The Secret of the Stone-Oven Country

by Beatrice Grimshaw

 

THE SECRET
of the
STONE-OVEN COUNTRY

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Wherein the Marquis turns Sorcerer

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By

BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

AUTHOR OF “VAITI OF THE ISLANDS,” “WHEN THE RED GODS CALL," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES SARKA

THE Marquis and I sat on the hot, black sand of Kara Bay and tried to realize that we were shipwrecked.

It was not easy. There was the calm, blue, burning sea in front of us; there was the ruffle of foam on the coral reef, a mile or two out from the beach. There were the sea-hawks, hovering and veering, just as they had been doing an hour or two ago when we had left the little coastal steamer for a stroll on shore while some small trouble in the engine-room was repaired. And there—was not—the Waiwera.

With our own eyes we had seen her get under steam again; start to make a little closer in shore before putting out her boat to fetch us off; strike the ill-charted reef bow on, and go down in the deep water outside like a tin can that fills and sinks in a well.

It was so quick that they had not even time to sling the boat out. The reef, with its long knife-edges, had ripped her open from end to end—she was overloaded with ore from a new mine near Samarai; she was a crank little boat at best, and as for water-tight compartments, you might as soon have expected electric light, or cold storage, or a satinwood grand piano made to turn into a high altar for Sunday services, such as they have on the western ocean liners. There were no frills of any kind about the Waiwera. When she hit, she went down and made no fuss about it.

The Marquis and I saw the whole thing, there on the beach two miles away. We heard the rattle of the engines as they broke loose and plunged when she up-ended. We heard the piteous cry, thin and faint with distance, that rose to an unpitying heaven as the decks went under water. After that there was nothing any more, just the blue sea and the burning sky and the circling and hovering bronze sea-hawks, busy with their fishing again....

“Is it real?” asked the Marquis, his hands flat on the sand supporting his huge body, his eyes staring, like the fixed eyes of a doll, out to the empty sea. “Flint, what shall a man say when he sees a thing like that? This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men encounter death out there at one's eyes and sit and look as calm as this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no emotion no more than me.”

“We're neither of us mad, or bad either,” I said. “We'll be sorry enough when we've had time to realize that poor old Tommy Gregg is gone, and Jensen and the rest; but we're shipwrecked ourselves, and in a bit of a fix, Marky, and that's going to take all our thinking for some time.”

“Where are we?” asked the Marquis, looking round.

It was not a pretty bit of scenery. Kara Bay is the sort of place a man might go to die in, if he felt like it, but it is not the sort of place any one would ever want to live in. As a matter of fact, no one ever has lived there.

The bay is like a black-lip shell, in curve and in color. The sand is like powdered cinder to look at, and as hot as the innocent-looking iron door of a furnace to feel. Behind comes a belt of poisonous painty-green low bush; behind that again, forest, so dark and tangled that it shows black even at midday. The whole place has a deadly, fungoid sort of look, as if it had sprung up in a night out of the heat and rain and general decay and never had been, or could be, natural and normal in its growth.

I knew where we were well enough, and did not like the knowledge. The Waiwera, on her voyage to join a North-German Lloyd boat at Wilhelmshafen, ran along a lonely and unfrequented coast; and the loneliest, most unfrequented, and most generally undesirable bit was the bit where the Marquis and I had been marooned—here in Kara Bay with a suit of clothes apiece, two revolvers, a few dozen cartridges, two tins of meat, and a paper bag of biscuits.

The Marquis, of course, did not quite understand how bad a fix we were in. I did, and I had no time to spare for anything but consideration of our case.

Kara Bay is a hundred miles or more from anywhere along the coast. The sea-line is precipitous thereabout; there is no easy beach to follow, as in the western country. A boat is your only chance. But when you have no boat?

The Kara River runs into the sea close at hand. It comes from the Kiloki Range, a rampart of rock and forest eleven thou sand feet high. It is a succession of rapids and falls. I knew all about the Kara River: no help there.

Behind the Kiloki Range you strike down toward country that is at least known, if not inhabited. There is a Government station there. I calculated it to be something like sixty miles away from us in a direct line—a fortnight's journey over those mountains, if we were lucky. It seemed to be the Kiloki Range or nothing. We wanted about forty carriers with food and tents and trade goods, and we wanted maps and field-glasses and compasses and rifles and shotguns and ammunition, to take the journey as most people in Papua take such trips. But as we were not likely to get any of these things on the black-sand beach of Kara Bay, it was up to us to try what we could do without them. Or else stop there and die.

