RGL e-Book Cover©
Based on a detail from a public domain wallpaper
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover©
Based on a detail from a public domain wallpaper
Blue Book, November 1938, with "The Devil's Lantern"
James Francis Dwyer
JAMES FRANCIS DWYER (1874-1952) was an Australian writer. Born in Camden Park, New South Wales, Dwyer worked as a postal assistant until he was convicted in a scheme to make fraudulent postal orders and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1899. In prison, Dwyer began writing, and with the help of another inmate and a prison guard, had his work published in The Bulletin. After completing his sentence, he relocated to London and then New York, where he established a successful career as a writer of short stories and novels. Dwyer later moved to France, where he wrote his autobiography, Leg-Irons on Wings, in 1949. Dwyer wrote over 1,000 short stories during his career, and was the first Australian-born person to become a millionaire from writing. —Wikipedia
The able writing man who gave us "Caravan Treasure," "The Splendid Thieves" and many another good story is at his best in this drama of a jewel that left a red trail of murder in its wake.
ALWAYS I have been filled with a desire to write down all that I know of the "Heart of Sappho." People there are, thousands of them, who believe that the great "Heart" is somewhere in America in the strongbox of a millionaire, who takes it out from time to time just to gloat upon its beauty, or string it for an hour on the white bosom of a woman he loves; but it is not so. Alas, and alas, the Heart of Sappho is for the time being out of reach of the greedy hands that pursued it during the years—the long, long years.
It was Captain Jack Fanning of the schooner Seven o' Spades who first spoke to me of the Heart of Sappho. I was then a small boy of nine years of age, and the amazing story kept me awake for many nights after he had related it to me...
The Heart of Sappho, according to the story told by Captain Jack, was the most romantic stone in the whole history of wonderful gems. It was a light o' love in the world of great treasures. It had stirred men for centuries, maddening them till they hacked at each other with knife and sword, and round the Islands of the Blest which was its habitat, it had left a trail of blood to mark its passing.
"There are," said Captain Jack, "respectable stones like the Koh-i-noor that have clean histories; but the Heart of Sappho is a gem that breeds corruption. To compare it with the Koh-i-noor would be something like a comparison between Cleopatra and Queen Victoria."
It was those words that made me love the Heart, for truth to tell, the lady of the Nile appealed to my boyish fancy, while the good queen did not. Day after day I plagued Captain Jack to tell me more of the wonderful gem.
"This Sappho," explained Captain Jack, "was a Greek poetess who lived ages and ages ago. She never loved any man, an' she wouldn't stay with one. She was just like this big ruby, always wanting to escape, till one day she jumped into the sea and drowned herself. Folks say that her heart turned into this great blazing stone, an' whenever a man thinks he's got it, why—he hasn't. It gets away from him quicker'n light."
"And—and where is it now?" I stammered.
Captain Jack waved a big hand eastward. "Somewhere down in the Islands," he answered. "It's hidden for the moment, but it will turn up again. It always does turn up; and when it does, there's murder. Lots an' lots o' murder. An extraordinary story to seep into the head of a small boy—a story that came between me and the tattered pages of my schoolbooks. A gem that corrupted the souls of men! A stone that spurted beams of fire so that if a sailor put it in his locker, and this was "Bible oath" according to Captain Jack,—the red rays would stream through the wood and make its presence known to others searching for it! "An' that," said the Captain, "makes the job of holding it mighty difficult. It's like a woman that flaunts herself at every man she sees."
Now, at the time I first heard of the Heart of Sappho, my parents lived on the very lip of a romantic port to which surged up ships from those mysterious isles where the great ruby was hidden. These trading schooners brought cargoes of copra, pearl-shell, palm-oil, bêche-de-mer, shark fins, and sugar bananas, From them leaped woolly-headed Fijians, muscular Samoans, wild Tongans and Solomon Islanders, and sometimes fierce Papuans with quills thrust through their nostrils and the lobes of their ears: half-naked savages, who were so astonished at the size of the great wool warehouses on Circular Quay, that they fell on their stomachs and made obeisance. The world was young in those days, and continuous contact with the uncivilized Fringe kept alive the story told to me by Captain Jack Fanning. I was possessed of a consuming longing to see the Islands where the Heart of Sappho lay hidden.
