Less than thirty yards ahead of me I saw a fence. I had seen such fences before and they weren’t the kind that surround an English meadow. Where I’d seen them before had been in Korea, round prisoner of war cages. This one was a nine-stranded barbed-wire affair, over six feet high and curving outwards at the top: it emerged from the impenetrable darkness of the vertically-walled cleft in the mountain to my right and ran due south across the plain.
Perhaps ten yards beyond that there was another fence, a duplicate of the first, but what occupied my attention was not either of the fences but a group of three men I could see beyond the second fence. They were standing together, talking, I presumed, but so softly that I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and one of them had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in white ducks, round caps, gaiters and cartridge belts, and carried rifles slung over their shoulders. They were, without any doubt at all, seamen of the Royal Navy.
By this time my mind had given up. I was tired. I was exhausted. I couldn’t think any more. Given time, I could maybe have thought up a couple of good reasons why I should suddenly on this remote Fijian island stumble across three seamen of the Royal Navy, but that seemed a daft sort of thing to do when all I had to do was stand up and ask them. I transferred the weight from my elbows to the palms of my hands and started to get to my feet.
Three yards ahead of me a bush moved. Shock froze me into involuntary and life-saving immobility, no relic dug out by the professor was ever half so petrified as I was at that moment. The bush leaned over gently towards another bush and murmured something in so low a voice that I couldn’t have heard it another five feet away. But surely they must be hearing me. My heart was reverberating in my ears like a riveter’s hammer. It was going about the same speed, too. And even if they couldn’t hear me they must surely have felt the vibrations being transmitted through my body and ground, I was as near to them as that, a seismograph could have picked me up in Suva. But they heard nothing, they felt nothing. I lowered myself back to the ground like a gambler laying down the last card that’s going to lose him his fortune. I made a mental note that all this stuff about oxygen being necessary for life was a tale invented by the doctors. I had completely stopped breathing. My right hand ached, in the moonlight I could see the knuckles of the fist clenched round the hilt of the knife gleaming like burnished ivory. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the grip even slightly, but even so I still clung on to the handle of that knife harder than I’d ever clung on to anything before.
Seven or eight aeons passed. By and by the three naval guards, who had that liberal interpretation of their duties possessed by naval guards the world over, disappeared. At least they seemed to disappear, until I realised that what I had taken for a dark patch in the ground behind them was really a hut. A minute passed, then I heard the metallic clacking and hissing of a primus stove being pumped into life. The bush in front of me moved again. I twisted the knife in my hand until the blade was pointing up, not down, but he didn’t come my way. He crawled off silently, parallel to the wire, heading for another bush about thirty yards away, and I could see that other bush stir as he approached. The place was full of moving bushes that night. I changed my mind about asking the guards what they were doing there. Another night, perhaps. Tonight, the wise man went to bed and thought about things. If I could get to my bed without being chewed to pieces by dogs or knifed by one of Hewell’s Chinese, I would think about things.
I made it back to the house in one piece. It took me ninety minutes altogether, half of it to cover the first fifty yards, but I made it.
It was coming on for five in the morning when I raised the corner of the seaward screen and slipped into the house. Marie was asleep, and there seemed to be no point in waking her, bad news could wait. I washed off the boot-black in a basin in the corner of the room, but I was too tired to do anything about rebandaging my arm. I was too tired even to think about things. I climbed into bed and have only the faintest recollection of my head touching the pillow. Even if I had had a dozen arms and each one throbbing with pain as was my left, I don’t think they would have kept me awake that night.
CHAPTER SIX
Thursday Noon-Friday 1:30 A.M.
It was after noon when I awoke. Only one wall screen had been pulled up, the one that gave on the lagoon. I could see the green shimmer of water, the white glare of sand, the washed out pastels of the coral and, beyond the lagoon, the darker line of the sea with a cloudless sky above. With three side-screens down there was no through draught and it was stiflingly hot under that thatched roof. But at least it made for privacy. My left arm throbbed savagely. But I was still alive. No hydrophobia.
Marie Hopeman was sitting on a chair by my bed. She was dressed in white shorts and blouse, her eyes were clear and rested, she had colour in her cheeks and altogether just looking at her made me feel terrible. She was smiling down at me and I could see that she had made up her mind not to be sore at me any more. She had a nice face, far nicer than the one she had worn in London. I said: “You look fine. How do you feel?” Original, that was me.
“Right as rain. Fever all gone. Sorry to wake you up like this, but there’ll be lunch going in half an hour. The professor had one of his boys make those so that you could get over there.” She pointed to where a pair of remarkably well-made crutches lay against a chair. “Or you can have it here. You must be hungry, but I didn’t want to wake you up for breakfast.”
“I didn’t turn in till about six o’clock.”
“That explains it.” I took my hat off to her patience, to her ability to suppress her curiosity. “How do you feel?”
“I feel awful.”
“You look it,” she said candidly. “Just not tough at all.”
“I’m falling to pieces. What have- you been doing all morning?”
“Been squired around by the professor. I went swimming with him this morning-I think the professor likes going swimming with me-then after we’d had breakfast he took me round a bit and into the mine.” She shivered, mock-earnest. “I don’t care for the mine very much,”
“Where’s your boy-friend now?”
“Away looking for a dog. They can’t find it anywhere. The professor’s very upset. It seems that this was a particular pet and he was very attached to it.”
“Ha! A pet? I’ve met the pet and he was very attached to me. The clinging type.” I freed my left arm from the blanket and unwrapped the blood-stained strips of cloth. “You can see where he was clinging.”
“My God!” Her eyes widened and the warm colour ebbed from her cheeks. “That-that looks ghastly.”
I examined my arm with a kind of doleful pride and had to admit that she wasn’t exaggerating any. From shoulder to elbow most of the arm was blue, purple and black, and swollen as much as fifty per cent above normal. There were four or five deep triangular tears in the flesh and the blood was still oozing slowly from three of them. The parts of my arm that didn’t seem discoloured were probably just as bad as the rest, only they were hidden under a thick crust of dark dried-up blood. I had seen pleasanter sights.
“What happened to the dog?” she whispered.
“I killed him.” I reached under the pillow and drew out the blood-stained knife. “With this.”
“Where on earth did you get that? Where-I think you’d better tell me everything from the beginning.”
So I told her, quickly and softly, while she cleaned up my arm and bandaged it again. She didn’t like the job, but she did it well. When I’d finished speaking she said: “What lies on the other side of the island?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “But I’m beginning to make all sorts of guesses and I don’t like any of them.”