That was what I told the Marquis, not exaggerating the seriousness of our situation, but not making little of it. He listened patiently and sighed. I really do not think any one, even a man who knew him as I did, could have anticipated what he would reply.

“Flint, my very good friend,” he said, twisting both ends of his mustache at once, “that which I chiefly regret in the affair is that it shall now' be so many weeks that we shall see no white woman. And look, on the Norddeutscher Lloyd we should in three or four days have been sitting at the feet of many beautiful ladies, and they should have said politenesses—what do you say?—smooged us greatly, because of the horrors we have encountered. I regret to lose that. Also, I begin to feel that this sacred pig of a diamond has made us enough adventure already.”

“You don't suppose it was the Sorcerer's Stone sunk the Waiwera?” I said.

“I don't know, but I think it's confoundably likely,” said the Marquis, putting up his hand to the string that ran round his fat neck. “She brought us adventure, yes, adventure, that diamond, and she brings us more. And Flint, my friend, there comes the time, after all, when the rolling stone maketh the heart sick. Don't you think it?”

“I reckon this isn't just the time to think it, if I do,” I said. “We may get through this, and we mayn't, Marky.”

“Is it so bad as that?”

“Just so bad,” I said.

The Marquis looked out at the sea, lying blue and calm above our late companions' grave. He then produced a large white silk handkerchief embroidered with a coronet at the corner, spread it between his two hands, and deliberately began to shed tears.

I was long past being astonished at anything that he might do. I watched him, reasonably certain that my statement of our difficulties had nothing to do with his emotion. He cried quite simply and unaffectedly for a minute or two. Then he stopped, wiped his eyes and face with the handkerchief, and said:

“I have wept them who died. I am finished. Lead on”—adding, as an afterthought: “It is a magnificent embroidery on that handkerchief. It was made for me by a little beautiful who loved me. Shall I tell you of her?”

“I'd be delighted, another time,” I answered. “Just now we have to think of how we're ever going to get back again to the 'beautifuls' who love us both. Marky, you and I have got to get up and travel, right now. Do you see those mountains up there?”

“That range of enchanting beauty? Yes.”

“I hope you'll go on thinking it beautiful. We've got to cross it before we die of starvation or fever. Our lunch that we brought from the steamer is going to last us a good while.”

“We will depart at once,” said the Marquis, lifting his huge bulk lightly enough from the ground and drawing himself up, like a soldier on parade. “March!”

{dhr{}} It was the wild pig, I think, that saved our lives—and, at the same time, nearly caused their loss.

We were three days from the beach, well up into the Kiloki Range, but almost broken down with hardship and short commons, when we chanced upon the brute in a gully and shot it with our revolvers. We cut it up and set a leg to roast; the savory smell spread far into the forest; and, as we soon had reason to know, ours were not the only nostrils that perceived it.

When the leg was done, we stuffed. No food could be carried far in that climate, and the more we ate the less we lost. We were both greasy with the richness of the meat; our hands were slippery, our faces shining, and, I think, our hearts felt stouter than they had done for the last forty-eight hours.

“Another one, my Flint; make hay while the iron is hot,” counseled the Marquis, filling his own mouth to speechlessness. He was sitting opposite me as he spoke, and I saw his face grow suddenly swelled; the eyes started out, the cheeks became puffy. At first I thought he was choking; then I guessed he was trying to say something; then I knew that he had seen something, and I turned round like a shot.

Behind us, looking, as savages in the bush always do, just as if they had grown there instead of arriving, were ten or a dozen ugly heads, fixed quite still in the underbrush. The tips of a number of spears showed up in the tangled green beside them. They were an unpleasant crew: their foreheads sloped enormously, making them look scarcely human; their hair was trained in greasy curls that fell far back and increased the beast-like angle of the face. Their black-and-white eyes looked steadily at us out of their brown faces, and the look was that of savage man, near, yet ten thousand æons of evolution distant. Across the gulf, what thought could travel?

We got up on our feet at once, and I spoke to the men in half a dozen different languages—all the New Guinea tongues I knew anything of—hoping to find some means of communication. I was lucky enough to hit on one at last. When I got down to the Mambare tongue, one of the faces showed signs of intelligence; the others remained blank.

I explained that we were great chiefs who had lost our way; that our ship had sunk, and that we desired to go to the Government station on the other side of the range. If the men would guide us there, I said, the Government would give them any amount of treasure—salt, tobacco, knives, and tomahawks, calico-cloth.

The interpreter spoke to the others. They seemed dissatisfied, but they came out of the brush into the clearing, and we were able to see them.

