The Spanish Cave (8 page)

“None is prepared,” said Echegaray sadly. “I have no son, nor have I ever mingled my blood with that of any youth in the rite of adoption.”

“It shall be mingled,” uttered Paca in a strange voice, with her eyes fixed on the rafters above his head.

“Is that a hope?” Echegaray asked. “Or do you speak as one who has seen what shall come?”

“As one who has seen,” Paca answered.

CHAPTER SIX

AT ten in the morning the party were assembled in the oak grove at the entrance to the cave. It was a clear, fresh day with little puffs of wind that travelled over the grass like the shadows of clouds. For awhile they lay and talked under the low canopy of the trees, all of them reluctant to leave the sane and lovely hillside for the black labyrinth of rock and water. The sound of a ship's siren drifted across the valley, a reminder of the sea, two miles away and yet coiling among the rocks under their feet. It was Olazábal tooting the
Erreguiña's
whistle as a signal that he was in position off the coast.

“Stations, gentlemen!” said Echegaray.

They shook hands. Then he, Pablo, and Dick went down the rope ladder and took their places in the boat.

The headlight fizzled, flickered, and burned brightly, throwing a powerful beam which glittered on the smooth,
damp walls of the cavern. Dick gave the flywheel a turn, and the motor chugged into life.

“Adios,
and a good journey!” called Father Juan.

“Hasta la vuelta
—Till we return!” they answered.

The boat slid round a bend in the channel and disappeared. The noise of the motor faded away. Hal sat at the telegraph, watching the cable reel steadily off the drum. Father Juan produced a small black bag from under his cassock.

“What have you got there, padre?” asked Hal.

“The only supplies that Echegaray forgot,” replied Father Juan. “Bandages, antiseptics, a tourniquet, and a few simple surgical instruments. I didn't like to bring them out before. It might have been a little—er— depressing to the party.”

“It depresses me all right,” said Hal. “They show that you believe in Echegaray's theory. I'm afraid I've been taking it with a grain of salt.”

“You see, you didn't hear him tell it,” said Father Juan.

The revolving drum slowed and stopped. A minute later Dick's first message came through:

“Big cleft on our right. Can hear a waterfall somewhere inside. Are keeping straight on. General direction due south.”

Some two hundred yards of cable reeled off the drum. It slackened, stopped, and started again in little jerks.

“The ferret is uncertain which hole to follow,” said Father Juan.

“What are you doing?” tapped Hal.

“Small cave here with many openings,” came the answer from Dick. “We are exploring them all.”

“O.K. How's everything?” Hal replied.

“Smelly.”

There was silence for quarter of an hour. Then the buzzer purred insistently.

“Lost our way. Don't know which hole we came in by. Echegaray says reel up wire if you can.”

Hal and Father Juan put their shoulders to the drum and slowly turned it till a hundred yards of wet cable were wound up. It was covered with slime from the bottom, and they got a taste of the atmosphere of decay through which the boat was passing.

“Thanks,” said the telegraph. “You pulled the boat back and showed us how we got in. Trying another hole now.”

The cable whirred off the drum for five minutes, and then stopped. A long message came through from the boat:

“Have arrived at end of tide water. Fish. Mudbank ahead of us. Thousands. Noses against it.”

“What does he say?” asked Father Juan.

“They've got to the end of the channel,” answered Hal. “And he's all excited about some fish. I can't make much of it.”

“Tell us more,” he tapped.

“Going ashore. Will explain later,” Dick replied. “Don't expect any messages for little time.”

Hal swore. Then either they were within striking distance of their quarry, or—a thought which made him glance murderously at the two stripped oranges within reach of his hand—the creature was now between them and their line of retreat. He told himself that they could not be in danger once they were off the water, but the fact remained that if they did get caught away from the boat, there would be no means of communication.

