“You must go on alone,” I said, pantingly, to Yorke; “leave me here. I'll be all right, even if I have to stop here a month of Sundays. I can't starve in such a place as this.”
Pitching his own and my rifle up on the bank above high water mark, he seized me and lifted me up on his back, telling me to hold on, as he meant to make a big try for the boat. It was no use my protesting—he set off again at a steady run, my weight apparently impeding his progress no more than if he had been carrying a doll instead of ten stone.
At last we gained the end of the island, where there was a break in the verdure, and from which we had a brief view of the sea before it was blotted out by the black wall of the coming hurricane.
“We're done as far as getting on board is concerned,” he said, as I slid down his back on to the sand; “but, thank God, the boat is safe. In another ten minutes she would have been too late to have reached either the cutter or brigantine, and have been smothered. Look, Captain Guest is all ready, and so is the cutter!”
I got up on my feet, just in time to see the boat go alongside the brigantine, which was under a close reefed lower topsail and a bit of her mainsail only—for Guest knew what was coming, and had prepared to meet it; the cutter, too, was reefed down, and had taken her dingy on deck. At that moment, however, both vessels were becalmed; but scarcely had the whale boat been hoisted up to the starboard davits of the Fray Bentos and secured, when the hurricane struck both vessels. I thought at first that our poor old brigantine was going to turn turtle, for she was all but thrown on her beam ends; but righting herself gallantly, she plunged away into the growing darkness, followed by the cutter, and in five minutes both were hidden from view, and Yorke and myself had to throw ourselves flat on our faces to avoid being blown down the beach into the lagoon.
I had once, years before when a boy in Fiji, seen a bad hurricane, and was rather proud of my experience, but I never saw, and never wish to see again, such a truly terrifying and appalling sight as my companion and I now witnessed—for within an hour all Nature seemed to have gone stark, raving mad, and I never expected to see the next morning's sun. I do not think it was the fearful force of the wind which so terrified me into a state of helplessness as the diabolical clamour—the clashing and tearing and rending asunder of the trees, accompanied by a prolonged howling mingled with a deep droning hum like one sometimes hears when a volcano is in eruption—and, in a minor key, the dulled roaring of the surf as the mighty seas swept over the outer reef, and broke over the weather shore with such tremendous force that the island seemed to tremble to its very foundations.
Unable to make himself heard in the pandemonium roaring around us, Yorke turned to me, and gripping me by one hand, and shielding his eyes with the other from the hurtling showers of sand and pebbles which threatened to cut our faces to pieces, he managed to drag me along the beach to a low ledge of coral rocks, under the shelter of which we were protected from the fury of the wind, and, in a measure, safe from flying branches, though all along the beach coco-palms were being torn up by the roots, or their lofty crowns cut off as if they were no stronger than a dahlia or some such weakly plant.
As we crouched on the sand under the ledge of rock, a terrific but welcome downpour of rain fell, and we were able to satisfy our thirst by pressing our mouths to crevices in the rock overhead. But we were not long allowed to remain undisturbed in our shelter, for, although the tide was on the ebb, the enormous influx of water, driven over the reef by the violence of the wind, so swelled the lagoon that we had to abandon our refuge and crawl on our hands and knees up over the bank, and thence into the thorny scrub, where we were at least safe from falling trees, there being none near us.
“I must try and get our rifles before it is too late,” shouted Yorke in my ear. “I know the place, but if I don't get there pretty quick, I shall never be able to recognise it. Stay where you are until I get back, then we'll try and find a better camping place before night comes on—if this little tin-pot island isn't blown out of the water over on to New Guinea in the meantime.”
By this time I was beginning to get some courage, and to feel ashamed of myself; so, as soon as Yorke had crept out of the scrub, I braced myself up, and taking out my sheath knife, began to cut away the thorny branches, and pull up by the roots some of the scrub around me, so as to make more room. The soil consisted of decomposed shell and vegetable matter, very soft and porous, underneath which were loose coral slabs, and I soon had a space cleared large enough for us both to lie down upon. Then I started to enclose it on three sides by a low wall of the flat coral stones, across which I laid a thick and nearly rain-proof covering of branches and leaves, and when Yorke returned an hour later, I was almost finished, and had begun to make a fire of dead roots and branches.