“Marky,” I said, “we've got to keep our eyes skinned; these seem to be Koiroros, and they're among the worst cannibals in New Guinea. Probably they've never seen white men before, up here: it's all unexplored country.”

“Do you suppose we shall be eat?” asked the Marquis.

“Not necessarily. Cannibals aren't always eating other people. We may be able to make friends, and get them to guide us.”

With a view to this, I collected any little trifles we could spare—a tin match-box, a silk tie, a small penknife—and offered them to the tallest man, who seemed, by his demeanor, to be something of a chief.

He was a splendidly made fellow, quite naked save for a bark waist-cloth, and all hung over with shell and dog's-tooth ornaments. I looked anxiously for any trade beads in his jewelry, but didn't see any, nor had any of the party steel knives or tomahawks. They were armed, besides the spears, with stone-headed clubs and long daggers made of human thigh-bone. It seemed plain that they had had no dealings with civilized men; and this was so much the worse for us.

The chief seemed pleased with the gifts, and said something to the man who could speak Mambare. It appeared that he wanted us to come to his village, which was only a little way off. He said that he would give us guides; but I noticed that he looked at the ground as he spoke and did not face us.

“We had better go,” I told the Marquis. “I don't like making friends with natives as a rule: nine times out of ten it's a mistake—but want of tucker gives us no choice. We'll try and get carriers there and some yams to take us on.”

The way proved to be very much longer than we expected, but, tired as we both were, the sight of the village aroused us when it came into view. It was certainly one of the strangest things I had seen, even in strange New Guinea.

We were now in the midst of the high ranges, and there was no level anywhere—not so much as one could use to lay out a tennis ground. Every hill clasped hands with the next; torrents, foaming white and furious among the ferny green, cut up the ranges into a gigantic pattern of “rig and furrow.” The mountains nudged and crowded one another: their shoulders, their hips, their elbows were massed like the shoulders, hips, and elbows of a human crowd. The peaks ran up into needle-points like incredible pictures in geography books; they stuck out battlements, roofs, and buttresses into empty air; they sloped at every angle, into every shape. It was the world run through a chopping-machine and thrown out at random. And in this place, without a spot where you could set down the sole of your foot in comfort, men lived!

The village crowned the impossibility of the scene. It was exactly like a clump of enormous brown toadstools, and it was bracketed— one could not say set—on to the sides of a needle-point peak more like a church spire than anything else. The houses were mere semi-circular roofs of thatch, placed upon bamboo floors that were stuck to the mountain by piles in some incomprehensible fashion.

Up the peak of this amazing place we were guided by the Koiroros, who kept unpleasantly close about us, and seemed resolved that we should not get away from them. As nothing unprovided with wings could have got away from the mountain-men in their own country, we did not think of trying, even though it began to be unpleasantly clear that we were in reality not employers of these people, but prisoners.

The Koiroros began to sing as they approached their homes, chanting loudly and triumphantly, with an indescribable undertone of something that—as we understand the word—was not human: something that harked back to ages very near to them and very far from us.

The Marquis heard it too. Tired as he was, he managed to gasp out, as we toiled up the frightful slope:

“Flint, if you desire a proof that this Darwin of yours had reason, listen then—listen to the wild beast howling over its preys!”

“We aren't going to be any prey,” I snapped, being a little cross with fatigue. “And, anyhow, the less you talk the better. They can guess a lot from one's tone.”

But I must say, when we got into the village itself, on to the slope that seemed to take the place of its Plaza, or Place Royale, or Unter den Linden, I began to feel that we were in a tighter place than I had thought. For I saw something that I had not quite expected to see.

Dug out in the side of the hill and lined with neatly fitted stones were certain long, coffin-like holes that I knew at once for the stone ovens of the main-range people. They seemed to be nearly six feet in length. Now there is only one kind of game that needs a stone oven six feet long to bake it in....

Of course the greater number of Papuan inland tribes are cannibals now and then; I was accustomed to that sort of thing, and had even seen human joints made ready for cooking—not, of course, the killing of the game, which I shouldn't have allowed for a moment. But cannibalism, among most of the tribes, is not at all an every-day affair; it is the sequel of a big, victorious raid, or the end of some unusually bitter private quarrel.

There are tribes, however, who eat man whenever and wherever they get the chance; and it is those tribes who go to the trouble of building big stone ovens, specially designed for cooking human beings. That is why I was not too well pleased to find that we had got into the stone-oven country without expecting it. I wondered if we should ever get out again. I trusted a good deal to our revolvers: firearms will go far among men who have never seen them; but the mountain tribes are good fighters, for Papuans, and I did not anticipate that it would be easy to get away, if we had occasion to try.

