CHAPTER VII
THE PIT
We were under way early on the morning after I joined the party. Leith had the camp astir by daybreak, and after a hasty breakfast we trailed off behind Soma and the carriers, heading directly toward the basalt towers that rose up in the middle of the island.
I for one was not sorry that we were making an early start. All through the night I lay awake expecting another member of the crew to rush into camp with a message from Newmarch to Leith, and when we started on the trail, I took particular care to lag behind the procession for the first few hours so that I would be in a position to intercept any diligent runner from The Waif. I took the first opportunity of telling Holman of the manner in which the bilious Englishman had hastened my departure with the Winchester, and the youngster's face wore a perplexed expression.
"That precious captain is Leith's partner in villainy," he cried, "but our hands are tied. The Professor is simply crazy with delight over the things that the brute is going to guide him to, and all our suspicions don't amount to much when you put them together. You see we've got nothing definite to go on at present. All we can do is to watch and wait, and be ready to act when the moment comes. Soma and his five mates are Leith's pets, you can bet your life on that, but we have one ally in your friend Kaipi."
The path of the preceding day was smooth compared to the ground we climbed over that morning. There was no trail as far as we could see. Soma, who was in the lead, found his way by occasional marks that could only be visible to the eye of a native. Barbara Herndon remarked on one occasion that there was danger of our getting lost, but Leith grinned at the remark.
"Soma has been here more than once," he replied. "What he doesn't know about this place isn't worth knowing."
The path continued to ascend, but the thick tropical growth did not lessen during the tramp of the morning. Leith walked with the Professor, who appeared to be in a state of joy bordering upon hysteria, while Holman and I in the rear tried to assist the two girls over the roughest sections of the road. I thought as we scrambled through impenetrable scrub and crawled over rocky piles that it was the strangest expedition that had ever set forth. If Leith was the wicked devil that we suspected him to be, four persons were risking their lives to gratify the whim of a half-crazy scientist who was dying for notoriety. He would not be turned aside from his pursuit of the specimens which Leith had told him of; his daughters would not desert him, and their resolve had brought Holman and myself. We were blind automatons that the fame-seeking archæologist was dragging at his heels. He did not consider the sufferings of the two girls; least of all did he think that Holman or myself was doing anything to safeguard his life or property. He was blind to everything but the natural curiosities around him, and he made frequent entries in the notebook that was to be his crutch to Olympus.
Leith did not allow me to remain long in the rear. He called me up to the front, and very politely asked me to help in hustling along the carriers who were inclined to dawdle as the way grew rougher, and, although I would much rather have had the task of helping the two girls, I had to accept the position without demur. Leith was in charge, and Holman and I were only intruders who had on standing, and whose food was paid for by the Professor.
We halted at midday in an ugly-looking spot far up the shoulder of the mountain that we were climbing, and through a break in the trees we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. The ocean seemed directly beneath us, and yet, as Edith Herndon expressed it, we seemed to be a thousand leagues away from it.
"This horrible silence makes me long for the clean sound of the waves," she whispered, as I rolled a stone over to make her a seat. "This stillness stops one from speaking. Do you know that Barbara and I haven't spoken a word during the last hour? We simply hadn't the courage to make the effort."
Under the watchful eye of Leith I endeavoured to cheer her up, while inwardly I cursed the prattling old Professor who chattered of the honours he expected as the rewards of his discoveries. The affair was enough to bring tears to the eyes of a man with a heart of stone.
"I'm just thinking we should have stopped this business before it got this far," muttered Holman, as he reached closer to get a light for his cigarette.
"What should we have done?" I asked.
"I don't know," he growled. "We should have done something though. Pity we didn't lose Leith overboard with your friend Toni."
"What's wrong now? Has anything happened?"
"No, nothing has happened," he replied. "I wish something would. This silence is beginning to put my nerves on edge, but I'm afraid to yell out for fear that I might wake something that has been dead for centuries. Does it strike you that way?"
"Very much."
"Well, it's the same with the girls," muttered Holman. "The stillness of the place has brought their ordinary conversational tone down to a whisper."
