Palm Tree Island

by Herbert Strang

We had been digging out the rock, and carrying it to the cliff, for a matter of two days when a terrible storm of rain came on in the night, and when we got up in the morning and went to the cliff, we saw that all the rock we had so toiled in collecting had spent itself, and left a black desolation all around the spot where it had lain. This gave us a great deal of annoyance, as much at our thoughtlessness as at the thing itself; but we did not give up our design, resolving rather to be the more careful in our preparations. It took us a very long time to assemble as much material as we had before, because we had to dig deeper into the side of the mountain for it, and when we got it we covered it over very scrupulously, so that the rain could not touch it. Billy remarked that of course, after our taking all that trouble, there would be no more rain for a month, and he was right; but I pointed out to him that we should have been very foolish if we had not taken these precautions, and he said it was a pity you could not tell things beforehand, adding, as if it had never struck him before, that you never could tell what might have been, because all we knew was what was. And then he was silent for a time, and when he spoke again, he said: "Ain't it terrible, master, to think you never can catch a minute what's gone?" Billy so seldom said anything of a reflective nature that I looked at him in some alarm, with a kind of superstitious fear that he was sickening for something; but I was relieved in a moment when, in the same breath, he said: "It do make you eat hearty, though."

When we had heaped up on the cliff a good many hundredweights of the rock, we waited for the flow of the tide, and then, choosing a place where the cliff ran down very steep and straight to the mouth of the cave, we flung the stuff into the water between the mouth and the rocks where we first encountered the shoal of monsters. We watched eagerly to see what happened, and saw a vast number of bubbles come to the surface, and a certain quantity of smoke that floated away on the breeze, but not near such a smother as we had experience of, which made us hope that there was all the more poison in the water. There was a slight current at the foot of the cliffs, setting past the cluster of rocks towards the channel between Red Rock and the island. We walked along for a little space, in the same direction as this current, to see if there was any sign on the surface of the water of our experiment having had any effect. For some little while we saw nothing, and had begun to believe that the monsters were proof against what we had fondly hoped was poison, when we observed some tentacles appearing above the water by the rocks, and also at the base of the cliffs, and by and by the palpitating bodies of the monsters themselves, crawling up as if the water did not very well agree with them. We pelted these creatures very hard with stones and lumps of the strange rock, and though we missed pretty often, yet we hit them pretty often too, and had lively satisfaction when we saw them loose their hold and tumble back into the water as soon as the rock began to fizz. But we could not see that any of them were killed, and had to conclude that the water about the rocks was too deep, and the current moved too fast, for our poisonous substance to work its full effect, and so we went back disappointed, with the problem of making a safe way through the tunnel to the sea as far from solution as ever it was.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

OF THE END OF THE SEA MONSTERS; AND OF THE EVENTS THAT LED US TO RECEIVE THE CREW AS OUR GUESTS

We had failed to destroy the monsters from the cliff top, and I concluded that we must still fail, unless we could, find some means of attacking them in an enclosed space, where there was no current to carry away the water as soon as it was rendered poisonous. It was Billy who suggested the plan which we ultimately found successful. Though he had refused point blank to approach the cave in our canoe, he would not mind, he said, "having a go" at the monsters from the tunnel, for there at least we had dry land to run back to, whereas if the canoe were caught in the embrace of one of the large creatures there would be little chance for us. And since we had already learnt that the monsters came into the cave, as well as haunting the rocks outside, I agreed, when Billy suggested it, that even if we could not kill them outright we might make the water in the cave so exceeding noisome that they would depart thence and seek more savorous quarters. We saw great difficulties in the way, first, to the conveying a sufficiently great quantity of the rock to the cave; then the possibility of heavy rains falling before we had accomplished our task, with the consequent rise of the water in the lake and the flooding of the tunnel, which would not only render it a perilous place for us ourselves, but would use up, or decompose, as they say, the material we had collected before we got it to the proper place. As to the first difficulty, we were already so well accustomed to hard work of various kinds that we thought nothing of it; while for the matter of the rain we could only take our chance and resolve to be as philosophical as possible if all our labour was undone. With this in mind, we determined to collect the lumps of rock first of all in our hut, and not to begin to convey them through the tunnel until we had as much as we wanted: which accordingly we did, going backwards and forwards for many days between the hut and the spot on the mountain-side where we found an inexhaustible supply of the rock. When we had got together a sufficient quantity, we carried above two-thirds of it in baskets to the entrance of the cave, and very laborious it was, because the way was so rough and in places so narrow, and we barked our shins and elbows pretty often. But it was done at last, and then we laid up a similar heap on the cliff, at the same spot as we had put it before.

End of the Monsters

When all things were in readiness, we went along the tunnel one day, carrying torches in our hands, until we came to the place where we had put our heap of rock, at the brink of the pool. Now that the moment for our great enterprise was come, we were in a fever, I assure you, both from the importance of what we had taken in hand to do, and from our shuddering horror of the monsters. We held our torches above our heads, searching the cave for signs of them, expecting every moment to see the hideous tentacles emerge from the black water at our feet, and fancying we saw these dreadful enemies on all the rocks that strewed the floor of the cave. "What are we waiting for?" says Billy in an awful whisper, and seeing that certainly nothing was to be gained by delay, we stuck our torches into crevices in the wall, and then with two great heaves cast the pieces of rock into the water, and retreated instantly into the tunnel to escape the choking fumes that arose. We had to go a good way before we felt ourselves to be in safety from them, and indeed it promised to be so long before we could venture to go down to the cave again that we thought we might as well return to our hut and run down to the cliff, to see if any of the creatures had been driven forth. Accordingly we made great haste, and when we came to the cliff and looked over, we saw first several of the smaller creatures floating at the mouth of the cave, and quite dead as far as we could tell; but immediately afterwards there came slowly swimming out a huge monster that far exceeded in size and ugliness that which had seized me on that day when we climbed down the cliff for eggs. Whether it was the same that had nearly caught Billy I know not, because we never saw that clearly; but we were perfectly amazed at the hugeness of it, being as big round as my aunt's round table in the parlour, and its tentacles stretching on all sides like the roots of an immense oak. Though we were far above it, and in safety, we shuddered when we beheld it, and our cheeks became pale; I saw that Billy's did, and he told me afterwards that I was as white as a ghost. We both felt beyond measure thankful that we had been so mercifully preserved from falling a prey to this terrible giant, which could have crushed the life out of us in a few minutes.