Meanwhile Dick and the two men had almost forgotten the object of their expedition in wonder at the extraordinary sight revealed by the sputtering glare of the headlight. The channel was blocked by a steep slope of mud over which were seeping little streams of fresh water. The mud was covered with pieces of jelly which slid slowly and greasily down the bank to the bottom. This jelly was brown in the beam of light, but, outside it, shone with a faint, violet phosphorescence of its own. Where the mud met the water there was a broad ribbon of silver, shivering with greed and excitement. It was formed of the noses and backs of fish, which pressed against the mud nibbling and sucking, rank upon rank of them continually sliding and squirming over each other. The cave was filled with a faint lapping sound caused by the tens of thousands of tiny mouths pecking at the jelly. Sometimes the ranks were broken as dogfish plunged
into the shoal and tore at the shimmering bodies; but never for an instant was there an empty space along the mud-bank. For every square foot of fish that vanished into the swirling, snapping jaws, masses rose from the bottom to press into their places.

“Jellyfish!” exclaimed Pablo. “Jellyfish—I spit in the milk!”

Echegaray lifted a scrap of the jelly on the blade of an oar, and examined it in the glare of the headlight.

“No,” he said. “I think they're algæ. But I've never seen such big colonies in the sea. They must be fresh-water algæ.”

“What are algæ?” asked Dick.

“Plants. Very primitive plants. There are tons of them to every acre of sea, and they feed the fish just as grass feeds the land animals. But they're so small you can't see them unless they form colonies.”

“What do they eat?” Dick asked.

“They don't eat. Water and minerals and light are all they want. I don't know where these get their light, but we'll climb up the bank if we can and see what's on top. Back her down, Dick, and then run her nose hard into the bank.”

Dick backed the boat into the darkness, and then charged the bank. It squelched and gave under the bows. The propeller churned up eddies of scum and little fish.

“That'll do,” said Echegaray. “Now let's see if the mud will bear,”

Pablo gingerly let himself over the side of the boat. He sank up to his knees in yellow slime, and began floundering up the bank.

“It's soft,” he reported, “but there's no suck.”

Dick and Don Ramon followed him. They could not pull their feet clear of the thick tidal mud, but shambled forwards a few inches at each step. Their movements stirred up a rich, strong smell that was not unpleasant after the odour of decay that pervaded the dark channel behind. Halfway up the slope the mud became shallower and the going easier. A moment later they were on a fairly level terrace of hard rock. A few inches of water trickled over it, covered by the jelly-like algæ as thick as green scum on a pond.

They saw that they were in a last cave, well above the high-water mark. It was not so wide as some of the underground lakes through which they had passed, but of vast height. A shaft of white light shot down from a rift, like a window high up in the nave of some cathedral, picking out a smooth slope of rock carpeted with the bluish-brown jelly. Evidently this was the parent patch, from which all the floating scum had broken away.

Echegaray took the bearings of the rift, and roughly calculated its angle with the meridian.

“Due south,” he said. “We'll see the mid-day sun through that cleft in a minute. It must shine directly through for about a quarter of an hour every day, except for a few months in winter.”

The shaft of light was uncanny. The walls and floor of the cave merged into a grey darkness. The entrance was in black night, except where the beam of their headlight glanced off the upper edge of the mud-bank. As they examined the bed of algæ, the sun swung into line with the cleft, and the ray changed from white to gold. It seemed as deliberate as a searchlight, so exactly did it pick out the bed.

Under the direct rays of the sun the patches of jelly quivered and spread. At the sudden movement, the three jumped back, startled. Then they watched the rapid multiplication of the jelly with fascinated eyes. The edges of each patch expanded and broke off, forming islands around the mother patch. Each of these islands expanded and threw off colonies in turn. Some clung to the rock and continued to grow, but most slid down into the water, thickening the scum on its surface.

“Help me, St. Andrew!” exclaimed Pablo. “They'd cover all the ocean in a year!”

“Yes,” agreed Echegaray, “if they could breed at this pace anywhere else, and if the fish didn't eat them.”

“Are they breeding?” asked Dick, amazed.

“Must be!” answered Don Ramon. “Each of these patches is made of hundreds of thousands of individual cells, and each cell is splitting in two. Then those two split into four, the four into eight, and so on.”

“Man! Another legend!” said Pablo sceptically.

“No—fact!” Don Ramon replied. “That's the way they breed. The astonishing thing is that they seem to do it only during the minutes of sunshine, and then very fast. But they have such favourable surroundings. Slimy rock. Water full of minerals and salts. Lord knows what gases. And this blast of sunshine once a day. It's enough to create life itself, let alone make blue algæ get out of control!”

