“Is it real?” asked the Marquis, his hands flat on the sand, supporting his huge body, his eyes staring, like the fixed eyes of a doll, out to the empty sea. “Flint, what shall a man say when he sees a thing like that? This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men encounter death out there at one’s eyes and sit and look as calm as this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no emotion no more than me.”
“We’re neither of us mad, or bad either,” I said. “We’ll be sorry enough when we’ve had time to realize that poor old Tommy Gregg is gone, and Jensen and the rest; but we’re shipwrecked ourselves, and in a bit of a fix, Marky, and that’s going to take all our thinking for some time.”
“Where are we?” asked the Marquis, looking round. It was not a pretty bit of scenery. Kara Bay is the sort of place a man might go to die in if he felt like it, but it is not the sort of place any one would ever want to live in. As a matter of fact, no one ever has.
The bay is like a black-lip shell, in curve and in color. The sand is like powdered cinder to look at, and as hot as the innocent-looking iron door of a furnace, to feel. Behind comes a belt of poisonous painty-green low bush; behind that again, forest, so dark and tangled that it looks black even at midday. The whole place has a deadly, fungoid sort of look, as if it had sprung up in a night out of the heat and rain and general decay, and never had been or could be natural and normal in its growth.
I knew where we were well enough, and did not like the knowledge. The Waiwera, on her voyage to join a North-German Lloyd boat at Wilhemshafen, ran along a lonely and unfrequented coast; and the loneliest, most unfrequented and most generally undesirable bit was the bit where the Marquis and I had been marooned—here, in Kara Bay, with a suit of clothes apiece, two revolvers, a few dozen cartridges, two tins of meat and a paper bag of biscuits.
The Marquis, of course, did not quite understand how bad a fix we were in. I did, and I had no time to spare for anything but consideration of our case.
Kara Bay is a hundred miles or more from anywhere along the coast. The sea-line is precipitous thereabouts; there is no easy beach to follow, as in the western country. A boat is your only chance. But when you have no boat?
The Kara River runs into the sea close at hand. It comes from the Kiloki Range, a rampart of rock and forest eleven thousand feet high. It is a succession of rapids and falls. I knew all about the Kara River: no help there.
Behind the Kiloki Range you strike down towards country that is at least known if not inhabited. There is a Government station there. I calculated it to be something like sixty miles away from us in a direct line—a fortnight’s journey over those mountains if we were lucky. It seemed to be the Kiloki Range or nothing. We wanted about forty carriers with food and tents and trade goods, and we wanted maps and field-glasses and compasses, and rifles and shotguns and ammunition, to take the journey as most people in Papua take such trips. But as we were not likely to get any of these things on the black-sand beach of Kara Bay, it was up to us to try what we could do without them; or else stop there and die.
That was what I told the Marquis, not exaggerating the seriousness of our situation, but not making little of it. He listened patiently and sighed. I really do not think any one, even a man who knew him as I did, could have anticipated what he would reply.