The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER SIX

It was after noon when I awoke. Only one wall screen had been pulled up, the one that gave on the lagoon. I could see the green shimmer of water, the white glare of sand, the washed out pastels of the coral and, beyond the lagoon, the darker line of the sea with a cloudless sky above. With three side-screens down there was no through draught and it was stiflingly hot under that thatched roof. But at least it made for privacy. My left arm throbbed savagely. But I was still alive. No hydrophobia.

Marie Hopeman was sitting on a chair by my bed. She was dressed in white shorts and blouse, her eyes were clear and rested, she had colour in her cheeks and altogether just looking at her made me feel terrible. She was smiling down at me and I could see that she had made up her mind not to be sore at me any more. She had a nice face, far nicer than the one she had worn in London. I said: "You look fine. How do you feel?" Original, that was me.

"Right as rain. Fever all gone. Sorry to wake you up like this, but there'll be lunch going in half an hour. The professor had one of his boys make those so that you could get over there." She pointed to where a pair of remarkably well-made crutches lay against a chair. "Or you can have it here. You must be hungry, but I didn't want to wake you up for breakfast."

"I didn't turn in till about six o'clock."

"That explains it." I took my hat off to her patience, to her ability to suppress her curiosity. "How do you feel?"

"I feel awful."

"You look it," she said candidly. "Just not tough at all."

"I'm falling to pieces. What have- you been doing all morning?"

"Been squired around by the professor. I went swimming with him this morning-I think the professor likes going swimming with me-then after we'd had breakfast he took me round a bit and into the mine." She shivered, mock-earnest. "I don't care for the mine very much,"

"Where's your boy-friend now?"

"Away looking for a dog. They can't find it anywhere. The professor's very upset. It seems that this was a particular pet and he was very attached to it."

"Ha! A pet? I've met the pet and he was very attached to me. The clinging type." I freed my left arm from the blanket and unwrapped the blood-stained strips of cloth. "You can see where he was clinging."

"My God!" Her eyes widened and the warm colour ebbed from her cheeks. "That-that looks ghastly."

I examined my arm with a kind of doleful pride and had to admit that she wasn't exaggerating any. From shoulder to elbow most of the arm was blue, purple and black, and swollen as much as fifty per cent above normal. There were four or five deep triangular tears in the flesh and the blood was still oozing slowly from three of them. The parts of my arm that didn't seem discoloured were probably just as bad as the rest, only they were hidden under a thick crust of dark dried-up blood. I had seen pleasanter sights.

"What happened to the dog?" she whispered.

"I killed him." I reached under the pillow and drew out the blood-stained knife. "With this."

"Where on earth did you get that? Where-I think you'd better tell me everything from the beginning."

So I told her, quickly and softly, while she cleaned up my arm and bandaged it again. She didn't like the job, but she did it well. When I'd finished speaking she said: "What lies on the other side of the island?"

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "But I'm beginning to make all sorts of guesses and I don't like any of them."

She said nothing to this, just finished tying up my arm and helping me into a long-sleeved shirt. After that she fixed up the splints and plaster again on my right ankle, went to the cupboard and brought back her handbag. I said sourly: "Going to powder your nose for the boy-friend?"

"I'm going to powder yours," she said. Before I was properly aware of what she was doing she had some kind of cream on my face, and rubbed it in and was dusting powder over it. After a bit she leaned back and surveyed her handiwork. "You look simply sweet," she murmured and handed me her pocket mirror.

I looked awful. One horrified glance at me would have had any life assurance salesman in the land jumping on his fountain pen with both feet. The drawn features, the bloodshot eyes with the blue under them were my own contributions: but the ghastly and highly convincing pallor of the rest of my face was entirely due to Marie.

"Wonderful," I agreed. "And what's going to happen when the professor gets a good whiff of this face powder?"

She drew a miniature scent-spray from her bag. "After I've sprayed a couple of ounces of Night of Mystery on myself he won't be able to smell anything else within twenty yards."

I wrinkled my nose and said: "I see your point." Night of Mystery was pretty powerful stuff, at least in the quantities she was using. "What happens if I start "sweating? Won't all this cream and powder stuff start to streak?"

"It's guaranteed not to." She smiled. "If it does, we'll sue the makers."