I was sixteen years old when my dream was realized. I sailed on the schooner Black Princess for Apia in the Samoan Group, a place that had at the moment gained much newspaper space by an unfortunate calamity. In the previous year two United States warships, the Trenton and the Windalia, were smashed to pieces on the vicious coral reefs during a tremendous cyclone followed by a tidal wave. Their brave crews made sentimental history by manning the yards and cheering the British cruiser Calliope, which had hurriedly got up steam and made a dash for the open sea. Apia then, through this disaster, was the place I wished to visit.
The crew of the Black Princess gossiped much about the Heart of Sappho; but only one of their number had ever seen the stone. This was an old man named Ferguson who had sailed with Bully Hayes, the South Sea pirate, on the famous, or rather infamous, schooner Leonora. Ferguson told me many stories concerning the great ruby.
He said that Bully Hayes once heard that the Heart was in the possession of the captain of a "blackbirder" loaded with colored labor for the Queensland sugar plantations, and that Hayes attacked the vessel in Levuka harbor. The blackbirder had discovered something concerning the great gem. When the first man was slain in the battle, the captain, unperceived, tossed the ruby into the blood that flowed upon the deck, and there it was imperceptible to Hayes, because human blood arrested the fiery rays that came from the stone. The pirate, after killing captain and crew, searched the vessel from bow to stern, but he couldn't find the Heart, which was not discovered till days later, when the blood dried and allowed the ruby to send forth its blinding rays.
"But—but why can't it be seen when it is in blood?" I questioned.
"Because it is too busy drinking it to do anything else!" snapped the old man. "It's drunk quarts an' quarts o' blood, that stone has! That's why it spurts fire."
He took his pipe from his mouth and chanted the first verse my ears had heard of that endless ballad of "The Heart of Sappho"—a ballad that has been added to by every poetic sailor who has roamed the South Seas since the days of Van Diemen.
Oh, the Heart of Sappho is red and bright.
It shines in the day an' it shines at night,
Its thirst is so great that it needs, they say,
The blood of a lover to feed it each day.
The verse made my nerves tingle. "Does that mean a lover who is in love with a woman, or a man who is in love with the Heart itself?" I asked.
"They're just the same," answered Ferguson. "It's women that send men hunting for the Heart. I know! Bully Hayes wanted it so that he could give it to a Creole witch in Papeete; an' the blackbirder wanted it for a skirt in Brisbane. An' there was Mad Harry Bates too. He hunted the stone 'cause he had promised it to a girl on Battery Hill in Frisco. He got killed tryin' to get it."
CRITICS might quibble at the quality of those verses, but
they set my blood pulsing as we drove toward Apia. Ferguson, for
a small tobacco bribe, recited some twenty-two stanzas that I
copied down with a stub of pencil. They are still with me; they
will always be with me. As I write this, I can hear, in fancy,
the old man chanting one of them:
It's the devil's own lantern, so keep away,
Or you'll crash on the roof of hell some day.
I was possessed of a foolish belief that I would one day see the Heart of Sappho—that I would hold it in my hand and become drunk with the power of the red rays that spurted from it. The fact that it stirred men to murder pleased me. I believed that romance flourished on murder and corruption...
Raw and uncivilized were the Islands in those days. Tough men were the traders who swapped axes, knives, rum, cheap prints and tobacco for copra and palm-oil. Missionaries who ventured into the Ellice, Kingsmill and Gilbert groups often attained paradise as a menu item. The law had a lame leg. There were escapees from New Caledonia, beachcombers under false names, and murderers who took to the bush when a prowling gunboat stood inshore. And in the palaver of beer-shops and traders' huts the Heart of Sappho held first place in the conversation. Hot news it was, no matter what other gossip was abroad. Men saw it in their dreams, a thing of beauty and fire, a precious philanderer that flirted with them, lured them to wild places, lay down with them in their drunken sleep and fled at dawn.
