The gray god

THE JUNGLE TRAIL.

They sighted it at dawn. It revealed itself in the growing light, before the sun rose above the sea-line, like an image developing on a negative in the dark room, somber, gradually acquiring definite shape, a blot against the purple-black of the sky where the stars were winking out.

The skipper had found it unerringly; he told them he expected to pick it up at daylight, and here it was, darkly sinister, spray booming along iron-bound cliffs, heights veiled in mist. The sound of the surf rolled back to them as they skirted the coast to the east, seeking for some place to land. It was not going to be easy, and they held off until the light strengthened.

It came with a rush as the disk of the sun rolled up from the tumbling sea rim, day instantly proclaimed. The island woke to life. Myriads of birds rose from the cliffs and from tiny, outlying islets; gulls and gannets, squas and boobies, whirling and screeching, then winging out to sea to some shoal where they would find good fishing.

There were other birds, of the land, squawking parrots above the thick forest that verged the iron walls rising sheer from the spouting sea. Above the bush lofted three torn pinnacles, fangs that tore the vapors writhing about them. There were deep cañons here and there, dark in shadow; small coves; waterfalls, leaping to the beach over sheer precipices.

Then they saw the god. A cliff was sharply set back, and they only saw the upper part of the image, flaring livid red in the sunrise, carved, it seemed, from the living rock. It was of gigantic proportions, the art primitive, so primitive it might have been the work of some futurist, striving to simplify curves and lines, to crystallize expressions.

The face was long, a long nose, flattened, bridgeless, but with flaring nostrils. A wide mouth, thin-lipped, austere, yet subtly sensual, with the hint of a cruel sneer at the corners. The eyes were carved so that they suggested a malignant glance as the crimson light blazed full upon them. The ears touched the narrow shoulders.

The body, what they saw of it, was misshapen, out of all proportion, small arms, with the hands resting on knees far apart, deep shadow between them. It stood out of the cliff in full and startling relief, infinitely evil, leering. It had a sort of crown, hewn from the summit of the cliff and the foliage back of this looked like plumes. The whole aspect was baleful, brooding, gazing out to sea like the old gods at Easter Island, whose origin and purpose no man has yet discovered.

The Chinese gazed at it stolidly. The man at the helm paid no attention and the captain was occupied with the shore line, looking for some spot where he could send a boat ashore. There was no indication of a lagoon. The island rose straight from the waves that ravened all about it.

Tiki's attitude was curious. He squatted on deck and bowed his head to the planks, in deference rather than fealty. This was his fetish, but he did not seem to be afraid. The priests of Moloch may have felt no terror at their horrible, blood-demanding image.

The girl shuddered, and Stanton had to tell himself sharply that here was only a thing hewn from lifeless stone. It glared at them and, as the morning clouds dissolved under the sun, its lips seem to quiver scornfully.

"Lifeless, I am," it seemed to say, "yet man-made from things he sensed, the brooding influences of this solitary isle, born of fire and smoke, delivered in water. Influences that may still be conjured from the sea, the sky, the core of the earth. I represent them and I bid you beware."

Bizarre and fantastic thoughts these; but the image itself was only concrete thought. It seemed to proclaim the place dangerous, cynically warning the intruder. It appeared to hold many tragic secrets, reaching back through the centuries.

A spur of land, a cape like a high fin, reached out far into the sea. As they passed it a putrid smell enveloped them. It was like the odor of a glue factory and it pursued them on the breeze until distance made it bearable. This was the stench from piles of shell set out long since to rot so that the shells might be more readily searched for pearls. The shell itself was valuable.

Here there was a deep indentation in the island, and placid water showed behind a foaming barrier of lava reef, not coral, that paralleled the shore. This must have been the diving ground for the precious bivalves. The skipper surveyed it narrowly, seeking an entrance. The reef ended presently, and he came about, hugging the land, one man casting the lead from the bobstay and chanting out the depth. It was satisfactory and the tide was with them as they glided along between the barrier and the shore, once more encountering the foul odor of decay until they tacked into the cleft and made slowly up it, foresail down and mainsail peaked, with the current.

They were in a somber water cañon, still in shadow, though, higher up the fanged peaks glowed in the sunrise and the timber on the loftier slopes took on vivid coloring. The ravine turned sharply and they saw a narrow beach lined with dark-green mangroves from which a stream issued. There were signs of habitation here, a long shed of thatched roof and wattled walls, two houses of the same type. But there was no indication of life, no hail. The place lay wrapped in silence as the Fahine glided slowly on.

The masts of a vessel showed their tops above water a hundred yards out—a sunken schooner. It was a depressing sight, but Stanton twisted a measure of hope from it which he handed to the girl.

"Loo Fong didn't find the pearls," he said. "I think this means that your father is still on the island. They sank his ship to prevent his leaving."