"Sure," I said heavily. "That should be interesting. You know, "The shades of the late J. Bentall and M. Hopeman herewith propose to raise an action-' "

"Stop it!" she said sharply. "Stop it, will you?"

I stopped it. She was a very touchy girl on some subjects. Or maybe I was just clumsy and careless. I said, "Don't you think the half-hour is just about up?"

She nodded. "Yes. We'd better go."

It took me until I had got down the steps and moved six paces into the sunshine to realise that Marie's careful preparation with the cream and powder was probably just so much wasted effort. The way I felt, nothing could have made me look worse. With only one foot in commission and the other shoeless foot swinging clear of the ground I was forced to throw much of my weight on the crutches and with every thud of the left-hand crutch on the hard-baked earth a violent jolt of pain stabbed clear through my arm, from the finger-tips all the way to the shoulder, then across my back to the very top of my head. I didn't see why an arm injury should give me a violent headache, but it did. This was something else to take up with the medical profession.

Old Witherspoon had either been watching or had heard the thud of my crutches for he opened the door and came hopping briskly down the steps to greet us. The broad beam of welcome changed to a look of distress as he caught sight of my face.

"God bless my soul! Bless my soul!" He came hurrying anxiously forward and took my arm. "You look-I mean, this has given you a terrible shake. Good God, my boy, the sweat's pouring down your face."

He wasn't exaggerating. It was pouring down my face. It had started pouring at the precise instant that he had gripped me by the arm, the left arm, just above the elbow. He was screwing my arm off at the shoulder socket. He thought he was helping me.

"I'll be all right." I gave him my wan smile. "Just jarred my foot coming down our steps. Otherwise I hardly feel a thing."

"You shouldn't have come out," he scolded. "Foolish, terribly foolish. We would have sent lunch across. However, now that you're here… Dear me, dear me, I feel so guilty about all this."

"It's not your fault," I reassured him. He'd shifted his grip higher to assist me up the steps and I noted with faint surprise that his house was swaying from side to side. "You weren't to know that the floor was unsafe."

"But I did, I did. That's what vexes me so much. Unforgivable, unforgivable." He ushered me into a chair in his living-room, fussing and clucking around like an old hen. "By Jove, you do look ill. Brandy, eh, brandy?"

"Nothing I'd like better," I said honestly.

He did his usual testing to destruction act with the handbell, brandy was brought and the patient revived. He waited till I'd downed half my drink, then said: "Don't you think I should have another look at that ankle?"

"Thank you, but fortunately no need," I said easily. "Marie fixed it this morning. I had the good sense to marry a fully qualified nurse. I hear you've had a little trouble yourself. Did you find your dog?"

"No trace of him anywhere. Most vexing, most disturbing. A Doberman, you know-very devoted to him. Yes, very devoted. I can't think what has happened." He shook his head worriedly, poured some sherry for himself and Marie and sat beside her on the rattan couch. "I fear some misfortune has overtaken him."

"Misfortune?" Marie gazed at him, wide-eyed. "On this peaceful little island?"

"Snakes, I'm afraid. Highly poisonous vipers. They infest the southern part of the island and live in the rocks at the foot of the mountain. Carl-my dog-may have been bitten by one of those. Incidentally, I meant to warn you-on no account go near that part of the island. Extremely dangerous, extremely."

"Vipers!" Marie shuddered. "Do they-do they come near the houses here?"

"Oh, dear me, no." The professor patted her hand in absent-minded affection. "No need to worry, my dear. They hate this phosphate dust. Just remind yourself to confine your Walks to this part of the island."

"I certainly shall," Marie agreed. "But tell me, professor, if the vipers had got him wouldn't you-or someone-have found his body?"

"Not if he were in among the rocks at the foot of the mountain. Fearful jumble there. Of course, he may come back yet."

"Or he may have taken a swim," I suggested.

"A swim?" The professor frowned. "I don't follow you, my boy."

"Was he fond of water?"

"As a matter of fact, he was. By Jove, I believe you've hit on it. Lagoon's full of tiger sharks. Monsters, some of them, up to eighteen feet-and I do know they move close in at night. That must have been it, that must have been it. Poor Carl! One of those monsters could have bitten him clear in two. What an end for a dog, what an end." Witherspoon shook his head mournfully and cleared his throat. "Dear me, I shall miss him. He was more than a dog, he was a friend. A faithful and a gentle friend."

