Kitabı oku: «The Sign of the Spider», sayfa 15

"Hold!" cried a loud voice. "I have a favour to ask the king. I, who bear the Sign!" And Laurence, who in the midst of one of the listening groups had been unseen hitherto, now came forward, none hindering, and stood before the king.

A deep silence was upon all. Every head was bent forward. The frightful priesthood of the demon paused, with staring eyes, to wait on what new turn events would take.

"Say on, Nyonyoba," said Tyisandhlu shortly, looking anything but pleased at the interruption.

"It is this, O Burning Wind. Let Nomtyeketye return to his own people. I will take his place."

"You?" exclaimed the king, as a gasp of amazement shivered through the listeners.

"Yes, I. Hearken, Ndabezita. I it was who brought him hither. He is young, and his life is all before him. Mine is all behind me, and has been no great gain at that. I will proceed with these" – with a glance in the direction of the blackly horrible group – "to where atonement is offered. But let the two return together to their own land."

"Pause, Nyonyoba! Pause and think!" said the king, speaking in a deep and solemn voice. "That which awaits you, if I grant your request, is of no light order. Men have sought their own death rather than face it. Pause, I say." Then rapidly, and speaking very low: "Even I cannot save you there. It may be that the Sign itself cannot."

Now, what moved him to an act of heroic self-sacrifice, Laurence Stanninghame hardly knew himself. It may have been that he did not appreciate its magnitude. It may have been that he held more than a lingering belief that the king would find some secret means for his deliverance, whereas to his younger comrade no such way of escape lay open. Or was it that at this moment certain words, spoken long ago in warning, now stood forth clear and in flaming letters upon his brain: "Other men have gone up country with Hazon, but not one of them has ever returned!" He himself, abiding henceforward among the Ba-gcatya, and Holmes consigned to the mysterious doom, would not those warning words be carried out in all their fell fatality? But that after these years of hardening in the lurid school of bloodshed and ruthlessness he should be capable of sacrificing himself for another, through motives of impulsive generosity, Laurence could not have brought himself to believe. Indeed, he could not have defined his own motives.

"Give me your word, Great Great One, in the sight of the whole nation," he said in a loud voice, "that these two shall be suffered to depart unharmed – now, at once – and I will take the place of Nomtyeketye."

"That will I readily do, Nyonyoba, for I have no need of strangers here such as these," answered Tyisandhlu. Then, sadly, "And – you are resolved?"

"I am."

"Then it must be. For ye two, go in peace; – enough shall be given you for your journey."

Holmes, who understood the language very imperfectly, had no clear notion, even then, of what had taken place. But when he saw the gigantic forms in their black disguise bounding forward to surround Laurence, he, being otherwise unarmed, instinctively threw himself into a boxing attitude, which was, under the circumstances, ridiculous, if natural.

"Keep cool, you young idiot," snarled Hazon. "We're out of this mess better than we deserve."

"Why, what's happened?"

"Stanninghame is acting substitute for you, and we are to be fired out of the country, which is good news to you, I take it."

"But I can't allow it!" cried Holmes bewilderedly, as the truth began to dawn upon him. "No, hang it, I can't, – tell the king, I – "

"No good! Keep your hair on! and remember, too, it's more than probable he won't come to any harm. He stands in with them too well."

Holmes, more than half reassured, suffered himself to be persuaded – especially as he was powerless to do anything at all. But whether Hazon believed or not in what he had just advanced must remain forever locked up as a mystery in the breast of that inscrutable individual. One thing, however, he did not believe in, and that was in he himself suffering for the foolishness of other people.

Meanwhile Laurence, in the midst of his disguised executioners, was pursued by the howling and execrations of the crowds, which parted eagerly to make way for their passage. Outside on the open plain a vast mob of women had collected, yelling shrilly at him – and even pelting him with earth and sticks. One of the latter, thrown at close quarters, hurling over the heads of his guards, struck him on the shoulder, painfully and hard. He looked up. It had been hurled by the hand of Lindela; and as he met her eyes full, the face which he had last looked upon softening and glowing with the wondrous light of love, was now wreathed into a horrible grin of hate and savagery.

"Yau! The Spider is hungry! Fare thee well, Umtagati,"⁶ jeered the chief's daughter shrilly.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THE PLACE OF THE HORROR

Was he awake – asleep and dreaming – or – dead?

