The Spanish Cave (5 page)

“I must be over the hole I came in by,” thought Dick. “This doesn't look too good.”

He turned and paddled back again, away from the sea.

Once in smoother water he began to explore his prison, driving the boat from side to side. He calculated roughly that the cave was about seven boat's lengths across. The roof he could not see, but as he went farther into the recesses of the cave it came within the range of his flashlight. It got lower and lower. Dick became horribly certain that the roof and the water were going to meet, shutting him in for ever. Soon he had to lie face downwards on the keel, while the wet rock bumped against his back. He hated to hold the light in front of him, for fear that it would show the end of the tunnel; at last, it did.

Dick was so determined to go forward and get out that he nearly took to the water in the wild hope of swimming into the depths until he could work his way up again. But then it occurred to him that if this passage were really the only way out of the cavern, the air would
be bad. And the air was not bad. It was stale and damp and filled with a pungent smell of wet minerals, but it did not make him feel ill.

There was no room to turn. He pushed the boat backwards out of the tunnel until the passage widened, and then hunted back and forth for the opening he had apparently missed. He found it easily enough—a ragged, black cleft which had been screened from him as he approached from the other side by a buttress of rock. Beyond this opening, the passage became tortuous and irregular, but remained comfortingly high. Now and again it led through pot-holes, like bubbles in the rock. Dick gave up trying to paddle the boat along with his feet, and pushed it forwards by running his hands along the wall of the cave. It moved very slowly, for it was heavy and barely afloat. He lost track of time and distance altogether, for often, following the wall, he went halfway round the pot-holes when he might have cut straight across them. The swell had almost disappeared.

After several hours Dick saw a faint, grey glow of light ahead of him. He jumped to his feet and yelled with excitement. The boat naturally slid from under him, and his enthusiasm was momentarily quenched in the stagnant water. He climbed back on to the keel, and hurried towards the light.

Turning a last corner, he found himself in a craggy, misshapen cave, dimly lit by the daylight filtering through a narrow cleft high above him. A massive rock, weighing thousands of tons, had fallen from the roof into the water.
It closed the whole channel except for a passage so narrow that the little boat could hardly scrape through it. The face of the rock opposite Dick was perpendicular and covered with barnacles and slippery weed. It was quite unclimbable. Dick pushed the boat through the narrow gap between the wall of the cave and the rock, and examined the other side of it. This face was even worse for it was much higher and overhung the water, so that nothing but a fly could possibly climb it.

The underground channel ran straight on beyond the rock, but Dick had had enough of it. He reckoned that he must be nearly under the first slopes of the mountains, and that the farther he went the less likely he would be to find another opening leading to the surface. Besides, the water had begun to smell; a smell of decay, but very ancient decay; like the odour of an old church with a stench of fish added. Dick decided that he was not going to leave that patch of daylight which promised safety.

“I'm going to climb that rock or die!” he exclaimed aloud.

Then it occurred to him that his exclamation was perfectly true. He
would
have to climb that rock or die.

He worked the boat back through the narrow passage to the other side of the rock—that to which he had first come. It was not such a terrible barrier as the far side, but he saw no hope of getting up it.

Almost crying at his helplessness before this vast, merciless lump of stone, he looked at it desperately, examining every crack and tuft of weed. Suddenly he
gave a little shout of joy, for he had noticed the mark left by the morning's high tide, barely six feet below the top of the rock. He had only to sit on the boat and the afternoon tide, which was already making, would lift him slowly up to the high-water mark. He reckoned that by standing on the keel he could then just get his fingers over the edge of the rock.

Now that the worst seemed to be over, Dick felt hungry. He pulled out his sausage, which was none the worse for being soaked in salt water, and ate ravenously half what was left. With the water in the leather flask at his belt he was more careful, for he did not yet know how he would get off the top of the rock once he was on it. The tide rose, with an invisible but steady movement like the minute hand of a clock. Dick wanted to keep track of the rise, so he carefully marked a large barnacle on a level with his eyes and then looked away while he counted up to one thousand. When he had reached the thousand, he looked at the barnacle again, and found that his eyes were now some eight inches above it. Thus the hours passed until the water was within a foot of the high tide mark of the morning. Dick decided to count a last thousand. He picked a barnacle, looked away, counted, and then looked back. The water had risen a bare two inches, and the ebb had begun. The tide had turned without nearly reaching its record mark of the morning. It would not reach it again for another six months.