We all sat around for a couple of minutes in silent sorrow, paying our last respects to this departed pillar of canine benevolence, and then we got on with the lunch.

It was still daylight, but the sun had sunk beyond the shoulder of the mountain when I woke up. I felt fresh and rested, and while my arm was still stiff and sore, the throbbing pain of the morning had gone: as long as I didn't have to move around, the discomfort was hardly worth mentioning.

Marie had not yet returned. She and the professor had gone out trolling for trevally-whatever trevally might be- with the two Fijian boys after lunch while I had returned to bed. The professor had invited me also, but it had obviously been only as a gesture of politeness, I hadn't the strength to pull in a sardine that afternoon. So they'd gone without me. Professor Witherspoon had expressed regrets and apologies and hoped I didn't mind his taking my wife with him. I'd told him not at all and hoped that they would enjoy themselves and he'd given me a funny look that I couldn't quite figure out, and I'd had the obscure uneasy feeling of having put a foot wrong somewhere. But whatever it was he hadn't let it puzzle him long. He was too interested in his trevally. Not to mention Marie.

I'd washed and shaved and managed to make myself look more or less respectable by the time they returned. It appeared that the trevally hadn't been biting that day. Neither of them seemed very upset about it. The professor was in tremendous form at the table that evening, a genial thoughtful host with a fund of good stories. He really went out of his way to entertain us and it didn't require any great deductive powers to guess that the effort wasn't being made on my behalf or on the behalf of Hewell, who sat at the opposite end of the table from me, brooding and silent and remote. Marie laughed and smiled and talked almost as much as the professor. She seemed to find his charm and good humour infectious, but it didn't infect me any: I'd done a good solid hour of constructive thinking before I'd gone to sleep that afternoon and the thinking had led me to inevitable conclusions that I found very frightening indeed. I don't scare easy but I know when to be scared: and never a better time in my opinion than when you've made the discovery that you're under the sentence of death. And I was under the sentence of death. I had no doubt at all left in my mind about this.

Dinner over, I pulled myself to my feet, reached for the crutches, thanked the professor for the meal and said that we couldn't possibly trespass on his kindness and hospitality any more that night. We knew, I said, that he was a busy man. He protested, but not too violently, and asked if there were any books he could send across to our house. I said we would be pleased, but that I'd like to take a few steps down to the beach first and he clucked his tongue and wondered whether it would not be too much for me but when I said that he had only to look out of the window and see for himself how little I was exerting myself, he supposed doubtfully it would be all right. We said goodnight and left them.

I'd some difficulty in negotiating the steep bank overhanging the top of the beach, but after that it was easy. The sand was dry and hard-packed and the crutches scarcely sank in at all. We went about a couple of hundred yards down and along the beach, always keeping in line of sight of the professor's windows, till we came to the edge of the lagoon. There we sat down. The moon was as it had been the previous night, one moment there, the next vanished behind drifting cloud. I could hear the distant murmur of the surf breaking on the reef of the lagoon and the faint rustling whisper of the night wind in the nodding palms. There were no exotic tropical scents, I supposed that suffocating grey phosphate dust had crushed the life out of all but the trees and the toughest plants, all I could smell was the sea.

Marie touched my arm with gentle fingers. "How does it feel?"

"Improving. Enjoy your afternoon out?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. You were too happy by half. Learn anything that might be useful?"

"How could I?" she asked disgustedly. "He did nothing but babble and talk nonsense all afternoon."

"It's the Night of Mystery and those clothes you wear," I pointed out kindly. "You're driving the man out of his mind."

"I don't seem to be driving you out of your mind," she said tartly.

"No," I agreed, then, after a few seconds, added bitterly: "You can't drive me out of what I haven't got."

"What strange modesty is this?"

"Look at this beach," I said. "Has it ever occurred to you that four or five days ago in London, before we even took off, that someone knew that we would be sitting here tonight? My God, if ever I get out of this I'm going to devote the rest of my life to tiddley-winks. I'm out of my depth in this line. I knew I was right about Fleck, I knew I was. He was no killer."

