, so after a little I went back to the hut, and we had our own supper, and then settled on what we should do for keeping guard during the night.

[Sidenote: The Mariners Depart]

Neither of us had much sleep, for when our turn of watching was done, we were uneasy at the chance of being attacked in the darkness, and so slept but fitfully. However, nothing happened to alarm us, and in the morning when we looked forth we could see none of the men, and supposed that they were either still asleep or had already gone a-hunting their breakfast. But when the sun rose in the heavens and we had not yet seen a man of them, we fell into that same uneasiness that we had felt before, until I could endure it no longer, but resolved to sally out and see what had become of our visitors. I told Billy to be ready to pull the drawbridge from the moat if he should see any of the men approaching, and when he asked how I should get over if the bridge was gone I told him not to worry about me, because, knowing the island as I did, I could find some remote spot, and hard of access, if I should be pursued. Accordingly, I left the hut, but instead of going directly towards the cliffs, I made my course at first towards the mountain, intending to make a circuit and so come near the place where I had last seen the men. But I had not gone above half the distance when, looking over the sea, I was beyond measure amazed to see the boat departing under sail and oars, only instead of returning to the eastward, whence it had come, it was going westward. It was soon hidden from my sight by the shape of the cliffs, but I made great haste to go up to our watch-tower, whence there was a view all round the island, and perceived with as much puzzlement as joy that our enemies were in very truth sailing clean away, and not merely cruising about the coast, as I thought might be their design. I watched until the boat was almost out of sight, and then went back to the hut to acquaint Billy with our surprising good fortune. He immediately asked me whether I had counted the men, and when I said that I had not thought of doing so, and besides the boat was already too far off when I saw it, he cried, "Then I take my davy 'tis a trick, and they have left some behind to trap us." This fairly startled me, for such a notion had not come into my head; and though I thought it unlikely that the boat would have gone so far if the men's intention had been to return, yet I saw it was needful we should be still on our guard. However, when half the day was gone and we had seen never a sign of the men, but on the contrary some of our pigs came back and entered their sty like wanderers returning home, we thought it was ridiculous to be scared at mere fancies, and resolved to set forth and see if any man had indeed been left. We took our bows and arrows, and our axes in our belts, and went abroad very valiantly, yet with caution; but though we spent the rest of the day in searching the island, we found no man, nor indeed any trace at all of the seamen's visit save their camp fire and signs of cooking, and also a jack-knife, which one of them had without question left by mistake.

When we were pretty well assured that we were still alone on the island, we debated together what had brought the men back to our shore, and why they had so soon gone again, especially after Hoggett had been wounded and had uttered such terrible threats of vengeance.

"What could they do, master?" says Billy. "They couldn't conquer us so long as we stayed in the hut, and they couldn't starve us out, because they'd have starved first; and 'tis my belief that, what with the trees having no fruits to speak of, and Old Smoker, and the griping water of Brimstone Lake, they considered this island to be an uncomfortable sort of place, and so sheered off."

[Sidenote: Story of the Mariners]

We afterwards discovered that Billy's guess was very near the truth, and for the better understanding of my story, I deem it convenient to relate here what we only learnt at a later time. The seamen of the _Lovey Susan_, when they left us on the island the first time, went away to the south-east, and by and by came to a small island, uninhabited as ours was, but pretty well furnished with fruit trees, and there they took up their abode, and for many months lived in plenty, their fare, in addition to the fruits, being fish and birds--when they could catch them--and pigs, of which there were a few. They made simple grass huts for themselves, not taking the trouble to build substantial houses, and when this was done, they being not at all diligent, did nothing else but quarrel among themselves, and their laziness and improvidence in due time found them out. They lived very comfortably while their supplies of food lasted, but they hunted down the pigs until one day they were astonished to find there were no more; and as to fish, that was very plentiful at certain seasons and scarce at others, and during the time of plenty they did not trouble about curing any--at least, only two or three men did, one of whom was Mr. Bodger, and these gave up doing it when they found that the others expected to share with them. But their principal food at all times was bread-fruit, because they got less tired of this than of cocoa-nuts and other fruits; yet they were so reckless that they consumed the fruit when it was ripe without any thought for the morrow, having no notion of preserving it. The season of bread-fruit being over, they subsisted on cocoa-nuts, but they being a score of ravenous men, and the island small, they had well-nigh consumed all the cocoa-nuts before the next bread-fruit ripened; thus they had at one time more than they could eat, and at another very short commons, and at these times they became very sour in temper, and there were constant bickerings and recriminations amongst them.