All these questions did Laurence Stanninghame ask himself by turn as he recovered his confused and scattered senses; and there was abundant scope for such conjecture for, in truth, the place wherein he found himself was a strange one.

A wall of rock arose on either side of him – one straight, perpendicular, the other overhanging, arching out above the first. As he lay there in the semi-gloom, his first thought was that he was in a cave; a further glance, however, convinced him that the place was a gigantic fissure or rift. But how had he come there?

With an effort, for he still felt strangely languid and confused, he sent his mind back to the events of the previous day. Stay, though – was it the previous day? Somehow it seemed much longer ago. He remembered the long hurried march into the heart of the mountains with his gruesome escort. He remembered partaking of a plentiful meal and some excellent corn-beer; this he had done with a view to keeping up his strength, which he might need to the full. Then he remembered no more. The liquor had been drugged, he decided.

But to what end? To what end, indeed, was he there? How had he been brought there? He raised himself on his elbow and looked around.

He started. A large bundle lay beside him – something rolled up in a native blanket. Speedily undoing this, he discovered several grass baskets with lids. These contained pounded corn, such as is eaten with amati, or curdled milk – and, indeed, a large calabash of the latter, tightly stoppered, was among the stores. Well, whatever was to become of him, he was not to starve, anyhow. But was he only being fattened for a worse fate?

Then a thought struck him, which set all his pulses tingling into renewed life. He, too, had been sent out of the country, and these stores were to last him for, at any rate, part of his journey. True, the prospect was anything but an exhilarating one, seeing that he was unarmed, and had but the vaguest idea which way to turn; that the Ba-gcatya country was surrounded by ferocious and hostile races. But then, everything is relative in this world, and to a man who has spent hours of a long day journeying towards a mysterious, horrible, and certain death, the discovery of release and life, even with such slender chances, was joy after the boding dread which those long hours had held for him. Yes, that was it, of course. Tyisandhlu had not been faithless to the friendship between them. While openly consenting to his sacrifice, for even the king dare not, in such a matter, run counter to the feelings of the nation, Tyisandhlu had given secret orders that he should be smuggled out of the country.

Having arrived at this conclusion, it occurred to Laurence that he might as well explore a little. He would leave his stores here for the present; for a glance served to show that the rift or fissure ended there, so taking only a handful of the pounded corn, to eat as he walked, he started at once.

But there was a something, a cold creepiness in the air perhaps, that quelled much of his new-born hope. The rift seemed to form a kind of circle, for he walked on and on, ever trending to the right, never able to see more than a short distance in front; never able to behold the sky. There was something silently, horribly eloquent in the grim sameness of those tomblike walls. Just then, to his relief, the semi-gloom widened into light. The cliffs no longer overhung each other. A narrow strip of sky became visible, and, in front, the open daylight.

But with the joy of the discovery another sight met his gaze, a sight which sent the blood tingling through his veins. Yet, at first glance, it was not a particularly moving one. On the ground, at his feet, lay two unobtrusive-looking pebbles of a bluish gray. But as the next moment he held them in his hands, Laurence knew that he held in a moment what he had gone through years of privation and ruthless bloodshed to obtain – wealth, to wit. For these two unobtrusive pebbles were, in fact, splendid diamonds!

More of them? Of course there were. The exploration could wait a little longer. An accident might cut him off from this spot – might cut him off from such a chance forever. The hands of the seasoned adventurer trembled like those of a palsied old woman as he turned over the loose soil with his foot, for instrument of any kind he had none; and indeed, his agitation was not surprising, for in less than an hour Laurence was in possession of eight more splendid stones as large as the first, besides a number of small ones. He knew that he held that which should enable him to pass the remainder of his life in wealth and ease, could he once get safe away.

Could he? Ah, there came in the dead weight – the fulfilling of that strange irony of fate which well-nigh invariably wills that the good of life comes to us a trifle too late. For his search had brought him quite into the open day once more. Before him lay a valley – or rather hollow – of no great size, and – it was shut in – completely walled in by an amphitheatre of lofty cliffs.

Cliffs on all sides – at some points smooth and perpendicular, at others actually overhanging, at others, again, craggy and broken into terraces; but, even with the proper appliances, probably unscalable; that detail his practised eye could take in at a glance. How, then, should he hope to scale them, absolutely devoid, as he was, of so much as a stick – let alone a cord.

