“I quite understand, professor,” I said soothingly.
“Got the government behind me now, though,” he went on triumphantly. “British territory this, of course. All access to the island forbidden till I’m through.” He drained his glass.
“Well, well, shouldn’t be bothering you with my troubles. Shall we go for this look round?”
“Pleasure. Mind if I see my wife first?”
“Certainly, certainly. You know the way.”
Marie Hopeman stirred, turned and looked up at me sleepily as I opened the creaking door. The bed was a pretty primitive affair, a wooden frame with criss-cross stringing, but she seemed comfortable enough. I said: “Sorry if I wakened you. How’s it going?”
“You didn’t waken me. Ten times better now.” She looked it, the blueness had gone from beneath her eyes and the harsh red spots from her cheeks. She stretched luxuriously. “I don’t intend moving for hours and hours. He’s very kind, isn’t he?”
“Couldn’t have fallen into better hands,” I agreed. I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. “Best thing would be for you to go to sleep again, my dear.”
She blinked a bit at the ‘my dear’, but let it go. “It won’t be too difficult. And you?”
“Professor Witherspoon is going to show me around. Apparently he’s made some very important archaeological discoveries here. Should be very interesting.” I added a few more banalities, bade her what I hoped old Witherspoon would consider a suitable tender farewell and left.
He was waiting for me on the verandah, pith helmet on head, malacca cane in hand. The British archaeologist abroad, he was perfect.
‘This is where Hewell lives.” He waved his stick in the direction of the thatched house nearest his own. “My overseer. American. Rough diamond, of course”-the tone of his voice lumped 180,000,000 citizens of the United States into the same category-“but able. Yes indeed. Very able. This next house is my guest house. Unused, but having it done up. Looks a bit airy, I admit”-he wasn’t exaggerating, all it consisted of was a roof, floor and four supporting corner-posts-“but very comfortable. Adapted for the climate. Reed curtain divides it in half and all the walls-screens of plaited coconut leaves-can be lowered to the floor. Kitchen and bathroom behind-can’t have them inside a house of this type. And that next long house belongs to the workers-the diggers.”
“And this eyesore?” I nodded at the corrugated iron building “Quarry hopper or crusher?”
“Not a bad guess at all, my boy. It is ghastly, isn’t it? Property-or ex-property-of the British Phosphate Commissioners. You can see the name on the side if you look closely. Their crushing mill. That flat-topped shed behind was the drying plant.” He waved his malacca around in a sweeping half-circle. “Almost a year since they left, but still the place is covered in this damnable grey dust. Killed off most of the vegetation on this side of the island. Damnable!”
“It’s not very nice,” I agreed. “What’s a British firm doing out in this forsaken part of the world?”
“Not purely British. International, but run mostly by New Zealand. Digging out the rock, of course. Phosphate of lime. They were taking out a thousand tons a day a year ago. Valuable stuff.” He peered at me shrewdly. “Know anything of geology, hey?”
The professor seemed suspicious of anyone who knew anything about anything, so I said I didn’t.
“Ah well, who does, these days?” he said cryptically. “But to put you in the picture, my boy. You must understand that this island once probably lay on the bottom of the sea-and as the bottom of the sea is about three miles down here, that was a fair depth. Then one day-geologically speaking you understand, it probably took a million years-the bottom came up to near the top. Upthrust or volcanic activity associated with the continuous outpouring of lava. Who knows?” He coughed deprecatingly. “When one knows a little of those things”-from the tone of his voice I gathered that if he knew only a little anybody who claimed to know a lot Was a liar-“you are unwilling to be dogmatic about it. Anyway, the net result was that after a few aeons you had this massive underwater mountain with the peak not yet above water but less than 120 feet below the surface.”
He peered at me, waiting for the obvious remark, so I obliged.
“How can you be so certain about something that happened millions of years ago?”
“Because this is a coral island,” he said triumphantly, “and the polyps that build the coral reefs must live in water but die below 120 feet. Well, some time later-”
“Another million years?”
“Give or take a million. This must have been a big low-lying coral reef when it was upthrust below. This upthrust probably coincided with the beginning of the age of birds. This became a sanctuary for untold numbers of birds-there are many such in the Pacific-who stayed here for countless years. Eventually you had a layer of guano, up to perhaps fifty feet thick. Millions of tons of it, millions of tons-and then island, coral and guano subsided and sank to the floor of the sea.”
It seemed to me that this island had had a pretty chequered history.
“Some time later,” he went on, “up it comes again. By this time the actions of sea deposits and salt water had changed the guano into a very rich phosphate of lime. Then came the slow laborious process of soil forming, of growing grass, shrubs, trees, a veritable tropical paradise. Then, probably in the last ice age, along came the wandering sea-rovers from south-east Asia and settled in this idyllic spot.”
‘If it was all that idyllic, why did they leave it?”
“But they never left it! They never left it for the same reason that those fabulous deposits of lime phosphate weren’t discovered until recently, though most other deposits in the Pacific had been worked out by the end of the last century. This, Mr. Bentall, is a highly volcanic region-there are still active volcanoes on the neighboring Tonga Islands, you know. In the space of a few hours a gigantic volcano erupted out of the sea, drowning half of this coral island and covering the other half-coral, phosphate, vegetation and the unfortunate people who lived here in a tremendous layer of basaltic lava. The 79 A.D. eruption that destroyed Pompeii,” Professor Witherspoon finished disparagingly, “was a bagatelle compared to this.”
I nodded at the mountain sloping up sharply behind us. “That’s the volcano that was formed?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“What happened to the other half of it?”
“Must have been some ground fault formed at the same time as the volcano. One night it just broke in half and vanished into the sea. It took the seabed with it and the coral reefs built out to the north: you can see that the lagoon is open there.”
He marched on at a brisk pace apparently undisturbed by the thought that he lived in a very dicey spot where cataclysmic upheavals of a very final nature were of the order of the day. He was angling his way slightly uphill, and less than three hundred yards from the crushing mill we came to a sudden cleft in the side of the mountain. It was about seventy feet high and thirty wide, vertical at the sides and back and with a flat floor leading in to a circular hole in the mountainside. There were railway tracks of very narrow gauge coming out from the hole, running along the horizontal floor of the fissure then turning to the south where they dipped from view. There were two or three small sheds just outside the entrance, and from one of these came the humming sound I’d been hearing more and more clearly on the way up.
Petrol-driven generators. It had never occurred to me until then but of course if the professor and his assistants were prospecting about inside the mountain they would have to have electric power for light and probably also for ventilation.
“Well, here we are,” the professor announced. “This is the spot where some curious intelligent prospector for the phosphate company noticed this peculiar fault in the mountainside, started digging through the top-soil and struck phosphate before he’d gone three feet. Heaven knows how many million tons of rock they took out-the mountain is a perfect honeycomb. Just as they were finishing up here somebody found a few pieces of pottery and curiously-shaped stones. An archaeologist in Wellington was shown them and immediately sent them to me.” The professor coughed modestly. “The rest, of course, is history.”
I followed the history-maker through the entrance and along a winding horizontal passage-way until we came to a huge circular excavation in the rock. It was a gigantic cavern, forty feet high, twenty by the encircling walls, supported by concrete columns and about two hundred feet in diameter, Half a dozen tiny electric lights, suspended from some of the pillars at about a height of ten feet, gave the dingy grey rock an eerie and forbidding appearance and were but token illumination at best. Spaced evenly round the perimeter of this cavern were five more tunnels, each with its own railway track.