"You're hopping about too much," Marie protested. "Sure, he wasn't going to kill us. Not nice Captain Fleck. He was just going to tap us on the head and push us over the side. The sharks would have done the dirty work for him."

"Remember when we were sitting on that upper deck? Remember I told you that I felt there was something wrong but that I couldn't put my finger on it? Remember?"

"Yes, I remember."

"Good old Bentall," I said savagely. "Never misses a thing. The ventilator-the ventilator we used as a hearing aid, the one facing the radio room. It shouldn't have been facing the radio shack, it should have been facing forward. Remember we got no air down there. No bloody wonder."

"There's no need to-"

"Sorry. But you see it all now, don't you? He knew that even a fool like me would discover that voices from the radio room could be heard down that pipe. Ten gets one he had a concealed mike down in that hold which let him know whenever Bentall, the Einstein of espionage, made such shattering discoveries. He knew there were rats there, and he knew that the rats would discourage us from sleeping on a low bunk, so Henry pushes back some battens which coincidentally happen to be at the very spot where we can start searching for tinned food and drink after we'd passed up that deliberately awful breakfast they gave us. More coincidences: behind the tinned food are battens with loose screws and behind them are lifebelts. Fleck didn't exactly hang up a sign saying 'Lifebelts in this box"-but he came pretty close to it. Then Fleck puts the wind up me good and proper, without in any way appearing to do so, and more or less lets us know that the decision to execute or not will be coming through at seven. So we latch ourselves on to that ventilator and when the word comes through we leave, complete with lifebelts. What do you bet that Fleck hadn't even loosened the screw on the hatch to make things easy-I could probably have forced it with my little finger."

"But-but we could still have drowned," Marie said slowly. "We might have missed the reef or lagoon."

"What-miss a six-mile wide target? You said old Fleck seemed to be changing course pretty often and you were right. He wanted to make good and sure that when we jumped we did so opposite the middle of the reef where we couldn't miss. He even slowed right down so that we couldn't hurt ourselves when we jumped overboard. Probably standing there killing himself laughing when Bentall and Hopeman, two stooges in search of a comedian, pussy-footed it down the stern. And those voices I heard on the reef that night? John and James out in their canoe, seeing that we didn't even put a foot wrong and sprain an ankle. God, how much of a sucker can you be?"

There was a long silence. I lit a couple of cigarettes and gave her one. The moon had gone behind a cloud and her face was only a pale blue in the darkness. Then she said: "Fleck and the professor-they must be working hand in hand."

"Can you see any other possibility?"

"What do they want with us?"

"I'm not sure yet." I was sure, but this was one thing I couldn't tell her.

"But-but why all the fake build-up? Why couldn't Fleck have sailed right in and handed us over to the professor?"

"There's an answer to that, too. Whoever is behind this is a very smart boy indeed. There's a reason for everything he does."

"You-do you think the professor-is he the man behind-"

"I don't know what he is. Don't forget the barbed wire. The Navy is there. They may have come to play skittles, but I don't think so. There's something big, very big, and something very secret going on on the other side of the island. Whoever is in charge there will be taking no chances. They know Witherspoon is there, and that fence doesn't mean a thing, that's just to discourage wandering employees, they'll have investigated him down to the last nail in his shoes. The Services have some very clever investigators indeed and if they're content to have him there that means he's got a clean bill of health. And he knows the Navy is there. Fleck and the professor in cahoots. The professor and the Navy in cahoots. What kind of sense do you make out of it?"

"You trust the professor, then? You're saying, in effect, that he is on the level?"

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just thinking out loud."

"No, you're not," she insisted. "If he's accepted by the Navy, he must be on the level. That's what you say. If he is, then why the Chinese crouching in the darkness down by the fence, why the man-killing dog, why the trip-wire?"

"I'm just guessing. He may have warned his employees to keep clear of that place and they know of the dog and the wire. I'm not saying those were his Chinese employees I saw, I only assumed it. If there's something big and secret happening on the other side of the island, don't forget that secrets can be lost by people breaking out as well as by people breaking in. The Navy may well have some top men on this side, to see that no one breaks- out. Maybe the professor knows all about it-I think he does. We've lost too many secrets to the communist world during the past decade through sheer bad security. The government may have learned its lesson."

