02 South Sea Adventure (14 page)

Roger smacked his lips. ‘I won’t know what to do when I get home if I don’t have my grubs and termites,’ he said.

Further search revealed nothing. Just before the sun sank in the west Hal dived to bring up more drinking water. It seemed to him that the submarine stream was not quite as strong as it had been. It was perhaps caused by the rain that had fallen upon the island a few days before. This water filtering down through the rocks was coming out below. But it would not keep coming if there were no more rain. Rather anxiously, Hal returned to camp, but said nothing about his fears.

‘Surely there must be some fish in these waters,’ he said. ‘How can we catch them?’

They debated the possibilities. It was a real problem since they had no fishline, no hook, no rod, no bait, no net, no spear.

Omo, if he had been his usual self, probably would have come up with the answer. But he was very tired and presently went to sleep. Hal and Roger continued to wrestle with the problem, but the younger brother was getting drowsy.

‘We might make a trap,’ Hal said, ‘If we had a crate or a box or a basket’

‘But we haven’t,’ yawned Roger, ‘so we don’t make a trap.’

‘Yes, we do!’ cried Hal, and was out of the hut before he had finished the words. Roger sleepily followed, wondering what crazy idea possessed his brother now.

Though the sun had gone there was still some light in the sky. Hal trudged to the ocean shore where he began to fling rocks about. ‘Will you tell me what you are up to?’ ‘We’ll build a fish-trap of stone. Now’s a good time - at low tide. We make a circular wall. When the tide rises it will fill with water and perhaps some fish will swim into it. When the tide goes down some of them may be left there, trapped.’

‘Pretty neat, if it works,’ agreed Roger, and they began to build the wall. They extended it a few feet into the sea so that even at low tide there would be a little water in the trap.

When it was finished the weir stood three feet high and was about twenty feet across.

Hal calculated that the tide would be high a little after midnight and low again at sunrise.

When the first rays of the sun felt their way into the sharkskin hut the next morning they found Roger awake and thinking about breakfast. His repast of grubs and termites had been long since digested and he was ready for something more substantial. ‘Wake up, you dope! Let’s see what’s in our trap.’ In the shallow water at the bottom of the trap several finny creatures were dashing about seeking a way of escape. One of them was a gorgeous fish in a coat of green and gold with fine stripes of blue and red. Hal identified it as an angel fish. There were two other fish that were less beautiful but better eating - a young barracuda and a mullet.

Also there was a poisonous scorpion fish which they left in the pool hoping that the next tide would take it away.

Roger was about to lay hand on a cone-shaped starfish but Hal stopped him.

‘There’s poison in those barbs,’ he said. ‘If you puncture your hand on them your arm swells up and then your body and pretty soon your heart stops beating.’

Roger gave it a wide berth. They caught the fish with their hands and took them to camp. Omo was delighted.

‘Of course we could eat them raw,’ he said, ‘but they’d taste a lot better cooked. If I had any strength in these arms I’d make a fire.’

‘Let me try it,’ Hal said, not too confidently for he remembered his troubles in producing a fire on the floating island in the Amazon.

First he must get tinder. That at least was easy. From the rotten log he scraped up a quantity of wood dust and split off chips and slivers. Then he and Roger accumulated a pile of bark and sticks cut from this and other logs.

‘Now to find a firestick,’ Hal said. ‘It must be very white and dry.’

‘How will this do?’ Roger brought up a piece of driftwood from the shore. It was extremely light and dry as a bone.

‘Just the thing!’ said Hal.

He split off a little of it and whittled it to a sharp point. Then he braced the larger piece against a stone and began to rub it up and down with the point of the small stick.

His hands moved faster and faster. Only strength and great speed would bring success. Perspiration dripped from his face. The point was wearing a groove. The wood dust scraped off by it fell to the end of the groove.

Faster went the point. The groove began to smoke. Then a wisp of flame rose from the dust.

Roger, lying on his stomach, encouraged the flame by gently blowing upon it. It was now burning brightly. Hal stopped scraping to lay slivers of wood across the dust. These caught fire. Larger pieces were added. The fire was burning well. ‘Phew!’ exclaimed Hal. wiping his forehead. ‘I think I prefer matches!’

