Meet the Tiger

by Leslie Charteris

Already he had been swept some distance from where he had fallen—it must have been a longish way, reckoning by the force of the stream as measured by the pull on his arms. The blackness was not complete, fortunately. His eyes were already used to the darkness, and so he was able to take in the surroundings comparatively well by the faint phosphorescent light which filtered up, apparently, from the surface of the water.

He had been dropped into some sort of subterranean river. His handhold was a rough projection in the rock wall of the cavern through which the stream ran. The cave was no more than a dozen feet wide, but the vaulted roof arched over a good twenty-five feet from the surface: during the centuries of its mill-race career the river must have worn itself deeper and deeper into its bed. “Mill-race” was a good description. The superficial smoothness of the water was no guide to the murderous speed and power of the current. The Saint wondered what beneficent deity had placed that shelf of rock directly under his flailing hand, for without it he would undoubtedly have been dragged down and drowned in a few minutes. Even now he wasn’t out of the wood: the agonising twinges of over-worked muscle were throbbing up and down his arms, and though he had fingers of steel they wouldn’t stand up to that gruelling tension indefinitely.

Clearly the great thing was to slip the clutch of the torrent which was patiently struggling to pluck him away and haul him down to the death which had been arranged for him. The Saint pulled himself up a few inches to test his muscles, and groaned, for he had been weakening faster than he realised. He let himself down again for a second’s rest and set his teeth. Perhaps he prayed. . . . Then he took and held a deep breath, and heaved again. He edged up six inches . . . seven . . . eight. . . . There he stopped to breathe again. Even that slight drawing of his body from the clasp of the rushing water lessened the stress, and he tackled the next effort with a better heart. This time he brought his chin over the ledge, and one of his feet, scrabbling for help against the submerged face of the rock, lodged in a cranny and enabled him to get enough support from his legs partially to relax his arms and hands while he gathered strength for a final spurt.

He looked up, wondering now whether this strenuous climbing was only going to lead to a postponement of the end—to a cramped and painful clinging to the stone until his endurance petered out and he slipped and fell again into those evil waters. And then he had difficulty in stopping himself wasting precious energy in a resounding cheer, for he saw a wide black opening in the rock some ten feet over his head. That was certainly a recess where he could lie down and rest almost indefinitely. It seemed as if the kind gods were giving him all the breaks that afternoon.

“Not yet, my Tiger, not yet,” muttered the Saint, with all his old indomitable jauntiness flooding back. “Shoals of people have sweated like Harry to bump me off, but I’m beginning to think it can’t be done!”

The sight of that prospective refuge was enormously encouraging, and he felt new reserves of strength tingle into his body. He shifted his grip to another narrow angle of rock at arm’s length overhead, and with a long pull he managed to hitch himself right out of the water and get his toes on to the ledge which had saved his life, while his hands moved up from crevice to crevice in the stone; so that when he paused again he was standing straight up, flattened out against the rock, with the river slinking past clear beneath him.

The opening he had seen was temptingly near now, and in his eagerness he nearly over-reached himself. He flung his weight on to a jutting bit of rock without first testing it, and it broke away in his hand. He was left swinging by three fingers of his left hand in a hold barely an inch deep, and it was several nerve- and muscle-wracking seconds before he found fresh holds. Thereafter he proceeded with more circumspection, and eventually scrambled over the rim of the ledge he had marked down with no further mishap.

He stretched himself out on his back and closed his eyes. Now that the immediate peril was past, reaction came. In the ordinary way his nerves were faultless, but perhaps the prefatory shock of the fall, followed by the awful sensation of being swirled helplessly down into the depths of the underground river, had between them succeeded in undermining some of his confidence. He felt utterly weary, and he was shaking in every limb—though this could have been largely due to the reaction of relaxing muscles and tendons. It was some time before he was able to roll over on his side and peer down at the treacherous, glimmering sheen of smooth water a dozen feet below. Unenviable as his position still was, the Saint contrived a twisted grin.

“Rotten luck, son,” he croaked. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t want to die to-day.”

Then, in the nebulous light which permeated the clammy atmosphere, he turned to examine the possibilities of further progress. He had heard of such caverns as this, and knew that parts of the country were honeycombed with a vast network of such subterranean natural excavations. Some of these caves went further than even the most intrepid had ever dared to explore them: he remembered a story he had heard about Cheddar Caves, of a party which had set out to investigate a certain tunnel and had never returned, and he recalled how his fertile imagination had been fired with visionings of strange prehistoric beasts surviving in the bowels of the earth, and perhaps a race of semi-human beings similarly entombed, and how he had resolved one day to go in search of the lost explorers. But that would have been with all the armoury he wanted, suitable companions, ropes, and torches. . . . This, however, was not Cheddar, and he had nothing but his soaking clothes and the few things in his pockets. Yet, since there was no retreat towards the water, he must go the other way. He was certain that he had been carried too far down the stream for there to be any hope of a search party getting in touch with him.