“The only boat on the island is the one belonging to James and John. Not their right names, those natives from Kandavu have unpronounceable names. They’re here on contract to supply fresh fish and whatever food and fruit they can gather. They wouldn’t take you anyway-even if they would, I’d absolutely forbid it. Absolutely.”
“Too dangerous?” If it was, I was right with him.
“Of course. And illegal. The Fijian Government forbids inter-island proa travel in the cyclone season. Heavy penalties. Very heavy penalties. For breaking the law.”
“No radio we could use to send a message?”
“No radio. Not even a radio receiver.” The professor smiled. “When I’m investigating something that happened many thousands of years ago I find contact with the outside world disturbing in the extreme. All I have is an old-fashioned hand-wound gramophone.”
He seemed a harmless old duffer, so I didn’t tell him what he could do with his gramophone. Instead, while Marie bathed, I had another drink, then after a shave, change and first-class breakfast, stretched out on a low rattan armchair in the shade of the verandah.
I meant to do some heavy thinking for it seemed to me that the situation was such that it was long past time that I showed some rudimentary signs of intelligence, but I’d reckoned without my weariness, the warmth of the sun, the effects of a couple of double Scotches on an empty stomach and the soporific sound of the trade-wind whispering its sibilant clicking way through the nodding palms. I thought of the island and how anxious I’d been to leave it and what Professor Witherspoon would say if he knew that the only way to get me off now would be by sheer force. I thought of Captain Fleck and I thought of the Professor, and I thought of them both with admiration, Fleck for the fact that he was twice as smart as I’d thought-which made him at least twice as smart as me-and the Professor for the fact that he was as polished and accomplished a liar as I’d ever met. And then I fell asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday 3 P.M.-10 P.M.
There was a war on and I was right in the middle of it. I couldn’t see who or what was to the right or the left of me and I wasn’t even sure whether it was day or night. But there was a war on, I was sure of that. Heavy artillery, laying down a barrage before an attack. The low ominous nimble of explosions, the very earth shaking. I was no hero. Let me get out of the way. I wasn’t going to be cannonfodder for anyone. I moved, seemed to stumble and felt the sharp pain in my right arm. Shrapnel, perhaps, or a bullet. Maybe they’d invalid me out, it would be a change from the front line. Then I opened my eyes and found that I wasn’t in the front line: I’d achieved the near impossible feat of falling out of an armchair and had landed on the wooden floor of Professor Witherspoon’s verandah. I seemed to have made a neat one point landing. On my right elbow. My elbow hurt.
I’d been dreaming, but I hadn’t been dreaming about the rumble of the explosions and the earth-shaking. As I got to my feet, clutching my arm and trying not to hop around too much, I heard another couple of distant muffled thuds and the floor of the verandah shook both times, quite violently. I hadn’t even had tune to try to guess at the source of those disturbances when I caught sight of Professor Witherspoon standing in the doorway leading in off the verandah, his face filled with concern. At least, his voice was, so I assumed that what lay behind the foliage would reflect his voice.
“My dear fellow, my dear fellow!” He came hurrying forward, hands outstretched as if he thought I was going to collapse at any moment. “I heard the sound of the fall. By Jove, it was loud! You must have hurt yourself. What happened?”
“I fell out of my chair,” I said patiently. “I thought it was the Second Front. It’s my nerves.”
“Dear me, dear me, dear me!” He fussed and fluttered around without achieving anything. “Have you-have you damaged anything?”
“Only my pride.” I felt my elbow with cautious fingers. “Nothing broken. Just numbed. What’s making all that damned racket?”
“Ha!” He smiled, relieved. “I thought you’d want to know that. I’m just about to show you-thought you’d like to have a look over the place anyway.” He regarded me with quizzical eyes. “Enjoy your two hour snooze?”
“Except for the waking-up bit, yes.”
“You’ve been asleep for six hours, Mr. Bentall.”
I looked at my watch and looked at the sun, already far past the meridian, and realised that he was right, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss over so I merely said, politely: “I hope that didn’t cause you any trouble? Having to stay behind and look after me when you may have wished to be working.”
“Not at all, not at all. No time clock here, young man. I work when I want to. Hungry?”
“Thank you, no.”
“Thirsty? Some Hong-Kong beer before we go. Excellent stuff. Chilled. Eh?”
“Sounds fine, Professor.”
So we went and drank his beer and it was as good as he had promised. We had it in the living-room where he’d first taken us and I looked at the various exhibits in the glass-fronted cases. To me they were only a mouldy collection of bones and fossils and shells, of stone pestles and mortars, of charred timber and clay utensils and curiously shaped stones. It was no difficulty at all not to show any interest and I didn’t show any interest because the Professor had shown signs of being wary of any person interested in archaeology. But it seemed he’d given up being wary for when he caught my roving eye, he said enthusiastically: “Magnificent collection of specimens, eh? Magnificent!”
“I’m afraid it’s hardly in my line,” I began apologetically. “I don’t know-”
“Of course not, of course not! Wouldn’t expect you to.” He went across to his roll-top desk, pulled out a handful of papers and magazines from the central drawer and gave them to me. “Those may help you understand better.”
I leafed quickly through the magazines and papers. Nearly all of them were dated six months previously and of eight papers, five London national dailies and three major U.S. papers, no less than seven had given the professor page one headlines. It must have been a field day for the old boy. Most of the headlines were of the ‘Archaeological Discovery of the Century’ variety, far outranking in importance Tutenkhamon, Troy or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every latest archaeological discovery, of course, was usually acclaimed in the same way, but there did appear to be some basis for this latest claim: Oceania, it seemed, had long been the dark continent of archeological research, but now Professor Witherspoon claimed to have discovered on the island of Vardu, south of the Fijis, complete proof of the migration of the Polynesians from the south-east of Asia and of there being some form of primitive civilization in those islands as far back as 5,000 B.C., some 5,000 years before the previous earliest estimate. Three magazines carried coloured spreads of the story, and one had a very fine picture of the professor and Dr. ‘Red* Carstairs standing by what looked to me like a cracked paving stone but which the caption said was part of a stepped tomb. Dr. Carstairs was a remarkable looking character, six and a half feet tall if he was an inch, with a flaming red handle-bar moustache of heroic proportions.
“I missed it all, I’m afraid,” I said. “I was in the Middle East at the time and pretty cut off from everything. This must have caused a terrific stir.”
“It was the crowning moment of my life,” he said simply.
“It must have been. Why haven’t I read anything about this recently?”
“There’s been nothing about it in the papers since and there won’t be till I’m through here,” he said darkly. “I foolishly granted news agencies, papers and magazines facilities to come here after my first announcement had caused some stir. They hired a special ship from Suva. Descended on me like locusts-like locusts, I tell you, sir. All over the shop, interfering, poking, ruining weeks of intensive work. Helpless, I was completely helpless.” The anger deepened. “And there were spies among them.”
“Spies? You must forgive me-”
“Rival archaeologists. Trying to steal my thunder.” That would be just about the ultimate crime as far as the old boy was concerned. “Trying to steal other things, too, some of the most valuable finds ever made in the Pacific. Never trust a fellow archaeologist, my boy,” he said bitterly. “Never trust ’em.”
I said I wouldn’t and he went on: “One of them actually had the effrontery to arrive here in a yacht a couple of months ago. American millionaire who does archaeology as a hobby. Just wanted credit. Damned impertinence to say he’d lost his way. Never trust an archaeologist. Threw him off. That’s why I was suspicious of you. How was I to know you weren’t a reporter, eh? At first, that is?”