And with me, as the months passed, the belief that I would see the stone became an obsession. I thought that my great longing must needs bring it to me. I remembered the Chinese folk-story of the three cats who concentrated on the cart of the fish-peddler till their longing for fish broke the axle. In the same manner I would obtain food for my hunger to see the Heart that drank the blood of men.
In the Marshall Group I found an Englishman named Featherstonehaugh who had studied the history of the great stone. He was an educated man, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he had collected much data regarding the ruby. His longing for it was as great as mine. He had dreams of rebuilding some moldy abbey at Melton Mowbray, and chasing Lincolnshire foxes.
He told me that the stone had come originally from the famous ruby mines at Mogok in Burma, and through a thousand hands it had found its way to China. It was seen at Canton in 1565 by the physician to the Portuguese viceroy, that same Garcia de Orta who made the first report on the mines of the Orient, and by so doing killed all the fantastic beliefs that were held up to that time. Possibly the Portuguese got their hands on the stone, for it was noted at Maçao in the year 1580, where a Jesuit missionary reported its existence in a letter to Pope Gregory XIII.
And there was another letter that was in the British Museum, a letter written by an English lord traveling in China in the year 1592. Featherstonehaugh had a copy of it sent to him from London. Aloud he read a paragraph that took my breath. I stared at the words, copied with their curious spelling from the original.
And I have scene a great scarlete stone from which spurteth rayes that blindeth those who looke at it and which is valued at one million poundes starling.
"Dumont D'Urville and La Perouse mentioned in their logbooks stories that they had heard of it," said Featherstonehaugh; "and Captain James Cook heard rumors. Dammit, the thing is down here somewhere! Every night I find it in my dreams, and every morning I open my clenched right hand, thinking I will see it within."
THERE were hundreds like Featherstonehaugh—poor devils,
mostly remittance-men, who had wild dreams of returning to the
splendor of the West End with a fortune that they had snatched on
the rim of space.
The belief that the stone was somewhere in the Islands was held by all. There was a wild story of a bloody fracas that its presence had produced at Ponape in the Carolines. Ponape, in the earlier days, had been the resort of American ships whaling in equatorial Polynesia, a place of unholy reputation. Ten men had been knifed in a battle that had followed the sudden appearance of the ruby in the hands of one of the American whalers; and when peace was restored, the stone had disappeared. As the original holder lay dead on the sand, he could give no information as to where he had got it; and each man of the milling mob on the beach denied taking it. It had mysteriously vanished after causing the deaths of half a score.
AFTER a year of fruitless wandering, I came back to Apia from
the Paumotus. I hung around the native town at Mulinu'u Point for
a week or so, wondering if all the gossip concerning the Heart of
Sappho was but cobweb dreams born of beer and white sunshine. I
began to doubt the existence of the great gem; then, on a morning
when I had convinced myself that the ruby was a phantom thing, I
met, on the road leading into Apia, a huge man dressed in bright
blue pajamas.
"Want a ship, boy?" he asked.
"Where to?" I questioned.
"To search for the Tree of Love," he answered jestingly. "To find the fabled Sword of Buddha. To look for—oh, what does it matter to a boy of your age where he is going, so long as he's going somewhere?"
I grinned in turn. An impressive person was the gentleman in blue pajamas: he stood well above six feet, and he would have turned the scale at over two hundred—bone and muscle, at that.
"Name is Warburton," he said, finding I had no answer to his question. "Captain Warburton of the Lovely Lady. Sailing at sunset. Tell Mr. Sleath I sent you."
He nodded and walked on. I sat down by the side of the track and considered the offer. I had heard of Captain Herbert Warburton. He was an Englishman who had, with amazing celerity, created an unenviable reputation in the island of Upolu, the largest of the Samoan Group. It was rumored, and many believed the story, that he was the younger brother of a duke, and that he had been sent to the South Seas because of some faint connection with the famous case out of which sprang the libel action in which the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was a court witness.
