The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Smith, buy me time to get this parchment pried loose!”

The Englishman darted away with his blunderbuss again.

The old document was surprisingly pliable, but the sheepskin had bonded to wall and mural like glue. It could only be peeled off a little at a time. Cuvier used my rapier to scrape from the other side, the false painting flaking away.

I heard the roar of Smith’s gun, shouts, and answering shots.

“Hurry,” the French scientist muttered unnecessarily.

Then we heard a whoosh and crackling. I sniffed. Something was burning again.

Smith rushed back in. “Fulton is as mad as you are, Gage. He’s set the mine’s shoring on fire with his bagpipes. There’s so much smoke we can’t see a damn thing. Neither can our enemies, I suppose.”

Cuvier slid the rapier behind the parchment like a razor and at last the document, about eighteen inches square, came free. I’d no idea what it said, given that it was in Latin, and there was no time for us to translate in any event. I slid it inside my shirt and nodded. “What happens when the timber burns through?”

“The earth will collapse on all this beauty,” Cuvier said.

“And on us,” Smith amended.

We hurried out to the main street. Fulton had backed down it, coughing. Flames seemed to be racing along the network of dried supports as if they’d been soaked in oil, and there was a merry popping and crackling as our roof burned. I could hear shouts of consternation from the other side of the smoke.

“Who followed us down here?” I asked.

“We didn’t get a clear look at them,” Fulton said. “William let them have it with his blunderbuss, and then I used the last oil from my pipes. I’d hoped it might collapse just a section to buy us time, but it appears the whole lot of it is catching fire. I think I’m going to bring the entire cave down on us, Ethan, and I don’t have a gambling salon above to help us escape this time.”

“I’m not the only idiot,” I said, with more than a little sincerity.

“For the timber to burn vigorously like this means it’s being fed by air, my savants,” Cuvier put in, holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “We still haven’t found the vent that kept us from suffocating in the sarcophagus, so there’s hope.”

We backed away from the flames to the end of the ancient street, where there was that small crevice at the top of a slope of rock and sand. When I put my face to it I got some grit from wind being sucked by the fire. The breeze was rushing through as the fire sucked, pushing the worst of the smoke toward our enemies.

“Help me dig! Maybe there’s still a way out.”

We threw sand like terriers. The crevice widened, more air pouring through, as behind the fire ate timbers that hadn’t seen a drop of rain for seven centuries. This new hole was another lava tube, I saw, or perhaps a continuation of the one we’d already negotiated, this time just wide enough to crawl into. Ahead was complete blackness, with no clue if the geologic pipe would continue as a pathway or shrink to something we couldn’t squeeze through. I took stock. Our stub of candle had blown out and our torches were too long for such a confined crawl. The only light we had was coming from Fulton’s fire.

“I’ve no idea if we can get through here.”

Then there was a roar and the ceiling back toward our attackers came down with a crash and an eruption of dust, thousands of tons of dirt snuffing out much of the fire and burying many of the rooms we’d just been in. They were lost forever, unless someone figured a way to dig down from above. The tunnel and the shaft that led toward the surface were plugged, separating us from any pursuit. Had it buried our enemies?

“It’s not like we have a choice,” said Cuvier. “Lead the way, Ethan, in the dark.”

“What about the candle then?”

“I’ll hold it in my teeth until we get to the place we most desperately need it.”

“Don’t leave your weapons. I’ve got a feeling we might need them, too.”

“Given our luck so far, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

So we crawled. The tunnel was rough basalt, just wide enough for our shoulders. I took the lead, the others coming as best they could. I shifted the parchment and rapier onto my back, to protect them as much as possible from scraping, while using my longrifle to probe ahead for obstacles and falls. I hated the clang and clack that I knew was scuffing my armaments even more. No fine lady would be impressed.

The only encouragement was the breeze that blew around us, coming from somewhere ahead and blowing toward the fire behind. The discouragement was how warm the tunnel was getting from the surrounding rock.

There were more crashes to our rear as timbers burned through, and the last of the light winked out as the earth slumped. We were in blackness as profound as death itself. I could hear the quiet curses of the others as they crawled behind me, and the rattle of the weapons we doggedly kept. At least Fulton had let go of his empty bagpipes.

I detest underground places. I haven’t found a burrow yet that doesn’t involve dirt, sweat, the occasional swim, and precious little treasure. If I ever have a proper house I think I’m going to put it on stilts to get as far from the earth as possible. Or maybe I’ll live in a boat, in a tub-sized pond too small to have any waves.

Even in the dark I could feel the rock seeming to press on us as I thought about the cave-ins behind. Suddenly the floor disappeared and I reached down with my arm in the dark, tensing in case I somehow touched something that could touch back. But I felt only air. I reached ahead and the tunnel floor we were on seemed to continue across a gap of only two feet. My vision seemed pink, and I blinked a moment. There was the faintest of glows far, far below, I realized, the merest murmur of hell. Heat wafted up from the hole.

I shouted back to the others that I was going to wriggle across the gap and continue on, and warned them to be ready for it. Then I dragged myself across the void, stomach clenching, and went on.

The tunnel kept getting narrower, however, squeezing down toward my head. I scraped several times, and could feel the trickle of blood from my crown. It was getting hard to breathe, the air stale, and finally my shoulders wedged and I could go no farther. Utterly dark, no hope ahead, and as I patted with my hands I could feel nothing but enclosing rock. I probed with my rifle, which only confirmed the passage constricted still more, far too small to wriggle through. Cuvier bumped up against the soles of my boots and grunted.

“What’s wrong, Ethan?”

“I’m stuck!” I couldn’t get the room to even go backward. “This isn’t the way out, there’s no air. We have to go back to that little chasm we crawled over and go down.”

“Go down? Merde, I’m longing to go up.”