He tried to make it convincing, and Lucy Haines essayed a pitiful smile.

"I hope so," she replied, "but why doesn't he show himself? Why doesn't some one answer?"

"They may be asleep," he said, and shouted. The echo came back from the cliff, rebounded from the opposing one. The Chinese captain found bottom to his liking, the cable slipped out to twelve fathoms, and a boat was lowered. It was impossible to tell from those yellow faces what they thought of the situation, but the rowers took rifles with them, pistols holstered at their belts. Stanton took his automatic and another revolver. He had shortened a belt for the girl and she also carried a gun at her hip.

She had dressed for the landing in breeches and high-laced boots, and she looked like a tight-lipped boy, her expression much as Stanton had seen it on the street in Suva. Tiki slid down the fall rope and squatted in the bows. The captain had given him a knife and a leather belt in which he thrust it above his sulu kilt.

The silence was profound. The sea birds had gone, the land birds settled down. The only sound was the melancholy cooing of doves. In the water appeared the scything fins of sharks on some mysterious patrol.

The boat grounded and the rowers hauled it beyond the rise of the flooding tide. Crabs scuttled along the shingle. Blocks of lava protruded here and there. Beach vines straggled over black sand.

Stanton tried to save the girl the sight of the skeletons. There were six of them, the bones scattered, picked clean by crabs, in front of the long shed. They lay in plain view, and she uttered a low cry and halted, then started to hurry forward, checked by Stanton's hand on her arm.

"There's no clothing," he said. "Your father's not there." It was scant comfort. There were a few lengths of cloth, but he thought these the loin coverings of the men Haines had with him. The grisly objects were separated as if they had fallen making a stand against invaders. The yellow men investigated as Stanton led the girl aside. Tiki looked at the skeletons incuriously.

The captain reported briefly:

"They all Kanaka. Some got hole in head. Bullet make. No white man there."

Nor anywhere else, it seemed, as they searched the shed, half full of lustrous shells; the two houses, one of which held some of Haines's belongings that brought tears to the girl's eyes, though she strove to check them. Both huts showed signs of search. The winds had erased all footprints. The shell was valuable, but it had been disdained. It looked as if the dead men had been wantonly shot down at the first encounter.

"He got away," said Stanton. "We'll find him somewhere." But he held faint hope of finding Haines alive. The atmosphere of murder and sudden death possessed the place.

"We'll stay here until we've searched the island," he said to the captain.

"Can do," the skipper answered. It seemed a stupendous, futile task. Towering cliffs, dense jungle and barren, precipitous crags, deep clefts, hidden valleys, caverns: a myriad places where a man might stow himself away, or lie dead.

They spread out, hallooing, looking in all likely spots. The captain made Tiki understand what they were seeking and he nodded, came to Stanton, took his hand and set it on his breast, starting off on a quest of his own, trotting along the beach, disappearing up a ravine choked with guava scrub. They saw no more of him that day as they searched without finding any trace of Haines, living or dead. Night fell with tropic swiftness on their utter lack of success.

The skipper, at least, looked also for the pearls. He had his own instructions. To Stanton, the discovery of Haines was more important, even aside from thought of the girl, who had stayed beside him all day as they tried in vain to solve the riddle of what had happened to her father. Let them find Haines and, if he was alive, the pearls would be forthcoming.

The fear grew on him—he knew it grew on the girl also—that Haines had been killed by the raiders because he refused to give them up or tell where he kept them. Only the lack of a body offset this dread and a body was easily disposed of. He did not try to comfort Lucy Haines; to do that would be practically an acknowledgment there was no hope. He got her to eat on the plea that she must keep her strength for renewal of search the next day.

They slept aboard. No sail had been in sight up to nightfall. A lookout had been maintained on a cliff and, since the search had extended to the crags, they had seen the whole circle of the horizon. They had won the race down, but their advantage was checked by the search. When Loo Fong arrived, with Johnson, there was going to be trouble.

Stanton was up at dawn. He dressed swiftly, going on deck. The girl was already there, pale from a sleepless night. She was gazing at the island with an expression of hopelessness that she tried to banish as she saw Stanton.

"I'm not going to leave here until I know what has happened to him," she said, her voice firm, her mouth and chin resolute as she finished the determined sentence. He did not answer her. There was nothing to say. He was not going to let her stay alone. The question of conventions did not enter into the matter. Conventions vanished in these latitudes.

"He's all I have," she said. It was in his mind, his heart, to deny this, but it was not the time for it. Complications were likely to settle matters, not as they would have them, but as the fates willed. Motutabu lay in sunshine, but it was emphatically a savage place. The Chinese had buried the skeletons, but they were not to be forgotten. Tragedy brooded over the island.

