CHAPTER XVII
BENEATH THE CENTIPEDE
The natives moved at a slow walk across the clearing, and for this little indulgence we were exceedingly thankful. There was no grass covering upon the bed of coral rock in the middle of which the singular structure stood, and our bleeding bodies could have hardly stood a swift gallop across the prickly surface. As it was we were immensely glad when the trinity halted in front of the edifice.
"Say," murmured Holman, "do you remember what the Professor said about this place the other night when he was speaking about sacrificial altars?"
I groaned as an intimation that the subject was not a pleasant one, but Holman wanted to make public admission that he had exhibited gross ignorance in ridiculing the Professor's assertions.
"I thought he was handing it out too strong, Verslun," he murmured, "but it strikes me now that he had the right dope about this infernal thing. I believe they're going to settle us."
I groaned again. Holman's airy manner of discussing our predicament annoyed me. I hated the Professor for making the remarks about sacrificial stones when he drew comparisons between the table and Aztec altars, because I now thought that the very fear planted within my brain would carry a thought suggestion to the three devils who had us prisoners. Under ordinary circumstances I am not deficient in physical courage, but our position in front of the strange monument on the Isle of Tears left me with the valour of a jack-rabbit. The terror generated by the surroundings bit into my system like an acid.
"What I'm wondering at," continued Holman, "is about that guy that we saw on the top of the place. How he got away was a mystery."
"It was," I replied. I didn't feel disposed to trust myself to make a longer comment at that moment.
"Well, they're going to start operations," said the youngster. "We're going to the top, Verslun."
It was plain that we were. Two of the natives had shinned up one of the pillars by means of small notches in one corner, and now the other cut the bands that tied us together, promptly attached Holman's feet to the rope his comrades lowered, and signalled that all was ready by clapping his hands. The youngster was quickly jerked upward, and in a few minutes I was beside him on the moss-grown sloping surface of the immense stone.
The three dancers were evidently impressed with the importance of the work they had in hand. Their movements on the stone became more dignified and solemn. They moved around us in a manner that would have provoked laughter at any other time, and we watched eagerly for developments.
With much care they placed us side by side on the upper part of the stone, but Holman's feet were turned to my head, and as we were placed crosswise upon the inclined surface, my body was a few inches lower than his. That we were to be sacrificed appeared to be a certainty at that moment, but the method by which we were to be sent into eternity puzzled us. Not one of the three had a weapon. The surface of the stone was as bare as it was upon the night that we had investigated it, and we began to think that death by starvation and thirst would probably be our fate.
But thoughts of such an ending were soon put aside. Two of the savages slipped from the stone while the other dropped upon his stomach and hid his face. That something was going to happen we felt certain, but we could not discover the slightest clue that would guide our puzzled wits to a solution. We expected death, but we could not guess in what manner the job was to be performed.
"Looks as if something is coming, Verslun," cried Holman. "I was a fool to miss him, old man, but I guess—oh, Gee!"
The final exclamation was caused by a happening immediately beside us. A section of the moss-grown stone, about eight feet long and eighteen inches in width, started to rise slowly, and when our astonished eyes fell upon it we knew that we had the solution of the strange appearance of the figure upon the table on the night we camped in its shadow. Holman had seen this movable slab rise above the top of the table, but it had returned to its groove before we had climbed the tree, and it had fitted so closely into its moss-grown bed that we had been unable to detect a crevice in the moonlight. We had been on the verge of a discovery, but as we recalled the incident, lying there helpless, we were doubtful if it would have saved us from the fate we expected. The note which Soma had dropped gave full confirmation to all our suspicions concerning Leith, yet we had been unable to hold our own against him.
One end of the slab remained stationary after it had risen a few inches from its bed, but the other end, which was nearest us, went up and up, pushed by some screwjack arrangement that lifted it with slow, jerky movements till it was nearly upright. The moonlight fell upon the under surface that was turned toward us, and we understood the manner in which Leith's friends had arranged for us to make our exit from this world. The bottom of the stone slab had been carved into a perfect representation of a centipede, and as the slab remained stationary just before it reached the perpendicular, I began to dive into my mental reticule for the scraps of prayers that had been caught and held through a rather checkered career in places where the efficacy of prayer was looked upon with a cold eye.
