CHAPTER XII
THE DEVIL DANCERS
The snaky vines seemed to us to be leagued with Leith as we tried to force our way to the spot where the tiny flash of light had appeared amongst the rocks. The lawyer-vines gripped our ankles and flung us upon our faces scores of times, but we scrambled to our feet and rushed on. Kaipi had made the discovery at an opportune moment. Now that we were certain that Leith contemplated treachery, the wait through the long night would have maddened us. We wanted to meet him quickly, and instinct told us that the appointment place mentioned in the note was identical with the spot to which we were fighting our way.
We were bruised and bleeding when we reached the foot of the black cliffs whose perpendicular walls towered above us. We were almost certain that the light had been flashed from a point immediately above the spot where we came face to face with the barrier, but the scaling of the black barricade was a proposition that seemed incapable of solution as we rushed along the base.
"This is the spot," gasped Holman. "This big tree cluster was just to the right of the place where the light was flashed."
"That's so," I remarked, "but how are we to get up to the point where the signal came from?"
We raced madly up and down the front of the strange black wall, hunting eagerly for a place that offered the slightest foothold by which we could climb to the terraces that we could see far above, but the search was a futile one. The tremendous mountain of ebony rock appeared to have been driven up out of the earth during some volcanic disturbance, and as we stumbled blindly along we thought it would be easier to scale the outside wall of a New York skyscraper than the slippery sides of the obstruction in our path.
It was Holman who found a key to the situation. The big clump of maupei, or Pacific chestnut, that we had taken as a landmark when we were running through the moonlit night, grew close to the barrier, and the limbs of several of the trees scraped the sides of the basalt columns as the faint night breeze moved them backward and forward.
"There's a ledge up there," whispered the youngster. "Look! It's about fifty feet from the ground. If we could climb a tree we might be able to reach it from one of the limbs."
He had hardly outlined the proposition before we were swarming up the trunk, Holman in the lead by right of discovery, and the nimble Kaipi in the rear. Higher and higher the youngster climbed into the thick green foliage. He reached the topmost branches, and selecting one that led toward the rocky wall, he straddled it and worked his way slowly forward.
Kaipi and I clung to the fork of the limb and waited, and as I watched Holman the wisdom of our actions was assailed by a cold doubt. We had left the two girls entirely unprotected, and if Leith reached the camp before we returned, and heard from the chattering Professor the story of the finding of the scrap of paper, it would be reasonable to suppose that he would consider the moment had arrived for the perpetration of any deviltry he had planned.
But Holman's actions interrupted my mental criticism of the wisdom of our plans. The youngster had reached the extreme end of the limb, and he was clawing madly at the rock to obtain a footing. He succeeded after a five minutes' struggle, and he sent a breathless whisper back to our perch.
"There's a ledge here," he murmured. "I think we can climb up from it. Hurry along, and I'll give you a hand."
I needed a hand when I reached the end of that leafy seesaw. I was much heavier than the boy, and the limb could hardly support my weight when I neared the end. Holman reached out his hand at a moment when I thought that a drop through the air would be my reward for attempting aerial exhibitions, and the next moment I was beside him on a little projection that barely gave us a footing.
"It's easy climbing just above us," whispered Holman. "Wait till we get Kaipi."
The Fijian came along the limb with the agility of a trapeze artist, and when he reached the ledge we stared up at the dizzy heights that rose above our little resting place. Small jutting projections, like gargoyles, stuck out from the wall, and we looked at them hungrily.
"If we had only brought the rope!" cried the boy. "Say, Verslun, put your face against the rock and I'll climb on to your shoulders."
I did so, and the youngster climbed up cautiously. For a long time he stood there, peering around in an effort to discover a path by which we could go upward and onward, but at last he stepped off, and I looked up to find him clinging to the wall like a huge beetle. A pack of fat clouds that had harried the moon during the earlier part of the evening now closed in upon her, and we were in complete darkness. The threshing limb of the maupei tree that was within a yard or two of the spot where Kaipi and I stood waiting disappeared in the night, and the scratching of Holman's shoes high above our heads came down to us through the intense silence and proved that he was holding his position with difficulty.
A small piece of shale hit me on the shoulder after a long wait, and I turned my face upward.
"Verslun!" breathed the strained voice of the youngster. "Are you there?"
"Well?" I asked.
"H'sh!" he murmured. "We are right near the spot, Verslun. If Kaipi climbs up on your shoulders to this place I think the two of us could pull you up. Are you willing?"
"Come on, Kaipi," I whispered, and the Fijian climbed nimbly upon me and moved up into the void above.