Dick sprang to his feet, for now or never he must try
to reach the top of the rock. He gathered his legs under him and jumped. He caught the edge with the tips of his fingers, and hung for a second until his grip slipped. Plunged into the water, he lost precious minutes climbing on to the boat and working it back into position. Again he jumped. The boat slid from under him, and he crashed against the side of the rock. He tried once more, grabbed, and hung on. The edge was sharp and formed a good handhold; but the rough rock, rasped the skin from his fingers before he could pull himself up, and he fell back. Then he tried to scale the rock, using the barnacles and the tiny cracks as handholds, but again and again he fell back into the water, now tinged with blood from his hands and knees.

Once again he jumped, but the tide was falling fast and he could not even reach his handhold. He struggled back on to the boat and lay face downwards on the keel, helpless and moving feebly like a little animal which is going to die. He thought of the skull he had held on his knees the day before, and shivered. The memory of the skull brought the anchor to his mind.

“Is it still there?” he wondered.

It probably was, lashed carefully to the locker and made fast by one of Pablo's slip-knots.

“The anchor …” thought Dick. Something was taking shape in his mind.

Then the idea came to him clearly. Dick's unconquerable spirit flared up again, giving new strength to his limbs.

Drawing a deep breath, he dived under the boat and came up inside it. He felt his way to the bows, and when he found the little anchor where it ought to be his heart gave a leap of joy. He loosened the knot and let the anchor whiz to the bottom. Then, with the slack of the rope gathered in his hand, he shot up to the surface.

Balancing himself on the keel of the boat, he hauled up the anchor, carefully coiling the rope. He grasped it with both hands a yard from the shank, and swung the light anchor like a pendulum, back and forth, and back and forth, and twice round in a circle, and then launched it through the air. It soared high over the edge of the rock and crashed to the ground with a clank that reverberated through the cavern. Dick pulled on the rope cautiously. The anchor dragged a little way and then caught firmly in a crack. It held. He swarmed up the cable, and in a minute was safely on top of the rock.

He looked up at the narrow rift in the roof of the cave, and saw the branches of a small tree with the sun shining on them. The patch of light wavered before his eyes. The cave revolved around him, growing blacker and blacker.

“Darn it!” whispered Dick, looking for a soft place to fall.

Then he fainted.

When he came to, he lay still for a long while. All the joints of his arms felt as if they had been pulled from their sockets. The blood was dry on his fingers, but his knees were still oozing a steady flow. He washed
them with a little fresh water and bound them up with the tail of his shirt. Then he got shakily to his feet, and took stock of his position.

The top of the rock was worn smooth, and plastered with streaks of evil-smelling mud. On three sides of it was water; the fourth side, the highest of all, was jammed against the wall of the cave below the hole in the roof. Dick thought at first that he could walk straight out to freedom, but then he saw that the top of the rock had crumbled away on the landward side, leaving a V-shaped chasm between it and the wall of the cave. With a plank he could easily have crossed the top of the V; it was just too wide to jump. He slid down to the bottom of the chasm, hoping to be able to climb up the other side, but the steep slope was faced with brittle rock that crumbled at a touch. At the bottom of the V, however, he found what his weary limbs longed for; a bed of soft, dry earth that had fallen from above.

Dick clambered back on to the rock, took off all his clothes, wrung them out, and spread them opposite the hole to dry. Then he ran around in circles to get warm. The cave was damp and chilly, but a little of the heat of the evening blew in through the rift, and his teeth soon stopped chattering.

His next task was to invent some method of signalling where he was to the outside world.

“Shipwrecked mariners,” said Dick, “always use their shirts—and if I'm not a shipwrecked mariner I'd like to know who is.”

He knotted the ends of the sleeves and filled them with pebbles. Then he swung the weighted shirt around his head and sent it flying through the hole to land in the branches of the little tree, where it hung waving gallantly in the wind.

Even so, Dick knew that he was in serious danger. He guessed that all Villadonga would be searching the sea and the cliffs for his body, but he had no hope that they would look inland. His only chance of deliverance lay in some passing shepherd or farmer; but the far side of the plain, where he reckoned he must be, was very desolate, and none might pass in months. And if somebody did pass, he would probably think that the torn old shirt had been blown into the tree by the wind.

He hated the thought of spending a night in the underground channel, for he suspected that out of it had come the uncanny movement which he had seen while on watch in the Cave of the Angels.

“But it's no good my being afraid,” said Dick. “I've got to stay here, and that's that.”

