CHAPTER XVIII

A TERRIBLE DANGER

Next day whilst the hands were cutting grass, Bobby, who had come on shore with them and who was not wanted for the work, started on an expedition of his own.

Hyalos from far at sea, to the west looks like a single rock washed by the waves, closer and to the north you can see a high down by the peak, and the beach seems just a strip of foreshore, but when you land it is different, the beach is broad and the high lands are broken showing two cañons on this the northern side.

You can in fact cross the island from north to south by taking either of these cañons which run east and west of the main peak.

Lestrange, having helped to pull the boat up, and whilst the hands were getting to work, took his seat on a rock for a moment to look at the view. The island looked nothing from the sea, but the sea seen from the island was a vision of pure enchantment. It is like that amongst the Greek islands. One world when you are on board ship, another world when you land.

The sea brimming in to the beach, the diamond-clear green-blue sea, showed scarcely a ruffle; smooth as a satin sheet, under-blown by a gentle wind it raised and let fall the _Lorna_ mirroring her and passing on to break on the beach in foot-high waves.

Then, from the cliff foot and from the cañons cutting inland a faint fragrance filled the air, the warm smell of lavender and thyme and all sorts of low-growing herbs trodden on by the sun, a bouquet sweet as that of the Corsican maquis, the incense of a hundred humble plants that in some subtle way brought back the past. It was strange to think that when Hyalos was a town standing in the sunlight and not in the sea those plants were as fragrant as to-day, the thyme just as curious in its speech and the wild lavender just as sweet. Strange, were they not denizens of a world where flesh is more enduring than the Alps and the daisy a million years older than the pyramid, and where a song may outlive a people and a story a civilisation.

Here on the north beach of Hyalos or over at Naxos or Milo, if you get by yourself with no companions but the sun and blue sea and the sky above and the perfume of the shore, a trireme coming in with the black bearded rowers keeping time to a flute would be perfectly in the picture. Nothing has altered since the change in the land level that has submerged a city and the attrition that has made the peak a shade less high than the peak observed by the Argo or the wool ships of Amorgos.

Leaving the beach and the grass cutters at their work, Lestrange came up the eastern-most cañon treading the sweet herbs under foot and avoiding the vast rocks that the course of ages had tumbled from the peak and higher lands.

A turn of the valley brought him to a place where it widened out and spread into a vast down, like the downlands above Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. It was steep climbing, yet easy compared with the stair-steep cañon, and worth the trouble, for here on the shoulder when he reached it, he found himself in a new world, a world of silence and high clear air, where the turf and thyme bushes spread to the edge of the southern cliffs and beyond the cliff edge the southern sea sailless to the remote and sharp-cut sea-line. The down sweep had only one break in it, a broad and cup-like hollow where, sheltered from the sea winds, grew a few distorted trees; near the trees something was moving--a wild goat cropping the herbage.

He sat down amidst the thyme to rest and smoke a pipe. It was delightful, just as if a door had been closed shutting out the ship and Sam and the voyage, and the hunt after hidden treasure, ambition, the past, everything he had ever known--even Martia. That was the strange thing. He never once thought of her; in this feeling of release that had come upon him there was no place for the past.

The cry of a bird from far above made him turn as he lay on his elbow and look up. An eagle that had left its eerie on the peak was wheeling in the blue, it passed away and he turned again on his side watching the goat that had left the zone of the trees and was browsing now on the grass beyond. Something lying on the turf in the centre of the depression caught his eye, it looked at first like a small tree trunk, ash-coloured and fluted--then he saw that it was part of a broken pillar. Some old temple had once been there no doubt, of which it was the sole remains.

The warmth of the sun had brought out more than the perfume of the herbage, the tiny song of innumerable insects filled the air; he only noticed it now when resting and close to the earth; occasionally the chanting of gulls came from the southern cliffs, sounds that had ringed and filled this place for ages and ages, sharing to-day in the terrible antiquity of the grass, of the thyme bushes and the hidden wild hyacinth bulbs that later would flower in the face of Spring with a shameless pretence of newness.

He was, perhaps, the first man to visit that spot since--when? The reef-strewn sea that guarded Hyalos alone could tell, and one might have fancied that all those vague scents and tiny sounds of nature so long unsampled by man had gained potency by reason of man's abstention from them. They were of the essence and nature of slumber, a drug in the air that gathered force till presently, turning from his side to his back and with his hat over his eyes, he fell asleep.

He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder; someone was shaking him and calling on him to wake up. It was Sam.

