The Man who Missed the War (42 page)

‘That sounds much more like a distant memory of Atlantis to me,’ Philip declared when Gloria produced her theory, and he told her all about the Canon’s account of the great Island Continent that had been engulfed by the Flood.

After discussing the matter, they agreed that, in any case, the primitive Irish would have been the Atlanteans’ nearest neighbours in the west, so it was perfectly possible that the races in the two countries had been related. Philip produced the Canon’s belief, and one now shared by many leading anthropologists, that all myths and legends are race memories of actual historical happenings in the distant past, and, as it seemed in some ways fantastic, Philip and Gloria came to the conclusion that they were actually living among a race of European pigmies whose ancestors, when they lived in the old lands, had provided the foundation for such stories as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’.

Now that they had to remain in the valley for another Antarctic winter they once more gave their thoughts to various measures for improving the lot of their people. Gloria made some crude musical instruments for them; a drum, a harp and a kind of banjo, which proved a great success; and she showed a number
of the little women how to cook all sorts of new dishes that they had never thought of before. Philip enlarged the mill, made a number of small carts and introduced the rake as a new innovation in hay-making. That autumn he also showed them how to store potatoes and root crops against the winter in a barrow; but by far his greatest achievement that year was the manufacture of glass.

On one of his longer expeditions he had come across a sandpit and, quite near it, the place where the Little People smelted the crude iron to make their forks and spades. After several failures he succeeded in producing a rough glass, which, although it was not clear enough to be seen through, gave much more light than the little pieces of dark horn which up to then had been the only material from which to make windows.

As the Antarctic spring approached they began their preparations for a second journey to the MacKenzie Sea, since Philip was determined not to leave it too late in the season to catch a ship for home. Gloria was going to have another baby, but it was not due until early January, and he planned that they should leave the valley by mid-October. By the 14th everything was ready, but to their surprise and dismay, when they awoke up on the morning of the 15th, they found that John A. was no longer in his cot. During the night the now lusty fellow of eleven months had disappeared without a sound.

He was already capable of staggering about, but, quite apart from the fact that he habitually uttered loud cries while doing so, he certainly could not have wandered off on his own; so one of the pigmies with whom he was such friends must have taken him.

In an anxious flurry Gloria summoned Gog and Magog and asked them if they had any idea what had happened to the child. They had. With disconcerting frankness they admitted that John A. had been stolen away by some friends of theirs whose names they were not prepared to disclose, and without the least sign of contrition they went on to reveal the reason for this kidnapping.

It seemed that Philip and Gloria had so won the hearts of the Little People that the idea of their departure was now regarded as a national calamity. The fact that during the two years they
had lived in the valley there had been no raids by the great Dog, other than the apparently inevitable annual ones, had also caused special protective powers to be attributed to them. It was admitted that when they had left the valley in the previous March they had duly returned to it safe and well, but, when they had departed many months earlier with the Prince, he had not come back at all, and both of them had come back grievously wounded; so, the little men argued, it would be tempting providence to leave it again. To ensure that they should not do so it had been decided to steal the baby, without which it was felt they would certainly not leave the valley.

Flattering as was the motive behind the crime, Philip could not help being greatly annoyed at this frustration of his plans; but, although he argued, pleaded and threatened during most of the day, all the pigmies with whom he spoke displayed an unusual degree of determination in their opposition to him.

At first Gloria was not particularly worried about John A., as she felt certain that the Little People were much too fond of him to do him any harm and knew even better how to look after him than she herself did; but after a week, with Philip still vowing vengeance against the kidnappers when he found them and no hint of when John A. was likely to be returned to his home, she became distinctly anxious as to how he was getting on. In consequence, one afternoon when Philip had gone down to the mill, she tackled Gog and Magog.

To begin with they tried to reassure her as well as they could while showing reluctance to go any further, but at length she persuaded them to relieve her anxiety in a more practical manner. First they took her up to the meadow in which the Little People of that neighbourhood were in the habit of dancing at the full of the moon, and, putting her in the centre of one of the big rings made by their dancing feet, they made her promise that, if they took her to the place where John A. was hidden, she would neither attempt to take him away nor tell Philip where it was. Then they led her to the far end of the valley and into a wood. Here they insisted on blindfolding her, then after a further quarter of an hour’s walk she heard a babble of children’s voices, and they told her that she might take off the bandage.

Looking about her she saw that she was in a high cave lit by
a funnel-like opening in the roof. As she and Philip had suspected, the Little People reared their children in a secret crèche, and this was it. In front of her there were scores of infants, toddlers and playing children of all ages up to about ten, with here and there among them one of the pigmy women acting as nurse. John A. came staggering towards her with squeals of joy, and next second she had him in her arms.

On the way home that evening she asked Gog and Magog why it was that, if, as she supposed, the children were all brought up in the secret retreat in the mountainous side of the valley from fear of the Dog, all the grown-ups did not take refuge there every time the beast appeared.

They said that the children had always been brought up there as long as anyone could remember, but no doubt the custom had originated on account of the Dog and its visits, which also went back into the mists of antiquity. But the idea of any grown-up other than the nurses taking refuge there shocked them profoundly. To attempt to do so would only have resulted in leading the Dog to the secret place which, apparently, was not invulnerable; and they thought it better that half their race should be taken than that their children should be imperilled. This reply showed a new side to the pigmies’ natures and a capacity for courage and self-sacrifice that Gloria had not till then suspected that they possessed.