He put on his shorts and sweater, which were nearly dry, and slid down again into the bottom of the V-shaped hollow. He dug a hole for his hips and another for his shoulders, as Hal had taught him to do when camping on bare ground, and snuggled down into his nest. He noticed that he was completely hidden from the water and from the top of the rock, and felt much more secure. The light faded from the patch of sky. Dick fell into a dreamless sleep.

The instincts of a twelve-year-old are much sharper than those of a grown man, and Dick's were particularly keen. He was awakened by two or three gobbets of mud dropping on to him from the rock above. His sleepy impulse was to roll out of the way, but instinct cried: “lie still!” And still he lay. The tide, now high again, was lapping and plunging against the sides of the channel for no apparent reason. Dick knew that if he had woken up one minute earlier he would have seen or heard what it was that disturbed the water. He was very glad that he had not woken up. The lapping of the waves slowly died down. No more mud fell on him. But the whole cave smelt as if the ancient bottom of the sea had been turned up and was rotting. Dick lay without stirring a grain of his earthy bed, thinking frantically of all the pleasant things he had ever done, to keep himself from giving way to panic. But so tired was he that all those pleasant things soon merged into dreams, and he fell sound asleep again.

When he woke up, the sun was shining directly into the cave, throwing a bridge of light, that looked almost solid enough to walk on, from the cleft in the roof across to the grim rock. But to Dick it simply measured the distance that separated him, perhaps for ever, from the outside world.

CHAPTER FOUR

RAMON ECHEGARAY was up and about at the first glimpse of dawn. He had eaten a remarkable midnight supper prepared by the hands of the admiring Paca, and had slept for five hours, which was all the sleep he ever needed. He did not disturb Hal and he did not call for Pablo. He wanted to get his own impressions of the coast without answering questions or listening to other people's talk.

The blue haze of September hung over land and sea as he strolled along the cliffs. It rolled away before the first determined puff of wind from the Atlantic, and the beauty of the coast opened up like a flower. Don Ramon stood with his short sturdy legs wide apart, and examined it appreciatively. Alone on the cliffs, he had the air of an industrious farmer looking over his fields in the early morning. And Echegaray's attitude was not very different from that of the farmer, for he considered the whole north coast of Spain as his personal property; this was an outlying part of the estate which he did not know very well.

Green and white and pale grey, it was uncommonly beautiful, thought Echegaray. But he did not approve
of it. This Asturian coast was too much of a fairyland. He preferred the honest, brown cliffs of the Basque country, the many villages, and the broad stretches of sand. And what was the good of the pale blue sea when there wasn't a ship to be seen on it?

“It's a pretty field,” Echegaray would have said, had he been the farmer he resembled, “but we must sow some turnips in it next year.”

He continued his walk along the cliffs. A rough semi-circle of white rocks on the plain below him aroused his curiosity, and he strolled down through the long grass to look at them. As he approached, a little white figure with streaming black hair jumped up like a rabbit from under the rocks, and stared at him.

“Hola!” said Echegaray.

“Hola!” said the girl.

“Ramon Echegaray—at your service.” The old Basque introduced himself with a courteous salute.

“Lola Pelayo—at yours,” she answered.

“And what are you doing out so early in the morning, young woman?”

“I'm looking for Ricardito.”

“So am I,” said Echegaray.

Lola gave him her most bewitching smile.

“Then suppose we join forces, Don Ramon? You see the land belongs to me, and the water belongs to you, so together we're sure to find him.”

“You seem to be very certain, señorita,” answered
Echegaray, completely disarmed. “Where do you think he is?”

“Where I was looking—in one of the pot-holes.”

Echegaray walked around the semicircle of rocks. He found that on the inner side it was shaped like a cowl, overhanging a little miniature beach which sloped down to a pool of sea water.

“Does this belong to your kingdom or mine?” he asked.

Lola looked puzzled for an instant, and then grinned.

“Oh! You mean, is it land or water? I suppose it's on the frontier, your majesty.”

Echegaray laughed. He always laughed without opening his mouth, but the wrinkles on his cheeks unfolded and danced and shut, and the twists of his nose wriggled, so that his whole face seemed to be in movement.

“It's good to find a countess with some intelligence,” he said.

“How do you know I'm a countess?” asked Lola.

“Yours is a name that every Spaniard knows and honours—even an old republican like myself,” Echegaray answered. “Besides, I built the yawl
Bruja
for your father. Do you remember her?”

“Just,” Lola replied. “But we got so poor that we had to sell her.”

“Never mind,” said Don Ramon “I'll build you
another for the love of it. She'll be a little white witch with a blue line round her, the colour of your eyes, and we'll call her the
Condesita.
Let's see. Slip Number 4 is empty. You shall have her next spring. And now let's get to business. Show me this Cave of the Angels.”

