The Land That Time Forgot
my men might overcome the enemy, none would know of my predicament until long
after it was too late to succor me. The top of the conning-tower was now awash.
I clung to the wireless mast, while the great waves surged sometimes completely
over me.
I knew the end was near and, almost involuntarily, I did that which I had not
done since childhood—I prayed. After that I felt better.
I clung and waited, but the water rose no higher.
Instead it receded. Now the top of the conning-tower received only the crests
of the higher waves; now the little triangular deck below became visible! What
had occurred within? Did Benson believe me already gone, and was he emerging
because of that belief, or had he and his forces been vanquished? The suspense
was more wearing than that which I had endured while waiting for dissolution.
Presently the main deck came into view, and then the conning-tower opened
behind me, and I turned to look into the anxious face of Bradley. An expression
of relief overspread his features.
“Thank God, man!” was all he said as he reached forth and dragged me into the
tower. I was cold and numb and rather all in. Another few minutes would have
done for me, I am sure, but the warmth of the interior helped to revive me,
aided and abetted by some brandy which Bradley poured down my throat, from
which it nearly removed the membrane. That brandy would have revived a corpse.
When I got down into the centrale, I saw the Germans lined up on one side with
a couple of my men with pistols standing over them. Von Schoenvorts was among
them. On the floor lay Benson, moaning, and beyond him stood the girl, a
revolver in one hand. I looked about, bewildered.
“What has happened down here?” I asked. “Tell me!”
Bradley replied. “You see the result, sir,” he said. “It might have been a very
different result but for Miss La Rue. We were all asleep. Benson had relieved
the guard early in the evening; there was no one to watch him—no one but Miss
La Rue. She felt the submergence of the boat and came out of her room to
investigate. She was just in time to see Benson at the diving rudders. When he
saw her, he raised his pistol and fired point-blank at her, but he missed and
she fired—and didn’t miss. The two shots awakened everyone, and as our men were
armed, the result was inevitable as you see it; but it would have been very
different had it not been for Miss La Rue. It was she who closed the
diving-tank sea-cocks and roused Olson and me, and had the pumps started to
empty them.”
And there I had been thinking that through her machinations I had been lured to
the deck and to my death! I could have gone on my knees to her and begged her
forgiveness—or at least I could have, had I not been Anglo-Saxon. As it was, I
could only remove my soggy cap and bow and mumble my appreciation. She made no
reply—only turned and walked very rapidly toward her room. Could I have heard
aright? Was it really a sob that came floating back to me through the narrow
aisle of the _U_-33?
Benson died that night. He remained defiant almost to the last; but just before
he went out, he motioned to me, and I leaned over to catch the faintly
whispered words.
“I did it alone,” he said. “I did it because I hate you—I hate all your kind. I
was kicked out of your shipyard at Santa Monica. I was locked out of
California. I am an I. W. W. I became a German agent—not because I love them,
for I hate them too—but because I wanted to injure Americans, whom I hated
more. I threw the wireless apparatus overboard. I destroyed the chronometer and
the sextant. I devised a scheme for varying the compass to suit my wishes. I
told Wilson that I had seen the girl talking with von Schoenvorts, and I made
the poor egg think he had seen her doing the same thing. I am sorry—sorry that
my plans failed. I hate you.”
He didn’t die for a half-hour after that; nor did he speak again—aloud; but
just a few seconds before he went to meet his Maker, his lips moved in a faint
whisper; and as I leaned closer to catch his words, what do you suppose I
heard? “Now—I—lay me—down—to—sleep” That was all; Benson was dead. We threw his
body overboard.
The wind of that night brought on some pretty rough weather with a lot of black
clouds which persisted for several days. We didn’t know what course we had been
holding, and there was no way of finding out, as we could no longer trust the
compass, not knowing what Benson had done to it. The long and the short of it
was that we cruised about aimlessly until the sun came out again. I’ll never
forget that day or its surprises. We reckoned, or rather guessed, that we were
somewhere off the coast of Peru. The wind, which had been blowing fitfully from
the east, suddenly veered around into the south, and presently we felt a sudden
chill.
“Peru!” snorted Olson. “When were yez after smellin’ iceber-rgs off Peru?”
Icebergs! “Icebergs, nothin’!” exclaimed one of the Englishmen. “Why, man, they
don’t come north of fourteen here in these waters.”
“Then,” replied Olson, “ye’re sout’ of fourteen, me b’y.”
We thought he was crazy; but he wasn’t, for that afternoon we sighted a great
berg south of us, and we’d been running north, we thought, for days. I can tell
you we were a discouraged lot; but we got a faint thrill of hope early the next
morning when the lookout bawled down the open hatch: “Land! Land northwest by
west!”
I think we were all sick for the sight of land. I know that I was; but my
interest was quickly dissipated by the sudden illness of three of the Germans.
Almost simultaneously they commenced vomiting. They couldn’t suggest any
explanation for it. I asked them what they had eaten, and found they had eaten
nothing other than the food cooked for all of us. “Have you drunk anything?” I
asked, for I knew that there was liquor aboard, and medicines in the same
locker.
