King Solomon's Mines
What we did _not_ see, however, was the look of fearful malevolence
that old Gagool favoured us with as she crept, crept like a snake, out
of the treasure chamber and down the passage towards the door of solid
rock.
Hark! Cry upon cry comes ringing up the vaulted path. It is Foulata’s
voice!
“_Oh, Bougwan! help! help! the stone falls!_”
“Leave go, girl! Then—”
“_Help! help! she has stabbed me!_”
By now we are running down the passage, and this is what the light from
the lamp shows us. The door of the rock is closing down slowly; it is
not three feet from the floor. Near it struggle Foulata and Gagool. The
red blood of the former runs to her knee, but still the brave girl
holds the old witch, who fights like a wild cat. Ah! she is free!
Foulata falls, and Gagool throws herself on the ground, to twist like a
snake through the crack of the closing stone. She is under—ah! god! too
late! too late! The stone nips her, and she yells in agony. Down, down
it comes, all the thirty tons of it, slowly pressing her old body
against the rock below. Shriek upon shriek, such as we have never
heard, then a long sickening _crunch_, and the door was shut just as,
rushing down the passage, we hurled ourselves against it.
It was all done in four seconds.
Then we turned to Foulata. The poor girl was stabbed in the body, and I
saw that she could not live long.
“Ah! Bougwan, I die!” gasped the beautiful creature. “She crept
out—Gagool; I did not see her, I was faint—and the door began to fall;
then she came back, and was looking up the path—I saw her come in
through the slowly falling door, and caught her and held her, and she
stabbed me, and _I die_, Bougwan!”
“Poor girl! poor girl!” Good cried in his distress; and then, as he
could do nothing else, he fell to kissing her.
“Bougwan,” she said, after a pause, “is Macumazahn there? It grows so
dark, I cannot see.”
“Here I am, Foulata.”
“Macumazahn, be my tongue for a moment, I pray thee, for Bougwan cannot
understand me, and before I go into the darkness I would speak to him a
word.”
“Say on, Foulata, I will render it.”
“Say to my lord, Bougwan, that—I love him, and that I am glad to die
because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for
the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.
“Say that, since I saw him, at times I have felt as though there were a
bird in my bosom, which would one day fly hence and sing elsewhere.
Even now, though I cannot lift my hand, and my brain grows cold, I do
not feel as though my heart were dying; it is so full of love that it
could live ten thousand years, and yet be young. Say that if I live
again, mayhap I shall see him in the Stars, and that—I will search them
all, though perchance there I should still be black and he would—still
be white. Say—nay, Macumazahn, say no more, save that I love—Oh, hold
me closer, Bougwan, I cannot feel thine arms—_oh! oh!_”
“She is dead—she is dead!” muttered Good, rising in grief, the tears
running down his honest face.
“You need not let that trouble you, old fellow,” said Sir Henry.
“Eh!” exclaimed Good; “what do you mean?”
“I mean that you will soon be in a position to join her. _Man, don’t
you see that we are buried alive?_”
Until Sir Henry uttered these words I do not think that the full horror
of what had happened had come home to us, preoccupied as we were with
the sight of poor Foulata’s end. But now we understood. The ponderous
mass of rock had closed, probably for ever, for the only brain which
knew its secret was crushed to powder beneath its weight. This was a
door that none could hope to force with anything short of dynamite in
large quantities. And we were on the wrong side!
For a few minutes we stood horrified, there over the corpse of Foulata.
All the manhood seemed to have gone out of us. The first shock of this
idea of the slow and miserable end that awaited us was overpowering. We
saw it all now; that fiend Gagool had planned this snare for us from
the first.
It would have been just the jest that her evil mind would have rejoiced
in, the idea of the three white men, whom, for some reason of her own,
she had always hated, slowly perishing of thirst and hunger in the
company of the treasure they had coveted. Now I saw the point of that
sneer of hers about eating and drinking the diamonds. Probably somebody
had tried to serve the poor old Dom in the same way, when he abandoned
the skin full of jewels.
“This will never do,” said Sir Henry hoarsely; “the lamp will soon go
out. Let us see if we can’t find the spring that works the rock.”
We sprang forward with desperate energy, and, standing in a bloody
ooze, began to feel up and down the door and the sides of the passage.
But no knob or spring could we discover.
“Depend on it,” I said, “it does not work from the inside; if it did
Gagool would not have risked trying to crawl underneath the stone. It
was the knowledge of this that made her try to escape at all hazards,
curse her.”
“At all events,” said Sir Henry, with a hard little laugh, “retribution
was swift; hers was almost as awful an end as ours is likely to be. We
can do nothing with the door; let us go back to the treasure room.”
We turned and went, and as we passed it I perceived by the unfinished
wall across the passage the basket of food which poor Foulata had
carried. I took it up, and brought it with me to the accursed treasure
chamber that was to be our grave. Then we returned and reverently bore
in Foulata’s corpse, laying it on the floor by the boxes of coin.
Next we seated ourselves, leaning our backs against the three stone
chests which contained the priceless treasure.