Lola led him down into the track that ran the length of the plain. As they skirted the rocky basins and white sands of the coves, Lola felt that not a puff of wind nor a current nor a piece of driftwood escaped Echegaray's notice. She took him up again to the cliffs above the Cave of the Angels, and the two peered over the edge.

“Do you think you can climb down to it?” asked Lola doubtfully.

“Let's see who gets there first,” answered Echegaray.

He started with a flying leap on to a ledge beneath him. When he hit it, his legs flexed and straightened as if they had springs in them, and his body bounced like an old leather ball on to another ledge below. Turning his face to the cliff, he went down the rest of the way hand over hand, and swung his body into the cave while Lola was still feeling for her second foothold.

“I was trained in the days of sail, my dear,” said Echegaray when at last she joined him, “but
vaya! Vaya!
my wind isn't what it was!”

He puffed and blew and fanned himself with his beret.

Echegaray sat down at the mouth of the cave and fixed his eyes on the water below. He sat there for a quarter of an hour without stirring, as if in a trance. Lola, awestruck, watched him. He seemed to be holding silent communication with the people of the sea. She wondered if legend were true, and he really had webbed feet.

“What are you doing?” she whispered at last.

“Waiting to see if the fish will tell me anything,” he replied.

“What fish?”

“Look!” he said. “Follow my finger!”

Lola peered along his arm. She could see nothing but the gentle ripple of the water, the eddies of the backwash, and purple shadows far in the depths.

“I still don't see them,” she said.

“The shadows,” explained Don Ramon. “They are shoals of fish.”

One of the shadows changed direction suddenly in a quite unshadowlike manner.

“Dogfish after them,” said Echegaray.

The shoal split. Part of it vanished into the cliff under their feet. The other shadows, barely visible, circled to and fro, then came together into one whole, and streamed into the cliff after the first.

“You see,” said Echegaray. “They've told us. There's
a cave down there. Are there any of our ‘frontiers' inland?”

“I don't think so,” Lola replied. “But let's explore.”

They climbed back up the cliff, and Echegaray searched the valley below with his powerful glasses. Red cattle grazed in the lush grass. There were neither pools nor boulders. The sea might have been hundreds of miles away.

“Nothing!” he said, handing the glasses to Lola.

Two miles away the ground soared up in a steep slope, over the top of which peeped the jagged sierra. At the foot of the slope and straggling a little way up it was a grove of dwarf oaks with some grey rocks crouching like beasts in the shadow of the trees.

“Don Ramon!” said Lola, without lowering the glasses from her eyes.

“Yes, my dear.”

“Did you see that little wood on the hillside?”

“The one with an old blue shirt stuck in a tree? I did.”

“Don Ramon, it looks the sort of place where there might be a cave, and—and Ricardito used to wear a blue shirt.”

“I never heard of anyone sailing a wrecked boat two miles across the land,” said Echegaray, “but this is a crazy coast. Let's go and see.”

Climbing low stone walls and jumping ditches, the old shipwright stumped across the plain, while the white
Lola flitted along at his side. They entered the grove and worked their way up through the undergrowth towards the shirt.

Two great boulders, carpeted with moss and dead leaves, stuck up a few feet from the ground like the lips of an open mouth. They peered between them. For a moment they could see nothing, since their eyes were accustomed to the brilliant sunshine outside. Echegaray's sight was the first to adjust itself. He saw a huge, irregular rock rising from the depths of the cavern nearly to the mouth, and on the top of it a small figure sitting dejectedly with its head on its knees.

“Good-morning, Don Ricardo,” said Echegaray in a very gentle voice so as not to startle him.

As it was, Dick jumped so nervously that he found himself on his feet without knowing how he got there. Then he pulled himself together.

“Good-morning,
caballero,”
he answered coolly. “Can you get me out of here?”

“Ricardito mio!”
cried Lola.

She dropped down on the dead leaves, and burst into tears of relief.

“Hola, Lolita!” shouted Dick. “I'm feeling fine! Don't cry!”

“Well, I'll say you're a cool hand, young man!” exclaimed Echegaray. “Just a minute, and I'll be with you!”

He stroked Lola's shoulders.

“I've got a job for you, brave girl. Go to Villadonga and tell Hal to bring out some blankets and a long plank at once. I'm going down to warm the boy up a bit. He must be frozen, and the sooner he gets taken care of, the better.”

Lola nodded and, crying good-bye to Dick, ran with her long, light stride in the direction of Villadonga.