Apia gossiped of his two ruling passions, love of battle and love of ladies. His name at the moment was coupled with that of a dashing Spanish señorita who, for some reason best known to herself, had stepped "with legs an' luggage," as an old beachcomber phrased it, from a Frisco boat and taken up her residence in the town. Captain Warburton had introduced himself the moment she was settled.
The words: "What should it matter to a boy of your age where he is going, so long as he is going somewhere?" ran around within my brain. I gathered myself up and walked down to the beach. For a half stick of twist, a native put me aboard the Lovely Lady.
Mr. Sleath, the mate, was a lean, middle-aged man who had spent his life in the Islands. He knew every green speck from the Louisiades to Penrhyn Island, and from San Agostino to the Kermadecs. At Pingelap, in his early life, he had received a hack across the nose from the cutlass of an American sailor, and this injury gave his face a peculiar appearance. The scar divided it in two, so to speak, giving one the impression, when they watched him speaking, that the motionless upper part had no connection with the moving lips and champing underjaw. This earned him the nickname of Double-face Sleath.
Besides Sleath, the schooner carried a young fellow, a little older than myself, named Lister—a strong and well-set-up youngster who hailed from Sydney and was seeking adventure in the Islands. There were also four Samoans, a Raratongan, and a Tokèlau boy. They all spoke pidgin.
IT was not till late that evening, with the harbor lights of
Apia far behind us, that I got any definite information as to
where we were heading. I then cornered Sleath and repeated the
question he had dodged when I first came aboard.
"Why, idiot," he drawled, "we're bound for Satan's Gut."
"Satan's Gut?" I cried.
"So," said Sleath, adding: "Your big ears have been hearin' somethin'?"
"Why—why," I stammered, "that's the last place which the Heart was seen! Bill Capperley's story! Are we—are we hunting for it?"
Sleath waved a hand in the direction of Captain Warburton's cabin. "Go an' ask him," he growled. "He's a most confidin' chap. All the English are. They'll tell their secrets to the dogs on the street. Damn 'em!"
I walked away with the Capperley verse of the Ballad ringing in my ears—a rather startling verse that ran:
When the Centipede crawls from the big stone hut
The light from the Heart shines over the Gut—
Lister had the information that I couldn't obtain from Double-face, and he communicated it gladly. A Swedish sailor, dying at the Rathole, a filthy dosshouse kept by a man called Pierre the Rat, wished a parson to comfort him in his death agony. Pierre the Rat, for some reason or other, believed the Swede had a story. He refused to bring the "crow" till the Swede coughed up.
THE story concerned the "Devil's Lantern." Pierre the Rat
listened to it, then raced hotfoot to Captain Warburton and sold
the tale for fifty pounds. The Swede died without religious
consolation. Warburton and the dosshouse proprietor thought it
might prove dangerous to let the parson hear the fellow's last
mutterings.
"But what's to prevent Pierre the Rat from selling the story to others?" I asked Lister.
"Nothing," he replied. "It just happens that there's no other skipper in port who would pay cash for it. Jack the Slasher is expected in from Papeete sometime tonight. It's a certainty that he'll get second rights on the tale, and he'll be after us. There's going to be trouble. Last night I dreamt that I was riding a rhinoceros, and whenever I dream of riding a rhino, there's trouble coming to me."
Lister glanced astern at the black night. Jack the Slasher had a reputation equal to that of Bully Hayes. He was, so rumor assented, a runaway murderer from Chicago; and around his name dark and bloody stories clustered like oysters clinging to mangrove roots. He was credited with the cutting out of the Little Nigger and the slaughter of her crew. He had burned a village in the island of Maiwo and had carried off women and young girls, tossing them overboard later when the smoke of a French gunboat appeared on the horizon.
"If he gets the story, there'll be two bloodstained hounds hunting the same hare," said Lister.
