Part 4

Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as possible. Pita, for his part, made no comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one into his belt, handing the other to the girl. Then he girded up his pareo—a significant action among islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it was loose in the sheath. There was a large sack in the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other filling later on. Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as they went.

“They are all down with the _Sybil_—it is safer now than it would be at night,” said Pita. “Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and ’uakari’ every day.”

“My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship,” replied Vaiti conversationally. “Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town there.”

“Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself. And every one shall be afraid of me and you, and they will say——”

Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds. Suddenly, looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.

“Pita, you talk too fast. There are things you do not know. Tell me, is your heart strong within you?”

“It is strong,” answered the island Maori.

“Then listen. There is a devil in the cave.”

“I do not believe in devils. I am misinari, and go to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other to wear on collection days.”

“There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in the world, little Pita,” replied Vaiti. “There is something bad there. I do not believe in native devils, for I am ’papa-langi’; but I know there is—a thing of some kind—there. A bad thing. A black viri, they say, but I do not understand that.”

“A black viri is nothing. You and I do not mind such things. See—there will perhaps be one in this rotten wood.” Pita struck and kicked at a mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.

There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the centipede, and Pita’s quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself lightning-wise across a forest path. Pita, however, with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion. Vaiti’s eyes dilated ever so little. She drew her knife and slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat. Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.

“It is no matter,” she said. “We two shall see what we shall see. Keep your heart warm within you.”

“And if we come back safe?” cried the impetuous Pita, catching the girl’s warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.

Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen. Far away the surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried. Above the two beautiful, motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade wind.

“... If we come back” ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—“if we come back—we will go away together, you and I.”

She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita’s hands dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph. But Vaiti recalled him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:

“I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole his wife.”

At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward cliffs.

Pita’s hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of angry surprise. Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.

“Do not shoot,” said Vaiti quickly. “It will do no good. Let me look to him myself.”

She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering things. The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned away from her and addressed Pita.

“I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,” he said. “It is with men I would speak.”

“Speak, then, pig-face,” said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.

“Enter if you wish,” replied the other. “We have sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti. Enough.”

The man’s words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the cave. Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of death.

But Vaiti’s courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in that moment. She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face. Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita’s leaped into it, warm and strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.

The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.

“Shall we not kill him?” asked Pita.

“There is no use,” said Vaiti. “It is plain to me that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be. This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things may happen here.”

“Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place,” said Pita, looking back. Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the air struck gravelike and cold. In the distance the mouth of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play. Then came the dripping roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.

Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world of unconquerable gloom. Pita, however, was strangely gay. He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities. He sang when the way along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged. When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his teeth. So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.

When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a little uneasy now. Did this cave go on for ever?

Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on again they did not talk. And now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered suddenly barred the way. The winding tunnel along which they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all appearance in nothing. They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless sky and of depth unknowable. Thin trickles of light, from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull throws off a rifle bullet.

Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge. Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes. “There is no bottom there,” she said. “It goes through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think.”

“Children’s talk,” said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down. The rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed to die out. Seemed—for although there was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded away.

“I told you,” said Vaiti. “There is no bottom.” Pita did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were possible before taking off.

“It is not two fathoms wide here,” he said, throwing the provision sack across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light. Yet, despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of his powerful young body.

“Can you jump it?” he called to Vaiti—without any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.

To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest. In a moment more she was violently sick.

“The smell!” she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the light of Pita’s candle.

“I smell nothing,” said Pita, puzzled. “The wind blows your way. There is perhaps some dead thing down there.”

Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into the gulf. Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. “Come, come,” she said, taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.

They had little farther to go. The tunnel wound on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long underground passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of stalagmite. Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of Falaite’s long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers been able to understand them. In the projecting jaws, huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things. They only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them, and turned homewards.

“Vaiti,” said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under their feet. “Vaiti, what did you——”

Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his lips.

It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again. The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a fair take-off. Pita looked calculatingly at the farther side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.

“Do not throw!” said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.

“Why not? I can jump better if I hear where it hits,” replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand. It fell short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.

“Fool! fool! Jump quickly!” exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained, horrible whisper.... Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the candles, and then was gone.... There was a sickening odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding, rustling sound....

“Jump!” shrieked Vaiti.

They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on the farther side. Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar, in which there was nothing left of human.

... Pita had jumped short. Falling on the far side, with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti’s outstretched hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long, ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its prey.... The head was a foot long at least, the horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body, that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man’s thigh. It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the Black Viri.

For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found herself sitting on the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black, horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone. The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss. There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.

* * * * *

That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and almost old. He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the beach and brought her on board the schooner. There, when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes, farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite. The story of the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information. And as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide unseen, the witch-doctor’s reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl. And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite Island.

Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather that the “blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too.”

None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti’s rather prolonged depression, and though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten days.

About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of sweet Samoa, “Good-bye, my F’lennie”—the song that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.

“Good-bye, my F’lennie (friend)—o le a o tea, Efau lau le va’a, o le alii pule i....”

he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.

Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at the captain’s door.

“Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?” he said.

“Who for?” asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in every shipmaster’s cabin about the peaceful Pacific.

“Te Ai, sir. He’s been knocked down, and his head got cut against the pump.”

“Who did it?” bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar privileges, at once.

“She did, sir,” said Harris, nearly choking. “Te Ai, he was singin’ ’Good-bye, my F’lennie,’ on the main ’atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups with a belayin’ pin from the rail, an——”

“All right, all right; there’s your plaster,” interrupted Saxon. “Harris! Here.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Give this to Te Ai.”

“Lor’ bless you, sir, ’e don’t mind; ’e’s a——”

“You do what you’re told. Stop. Where’s my daughter?”

“Walkin’ on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty weather ahead.”

“That’s all right,” sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.

*CHAPTER V*

*A DIAMOND WEB*

It was six o’clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth silk. The stores were closed along the straggling beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees. Native dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital. Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.

In “Charley’s”—the least reputable of Apia’s tavern-hotels—the egregious _table d’hôte_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah. Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table. A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery soup. The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black. But there was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that mounted high in each man’s smeary tumbler was good of its kind. Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.

Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind. This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.

It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter. And yet Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was evidently not quite herself. She sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table, looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to remonstrate.

Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope’s ends, was looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup. The inspection did not appear to please him altogether. He finished his dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.

“Still on for it, cap?” asked the latter, leaning over the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.