They led us into the largest house of the village, a ramshackle shanty of a place, with spears and shields hung up on the walls and bamboo shelves to sleep on. It smelt of unwashed nigger, old hay, damp, and rain; and you could see the mountain-clouds curling and wreathing through the splits in the crazy floor—very much of the house projecting right out over nothing at all.

Down the hill, like ants coming out of the top of a tall ants'-nest, ran the people of the place, yelling with excitement at our arrival. They had not a stitch of clothes among the lot; even the women were dressed merely in a few small land-shells strung round the neck and a handful of dogs' teeth fastened like tassels into the hair.

“When we shall leave this place,” remarked the Marquis, “I will take with me a complete costume of one of these women, to carry in my purse all the time, so that I may show it to the delightful English misses when I go to London, and hear them say, 'Oooh, shoking!' That is what they love to say, my Flint.”

He looked about the ugly crowd again. “They are not natural, these people: I do not love them,” he commented. “See, then, how they are every one bended back from the waist like a man who has a tetanus fit, because of the climbing they always do. When we go away from here—” He looked about again. “If we go away from here,” he amended coolly, “you shall see that I will give a lecture to the scientifics in Paris, a most blooming learned lecture.”

“I hope you will, Marky,” I said.

We were sitting on the bamboo bed-place now, smoking a little of our cherished tobacco, and wondering when, or if, the Koiroros would give us something to eat. One of the children—rather a pretty little chap of toddling age, who had been half walking, half crawling on the verge of an appalling precipice as we came up to the village—made his way over to us, and began touching our clothes, with childish curiosity. The older people watched it, but did not come near; they seemed shy of putting their hands on us.

The Marquis, who was fond of children, caressed the little thing and tried to make friends with him (rather foolishly, I thought) by taking the diamond out of the case in which we carried it and making it flash. The child looked at it, and then retreated, at a call from his mother, striking at the stone as he went. It dropped and we both went after it with a hasty exclamation, as the floor was full of holes. I recovered it and fastened it up again in its case with a bit of string.

“I'll take my turn now, Marky,” I said, hanging it round my neck. For we had been carrying it day and day about, under our clothes.

“Look!” said the Marquis, making a small motion with his hand. I looked, and saw a Koiroro, whom I had not previously noticed, literally glaring at me as I put the stone away.

He was by a good deal the tallest man in the village, and he had a very fine crown of bird-of-paradise feathers on his head—among them the plumes of the rare blue species, which are worth almost what you like to ask for them in civilization. It was evident that he was a man of some standing. I suspected him to be the village sorcerer, as he had an ugly necklace about his neck, made of locks of human hair, strung alternately with some of the small bones out of the ear, and supporting a kind of trophy made of double teeth.

“More trouble about the diamond,” I said. “That oily brute has a mind to get it if he can. A sorcerer, I reckon.”

There was some murmuring among the men, and they drew off into a corner of the house by themselves, talking, and looking at us, especially at me. The inevitable evening rain of the mountains was coming down now in a waterfall rush; the purple gorge beneath us, which we could see through the open door, was filling up with a stormy sea of white cloud. Without, precipices, tree-tops, clouds, and plunging steps, all drenched in roaring rain; within, a gloomy, damp-smelling house of rotten thatch; white skulls gleaming through the dusk from the place where they hung aswing upon the rafters; shadowy men-things, more than half brute, glowering at us from their corner. And out upon the hill-side, just a few yards away, the long stone ovens waiting.

No, it was not a pleasant prospect, take it all in all.

For the moment, however, I thought there was no actual danger. I have seen much of the Papuan tribes, and it did not seem to me that these Koiroros had the blood-seeking mood on, that night.

“I don't think they'll attack just yet,” I told the Marquis. “But I'd be as glad if they hadn't seen the stone. They're talking about it now.”

“What do they say? ' asked the Marquis eagerly.

“I can't tell you that, but I can guess they're telling each other all about it. I'd be willing to make a bet it's known to them. It must be one of the celebrated sorcerer's charms that go knocking about all over the country, passed from one to the other.”

“And they will try to get it?”

“Yes, it, and us.”

It grew darker in the chief-house, there where we sat on the bamboo sleeping-shelf, listening to the unvarying roar of the rain and watching the excited waving of the head-plumes in the corner where the cannibals held their conference—the plumes were all we could see now, for a naked Papuan becomes rapidly and completely invisible once it begins to grow dark.

