He had pa.s.sed Mount Gaillard, and saw, some miles to the north, the remarkable saddle shape of Mount Mahaga. Then he made a bee-line for Fulakora Point. Rounding this, his course was to the north-west. The coast was steep and precipitous; here and there were reefs, over which the sea broke in white upward cascades, and he was at no loss to understand how even the most skilfully navigated vessel might easily come to grief. About forty miles from the extremity of the island he flew over an immense lagoon, extending for several miles between Ysabel Island and a series of islets and reefs lying off the sh.o.r.e.
From this point the sea was dotted with islets so numerous that it was impossible, at his high speed, to identify them. But he recognized the deep indentation of Marcella Bay, confirming his observation by the conspicuous wooded islet rising some hundred feet from the sea at its northern arm. He knew that the scene of the wreck must be within a few miles of this point, and reduced his speed so that he might scan the sea for any sign of the _Albatross_.
For some time he flew up and down, but failed to distinguish a battered hull, a funnel, or any remnant of the vessel. It was plain that she had been entirely broken up. This was perplexing. He wondered how he was to discover the party, if they were yet alive. The island itself appeared, from his position off the sh.o.r.e, to be an impenetrable ma.s.s of forest. Flying in a little nearer, and going dead slow, Rodier presently caught sight of a square fenced enclosure within a few yards of the edge of the cliff. Smith steered directly over it, descending to a height of about fifty feet, and then saw in the middle of the s.p.a.ce a long piece of navy tarpaulin, several biscuit tins, a hammer, two or three hatchets, and other objects, which only white men could have placed there. It flashed upon him in a moment that the shipwrecked party had encamped here. But there was not a human being in sight, and he felt a stabbing conviction that he had come too late.
Sick at heart, he made up his mind to descend and examine the place and its surroundings more closely. There was plenty of room for the aeroplane within the enclosure. Coming to the ground, he stepped, with Rodier, out of the car, each carrying his revolver. Now he saw, in addition to the articles before mentioned, a good number of arrows at various points, a few broken spears, a tomahawk of a rude kind. Here and there, on the barricade and below it, there were dark stains.
These signs only increased his anxiety, but at the same time awakened wonder. Why had the party left their fort? It seemed scarcely likely that they had been overpowered in an a.s.sault, for there were no marks of a struggle within the barricade, and if the savages had succeeded in an attack they would certainly have appropriated all that they could lay hands on; even the most trivial objects would be precious to unsophisticated children of nature. Rodier suggested that the castaways had been taken off by some pa.s.sing vessel, and Smith, catching at the hope, was beginning to accept this view, when, lifting the tarpaulin, he found beneath it the papers of the _Albatross_, some notebooks filled with jottings in his father"s spidery handwriting, and a few small cases that contained bits of rock, fossils, and other specimens dear to the geologist, each labelled with the name of the place where it had been found.
Smith was now thoroughly alarmed. He knew that his father, if he had quitted the place voluntarily, would never have left behind these fruits of his labours. Yet why was the fort deserted?
"Ah, bah! They have gone foraging," said Rodier, unwittingly hitting on the truth.
"But they would never leave the place unguarded," replied Smith. "The savages certainly attacked them; look at the arrows and spears. But Mr. Underhill would not have yielded without fighting; yet there are no dead bodies, not even the cut-up earth there would be if they had had a tussle. I can"t account for it any way."
"Well, mister, we better look them up."
"In the aeroplane, you mean?"
"Yes. They must be here, in this island, or not here. In the aeroplane we search all over."
"It will be like looking for rabbits in bracken," said Smith, pointing to the forest. "Still, we must try."
