CHAPTER XXIII.
[THE HOME OF THE MONSTER.]
It was now growing dusk. The loneliness of the place was extreme. A few sea-gulls were wheeling and crying in the dull air overhead. They had come back from their long day's fishing far out to sea and up and down the coast, and were leisurely wheeling, scouting, and sailing shoreward to their homes among the crags.
Nothing else stirred or broke the stillness, except the sea--the imperial, the insatiable, the eternal sea!--the sea that for ever chafes and storms, and seeks to eat away or overwhelm the land because it spurns and writhes under its function of merely filling up the hollows of earth and balancing the volume of the world.
If all the solids of the earth were turned smooth in the mighty lathe that drives the earth round its axis, then water would be supreme, and this planet would be a polished, argent sphere, flashing through interspaces between clouds as it spun and flew along the orbit of gold woven of light for it by the sun.
Day and night the waters work without ceasing to overwhelm the earth. Day and night the torrents tear down the sand and boulders and trees of the mountains and fling them into the hidden hollows at the mouths of rivers. All the deltas of the world are offerings of the torrents and rivers towards carrying out the grand scheme of the oceans metropolitan. Pool and tarn and lake and inland sea, and remotest waters that touch undreamed-of isles, are daily and nightly fretting or tearing away the uncomplaining shores.
The sun and moon and winds are leagued against the pastoral earth. Daily the sun transports millions of tons of water from the harmless plains of deep-sea waters, and the wind takes these vaporous foes of the land and hurls them on the loftiest mountains, so that they may gain the greatest speed and rending force and carrying power as they fly back with spoils of earth to their old friend the sea. The sun splits the cliffs with heat, and the winds lend fascines to the waves, so that the injured portions may be reached, cast down, and another line of defence destroyed.
Lest the sun and the winds and the rivers are not enough to accomplish the ruin of man's territory, the moon--the gentle moon of poets and lovers--the cold, frigid moon helps with that coldest of all things on earth, the glacier, to complete the havoc. The power of the wind is but partial, intermittent; that of the moon and the glacier general, everlasting. The tides are the heights commanding the outworks of the land; the moving fields of ice unsuspected traitors, in the garb of solidity, sapping the walls of the citadel.
Even now the list of enemies is not complete. In the core and centre of the earth itself the arch-traitor, the mightiest traitor of all, lies, gravitation, which should naturally be the lieutenant of the denser of the two combatants. This is the most relentless, the most unmerciful leveller of all. It seizes with equal avidity upon the moat that the sunlight only makes visible, and the loosened but yet unapportioned cliff of a thousand feet high, cut by the river of a Mexican cañon.
Electricity, the irresistible enemy and imponderable slave of man, is on the side of the waters. It binds the vapours of the oceans together, and scatters them when it reaches the hills. It rends trees and stones and buildings, and flings them down ready for easy porterage by the more methodical water.
One of these forces that ought to be on the side of the land, gravitation, has deserted its own side for the water. It is one force, and is universally operative. One of these forces that ought to be on the side of the sea has deserted its own side for the land. It is one force, but it operates through hundreds of thousands, of millions of agents; it is the coral insect. It transmutes the waters which give life and sustenance to it into land against which the waters war. It raises up an island where there ought to be two hundred fathoms of water. It uses up more material in making islands than all the great rivers put together deposit at their deltas.
The only loyal servant land has is the central fire. It can throw up in one minute as much as all the others can tear down in a hundred years. The central fire pushes an ocean aside with as much ease as a wave raises a boat. It throws up the Andes in less time than it took the sea, with its allied forces, to rob England of Lyonnesse.
The coral insect and the central fire, the least and the hugest of the world's working forces, are more than equal to all the forces arrayed against them, and are the humble and the terrible friends of man.
Here, by this gloomy sea, no coral insect toiled, no earthquake heaved, no volcano thrust up a flaming torch of hope to heaven. Here the enemies of the land had no foe to encounter but the resolute indifference of the veteran cliffs. Here the sea, and the tides, and the winds, and gravitation worked on unchallenged by active resistance. Year after year, almost imperceptible pieces of cliff fell, were engulfed. Year after year the incessant action of the waves was gnawing deeper and deeper into the heart of the land. Year after year the adamantine substance of the Black Rock was diminishing, though in a generation no man noticed a change in the Rock, and few a change in the cliff.
This coast was honeycombed with caves. In the summer time, when the weather was fine, pleasure parties put off from Kilcash for "The Caves," as the district in which they were to be found was, with peculiar want of fancy or imagination in so imaginative a race, called by the inhabitants of the village.
The region of caves was all to the east of Kilcash, and extended along several miles of coast. Some caves were wide-mouthed, shallow, low, uninteresting; others spacious, lofty, ramified. In order to excite curiosity and inspire awe, some were reported to be unexplored; others had legends. Others had sad stories of truthful tragedies. It was safe to enter one at low water only, and safe to stay no longer than a few minutes because of the stalactites. If you wished to see another, and not stay in its black, chill maw for four hours, you must go on the top of high water, and stay no more than a good hour. To a third you might go at any time of tide. To a fourth only on the last of the lowest of neaps, and then be quick and get away again. To a sixth only on the top of spring tides. To one, and one only, which might be entered at any state of tide--Never.
This last cave, which not the boldest fisherman in Kilcash or the next village to it would face, was called the Whale's Mouth, and ran in under the Black Rock.
The opening of the Whale's Mouth is on the south-west or extreme seaward side of the Black Rock. At full of spring tide the entrance to it is about fifteen feet high and of equal breadth. The difference between high and low water here is about fifteen feet. Hence, at lowest of spring tide, the measurement from the surface of the water to the roof at the entrance would be thirty feet.