The Marquis was very much quieter than usual, but I do not think he was at all afraid. I think he reckoned on having a fight by and by, and liked the idea. As for myself, well, a man with any sense isn't afraid in a tight place; it would be idiotic, because you want all the nerve you have to get out of it. And usually you are much too busy thinking what to do to worry over what may happen if you don't do it.

A woman brought a torch in by and by and said something that caused great excitement. The men jumped about and clapped their hands and made noises exactly like the noise a dog makes when it sees its food in front of it. The Marquis and I both had our hands ready upon our revolver butts, but we needn't have troubled—it was only the pig, that had already had so much to do with our fortunes, coming in again. They had been heating it up and were bringing it in for supper.

We all sat down on the floor then, and the meat was shared out, together with a lot of sweet potatoes, hot from the ashes. The cannibals gave us a liberal share and offered us a bamboo full of water to drink out of. They tore and gnawed their food in a way that was not pleasant to watch—remembering those long ovens on the hill.

“Sacred name of a camel, what a lecture I will give!” sighed the Marquis, with his mouth full of sweet potato. “Look at their chests all blowed out with the climbing, and their feet that have monkey toes, and the cords on the insteps, and the nostril of the pig that they have! See how they jump, they flitter, they are all the time nervous and distracted! That comes of living on the edge of the cook-pot: if you hold your finger up at one and say 'Hi!' he should jump to break the floor.”

“I hope you won't,” I said, looking down at the velvet-black gulf of vacancy that one could see between the slats of the flooring. “Don't you get too scientific, Marky. I warn you, that nervousness of theirs is a bad sign. Also, their friendliness is a bad sign. Shove back and finish your food with your shoulders against the wall. if you take my advice.” I moved over as I spoke, and the Marquis followed me.

We ate as men eat who do not know where their next meal is to come from; we filled our pockets quietly, when we could swallow no more. The Koiroros were so busy chattering among themselves that they did not notice what we were doing. They did not molest us, though I could feel there was trouble in the air.

I can not say we passed a pleasant night. We kept watch in turns, and got some sleep, through sheer fatigue, lying just where we had eaten our meal, on the floor of the chief-house. The cannibals were sleeping all round us, snorting and snoring like walruses. One of them lay across the door, I noticed, and, as it was hardly large enough to crawl through, he guarded it effectively.

Toward four o'clock in the morning (I found the time by feeling the hands of my watch) the presentiment of coming trouble got hold of me so completely that I resolved to make an attempt at getting away, cost what it might. The more I thought about that liberal supper the less I liked it. The more I considered those long stone ovens on the hill the more likely I thought it that they would be filled on the morrow—if we did not get away.

I felt for the Marquis in the dark; it was his turn to sleep, but he was not sleeping. I put my mouth to his ear and whispered a little. Then I got out my knife and began cutting away the flimsy bamboo flooring. It was the time of the waning moon. I knew that we should have light enough to see by, once we got outside, and that it would last till dawn came up. By dawn we might hope to be out of the way.

It was easy enough to cut the floor without waking the Koiroros, since all natives are heavy sleepers, and these men had fed full before they slept. Getting through was more difficult. I gritted my teeth at the creaking noise made by the Marquis's weight as he lowered himself after me.

Where I had cut through there was sloping soil underneath. We got hold of the supporting piles that were thrust into it, and, holding on by them, made our way very cautiously down the precipice to the place where the trees and lianas began once more. The angle here was awful, but we had plenty of hand-hold and crept along securely enough in the watery moonlight. The rain was over now, and the river far below us at the bottom of the gorge roared full-fed along its way.

Not a sound came from the toadstool clump of houses above as we crept down the precipice. We were out of earshot before long and able to speak as we mounted the next great wall of rock, keeping always in the direction of the far-off Government station, which I now began to hope we should reach. By the lay of the land I guessed we had forty miles or more to go, and that might mean a week in this country of precipices. Still, if we could find anything to eat on the way, and if the Koiroros did not recapture us, it was just possible to get through.

Dawn, rising red through the tableland of white cloud, like spilled blood spreading on snow, came up and caught us sooner than I liked. We were out of sight of the village, having crossed two ridges; but our position, climbing up the bare rock at the side of a waterfall, was dangerously exposed should any of the Koiroros be within sight.

I stopped where I was, on a ledge of stone overgrown with white butterfly orchids, and looked back over the tossing billows of tree-tops that lay behind. There was small satisfaction in that. An army might have been hidden in the bush, following us up. Still—considering the speed the Koiroros could keep up in this mountain country when they chose—it certainly did look as if they were not pursuing us. The Marquis was jubilant.