A cord? How had he been brought there? Had he been let down by a cord – or brought in by some secret entrance? the latter appeared more probable; and that entrance he would find, – would find and traverse, be its risks, be its terrors what they might. He had that upon him now which rendered life worth any struggle to preserve.

He stepped forth. The sky was over his head once more, clear and blue. That was something. By the slant of the sunrays he judged it must be about the middle of afternoon. The floor of the hollow was bumpy and uneven. Sparse and half-dry grass bents sprung from the soil, but no larger vegetation – no trees, no brush. Stranger still, there was no sign of life – even of bird or insect life. An evil, haunted silence seemed to brood over the great, crater-like hollow.

The silence became weighty, oppressive. Laurence, in spite of himself, felt it steal upon his nerves, and began to whistle a lively tune – as he walked slowly around, examining the cliffs, and every crack and cranny, with critical eye. The echoing notes reverberated weirdly among the brooding rocks. Suddenly his foot struck something – something hard. He looked down, and could not repress a start. There at his feet, grinning up at him, lay a human skull – nay, more, a well-nigh complete skeleton.

It was a gruesome find under the circumstances. Laurence, his nerves unstrung by the effects of the drug, and recent alternations of exultation and what was akin to despair, felt his flesh creep. What did it mean? Why, that no way of escape did this valley of death afford. This former victim – had he been placed there in the same way as himself, and, all means of exit failing, had succumbed to starvation when his provisions were exhausted? It looked that way. Bending down, he examined this sorry relic of humanity – examined it long and carefully. No bone was broken, the skeleton was almost complete; where it was not, the joints had fallen asunder without wrench, and the smooth round cranium showed not the slightest sign of abrasion or blow.

With sinking heart he pursued his search; yet somehow his attention now was given but languidly to potential means of exit which the faces of the cliffs might afford. Something seemed irresistibly to draw it to the ground. Ha! that was it. Again that horrid gleam of whitened bones. Another skeleton lay before him – and look, another, and another, at short distances apart. All these, like the first, were unshattered, uninjured; but – the whole area here was strewn with skulls, yellow and brown with age, – was strewn with bones also, mossy, mahogany-hued, and which crackled under his tread.

No one could be more ruthless, more callous; no man could view scenes of cruelty and bloodshed more unmoved than Laurence Stanninghame, – as we have shown, – or bear his part more coolly and effectively in the fiercest conflict; yet there was something in these silent human relics lying there bloodless; in the unnatural, haunted silence of this dreadful death-valley that caused his flesh to creep. Then he noticed that all were lying along the slope of a ridge which ran right across the hollow, dividing the floor of the same into two sections. He must needs go over that ridge to complete his explorations, yet now he shrank from it with awe and repugnance which in any other man he would have defined as little short of terror. What would await him on the other side?

Well, he must go through with it. Probably he would find more of such ghastly relics – that was all. But as he stood upon the apex of the ridge, with pulses somewhat quickened, no whitening bones met his gaze – fixed, dilated as that gaze was. The cliff in front – he thought to descry some faint chance of escape there, for its face was terraced and sloping backward somewhat. Moreover, it was rent by crannies and crevices, which, to a desperate and determined man, might afford hand and foothold.

And now for the first time it flashed upon Laurence that the mystery of "The Spider" stood explained. This horrible hole whence there was no escape – where men were thrust to die by inches as all of these had died before him – the repulsive and blood-sucking insect was in truth a fitting name allegorically for such a place, which swallowed up the lives of men. Besides, for all he knew, the configuration of the crater might, from above, resemble the tutelary insect of the Ba-gcatya. Yes; he had solved the mystery, as to that he was confident – the next thing to do was to find some way out, to break through the fatality of the place.

For the first time now his shoulder began to feel stiff and sore, where the stick hurled by Lindela had struck him. That was a bad preparation for the most perilous kind of cliff-climbing. Then the incident recalled to mind Lindela herself. Her sudden change of front was just such an oddity as any of the half-ironical incidents which go to make up the sum of life's experiences. Well, savage or civilized, human nature was singularly alike. A touch of superstition and the god of yesterday became the demon of to-day.

