CHAPTER XXVIII

A CLIMB FOR LIFE

The passage, for such it was, through which Jack was now advancing, was swept by a wind of such violence that at times it almost lifted the boy from his feet.

But this Jack regarded as a good omen. He knew that there must be some opening in this bore of nature’s making to cause the great draught. He was glad he had his electric torch. No other light could have remained burning in the fierce gale.

The walls were of black rock, and the electric torch gleaming on them was flashed back in spangled radiance from some sort of ore it contained. In places, the tunnel contracted till it was only possible for the boy to progress by bending double. Again it broadened out till he could only touch the roof with his finger tips.

Suddenly he heard ahead of him a roaring sound like a water fall. Pressing on with a beating heart, lest he should find his further progress barred, Jack found himself facing a fair sized chamber, from the roof of which a cascade was falling. The boy guessed that he must be beneath the bed of some river and that the water was pouring into the cavern from a fissure in the rocky roof.

It was a beautiful sight, but he had no time to stop and admire it. He must push on. He left the cavern and the singing waterfall behind him, and once more battled with the mighty wind that swept through the bore.

The walls began to grow damp now and it was almost as cold as if a heavy frost had fallen. Jack shuddered and drew his coat close around him. He tried to calculate how far he had come, but the bore had made so many twistings and windings that he found it impossible to estimate.

His limbs felt tired and his eyes ached, but he kept on stubbornly.

“I’ve started this thing and I’m going to see it through,” he said doggedly to himself.

And now the passage began to grow narrower. Jack felt the walls closing in on him as if with intent to crush out his life. The passage began to slope steeply and it was hard to keep a footing on the wet floor.

All at once the boy stumbled and slipped. He almost fell headlong, but recovered himself with an effort. In front of him he could hear a mighty roaring sound. The wind, too, was stronger and seemed damper than it had further back. It smelled as if impregnated with salt.

Jack gave another stumble on the uneven floor. This time he did not recover himself, but pitched headlong. And then——

He was in the water. It filled his ears, drowning all sounds. He rose to the surface battling desperately, all senses dormant but the frantic desire to live.

He dashed the water from his eyes. He spat it from his mouth. It was salt and must come from the sea. Wave after wave swept toward him and under each of them he dived.

He soon realized that his fight for life was well-nigh hopeless, but he struggled as men will when death stares them in the face, for life is never sweeter than when it seems to be slipping from our grasp.

Weaker and weaker he felt himself growing. A sort of lethargy crept over him. He didn’t care much longer. His limbs were numbed and chilled. The waves swept down on him, each gleefully following its predecessor, as if they were determined to end Jack’s life in this cavern of the seas.

At last he felt himself uplifted on the crest of a gigantic comber and carried helplessly into the maw of that black gullet.

“It’s the end,” he thought.

But still the instinct of life was strong in his battered body. His outflung hand caught a projecting scrap of rock in a drowning grip and clung there, despite the efforts of the wave to tear him loose. It was more blind instinct than human reason that sustained him as the wave swept on into the dark cavern, thundering against its sides like a train passing through a tunnel.

He found himself hanging to the side of a jagged crack that slanted across the rock high up on the side of the cavern. Into it he managed to jam himself, and then he hung there, too exhausted to move hand or foot, waiting for the next wave to tear him from his precarious hold.

How long he hung there he never knew. Wave after wave came racing by, reaching up watery fingers to tear him from his haven. But he had jammed himself too securely into the providential rift in the rock to be easily dislodged.

Hope began to dawn in his mind once more, despite his position. He mentally cast up what had occurred since that disastrous tumble in the passage. It was plain enough that the bore in the rock opened on this cavern where the salt seas swept and raved. The cave, then, must be connected with the sea. Jack’s reasoning was right. By an extraordinary chance, he was in the cave which Jarrold had told Cummings existed far under the ruins of the old Don’s castle.

The boy had lost his rope and his electric torch and he was soaked through and through. But the canteen of water still hung round his neck. Safe for the time being, he began to cast about for some means of extricating himself from his position, but his heart sank as he realized the full hopelessness of his predicament.