The Island Treasure Part 13

"Vo'c's'le ahoy!" shouted the second-mate, his deep, manly tones at once putting fresh courage into all of us, and making the men pull themselves together and start up eager for action, abandoning all their craven fears. "How vas it mit yous vorvarts! Ze sheep, I zink, vas in ze deep vater astern."

"I'll soon tell you, sir," cried Tom Bullover in answer, jumping to the side in a jiffey, with a coil of the lead line, which he took from the main chains, where it was fastened. "I'll heave the lead, and you shall have our soundings in a brace of shakes, sir!"

With that he clambered into the rigging, preparatory to carrying out his intention; but he had no sooner got into the shrouds than he discovered his task was useless.

"There's no need to sound, sir," he sang out; "the s.h.i.+p's high and dry ash.o.r.e up to the foremast, and there ain't more than a foot or two of water aft of that, as far as I can see."

"Thunder!" roared out the skipper, who had in the meantime come up again on the p.o.o.p from the cuddy, where he and the first-mate had no doubt been drowning their fright during the darkness with their favourite panacea, rum, leaving the entire control of the s.h.i.+p after she struck to Jan Steenbock. "Air thet so?"

"I says what I sees," replied Tom Bullover brusquely, he, like most of the hands, being pretty sick by now of the captain's drunken ways, and pusillanimous behaviour in leaving the deck when the vessel and all on board were in such deadly peril; "and if you don't believe me, why, you can look over the side and judge where the s.h.i.+p is for yerself!"

Captain Snaggs made no retort; but, moving to the port bulwarks from the companion hatchway, where he had been standing, followed Tom's suggestion of looking over the side, which indeed all of us, impelled by a similar curiosity, at once did.

It was as my friend the carpenter had said.

The _Denver City_ was for more than two-thirds of her length high and dry ash.o.r.e on a sandy beach, that looked of a brownish yellow in the moonlight, with her forefoot resting between two hillocks covered with some sort of scrub. This prevented her from falling over broadside on, as she was sh.o.r.ed up just as if she had been put into dry dock for caulking purposes; although, unfortunately, she was by no means in such a comfortable position, nor were we on board either, as if she had been in a s.h.i.+pbuilder's yard, with more civilised surroundings than were to be found on a desert sh.o.r.e like this!

Her bilge abaft under the mizzen-chains was just awash; and, the water, deepening from here, as the sh.o.r.e shelved somewhat abruptly, was about the depth of four fathoms or thereabouts by the rudder post, where the bottom could be seen, of soft, s.h.i.+ning white sand, without a rock in sight--so far, at least, as we were able to notice in the pale greenish moonlight, by which we made our observations as well as we could, and with some little difficulty, too.

"Guess we're in a pretty tight fix," said Captain Snaggs, after peering up and down alongside for some time, Tom Bullover in the interim taking the hand lead with him on to the p.o.o.p and sounding over the taffrail at the deepest part. "We can't do nuthin', though, I reckon, till daylight, an' ez we're hard an' fast, an' not likely to float off, I'll go below an' turn in till then. Mister Steenbock, ye'd better pipe the hands down an' do ditter, I guess, fur thaar's no use, I ken see, in stoppin' up hyar an' doin' nuthin'."

"Yous can go below; I vill keep ze vatch," replied the second-mate, with ill-concealed contempt, as the skipper shuffled off down the companion way again, back to his orgy with the equally drunken Flinders, who had not once appeared on deck, after perilling the s.h.i.+p through his obstinacy in putting her on the course that had led to our being driven ash.o.r.e.

The very first shock of the earthquake, indeed, which we felt before the tidal wave caught us, had been sufficient to frighten him from the p.o.o.p even before the darkness enveloped us and the final catastrophe came!

As for Jan Steenbock, he remained walking up and down the deck as composedly as if the poor _Denver City_ was still at sea, instead of being cooped up now, veritably, like a fish out of water, on dry land.

He did not abandon his post, at any rate!

After a while, though, he acted on the skipper's cowardly advice so far as to tell the starboard watch to turn in, which none of the men were loth to do, for the moon was presently obscured by a thick black cloud, and a torrent of heavy tropical rain quickly descending made most of us seek shelter in the fo'c's'le.

Here I soon fell asleep, utterly wearied out, not only from standing about so long, having been on my legs ever since the early morning when I lit the galley fire, but also quite overcome with all the excitement I had gone through.

I awoke with a start.

The sun was s.h.i.+ning brightly through the open scuttle of the fo'c's'le and it was broad daylight.

It was not this that had roused me, though; for, habituated as I now was to the ways of sailor-folk, it made little difference to me whether I slept by day or night so long as I had a favourable opportunity for a comfortable caulk. Indeed, my eyes might have been 'scorched out,' as the saying is, without awaking me.

It was something else that aroused me,--an unaccustomed sound which I had not heard since I left home and ran away to sea.

It was the cooing of doves in the distance.

"Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c-o-o!"

I heard it as plainly as possible, just as the plaintive sound used to catch my ear from the wood at the back of the vicarage garden in the old times, when I loved to listen to the bird's love call--those old times that seemed so far off in the perspective of the past, and yet were only two years at most agone!

