CHAPTER XXXII.
HELL SHORE.
But the dread geyser gave no light, and the darkness about me was black. I could see neither the Doctor nor Ambrose; and, when I called to them, there came no answer.
Suddenly something leapt forth from the thicket and seized hold on me. It was a man; it was Thalass.
“Quickly! Quickly!” cried he. “I keep you safe! I have boat!”
Hereupon he began to hurry me along faster and faster.
The air became sulphurous and laden with heated dust and ashes. A rumbling, low and ominous, sounded intermittently from the region of the volcan. The woods were full of the crying of terrified beasts; and presently, from afar, came the voices of men.
The darkness became tinged with a ruddy glow. A fierce roaring sound arose. I looked up, to see that all about the volcan, which continued to belch forth fire, the woods were kindled and roaring in a holocaust.
Scouring hard behind the Indian, I presently descended with him a gully of the cliff, coming safe to the shore. There he led me to a cave, wherein lay housed a little, stout cockle-boat, hewn all out of a great tree-trunk. In the stern was a leathern sack full of bread, and a jar of water. I helped him to hale her down the narrow strip of shore. The breakers foamed and gnashed like things possessed.
And now began the island to quake and to be shaken to pieces: the cliffs split in flaws and fissures, with stupendous sounds; the roar that came to us from the woodland bespoke a deluge of fire, over which, no doubt, the volcan reared high its infernal plume.
“Quickly! Quickly!” cried Thalass, when the boat was gotten down. “Get ’e in! Get ’e in! Her good fine boat! No sink! no break! I made ’e, fine! beautiful!”
“But you?” said I; “there’s no room.”
For I perceived that the little boat would hold but one.
But there came a dreadful thundering of the cliff, and fragments of rock fell about us like hail. Lifting me bodily into the boat, Thalass launched her forth, running out through the breakers, and giving her at the last a mighty impulse. I beheld for a moment his stern, hard-favoured face shining like bronze in the livid light--and saw it no more for ever!
Tossed in the turmoil of the boiling sea, the boat blundered out beyond the breakers, vaulting nimbly over the surges. I clutched her sides, seared and scalded and near stifled with the smoke and fiery spume and dust that blew whirling down upon me from the erupting and burning island. A giddiness came over me. I fought against it hard, with shut eyes, bringing the whole force of my will on the resolve to endure and live.
_There came the sound of singing._
The roar of the holocaust in the woods was abated, the wind coming about from the sea; the cliffs, for a space, had ceased to thunder; and, faint and small, but clear and serene and bewitching sweet, there sounded that phantom voice singing.
Struck out of myself with amazement, I forgot all my peril as I listened.
And thus it was:
Stay not in the land of sighing, Stay not in the vale of tears; Where the phantom of the years Haunts the weary and the dying: Lo! the Island of the Holy; Hie you hither presently, From a land of melancholy, From a land of misery.
Straining my eyes upon the livid-looming cliffs vaulted with fire, I made out a meagre form standing upon the shore.
As the singing ceased, there came a sheet of light, a tongue of flame, that, serpent-like, wound coiling down; and then I saw the singer. _’Twas the skeleton antic lad!_
For a moment, the lull in the Inferno-storm continued. Then, on a sudden, there came a stupendous loud report; and, wave upon wave, and sheet upon sheet, a sulphurous blue flame swept, coiling and writhing, down the face of the cliff, down upon the little lad!
It leapt upon him; it lapt him round in clinging, entwining wraiths; it encircled his floating hair with tongues of flame. Thus, for a moment, he stood transfigured; and then came the end!
A giant boulder crashed from the summit of the lofty cliff headlong down; and, rebounding upon a spur of rock that projected almost to the place where the lad stood, it took him upon the head, and on the instant killed him.
But this was a merciful thing. For, hard upon the falling boulder, there came an avalanche, an avalanche of molten stone!
It roared down the cliff; it swept over the shore. At its touch, the sea reared madly up in an appalling great wave, hissing out clouds of steam that veiled the livid light.
And upon me then there had fallen a dreadful fate: to be whelmed in burning lava!