SATAN'S GUT was the inelegant name given to a narrow strait
separating a partly submerged coral atoll, known as a "mushroom,"
from the Isle of Centipedes. The surf beat over the patch of
coral; but between it and the steep cliffs of the island was a
passage of water so deep that soundings taken by a warship gave
no bottom at two thousand fathoms. The cliffs on this, the
western side of the island, made a landing impossible; but a ship
making for the beach on the eastern shore had first to enter the
Gut and thread a tortuous passage through openings in numerous
coral reefs.
There were strange stories afloat regarding the Isle of Centipedes—bloodcurdling stories. Trading schooners kept away from it, and on its dark-green foliage the cloak of mystery rested always.
There was a reason: It would seem, according to the words of the old men of the Islands, that the centipede was unknown in Polynesia up to the arrival of the whaling ships from New Bedford and Martha's Vineyard. The crawling creatures, so the ancients asserted, came in the holds of the whalers, found the climate suitable, crept ashore, and flourished exceedingly.
And on the Isle of Centipedes the arrival of the loathsome insects had a peculiar significance. The natives thought it meant the return of a god who had left the place centuries before. On one of the great stone pillars, similar to those mystifying monuments in the Tongan, Caroline and Cook Groups, the islanders found a chiseled representation of a centipede of enormous length and girth; and this, so they thought, had been a beneficent god to their people in the long ago. Evidently the god had deserted them. He had sailed away to the land of the papalagi, and misfortune had come upon them during his absence. Now he had come back, a small baby god in comparison with the sculptured centipede on the great stone column, but possibly capable of growth if tended carefully and given the worship they had lavished on him in the forgotten years.
The islanders set up a society whose efforts were directed toward increasing the length and thickness of the crawling insects. The cult of centipede-worship flourished. Strange stories spread across the Pacific, nauseating stories. And now to this weird island the Lovely Lady was heading in a search for the Heart of Sappho. A strange dread gripped me. My skin became gooseflesh; yet that desire to see the "Devil's Lantern" fought with the terror that was upon me...
The fear of pursuit filled the minds of Warburton and Sleath. They spent much time surveying the waters astern, and their anxiety was communicated to the natives. The Polynesians chattered among themselves; the Lovely Lady was a vessel of restless and anxious men.
On the third night from Apia a storm sprang upon the schooner. The winds played the Song of the Dead in her rigging, and she fled before the waves roused by the chant—snarling, snaky waves that bit at the flanks of the Lovely Lady and rolled over her deck.
At the very apex of the storm a Samoan, waist-deep in foam, screamed a warning and pointed astern. Something blacker than the night itself was overhauling us, plunging down on us in frightening bounds: an ebony Flying Dutchman, monstrous and terrifying!
WE felt that the thing would ride us under. It was leaping
toward us at double our speed; then, when within a boat's-length,
it sheered slightly and raced by so close that the slather of
foam from its forefoot swept over us as we clung to the
rigging.
It was the Panther, captained by Jack the Slasher. Above the roar of the storm there came clear to us his yell of hate and defiance directed at Warburton. The challenge of one lieutenant of the devil to another! Words that came out of the night with the wicked quality of blows. "Beat you to the Gut!"... "Fat-headed Limey!"... "Heart of Sappho is mine!"
The ship disappeared in the darkness. For a few minutes I believed that she was a phantom vessel, but the yells of Captain Warburton proved that he at least thought her real. The big Englishman was taking up the challenge of his brother freebooter. He dragged the terrified natives to the work of cutting away the tangled spars and cordage, cursing and screaming. The Lovely Lady went plunging forward in the race to reach the spot where the Heart of Sappho was supposed to be hidden.
ALL through the night we drove blindly on. Toward dawn the
wind fell, and when it was light enough to see, we were alone on
an ocean of angry whitecaps. There was no trace of the
Panther.
Captain Warburton, barefooted, red-eyed, and looking like a huge shaggy monster, shouted his belief. He was convinced that the Slasher's boat had gone down in the storm. He voiced his opinion so vigorously that he made the rest of us believe that the Panther was lost. "She's at the bottom!" he roared. "That tub is fifty years old! I'll give him 'fat-headed Limey!'"
