The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
need much brains to tumble to that. And he was the leader from the first
to the last. He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were
brothers, and the brig was the _Pride of Banya_, and he it was bought
the diving dress--a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus
instead of pumping. He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him
sick going down. And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart
he'd cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty
miles away.
"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink and
bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean and
straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we used to
speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd started
two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached. We all
messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it was a curious crew, all
officers and no men--and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.
Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was
something funny in the confounded thing's great fat head and its stare,
and he made us see it too. 'Jimmy Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk
to it like a Christian. Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was,
and all the little Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day
all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew
his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty
mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum. It was
jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little suspecting, poor
chaps! what was a-coming.
"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry, you
know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where the
_Ocean Pioneer_ had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey
rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off
about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was a thundering row
who should stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so
that you could see the top of the masts that was still standing perfectly
distinctly. The row ended in all coming in the boat. I went down in the
diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.
"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was a
queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here think
every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm-trees and
surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way. Not
common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks like
ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and
things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and
clear, and showing you a kind of dirty gray-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting things
going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools and the heaps
was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after the fires and
cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way forest, too, and a
kind of broken--what is it?--amby-theatre of black and rusty cinders
rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in the middle.
"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the _Pride of Banya_, lying out beyond a lump of
rocks towards the line of the sea.
"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.
"_I_ don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I
was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught up
the bogey, and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat round.
When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I shut the
valve from the air-belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped overboard,
feet foremost--for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all
of them staring down into water after me, as my head sank down into the
weeds and blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the
most cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a look-out at
such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.
"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving. None of
us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get the way of
it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels damnable. Your
ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt yourself yawning or
sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten times worse. And a pain
over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a feeling like influenza in the
head. And it isn't all heaven in your lungs and things. And going down
feels like the beginning of a lift, only it keeps on. And you can't turn
your head to see what's above you, and you can't get a fair squint at
what's happening to your feet without bending down something painful. And
being deep it was dark, let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that
formed the bottom. It was like going down out of the dawn back into the
night, so to speak.
"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of fishes,
and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came with a kind
of dull bang on the deck of the _Ocean Pioneer_, and the fishes that
had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of flies from road
stuff in summer-time. I turned on the compressed air again--for the suit
was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in spite of the rum--and
stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down there, and that helped
take off the stuffiness a bit."
"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was an
extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind of
reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed that
floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just a moony,
deep green blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight list to
starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between the weeds, clear
except where the masts had snapped when she rolled, and vanishing into
black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't any dead on the decks,
most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose; but afterwards I found two
skeletons lying in the passengers' cabins, where death had come to them.
It was curious to stand on that deck and recognise it all, bit by bit; a
place against the rail where I'd been fond of smoking by starlight, and
the corner where an old chap from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we
had aboard. A comfortable couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now
you couldn't have got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.
"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I daresay I spent the
best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went below to find
where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work hunting, feeling it
was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing blue gleams down the
companion. And there were things moving about, a dab at my glass once, and
once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect. I kicked a lot of loose stuff
that puzzled me, and stooped and picked up something all knobs and spikes.
What do you think? Backbone! But I never had any particular feeling for
bones. We had talked the affair over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew
just where the stuff was stowed. I found it that trip. I lifted a box one
end an inch or more."
He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as that!
Forty thousand pounds' worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted inside my
helmet as a kind of cheer, and hurt my ears. I was getting confounded
stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down twenty-five minutes
or more--and I thought this was good enough. I went up the companion
again, and as my eyes came up flush with the deck, a thundering great crab
gave a kind of hysterical jump and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a
start it gave me. I stood up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the
helmet to let the air accumulate to carry me up again--I noticed a kind of
whacking from above, as though they were hitting the water with an oar,
but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to come up.
"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood a-quiver
in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd seen young Sanders
handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was still calling him this kind
of fool and that---for it might have hurt me serious--when I began to lift
and drive up towards the daylight. Just about the level of the top spars
of the _Ocean Pioneer_, whack! I came against something sinking down,
and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something else, struggling
frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and
twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if
it hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was all in
a moment, of course.
"I felt myself sinking down again, and I threw my arms about to keep
steady, and the whole lot rolled free of me and shot down as I went up--"
He paused.
"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what looked
like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went clutching one
another, and turning over, and both too far gone to leave go. And in
another second my helmet came a whack, fit to split, against the niggers'
canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.
"It was lively times I tell you? Overboard came Always with three spears
in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps kicking about me
in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw the game was up at a glance,
gave my valve a tremendous twist, and went bubbling down again after poor
Always, in as awful a state of scare and astonishment as you can well
imagine. I passed young Sanders and the nigger going up again and
struggling still a bit, and in another moment I was standing in the dim
again on the deck of the _Ocean Pioneer_.
"Gummy, thinks I, here's a fix! Niggers? At first I couldn't see anything
for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly understand how
much air there was to last me out, but I didn't feel like standing very
much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully heady, quite apart
from the blue funk I was in. We'd never reckoned with these beastly
natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good coming up where I was,
but I had to do something. On the spur of the moment, I clambered over the
side of the brig and landed among the weeds, and set off through the
darkness as fast as I could. I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted
back my head in the helmet and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary
bright green-blue above, and the two canoes and the boat floating there
very small and distant like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick
to squint up at it, and think what the pitching and swaying of the three
meant.
"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness--pressure something awful, like being buried in
sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing as it
seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit, I found
myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another squint to see if
anything was visible of the canoes and boats, and then kept on. I stopped
with my head a foot from the surface, and tried to see where I was going,