“We don’t have a choice. Collapsed behind, and too narrow ahead. The only way out is descent, I think.”

The others groaned, but what choice did we have? Cuvier had to drag me back a couple of feet by my ankles to free my shoulders enough to wriggle backward, and then we all inched laboriously the way we’d come, sweating and panting, our weapons occasionally catching and jamming us. Fulton’s feet were now leading.

“I’m going down the demon hole!” the inventor finally announced. “At least I feel a current of air! Hot as a bellows.” And so we followed, one by one, my own legs slipping into the unknown chasm and my body following. Once again, by bracing my back on one side of the shaft and my feet on the other, I could descend.

“Now I smell sulfur!” Fulton called.

“The mouth of Hades.”

“Maybe we did suffocate in that sarcophagus.”

“No, this is worse than the real hell, I think. There, we’d have the devil to guide us.”

Down I went, groping for a grip, worried that I’d slip and fall on my companions. My sword and rifle were a constant trial, but I refused to leave them. Then the shaft began to pitch at an angle and we felt a floor of sorts, sloping steeply downward. We slipped down it blind, bracing with our feet, this time with me in the rear.

“It’s getting hotter,” Fulton reported.

“Look!” Smith said excitedly. “Is that light?”

We did see a glow. In a normal night we wouldn’t have even noticed its feebleness, but after what seemed an eternity in complete darkness, it shone like a reddish beacon. Yet when we came to the source we cringed.

There was a crevice giving a view far below, and from it came the reflected glow of something red. We were very hot now, and realized we were in a venous system tied to the heart of this ancient volcano.

“Hell’s front door,” Cuvier muttered. “We’re peering into the bowels of the earth.”

“We’re seeing what few men have ever seen,” Smith added.

“Pray we just see it, and not feel it as well.”

“We need to light the candle to take a look,” Fulton said. “There’s more than one way to go here.”

So we balled up more lint, struck sparks—a mighty flash to our light-starved eyes—and got it burning long enough to reignite the wick of our stub. How hope flooded back from even that tendril of feeble light! We were in a junction of sorts, one crevice leading down to that eerie glow, and two tunnels going on, one level and one aimed up.

“For God’s sake, let’s climb,” said Smith wearily.

Cuvier sniffed. “No. This middle one has the breeze of air. We must take it.”

He blew out the wick on our precious candle, put it in his mouth once more, and this time took the lead by crawling on.

How long we spent in Hades I can’t really say. It seemed like forever, though was probably only hours. My hands were raw, my mouth cotton, and my clothes in shreds. On and on we crawled, blind mice, hope kept alive only by the whisper of air.

Almost imperceptibly, however, the tunnel began rising again. In places we squeezed through like corks in a bottle, and in others our arms thrashed out into voids we couldn’t tell the extent of. Our fear was that we might pitch headlong into some new chasm, but that didn’t happen, either. And at length we finally heard noise ahead, like wind blowing through trees.

“Is that a machine?” Fulton asked.

“The sea,” said Cuvier. “We’re coming to a sea cave, I think. I see a glow, if I haven’t gone crazy.”

“I’m not a good swimmer,” warned Smith.

“At this point, drowning is preferable.”

For the last two hundred meters we could hear the echo of rolling waves, and a slow blue light grew like a turquoise dawn. And then at last the tunnel opened up and we came into a high domed cave, illuminated from below by the glow of water and from above by a crevice in the ceiling. It was from there that the air we’d been breathing since the sarcophagus presumably came. A pale dawn glowed through the crack. Its opening was unobtainable, however, thirty feet overhead in a vaulted roof we had no way of climbing. Beneath it was a pool from the sea, the water breathing in and out like a sleeping giant. We splashed in the salty coolness, but it was only momentary relief. We were all very thirsty.

“How can we get up there?” I asked.

“We could shout for help,” said Smith.

“Shout? They’re as apt to shoot us as send a rope down.”

“We’ve come all this way to be stuck in a pot?”

“It’s too bright in here for that crack of light alone,” I said. “Look—you can see more light at the far side of this pool. The open Mediterranean is just beyond this grotto, lads, and all we’ve got to do is swim through the underwater part and pop out the other side.”

“How far is it?” asked Smith.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should just shout for help,” he tried again.

“No. Look—dawn is coming, it’s getting brighter. We need to be out and hidden before our pursuers see us. I’ll swim first. If I don’t come back, I’ll either have succeeded or drowned.”

“Well, there’s reassurance!”

“Drown there or die of thirst and hunger here,” I said, and shrugged. I’d faced this dilemma before. “Let’s go while we have strength left to die swiftly.” And so I dove.

It was probably a dunking of only about fifteen or twenty meters, but it seems twice that when you don’t know. My rifle was an anchor, the sea dark, and the wave surge pushed me backward. But I held my breath, swam with all my might, and finally saw the surface silver from the sky beyond. I broke clean in a wave-churned inlet at the base of red lava cliffs. Air! I grasped a rock, floating and gasping, and at length Cuvier and Fulton popped up, too.

“Smith’s hesitant. Doesn’t like the water much, for an Englishman.”

“Here, hold my rifle. I’m rested now.” So I swam back through the cave to the grotto, the distance seeming a fraction of what it had been before, and took his blunderbuss from him. “It’s just like being born,” I coaxed. “The whole world is on the other side.” I led the awkward geologist to the edge of the grotto, taught him to take deep breaths, and then we dunked and swam through, me leading him by the arm, and coming up just as the sky was pinking to our left, which must be east. Smith blew like a whale and coughed. I glanced around. From the direction of the sunrise, we’d come out somewhere on Thira’s southern coast.

“Now what?” asked Fulton. “We can’t even climb up.”

“We go home,” Cuvier said. “Look—isn’t that our ship?”