He sat down on a biscuit tin to think over the position and evolve a plan. A random search might be mere waste of time. Starting with the a.s.sumption that the castaways were still on the island, he said to himself that they must have left the fort voluntarily, or there would certainly be signs of a struggle. That they had left no one on guard seemed to show that they were in no alarm, otherwise they would have carried their belongings with them. His father, he knew, would not abandon his note-books and specimens. Was it possible that they were making reprisals on the enemy who had previously attacked them? But even in this case they would hardly have left their fort wholly undefended, unless in the heat of victory they had rushed out in headlong pursuit, a rash movement which a naval officer would hardly countenance. Besides, they were but ill-provided with arms. Had they been enticed forth by the savages? In that case the savages would surely have plundered the camp, unless--and now his thought and his pulse quickened--unless there had not yet been time. Perhaps they had only recently left the place. Then they could not be far away, and if they had yielded to allurement there might still be time to save them. He started up, and told Rodier, who had begun his customary task of cleaning the engine, the conclusion to which he had come.
"We will ascend at once," he said, "and scour the neighbourhood. The forest is thick, but perhaps there are clear s.p.a.ces in it. Let us lose no time."
They dragged the aeroplane to the inner extremity of the enclosure, turned it round, and started it towards the sea. In less than a minute it was two hundred feet in the air. Then Smith wheeled round and steered across the camp, intending to take that as a centre, and strike out along successive radii, so that in the course of an hour or two, even at moderate speed, he would have searched a considerable extent of country in the shape of a fan. It was a question how far he should proceed in one direction, but relying on his idea that the evacuation of the camp could only recently have taken place, he resolved to content himself at first with a distance of about ten miles.
Having risen to a height of about three hundred feet, he found that he commanded a view of many miles of the country. Far to the south were the mountains; all around was forest, broken here and there by patches of open rocky ground. Beneath him the trees were so densely packed that a whole army might have been encamped among them without giving a sign of its presence. He sped in a straight line west-north-west of the fort, at a speed of between forty and fifty miles an hour; to go faster would have rendered careful exploration of the country difficult. Having completed ten miles without pa.s.sing over a single spot of clear ground, he flew about five miles due west, then turned the machine and steered back towards the fort along the next imaginary radius of his circle. He had arranged that Rodier should scan the country to the left while he himself kept as good a look-out to the right as was possible when he had engine and compa.s.s to attend to.
They had not flown far on this backward journey when Rodier, who was using his binocular, shouted that he saw, on a headland far to the left, what appeared to be a native village. Smith instantly steered towards it. It was the first evidence of human habitation they had as yet come across, and even at the risk of losing his bearings he must examine it. He could now afford to go at full speed, and a few minutes brought him above the village, which was a collection of rude huts perched on a steep headland overlooking the sea, and defended on its inland and less precipitous side by barriers of stakes. The noise made by the engine as the aeroplane swept down towards the village first drew all the inhabitants from their huts into the open enclosure, and then sent them scampering back with shrieks of alarm as they saw the strange object in the air. A glance sufficed to a.s.sure Smith, as he wheeled round the village, that it contained no white men, unless they had been taken inside the huts, which was unlikely. Without loss of time he steered as nearly as he could towards the point at which he had diverged from his settled course, and returned to the camp, pausing once to examine a small tract where the trees were somewhat thinner, allowing him to see the ground beneath.
Once more he started, steering now in a more westerly direction. There were several clear s.p.a.ces along this radius, and Smith flew over them slowly, more than once wheeling about to make sure that his eyes had missed nothing. But at these times he saw no human beings, nothing but the wild animals of the forest, huge pigs being diminished to the size of rabbits, and dingoes to the size of mice. These scurried away when they heard the noise of the engine, and Smith hovered around for a time to see if the flight of the animals attracted the attention of men, but in vain.
Having again covered ten miles, as nearly as he could judge, he swung round to the southwest. A minute or two later he came to the largest open s.p.a.ce he had yet seen, clear of undergrowth as well as of trees.