Thus musing, he came, suddenly and unexpectedly, upon another skeleton. But the effect of the discovery of this was even more disconcerting than that of the first. For, around, lay rotting rags of clothing, and a gold ornament or two. These remains he recognized at a glance. They were those of Lutali.

Yes, here was a broad bracelet of gold, curiously worked with the text of the Koran, which he had seen last on the Arab's sinewy wrist. Now that wrist was but a grisly bone. There, too, were parchment strips, also inscribed with Koran passages, and worn in a pouch as amulets. The identity of these remains was established beyond a doubt.

But the discovery inspired within him a renewed chill of despair. If Lutali had been unable to find means of escape, how should he? The Arab was a man of great readiness of resource, of indomitable courage, and powerfully built. If such a one had succumbed, why should he, Laurence, fare any better? He sat down once more, and, gazing upon the sorry remnant of his late confederate, began to think.

What a strange, vast, practical joke was that thing called life. Here was he at the end of it, and the very means of ending it for him had, at the same time, put him into possession of that which rendered it worth having at all. He felt the stones lying hard and angular in his pockets, he even took out one of them and turned it over sadly in his hands. He would gladly give a portion of these to be standing on the summit of yonder cliff instead of at the base; not yet had he come to feel he would gladly give them all. It was only of a continuance with what life had brought him that he should be there at all. He had sacrificed himself for another. The sublimity of the act even yet did not strike him. He regarded it as half-humorous, half-idiotic, – the first because his cynical creed was bolstered up by the consciousness that Holmes would never more than half appreciate it; the last, because – well – all unselfishness, all consideration, was idiotic.

Then it occurred to him that it would be time enough to sit down and dream when he had exhausted all expedients, and he had not explored that side of the hollow at all yet. To this end he moved forward. A very brief scrutiny, however, of the face of the cliff sufficed to show that for climbing purposes the cracks and crannies were useless.

Ha! What was this? A cave or a rift? Right in front of him the cliff yawned in just such a rift as the one in which he had awakened to find himself, only not on anything like such a large scale. Eagerly Laurence plunged into this. Here might be a way to the outer world – to safety.

He pressed onward in the semi-gloom. The rocks darkened overhead, forming, in effect, a cave. And now it seemed that he could hear a strange, soft, scraping, a kind of sighing noise. A puff-adder was his first thought, looking around for the reptile. But no such reptile lay in his path, and he had no means of striking a light. With a dull shrinking, his flesh creeping with a strange foreboding, as with the consciousness of some fearful prescience, he decided to push on, being careful, however, to tread warily. This was no time for sticking at trifles.

But as he advanced the air became fœtid with a strange, pungent, nauseous odour. There were lateral clefts branching off the main gallery, but of no depth, and to these he had given but small notice. Now, however, something occurred of so appalling a nature that he stood as one turned to stone.

There shot out from one of these lateral recesses two enormous tentacles – black, wavy as serpents, covered with hair, armed at the extremity with a strong double claw. They reached forth noiselessly to within a couple of yards of where he stood, then two more followed with a quick, wavy jerk. And now behind these, a head, as large as that of a man, black, hairy, bearing a strange resemblance to the most awful and cruel human face ever stamped with the devil's image – whose dull, goggle eyes, fixed on the appalled ones of its discoverer, seemed to glow and burn with a truly diabolical glare.

Laurence stood – staring into the countenance of this awful thing – his blood curdled to ice within him, his hair literally standing up. Was it the Fiend himself who had taken such unknown and fearful shape to appear before him here in the gloom of this foul and loathsome cavern? Then, as his eyes grew more and more used to the dim shades, he made out a huge body crouched back in the recess, half hidden by a quivering mass of black, hairy tentacles.

For a few moments thus he stood – then with a cry of horror he threw out his hand as though instinctively to ward off an attack. The four tentacles already protruded were quickly withdrawn, and the fearful creature, whatever it was, seemed to shrink back into the cranny. One last look upon the hairy heap of moving, writhing horror – upon those dreadful demon eyes, and this man, who had faced death again and again without shrinking, now felt it all he could do to resist an impulse to turn and flee like a hunted hare. He did, however, resist it – yet it was with flesh shuddering and knees trembling beneath him that he withdrew, step by step, backwards, until he stood once more in the full light of day.