"Now, Verslun," muttered Holman. "Reach up till we get a grip of your wrists. Are you ready? Well, try hard, man! Think of those two helpless girls and dig your toes in!"
I didn't need any reminder concerning the position of the two sisters as I stood on tiptoe and scratched with my fingers at the crumbling ledge upon which Holman and the Fijian crouched. The predicament of Edith Herndon, and not fears for my own safety, made me scratch madly for a foothold as I swung above the shelf I left. Kaipi and Holman tugged till every muscle in my arms shrieked out against the way they were being handled. But I was going up. I "chinned" the crumbling layer of rock upon which my fingers had a perilous grip, laid my chest across the shelf and wriggled into safety.
"That's good," whispered Holman. "Don't puff so hard, man! We're too close to take any chances."
I got upon my hands and knees and followed him along the narrow pathway. Over a thousand obstructions we crawled like three rock snakes, till finally the boy halted and turned toward me.
"See the streak of light through that split in the rock?" he whispered. "Look in front of you! Well, they're inside."
The split in the rock to which Holman had pointed was a perpendicular crevice about four feet in length, but possessing only a width of six inches. It separated two rock masses that were fully eighteen inches thick, and as we wriggled noiselessly toward it we saw that it gave us a glimpse of the interior of a huge cavern, the part of which that was just inside our point of observation being illuminated by a swinging ship's lamp which hung by a rope that dropped from the vaulted dome.
The lamp swung directly in front of the crevice through which we peered breathlessly, and for a few seconds it was the only object that was visible. Gradually our eyes became accustomed to the light, and we found that a pair of brown legs were moving slowly along the floor past our spyhole. A body, gorgeously decorated in mats of green and crimson parrot feathers, followed the legs, and then came a head that was hidden behind a mask of sennet daubed thickly with coral lime and ochre till it appeared a ghastly nightmare.
The horror moved upon its stomach, and, viewing it as we did through the narrow cranny, it appeared as if the film of a biograph was being slowly dragged before our eyes. Another pair of legs followed the masked head, another body, and another mask that was even more fear-inspiring than the first. And the procession continued. Three, four, five, and six—each succeeding one being arrayed in a mask of more ghastly appearance than those which had preceded him. The sixth was followed by the first, who had wriggled clear around the circle of light thrown by the lamp, and in perfect silence the infernal snaky circle moved backward round and round, the faint light shining on bare legs, on bodies from which the parrot mats were thrust aside by the contortions, and upon the masks that were weirdly fantastic and Mephistophelian.
They had circled the floor about ten times when Holman tugged my coat and I wriggled back from the crevice.
"What's up?" My lips were dry as I put the question.
"Kaipi."
"Where is he?"
"Cleared out. Those human serpents scared him. Go softly, man! We must get him before he attempts to go down that cliff or he'll break his thick head."
We caught up to the deserter on the ledge to which Holman and the Fijian had dragged me a short time before, and the youngster abused the frightened native as he endeavoured to turn him back.
"No, no!" shrieked the Fijian. "Me no see dance like that. Me die if I stay."
"Why?" I asked.
"It is 'tivo'—death dance," gasped Kaipi. "Wizard men dance it. Something going happen, damn bad."
"But they can't get you," cried Holman, "Come back and watch them. Soma and Leith will be there directly, and you'll get your revenge."
But Kaipi would have nothing more of the performance in the rocky chamber. The repulsive masks and the backward wriggling of the six upon the floor had upset his fighting stomach for the time being, and we could not induce him to return.
"Well, you wait here," ordered Holman. "We're going back, but we'll return in a few hours and pick you up. Don't move from this ledge."
Kaipi would promise anything if he was not forced to witness the performance, and we left him huddled up in the darkness, and returned to the spyhole in the wall.
The "tivo," as the Fijian called it, was still in progress. Without noise, the six half-nude figures were describing circles upon the smooth floor. The silence and the serpentlike motions had a peculiar hypnotic effect upon us, and in a sort of dreamlike trance we watched them wriggle by the narrow aperture to which we pressed our faces. With each circle more of the brown, sweat-polished bodies showed beneath the twisted mats. The pace was beginning to tell upon them now. Slower and slower they moved past the crevice, till at last all movement ceased, and, apparently lifeless, they lay face downward upon the floor.
I thought of the two girls at the lonely camp as we sat watching, and I knew well that Holman's thoughts were turned in the same direction. We had seen nothing of Leith, but an intuition that would not be put aside connected Leith with the strange ceremony that was in progress within the cavern, and we were chained to the spot.