Echegaray ducked between the boulders, and launched himself with a powerful standing jump on to the rock. The top of the rock was below the mouth of the cavern, so that it was much easier to get in than to get out.

“Knees good,” said Echegaray, “but wind rotten! Keep away from cafés when you grow up, young man! And now off with those damp clothes!”

Dick grinned and obeyed. Echegaray wrapped him in his own ample coat, and massaged him till his skin tingled. It was half luxury and half agony. Echegaray seemed to know every muscle that hurt him most.

“Now!” said the Basque. “You're a bit old to sit on knees, but the closer you are the warmer you'll be!”

He took Dick on his lap, lifted up the bottom of his voluminous blue jersey, and tucked Dick under it. Dick poked his head out of the V of the jersey on Echegaray's chest, and stayed there looking like a baby on its mother's bosom—a bosom that smelt strongly, but rather pleasantly, of salt, sweat and tobacco.

“If you're not too tired,” invited Echegaray, “you could tell me your story while we're waiting. I'm Ramon Echegaray of Bilbao.”

“The
Echegaray?” asked Dick, who had heard of him from Pablo.

“Man!” exclaimed Don Ramon modestly. “Just plain Echegaray—and at your service.”

Dick told him his story, while Echegaray listened, fascinated.

“What do you think it was that you saw from the Cave of the Angels?” he asked when Dick had finished.

“I think it was a submarine,” said Dick.

He would have hesitated to say that to anyone else for fear of being laughed at, but Echegaray was different.

“It might be,” agreed the old shipbuilder. “Whatever it was, it sunk the
San José.”

“What was the
San José?”
asked Dick.

So Echegaray told him how the fishing launch had gone down inexplicably in a dead calm.

“Could it have been a whirlpool that you saw?” suggested Don Ramon.

“No,” replied Dick definitely. “It was something which cut through the water. Lola felt the wash of it, and thought a steamer had passed.”

“What about an eruption of volcanic mud under water? That might happen at the time of an exceptionally high tide.”

“Perhaps,” answered Dick doubtfully. “It let out a whoosh like all the steam in Spain blowing off.”

“Well,” said Echegaray, “ now that we know where it comes from, we can find out what it is in a day or two. The holes in this Asturian coast look as if they might
dive plumb to the eternal fires, and fill the devil's bath-tub for him.”

He borrowed Dick's flash-light, and let the beam rove around the walls of the cave.

“This rock makes our search a bit easier,” he said. “The sea has never gone over the top of it, and nothing of any size or force could get around it. So the source of the trouble must lie between here and the sea. I'll sound and chart the whole channel along which you came.”

“Dick!” yelled Hal from outside the cave.

Dick wriggled frantically within the jersey, and Echegaray lifted it to let him out.

“Hal! Hal! It's good to see you again!” he cried, prancing up and down on the rock with excitement.

“One! Two! Three!” chanted hearty voices outside.

At “three” a heavy plank shot through the mouth of the cave, and fell with one end on the rock. Dick and Echegaray marched over the bridge to freedom.

Father Juan, Pablo, Paca, and Lola were there to greet them, and half the village besides. Hal and Dick grinned at one another sheepishly, each knowing what the other was thinking and both determined not to make a scene in public. Paca caught Dick in her arms and wept over him, much to Dick's embarrassment. Pablo, who was volleying curses of joy at the heavens, slapped him on the back much harder than he meant to; and
Father Juan put his arm around him, and blessed him in grave and gentle Latin which Dick did not understand— though he loved to hear Father Juan's voice anyway. Lola, gazing at Dick with wide eyes, put out her hand and just touched him with her finger-tips as if to make sure that he was really there.

“I can never thank you enough, Don Ramon,” said Hal, shaking his hand.

“Nothing to thank me for,
amigo!”
answered Echegaray. “I might have looked for your Ricardito all my life and not found him. I expect the sea to be where it ought to be—off the coast. But she whose ancestors owned this land, she understands it. Lola told me where to look. Lola found Dick.
Caballeros,
three cheers for Dolores Pelayo, Countess of Ribadasella!”

“Viva la Condesita! Viva! Viva!”
they yelled.

Hal wrapped Dick in blankets and carried him down the slope to the ox-cart that was waiting. The two white oxen laid their great foreheads to the yoke and ambled home with a rolling walk, neither quickening it at Pablo's hoots of encouragement nor slowing it when the cart, creaking and swaying, jammed in a rut or mounted a rock with two of its wheels. They are independent beasts, oxen.