"But where do we come in?" she said helplessly. "It's so-so terribly complicated. And how can you explain away the attempt to cripple you?"

"I can't. But the more I think of it the more convinced I am that I'm only a tiny pawn in this and that nearly always tiny pawns have to be sacrificed to win the chess game."

"But why?" she insisted. "Why? And what reason can a harmless old duffer like Professor Witherspoon have for-"

"If that harmless old duffer is Professor Witherspoon," I interrupted heavily, "then I'm the Queen of the May."

For almost a minute there was only the far-off murmur of the surf, the whisper of the night wind in the trees.

"I can't stand much more of this," she said at last, wearily. "You said yourself you've seen him on television and-"

"And a very reasonable facsimile he is, too," I agreed. "His name may even be Witherspoon but he's certainly no professor of archaeology. He's the only person I've ever met who knows less about archaeology than I do. Believe me, that's a feat."

"But he knows so much about it-"

"He knows nothing about it. He's boned up on a couple of books on archaeology and Polynesia and never got quarter of the way through either. He didn't get far enough to find out that there are neither vipers nor malaria in those parts, both of which he claims to exist. That's why he objected to your having his books. You might find out more than he knows. It wouldn't take long. He talks about recovering pottery and wooden implements from basalt-the lava would have crushed the one and incinerated the other. He talks about dating wooden relics by experience and knowledge and any schoolboy in physics will tell you that it can be done with a high degree of accuracy by measuring the extent of decay of radioactive carbon in those relics. He gave me to understand that those relics were the deepest ever found, at 120 feet, and I don't suppose there are more than ten million people who know that a ten million year old skeleton was dug out from the Tuscany hills about three years ago at a depth of 600 feet-in a coal-mine. As for the idea of using high explosive in archaeology instead of prying away gently with pick and shovel-well, don't mention it around the British Museum. You'll have the old boys keeling over like ninepins."

"But-but all those relics and curios they have around-"

"They may be genuine. Professor Witherspoon may have made a genuine strike, then the idea occurred to the Navy that here would be the perfect set-up for secrecy. They could have all access to the island forbidden for perfectly legitimate reasons and that would give them the ideal cover-up, nothing to excite the suspicions of countries who would be very excited indeed if they knew what the Navy was doing. Whatever that is. The strike may be finished long ago and Witherspoon kept under wraps with someone very like him to put up a front for accidental visitors. Or those relics may be fakes. Maybe there never was an archaeological find here. Maybe it's a brilliant idea dreamed up by the Navy. Again they would require Witherspoon's cooperation, but not necessarily himself, which accounts for the bogus prof. Maybe the story was fed to the newspapers and magazines. Maybe some newspaper and magazine proprietors were approached by the government and persuaded to help out in the fraud. It's been done before."

"But there were also American papers, American magazines."

"Maybe it's an Anglo-American project."

"I still don't understand why they should try to cripple you," she said doubtfully. "But maybe one or either of your suggestions goes some way towards an answer."

"Maybe. I really don't know. But I'll have the answer tonight. I'll find it inside that mine."

"Are you-are you really crazy?" she said quietly. "You're not fit to go anywhere."

"It's only a short walk. I'll manage. There's nothing wrong with my legs."

"I'm coming with you."

"You'll do nothing of the kind."

"Please, Johnny."

"No."

She spread out her hands. "I'm of no use to you at all?"

"Don't be silly. We've got to have someone to hold the fort, to see that no one comes snooping into our house to find two dummies. So long as they can hear even one person breathing and see another form beside him, they'll be happy. I'm going back for a couple of hours' sleep. Why don't you go and whoop it up with the old Professor? He can't keep his eyes off you and you may find out a great deal more in that way than I will in mine."

"I'm not quite sure that I understand what you mean."

"The old Mata-Hari act," I said impatiently. "Whisper sweet nothings in his silver beard. You'll have him ga-ga in no time. Who knows what tender secrets he might not whisper in return?"

"You think so?"

"Sure, why not. He's at the dangerous stage as far as women are concerned. Somewhere between eighteen and eighty."

"He might start getting ideas."

"Well, let him. What does it matter? Just so long as you get some information out of him. Duty before pleasure, you know."