Sam had seen him go up the cañon and had come to look for him and fetch him. It was dinner time; he must have been asleep for hours.

"Wake up, you old fool," said Sam, "going to sleep in the sun like that!"

The sleeper roused himself, propped himself on his elbow and stared at the other. Then he yawned, rubbed his eyes and sat up.

Sam had wakened him from a most delightful dream; he could not remember a single detail of it, yet the after-taste was heavenly.

It seemed to him that he had been with a number of people who had been leading him to some place more beautiful than earth, that he had almost clasped an impossible happiness, the rays of which still clung to him.

"Here's your pipe and hat," said Sam. "I found them away over there--What you want fooling about and going to sleep in the sun without a hat for?"

Bobby, fully awake now, saw that he was not in the place where he had fallen asleep. He must have got up in his sleep and crossed the depression in the ground and lain down again here--led, perhaps, by those delightful people of his dream. It was well that they had led him no further for the cliff edge was only a few yards away.

"I must have been doing a sleep walk," said Bobby, quite unconcerned, "sit down a moment, there's no hurry--What you say? Rot, there was no danger. It's not the first time I've done it."

"I know," said Sam, who remembered this peculiarity of the other in Oxford days, "but it's been darned near the last time. This stuff is slippery and you stopped just where it begins to shelve. Get up, you old fool, and come on. I want my dinner."

He got him up at last, and they recrossed the hollow and got back to the beach where the men who had knocked off work for dinner were seated about with the grass they had cut that morning lying in a pile near the boat landing place.

After dinner this stuff had to be dealt with. It would have been easy enough to get it into the boat in armfuls, but the real problem was how to get it from the boat on the _Lorna_. It would have to be lifted. They solved the problem by making it into bundles, this took time--it took them till four o'clock, when by common consent they knocked off work for the day.

It was curious how this alien business had tired the hands and put them out of temper, even Bowler the proposer of it was short in manner and Sam was not too sweet about it.

The skipper of the _Lorna_, though he had fallen in with Bowler's suggestion, before the accomplished fact resented his ship being turned into a hay barge; that the hay was to be used to pack antiques, not to feed horses, was a fact that made no difference to him--he objected to the hay. Sailors are queer things, especially small-yacht sailors, and at supper when the question was touched on he refused to take it as a joke.

"I'm sure I don't know what is wrong with the place," said Martia. "You're all come back in such a bad temper--all except you," she finished, turning to Bobby.

"No reason to," said Sam. "He's had the whole morning off snoozing on top of that blessed downs...."

"It was such a relief to get rid of you," replied the other. "It's a wonder I didn't stick there."

"You'd have stuck there right enough," grumbled Sam, "if you'd tumbled over that cliff." Then lighting his pipe, off he went on deck, leaving the others to finish their meal.

"What cliff?" asked Martia.

"Oh, Sam's an idiot," replied Bobby, "there wasn't any danger. I climbed up to the top there and went to sleep on the grass, and I must have got up and walked a bit in my sleep--I've done it before, and I expect it was finding myself on land and able to use my legs that made me do it. You must come up there to-morrow and see that place, it's just like the Sussex downs when you get there."

"The Sussex downs?"

"Yes, you'd never believe it from here, the land goes rolling away to the cliffs on the south side and there are wild goats and there's a temple."

"A temple?"

Bobby paused for a moment. "No, what was I saying, a temple, there's just a bit of an old pillar lying on the ground--I remember now, I dreamt something about a temple being there, I suppose it was the sight of that pillar started the idea in my mind. I had a most awfully jolly dream. I can't remember a bit of it except that temple which has just cropped up in my mind." He paused and fell into a frowning reverie as though trying to recapture other parts of that jolly dream and failing.

"No, it's gone--clean."

"Maybe," said Martia, "you saw what once had been there."

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know--things leave photographs of themselves, at least I believe they do. I was told some time ago by a person who said the story was absolutely true, that an old farmer was coming home one night over the downs somewhere on the south coast, where there had been a Roman camp. When he got home he said he had seen the funniest sight on the way--a race between a lot of milk carts."

"Milk carts?"

"That's what he said. What he did see without any doubt was a chariot race."

"A chariot race?"

"What else could it have been? A Roman chariot would at once recall a milk-cart to a farmer's mind."

"But surely," said Bobby, "you don't believe that nonsense?"

"Why not? We know very little about this world and its possibilities--and now if you have done, I'll clear up. Yes, I'll go and see that place with you, to-morrow. I'd love to."