There were no huts upon it, and at first he saw no sign of men; but all at once Rodier cried that there was a ladder against one of the trees on the farther side of the clearing. Flying towards it, and descending until the aeroplane was level with the tree-top, Smith was amazed to see a brown woman, with a brown baby under her arm, scuttling down the ladder towards the ground. At the same time he became aware that there were ladders against many of the trees in the neighbourhood, and women and children were descending by them, showing all the marks of terror. He had come upon a collection of the curious tree-houses, sixty or seventy feet from the ground, which some of the islanders inhabit. The terrified people when they reached the ground fled into the forest. There was no man among them, which led Smith to suspect that the men were either hunting for food, or were perhaps fighting with the castaways. Instead of returning directly to the camp, therefore, he pursued his flight across the forest in the same direction in which the startled natives had run. Now for the first time he wished that he could have had a silent engine, for then his ears might have given the information which failed his eyes. Though he flew to and fro for some time in the vicinity of the tree-houses, he discovered no other break in the forest; and the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath that vast screen of foliage began to affect him with hopelessness of success.
He wished it were possible to descend in the clearing, and continue his search on the ground. The appearance of the aeroplane was so terrifying to the islanders that he need fear no opposition to his landing. But the idea occurred to him only to be at once dismissed.
When once among the trees, away from the aeroplane, he would be no longer sacrosanct. Those islanders who had actually witnessed his descent might fear him as a denizen of the sky; but any others that met him in the forest would not be restrained by superst.i.tious fear from, treating him as an enemy. Further, having once involved himself in the obscure and pathless depths of the forest, he might wander for hours, or even days, without finding the aeroplane. It was an impossible course of action. Hopeless as he was becoming, he felt that he could do nothing better than persevere as he had begun; after all, he had as yet covered only a small wedge of the segment he had proposed to himself.
But he now found himself in a difficulty. In the excitement of his recent discovery he had neglected to keep a watch upon the compa.s.s, and he was now at a loss to know the precise direction in which to steer. He must certainly go to the east, but he could not tell whether he was north or south of the camp. It occurred to him that by rising to a greater height he might probably be able to descry the camp, so he planed upwards until he attained an alt.i.tude of nearly two thousand feet, Rodier searching the country seawards through his binocular.
"I see it!" he cried at length, adding, as Smith began to steer towards it, "Wait a minute, mister; I see all the country better here; I can pick out the clearings, though they are only dark blots; but yet I can do it."
He swept the country for miles around. Beyond the forest, far to the west, there were stretches of rugged uplands, bare of vegetation. It was not at all likely that the Englishmen had gone so far from their camp, whether willingly or unwillingly. To the east and south-east stretched the sea, and Rodier declared that he saw, an immense way off, the smoke of a steamer, no doubt the gunboat. Lowering the gla.s.s to scan the nearer prospect, he suddenly gave a l.u.s.ty shout.
"I see smoke, mister; a quite little smoke, as of a cigarette."
"Where?" asked Smith eagerly.
"South-east of us, in the forest, about five or six miles off."
"We"ll go and see what it comes from."
Smith scarcely dared to hope that the discovery of the smoke would be of any a.s.sistance to him. But it was the first indication of a camp within the forest, whether of the islanders or of his friends, and he could not neglect to investigate it. The aeroplane flew along at the speed of a swallow. In little more than three minutes it reached the twine of smoke. Checking the engine, Smith wheeled the aeroplane round until it pa.s.sed slowly over an extensive gap in the forest. He looked down. The smoke rose from a fire in the midst of the clearing. At a little distance from it there was a throng of islanders, gazing up awe-struck at the strange apparition whose approach had been heralded from afar, and which now circled above them, making terrifying noises.
But Smith was not interested in the islanders. He peered among them and around for white men. He felt a shock of bitter disappointment; all the upturned faces were brown. But the movement of the aeroplane brought him to the verge of the forest, and then Rodier gave a shout of delight.
"There they are! There they are, mister!" he cried, pointing obliquely downwards.
Smith looked over. In the shade at the foot of the trees he saw a number of men bound each to a trunk. Their faces, directed upwards, were too darkly shadowed for him to distinguish their race; but they were clothed. Beyond doubt they were the castaways.