Sleath was a little doubtful, but the Captain fell upon him. If the Panther was above the waves, where was she? Her speed might have appeared great as she passed us, but she would still be in sight. At last the mate admitted that it looked as if she had gone under.
At noon on the following day we sighted the high cliffs of the Isle of Centipedes. Cautiously we entered the Gut that separated the island from the mushroom-like atoll over which the waves creamed in half-mile lengths. We followed an intricate passage, and swung at last into a little bay on the eastern side of the island.
The isle sat in a silence: a mass of solid green enclosed in a frightening quiet that came out from it. Not a native appeared; not a grass hut showed amongst the trees. A network of mangroves ran around the curve of the bay; and beyond, running up to the higher ground toward the side of Satan's Gut, was a dense forest of coconut palms and clumps of pandanus.
"No one at home," growled Sleath.
"From what I hear, there are no women or children on the island," said Warburton. "And the natives don't come here except for the centipede-feasts. If they're here now, they're hiding."
That startling verse supposed to have been written by Bill Capperley swam into my mind as I listened to Warburton's words. Where was "the big stone hut" from which came the light of the Heart?
Those dark groves had eyes, a million eyes. They were turned upon the Lovely Lady. They were watching the gigantic Englishman laying out rifles and ammunition, watching the mate with his deformed face, studying the silent and rather frightened native crew, wondering about Lister and myself—wondering why we two were mixed up with the search for the Heart of Sappho.
Warburton had made his plans. He was fearless and confident. The words hurled at him by Jack the Slasher had annoyed him, and although he felt certain that the Panther had gone to the bottom in the storm, he was in a hurry to get ashore and make a search for the great ruby.
He gave his orders in a voice tense with excitement. He and Sleath, three Samoans and the Tokèlau boy were going ashore. Lister and myself, with one Samoan and the Raratongan native, would stay by the boat. The shore party carried four of our rifles, two pistols and a quantity of ammunition. Two rifles remained on the schooner. We were told to wait twenty-four hours; then if no news came from the shore, we were to make a search. If in distress, Warburton would fire five shots in quick succession. He explained the course they would take on landing. They would move due west toward the cliffs overlooking the Gut through which we had come. Here, so the captain hinted, were the stone altars where the priests of the centipede cult held their services.
Lister and I hung over the rail and watched the boat making for the shore. Those eyes—those million eyes were upon it. The boat touched the bank of mangrove trees; one by one the occupants were swallowed up in the green tangle. It seemed as if a soft sigh of contentment came from the island, a sigh such as an ogre might make after swallowing some rare tidbit.
"Do you—do you think it's there?" I questioned, minutes after the party had disappeared.
"I think anything might be there," answered Lister. "Anything at all. Gosh, it must—it must be hiding something precious, or it wouldn't look so vicious. It looks like a python sitting on its clutch of eggs!"
The afternoon slipped by, the silence, if possible, becoming more intense. We moved in fear of making a noise. The snaky swish of a rope was frightening. The island demanded quiet.
My thoughts were of the Heart. Would Warburton find the great ruby on some sacrificial stone placed before the centipede god? I wondered what he would do with it. Was he, like Bully Hayes, the blackbirding captain, and Mad Harry Bates, seeking it to give to a woman? Would the Spanish señorita who had stepped ashore "with legs an' luggage" receive the great gem?
It was dusk when the Raratongan boy saw the huge black finger—the enormous black finger moving above the low jungle strip that ran out towards the reef at the entrance of the bay: a finger that waved against the sky as if writing our doom across the heavens. It was the mainmast of the Panther as she nosed toward the opening in the reef!
Possibly the Raratongan and the Samoan had heard of the cruelties of Jack the Slasher. Without a word they slid over the side and made for the shore. Lister and I, left alone, half-heartedly seized the two rifles and waited.
The Panther swung into the little bay. The silence was shattered by a burst of rifle-fire. A hail of lead passed over us. Lister dropped the rifle as a bullet nicked his shoulder; then we, feeling certain that an attempt to hold the Lovely Lady against the murderous Slasher would mean certain death, followed the example of the two natives. We dropped over the side of the schooner and struck out for the shore.
