The White Waterfall Part 27

"I--I might be silly in thinking it," she stammered, "but I believe--oh, please, Mr. Holman, try and walk in the direction I pointed in!"

"I certainly will try," said the youngster. "If I go wrong, you put me right, will you? I believe somehow that we're going to find a way out. I don't know the right path to it, but I've got a premonition we'll find it. Now we're off again."

We moved forward with anxious footsteps. Imagination furrowed the floor of that place with bottomless crevices, and the cold hand of fear gripped our hearts. It required a mental effort to move one foot past the other, and whenever one of the girls stumbled, her little cry of alarm brought untold agony to Holman and myself as we took a grip of the rope and braced ourselves against the happening which our excited minds expected any moment. We were walking hand in hand with dread--a dread that became greater when we thought that a false step of ours might drag to death the two women that we loved.

On, and on, and on, we bored into the horrible night. With blind footsteps we walked fearfully through the Stygian waves that rolled around us. The place seemed to be of enormous size, and in the dead silence that surrounded us our footsteps woke clattering echoes that appeared to mock our efforts to escape.

The air in places had a strange odour that reminded us of camphor. This peculiar smell seemed to be in certain stratas of the atmosphere through which we pa.s.sed, and whenever our pa.s.sage through these scented layers was unduly prolonged, we experienced a sensation that I can only liken to the near approach of seasickness. It made the girls sick and faint, but they walked on without complaining.

We struck the wall of the place after we had been walking for a period that we judged to be about three hours, and we decided to rest for a while. We sat close together upon the cold floor and endeavoured to cheer each other's spirits by constantly a.s.serting that the air of the place made it reasonable to suppose that there must be some other entrance besides the hole through which Leith had lowered the three, and the fissure through which Holman and I had rolled down the gigantic ash pile. And the a.s.sertions seemed logical. The two entrances that we knew of opened into Leith's retreat, and it was hard to think that the air supply of the enormous cavern in which we were wandering could come through those two openings. We combatted our fears with this argument as we ate a morsel of the food we had received that morning, and feeling that he who has the biggest stock of hope has the biggest grip upon life, we endeavoured to make light of our misfortunes as we stumbled on again after a short rest.

But that impenetrable night produced a depression that we could not shake off. Imagination sprang ahead of the moment and pictured our final struggles. We fought with the nightmares that entered our minds, and conversation languished. We couldn't speak while the mental canvases were being rapidly coloured with scenes depicting our end in the darkness and the silence, where a grim fate would even deny one a last look at a dearly loved face. A silence came upon us that had the same effect as intense cold. Each in his own frozen husk of despair plodded forward with the idea that the others were so engrossed in their own thoughts that they were not inclined to answer when addressed. The darkness so completely isolated each person that after some hours of silence it required a tremendous effort to thoroughly convince the mind that one was walking with living people and not with phantoms.

It was after one of these intervals of silence that Barbara Herndon made a discovery that chilled our blood. She made some commonplace remark to her sister and received no reply. She repeated the observation, but it brought no comment. The happening seemed to drag the rest of us from the strange torpor, and we stopped. We sensed that Barbara Herndon was feeling her way toward her sister, and presently the younger girl gave a shriek of alarm that stirred a million echoes in that place of terror.

"Edith!" she shrieked. "Edith! Edith! Where are you?"

Holman and I clawed fiercely upon the rope, moving toward each other in an effort to find a quick solution for the mystery. We collided violently as we reached the spot where the rope had circled Edith Herndon's waist, and we stood, stunned and speechless, as we fingered the cord. In some manner, probably severed by a knifelike projection of rock, the loop which I had knotted around her body had been cut through, and the rope had fallen unnoticed from the waist of the weary girl!

"Great G.o.d!" I cried. "Where did we lose her? What way did we come?"

The questions were ridiculous. The numbing influence of the place had made us walk for an hour or so in complete silence, and it was impossible to say when she had lost her position in the line. And now, as we moved round and round, endeavouring to peer into the blackness, we lost all sense of direction. Each had a different notion about the way we had come. While we were moving forward, our combined efforts to walk straight ahead made it impossible for one to turn and go in an opposite direction, but in the few moments of our excitement as we turned and twisted in clawing for the loop where Edith had been tied, we became bewildered. We didn't know in which direction to turn in searching for the lost one!

"What'll we do?" cried the Professor. "Do something! Quick! Find her!

Find her!"

I took a great breath and yelled her name into the darkness. The sound thundered through the place like the noise made by a freight train.

Again and again I screamed it, and the million devils in the place shrieked the name in mockery. I exhausted myself in my mad efforts to send my voice to her ears.

Holman gripped my arm when I had worked myself into an insane frenzy, and he begged me to be quiet.

"Barbara thought she heard an answer," he cried. "Listen! There it is again!"

It was Edith! Her voice came to us like a thread of silver, and with no thought of the bottomless crevices that might be in our path, we charged blindly toward the spot from which her cry had come.

It seemed ages before we met her. The sounds puzzled us, but at last we gripped her hands, and the Professor and Barbara, hysterical with joy, sobbed their thanks into the gloom.

"I don't know how the rope became undone," cried Edith. "I didn't find out that I had become separated from the rest of you till I attempted to draw your attention to the waterfall."