Why, I must be dreaming, I thought.

But, no; there came the soft, sweet cooing of the doves again.

"Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c-o-o!"

Thoroughly roused at last, I jumped out of the bunk I occupied next Hiram, who was still fast asleep, with a lot of the other sailors round him snoring in the fo'c's'le; and rubbing my eyes with both knuckles, to further convince myself of being wide awake, I crawled out from the fore-hatchway on to the open deck.

But, almost as soon as I stepped on my feet, I was startled, for all the starboard side, which was higher than the other, from the list the s.h.i.+p had to port, was covered, where the rain had not washed it away, with a thick deposit of brown, sandy loam, like snuff; while the scuppers aft, where everything had been washed by the deluge that had descended on the decks, were choked up with a muddy ma.s.s of the same stuff, forming a big heap over a foot high. I could see, too, that the snuffy dust had penetrated everywhere, hanging on the ropes, and in places where the rain had not wetted it, like powdery snow, although of a very different colour.

Recollecting the earthquake of the previous evening, and all that I had heard and read of similar phenomena, I ascribed this brown, dusty deposit to some volcanic eruption in the near neighbourhood.

This, I thought, likewise, was probably the cause, as well, of the unaccountable darkness that enveloped the s.h.i.+p at the time we experienced the shock; but, just then, I caught, a sight of the land over the lee bulwarks, and every other consideration was banished by this outlook on the strange scene amidst which we were so wonderfully placed.

If our surroundings appeared curious by the spectral light of the moon last night, they seemed doubly so now.

The glaring tropical sun was blazing already high up in the heavens, whose bright blue vault was unflecked by a sc.r.a.p of cloud to temper the solar rays, while a brisk breeze, blowing in from the south-west, gave a feeling of freshness to the air and raised a little wave of surf, that broke on the beach with a rippling splash far astern; the cooing of the doves in the distance chiming in musically with the lisp of the surge's lullaby.

But, the land!

It was stranger than any I had ever seen.

The high mountain on our left, looked quite as lofty by day as it had done the night before, two thousand feet or more of it towering up into the sky.

It was evidently the crater peak of an old extinct volcano; for, it was shaped like a hollow vase, with the side next the sea washed away by the south-west gales, which, as I subsequently learnt, blew during the rainy season in the vicinity of this equatorial region.

At the base of the cliff was a mound of lava, interspersed with tufts of tufa and gra.s.s, that spread out to where the sloping, sandy beach met it; and this was laved further down by the transparent water of the little sheltered harbour formed by the outer edge of the peak and the other lower projecting cliff that extended out into the sea on the starboard side of the s.h.i.+p--the two making a semicircle and almost meeting by the lava mound at the base of the broken crater, there not being more than a couple of cables length between them.

Most wonderful to me was the fact of the s.h.i.+p having been carried so providentially through such a narrow opening, without coming to grief on the Scylla on the one hand, or being dashed to pieces against the Charybdis on the other.

More wonderful still, though, was the sight the sh.o.r.e presented, as I moved closer to the gangway, and, looking down over the bulwarks, inspected the foreground below.

It was like a stray vista of some antediluvian world.

Near the edge of the white sand--on which the s.h.i.+p was lying like a stranded whale, with her prow propped up between two dunes, or hillocks, that wore up to the level of her catheads--was a row of stunted trees without a leaf on them, only bare, skeleton branches; while on the other side of these was a wide expanse of barren brown earth, or lava, utterly dest.i.tute of any sign of vegetation.

Then came a grove of huge cacti, whose fleshy, spiked branches had the look of so many wooden hands, or glove stretchers, set up on end; and beyond these again were the more naturally-wooded heights, leading up to the summit of the mountain peak.

The trees, I noticed, grew more luxuriantly and freely here, appearing to be of much larger size, as they increased their distance from the sterile expanse of the lower plain; until, at the top of the ascent, they formed a regular green crest covering the upper edge of the crater and sloping side of the outstretching arm of cliff on our right, whose mantle of verdure and emerald tone contrasted pleasantly with the bright blue of the sky overhead and the equally blue sea below, the latter fringed with a line of white surf and coral sand along the curve of the sh.o.r.e.

This outer aspect of the scene, however, was not all.

Right under my eyes, waddling along the beach, and rearing themselves on their hind legs to feed on the leaves of the cactus, which they nibbled off in huge mouthfuls, were a lot of enormous tortoises, or land turtles, of the terrapin tribe, that were really the most hideous monsters I had ever seen in my life. Several large lizards also were crawling about on the lava and basking in the sun, and a number of insects and queer little birds of a kind I never heard of.

All was strange; for, although I could still catch the cooing of the doves away in the woods in the distance, there was nothing familiar to my sight near.

While I was reflecting on all these wonders, and puzzling my brains as to where we could possibly be, the second-mate, whom I had noticed still on the p.o.o.p when I came out from the fo'c's'le, as if he had remained up there on watch all night, came to my side and addressed me.

"Everyzing's sdrange, leedel boys, hey?"

"Yes, sir," said I. "I was wondering what part of the world we could be in."