One day a fleet of canoes filled with savage warriors came to their island, and the savages having landed, there was a sharp fight betwixt them and the mariners, in which the latter came off victors by virtue of their firearms, though not without suffering considerable loss, two of them being killed and nearly all wounded. When we heard of this fight, Billy and me, we guessed that the savages were those we had seen one day from our watch-tower, though, of course, we could never prove it. Saving for this fight, the mariners were unmolested on their island; but in course of time the scarcity of food drove them to make voyages in search of islands that would afford better sustenance, which, however, they failed to discover. Then it was that one of them proposed that they should return to our island, which they knew from what they had seen of it to be fertile--at least, in parts--but they had so clear a recollection of the terrors of the volcano, especially Wabberley, who had been scalded the worst by the boiling water, that they were some time in making up their minds to the voyage, but did so at last. This was the occasion of their first visit to our island, when they discovered our hut, and were driven to panic and flight by our invention of an eruption. The boat being leaky, they had not ventured to lengthen their voyage, lest they should not be able to get back to their own island, where there was at least present security, and where they had left some of their number. Thither they returned, and lived there as best they could until the pinch of want again compelled them to set forth. Having seen from the slopes of our island the dim line on the western horizon betokening other land, they determined to sail thither; for though they suspected that their enemies the savages might have come thence, the bolder spirits among them thought it better to risk sudden death at the hands of savages than slow starvation on their island prison, especially as there was a chance that they might find friendly savages on some island or another. Accordingly they did what they could to patch up their boat for the voyage, and set forth, all of them this time, for four being dead--two slain by the savages and two by disease--the boat would hold them all. Their design was to touch at our island on the way for rest and refreshment, and see, also, whether there were still signs that it was inhabited, for on their former visit they believed that we had been driven away by fear of the volcano, so that they did not think of settling on the island themselves. But when they landed, and Hoggett saw that, so far from being scared away, we had remained--or, at any rate, returned--and improved our settlement, he was for capturing our hut and entering into possession of the island, and was deterred from attempting this design only by finding that we could defend ourselves and by the overruling of his companions when they found, on roaming over the island, that it was not near so fertile as they had supposed. They did not discover our yam plantation, and feared that their case here would very soon be no better than it had been on their own island. Accordingly they sailed away, westward, as I have said, to accomplish the purpose with which they had set forth.

All this, I say, we did not learn till a good while afterwards, and having set it down for the better understanding of those that read, I will now return to the place where I left our own story--like a child standing in a drawn circle and forbid to move till he is told. We were greatly rejoiced to find that our visitors had quite left us, and went with cheerful hearts about our work, a part of it on this day being the gathering together of our swine which we had released. Some came back of themselves; others had struck up acquaintance with some of the wild pigs that were still on the island, and appeared to be indisposed to return to civilization, though one did indeed come in what I thought was a shamefaced way above a week after all the rest, and him I called the prodigal son.

"The what son?" says Billy.

"The prodigal son," said I; and then I told him the story, which he heard with the same eagerness and pleasure as he heard all my stories, whether out of the Bible or out of profane history. When I came to that part where the wretched young man "would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat," Billy interrupted me, saying it was clear they did not feed their pigs half so well in that country as we did, and he warranted that Wabberley and the other seamen would be pleased enough if they got as good food as our pigs, for he persisted in believing (which turned out to be true) that the men were famishing, and he went on to declare that he was sure they would come back again.

"For why?" says he. "Why, they know we've been here these ever so many years" (it was about four by my reckoning), "and living comfortable, and wherever they go they'll either have to work, which they hate, or to fight, which will be worse, for their powder and shot won't last for ever, and I wonder they've any left at all. They must have been uncommon careful of it."

I did not think that Billy's prediction would come true, for they had certainly found no great stores of food on our island, and if it was food they were seeking they would surely suppose that, though we were alive, we had no more than supplied our own needs. However, there is no folly in being prepared for anything that may befall, so Billy and I set ourselves to think very seriously again of what we should do if our hut were besieged closely for any considerable length of time. Our situation would not be pleasant, between exasperated besiegers on the one side and the terrible monsters on the other, and I set my wits to work very earnestly to see if I might devise some means whereby we might extirpate those hideous creatures and so clear a way to the sea. To make an attack on them with our weapons held no great promise in it, for, as Billy said, they seemed to be terribly tough, and while we were disposing of one, others might cling around us and lug us to perdition. Besides, the very sight of the monsters made our blood run cold, and Billy said he would sooner face a thousand stepmothers than one of them, though he thought he might prefer one monster to three Hoggetts.

[Sidenote: Experiments]

It was after the matter had been beating in my head for several days that the notion came to me to try how the fizzy rock would affect the creatures. We knew what dreadful choking fumes came from it when it was thrown into water, and it seemed to me not impossible that these fumes might dissolve in water and poison it, and 'twould then be only a question of getting a sufficient quantity to destroy the whole nest or lair of the monsters. Considering that it would be a very laborious matter to bring down to the cliffs enough of the rock for our purpose, we determined to make a trial of it first, and the creature we selected for the _vile corpus_ (which is pretty nearly all the Latin I remember) was one of those robber crabs which I think I have mentioned. We caught one on the shore, and put him into one of my pots, which we filled with water and then cast in one or two lumps of the rock. There was a great fizzing and spluttering, with dense and suffocating fumes, and when they had cleared off and it was safe for us to go to the pot, we found the crab perfectly black and quite dead, and when Billy took it out of the pot he declared that the water stung his hand. We were very well satisfied with this trial, and immediately set about collecting a great quantity of the poisonous stuff, bringing it down from the mountain in baskets which we slung at our backs, and heaping it up on the cliff just above the entrance to the cave. I proposed that we should carry it down to the shore, and convey it to the monsters' haunt in our canoe, but this Billy would not hear of for a moment, avouching that he would sooner be eaten by savages than hugged by the slimy arms of the beasts.