While observing her promise to Gog and Magog, she told Philip that night about her afternoon’s adventure, and they agreed that, although the Little People had succeeded in foiling their plans to get to the whaling station early in the season, they had no cause to be concerned about their child. The best line now seemed to play a waiting game until they could persuade their subjects to give John A. back to them, and then, having made fresh preparations in secret, slip away from the valley one night when their departure was least expected.

The following week the horror of the Dog descended on the valley again in one of the surprise visits during which so many more people were lost than at the annual March raids. Gloria clung to Philip and refused to let him go out, but nearly all night they stood—he with the rifle now well cleaned and oiled and she with the pistol—behind their stockade waiting for the
brute to pass in the hope of being able to shoot it. Three times they caught glimpses of it in the distance, but it was the dark period of the moon, so they had only starlight by which to see, and to their disgust it whisked away into the darkness each time before they had a chance to aim their weapons at it. During the day of mourning that followed it was found that some sixty-five people had been dragged from their homes and spirited away—no one knew where.

Philip, angry, bewildered, sick with rage about this horrible thing which went on beneath his eyes and which he seemed powerless to stop, spent the day trying to find out more about the monster and from where it came. Its tracks about the main paths crossed and re-crossed each other so frequently that it was difficult to ascertain where it had entered the valley and where it had taken its victims once it had secured them. Yet, after Philip had followed innumerable false trails that led to cottages with broken doors, or great holes torn in their wattle and daub walls, it emerged that after each outrage the Dog entered at some point or other a small wood which lay to the south-east corner of the valley. After half an hour in the wood Philip discovered the focal point where all these tracks merged. It was at the base of the cliff, and near it a steep track led upward.

For the first time he realised that there must be a second way out of the valley and through the mountain peaks that hedged it in. Hampered by his lame leg and crutches, it took him over an hour to climb the track and reach a small plateau which lay at about the same level as the great plateau several miles further along the ridge.

There was nothing to be seen on the little plateau, save that the earth was freshly disturbed and trampled as though a number of men or beasts had been milling round on it quite recently. At the far side from the cliff up which Philip had come there was a gap between two walls of rock, which he now felt sure must be the entrance to another pass through the mountains. There could be no doubt that this was the way that the sinister beast came, but the day was now far advanced, and he was unarmed, so he decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and that he would not explore the pass that evening.

He had turned back and was just about to begin his descent of
the cliff track up which he had come when his eye caught something glittering about ten feet away on the ground. At first he thought it was just a bright piece of quartz, but its colour was so unusual that he went over to have a closer look. A moment later, with a hand that trembled so much that it could hardly hold his find, he picked the thing up. It was a beautifully coloured piece of semi-precious stone. It was also the twin of that wonderfully carved ten thousand year old Atlantean musical instrument that the Canon had shown him long long ago on the first evening they had spent together at the Rectory.

Very slowly Philip made his way home, examining his find afresh every hundred yards or so to make certain that his eyes had not deceived him, and trying to figure out exactly what this extraordinary coincidence portended.

The stone pan-pipes might, of course, have been washed up on that ledge by some great natural cataclysm thousands of years ago, but that seemed most unlikely. It was far more probable that it had been dropped there by someone who had been on the plateau the night before.

If that were so, then the Masters of the Dog—the Lords of the Mountain—were the descendants of some of the Atlanteans who had escaped destruction at the time of the Flood. There was no more reason why some of their ships should not have been washed up on the shores of the Antarctic than on any other continent. The miracle was that they had survived. But then the Atlantean priests were said to have been great magicians, and there were these strange hints both from the Prince and from the Little People of the powers of the Lords of the Mountain to control climate and weather.

When Philip got back to the Palace he and Gloria talked over the matter far into the night, and, as she pointed out, his discovery fitted in with the tradition of the Little People—that they had lived in a great island and at a time of storm and earthquakes been brought to the land of snow by Red men in a ship.

Another thing that they discussed at length, but on which they could reach no conclusion, was whether the supernatural appearances of the Canon had any connection with Philip’s find. Was it just a coincidence that it had been a flute such as the Canon had possessed that Philip had found, and not a necklace,
a sword, a buckle or a ring? Was this one more reminder that he yet had a part to play in the distant war which would bring grievous harm to Hitler and his Nazis? No ghost could possibly have placed the thing there; that was quite certain. But the Canon’s ghost might have scared its owner into dropping it up on the little plateau the previous night. Had it done so because, for some reason, it no longer had the power to appear to Philip direct? Had these circuitous means been used in one last effort designed to remind him of the Canon, of the prophecy of the Canon’s ghost, and so urge him to exert himself to get home?

On the following day, taking their arms with them, they went up the cliff together and explored the pass. It was much shorter than the one they knew, but it brought them out on the landward side of the chain of mountains in which the valley was set, and from two thousand feet up they gazed for a long time across the seemingly endless plain below to the great southern range, which they now felt sure was the home of some strange and sinister mystery.

They found no other traces of recent visitors and could do no more for the time being; neither, until they got John A. back, could they get away to the whaling station, as Philip was now more than ever anxious to do.

It was not until mid-December that John A. was restored to them, and, by then, as the Little People knew perfectly well, Gloria was too near the time for her second child to risk a journey. The child, a girl, was born on January the 4th with the help of four small midwives as before; and the arrival of the new infant put out of court any question of their leaving for the MacKenzie Sea so as to reach it during the whaling season of 1943–44.

Philip endeavoured to conceal his disappointment, and playing with his children was a big consolation. The new baby, whom they christened Aurora after the Aurora Australis, was a pet, with her mother’s blue eyes and Philip’s fair hair, and John A. was growing apace. He could now talk a little, although, to the annoyance of his parents he seemed to pick up the Little People’s language more quickly than theirs.