At the entrance of the Whale's Mouth the outline of the Black Rock is blunt, abrupt, solid. The base of the Rock is never uncovered by water. The wash of the long roller of the Atlantic is always against its sides. The general formation of the cave is that of a square. It is more like the hideous distended jaws of the crocodile than of the whale; but the reason for calling it the Whale's Mouth does not lie in the immediate entrance, but further on, in the roof of the forbidding cavern.
For years no one had dared to enter that cavern. Along the coast were stories of two boats which had ventured in. Not a plank, oar, or man of the first had ever been seen again. Part of the boat, oars, and crew of the other had been seen for one brief moment, smashed and mangled, and then disappeared for ever. What the fate of the former was no one could tell; what the fate of the latter had been all knew.
As far as could be seen into the cave from the outside, there was nothing dangerous or remarkable-looking about it. It declined slightly in height, but the walls did not seem to come any closer together. There was no rock or obstruction of any kind visible in it. The long, even swells rolled in unbroken; but after each wave passed out of sight there was a deep tumultuous explosion, and a strange, loud sound of rushing and struggling water. There was no weakening or gradual dispersion of the force of the wave. Its power seemed shattered and absorbed at once.
This cave had another mysterious and disquieting faculty. It absorbed and discharged more water than could be accounted for by any other supposition but that inside somewhere it expanded prodigiously. At flood tide the water went in eagerly; at ebb tide it ran out at so quick a rate, many believed a large body of fresh water, or foreign water of some other kind, found a way into it. On flood tide, the fishermen gave it a wide berth, lest by any chance or mischance they might be sucked into it.
Often curious people passing by at flood tide threw overboard articles that would float, and watched them as they were slowly but surely drawn into that gaping vault. There was no doubt they were swallowed by that inky void, but they never were seen by man again. Some of the simpler people believed that there was a whirlpool at the end of the cave, and that if this whirlpool took anything down, it never gave that thing, or sign or token of that thing, back again. People on these shores attach miraculous powers to whirlpools. There are no whirlpools of consequence in the neighbourhood, but terrible stories of them had reached the people, and filled the simple folk with superstitious awe.
In this shunned and mysterious cell the rock-monster had its home. On the sea it was harmless. But no one durst enter its haunt, and yet this was not wholly from fear of the monster, but of the place itself, with its loud explosions, its unaccountable indraught and outflow, and the unreturning dead of the two boats. The monster had its home in the cave; but his sphere of action was on the vast plain of rock above.
O'Hanlon and O'Brien succeeded in crossing the Black Rock without accident, and were drawing near the Hole.
"It was there," said O'Hanlon, pointing--"just there. I saw him as plain as ever eyes saw anything."
O'Hanlon pointed to the north-east, or shore side, of the Hole.
The two men drew nearer, and then, pausing a moment to fix their hats firmly on their heads and grasp one another round the waist, crept cautiously forward until they stood on the brink of the Hole. They looked down.
The Hole was almost square, about thirty feet by thirty feet, and narrowing irregularly as it went down to about half that size. The depth from where the two stood to the surface of the water below was thirty-five feet.
The bottom of the Hole was naturally scant of light, and the light now in the sky was poor and thin.
The sides were almost smooth, and at the bottom of the funnel the angles a little rounded in. The rock upon which they stood seemed to be about twenty-five feet thick, and the free space between the bottom of the rock and the surface of the water ten feet. Thus the height of the cave at the Hole was at the present time of tide--half-tide flood--ten feet.
At the bottom of the Hole the water was no longer smooth, even quiet, but broken and turbid, opaque, and mantled with froth. Every wave that entered the vestibule of the cave swung the uneasy seething mass inward, to return in a few seconds on the back-wash. But the froth did not come back every time; it crept further on, until at the third wave the froth disappeared inward, to be succeeded by other froth moving at the same rate.
It made one giddy to look for any length of time. After a few minutes both men drew back by mutual consent.
"No mortal man could live down there for five minutes," said O'Hanlon, with a shiver.
"No," said O'Brien, with a laugh, "or ghost either, for that matter. But, I say, O'Hanlon, what cool and roomy lodging it would afford to all the Fishery Commissioners in the United Kingdoms!"
"This is no place for joking," said O'Hanlon, uneasily. "Let us get back. I am sick of this place."
"Wait a minute," said O'Brien. "As this wretched man Fahey was seen here both in the flesh and the spirit for the last time, let me read the documents he left in your charge."
He put his hand in his pocket, and read the papers by the fast-fading light.
"Come on. Take care you don't slip. The papers are simple enough on the surface, except No. 11. Shall I read it to you?"
"Ay," answered O'Hanlon absently.
It was nothing to him. He was devoting his thoughts to getting safely over this greasy, clammy, slippery surface.
O'Brien read out slowly:
"'Memorandum.--Rise 15·6 lowest. At lowest minute of lowest forward with all might undaunted. The foregoing refers to sculls. With only one skull any lowest or any last quarter; but great forward pluck required for this. In both cases (of course!) left.'
"Well," said O'Brien, "I confess I can't make anything of it. Can you?"
"No," said the other listlessly.
They had now reached the foot of the path.
"I think it's rubbish. What do you say?"
"Unmitigated rubbish."
"What, for instance, can he mean by 'skull' and 'sculls' with a line under each? The writing is that of a man of some education."
"Oh, yes--he was a man of some education."
O'Brien paused in his walk, and cried:
"Stop! I think I have an idea."
"Eh?"
"From what you know of this man, do you think he could spell a word of ordinary English?"
"I should think so."
"Then I have an idea.
"What is it?"
"Wait."