Romance Island Part 16

"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."

"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively, from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"

The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.

George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.

In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent, perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of _The Aloha_ were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.

The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest, wheeled and screamed about them, almost brus.h.i.+ng their faces with long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches, but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral creva.s.ses made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had been split down the middle by some ancient force--very likely a Paleozoic b.u.t.terfly had brushed it with its wing--and the edges had been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer drop into s.p.a.ce wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others, following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.

"I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I fading away or anything?"

Amory stood still.

"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove--do you suppose--what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity--suppose there is something--suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that a body--by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"

St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as if he were bounding down.

"Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held down by any map!"

They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.

"In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels like a man."

"What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.

From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met, scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.

"Now," he said simply.

The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.

George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'

wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little improvements has been made which we resent because no one has thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one remembers than one knew that one remembered.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the mountain whose summit, royally crowned by s.h.i.+ning towers, had been visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the King's City--but its light was not the light of the day, for that was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a ma.s.sive, natural wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned to him was a glorified face, and some way _it meant what he meant_.

St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley--was she there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul these many days--not so very many, either, if one counts the suns--was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of silver smote the long gra.s.s at his feet, and the edge of the moon rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant exultation--did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man feel like that?--and strode back to the others.

"Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's mind, "let's be off!"

Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.

"I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"

St. George did not answer.

"It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to himself, "as they do in a cathedral."

The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.

First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss, singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.

The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here, from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no more to be regarded as witchcraft.

St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more, since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching; sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he could not have told whether the element was contained in that beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.

At last they emerged upon a narrow, gra.s.sy terrace where white steps mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:

"Behold Med, adon," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished eyes.

They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city itself. The clear light flooded the scene--lucid, vivid, many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended, lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and n.o.ble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.

If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty European princ.i.p.alities seem far less actual and practicable homes of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.

But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly turned and questioned him, saying:

"What of Olivia?"

For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool reason could comprehend. That was the princ.i.p.al impression that Med, the King's City, made upon St. George.

"To the right, adon," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are highest--that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the Litany."

"And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.

Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the mountain.

"But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.

"By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."

"No munic.i.p.al line of airs.h.i.+ps?" ventured Amory in slow astonishment.

Jarvo did not quite get this.

"The airs.h.i.+ps, adon," he said, "belong to the imperial household and are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."

"A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he murmured on.

"The adon," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko, have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the G.o.ds permit the possible."

"Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better look out the prince at once?"

"The adon is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from Prince Tabnit."

St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.

It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on the island, than to be upon the defensive.