Into the Primitive

by Robert Ames Bennet

He stooped to drink from a pool in the rock which was overflowing with the cool, pure rainwater, and started off at his sharpest pace. Winthrope and Miss Leslie, seated side by side in dripping misery, watched him swing away through the rain, without energy enough to call out a parting word.

Beneath the cliff the sand beach was succeeded by a talus of rocky debris which in places sloped up from the water ten or fifteen feet. The lower part of the slope consisted of boulders and water-worn stones, over which the surf, reinforced by the rising tide, was beginning to break with an angry roar.

Blake picked his way quickly over the smaller stones near the top of the slope, now and then bending to snatch up a fragment that seemed to differ from the others. Finding nothing but limestone, he soon turned his attention solely to the passage around the headland. Here he had expected to find the surf much heavier. But the shore was protected by a double line of reefs, so close in that the channel between did not show a whitecap. This was fortunate, since in places the talus here sank down almost to the level of low tide. Even a moderate surf would have rendered farther progress impracticable.

Another hundred paces brought Blake to the second corner of the cliff, which jutted out in a little point. He clambered around it, and stopped to survey the coast beyond. Within the last few minutes the squall had blown over, and the rain began to moderate its down-pour. The sun, bursting through the clouds, told that the storm was almost past, and its flood of direct light cleared the view.

Along the south side of the cliff the sea extended in twice as far as on the north. From the end of the talus the coast trended off four or five miles to the south-southwest in a shallow bight, whose southern extremity was bounded by a second limestone headland. This ridge ran inland parallel to the first, and from a point some little distance back from the shore was covered with a growth of leafless trees.

Between the two ridges lay a plain, open along the shore, but a short distance inland covered with a jungle of tall yellow grass, above which, here and there, rose the tops of scrubby, leafless trees and the graceful crests of slender-shafted palms. Blake’s attention was drawn to the latter by that feeling of artificiality which their exotic appearance so often wakens in the mind of the Northern-bred man even after long residence in the tropics. But in a moment he turned away, with a growl. “More of those darned feather-dusters!” He was not looking for palms.

The last ragged bit of cloud, with its showery accompaniment, drifted past before the breeze which followed the squall, and the end of the storm was proclaimed by a deafening chorus of squawks and screams along the higher ledges of the cliff. Staring upward, Blake for the first time observed that the face of the cliff swarmed with seafowl.

“That’s luck!” he muttered. “Guess I haven’t forgot how to rob nests. Bet our fine lady’ll shy at sucking them raw! All the same, she’ll have to, if I don’t run across other rock than this, poor girl!”

He advanced again along the talus, and did not stop until he reached the sand beach. There he halted to make a careful examination, not only of the loose debris, but of the solid rock above. Finding no sign of flint or quartz, he growled out a curse, and backed off along the beach, to get a view of the cliff top. From a point a little beyond him, outward to the extremity of the headland, he could see that the upper ledges and the crest of the cliff, as well, were fairly crowded with seafowl and their nests. His smile of satisfaction broadened when he glanced inland and saw, less than half a mile distant, a wooded cleft which apparently ran up to the summit of the ridge. From a point near the top a gigantic baobab tree towered up against the skyline like a Brobdingnagian cabbage.

“Say, we may have a run for our money, after all,” he murmured. “Shade, and no end of grub, and, by the green of those trees, a spring–limestone water at that. Next thing, I’ll find a flint!”