[Sidenote: Billy is Reflective]

We had been digging out the rock, and carrying it to the cliff, for a matter of two days when a terrible storm of rain came on in the night, and when we got up in the morning and went to the cliff, we saw that all the rock we had so toiled in collecting had spent itself, and left a black desolation all around the spot where it had lain. This gave us a great deal of annoyance, as much at our thoughtlessness as at the thing itself; but we did not give up our design, resolving rather to be the more careful in our preparations. It took us a very long time to assemble as much material as we had before, because we had to dig deeper into the side of the mountain for it, and when we got it we covered it over very scrupulously, so that the rain could not touch it. Billy remarked that of course, after our taking all that trouble, there would be no more rain for a month, and he was right; but I pointed out to him that we should have been very foolish if we had not taken these precautions, and he said it was a pity you could not tell things beforehand, adding, as if it had never struck him before, that you never could tell what might have been, because all we knew was what was. And then he was silent for a time, and when he spoke again, he said: "Ain't it terrible, master, to think you never can catch a minute what's gone?" Billy so seldom said anything of a reflective nature that I looked at him in some alarm, with a kind of superstitious fear that he was sickening for something; but I was relieved in a moment when, in the same breath, he said: "It do make you eat hearty, though."

When we had heaped up on the cliff a good many hundredweights of the rock, we waited for the flow of the tide, and then, choosing a place where the cliff ran down very steep and straight to the mouth of the cave, we flung the stuff into the water between the mouth and the rocks where we first encountered the shoal of monsters. We watched eagerly to see what happened, and saw a vast number of bubbles come to the surface, and a certain quantity of smoke that floated away on the breeze, but not near such a smother as we had experience of, which made us hope that there was all the more poison in the water. There was a slight current at the foot of the cliffs, setting past the cluster of rocks towards the channel between Red Rock and the island. We walked along for a little space, in the same direction as this current, to see if there was any sign on the surface of the water of our experiment having had any effect. For some little while we saw nothing, and had begun to believe that the monsters were proof against what we had fondly hoped was poison, when we observed some tentacles appearing above the water by the rocks, and also at the base of the cliffs, and by and by the palpitating bodies of the monsters themselves, crawling up as if the water did not very well agree with them. We pelted these creatures very hard with stones and lumps of the strange rock, and though we missed pretty often, yet we hit them pretty often too, and had lively satisfaction when we saw them loose their hold and tumble back into the water as soon as the rock began to fizz. But we could not see that any of them were killed, and had to conclude that the water about the rocks was too deep, and the current moved too fast, for our poisonous substance to work its full effect, and so we went back disappointed, with the problem of making a safe way through the tunnel to the sea as far from solution as ever it was.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

OF THE END OF THE SEA MONSTERS; AND OF THE EVENTS THAT LED US TO RECEIVE THE CREW AS OUR GUESTS

We had failed to destroy the monsters from the cliff top, and I concluded that we must still fail, unless we could, find some means of attacking them in an enclosed space, where there was no current to carry away the water as soon as it was rendered poisonous. It was Billy who suggested the plan which we ultimately found successful. Though he had refused point blank to approach the cave in our canoe, he would not mind, he said, "having a go" at the monsters from the tunnel, for there at least we had dry land to run back to, whereas if the canoe were caught in the embrace of one of the large creatures there would be little chance for us. And since we had already learnt that the monsters came into the cave, as well as haunting the rocks outside, I agreed, when Billy suggested it, that even if we could not kill them outright we might make the water in the cave so exceeding noisome that they would depart thence and seek more savorous quarters. We saw great difficulties in the way, first, to the conveying a sufficiently great quantity of the rock to the cave; then the possibility of heavy rains falling before we had accomplished our task, with the consequent rise of the water in the lake and the flooding of the tunnel, which would not only render it a perilous place for us ourselves, but would use up, or decompose, as they say, the material we had collected before we got it to the proper place. As to the first difficulty, we were already so well accustomed to hard work of various kinds that we thought nothing of it; while for the matter of the rain we could only take our chance and resolve to be as philosophical as possible if all our labour was undone. With this in mind, we determined to collect the lumps of rock first of all in our hut, and not to begin to convey them through the tunnel until we had as much as we wanted: which accordingly we did, going backwards and forwards for many days between the hut and the spot on the mountain-side where we found an inexhaustible supply of the rock. When we had got together a sufficient quantity, we carried above two-thirds of it in baskets to the entrance of the cave, and very laborious it was, because the way was so rough and in places so narrow, and we barked our shins and elbows pretty often. But it was done at last, and then we laid up a similar heap on the cliff, at the same spot as we had put it before.

[Sidenote: End of the Monsters]