The boys hurriedly and not too carefully cleaned the fish, then speared them on the ends of sticks and held them over the fire.

Breakfast that morning was a grand occasion. The merry castaways ate every scrap of the fish and washed it down with sparkling spring water. It was a delicious meal. Now they could forget the horrors of the first three days. They had conquered the desert island.

‘At least we know now that we can hold out until Kaggs gets back,’ Roger said, picking up a stick in which he had already made three notches. He began on a fourth notch.

‘What’s that for?’ Hal inquired.

‘Just to keep track of the days,’ Roger said. ‘You see, the stick is just long enough for fourteen notches. That’s when I expect to see that old motor-boat chugging into this lagoon. Boy, won’t that be a happy day!’

‘It’s time I told you a few things,’ Hal said, ‘I haven’t told you before because we were pretty low and I didn’t want to make you feel worse. We’ll have to forget about Kaggs. We’d better start building a raft.’

Roger and Omo stared at him. ‘A raft!’ Roger protested. ‘What’s the use of that when there’s a motor-boat?’

‘The boat won’t come back,’ Hal said. He went on to tell them how he had altered the bearings so that Kaggs would not be able to find the island. ‘So I’m afraid I gummed things up pretty badly.’

‘You sure did!’ agreed his younger brother indignantly.

‘No, no,’ Omo said gently. ‘You did just what you had to do. It was the best thing to do. It means that Kaggs can’t steal this pearl bed. You’ve saved the professor’s experiment and perhaps some very valuable treasure. That was your duty to the man who employed you. As for us - we’re not all that important. And anyhow, we’ll get out of this. Luckily we have plenty of logs for building a raft.’

‘But we have to have more than logs,’ said Roger practically. ‘How are we going to fasten them together without any nails, bolts, screws, or rope? And have you forgotten the job we were supposed to do for the professor? We were to get him some specimens of his pearls so that he could see how they were doing. And Omo is the only one of us who can dive that deep. And I’ll bet a plugged nickel that Omo won’t be doing any diving with that hole in his leg!’

‘Then we’ll have to do the diving,’ Hal said.

Roger’s jaw dropped. ‘Sixty feet? When we’ve never done more than thirty? You’re crazy!’

Hal grinned and said nothing. He knew his kid brother. After Roger finished saying that the thing was impossible, he would probably be the very one to do it.

Presently Roger slipped out. After a time, Hal followed. Sure enough, Roger was practising diving in the bay of pearls.

Roger came up, puffing and blowing.

When he was able to speak he said, ‘I can’t get below thirty. I wish I had a pair of lead boots to pull me down.’

‘I’ll run over to the store and get a pair for you. In the meantime you might use a rock.’

‘That’s right, so I could.’

Roger seized a rock twice as big as his head and slipped into the water. He went down rapidly at first, then more slowly, and finally reached the bottom. He held the rock under one arm and with the other pulled loose an oyster. Then he dropped the rock and rose to the surface. He laid the big brown shell on the shore.

Since he had not been down more than twenty seconds the changes in pressure had not greatly affected him.

That was swell!’ he chortled after he had caught his breath. ‘But it will take a year if we can only bring up one shell at a time.’

‘If we could make a basket…’

‘Out of what?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s ask Omo.’

Omo, when consulted, sent them out to look at the heads of the fallen palm trees. He said they would find cloth and out of it they could make a bag.

‘I think he’s spoofing us,’ Roger said.

But they found the ‘cloth’. It was like a mat, a brown criss-cross of fibres formerly wrapped around the bases of the leaves.

It was a simple matter to cut out a sheet of it with their knives. They laced the edges together with some of the fibres so that the sheet was turned into a bag.

‘And why can’t we make shirts out of this stuff?’ Hal wondered.

Roger’s shirt had been used to collect the water and Hal’s had been ripped up for use as bandages and a tourniquet The tropical sun reflecting on the white rocks had badly burned their skin.

They made shirts. They were not quite of the latest fashionable cut but they served to filter the sun.

‘And I want a pair of dark glasses,’ Roger said. The eyes of both boys were bloodshot, thanks to the merciless glare. Hal had been worrying about this. Castaways on such unshaded reefs sometimes went blind. So he welcomed his brother’s suggestion.

