The White Waterfall Page 18

Holman. "We're going back, but we'llreturn in a few hours and pick you up. Don't move from this ledge."

  Kaipi would promise anything if he was not forced to witness theperformance, and we left him huddled up in the darkness, and returned tothe spyhole in the wall.

  The "tivo," as the Fijian called it, was still in progress. Withoutnoise, the six half-nude figures were describing circles upon the smoothfloor. The silence and the serpentlike motions had a peculiar hypnoticeffect upon us, and in a sort of dreamlike trance we watched themwriggle by the narrow aperture to which we pressed our faces. With eachcircle more of the brown, sweat-polished bodies showed beneath thetwisted mats. The pace was beginning to tell upon them now. Slower andslower they moved past the crevice, till at last all movement ceased,and, apparently lifeless, they lay face downward upon the floor.

  I thought of the two girls at the lonely camp as we sat watching, and Iknew well that Holman's thoughts were turned in the same direction. Wehad seen nothing of Leith, but an intuition that would not be put asideconnected Leith with the strange ceremony that was in progress withinthe cavern, and we were chained to the spot.

  I have no idea how long the six figures remained motionless upon thefloor. It may have been an hour, it may have been two. The mystery ofthe performance we were witnessing seemed to drag us into a world whereminutes and hours did not exist. We were dumfounded by the confirmationof our suspicions and the peculiarly devilish exhibition, and I shookoff the lethargy with an effort as Holman prodded me with his finger andpointed at a spot beyond the body of the dancer who lay immediately infront of the spyhole.

  Looking in the direction Holman pointed I saw that another light wasapproaching through the gloom of the cavern. It bobbed toward us slowly,a tiny pin point that came nearer and nearer as the bearer walked in thedirection of the six. The distance it was away from the dancers, whichwas evident from the time that elapsed from the moment we saw it till itwas close up, convinced us that the cavern was of an enormous length,and the words "Long Gallery" in the note which Soma had dropped came upbefore my mind. There was no doubt that the cave was the meeting spotwhich Leith had mentioned, and as I felt Holman's body stiffen as heshouldered against me for a share of the peephole, I knew that hebelieved that the treacherous brute was one of the three that wereapproaching behind the bobbing lamp.

  The bodies of the dancers, or at least the parts that we could see,became tense and rigid. A soft hiss went round the circle, and onceagain the wriggling movement started. But this time the six went forwardinstead of backward. They broke out of the circular formation, and in along glistening line moved up the cavern toward the three approaching.The lamp halted, then it was raised high in the air as the crawling halfdozen approached, and Holman gave a curious little gurgle as the lightfell upon the three newcomers. Wrapped in parrot feathers and a whitemask, the lamp bearer stood revealed as Soma. Immediately behind him wasa tall white man in the same outlandish garb, while the last of thethree, barearmed and barelegged, and wearing an immense headdress ofplumes, was Leith!

  The snaky six circled the three at a respectful distance, then, againbreaking into a single file formation, they turned toward the end of thecave nearest our spyhole, and behind the length of creeping bodies,Soma, the tall white who had only one eye, and Leith came slowly.

  Holman's breath came faster as the procession approached. Theexhibition chilled us. There was a devilish suggestiveness in theproceeding. In some indescribable manner it brought up mental picturesthat were nauseating, and it required something of an effort to watchthe performance. The mystery of the silent night, the thoughts of thedanger which threatened the two girls, and the glimpses of theastounding performance within the cavern brought a dazed mentalcondition that made us doubt our sanity.

  I felt Holman's hand reach out across my shoulder as the processionmoved down upon us, and instinctively I understood the movement. Thecold barrel of a revolver had slipped by my face, and I gripped hiswrist and forced the hand downward. The manner in which Soma and theone-eyed man walked in front of the big brute made it impossible toshoot with telling effect, and Leith was the person we desired to killat that moment. The others seemed to be but creatures of his will, andhe stood up in our minds as a devil whose existence was a menace toeverything that was pure and clean.