"I see," she said softly. She rose to her feet and stretched out her hand. "Come on. Up."

I got to my feet. A couple of seconds later I was sitting on the sand again. It hadn't been so much the unexpectedness of the openhanded blow across the face as the sheer weight of it. I was still sitting there, feeling for the dislocation and marvelling at the weird antics of the female members of the race, when she scrambled over the high bank at the top of the beach and disappeared.

My jaw seemed all right. It hurt, but it was still a jaw. I got to my feet, swung the crutches under my arms and started for the head of the beach. It was pretty dark now and I could have made it three times as fast without the crutches but I wouldn't have put it past the old boy to have night-glasses on me.

The bank at the top was only three feet high, but it was still too high for me. I finally solved it by sitting on the edge and pushing myself up with my crutches, but when I got to my feet, swung round and made to take off, the crutches broke through the soft soil and I fell backwards over on to the sand.

It knocked the breath out of me but it wasn't much of a fall as falls go, not enough to make me swear out loud, just enough to make me swear softly. I was trying to get enough breath to swear some more When I heard the quick light sound of approaching feet and someone slid over the edge of the bank. A glimpse of white, a whiff of Night of Mystery, she'd come back to finish me off. I braced my jaw again, then unbraced it. She was bent low down, peering at me, in no position at all to haul off at me again.

"I–I saw you fall." Her voice was husky. "Are you badly hurt?"

"I'm in agony. Hey, careful of my sore arm."

But she wasn't being careful. She was kissing me. She gave her kisses like she gave her slaps, without any holding back that I could notice. She.wasn't crying, but her cheek was wet with tears. After a minute, maybe two, she murmured: "I'm so ashamed. I'm so sorry."

"So am I," I said. "I'm sorry, too." I'd no idea what either of us was talking about, but it didn't seem to matter very much at the moment. By and by she rose and helped me over the edge of the bank and I tip-tapped my way back to the house, her arm in mine. We passed by the professor's bungalow on the way, but I didn't make any further suggestions about her going in to see him.

It was just after ten o'clock when I slid out under a raised corner of the seawardfacing side-screen. I could still feel her kisses, but I could also feel my sore jaw, so I left in a pretty neutral frame of mind. As far as she was concerned, that is. As far as the others were concerned-the others being the professor and his men-I wasn't feeling neutral at all- I carried the torch in one hand and the knife in the other, and this time I didn't have any cloth wrapped round the knife- If there weren't more lethal things than dogs on the island of Vardu, I sadly missed my bet.

The moon was lost behind heavy cloud, but I took no chances. It was almost a quarter of a mile to where the mine shaft was sunk into the side of the mountain but I covered nearly all of it on hands and knees and it didn't do my sore arm any great deal of good. On the other hand, I got there safely.

I didn't know if the professor would have any good reason to have a guard at the entrance to the mine or not. Again it Seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution, so when I stood up slowly and stiffly in the black shadow of a rock where the moon wouldn't get me when and if it broke through, I just stayed there. I stood there for fifteen minutes and all I could hear was the far-off murmur of the Pacific on the distant reef and the slow thudding of my own heart. Any unsuspecting guard who could keep as still as that for fifteen minutes was asleep. I wasn't scared of men who were asleep. I went on into the mine.

My rubber-soled sandals heel-and-toed it along the limestone rock without the slightest whisper of sound. No one could have heard me coming and, after I was clear of the faint luminescence of the cave-mouth, no one could have seen me coming. My torch was off. If there was anyone inside that mine I'd meet them soon enough without letting them know I was on the way. In the dark all men are equal. With that knife in my hand, I was slightly more than equal.

There was plenty of room between the wall and the railway track in the middle to make it unnecessary for me to walk on the sleepers. I couldn't risk a sudden variation of length between a couple of ties. It was simple enough to guide myself by brushing the back of the fingers of my right hand against the tunnel wall from time to time. I took care that the haft of the knife did not strike solid rock.

Inside a minute, the tunnel wall fell away sharply to the right. I had reached the first hollowed-out cavern. I went straight across it to the tunnel opening directly opposite, guiding myself by touching the side of my left foot against the sleepers. It took me five minutes to cross the 70 yards' width of that cave. Nobody called out, nobody switched on a light, nobody jumped me. I was all alone. Or I was being left alone, which wasn't the same thing at all.

