That cave mouth might have been a magnet drawing my soul.With my body I should have been afraid, as I daresay I was, for our circumstances were sufficiently desperate.Here we were, castaways upon an island, probably uncharted, one of thousands in the recesses of a vast ocean, from which we had little chance of escape.More, having offended the religious instincts of the primeval inhabitants of that island, we had been forced to flee to a rocky mountain in the centre of a lake, where, after the food we had brought with us by accident was consumed, we should no doubt be forced to choose between death by starvation, or, if we attempted to retreat, at the hands of justly infuriated savages.Yet these facts did not oppress me, for I was being drawn, drawn to I knew not what, and if it were to doom--well, no matter.
Therefore, none of us cared: Bastin because his faith was equal to any emergency and there was always that white-robed heaven waiting for him beyond which his imagination did not go (I often wondered whether he pictured Mrs.Bastin as also waiting; if so, he never said anything about her); Bickley because as a child of the Present and a servant of knowledge he feared no future, believing it to be for him non-existent, and was careless as to when his strenuous hour of life should end; and I because I felt that yonder lay my true future; yes, and my true past, even though to discover them I must pass through that portal which we know as Death.
We reached the mouth of the cave.It was a vast place; perhaps the arch of it was a hundred feet high, and I could see that once all this arch had been adorned with sculptures.Protected as these were by the overhanging rock, for the sculptured mouth of the cave was cut deep into the mountain face, they were still so worn that it was impossible to discern their details.Time had eaten them away like an acid.But what length of time? I could not guess, but it must have been stupendous to have worked thus upon that hard and sheltered rock.
This came home to me with added force when, from subsequent examination, we learned that the entire mouth of this cave had been sealed up for unnumbered ages.It will be remembered that Marama told me the mountain in the lake had risen much during the frightful cyclone in which we were wrecked and with it the cave mouth which previously had been invisible.From the markings on the mountain side it was obvious that something of the sort had happened very recently, at any rate on this eastern face.That is, either the flat rock had sunk or the volcano had been thrown upwards.
Once in the far past the cave had been as it was when we found it.Then it had gone down in such a way that the table-rock entirely sealed the entrance.Now this entrance was once more open, and although of course there was a break in them, the grooves of which I have spoken ran on into the cave at only a slightly different level from that at which they lay upon the flat rock.And yet, although they had been thus sheltered by a great stone curtain in front of them, still these sculptures were worn away by the tooth of Time.Of course, however, this may have happened to them before they were buried in some ancient cataclysm, to be thus resurrected at the hour of our arrival upon the island.
Without pausing to make any closer examination of these crumbled carvings, we entered the yawning mouth of that great place, following and indeed walking in the deep grooves that Ihave mentioned.Presently it seemed to open out as a courtyard might at the end of a passage; yes, to open on to some vast place whereof in that gloom we could not see the roof or the limits.
All we knew was that it must be enormous--the echoes of our voices and footsteps told us as much, for these seemed to come back to us from high, high above and from far, far away.Bickley and I said nothing; we were too overcome.But Bastin remarked:
"Did you ever go to Olympia? I did once to see a kind of play where the people said nothing, only ran about dressed up.They told me it was religious, the sort of thing a clergyman should study.I didn't think it religious at all.It was all about a nun who had a baby.""Well, what of it?" snapped Bickley.
"Nothing particular, except that nuns don't have babies, or if they do the fact should not be advertised.But I wasn't thinking of that.I was thinking that this place is like an underground Olympia.""Oh, be quiet!" I said, for though Bastin's description was not bad, his monotonous, drawling voice jarred on me in that solemnity.
"Be careful where you walk," whispered Bickley, for even he seemed awed, "there may be pits in this floor.""I wish we had a light," I said, halting.
"If candles are of any use," broke in Bastin, "as it happens Ihave a packet in my pocket.I took them with me this morning for a certain purpose.""Not unconnected with the paraffin and the burning of the idol, I suppose?" said Bickley."Hand them over.""Yes; if I had been allowed a little more time I intended--""Never mind what you intended; we know what you did and that's enough," said Bickley as he snatched the packet from Bastin's hand and proceeded to undo it, adding, "By heaven! I have no matches, nor have you, Arbuthnot!""I have a dozen boxes of wax vestas in my other pocket," said Bastin."You see, they burn so well when you want to get up a fire on a damp idol.As you may have noticed, the dew is very heavy here."In due course these too were produced.I took possession of them as they were too valuable to be left in the charge of Bastin, and, extracting a box from the packet, lit two of the candles which were of the short thick variety, like those used in carriage-lamps.