CHAPTER XI.
ASHORE
The stern part of the Rockhampton was the last left afloat, for at each plunge forward it was the fore and mid-portions that suffered most directly, although the whole vessel was shaken and getting rapidly disjointed.
It was also in the aft part that the doctor kept most of his explosives stored, as he had been a saloon passenger. The knowledge of this, however, was mercifully unknown to the original master of the ship and his companions; even Adela supposed that he must have removed them to the quarters he lately occupied, and that no explosion had followed the repeated and violent concussions gave her reason to believe that he must have cast them overboard before the vessel struck.
They had not been unprepared for the catastrophe, for Captain Nelson had found some opportunities for examining the charts and taking observations in that carelessly guarded ship.
He knew how far out of his reckoning Captain Anatole was as he hovered about and listened to his boasting, or read his log-book while the other was enjoying himself below and neglecting his duty. It was a painful sacrifice for this true sailor to see this magnificent ship doomed through the incapacity of these pirates, yet it was better she should be wrecked than be used in such a diabolical cause, for he had now abandoned all hopes of recapturing her.
Thus he had prepared them all that day for the events of the night, and when she struck they were provided with life-belts and ready in secure places, so that no one was damaged, as the Anarchists were, with the concussion.
They had dined early on the ready-cooked provisions which the stewards had piled up in the saloon, and on which they had satisfied their cravings for the past ten days, for their desperate position had not deprived them of their appetites, therefore they were not so badly off.
As the Anarchists had done, they all rushed up to the open deck after the first thud, where, superintended and assisted by the captain and his officers, they linked themselves together and waited their chance also to get away.
They saw Anatole go off with the rope, and after the last of the living Anarchists had gone they also took advantage of it, and so reached the shore, with their own share of suffering, yet without a single loss, thanks to the devotion and care of the well-trained seamen.
But it was a terrible passage for all the care taken of them, and they were well-nigh as exhausted as their enemies, who had first reached the ledge, and now lay like corpses in the darkness.
They had no idea where they were, or how much room there was on the ledge, but at the same time neither could they be sure; therefore, for the few remaining moments that their late prison lasted, they crouched together and looked seaward, listening to the thunderous sounds underneath, with the cold, fierce blast cutting through them and the heavy flakes dashing wildly about them.
They had not long to wait before the end came for the once stately, floating hotel that had ridden so proudly over the ocean, which was now revenging itself for its former submission. Wilder gusts of wind came shrieking down the gullies of this desolate land and whirled the snow-drift aside like a curtain which has been rent asunder, so that they could see amongst the white froth and foam the black and shapeless mass that was being torn to pieces.
The maddened waves broke high up the face of the butting precipice on either side of them, spurting out from that projecting ledge, which they struck like whitewash, running down in vivid streams again to the next advancing column—a savage war of the elements, that nothing could withstand except those mighty boulders.
They saw the black mass advancing once more to that adamantine wall against which it had dashed so often already, and then, as it struck, a mighty blaze leapt up like a volcano suddenly bursting into activity.
Up—up that vomit of flame burst, bearing on its lurid wings all that was left of the Rockhampton, and illuminating, while it lasted, the whole scene which before had been a mystery of horrors.
The mystery was a revealed fact now with its horrors intensified. One can sit on the edge of a precipice in the dark without becoming light-headed if one knows not what it is, yet, once it is revealed, confidence for ever vanishes.
Had it been daylight it is doubtful if one of these survivors could have reached that projecting ledge of rock, for it was a huge shelf overhanging a death-trap of a fissure into which the boiling waves were sucked with terrific force, and from which they spurted backwards like pillars of white steam. To look down at this vent-hole was sufficient to make the heart stand still and the hair turn white with terror, for round it the waters, all a mass of angry curd, swirled and ran like a millrace, to be swallowed into its darkness, and spewed up again in that white spurt.
How Captain Anatole had reached that giddy shelf was only one of the unfathomable mysteries of that awful night. Had his guardian demon—the demon spirit of Anarchy plucked him from the rushing pool and landed him high and safely on the only possible refuge of this wall-like precipice? It appeared as if this must be the case, for surely no wave, even from the mystic south, could have reached so high up.
Captain Anatole could not tell how he got there. All he knew was that when he left the ship he was borne, with the speed of an express train, struggling on the crest of a mighty wave, and pitched like driftwood, yet with whole bones, although sadly bruised, upon that rough floor. He had the presence of mind to untwist the rope from his own body and brace it round the first object his hands could reach, a detached great boulder, before his strength left him, and that was all he could afterwards say about this hair-breadth escape from death.
The rocks beneath their feet trembled as with an earthquake with the force of those exploding chemicals, spent as they were in the open, for the wreck had rebounded a fathom or so before the explosion came, but for a moment, while those broken plates of metal went up into the gloomy sky, an orange-coloured glare flamed over the scene and showed up everything distinctly for a wide space.
In the white surf the ghastly faces and broken bodies of the drowned, as they danced round that fierce whirlpool, and shot up into the air from that blow-hole, the shrinking survivors from the saloon on the outer edge recognised some of the faces of the dead, when not too much disfigured. They came very close to where they were crouching, seeming to glare at them as they paused a second on the summit of that spurt before they sank with it again into the fissure, hovering like glass balls over a fountain. A gruesome spectacle which made them turn their gaze away after a single glance—yet that glance stamped each feature for ever on the tablets of their memory.
Above and on either side spread sterile and forbidding rocks. Far as the eye could reach, basaltic masses, worn into fissures and holes with many a conflict against the stormy elements, fringed with edges of white where the snowflakes had found a shelter, but otherwise black and gloomy. It was a grand, stern and hopeless picture which that fiery glare lighted up.
They were at the entrance of a vast cavern that yawned darkly behind them. Detached masses of rocks lay about, large enough, most of them, to shelter them from the eyes of those six prostrate enemies who lay on their backs, as yet seemingly unconscious of their proximity. They saw who these six were in that second swift glance—Doctor Fernandez, Captain Anatole, the huge Irish-American Dennis MacBride, Princess Sebastopol, Countess de Bergamont and the Baroness von Hilda. They only had escaped.
Crowds of strange-looking bats, startled by this sudden and fierce glare, were trooping out to the night and dashing, in their blind alarm, against white-winged seabirds, who had sought here a shelter, but were now also seeking to escape; the lofty space above, in that vast cave, was crowded with them, although their shrieks could not be heard through the outside tumult.
But other sights, stranger and more terrifying, met their eyes as they looked into the cave.
Below the birds crouched indistinct forms not unlike huge bats with human faces. They clung desperately to the rocks and gazed with horrified glances at the dead faces as they bobbed up outside the ledge, and hung there for an instant before sinking out of sight. Adela and the rest shivered as they turned from the ghastly faces of those rock-clingers to the dead faces in mid-air, for some of the faces there were repeated inside. The horrified living were watching their own dead faces, during the brief space that this awful red glow lasted.
Then the snowflakes came down faster, heavier and more densely than before, and chaotic darkness fell upon them—the bat-like spirits at the rocks; the six male and female Anarchists in the centre of the floor, and those miserable spectators who did not know yet whether they were in the body or not.