CHAPTER XVI

HYALOS

Two mornings later, as they were finishing breakfast, Sam suddenly rose from the table. His sharp ear had caught something unheard by the others, but they heard the voice of Atherfield, who was steering:

"Where away?"

And the voice of Church, who was on the look-out, faint against the wind:

"On the starboard bow."

"Land," said Sam.

They left the table and came on deck.

Away on the starboard bow, above the horizon of the blue and empty sea, a point showed clear in that crystal air, remote, like the sail of a ship dyed with Tyrian purple.

The glass resolved it into a rock, a vast rock two hundred feet in height, cleft at the summit and broadened at the base, the highest peak of an island whose low shore was vaguely indicated.

"Hyalos," said Sam, handing the glass to the girl.

Holding a stay and steadying the glass, she looked. Nothing but sea--sky line--then as she shifted the glass the great rock, lavender and purple, with its broken crest and spurs and gulleys, broke into view, leaped at her across the sea, captured her mind and imagination for ever with its desolation and loneliness.

It was less a rock than a vast monolith, a column of a single stone erected before Troy was a city or Athens a town. On it might have been written, "I saw the Persian ships pass on their way to the beach of Marathon and the Argo sailing to find the Golden Fleece. I was here before Sappho sang, and at my base lies Hyalos, a town of dreams sunk in an enchanted sea."

That was how the distant vision spoke to Martia.

Sam, taking the glass back from her, had another long look. Then he turned to the steersman.

"Keep her as she goes," said Sam. "We want to get well to the north." Then he turned to Bobby, "Get a fellow ready forward with the lead and then fetch me that chart up. No. A chart. You'll find it on top of the others in the chart locker. Bowler, get a tackle ready for lowering the boat. I'll anchor outside, if I can find decent holding ground, and take soundings with the boat. How's the glass?"

"Glass is steady, sir."

The _Lorna_ carried two boats, a solid clinker-built four-oar for shore work and the diving business, and a collapsible dinghy.

The skipper of the _Lorna_, having glanced at the boat, went to the sail-room; here he had stored a lot of other things besides canvas. Before leaving Poole he had studied the whole of this affair, and worked it out to the minutest detail. The sail-room contained, amongst other things, six or eight lobster-pot buoys with ground tackle, also a croquet-set box, labelled "Dangerous, don't touch," containing dynamite charges, a small electric battery, and the wiring necessary for deep-sea blasting operations.

He brought the buoys out now and placed them on the deck. Then he turned to the chart which Bobby had given him, and, laying it on the cabin skylight, pored over it, memorising once again the lie of the reefs.

There was one good thing. In this all-but tideless sea the difference between low and high water was next to nothing. The reefs did not play hide and seek, and, as a matter of fact, the reefs north of Hyalos were frank almost to the point of frightfulness. An hour later, with Hyalos full in view, they showed themselves, faint lines of foam where the flower-blue sea broke gently to the heave of the swell, traces of purple, and over all gulls flying and calling.

The _Lorna_ held on. The helm had been shifted, and the island lay no longer on the starboard bow but straight ahead.

On and on, the voices of the gulls growing clearer and the "Get away--get away" of the guillemots sharper against the wind, whilst Sam, who had swarmed up to the cross-trees, swept the reef lines from east to west with his gaze.

It was easy to understand why the bay of Hyalos, with its hidden treasures, had lain sealed through all the years. Only in one place, towards the westward end of the shark-toothed reefs, was there an opening through them, a blue line of clean water, too narrow for a full-sized ship to pass but sufficiently broad for a vessel of small tonnage.

Strangely enough, the fact that this was the only way of entrance simplified the whole problem enormously. Since there was only one way in, and that way had evidently been taken by Isaac Behrens' boat, it stood to reason that it must be a fairway: it must, from the very fact of its narrowness, be free of danger from rocks--as Behrens' boat would have had no room for manœuvring--and permanently free since there were no tides.

Sam came down at a run. His whole plans were changed. He ordered the buoys and tackle to be put back in the sail-room, the canvas to be taken in and stowed, and the auxiliary engine started. Then he went aloft again to conn the ship.

The reefs drew closer: the whisper of them came now through the faint thud of the little engine, and the challenging gulls, like snowflakes against the blue sky, flew around and above the _Lorna_ shouting, calling, passing away on the wind only to return, whilst the gently heaving swell broke now on the rocks to port and starboard, and the narrow line of blue water ahead seemed to grow narrower.