  The three newcomers moved to the side of the cavern, so that nothingexcept their bare feet were visible, and backward and forward in frontof those feet moved the human serpents with a regularity that wasstupefying. In an unbroken line they would move forward, flattenthemselves upon the floor, then, with a unanimity that was remarkable,they would wriggle backward, to repeat the same movement over again.

  Holman pulled me away at last, and we retired to a point that made itpossible for us to converse in low whispers without being heard.

  "What will we do?" he gasped. "I can't stay there any longer! I want toget inside to the devil! I don't want to shoot him; I want to throttlehim with my two hands!"

  "But the entrance to the cavern is from somewhere on the other side ofthe hill," I remonstrated, as the young fellow raved about ourhelplessness.

  "We must get there!"

  "Don't lose your head about it," I remarked. "Keep cool and we'll winout in the long run."

  It was useless to speak of patience to that boy at the moment. He claweddesperately at the slippery wall in an endeavour to find a path thatwould lead us to the opening on the other side by which Leith had madehis entry, but the attempt appeared to be madness. A dozen times theyoungster scrambled up rough portions that offered a slight footing, buteach time he slipped back bruised and battered. He would listen to noarguments. The desire to get to the mouth of the cavern, and kill Leithbefore the morning, had produced an insanity, and we crawled and climbedalong the face of those basalt cliffs in a manner that chilled myspinal marrow. Holman possessed the courage of a maniac. His imaginationwas blinded to the dangers that lay alongside the crumbling shelves ofrock, and I scrambled behind him wondering dimly what would happen toEdith and her sister if an unkind fate flung us from the ledge into thedarkness from which the soft croon of the chestnut clumps came up like awarning against our foolhardiness.

  Holman paused at the end of a wearisome climb, and he drew himselfupright. At that moment the cloud-harried moon dragged herself frombeneath the pack, and the young fellow gave a cry of joy.

  "We can do it from here, Verslun," he cried. "I see a path to the top.Come along, man!"

  "What about Kaipi?" I gasped. "We'll never find our way back here."

  "Let him sit there," he snorted. "Hurry or the moon will be under theclouds before we cross the cliff."

  CHAPTER XIII

  TOMBS OF SILENCE

  For my own part I found no great liking for the moonlight. Up to thatmoment I had followed blindly in the tracks of Holman, nerved somewhatby the thought that the trail he passed over would carry me. The dangerswere hidden by the darkness, and my imagination was too stunned by thehappenings of the night to make any endeavour to torture my nerves bypicturing them.

  But the reappearance of the moon brought an opportunity to my eyes, andI wondered if we could negotiate the goat track which the youngster wasscrambling over. I turned my face to the wall and crawled timorously inthe rear. Higher and higher we went with bleeding fingers and knees, butat last Holman reached the top, and I dragged myself up beside him.

  "Get up!" he cried savagely. "We must kill the devil before morning."

  We got to our feet and started to run toward what we knew to be thedirection of the cavern. The ground sloped gradually, and we reasonedthat it would continue to fall away till we reached the mouth of thecavern by which Leith had entered from the far side. For once we had aclear run. At that height there was little vegetation, and at a mad gaitwe sped across a bare stretch where the only obstacles were lumps ofrock that were scattered around in great profusion.

  "If--if we could find the place and block the devil and all his ganginside," gasped Holman.

  "That'
s too good a thing to entertain," I spluttered.

  "We might, Verslun! We might!" he cried. "I've got a feeling that we'vebeen picked to put that devil out of existence. That's why I'm taking achance in leaving the girls back there at the camp. I believe I'm goingto kill him, but whether it is to-night or some other time I don'tknow."

  "The sooner the better," I stammered. "From what Kaipi said about thatdance, something out of the way is going to happen, and I've got ahunch that the something will happen to us."

  Holman remained silent, and we raced on, moving down the slope at anangle that we judged would bring us somewhere near the entrance. Atmoments my brain assured me that it was a mad proceeding, but somethingof the certainty with which the youngster looked upon himself as