Beyond the Rim/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE DEAD MAN OF MOTUTABU
THE island of Motutabu was shaped like a broad-bladed sickle, the lagoon lying in the crook of the steel with low hills, thickly set with foliage, rising irregularly behind the emerald water patched with purple where the humps of coral came close to the surface. The handle of the sickle showed as a high, precipitous ridge, crowned with the clustering palms that Chalmers had first seen rise above the horizon.
Down the cliff fell a narrow white plume of water. From the tip of the crescent blade to the shoulder handle ran the line of the reef, accented here and there with creaming surf. Up to the barrier the free sea held the rich blue of a peacock's breast.
There was no sign of human life. A few birds wheeled above the hills, and once a flight of gulls scattered over the ridge like blossoms in a gale, and went soaring seaward bent on breakfast.
The dawn wind was fair from the sea, though light. Chalmers hauled in his sheets, dropped foresail and skirted the reef, looking for an opening.
Sayers and Tuan Yuck, the former in a high state of excitement, the latter impassive as ever, both scanned the shore line through binoculars, while Chalmers, setting his feet in the rings of the mainsail and grasping the halyards, mounted to the crotch of the main gaff, resigning the wheel to Hamaku, as he prepared to con the Aku in. His voice came clearly from aloft in the quiet morning air.
“Come up a bit, Hamaku. Little more. Steady. Tomi, come in on your mainsheet. Lend a hand there, Sayers, will you? Keep her up, Hamaku. There's a shore current. Stand by to let go the anchor. Down staysail, Sayers! Smartly. There's a back draft from the point.”
The Aku glided through the reef passage into the broad lagoon, the chain rattled out and the anchor struck, holding bottom in eight fathoms.
“Give her three fathoms of slack, Tomi,” called Chalmers, and slid down the halyards to the deck again.
“Chap must be asleep,” said Sayers. “What the devil's that?”
His exclamation was echoed by cries from Tomi and Hamaku, who threw themselves face down on the deck, lamenting loudly—
“Awwe, ke aitu!” (Alas, the ghosts!)
Even Tuan Yuck had started at the sight, and Chalmers stared in bewilderment. From the shore all about them came blinding flashes of light in rapid succession, as if a battery had suddenly been unmasked.
There was no sound, no sign, only the silent hostility of unwinking flares. Despite himself, Chalmers felt imaginary hair-lifting along his spine. Then, one after the other, the glares were swiftly extinguished.
“What d'ye make of those?” asked Sayers. “Signals?”
Hamaku, still prostrate, broke into a torrent of Hawaiian. Sayers translated.
“He says there are spirits on the island lighting ghost fires.”
The Australian himself seemed to half believe the superstition. A memory of Stevenson's stories of South Sea wizards burning fires that had no visible fuel flashed across Chalmers' recollection.
“Nonsense, Hamaku,” he said. “No pilikia (trouble). Aitu no good along haole (white man).”
The natives raised their heads above the rail and looked fearfully shoreward. Perhaps the Kapitani was right. May be the aitus were afraid of the white man. It might be.
Suddenly they howled again. A secondary line of dazzling lights above the first, back in the hills, broke instantly out in brilliant flame. For two or three minutes they glared, too vivid for eyes to meet, then died away. Tuan Yuck set down his glasses.
“Reflections of some sort, picking up the sun,” he announced. “There were none in the shadow.”
Sayers sighed with visible relief.
“My nerves are in rotten shape,” he said, wiping off the sweat from his forehead.
“Obsidian cliffs, I fancy,” said Tuan Yuck. “Volcanic glass. I've seen something like it before. Nothing like this though.”
The two natives plucked up courage as they sensed the mood of their masters, and the minutes passed without any hostile demonstration from the ghosts or further display of the weird lights. But they absolutely refused to go ashore.
“We'll have to leave them aboard,” said Chalmers. “I suppose we all three want to go. We'd better take our rifles and automatics.”
Sayers came up from below, steadied by his universal stimulant, refusing the coffee that Tuan Yuck prepared and shared with Chalmers.
The two white men pulled ashore with the Chinaman sitting in the stern, a Winchester across his knees. Sayers tugged at his oar, setting a hard pace even for Chalmers, and the whaleboat made rapid progress over the quiet lagoon. They spoke little, and then in whispers as seemed to befit the occasion.