The prostrate savage rose slowly when the movements of the slab had ceased, and very tenderly he rolled Holman and me over the bed from which the stone had been lifted. He pushed our bodies against the wooden post that, fitting into a sliding groove on the body of the stone centipede, had lifted the thing upright, and to make certain that we would be in the exact centre of the depression when the stone came back to its proper resting place, he strapped us carefully to the support with pieces of ramie fibre, so that we could not move an inch. With faces turned upward we stared at the carved figure above us, and the insecure tenure we had upon life at that moment was impressed upon our minds by the extreme caution which the officiating wizard exercised in keeping his own body clear of the slab lest his brethren, who were evidently operating the clumsy mechanism from some place nearby, should let the stone centipede return to his home without giving him proper warning.
At last he finished the business to his satisfaction and stepped backward. My imagination made the thing above me tremble as I looked at it with eyes of fear. The part of my body that spanned the depression became numb, and I breathed with difficulty.
Holman broke the silence. "Good-bye, Verslun," he said cheerfully. "It's mighty tough to go out like this, but it's the fortune of war."
I endeavoured to answer him, but the words, as if afraid of the horror that loomed above me, refused to come out of my throat. The fiendish manner in which we were to be killed unmanned me. The slab paralyzed thought, and it seemed to me that only the inmost kernel of my being, a very pin-point of the refined essence of life, was throbbing within my body.
The officiating wizard stepped around us for a final survey. He glanced keenly at the position of our bodies, and, evidently satisfied that the centipede had every opportunity to make a good job, he flung himself down upon his face and started to murmur softly in the strange dialect which Leith had spoken when addressing the three earlier in the night, and which the dancer had used in the Cavern of Skulls. I remember that I tried during those few minutes to catch a word or two of the queer tongue, and curiously enough, in that moment of extreme peril, I endeavoured to connect it with some of the dialects I had heard during my long stay in the islands. The soft muttering seemed to be a thread connecting us with life itself, and I dreaded the moment it would cease.
I do not know how long the chant continued. It rose and fell, a soft rhythmic murmur, and I prayed that it would never end. My ears sucked it in as if it was a life line to which my soul was clinging, and I dimly understood my eagerness to catch the sounds. My ability to do so seemed to be wanted as proof to convince my half-paralyzed body that I was still alive.
The low chant ended with a little throaty cry, and I shut my eyes tight to save myself the final moment of agony which the falling of the stone would bring. For an instant there was absolute silence, then some one gripped me by the legs and pulled madly. The ramie fibre held my body to the supporting post of the centipede, and I heard Holman give a muttered order. A knife sawed the cords, a pair of hands gripped my heels and flung me forward, and as I fell clear of the groove the stone horror crashed back into its bed with a jolt that shook the huge table! I opened my eyes to see Kaipi looking at the face of the dancer he had stabbed in the back as the brute was muttering his prayer!
"Oh hell!" said the Fijian. "Me thought him Soma. Me made mistake! Me going kill Soma, he kill Toni, Toni all same my brother, work long time with me at Suva!"
"Hurry up and cut these ropes," cried Holman. "There are two more of those devils and they'll be back before we get the cramp out of our muscles."
Kaipi sprang to obey, but when our bonds were cut away, we found that we could not get to our feet. Legs and arms were completely numbed, and the many abrasions that we had come by during the towing process to which we had been subjected made Kaipi's efforts to restore circulation by rubbing a species of torture that would surely have earned the commendation of Torquemada if it had been brought under his notice.
"Narrow squeak, Verslun," remarked Holman, as he endeavoured to get to his knees. "I wonder where those two other devils went to work the machinery."
"They must be close," I whispered. "Drag us over to the edge, Kaipi. They'll surely come up to see how the job was done or to see what is delaying their pal."
Kaipi helped us over to the edge of the table, and while he was doing so he related briefly how he came to be on hand at the opportune moment. Our little expedition to the stone table had passed the Fijian soon after the trinity had taken us in tow, and Kaipi's eyes had mistaken the biggest of the three natives for Soma. Revenge for Toni's death being the one motive that inspired him, he had followed the procession, watched from the bushes till the other two dancers had left Soma's double with us on the top of the table, and had then climbed quietly up and knifed the officiating wizard while that person was exhorting the stone centipede to make a good job of Holman and me. The matter of our rescue had been an afterthought. Strictly speaking, he deserved no great amount of praise for dragging us out of danger, as he frankly admitted that he was waiting for a good chance to attack the person who resembled Soma, without having any particular worry whether the stone slab would descend before the opportunity arrived.