"To the what?" I questioned.

"To the waterfall," repeated the girl. "Did you pa.s.s it? It is a beautiful little waterfall, and the water flows over a white limestone rock that makes it sparkle like so many fireflies in the dark."

I cannot explain what happened to me at that moment. Some veil within my mind was torn away by the few words that the girl had uttered. I was back upon Levuka wharf, lying under the copra bag where Holman had found me, and for a moment I could not speak as the subconscious mind flung a score of half-forgotten incidents into my conscious area.

_"It is the White Waterfall!"_ I yelled. "It is the White Waterfall that the Maori sang of on the wharf at Levuka! He was warning Toni, and Toni was killed by Soma because he knew! It is the way out! We're saved!

We're saved! It is on the road to heaven out of Black Fernando's h.e.l.l!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIII

THE WIZARDS' SEAT

As we stumbled toward the spot from which came the sounds of running water, the incidents of the preceding ten days seemed to be dropping into their places within my brain like the pieces of a picture puzzle that has suddenly become plain to the eye of the child who is putting it together. I understood! My brain seemed bursting within my skull. It appeared to me that G.o.d, in his own way, had made me a blind instrument to do his work. The big Maori on the wharf at Levuka knew of the h.e.l.l upon the Isle of Tears. The Maori had warned Toni, the little Fijian, but fear of what might happen to any one possessing the knowledge had made Toni deny that he was the companion of the Maori when he was questioned before and after he had reached _The Waif_. In a burst of confidence he had confessed the truth to me on the afternoon after I had saved him from being washed overboard, but the confession had been made in the presence of Soma, and, as Kaipi a.s.serted, it had cost Toni his life. Leith, alias Black Fernando, had ordered the big Kanaka to put the possessor of such important information out of the way.

I repeated over and over again the words which the Maori had addressed to his woolly headed pupil on that hot day at Levuka. They raced madly round in my mind, as if exultant because I had found the reason why they persisted in storing themselves in the cells of my brain. The soul within me had known that the knowledge would be wanted!

"How many paces?" asked the Professor.

"Sixty!" I roared; and then, seized with temporary insanity, I chanted the song of the Maori at the top of my voice:

"Sixty paces to the left, Sixty paces to the left, That's the way to heaven, That's the way to heaven, That's the way to heaven out Of Black Fernando's h.e.l.l."

"And here's the waterfall!" cried Holman, "Go easy now! It must be flowing into some hole, and we don't want to fall into an abyss just as Verslun has discovered the way out."

We advanced cautiously toward the spot where, as Edith had said, the water sparkled like fireflies in the darkness. It was an eerie place. We knew that the water was there by the sound it made flowing over the rocks, but, except for the tiny sparks of phosph.o.r.escent light that seemed to fly out from it, we could not see it. The spectacle thrilled us. A million sparks of light seemed to rise from the bed of feldspar over which the water leaped, and the peculiar quality of the rock gave to it the weird brilliancy which held us spellbound as we advanced with extreme caution. It wasn't white by any means, but in those inky depths it would not require a great effort of the imagination to call it white.

The faint luminous flashes were the only particles of light that we had seen since Leith had thrown the half-extinguished torch into the hole that morning, and we could hardly turn our eyes from the novelty.

The water fell into an opening in the rocky floor, and gurgled away into depths that made us s.h.i.+ver as the distant tinkle came up to us as we crept forward on hands and knees. We were all thirsty at that moment, but we wished to put the directions of the Maori to an immediate test, and we were satisfied to let our longing for a cool drink stay with us till we could prove whether the strangely luminous waterfall before us was the one about which the two natives chanted the strange song.

"They said to the left, didn't they?" asked Holman.

"Yes," I answered. I hardly recognized my own voice as I jerked out the word. I couldn't see the faces of the girls, but I understood what skysc.r.a.pers of hope they had built upon the announcement I had made when Edith had told of her discovery. Now, as we moved around the hole in the floor, I understood what a tremendous shock it would be to them if we discovered that there was no connection between the falling water and the chant.

"I suppose the left side will be the one upon our left hand when facing the fall?" said Holman.

"I suppose so," I stammered. "Let us move up close to the side of the water."

We edged along till we could touch the flas.h.i.+ng stream that dropped from some point high up in the immense roof of the place, and then we started to step the distance, the Professor chattering along behind us, while the two girls brought up the rear.

Holman chanted the numbers aloud, and a cold sweat broke out upon me as he counted. A fear of my own sanity came upon me. I thought that this connection between the song and the luminous water might have been suggested by a brain that had suddenly lost its balance under the torture of the preceding three days.

"Fifty-six! Fifty-seven! Fifty-eight!----"

It was Holman's voice, but to my reeling brain the sound came from the roof and thundered in my ears like a brazen bell.

"Fifty-nine! _Sixty_!"

We stopped together, and the suppressed sobs of Barbara Herndon were the only sounds that broke the little stillness that followed. There was no way out! The darkness, so it seemed to us, was thicker than ever!

"Nothing doing," muttered Holman. "I counted right, didn't I?"

"I think so," I answered huskily.

"Sixty paces exactly, and here's the wall alongside us."