"We'll have to arrange some sort of systematic search," he said, foreseeing how impossible was the task. An army, seeking for weeks, might not hope to unearth the secrets of the wild jungle, impenetrable in most places. The seabirds were winging out, others shrilling their morning ecstasy; fish leaped in the water while, up and down, two sharks roved as if they had tasted blood and scented more.

"We've got to eat," he said. "It's just a question of fuel."

"I suppose so," she answered wearily.

They went below and breakfast was served. Overhead the crew padded about their tasks, washing down the decks, ordinary duties that they carried on. Stanton saw two tears on her cheeks as she tried to drink the strong coffee. She wiped them away, but the drink choked her.

There was a singsong cry on deck that had a stirring note in it. Stanton thought that the Lehua must have been sighted.

"Something's happened," he said. "I'll see what it is." The girl looked at him, startled. For a moment hope flashed in her eyes and died out at the sight of his grim face. The captain came hurrying down the companionway.

"Tiki!" he said. "He come along beach. I think he find something."

They raced on deck. The shore boat was ready, the armed rowers in it. Tiki was at the water's edge, gesticulating, pointing to the heights. The girl was trembling as the oars bent to the short, sturdy strokes. She set her hand on Stanton's arm, and he laid his own over it. Her lips moved silently. He knew that she was praying that her father was still alive, fighting off the thought of other news.

"Call to him, please," she asked the skipper, "Ask him if—if—"

The captain stood up in the stern, handling the steering sweep, and shouted a few syllables. Tiki shouted back.

"He alive," said the skipper, and the girl broke down as Stanton put his arm about her and she set her head against his shoulder and wept in the revulsion of relief.

Tiki had found him, with his knowledge of jungle craft, looking for sign by instinct, finding it where others would have sought in vain. He pointed out certain places as they trailed him up the ravine in which he had vanished the night before. Stanton could see little. A fragment of broken lava, a snapped stem, but the savage had read all unerringly.

They climbed high, following an ancient path hacked through the bush, the ground hard-beaten, a relic of the time when Tiki lived on Motutabu. The trees, matted and bound together with undergrowth and vines, rose on either side like walls. Great orchids swung, brilliant butterflies hovered about them like living flowers.

They came to where the trail forked and here was a pyramid of crumbling skulls. Tiki took the right-hand path. It led to a deserted, half-ruined village back of walls of coral, in which bamboos grew along the top. There was a heavy gateway, sagging now, stilted houses, whose roofs had decayed, the wattled walls torn by the weather, rotting from the rains.

There was a sing-sing ground with a great banyan tree, whose boughs were decked with strings of skulls. One great building had collapsed. Two stone images had fallen on their faces, tall drumlogs, carven like totem poles, lay prone. The earthquake had flung them down. The place was littered with signs of hasty, frenzied flight.

Tiki led them through this abandoned capital of Motutabu, pressing on ever upward by paths that the jungle was already reclaiming. They climbed above the forest and crossed a plateau of high yellow grass that terminated at a great rift, at the bottom of which was a lake of dark water, divided into unequal parts by a sharp ridge that led to the other side. There the crags began.

It was a narrow and perilous crossing. The volcanic rock was badly decomposed and it scaled and broke as they passed, the fragments bounding down to the still water, far below.

On the other side they came to a ledge and Tiki turned and made gestures, nodding at them, talking in excited gutturals.

"He speak we soon find," the captain interpreted.

They had to go in single file along that narrow way. Once Tiki pointed to some dark marks on the rock.

"That blood," said the captain. The girl shuddered and Stanton steadied her. It was the dry season. Such stains would linger. Haines had been wounded. Suddenly Tiki stopped where a tangle of vines cascaded down the cliff that backed the ledge. He drew them aside and disclosed a narrow cleft, a fissure made ages past in some upheaval.

It led to a little glen that was merely an oval enlargement of the fissure. Its sides were thick with moss. Water trickled down and formed a pool. There was shrubbery, a few trees, guava scrub. The sun never reached this hidden place in which Haines had found sanctuary. They saw a little shelter of boughs by the pool and saw him lying there, gaunt, haggard, his face covered with a beard, his eyes deep sunken, but with light in them, as the girl gave a cry and ran forward to kneel beside him.

He was reduced almost to skin and bone. One shoulder and a foot were crudely bandaged. His voice was barely audible.

Stanton had brought along a first-aid kit and a flask of brandy. Lucy gave some to her father and a faint flush came into his hollow cheeks.

"I thought you were a ghost," he said faintly. "How did you come here? It was just in time. I wouldn't have lasted—much longer—my dear."

He closed his eyes and Stanton thought he was gone, but the pulse still fluttered feebly. The girl gave him more brandy.

"He's starved," she said. "We must get him down to the boat. Thank God he's still alive!" The pearls were forgotten. The Chinese captain had got a fire started. One of the crew put on some water to heat.