"We'll never get through," murmured Martia, half to herself, half to Bobby, as they stood in the bow with the reefs a biscuit toss on either side. "Ouch!" A heave of the swell had taken charge of them so that for a moment the steerage way seemed lost. She shut her eyes.

"We're through!" said Bobby.

She opened them. Only fifty yards of passage separated them from clear water, into which they passed, gliding with engine shut off over the surface of a vast bay. A bay two miles long by a mile wide, a bay closed to the sea by the reefs, and whose water changed in colour from aquamarine beneath the keel to emerald, and from emerald to the blue of sapphire.

The shore showed nothing but boulders, sand patches, and desolation, above which the great hill of rock stood, gaunt and seamed with gullies, sharp-cut against the cloudless sky. They were at the western end, and the two-mile stretch of water to east of them seemed infinite in extent, whilst beyond the reefs through which they had passed the outer sea lay hard and brilliant as a gem.

As the anchor fell and the _Lorna_ rode to her moorings, Bobby looked overside. Nothing. Nothing but rock and sand patches showing clear as through air in the diamond-bright water. He had forgotten for a moment that the submerged town lay, unless its existence was a dream of Isaac Behrens', in the eastern side of the bay. Martia reminded him of this fact. As for Sam, he had not even glanced over. He was busy snugging things down and as indifferent to his surroundings as though he had been in Poole Harbour.

When everything was right, he ordered the boat to be got over. They crowded into her immediately, and, with Bowler and Church at the oars, started.

"It'll be down to the east side of the bay," said Sam, "if it's here at all."

He had taken the yoke lines and was steering.

"Here at all?" said the girl. "Of course it's here." His words, as though casting a doubt upon Isaac's story, wounded her. "What makes you think it's not?"

"Oh, I don't know," said he. "It's only that, in my experience, things once they're sunk on the sea-floor aren't found again as a rule. Look at Tobermory. Of course, there are no tides here, but it's in the earthquake zone, and one never knows."

Sam was right enough. Once the sea has grasped a thing, be it ship or treasure, she holds it, hides it, defends it by all sorts of trickery. Very, very rarely is anything recovered from her clutch once it has been held for even a few years. But the case of Hyalos was different from all other cases. It had been seen and mapped recently, and it was unlikely that any earthquake disturbance would have destroyed or covered it from sight since then.

Bobby said this. Then, leaning over the starboard gunnel whilst the girl bent over the port side, they watched, gazing deep down through the clear, bright water, the floor of the bay shimmering up at them through the undulations caused by the oars.

Nothing. Sand and rock, fish fleeting here and there, the long red ribbon-fish of the Mediterranean and Ægean, a bass followed by its black shadow on the floor, a silver shoal of sardines, a globe jellyfish and a number of cup-shape jellyfish opening and closing like umbrellas as they pumped their way along--nothing more.

The leisurely creak of the oars sounded against the far crying of the gulls; the sun struck hot on their backs as they leant watching for that which never showed itself. And now, as minute after minute passed, and though they had not quite reached the eastern zone of the bay, there came to Bobby that horrible clutch at the throat known to the man who sees before him defeat, the man who sees the horse that carries his fortune falling back in the race.

Had Isaac Behrens suffered from illusion? Had the floor of the bay altered? Had they come to the wrong place, and was this not Hyalos, after all?

He did not dare to ask the questions aloud. Confused and dizzy with the heat of the sun he continued gazing.

Nothing. Though they rowed for ever and gazed for ever, nothing would they see but the rocks and the sand and the fish; all their work was undone and their labours in vain.

Then suddenly a great white mass shot up waveringly, as though to strike the keel of the boat, and Bobby, expecting the crash, yelled to the rowers to stop.

There was no crash: the thing was fathoms under; and now, as the boat floated placidly, gazing over they saw shimmering up at them not rock and sand but what seemed the interior of a vast white shallow bowl over the rim of which they had passed.

It was the theatre of Hyalos.

A theatre once open to the sky and breezes, once filled with people who had vanished from the earth before Christ was born.

Broken and ruined in places, the tiers of marble seats still showed, in parts almost perfect.

Sam, who had brought the map of Isaac Behrens with him, spread it on his knee.