"Never mind, Kaipi," said Holman, peering cautiously over the edge of the table, "I'm satisfied that you were handy at the moment without considering whether you came to help us or for some other purpose."
"Toni all the same brother to me," muttered the Fijian, dimly understanding the meaning of the remark; "me kill Soma pretty damn soon."
"Quite so," murmured Holman. "We'll give our consent to that operation, but keep quiet for the present till our two friends come back to see how neatly the old centipede fixed us."
We remained silent, but not inactive. As we waited for the missing pair we rubbed our limbs carefully, and at the end of ten minutes we began to feel alive. Our revolvers had been lost from our pockets during the mad rush through the night—Leith had been too intent on kicking us to order his guard to search us for arms—and now we had nothing but our bare hands with which to do combat with a pair of dancers. But we thought we could do a lot with bare hands when we glanced at the spot where the stone centipede had crashed back to its bed, A vision of that devilish carving standing above one in the moonlight was enough to stimulate a person to herculean tasks when he understood that failure would bring him again under its ghastly shadow.
For about twenty minutes we waited patiently. Kaipi had asserted that the two savages had slipped into the jungle growth after they had left the table, and it was evident that they had gone to some underground passage that connected with one of the pillars of the altar, through which the crude mechanism for lifting the stone slab had been operated. With one eye always to the dramatic, the wizards of the long ago had built the altar so that the common worshippers surrounding the place on days when the centipede was called upon to mash some unfortunate victim could not see how the slab was lifted, and would thus put the uplifting of the thing down to supernatural agency. It was the tribal Houdin who laid the foundation of many a strange belief amongst savage races.
"Must be waiting for him to come to them," said Holman. "We'll give them a few minutes longer."
It was Kaipi's sharp eyes that made the discovery. The pair came cautiously out of the bushes immediately underneath the tree which Holman and I had climbed to obtain a view of the surface of the table two nights before, and they crossed the clearing with hesitating steps. They evidently expected the officiating wizard to announce in sporting phraseology that the centipede had won the engagement with one swift blow to the body, and when no news was forthcoming they were puzzled.
They confabbed in the centre of the clearing, and then hailed the table in the strange tongue. Receiving no answer, they again debated with much vigour, and, finally taking their courage in their hands, they came forward with quickened steps.
We crept close to the edge, careful not to peer over while the pair were climbing up. As far as I was aware we had no plans made for their reception. Holman and I had no weapons, neither had the two dancers; Kaipi had the ugly short-bladed knife with which he had dispatched Soma's double.
The puffing of the climbing pair came to us. They came near and nearer. A black arm came up over the edge of the table and clawed at the moss-grown stone, but while Holman and I reached forward with the intention of gripping the climber by the throat, Kaipi upset our plans by driving the blade of the knife into the back of the huge paw that was endeavouring to get a grip!
A tremendous howl of pain came from the owner of the hand, the pinioned member was torn from beneath the blade, and as we pushed our heads over the edge, the top climber fell backward, swept his companion from the pillar, and the pair struck the coral rock beneath the table with a thud that was suggestive of broken bones. The native with the skewered hand picked himself up and dashed toward the trees, but the other remained at the foot of the pillar, and his position led us to believe that his neck had been broken by the fall.
"My knife!" cried Kaipi. "He knocked my knife down!"
The Fijian swung himself over the edge, and with monkey-like agility slipped down the pillar. He shouted up to us that he thought that the man on the ground was dead, but having found his precious knife, he proceeded to set all doubts upon the matter at rest.
"Soma better dodge that little fire eater," muttered Holman. "I thought him a coward last night, but it looks as if he's a fighter when once he gets started."
As we were unable to slip down the stone pillar in the same manner as the natives, we found the piece of rope by which the three dancers had hauled us up to the top, and making it secure upon a stone projection we lowered ourselves to the ground.
"Now," said Holman, "we must make a new start, and if we get beat in this round we deserve all that the big fiend who has brought all this trouble about can do to us. Kaipi, you're a friend of mine for all time. Shake hands."
The grinning Fijian shook hands with both of us, and we moved toward the trees, heading in the direction of the spot where Leith had kicked us so vigorously a few hours before.