In a moment he determined what to do. While the aeroplane circled slowly above their heads the islanders would feel no more than awe and wonder. They huddled together like a flock of sheep in a thunderstorm, probably not as yet connecting the aerial visitant with their prisoners. What was required was to scatter them, suddenly, in a way that would smite them with terror, and cause them to flee without thought of the captives helpless against the trees.
Smith sailed away eastward, disappearing from their sight. He had made a quick mental calculation of the extent of the clearing. Rising to the height of about three hundred feet above the ground, while still out of sight he suddenly stopped the engine and warped the planes for a dive. The aeroplane descended rapidly, grazed the tops of the trees, and then, more slowly, swept, silently, in a gentle curve towards the throng of men, who were chattering about the mysterious sky visitor.
When they caught sight of it they were struck dumb, and for a few moments seemed to be fixed to the ground with amazement. Then, as it came directly towards them, and Smith set the noisy propellers in motion, they uttered shrieks of dismay and terror, and fled like hares into the forest.
Some of them started too late. Smith, being now near the ground, set the engine going at low speed, overtook a group of the islanders before they reached shelter, and with a touch of the aeroplane flung them violently on their faces. He then wheeled round, and rose once more into the air in order to effect a complete descent. The prostrate natives lay for some time in a paralysis of fear; but finding that they were unhurt, and that the monster had withdrawn from them, they picked themselves up, and ran to overtake their friends, leaving the s.p.a.ce clear.
In another minute Smith had brought the aeroplane safely to the ground. Rodier and he sprang out and ran towards the bound figures.
"It"s Charley!" called a voice, in tones wherein surprise and joy were blended.
And then the sailormen, famished and feeble as they were, broke forth in hoa.r.s.e cheers and incoherent shouts, which died away in sobs.
CHAPTER XIV
SIR MATTHEW IMPROVES THE OCCASION
To cut the bonds of the prisoners was the work of only a few moments.
The sailors, the instant they were free, made a rush upon the villagers" cooking-pots, their pa.s.sion for food overcoming curiosity, grat.i.tude, and all other sentiments. Dr. Smith gripped his son"s hand, his emotion being too great for words. Tom slapped his brother on the back. Lieutenant Underhill was divided between his eagerness to learn all the circ.u.mstances of this strange intervention and his anxiety to prevent his men from getting out of hand. But a glance at them as they made free with the natives" provisions relieved him on this score, and when Smith explained that he had on board the aeroplane certain delectables in the shape of chicken patties (becoming rather stale), doughnuts, plumcake, a bottle of Australian burgundy, and sundry other remnants of the provisions furnished by the hospitable folk of Palmerston, he voted an immediate adjournment for lunch, and the officers, with the Smiths, were soon satisfying their clamant hunger.
"How in the world did you know about us?" asked Tom.
"By cable from Brisbane."
"Then our boat did not go down?" said Underhill.
"No; your men lost their sail and rudder, and drifted until they came into the current along the south coast of New Guinea. They were picked up by a barque bound for Brisbane, and carried there."
He gave them a rapid summary of his flight across the world. The sudden change in their fortunes induced a readiness to find amus.e.m.e.nt in the most trifling incident, and they laughed loud and long as he retailed the little mishaps and the comic episodes of his journey.
Then Underhill in his turn related all that had happened since the wreck, and all became grave again as he told of the capture in the early morning after their night march, the wild orgy in which their captors had indulged, the elaborate preparations they had made under the direction of their sorcerer for the sacrificial rite to which their captives were destined. But for the appearance of the aeroplane he had no doubt that within a few short hours they would have been ma.s.sacred, and their skulls hung up at the entrance of the huts as signal marks of the villagers" prowess.
"The poor wretches hate all white men," said Underhill, "and it can hardly be wondered at. They are recruited to labour in our plantations, and come back with ailments unknown to them until they met the white man. They do not distinguish, and a geologist like Dr.
Smith--"
"Ah!" said the doctor anxiously; "my specimens!"