"Yes," said he, quite unmoved by what was lying beneath them. "That's the theatre all right, and it's lying just where it should be by the map--it's the most westerly building of the town. Here's a note that says: 'It being possibly beyond the city wall, of which there is no distinct trace.'"

Martia scarcely heard him. She was fascinated; she could have gazed for ever. In that moment she caught the spirit and inner meaning of this lost town with a vividness that never came again; this town once filled with life and beauty and laughter, set now in the crystal silence of the sea. And it had been there before she was born, before the Victorian age and the age of Elizabeth; before the Norman Conquest; and when Romulus was making his wall which was to expand and ring the mighty Roman Empire, it had been there, just as now, preserved in the clear and tideless water of this bay, watched only by the seagulls.

Then the theatre began to fall away and vanish behind them, the boat was moving slowly forward under the direction of Sam, and now beneath them lay ruins. Heaps of marble blocks lying as though cast about by a giant, and broken columns, suggestive of some great building gone to ruin, glimmered up at them and passed astern, giving place to a level floor where there was nothing.

"This would be the agora," said Sam, referring to the map, on which Isaac Behrens had marked not only the streets and places but their names--names of his own invention except in the cases of the theatre and the agora, or market-place. "Hermes Street opens on the right of it, the Street of Victory on the left of it. Let's have a look at Victory Street first. Go slow, Bowler."

He steered to the left, and the agora passed under them, the boat's shadow flitting across it as the shadows of gulls and swallows had flittered in ancient days. They could see the ruts in its floor made by wheeled traffic, and now to the right the standing columns of what had once been a roofed colonnade.

Then again, as in the case of their approach to the theatre, something rose through the water ahead of them as if to hit the keel.

Houses. Houses closing this, the north, side of the market-place; houses whose walls rose to within a fathom and a half of the surface.

The old Greek house had no roof; it was, in fact, a courtyard surrounded by rooms and open to the sky, a covered colonnade running round the tiny courtyard.

Looking down now as the boat slowly drifted, they could see the colonnade roofs within a few yards of the keel, and the square courtyards whose tessellated floors showed vague patterns through the waving water. Spaces lay between these houses of a vanished world, spaces that had once been dark and narrow lanes; broader spaces that had once, perhaps, been gardens; and all lay here, shy, secret, hidden, yet suddenly revealed.

It was like opening the hand of Time and looking at things never intended to be seen by living eyes.

They had drifted over the houses on the right-hand side of Victory Street, and now, with a stroke of an oar and a shift of the helm, they came upon the street itself. Broad almost as Regent Street it lay beneath them, the houses on the left vaguely visible, the houses they had just passed over close and clear to sight.

Actually in this gin-bright water, as in some Pacific lagoon, things at a depth of six or seven fathoms were more clearly visible than they would have been if seen through air. As in the agora, here, too, the wheel-ruts of long-forgotten traffic showed, and here and there in front of a house a little cone-shaped column lay, the Apollo of the street, once the guardian of the house to which it belonged.

Sam ordered the oars in and let the boat drift. There was a gentle current here, setting north in the direction in which the street ran, and Bowler and his mate, released from their work, condescended to look over and take an interest in what was going on.

"You've never seen houses and a street like that before, Bowler," said the girl, flushed with excitement and looking up at the other.

"No, miss; I don't remember that I have," replied the salt: "It's the clear water shows 'em up. There's a place like this off Suffolk, where there's a church an' all sunk close off shore, but you can't see nuthin', the water bein' thick."

"Hoi! Look at that fish!" cried the other fellow. "Ain't it a big 'un?"

An enormous bream, stolen out of some back alley, had caught the sun; then, frightened by the boat shadow, with a twist of its tail it turned and vanished.

The boat floated on.

Then glimmering up at them from the street centre something white showed, a small mound of marble blocks--no, a group of statuary gone to ruin. It was their first find; up to this they had seen nothing of man's handiwork with the exception of the theatre and the houses, the street, and the broken Apollos of the street. This was different.

The oars were got out to stop the drift, and, gazing over, they absorbed the vision beneath them.

When Hyalos, with a great shudder, had sunk eight fathoms below the sea level, here in the Street of Hermes a wonderful group of statuary must have fallen, shaken at the base. Close to the little heap of white ruins lay a marble chariot-wheel and a horse's head; a headless, marble-winged woman with one wing broken lay near the wheel. The appealing charm of these things was their small size.