I have no idea how long the six figures remained motionless upon the floor. It may have been an hour, it may have been two. The mystery of the performance we were witnessing seemed to drag us into a world where minutes and hours did not exist. We were dumfounded by the confirmation of our suspicions and the peculiarly devilish exhibition, and I shook off the lethargy with an effort as Holman prodded me with his finger and pointed at a spot beyond the body of the dancer who lay immediately in front of the spyhole.
Looking in the direction Holman pointed I saw that another light was approaching through the gloom of the cavern. It bobbed toward us slowly, a tiny pin point that came nearer and nearer as the bearer walked in the direction of the six. The distance it was away from the dancers, which was evident from the time that elapsed from the moment we saw it till it was close up, convinced us that the cavern was of an enormous length, and the words "Long Gallery" in the note which Soma had dropped came up before my mind. There was no doubt that the cave was the meeting spot which Leith had mentioned, and as I felt Holman's body stiffen as he shouldered against me for a share of the peephole, I knew that he believed that the treacherous brute was one of the three that were approaching behind the bobbing lamp.
The bodies of the dancers, or at least the parts that we could see, became tense and rigid. A soft hiss went round the circle, and once again the wriggling movement started. But this time the six went forward instead of backward. They broke out of the circular formation, and in a long glistening line moved up the cavern toward the three approaching. The lamp halted, then it was raised high in the air as the crawling half dozen approached, and Holman gave a curious little gurgle as the light fell upon the three newcomers. Wrapped in parrot feathers and a white mask, the lamp bearer stood revealed as Soma. Immediately behind him was a tall white man in the same outlandish garb, while the last of the three, barearmed and barelegged, and wearing an immense headdress of plumes, was Leith!
The snaky six circled the three at a respectful distance, then, again breaking into a single file formation, they turned toward the end of the cave nearest our spyhole, and behind the length of creeping bodies, Soma, the tall white who had only one eye, and Leith came slowly.
Holman's breath came faster as the procession approached. The exhibition chilled us. There was a devilish suggestiveness in the proceeding. In some indescribable manner it brought up mental pictures that were nauseating, and it required something of an effort to watch the performance. The mystery of the silent night, the thoughts of the danger which threatened the two girls, and the glimpses of the astounding performance within the cavern brought a dazed mental condition that made us doubt our sanity.
I felt Holman's hand reach out across my shoulder as the procession moved down upon us, and instinctively I understood the movement. The cold barrel of a revolver had slipped by my face, and I gripped his wrist and forced the hand downward. The manner in which Soma and the one-eyed man walked in front of the big brute made it impossible to shoot with telling effect, and Leith was the person we desired to kill at that moment. The others seemed to be but creatures of his will, and he stood up in our minds as a devil whose existence was a menace to everything that was pure and clean.
The three newcomers moved to the side of the cavern, so that nothing except their bare feet were visible, and backward and forward in front of those feet moved the human serpents with a regularity that was stupefying. In an unbroken line they would move forward, flatten themselves upon the floor, then, with a unanimity that was remarkable, they would wriggle backward, to repeat the same movement over again.
Holman pulled me away at last, and we retired to a point that made it possible for us to converse in low whispers without being heard.
"What will we do?" he gasped. "I can't stay there any longer! I want to get inside to the devil! I don't want to shoot him; I want to throttle him with my two hands!"
"But the entrance to the cavern is from somewhere on the other side of the hill," I remonstrated, as the young fellow raved about our helplessness.
"We must get there!"
"Don't lose your head about it," I remarked. "Keep cool and we'll win out in the long run."
It was useless to speak of patience to that boy at the moment. He clawed desperately at the slippery wall in an endeavour to find a path that would lead us to the opening on the other side by which Leith had made his entry, but the attempt appeared to be madness. A dozen times the youngster scrambled up rough portions that offered a slight footing, but each time he slipped back bruised and battered. He would listen to no arguments. The desire to get to the mouth of the cavern, and kill Leith before the morning, had produced an insanity, and we crawled and climbed along the face of those basalt cliffs in a manner that chilled my spinal marrow. Holman possessed the courage of a maniac. His imagination was blinded to the dangers that lay alongside the crumbling shelves of rock, and I scrambled behind him wondering dimly what would happen to Edith and her sister if an unkind fate flung us from the ledge into the darkness from which the soft croon of the chestnut clumps came up like a warning against our foolhardiness.
Holman paused at the end of a wearisome climb, and he drew himself upright. At that moment the cloud-harried moon dragged herself from beneath the pack, and the young fellow gave a cry of joy.
"We can do it from here, Verslun," he cried. "I see a path to the top. Come along, man!"
"What about Kaipi?" I gasped. "We'll never find our way back here."
"Let him sit there," he snorted. "Hurry or the moon will be under the clouds before we cross the cliff."