We dived into the mangroves; and there, stretched on our stomachs, we watched the two vessels dimly outlined in the dusk. The voice of Jack the Slasher came plainly to our ears. He had fired another fusillade into the Lovely Lady; then, receiving no return volley, he ordered his mate to board her.
His shouts echoed across the island. "Grab everything that's worth takin', then stick a match to her!" he ordered. "Quick's the word!"
Silent, stupefied, we watched. The mate was a fast worker. He shouted to the Slasher, telling him there was no one aboard the schooner. Lister and I squirmed. Then a tongue of flame shot up from the deck of the Lovely Lady. They had fired her. I felt violently sick; I think Lister did too.
"We better—we better move before the blaze will make a target of us," he stammered. "Nice news to tell the Old Man."
THE island had us now—had us in its moist green clutch.
We breathed its odor: putrescent, musty, primeval.
That place had run loose for centuries. A wild stallion of an island, on which the bridle of civilization would never be placed. If it were possible to search the world for a fitting atmosphere for the strange cult that flourished there, no better place could be found. It was a natural altar for evil.
We started to crawl through the undergrowth, heading westward. The glow of the burning schooner lit up the place. We were silent, physically sick, altogether uneasy. We wondered what Captain Warburton would say when we told him of the burning of the Lovely Lady. We thought he would say a lot.
Progress was slow. The blaze from the schooner was wiped out by the darkness. The shouts of the Panther's crew died down. Possibly the Slasher's men felt that the island objected to their shouted profanities and mad laughter.
The night, alive, hectic, mysterious, roamed around us as if asking our business. Why were we there? What right had we to intrude on that place of awful quiet, that place of whispering dread?
The thick vegetation hampered us. Lawyer-vines twisted themselves maliciously around our feet. Creepers, thorn-covered and spiteful, blocked our path and forced us to make detours. We became doubtful of our direction. We felt that powers of which we knew nothing were obstructing our way. But we stumbled forward. We had to tell Captain Warburton that Jack the Slasher had arrived—that Jack the Slasher had destroyed the Lovely Lady.
A moon rose above the green belt of trees. We compared estimates in whispers. We thought we had covered one half of the distance separating the little bay from the high cliffs overlooking Satan's Gut—the cliffs toward which Warburton, Sleath and the three Samoans had headed. We had been walking, or rather crawling, for more than two hours.
We came to a cleared space which the moonlight had turned into a silver glade. We stood in the shadows on the very edge of it, afraid to step forward. Here the quiet was the double-distilled essence of silence. We felt it pressing us back, warning us.
Then, as we stood shoulder to shoulder, the thing that had in some macabre fashion created the terror and the choking stillness, became visible. It appeared at one end of the clearing. Out of the underbrush it came—a nightmare apparition that the imps of hell might have created...
I tried to run, but my legs refused service. The thing held me by my own frightful desire to find out what it was. To run from it without knowledge of its formation would produce madness later. Therefore I, like Lister, was glued to the spot by a self-protective curiosity.
It poured into the clearing—black, glistening, serpentine. Ten feet of it, twenty, thirty! Then, as it twisted and permitted a side view, that mental elastic whose tautness brought insanity close to us, relaxed. We breathed again.
The thing, the black glistening thing weaving wickedly across the clearing like a monster centipede, was made up of crouching savages. They were bent double, the head of each, with the exception of the leader, resting on the rump of the man before him, giving the line its curiously segmented appearance. The crouch hid the legs, save from a side view; but the arms, whitened with lime and thrust out on either side of the line, moved with the regularity of crawling feet.
It was a most horrifying representation of a huge centipede. With the moonlight falling on the bodies glistening with palm-oil, it made one believe that the sculptured god on the great stone pillars had come to life and was creeping around the island where he was worshiped in the long ago!