“Only water,” moaned one of them. “We all drank water together this morning. We
opened a new tank. Maybe it was the water.”
I started an investigation which revealed a terrifying condition—some one,
probably Benson, had poisoned all the running water on the ship. It would have
been worse, though, had land not been in sight. The sight of land filled us
with renewed hope.
Our course had been altered, and we were rapidly approaching what appeared to
be a precipitous headland. Cliffs, seemingly rising perpendicularly out of the
sea, faded away into the mist upon either hand as we approached. The land
before us might have been a continent, so mighty appeared the shoreline; yet we
knew that we must be thousands of miles from the nearest western land-mass—New
Zealand or Australia.
We took our bearings with our crude and inaccurate instruments; we searched the
chart; we cudgeled our brains; and at last it was Bradley who suggested a
solution. He was in the tower and watching the compass, to which he called my
attention. The needle was pointing straight toward the land. Bradley swung the
helm hard to starboard. I could feel the _U_-33 respond, and yet the arrow
still clung straight and sure toward the distant cliffs.
“What do you make of it?” I asked him.
“Did you ever hear of Caproni?” he asked.
“An early Italian navigator?” I returned.
“Yes; he followed Cook about 1721. He is scarcely mentioned even by
contemporaneous historians—probably because he got into political difficulties
on his return to Italy. It was the fashion to scoff at his claims, but I recall
reading one of his works—his only one, I believe—in which he described a new
continent in the south seas, a continent made up of ‘some strange metal’ which
attracted the compass; a rockbound, inhospitable coast, without beach or
harbor, which extended for hundreds of miles. He could make no landing; nor in
the several days he cruised about it did he see sign of life. He called it
Caprona and sailed away. I believe, sir, that we are looking upon the coast of
Caprona, uncharted and forgotten for two hundred years.”
“If you are right, it might account for much of the deviation of the compass
during the past two days,” I suggested. “Caprona has been luring us upon her
deadly rocks. Well, we’ll accept her challenge. We’ll land upon Caprona. Along
that long front there must be a vulnerable spot. We will find it, Bradley, for
we must find it. We must find water on Caprona, or we must die.”
And so we approached the coast upon which no living eyes had ever rested.
Straight from the ocean’s depths rose towering cliffs, shot with brown and
blues and greens—withered moss and lichen and the verdigris of copper, and
everywhere the rusty ocher of iron pyrites. The cliff-tops, though ragged, were
of such uniform height as to suggest the boundaries of a great plateau, and now
and again we caught glimpses of verdure topping the rocky escarpment, as though
bush or jungle-land had pushed outward from a lush vegetation farther inland to
signal to an unseeing world that Caprona lived and joyed in life beyond her
austere and repellent coast.
But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat. To enjoy Caprona’s
romantic suggestions we must have water, and so we came in close, always
sounding, and skirted the shore. As close in as we dared cruise, we found
fathomless depths, and always the same undented coastline of bald cliffs. As
darkness threatened, we drew away and lay well off the coast all night. We had
not as yet really commenced to suffer for lack of water; but I knew that it
would not be long before we did, and so at the first streak of dawn I moved in
again and once more took up the hopeless survey of the forbidding coast.
Toward noon we discovered a beach, the first we had seen. It was a narrow strip
of sand at the base of a part of the cliff that seemed lower than any we had
before scanned. At its foot, half buried in the sand, lay great boulders, mute
evidence that in a bygone age some mighty natural force had crumpled Caprona’s
barrier at this point. It was Bradley who first called our attention to a
strange object lying among the boulders above the surf.
“Looks like a man,” he said, and passed his glasses to me.
I looked long and carefully and could have sworn that the thing I saw was the
sprawled figure of a human being. Miss La Rue was on deck with us. I turned and
asked her to go below. Without a word she did as I bade. Then I stripped, and
as I did so, Nobs looked questioningly at me. He had been wont at home to enter
the surf with me, and evidently he had not forgotten it.
“What are you going to do, sir?” asked Olson.
“I’m going to see what that thing is on shore,” I replied. “If it’s a man, it
may mean that Caprona is inhabited, or it may merely mean that some poor devils
were shipwrecked here. I ought to be able to tell from the clothing which is
more near the truth.
“How about sharks?” queried Olson. “Sure, you ought to carry a knoife.”
“Here you are, sir,” cried one of the men.
It was a long slim blade he offered—one that I could carry between my teeth—and
so I accepted it gladly.
“Keep close in,” I directed Bradley, and then I dived over the side and struck
out for the narrow beach. There was another splash directly behind me, and
turning my head, I saw faithful old Nobs swimming valiantly in my wake.
The surf was not heavy, and there was no undertow, so we made shore easily,
effecting an equally easy landing. The beach was composed largely of small
stones worn smooth by the action of water. There was little sand, though from
the deck of the _U_-33 the beach had appeared to be all sand, and I saw no
evidences of mollusca or crustacea such as are common to all beaches I have
previously seen. I attribute this to the fact of the smallness of the beach,
the enormous depth of surrounding water and the great distance at which Caprona