They made masks of the matting long enough to go around and tie behind the head. They could see through the weave as through coarse cheesecloth. Most of the sun glare was cut off.

‘That feels a lot better,’ Hal sighed.

‘But I hope I don’t look as funny as you do,’ Roger laughed, inspecting his brother in his brown mask and the shirt that resembled a shaggy doormat. With no razor to keep them down, bristling black whiskers had sprouted on his cheeks and chin. ‘You sure look like Blackbeard the Pirate.’

‘Let’s surprise Omo.’

The two masked bandits crept back to the hut and prowled into the dark interior. Omo who had been dozing looked up with a start and gave a cry of alarm - then he recognized his strange visitors. He admired the shirts, masks, and bag.

‘Ithink you must be half Polynesian,’ he said, ‘you make such good use of what you find here.’

The two boys returned to the cove in high spirits. Omo’s approval meant a good deal to them.

‘I only hope we’re good enough Polynesians to bring up some pearls,’ Hal said.

But it was not too easy. Hal, after shedding his clothes, stepped in with the bag and a stone to carry him down. Reaching the bottom he quickly filled the bag with shell. But when he tried to rise with the bag he found it to be too heavy. He had to take out all but three shells before he could come up with it.

‘What we need is a rope,’ he said. ‘We’d tie it to the bag. The man on the bottom could fill the. bag and the man on top could haul it up. I think we’d better suspend operations until we can find some rope.’

‘Guess you’re right,’ Roger agreed. ‘We need it for the raft too - to fasten the logs together. But what chance have we got of finding rope on these rocks!’

They spent most of the day in the search. They learned from Omo that the Polynesians make rope from the husk of the coconut. But they had found only one nut and its husk wasn’t enough to make even a ball of string.

A liana would do as a rope - but such stout vines did not grow on reefs.

On their Amazon journey, they had seen jungle Indians use strips of the skin of the boa-constrictor and of the anaconda as rope. But there were no snakes, large or small, on coral atolls. There were sometimes sea snakes in the lagoons. They could find none in this one.

But they did discover some much-needed food. They returned to camp in the evening with a cucumber, a cabbage, and a pint of milk!

‘Won’t Omo be surprised?’ Roger chuckled. ‘Who’d ever have thought that we’d find a vegetable garden and a cow on a coral reef!’

Omo gratefully drank some of the rich milk. He knew that the cow from which it had come was the coconut tree -not from a nut but from a flower stem. And the cabbage was a palm cabbage, the coconut bud resembling a head of cabbage or lettuce, but much better tasting.

The cucumber never grew in a vegetable garden. It was the sea cucumber or sea slug or beche-de-mer, highly prized as a table delicacy by the Chinese.

They had found it on a coral shelf in the lagoon. It was shaped like a huge cucumber and had the same sort of a grooved or warty skin. It was a foot long but when they took it out it shrank to half that length.

Hal recognized it as the variety that is able to sting the flesh with its feelers and eject a poison that will cause blindness. So he did not touch it with his fingers but only with the point of his knife. He left it to die and dry in the sun while they went about their other errands.

After bringing it to camp, they cut it open under Omo’s direction and stripped out the five long white muscles. These they broiled over a fire. They made a surprisingly good meal.

The strange food gave Roger a nightmare. He squirmed and tossed, then woke with a start.

‘The sea slug!’ he screamed. ‘My eyes! I’m blind! I’m blind!’

‘Aw, shut up and go to sleep!’ growled Hal.

But Roger was too disturbed to sleep. He crawled out of the hut. He was relieved to find that he was not blind.

The tree stumps rose around him like black statues.

The clock of the stars told him that it was about 3 a.m. The Southern Cross was reflected in the lagoon.

He walked along the beach of the lagoon, trying to calm himself. He was still all stirred up inside. He crossed to the ocean shore. The sea was silent. There was not a ripple. The tide was going down.

He idly wondered what had been caught in the trap. He walked to its edge and looked in.

Then he got the start of his life. Two great eyes looked back at him.

They were as big as dinner plates. Surely no living thing could have such great eyes. He must still be dreaming. This must be another nightmare.