Thirty seconds after leaving the first cavern I'd reached the next one. This was the one where the professor had said the first archaeological discoveries had been made, the cavern with the two shored-up entrances to the left, the railway going straight ahead and, to the right, the tunnel where we'd found Hewell and his crew working. I'd no interest in the tunnel where we'd found Hewell working. The professor had given me to understand that that was the source of the explosions that had wakened me the previous afternoon, but all the amount of loose rock I'd seen lying there could have been brought down by a couple of good-sized fire-crackers. I followed the railway.across the chamber straight into the opposite tunnel.

This led to a third chamber, and then a fourth. Neither of those had any exits to the north, into the side of the mountain, as I found by walking round a complete semi-circle to my right before regaining the railway track again: I completed the circle in both chambers and found two openings to the south in each. But I went straight on. After that there were no more caverns, just the tunnel that went on and on.

And on. I thought I would never come to the end of it. There had been no archaeological excavations made here, it was just a plain and straightforward tunnel quite unconcerned with what lay on either side of it. It was a tunnel that was going someplace. I was having to walk on the ties now, the diameter had narrowed to half of what it had been at first, and I noticed that the gradient was slightly upward all the time. I noticed, too, that the air in the tunnel, and this at least a mile and a half after I'd left the mine entrance, was still fresh, and I guess that that explained the upward slant of the tunnel-it was being kept deliberately near the rising slope of the mountain-side to facilitate the driving of vertical ventilation shafts. I must have been at least halfway across to the western side of the island by then and it wasn't very hard to guess that it wouldn't be long before the tunnel floor levelled out and started to descend.

It wasn't. The stretch of level floor, when I came to it, didn't extend more than a hundred yards, and then it began to dip. Just as the descent began my right hand failed to find the tunnel wall. I risked a quick snap of the torch and saw a thirty-foot deep cavern to my right, half full of rock and debris. For one moment I thought this must be the scene of yesterday's blasting, but a second look put that thought out of my mind. There were a couple of hundred tons of loose rock lying there, far too much for one day's work, and besides, there was no percentage in driving suddenly north, into the heart of the mountain. This was just a storage dump, one probably excavated some time ago to provide a convenient deposit for the rock blasted from the tunnel proper, when the need arose to do that quickly.

Less than three hundred yards further on I found the end of the tunnel. I rubbed my forehead, which had been the part of me that had done the finding, then switched on the tiny pencil-beam of light. There were two small boxes lying o» the floor, both nearly empty, but still holding a few charges of blasting powder, detonators and fuses: this, beyond doubt, was the scene of yesterday's blasting. I played the torch beam over the end of the tunnel and that was all it was, just the end of a tunnel, a seven-foot high by four-foot wide solid face of rock. And then I saw that it wasn't all solid, not quite. Just below eye-level a roughly circular rock about a foot in diameter appeared to have been jammed into a hole in the wall. I eased out this lump of limestone and peered into the hole behind. It was maybe four feet long, tapering inwards to perhaps two inches and at the far end I could see something faintly twinkling, red and green and white. A star. I put the rock back in position and left.

It took me half an hour to get back to the first of the four caverns. I investigated the two openings leading off to the south, but they led only to two further caverns, neither of them with exits. I headed back along the railway till I came to the third of the caverns from the entrance, examined the two openings in this one and achieved nothing apart from getting myself lost in a maze for almost half an hour. And then I came to the second cavern.

Of the two tunnels leading off to the north, I passed up the one where Hewell had been working. I'd find nothing there. I found nothing in the neighbouring one either. And, of course, there would be nothing behind the timber baulks holding up the entrances to the two collapsed tunnels to the south. I made for the exit leading to the outer cavern when the thought occurred to me that the only reason I had for believing that those baulks of timber supported the entrances to a couple of caved-in tunnels was that Professor Wither-spoon himself had told me they did and, apart from the fact that he knew nothing about archaeology, the only certain fact that I had so far established about the professor was that he was a fluent liar.