Leith lurched across and interrupted our conversation. "Get the boys going, Mr. Verslun," he said. "We want to cross the Vermilion Pit while the light is good, and it is hard going from here on."
We started forward up the boulder-strewn slope, and with each step the difficulties of the ascent became greater. I took an axe and helped Soma chop a path which would make it easier for the two sisters, but no matter what amount of trouble we took, they found it a difficult matter to follow. Once, goaded into fury by Leith's attempts to hurry the girls when Holman was assisting them over a particularly rough stretch, I turned upon the old scientist who was puffing along with the natives in the lead.
The half-insane ancient heard my outburst to the end, staring at me through the thick lenses of his glasses as if I was some new kind of a bug whose appearance he wished to implant firmly within his mind.
"Science calls for sacrifices," he squeaked. "If my daughters are heroines who wish to share my hardships in the pursuit of information that will be of great benefit to the world, I fail to see what it has to do with you, sir!"
"But they have no interest in your silly discoveries," I cried. "They are doing this infernal tramp to look after you. Do you hear?"
"Confound you, sir!" he screamed. "Mind your own business and don't interfere with mine!"
I choked down my wrath as Leith came crashing through from the rear, and the old egoist, flushed and ruffled, dropped back to meet him, evidently convinced of my insanity through my inability to appreciate his efforts to prove that the skulls of long-dead Polynesians possessed peculiar formations they were foreign to the islanders of the present day.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when we began to draw near the Vermilion Pit which Leith had mentioned when he had urged haste at the midday luncheon. The surroundings became more strange and mysterious with each step we took. The basalt peaks that we had noticed from the deck of The Waif were now quite close to us, and they seemed to move in upon us from both sides. The trees and lianas became less numerous, and the black rocks came toward us in a sinister manner that conjured up thoughts of a dead something toward which the encircling ridges were guiding us like the arms of a corral. The place was fear-inspiring. It had the unearthly appearance that made the imaginative minds of the ancients people the silent woods with devils and dryads. The soft moaning of the Pacific was barred out by the leafy barriers, and we walked in a silence that was tremendous. The ticking of our watches sounded to our strained ears like the blows of a hammer, and once, when the Professor sneezed mightily, Miss Barbara gave a scream of fear before she realized what had caused the noise.
The ascent became still more difficult. The natives puffed under their loads, and Holman rushed angrily to the front and demanded a halt on behalf of the girls struggling in the rear. During the few minutes that Leith grudgingly allowed them in which to recover their breath, the youngster hurried up to the spot where I was busy fixing the loads of the natives, and in a nervous whisper he asked my opinion of the route.
"Where the dickens are we going?" he cried.
"This is the most eerie-looking patch of country that I have ever seen in my life."
"Leith said that we had to reach the Vermilion Pit before the sun went down," I replied. "I guess it is somewhere at the end of this staircase that we are trying to climb."
"Oh, Gee!" cried the boy. "Say, this game has got those two girls scared to death. There's something wrong with the place, Verslun. My skin feels it. The island looks as if it has been left too long by itself, and I'm beginning to think that all those rocks and trees are watching us and wondering what we want here."
That was how it felt to me from the moment I had left The Waif, and I had tried vainly to overcome the feeling. The island seemed to resent the appearance of human beings. It possessed a personality through being too long by itself. It had wrapped itself round a dead past, and we were filled with the awe which suddenly strikes the unimaginative globe trotter who wanders into the cool recesses of a Hindu temple. And I was of the same opinion as Holman regarding the trees and rocks. Traders in the lonely spots of the Pacific have gone insane through becoming convinced that the mountains and the trees were watching their movements, and the trees and rocks upon the Isle of Tears struck me as possessing a watchfulness that smacked of the supernatural. I thought of the story which the sailor told in the café chantant at Papeete just then, and I was inclined to give it more credence than I had at the moment he narrated it.
But I tried to rally Holman so that he would cheer up Edith Herndon and her sister.
"You're like an old woman," I growled. "Go back to the girls and make them laugh over some funny stories instead of getting nightmares about the scenery. Why, this place reminds me of a real pretty bit of scenery near my home town in Maine."