“They are not spiritual, those people,” he declared, scrambling like a cockroach in my rear. “By gum, I think their mentality is far back in the scale of evolution: they are blessed idiots. They lock the stable-door when the milk is spilt; I can figure how they are saying injuries to one another about our invasion, now we are safe away.”

I did not say anything, for the reason that I was not very sure we were safe away—yet. There was something I did not understand about this easy letting-go. All the same, there was only one thing to do—get on as fast as possible; and we did.

Toward midday, as we were crawling painfully up a perpendicular forest hung out like a hearth-rug left to dry over the side of a three-thousand-foot cliff, I fancied the light ahead was growing very clear. All morning we had been working along as one generally does in the interior, right at the bottom of the forests, judging our direction by compass and by the rise of the land and seeing no more of the country in general than if we had been crawling along in the depths of the sea. But the light ahead and above looked as if there were a big break-off somewhere. I pointed it out to the Marquis to encourage him.

“I believe that's the southwestern face of the Kiloki Range we're coming to,” I said. “If there's a big drop there, and if we can get down, it will give us a long lift on our way to the Government station.”

The Marquis paused to wipe his dripping face; it was atrociously hot in there, sheltered from all cooling breezes. He cast a glance at his khaki shirt and trousers, crumpled and stained and torn in many places.

“Has he a wife or a daughter, and is she beautiful?” he asked.

“Who? The R. M. at the station? Don't know who he is; but I should think it most unlikely he has any womenkind up there.”

The Marquis sighed and was silent.

We were coming up to the light now, and it grew clearer and clearer. There was evidently a big drop somewhere very near. And, unless my ears were much mistaken, there was also a big waterfall.

“Hear that, Marky?” I said. “That roaring sound? You'll probably see a young Niagara somewhere when we get to the top.”

Well, it was not a Niagara or a Victoria Falls, but it could have held its own very well with any other fall in the world you might like to mention. When we came out on the summit, we saw that the whole countryside was broken away under our feet, and that the nearest thing to us, as we stood up there on the verge of a mighty basalt wall, was the feathery top of a forest so far beneath as to be half blue with distance. And we saw that the whole of this immense rampart, greater than any straight-down drop I had ever seen in my life, was taken at one leap by a river that came down from a ridge above the one we had been climbing.

The Marquis stood quite still on the summit, looking for some minutes at the indescribably magnificent view spread out below.

“To think!” he said at last, “that it is ours alone—that no other eye shall——”

“Get your revolver out,” I said.

There was no use making a fuss—I hate fusses—but there was also no use trying to deny that our unlucky fate had caught up with us again, and that the puzzle of the morning was fully explained at last. There, on the verge of the precipice, standing nonchalantly with their toes half over, as only a mountain native can, were a dozen or more Koiroros, who had slipped out of the bush like snakes as the Marquis was speaking. From what I could see, they must have taken a short cut, got to the precipice before us, and been comfortably waiting for our arrival.

This time there could be no doubt whatever about their intention. They had surrounded us before you could say “knife”—not very close, but near enough to be dangerous—and were creeping closer and closer, poising their stone-headed clubs in an ominous manner. From the dense wall of greenery behind a spear came whistling out, excellently aimed for the Marquis: it missed him by no more than an inch. Another went into my hat and knocked it off.

We drew our revolvers and fired. The Marquis got his man clean through the temple, and dropped him as neatly as one could wish. Mine was hit in the ribs; he fell over the precipice, and his cry as he went down grew thin, like the whistle of a train running away in the distance, until we ceased to hear it. We had not much leisure for listening, in any case. The Koiroros had bolted at the first shot, as natives usually do; but they were busy throwing spears from cover now, and the Marquis and I had to use more ammunition than we liked, firing at random into the green, before we succeeded in stopping them.

They did seem to be driven off at last, however, and we began walking along the edge of the precipice, to try and find a way down, for that was now a vital necessity.

There was none.

We trampled and climbed and looked, for half the afternoon. The sun got down in the west. We ate a little of our food as we clambered about, seeking endlessly, and drank from the pools made by the spray of the waterfall. That waterfall! It blocked us like a wall of iron: we could not cross it, or swim it, or get down alongside it. It was, in truth, an efficient gate-keeper to the country of the stone ovens.