“Let us divide the food,” said Sir Henry, “so as to make it last as
long as possible.” Accordingly we did so. It would, we reckoned, make
four infinitesimally small meals for each of us, enough, say, to
support life for a couple of days. Besides the “biltong,” or dried
game-flesh, there were two gourds of water, each of which held not more
than a quart.
“Now,” said Sir Henry grimly, “let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die.”
We each ate a small portion of the “biltong,” and drank a sip of water.
Needless to say, we had but little appetite, though we were sadly in
need of food, and felt better after swallowing it. Then we got up and
made a systematic examination of the walls of our prison-house, in the
faint hope of finding some means of exit, sounding them and the floor
carefully.
There was none. It was not probable that there would be any to a
treasure chamber.
The lamp began to burn dim. The fat was nearly exhausted.
“Quatermain,” said Sir Henry, “what is the time—your watch goes?”
I drew it out, and looked at it. It was six o’clock; we had entered the
cave at eleven.
“Infadoos will miss us,” I suggested. “If we do not return to-night he
will search for us in the morning, Curtis.”
“He may search in vain. He does not know the secret of the door, nor
even where it is. No living person knew it yesterday, except Gagool.
To-day no one knows it. Even if he found the door he could not break it
down. All the Kukuana army could not break through five feet of living
rock. My friends, I see nothing for it but to bow ourselves to the will
of the Almighty. The search for treasure has brought many to a bad end;
we shall go to swell their number.”
The lamp grew dimmer yet.
Presently it flared up and showed the whole scene in strong relief, the
great mass of white tusks, the boxes of gold, the corpse of the poor
Foulata stretched before them, the goat-skin full of treasure, the dim
glimmer of the diamonds, and the wild, wan faces of us three white men
seated there awaiting death by starvation.
Then the flame sank and expired.
CHAPTER XVIII.
WE ABANDON HOPE
I can give no adequate description of the horrors of the night which
followed. Mercifully they were to some extent mitigated by sleep, for
even in such a position as ours wearied nature will sometimes assert
itself. But I, at any rate, found it impossible to sleep much. Putting
aside the terrifying thought of our impending doom—for the bravest man
on earth might well quail from such a fate as awaited us, and I never
made any pretensions to be brave—the _silence_ itself was too great to
allow of it. Reader, you may have lain awake at night and thought the
quiet oppressive, but I say with confidence that you can have no idea
what a vivid, tangible thing is perfect stillness. On the surface of
the earth there is always some sound or motion, and though it may in
itself be imperceptible, yet it deadens the sharp edge of absolute
silence. But here there was none. We were buried in the bowels of a
huge snow-clad peak. Thousands of feet above us the fresh air rushed
over the white snow, but no sound of it reached us. We were separated
by a long tunnel and five feet of rock even from the awful chamber of
the Dead; and the dead make no noise. Did we not know it who lay by
poor Foulata’s side? The crashing of all the artillery of earth and
heaven could not have come to our ears in our living tomb. We were cut
off from every echo of the world—we were as men already in the grave.
Then the irony of the situation forced itself upon me. There around us
lay treasures enough to pay off a moderate national debt, or to build a
fleet of ironclads, and yet we would have bartered them all gladly for
the faintest chance of escape. Soon, doubtless, we should be rejoiced
to exchange them for a bit of food or a cup of water, and, after that,
even for the privilege of a speedy close to our sufferings. Truly
wealth, which men spend their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing
at the last.
And so the night wore on.
“Good,” said Sir Henry’s voice at last, and it sounded awful in the
intense stillness, “how many matches have you in the box?”
“Eight, Curtis.”
“Strike one and let us see the time.”
He did so, and in contrast to the dense darkness the flame nearly
blinded us. It was five o’clock by my watch. The beautiful dawn was now
blushing on the snow-wreaths far over our heads, and the breeze would
be stirring the night mists in the hollows.
“We had better eat something and keep up our strength,” I suggested.
“What is the good of eating?” answered Good; “the sooner we die and get
it over the better.”
“While there is life there is hope,” said Sir Henry.
Accordingly we ate and sipped some water, and another period of time
elapsed. Then Sir Henry suggested that it might be well to get as near
the door as possible and halloa, on the faint chance of somebody
catching a sound outside. Accordingly Good, who, from long practice at
sea, has a fine piercing note, groped his way down the passage and set
to work. I must say that he made a most diabolical noise. I never heard
such yells; but it might have been a mosquito buzzing for all the
effect they produced.
After a while he gave it up and came back very thirsty, and had to
drink. Then we stopped yelling, as it encroached on the supply of
water.
So we sat down once more against the chests of useless diamonds in that
dreadful inaction which was one of the hardest circumstances of our
fate; and I am bound to say that, for my part, I gave way in despair.
Laying my head against Sir Henry’s broad shoulder I burst into tears;
and I think that I heard Good gulping away on the other side, and
swearing hoarsely at himself for doing so.
Ah, how good and brave that great man was! Had we been two frightened
children, and he our nurse, he could not have treated us more tenderly.
Forgetting his own share of miseries, he did all he could to soothe our
broken nerves, telling stories of men who had been in somewhat similar
circumstances, and miraculously escaped; and when these failed to cheer