The Return of Clubfoot

by Valentine Williams

I had to give Garth a back to do it and his sixteen stone I felt convinced, punched a pretty pattern of his hobnails into my skin. However, at the cost of my back and sundry abrasions of his hands and knees, Garth at last gained a footing on the sheer face of the rock and then, giving me a hand, swung me up beside him. After a vertiginous climb, which at one time brought us on to a ledge a hundred feet above the nullah, we struck something like a steep track that eventually landed us on the first terrace.

The view was disappointing. We were still too low to clear the frowning cliffs encircling the nullah and we looked forth on the same gloomy prospect of grey volcanic peaks that had confronted us from below. The shelf on which we stood was only about thirty feet wide and ran for a distance of sixty yards across the face of the cliff and then stopped abruptly. It had obviously been cut by the hand of man out of the friable rock; for a number of caves scooped out of the back wall showed that cave-dwellers must have lived here in that remote period when the island had been inhabited. The ledge was in fact nothing but a street for communication between the different cave-houses. The caves were low-roofed and empty. By craning our necks upward we saw that the whole face of the cliff was thus honeycombed with cave-dwellings in a succession of terraces. At the far end the steep track, by which we had gained access to the first terrace, wound its way upward to the higher levels. There were three terraces in all.

We rested for a while on our rocky shelf and ate some biscuits and chocolate. From our post of vantage we looked down on to the grave in the clearing. The sun had gone in but it was still oppressively sultry. The sky had assumed a forbidding leaden tinge. It looked like some great furnace door radiating a fierce heat from the fire within.

Whilst we ate our frugal lunch we discussed our plans. We decided that, in view of the weather, we would break off our exploration for the day, return to camp and get comfortably installed and make an early start the next morning in order to visit the upper ledges of the rock. Garth had apparently quite recovered his equanimity after our little breeze.

The descent from the rock was a thrilling business. In places the track had crumbled away and more than once we found ourselves, held only by the nails of our boots, on a slippery slope overhanging a sheer deep drop. I have a poor head for heights and to me it was a nightmare experience. The result was that our progress was slow and it took us a full hour to make the descent. By the time we had reached the rocky plateau the wind was whirling the grey volcanic dust in great pillars about our heads. The sky had grown perceptibly darker with an eerie yellow glow and a few big drops of rain splashed down on the bushes. With startling suddenness a long drawn-out rumble of thunder awakened a thousand echoes as it reverberated among the lonely island peaks.

"By George," said Garth turning up his coat collar, "we're going to catch it, Okewood. We'll have to steer clear of these trees."

"We'd better make a bolt for the hollow," I counselled. "The hut is out in the open. If it stands the wind it will give us some shelter!"

We started to run while the light perceptibly diminished, like a lighting effect on the stage. We were actually crossing the hollow when the storm broke. There was a blinding glare of lightning, a deafening peal of thunder and the light went out while, with a whooshing and rushing and crashing, the rain suddenly descended in what seemed to be a dense sheet of water.

"The hut!" I shouted in Garth's ear.

Well it was that we were just upon it or in that inky darkness we should never have found it. Over the wooden bedstead in the corner the roof was whole and solid and it kept the worst part of the rain off us, though we were splashed by the cataract of water which poured off the roof into the centre of the hut. The air was so highly charged that one could almost smell the electricity in the atmosphere as the lightning rent the sky in blinding flashes which illuminated the whole clearing and the trees and cliffs all round with the brightness of daylight.