“Marky, I'm of opinion that they knew this all along,” I said. “They played with us like cats with a mouse. They let us go just this far, knowing we could get no farther. As to what I think of the beasts——”

I said what I thought, without laying any restraint on myself. The Marquis listened for a moment, and then jumped up—he had been sitting on a stone—and gave a kind of howl.

“Look down!” he cried. I looked. Far, very far below, I saw the figure of one of the Koiroros, carrying a dead body on his shoulders, like an ant going home with a grain of corn.

We were a good way from the waterfall at that moment, but the wall was still unbroken, and I could not see any place where the man could have got down. Still, down he had evidently got, and the sight encouraged us more than I could say.

“The sun's failing us now, Marky,” I said, “but to-morrow we'll find that track, or die.”

“I think you have reason; if we do not find it, we shall undoubtedly kick the bucket in this out-of-the-road wilderness,” replied the Marquis. “And if we were to finish like that, how many women, of a great beauty and a great kindness, would pour tears for we two over all the world!”

The sun was going down.

“Your watch first to-night, Marky,” I said. “And my turn for the diamond.”

 

I had the stone round my neck next morning when it came daylight. We were both pretty tired, with short sleep, short food, and hard work, but neither of us was anything like done, and I, for one, felt almost brisk when the fresh wind of sunrise sprang up, blowing the ferns and orchids about on the edge of the precipice and sending the spray of the great waterfall flying out into the sun. The Marquis was sleeping just then. I did not wake him, but got up to reconnoiter; this sunrise hour is the clearest of all the day, and one can see the distant peaks and ranges that are invisible once the eight o'clock clouds begin.

I did not particularly like what I saw. In all the wide expanse of close-furred green before me there was not a break, not a suggestion of a clearing or a station: only the wave on wave of that primeval sea of tree-tops which buries all New Guinea beneath its overwhelming flood. Far in front the green lapped into a fold that suggested a river: that was my only hope. As to these mountain torrents——

Was that a cough?

It sounded like one—the cough that a native gives when he wishes to attract attention. I turned round to face the wall of bush, but could see nothing, and I could not even be sure I had heard anything, for we were not far from the waterfall and its thundering noise.

Well, if there had not been anything to hear there was certainly something to see—a green bough waving frantically all by itself, as if shaken by an unseen hand. The hand itself appeared by and by, and now the bough was waved more violently than ever, while a voice cried out in the Mambare dialect: “Let us speak!”

“Speak!” I answered, waking the Marquis with a push, and telling him to keep ready with his revolver.

“Is it peace?” continued the unseen native, whom I guessed to be the Koiroro who had interpreted before.

“What do you want?” I yelled.

“We want the sorcerer's great charm,” came the reply.

“Come out,” I said. “I will do no harm to you.”

Out they came, two of them—the interpreter and (as I had rather expected) the big sorcerer man who had worn the crown of paradise plumes. They motioned that we should lay down our arms, while they laid down their clubs and spears, and, this being done, the interpreter and the sorcerer came forward.

“You have guns in your belts that bite badly,” said the interpreter. “We thought you had none, because there were no long sticks such as the white men's guns usually have. But you have good guns: we shall not fight you any more.”

“Very kind of you,” I said.

“All the same,” continued the interpreter, “we will not let you go unless we like. There is a way down, but you will never find it if we do not tell you about it. If we do not tell, you will stay here till you die, and the wild pigs and dogs will come and tear your tongues out and eat your throats.”

“What do you want?” I asked, guessing the answer before it came.

“This sorcerer, who is a very great chief, wants your charm. If you give it you can go, and we will give you sweet potatoes to take with you.”

“Get the sweet potatoes, and we will talk more,” I answered, to gain time. The men disappeared.

“What do you think of that, Marky?” I said, translating.

“I think it is damn presumptuous cheek,” replied that nobleman, trying to smooth his hair with his pocket handkerchief and ruefully feeling his bristly beard. “What a species of an object I shall be, if we get to that station!”

“Well, it does seem as if the diamond landed us in a fix, everywhere we go,” I remarked. “What on the living earth are we going to do?”

I took the stone out of its case and looked at it. All in the rough as it was, it had some splendid rays when you got it into the sun. Just now it shot out crimson, blue, and green like a display of fireworks.

“Mark, it's a beauty,” I said. “I don't see myself giving it up to a man-eating savage to make spells with: not much. But I don't see either——”

“The Aryan races—” began the Marquis.

“Oh, don't get scientific,” I begged. “I don't feel as if I could stand it this morning, somehow. Besides, I was discussing what we were going to do.”