“Chap must be asleep, I fancy,” said Sayers. “We'll be a surprise party. Funny he isn't on the lookout. He must be getting anxious by now over his own outfit.”
“There's a pile of shell over there,” announced Tuan Yuck. “They've done some rotting out. If the wind had been offshore we'd have noticed it before from the smell.”
He leaned over the side of the boat as they neared the beach, a covetous look in his eyes, as he estimated the possible value of the shell that lay undisturbed on the floor of the lagoon, brilliant sea shrubbery waving about the patches, primary-colored fishes darting away as the boat passed over them.
Chalmers' mind was on the marooned captain, sleeping unconscious of his rescuers close at hand. Sayers and Tuan Yuck shared one thought—pearls. That betrayed itself in Sayers' nervous tugs at his oar, and a certain feverish glitter in the Oriental's eyes.
The keel slid softly over the white sand and they sprang out, hauling the boat up the slight incline out of tide reach, their rifles at the carry, hurried with long strides across the beach amid scuttling, rustling land-crabs toward the pandanus and palmetto scrub that shod the hills.
To their right mangroves apparently masked a swamp, and perhaps the exit of a stream. To their left the beach was strewn with irregular masses of coral. They had chosen the only practical landing-place.
With the exception of the faint screams of birds high in the hills, the place seemed invested with a strange silence, that infected them with a feeling of mystery. As they neared the scrub they insensibly slackened their pace.
The quiet was uncanny, utterly at variance with all preconceived ideas of a rescue party. The half-explained incident of the blinding flares still held them to caution. A shout to awaken the supposedly solitary inhabitant might bring a rush of savages or a shower of spears and arrows.
Chalmers, scouting to one side, stopped and beckoned to the Chinaman.
“Here's your volcanic glass,” he said.
He had stopped at a mirror propped against a block of coral, a warped looking-glass, cheaply framed, of the type used for trading purposes. Its surface had caught the rising rays of the sun as they had dropped anchor in the lagoon.
“That's a clever idea,” said Tuan Yuck. “The man knows his South Seas. You saw how it affected our boys. He's set these all about the place on exposed ledges to catch the sun and leave him undisturbed by the natives. They're not particularly friendly in these waters, and there may be other islands nearer than we imagine. I suppose he has them placed so as to catch the sun all the day round. The man has brains.”
Tuan Yuck's masklike face never seemed to change, but a certain quality of hardness entered his glance that indicated his recognition of the brain quality of the captain of the shipwrecked Manu did not have his unqualified approval. It simply meant a harder bargain to drive.
Sayers came hurriedly toward them. “There's a house back in the pandanus!” he cried excitedly. “And a tent behind it. No one in sight, though.”
THEY turned and entered the scrub. The house stood in a little clearing beneath a clump of hala that had been left for shade. It was a cozy portable dwelling, that had evidently been shipped for the purpose in hand. Its original roof was supplemented by a thick thatch of dried palm-leaves for coolness. Just back of it showed a small tent with a fly roof against the heat.
The place looked eminently practical and comfortable, yet it, too, appeared invested with unnatural silence. There is a quality of humanity that links itself with man's habitation in lonely places that is unmistakable. Tent and house seemed alike deserted. Something of mystery the trio could not fathom emanated from the spot, intangible, illogical, but plainly making itself felt.
The natural impulse would have been to shout a welcome, but the three men almost tiptoed to the little veranda. Tuan Yuck noiselessly mounted the steps and knocked on the door softly, then with a vigorous tattoo of his knuckles. There was no answer.
If there had been, it would have startled them as unexpected. The window was draped with a lapa cloth of mulberry bark that did not quite cover it. The Chinaman stooped and looked through the opening. Chalmers and Sayers still stood on the level ground watching him.
“There's a man lying on the bed,” he said, and kept on peering into the room.
Then he straightened up with determination, and the mystery of the occasion seemed to drop from his shoulders.
“Come on,” he said abruptly, opening the unlocked door and leading the way into the house.
The room was one of two, a wooden partition dividing them. It was furnished with a pine bureau, a rough table, two wooden chairs, and a sea-chest under the window. An iron bedstead was in one corner. Clothes hung from hooks, here and there. On the chest a diving-suit was laid.
Tuan Yuck pulled down the tapa from the window and the rays of the early sun entered, irradiating the room, leveling their direct strength upon the bed where the figure of a bearded man lay in the rigidity that unmistakably revealed the hand of death.