But he hadn't been lying about the first of these two tunnels. The heavy vertical three-by-six timbers that blocked the entrance were jammed immovably in place and when I pressed my torch against a half-inch gap between two of the timbers and switched it on I could clearly see the solid mass of stone and rubble that completely blocked the passage behind, all the way from the floor to the collapsed roof, Maybe I'd been doing the professor an injustice.

And then again maybe I hadn't. Two of the timber baulks guarding the entrance to the second barricaded tunnel were loose.

No pickpocket ever lifted a wallet with half the delicate care and soundless stealth that I used to lift one of these baulks out of position and lean it against its neighbour. A brief pressure on the torch button showed no signs of a roof collapse anywhere, just a dingy grey smooth-floored tunnel stretching and dwindling away into the darkness. I lifted a second batten out of place and squeezed through the gap into the tunnel beyond.

It was then that I discovered that I couldn't replace the battens from the inside. One, yes, but even then only roughly in place, but it was impossible to manoeuvre the other through the six-inch gap that was left. There was nothing I could do about it. I left it as it was and went down the tunnel.

Thirty yards and the tunnel turned abruptly to the left. I was still guiding myself as I had done earlier on, by brushing the back of my right hand against the wall, and suddenly the wall fell away to the right. I reached in cautiously and touched something cold and metallic. A key, hanging on a hook. I reached beyond it and traced out the outlines of a low narrow wooden door hinged on a heavy vertical post of timber. I took down the key, located the keyhole, softly turned the lock and opened the door a fraction of an inch at a time. My nostrils twitched to the pungent combined smells of oil and sulphuric acid. I eased the door another two inches. The hinges creaked in sepulchral protest, I had the sudden vision of a gibbet and a swaying corpse turning in the night wind and the corpse was myself, then I snapped abruptly to my senses, realised that the time for pussyfooting was over, passed quickly round the door and closed it behind me as I switched on the torch.

There was no one there. One quick traverse of the torch beam round a cave no more than twenty feet in diameter was enough to show me that there was no one there: but there were signs that someone had been there, and very recently.

I moved forward, stubbed my toe heavily against something solid, looked down and saw a large lead-acid accumulator. Wires from this led to a switch on the wall. I pressed the switch and the cave was flooded with light.

Perhaps 'flooded' is the wrong word, it was just by comparison with the weak beam from my torch. A naked lamp, forty watts or thereabouts, suspended from the middle of the roof: but it gave all the illumination I wanted.

Stacked in the middle of the chamber were two piles of oiled yellow boxes. I was almost certain what they were before I crossed to examine them, and as soon as I saw the stencils on top I was certain. The last time I had seen those boxes with the legend 'Champion Spark Plugs' stencilled on them was in the hold of Fleck's schooner. Machine-gun ammunition and ammonal explosive. So perhaps I hadn't been imagining things after all when I thought I had seen lights that night we'd been marooned on the reef. I had seen lights. Captain Fleck unloading cargo.

By the right-hand wall were two wooden racks, holding twenty machine-pistols and automatic carbines of a type I had never seen before: they were heavily coated with grease against the drippingly damp atmosphere of the cave. Stacked beside the racks were three squarish metal boxes, for a certainty ammunition for the guns. I looked at the racked guns and the boxes and for the first time in my life I could understand how a gourmet felt when he sat down to an eight-course dinner prepared by a cordon-bleu chef. And then I opened the first box, the second and the third, and I knew exactly how the same gourmet would have felt if, while still adjusting his napkin, the maitre d'hotel had come along and told him that the shop was shut for the night.

The boxes contained not a single round of carbine or machine-pistol ammunition. One box contained black blasting powder, another beehive blocks of amatol explosive and a drum of.44 short-gun ammunition, the third primers, fulminate of mercury detonators, about a hundred yards R.D.X. fuses and a flat tin case of chemical igniters, most of it stuff, presumably, that Hewell used in his blasting operations. And that was all. My pipe dreams about a loaded machine-pistol and the radical difference it would make to the balance of power on the island were just that, pipe dreams and no more. Ammunition without guns to fire them, guns without ammunition to fit them. Useless, all useless.

I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.

Twenty yards further on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one: it didn't need it for the door wasn't locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of foetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow in my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.

I opened the door further, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave.

But this was no cave. This was a tomb.