“Are they what the beast eats?” asked Dick.

“I shouldn't think so,” said Don Ramon. “The fish eat the algæ, and the beast eats the fish. And so, just because of the accidental meeting of a shaft of light and some chemicals, there's enough food to keep a great carnivorous animal in luxury.”

“We'd better get out of this,” suggested Pablo. “If your luxurious one should take a fancy to come fishing, he'd make short work of our boat down there.”

They splashed back to the edge of the mud-bank through the soupy water. Dick, exploring for an easier way down, discovered that close to the wall of the cave the slope descended in a series of little ledges of mud, like a faintly outlined flight of steps. He sat on the edge and cautiously felt the first step with his feet. It was quite hard under the coating of slime.

“Hola, Pablo! Don Ramon!” he called. “Here's something hard under the mud!”

He scrambled down to the bottom, sploshed along the foot of the bank to the boat, and swivelled the headlight so that the other two could see their way down. Echegaray
descended carefully with Pablo a step behind him. On the fifth ledge the Basque stopped for an instant to feel the mud ahead. Pablo came pounding down alongside him.

“Mind!” yelled Echegaray, feeling the support bend under their combined weight.

Pablo floundered desperately. There was a sharp crack. Smoothly and swiftly the two vanished into the mud up to their waists, while Dick howled with laughter.

“Silence,
chico!”
commanded Pablo, gazing at him reproachfully. “Have you no shame?”

Dick had not. He sat on the locker and roared.

“That boy wouldn't lose his sense of humour in the middle of a nightmare,” said Echegaray. “I like him.”

The wrinkles of his face opened and shut with amusement. He gathered a compact handful of slime, and slung it at Dick with deadly aim. It took him on the side of the head with a satisfying smack.

“If I can throw as well as that later,” said Echegaray, wiping his hands, “we'll bag our rabbit!”

“Ugh!” gasped Dick. “It's going down my back. Sorry, Don Ramon! You looked so funny.”

“Never mind about that, young man,” said Echegaray with a twinkle in his eye. “You get us out of here!”

Dick threw them a coil of rope and started the motor. The boat shot down channel away from the mud-bank. The rope snapped taut. Don Ramon and Pablo came
out of the mud with a plop, like a couple of plump corks coming out of a bottle.

Echegaray ruefully rubbed his shoulders, which felt as if they had been nearly dislocated by the jerk. Pablo offered to help him, but Don Ramon waved him hastily away.

“You keep above me or below me, Pablo,” he said. My weight is a lot more than it ought to be, and quite enough for whatever we're standing on. By the way, what
are
we standing on?”

He bent down and began to scoop away the mud with his hands. Meanwhile Dick turned the boat around and came back to pick them up.

Don Ramon quickly cleared the little ledge on which he stood. The glare of the headlight showed a strip of hard yellowish-white matter. He cleared the mud from the ledges above and below and found two more strips of the same stuff.

“Mother of Heaven! It's one of our rabbit's ancestors!” exclaimed Don Ramon.

“Go on!” said Pablo with disbelief.

“It is. These are ribs.”

“Ribs?”

“Yes,” answered Don Ramon. “Ribs. One of the beasts died here canted up against the mud-bank, and the steps are its ribs.”

He worked his way to the wall of the cave, and cleared away some more mud. There was the backbone—a
line of gaunt, giant vertebrae, from which the ribs curved out and down.

Dick and Pablo were silent. Both of them knew that some monster was sharing with them the dank, underground channel, but they had not realised its size. Dick should not have been surprised, for, from what he had already glimpsed, he could imagine the huge bulk of the beast they hunted. But not the most vivid imagination was equal to the stark fact of those enormous ribs which he had used as a flight of steps.

“This is luck,” remarked Don Ramon unperturbed. “Now we can know what our rabbit looks like before we actually see him. I hope he's not so big as his late grandmother.”

He struggled up the vertebræ to the top of the mud-bank in the hope of finding the skull, but the long neck burrowed deep into the mud, and there was no way of reaching the far end of it.

“All aboard!” ordered Echegaray. “Let's go back to that cave where we lost our way—the right hole must be one of those which lead off it. And for the lord's sake keep your eyes skinned!”