The winged woman could not have been more than four feet in height when standing in her chariot, the horses not so large as Shetland ponies, the wheel as it lay seemed not more than thrice the diameter of a dinner plate. Splendour of size had evidently no charm for the people of Hyalos.

The statuary had represented a Victory, standing in her chariot driving her horses across the face of the world. How lovely the thing must have been in its delicate minuteness when complete might be guessed by the little horse's head showing in profile from the floor of the street, a head beautiful as that of the horse of the Moon that once graced the eastern pediment of the Parthenon.

That mutilated woman and that severed head were worth, alone, all the trouble of the expedition. That little horse's head of marble filled with fire, what would it not "fetch" in a world where Art is not, only art dealers?

The Victory had fallen prone, the face could not be seen.

"Can we get them up?" asked Martia, appealing to Sam. "Now--at once? I want to hold that little wheel in my hands. Oh, the poor, lovely broken things!"

Her voice failed, her eyes were filled with tears. Hyalos had spoken to her through this little shattered dream, more appealing than any work of grandeur and magnificence.

"Yes," said the skipper. "We can get them up easy enough, but not now. I'll have to bring the ship right over here and rig a tackle. You can't do that in a minute. We've got the location, and it's easy to pick it up again. Let's go on and see what else there is."

The rowers, at his direction, put the boat forward with a stroke of the oars, and then let her drift, correcting her course now and then whilst the Street of Victory passed beneath them, showing now a fallen column that had once stood proudly in its centre, and now a Hermes of the street that had fallen from some house front, and now a grim fact.

The street had suddenly grown narrow, the houses dwarfed--almost hovels.

They had come upon poverty.

Hyalos, old as history itself, had its slums just as London has its slums, and New York. It seemed to say to the gazers: "Look, here is the evil that runs through all cities, in all times; so it was in ancient Athens, so it ever will be."

Martia, the most sensitive of the boat's crew, ceased gazing down into the water and turned her eyes across the sunlit bay to where the _Lorna Doone_ was riding at her anchor.

A curious feeling of depression had now come over her. It had been stealing upon her mind almost imperceptibly from the moment when, looking down, she had seen the wheel-tracks on the pavement of the market-place. Now, raising her eyes to the blue and sunlit bay, the living, laughing gulls, the perfect sky, the town beneath the keel seemed almost terrible, almost sinister, almost evil. This feeling in its acutest form lasted only a moment; it passed, but there still remained the vague depression.

"I don't know how you feel," said she to the others, "but I'd like to go back to the _Lorna_ for a while and rest. We've succeeded, haven't we? Everything is as it should be? But it's a bit overpowering at first. It wants getting used to."

"I was just feeling the same," said Bobby. "I want to sit down and think and smoke a pipe over it."

"Right!" said Sam.

He altered the helm, and, the rowers taking to their oars, the boat turned and headed due west across the sparkling water. The skipper of the _Lorna Doone_, without admitting it, had seen enough for the present moment. The thing wanted getting used to, and he was silent as he steered, an unlit pipe between his teeth.

It was Bowler who spoke. He was rowing stern oar.

"How long do you think them old houses has been sunk, sir?" asked Bowler, addressing Bobby.

"Ages ago," said Bobby, waking from a reverie. "Ages before William the Conqueror landed in England, and that's a good many years, Bowler."

"Would it be a hundred, sir?"

"Yes, and more than that."

Bowler, satisfied in his mind on this point, spoke no more, and the boat creaked on reaching the _Lorna_, where they scrambled on board.

Later, getting on for sundown, Bobby, who had come on deck, leaving the others resting below, heard voices from the fo'c'sle. The whole crew, Glastonbury included, were in the fo'c'sle smoking and talking. A furious discussion was going on, presumably on the wonders of Hyalos, and Bobby, anxious to hear what was said, paused by the fo'c'sle hatch to listen. Came Church's voice:

"It weren't, it weren't him; it was Black Jack. They wouldn't serve him no more at the _Anchor_, and he comes to the _Bull_. The girl drew him a glass, but, seein' him rockin' like a ninepin, took it back. Up he gets a knee on the bar, and over he'd 'a' been only for Benson, the landlord, who was sittin' talkin' to Hammond. Benson caught him by the foot and brought him down all standing and chucked him out, and that was the beginnin' of the whole business. Swore Benson had kicked him in the innards, he did, and got his licence took from him."

"That's so," came the deep voice of Bowler. "I was there."

So much for the wonders of Hyalos.