I saw it coming, the wave of torment and of death. I gazed with a horrid fascination on its livid front, livid and black and shimmering like silver slime; and that instant was swollen thousandfold with agony.
In the next, by a sudden strong rebuff of the clashing seas, my boat was jerked slanting up, and cast upon the beakhead of the pirate barque!
She had lasked away from her moorings; and, unchecked by her drunken and amazed custodians, had blundered round to save me.
THE END.
SUPPLEMENT.
_The manner of my preservation from the Haunted Island, as well as other particulars, may seem to many of my readers incredible; and some, perhaps, will not stickle to brand the whole relation as a fabulous tale._
_I can only say, and I do aver it, that herein I have set down nothing but what really fell out in my experience, described nothing but what I really saw in my brief sojourn on the island; which is a misfortune one way, leaving some things inevitably obscure._
_As to what happened to me after my escape in the pirate barque, ’tis beyond the drift of my relation, since nothing further transpired concerning the island itself. Indeed, as I believe, ’twas not only utterly devastated by that dreadful eruption and conflagration, but sunk to the bottom of the sea. And, as one returned from those parts did tell me, there goes a rumour amongst seafaring men of an enchanted island at the bottom of the sea. Perchance it was set on foot by those pirates who escaped with me; for, certainly, we alone survived._
_I owed my preservation from their hands at first, mainly to the fact that they were always fuddled with drink; like a drunken ship, she drove, in fair weather and foul, with only her topsails abroad, our course (if a course it can be called), being generally westward. At length, after many days, and when both our drink and victuals were nigh consumed, we drove blundering ashore upon an unknown and uninhabited island._
_This brought the pirates to their senses; and, having no more drink to befuddle themselves with, they began to amend, and took thought how to preserve their lives. In this time also, they took a notion into their superstitious heads, that ’twas for my sake they had been miraculously preserved, so that I was, as it were, the contrary to a Jonah unto them._
_The ship had grounded on a shoal, in calm weather; and, not being stuck very fast, we contrived to float her off. Having anchored her, we went all on shore, to fill our jars and to lade cocoanuts and plantains, and afterwards loosed to sea again, committing ourselves to the conduct of God. For there was not a navigator among us, and we had quite lost our reckoning._
_At length, we came to another island, where we anchored again, filled our jars, and laded more cocoanuts and plantains; and so on from island to island: sometimes suffering dreadful privations in the vaste desolate sea, when we despaired in our minds of seeing land ever any more; sometimes at imminent peril of our lives from savages and cannibals--yet marvellously preserved, until, at last, having wandered about for above two years, by the mercy of God, we came to the Island of Mindanao of the Philippine Islands; whence we stretched across to the coast of China, towards the Isle of Macao._
_Here was a Portuguese ship about to sail, and I went on board of her. But the pirates remained behind._
_From Lisbon I got me a passage to Plymouth; and so home to Clayton Manor, where, with my father, the Squire, I dwell unto this day._
(I thank Mr. N. W. Physick for his drawing of a King’s ship.--E. H. Visiak.)
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FOOTNOTES:
[A] Madras.
[B] How the Englishman would have grieved if he had known that the Mosquito Indians, faithful to the last, would be betrayed, to their fate, by the English Government into the hands of the Spaniards: in 1787.
[C] How this white light was contrived I never could learn. (Original footnote.)
_Perhaps by means of a radio-active earth discovered by Doctor Copicus._
[D] _This gully could not have been the ravine by which Clayton and Thalass ascended in their shore adventure. The gully must have been farther north._
[E] _The episode of the cut cable and the driving ship remains obscure. The many indraughts of water caused by the creeks and waterfalls on this side of the island, however, must have occasioned many currents converging upon the shore. Accordingly, the cutting of the cable, or cables, of a ship anchored within the current-zone (the wind being subservient, or neutral), would cause that ship to drive ashore._
[F] _Perhaps the explosion of the “grain” of the Doctor’s “combustible” which had “wrought the convulsion,” had, at the same time, released the pent-up forces of the “volcan.”_
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.