Of course I lied when I said that. You couldn't find any scenery like that outside the tropics. That place was queer; there wasn't the slightest doubt about that. I recalled as I stumbled along how a trader at Metalanim in the Caroline Islands had swam out to our schooner when we were down there the previous year, and how the poor devil had told old Hergoff, the captain, that a chatak tree at the back of his hut had begun to make faces at him, and I began to understand the complaint that had gripped that trader as I climbed along by the side of the puffing islanders. He had been jammed up too close against a personality. When a place has been too long by itself, as Holman had remarked, it cultivates a strength that tries the nerves of an explorer, more especially if it is situated near the equator. Places like Papua, the Caroline Islands, parts of Borneo, and the Never Never country in inland Australia seem to possess a fist that attempts to push you off when you endeavour to bring the atmosphere of civilization into a silence that has been unbroken for centuries.
Holman went back to the sisters, and we moved slowly forward. The basalt rocks came closer, showing plainly through the breaks in the lianas that grew less thickly on the higher slopes. The creepers fell away slowly, as if they had done the work they were required to do, and before we realized it we were walking between two natural walls of rock about eighteen feet high, above which the sky looked like a strip of blue paper that rested upon the marvellously even tops of the barriers.
The Professor was gurgling joyfully as we tramped through that miniature cañon. He was bumping up against new wonders at every footstep, and he stumbled continuously as he endeavoured to jot down his impressions in the fat notebook. The Professor felt nothing mysterious about the place. He had the bullet-proof skin of your cold analyst who yearns eternally for facts.
"Wonderful geological formation!" he chattered. "My friend Professor Hanlaw of Oakland would enjoy a glimpse of this spot. A geologist could spend a lifetime here."
Leith's sallow face was disturbed by a grin as he listened to the old science-crazed ancient disbursing information regarding the formation of the rock. It troubled me little at that moment whether feldspar and augite were the two largest components, and I knew that Holman and the two girls were not interested. We knew that the place was ugly and sinister, but feldspar and augite didn't give it that look.
The height of the walls increased as we advanced. We were in a narrow roadway scarcely more than twelve feet across, while on each side rose the nearly perpendicular rocks that blocked our view of the country immediately beyond. The ground beneath our feet was covered with small bits of lava from the crevices of which the moist flabby leaves of the nupu plant stuck up like fat green fingers.
As we stared ahead we noted that the road seemed to dip suddenly as if the highest point of the island was reached at that spot, and the prospects of a walk upon a down grade were cheering after the stiff climbs. As we neared the place, Soma, who was walking about ten paces in front of the carriers, slackened speed, and the islanders dropped back till Leith and the Professor led the procession.
Leith halted and beckoned to the two girls and Holman, who were some distance in the rear. "Hurry up!" he cried. "You'll get the sight of your lives in a few moments."
"What is it?" gurgled the Professor.
Leith grinned as the scientist dipped his lead pencil into his open mouth so that he would be able to dab down first impressions the moment he turned his thick lenses upon the wonders.
"You'll see in a moment," replied the big brute, as he walked slowly forward, and just as he spoke, we did see.
A ridge of bright vermilion came up suddenly about one hundred feet from the point where the road seemed to dip, and we walked forward wondering what lay between the spot where the track ended and the bright barrier of rock that appeared to rise higher as we approached the end of the trail. We seemed to sense the approach of something that chilled and yet attracted. The place possessed a devilish fascination. It seemed to repel with its very uncanniness, and yet I was aware that I was imitating Holman in thrusting forward my head in an endeavour to see what filled the space that was hidden from our eyes.
The desire was soon satisfied. Fifteen paces brought us to a point that left the strange curiosity naked to our eyes. The vermilion walls, thirty yards in front of us, formed part of the sides of an enormous circular crater, and we stood spellbound as we pulled up within a few feet of the ledge and looked into the fearsome depths beneath.
"Ladies and gentlemen," drawled Leith, looking around at us with the air of a cheap showman springing a novelty upon a gaping mob, "you are on the edge of the Vermilion Pit, the greatest wonder between Penang and the Paumotus."