"We'll have to be careful how we feed him," said Stanton. "I've got some beef cubes. We'll have to make a litter, and those wounds should be looked to. He doesn't seem to have any fever."

In the hope of Tiki's discovery they had brought up certain equipment, including the utensil in which the water was warming. The girl dissolved the cubes and added a little brandy, while Stanton unbound the foot. A bullet had gone through the small bones. The wound showed in a purple pucker. There had been inflammation, but, with the fever, it had been starved out of him. The lead had passed through and there was no infection. It was the same with the shoulder. Haines was terribly weak, but he had been a strong man and he had survived.

He managed to swallow the beef tea. It was all they dared allow him. Stanton cleansed the wounds and temporarily dressed and bandaged them. The litter was being made by the sailors. Haines insisted upon talking. Stanton thought it might be better for him than repression.

"They nearly got me," he said. "They got my men. They'd have had me but for chance. They came early in the morning expecting to catch us all asleep, and they butchered my boys, without giving them a chance. I saw it and could do nothing. They were after the pearls. They couldn't have found them. They tortured two of my men to find out, but they didn't know. It was the Lehua. They were all in it, but it was Loo Fong who brought them. I nearly got him. It was this way—let me talk, Lucy, I haven't talked for days, not since I went out of my head.

"I wanted meat. There are goats up here in the crags and I came up overnight to get a kid or two. We were running short of grub, you see, and were pretty well fed up on fish. We were going back in a few days. We cleaned the patches and were rotting out the last of the shell. A lot of pearls. We're rich, Lucy. Luck's turned, after all.

"I saw the schooner coming in. I didn't recognize it. Thought at first Cheung had sent it. I didn't suspect anything, but started down the mountain. There's a place across the grass where you can see the beach. Time I got there, they had anchored and were sending a boat ashore. They were all like ants from the height. I saw my men come out of their hut and run back again. Those devils were armed, of course, and they didn't even wait to parley. Some of them went to my house. Then the butchery started. My boys were not armed. I had my rifle with me. I had one extra clip along. It was all over in a few minutes and I couldn't help them. They'd have got me if I had been there. I ran down the trail when I saw what was happening and then they started up after me. I suppose they got out of one of my men that I was up here after goats. They burned the men's feet in the fire, damn them.

"One has to keep to the trails. I started back for the crags. They beat all through the grass and then they started to cross the big gap. I fired at them, hit one of them. He fell into the lake. That was a mistake, I suppose; it gave me away; but I was seeing red. On the next shot my rifle jammed. They came over and they hunted me all day, spreading out. The crew were black men and it was easy work for them. They sighted me three times. Once they hit me, in the shoulder.

"I saw they'd get me sooner or later. I couldn't stay in the crags. They had me nearly surrounded, but I got past them, down to the ledge just below here. My only chance was to bolt across the ridge. But they spotted me. They had me on the ledge. I knew who they were then. It was Loo Fong who hit me in the foot as I bolted for cover. I didn't feel it for the moment, though I had a shoeful of blood. I was bleeding from the shoulder, weak. I dodged out of sight and then I saw my last chance. I knew the cleft, though I had never been up it. A wounded dove flew into it one day and I had gone after it. I thought the vines might hide me. There was a loose bowlder on the ledge and I shoved it over and dodged into the crevice. The rock went crashing down to the lake and they thought it was my body.

"They came down to the ledge and looked at the place. I heard Loo Fong cursing. They stayed there for a little while and then went away, swearing. I suppose they tried to find the pearls, but they couldn't get down to the lake. I crawled up to this place presently, bandaged my foot at the pool, and my shoulder. They both got pretty bad after awhile. I made this shelter, I got some guavas, and lived off them and the olehau berries. I couldn't walk, and fever set in. I don't know how long I've been here; I was delirious."

The litter was ready. They set Haines in it, a light weight for all his big frame, and he lay there exhausted as two of the crew swung him up and they started down, Lucy as close to her father as the trail permitted.

They crossed the ridge and the grassy plain, coming to the place he had spoken of where they could see the beach and their schooner. There was another ship coming round the bend—the Lehua! They saw the two men left on board the Fahine jump into a small boat and row ashore. They were fired at from the Lehua. The reports came up in tiny cracks of sound, but the two reached the beach and bolted for the jungle.

A boat crammed with men put off from the raiding vessel.

They were hampered with the wounded Haines. They had to get him into safety. Stanton's blood boiled at sight of the invaders.

"We fight them," said the skipper. "Can do. If not, they sink ship, all same his." Tiki was jabbering.

"He say take him along god," said the captain. "He speak it safe place. He speak God fixee. Cave along that place."

Tiki nodded emphatically. Stanton thought of Cheung's warning, spoke of it to the captain.

"I savvy. All same I think Tiki talk plopeh."