NOW the head of the thing swung to the left at a point twenty
feet from where we stood. The whitened arms of the leader tore a
hole in the green vines, disclosing a cleft. Slowly the centipede
moved on, segment after segment, till the last joint of the
horror had disappeared. Listening intently, we heard it swishing
through the underbrush beyond—fifty feet or more of
deviltry.
Hearts pumping madly, Lister and I crept away, victims of a terrible nausea. That first clammy terror that had come upon us when the thing flowed out of the underbrush into the clearing could not be chased away by the knowledge of its make-up. Now and then it returned like a wound that had reopened, making us tremble with the fear that it would be with us always.
I THINK we lost all sense of direction after that. We were a
little fey. We went plunging through the depths of tangled vines,
clawing and struggling to escape we knew not what. At times we
forgot the mission we were on, forgot the world outside the
wretched vines that clutched us, tearing the jackets from our
shoulders and scratching our faces and hands.
At times we were doubtful if the great glistening centipede was really composed of crouching savages. Were those stealthily moving feet really feet, or whitened arms of the natives? They were so cleverly done; they moved in such frightening unison. The unclean thing was roaming around the island—at any moment we might come face to face with it!
It was daylight when we broke through the dank jungle onto the high cliffs above Satan's Gut. In our hurry to escape the torturing creepers, we nearly went over the edge. The sea was a glimpse of paradise. We fell on our knees and looked down at the rollers bashing themselves against the base of the rocky wall. We breathed the sea air, fresh and clean after the poisonous odor of decayed vegetation.
"I'd like to jump down into the water," I gasped. "Jump into it an' swim—"
Lister halted me with a little choked cry. He pointed to a higher ridge of rock partly hidden by the morning mist. The veil of cloud was lifting; and as it lifted, it disclosed something—something that put a hot clutch upon our nerves, something that brought the choking dryness to our throats, the imps of madness to our brains.
The thing, the thing that we had seen in the moonlit clearing, was ascending the slope! The morning light hit the glistening human segments, struck the whitened hands weaving up the narrow path to the very summit, where the cliff was a flat platform; moving as if for a definite purpose.
Then as our eyes, with a great effort, left the thing, we saw Captain Warburton and Mr. Sleath. They stood together on the top of the cliff, their backs to the sea, their faces turned to the imitation centipede that was climbing toward them.
The leading savage—the weaving head of the affair—came over the ridge of the platform on which stood the two whites. The Captain lifted his right arm, and fired. The "head" rolled away; the second man became the leader. Sleath fired; another savage moved up. Warburton fired in turn.
The speed of the imitation centipede increased now, and the two white men moved backward toward the edge of the cliff, firing in turn. The "centipede," either through desire to reach the two, or finding that the single-leader approach was disastrous, split itself into single units and rushed.
The black swarm fell with their lime-whitened arms upon the two whites. For a few seconds there was a frightening huddle of black bodies; then the human clump broke, and we saw Warburton and Sleath—saw them in mid-air, as the savage devils hurled them from the rocky platform!
It was then that Lister and I, straining forward, witnessed the miracle. There in the morning sunlight we saw it clearly. As Captain Warburton was thrown from the platform, there came from his bosom what we thought at first was a flash of flame. It separated itself from him. For the fraction of a second it hung in the clear atmosphere; then with red fire streaming from it, it dropped down, a blazing comet in flight, till it struck the sea. Even then we thought we saw it. A thing of fire in the water, slipping swiftly down into the unfathomable depths of Satan's Gut. We had seen the burial of the Heart of Sappho.
LISTER and I stumbled back to the little bay where the
Panther was anchored. We told our story to Jack the
Slasher, who, fox that he was, awaited the return of the big
Englishman.
Our story so impressed the Slasher that he pulled up his anchor and headed out over the reef. Slipping through Satan's Gut, we looked up at the cliffs. High above us, black woolly heads could be seen peering over the rocky edge.
They made no sound as we sailed by. They were staring down into the water. We believed that they saw in the depths the reflection of the wonderful Heart of Sappho—that "Devil's Lantern" whose extraordinary beauty had caused the deaths of so many mad worshipers.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.