Carette of Sark

by John Oxenham

"Well, I feel all the better, anyway, and so do you, I'll be bound. I'm beginning to think, you know, that we were over fearful perhaps, and that we need not have come hiding here at all."

"We'll know better when we hear what's going on outside. Your grandfather and George Hamon are not men to be over fearful, and they thought it well."

"That is so," I said, feeling better at that.

"I wonder if it is day or night, and how long we've really been in here?"

"Long enough to be hungry, anyway," I said, heartily ready to eat. And we fell to on Aunt Jeanne's ham and rabbit pie, Carette cutting Tip all I ate into small pieces with my knife, since we had forgotten to bring any other. We drank up the milk out of the big-bellied tin can, and never was there sweeter milk or sweeter can, for Carette had first drink. And then, lest it should get foul, we started off to find the fresh water to wash it out and bring back a supply.

There was no mistaking the hollow place where the fresh water was. The light of the lantern fell on many a narrow rift in the walls of rock on either side, all sharp cracks and fissures, with rough-toothed edges, as though the solid granite had been split with mighty hammer-strokes. The seams were all awry, and the lines and cracks were all sharp and straight, though running into one another and across in great confusion. And, of a sudden, in the midst of this tangle of straight clefts and sharp-pointed angles, we came on a little rounded niche where the wall was scooped out in a graceful curve from about our own height to the ground. It was all as smooth and softly rounded as if wrought by a mason's chisel, and as we stood looking at it with surprise, because it was so different from all the rest, a movement of the lantern showed us a greater wonder still. At our feet, in a smooth round basin, bubbled the spring, and looked so like a great dark eye looking up at us in a dumb fury that we both stood stark still staring back at it.

The dark water rushed up from below in coils and writhings like the up-leap of the tide in the Gouliot Pass, and our lantern set golden rings in it which floated brokenly from the centre to the sides, and gave to it a strange look of life and understanding. So strong was the pressure from below that the centre of the little pool seemed higher than the sides. It looked as though the pent-up force within was striving all the time to shoot up to the roof and any moment might succeed.

But the strangest thing of all was that with all this look of hidden power there was no sound, and no drop of water overflowed the hollow basin. The ground we stood on was a slab of solid rock and dry as bone,—no splash, no sound, no drop outside,—only the silent and powerful up-thrust of the water from below, the silent golden rings that tumbled to the sides of the basin, and the constant expectation of something more which never came.

It was Carette's quick understanding that named it.

"It is like Krok," she whispered, and the word was said. It was all as like Krok—not the outside man, but the inner Krok, dumb and powerful, silently doing his appointed work—as anything that could be imagined.