“Also I, if you would permit. The Aryan races—or, if you will be impatient, and make grimace at me, I will jump some thousand years. You say you can not think what we shall do: it is solely because you are of the Teutonic descent. It has courage, this branch, but nimbleness in the mind it has not. The Latin races, of whom I am one——”

“Oh, cut it, Marky,” I begged. “I believe they're coming back—we've got to be serious.”

“I am everything that there is of serious, man with a head of a cabbage! I myself will show you what it is to belong to the Latin. Do you leave the negotiation to me?”

“Oh, you can do the talking,” I said. “You can do no harm, if you can't do good. I'll pass on anything you say, and at the same time keep a lookout for an ambush, which is just as likely as not.”

The Koiroros, it appeared, had brought the sweet potatoes with them, and concealed them not far away, for there they were, back again with a good load, before the Marquis and I had well finished our discussion.

“Now,” said my companion, drawing himself up to his full height, “it is for you to see what it shall mean to be of the Latin and not of the Teutonic race. Behold! Tell them they shall not have the diamond.

“Tell them that I am a greater sorcerer than this man is, and that I know many wonderful sorceries.

“Tell them I will sell this man a sorcery that will make him king of his tribe, you bet, if he will give us the secret of the path.

“Tell him to behold me and see!”

The two Koiroros, already much impressed with the lordly tones and gestures of the Marquis, watched narrowly as he took a packet of cigarette-papers out of his pocket, looked solemnly toward the rising sun, held up one paper to its rays, and then bent his head over it, muttering to himself... I asked him afterward what he had been saying that sounded so impressive, and he confessed that it was merely the French for “Twice one is two, twice two is four,” etc.

When he had finished his muttering—the Koiroros now drawing back a little, in obvious fear—he lit a match and burned the paper, waving his hands over it as it burned. I can not describe the extraordinary appearance he made, there on the mountain-top in the scarlet dawn, with the naked, feathered cannibals looking on while he performed his incantations—his dirty, huge, bedraggled figure carrying a dignity all its own.

At the end of these mummeries he cast the ashes of the paper to the winds, raised a terrifying shout, and, taking hold of his (false) front teeth, pulled them down to the level of the lower lip, and let them go again with a snap.

The two Koiroros turned tail and fled into the bush, actually leaving their spears and clubs behind them in their panic. A long way off we could hear them howling with fright. The Marquis and I had to call for quite a long time to get them to return. When they did come back, the sorcerer seemed to have recovered his nerve in some degree, but he still looked uneasily toward the Marquis, whom he now appeared to recognize as a superior in his own line.

“Tell them,” said the Marquis, “to show us the way, and I will give them the papers.”

“He says he wants one now, to do the trick,” I reported.

Solemnly the Marquis pointed to the rising sun.

“It is above the horizon—did he not see that it was not yet cleared of the earth when I enchanted?” he said. “Say that he shall make the spell at to-morrow's sunrise, but never before again.”

The sorcerer, his eyes starting out of his head, half walked, half crawled to the Marquis's feet, and accepted the cigarette-papers, trembling. He stowed them away in his charm-bag, and then made signs to us to follow. We went after him along the rim of the precipice, to the very edge of the waterfall—and saw——

Well, after all!

Only a six-sided column of the black basalt—the sort of thing you see in photographs of the Irish Giant's Causeway—that lifted out of its place as neatly as a finger out of a glove and left a hole through which a man might squeeze himself. And, once squeezed through, a man came out—behind the waterfall.

There it hung in front of us, as we passed, like a gigantic crystal curtain, magnificent beyond all telling. And in the hollow at the back, where the water had worn the hard basalt away, foot by foot, through countless æons of years, was the roughest of rough staircases, cut by native hands, and leading down the cliff. Slippery, wet with spray, perilous to the last degree, and scarce passable for a white man's foot, yet after all it was not quite impassable, or so we found. In an hour or less we were down at the bottom of the wall.

The secret of the stone-oven country was told.

More than that, the sorcerer had informed us as we went down that the Government station was a bare two days away, down the valley of the river that we had dimly discerned from the height. And we had potatoes enough to last us all the way. And the diamond was still ours,

“Heaven tempers the wind to the lame dog: we are well out,” said the Marquis, looking up at the top of the ridge, as we paused in the river-bed below. The sorcerer, far away against the skyline, was faintly visible, feeling his jaw.

“I wager, on sunrise to-morrow morning, there shall be some sore teeth in the chief-house!” said the Marquis with a chuckle.

Another adventure in the pursuit of “The Sorcerer's Stone” will appear in the January number.