The Burning Bridge by Philip Verrill Mighels (the best novels to read TXT) 📕

"Oh!" said Elaine. "But why does it have to be entered?"

"Well," said Sidney, at a loss for a better argument, "it might be full of treasure;" and he smiled.

Elaine was no less ready with her answer. "Treasure is certainly indispensable to us here. No wonder we've felt that something was strangely lacking."

"There you are," he rejoined. "I think I can paddle the raft about the cliff, for the tide could never be better."

She was certain that Grenville attached some unusual importance to an inspection of the cave.

"Couldn't I help?" she asked him. "What was the fault of the ladder?"

"Fully six feet too short. Perhaps you'd better watch for passing steamers. If we missed one—whom should we blame?"

They had slowly returned to the shelter, where the table was attractively spread.

"What a luncheon!" said Grenville, enthusiastically. "I'll eat in a rush and be back before you know I've gone." He certainly ate with lively promise.

But, after the raft was launched on the tide, he lost all sense of time. He had left his shoes and stockings on the shore. He had brought a torch, lighted, which he lashed in an upright position on the raft. Wading and paddling, punting, pulling, and at times even pushing his craft along the beach, he warmed to his work in the briefest space, since the tide could hardly have been more favorable to his needs.

The pole he had brought had a hook at the end, bound firmly in place with copper wire. This was an excellent provision, especially when he came to the cliff, where wading was out of the question. He was thus enabled to catch at a ledge, or any open crevice, and draw his unwieldy float along, while fending it off from various rocks on which it might otherwise have pounded.

His work was hard and slow. The distance was not discouraging, however, and with some of the swirls to assist, here and there, he finally came to a broken sort of cape, from which he readily saw his dangling ladder. After that a hot bit of fighting was required to maintain his position near the wall. The tide was uneasy—a hungry, ugly swirl that alternately came and subsided.

When he passed it at last his task was done, for the cave was a stone's toss away. It was not even then to be seen, and its presence in the cliff would scarcely have been suspected. But Grenville knew the luxuriant plant that grew across a portion of its entrance. When he presently moored his raft to a rock fairly under the shadow of the weed, the cave was just above him.

Under his feet the ledge was rough and sloping. It was pitted so completely as to form a rude natural stairway to the opening under the overhanging shelf. This mouth to the cavern was hardly six feet wide and not more than four in height. Its access was comparatively easy.

Grenville, with his torch in hand, was presently gazing within. Obliged to stoop, and beholding nothing but absolute darkness ahead of his light, he stumbled against a lumpy vein of rock—and nearly met with disaster. He barely halted at the edge of a pool of ebon water.

After all his effort to gain the cave, it appeared to be filled with this inklike accumulation. The pool was absolutely still. Not a ripple disturbed its shining surface. How deep it was and how far it extended from the ledge that held it from flowing into the sea, could not be gauged by Grenville's torch, as he held it aloft to stare at the wall of velvet gloom.

He sounded a note that rolled about and reverberated weirdly. But he could not determine from the echoes how far the waves had traveled.

Casting his dull-red illumination to the left, and lower down, he proceeded a little along the ledge, till it merged in an upright wall. There was nothing at all to be seen in this direction save water and rock, that faded away into Stygian darkness beyond.

He retraced his steps and explored the ledge on the right. This led him considerably further than the first had done before it was similarly ended. He was then aware the cavern was of no inconsiderable dimensions, at least with regard to its width. He raised his eyes towards the ceiling, where nothing was to be seen.

At length he bethought him of another test—that of throwing lumps of rock against the walls. There were fragments in plenty scattered loosely at his feet. The first one he threw went straight out ahead—and presently thumped on something solid. He reckoned the distance some sixty feet away, but admitted it might have been eighty.

Every missile he cast right, left, or at an angle promptly reported a wall; and some plumped back into water. The cave was not gigantic, but all its floor was apparently flooded. His hand, which he thrust in the water where he stood, groped blindly and found no bottom. He rolled up his sleeve and tried again, without more definite results. The water, however, was warm.

"Good place for a swim, in any case," he told himself, aloud; and, planting his torch with a sudden determination that he would not retreat with information so utterly meager, he stripped off his clothing at once. He let himself into the ebon depths, with his torch held well above the water. He had rather expected to be able to wade, but he sank to his neck without sounding to the bottom.

Swimming almost perpendicularly, employing one hand only, he presently lost all sight of the walls and was out in an unknown pool of blackness. Save for a slight sensation of its weirdness, the experience was decidedly pleasant. He tasted the water as he swam and found that it was fresh. He turned to look out at the opening, but could barely see light through the weeds.

Some twenty or thirty feet from the ledge, his feet encountered a ridge. It was stone, and across it he waded to a greater depth beyond. Yet once again he was soon enabled to stand erect and walk along the bottom. The broken, uneven surface that he felt with his feet made his progress slow and careful.

He had presently crossed the underground pond, up the sloping bank of which he was soon making rapid progress. He emerged on a dry ledge beyond. Even then the walls were not to be seen till he walked a rod straight onward.

The briefest examination sufficed to establish the fact he had come to a sort of natural antechamber to the larger cavern he had crossed. Also, apparently, the entire place was as empty as a last year's bird's-nest.

Vaguely disappointed, though he hardly knew why, the man surveyed the place anew, by the light that entered at the opening as well as by that of his torch. He saw at once that, could it be drained, the place would afford a retreat of amazing security for anyone needful of shelter. He was also certain he could drain it in a day by blasting through the ledge of rock that blocked the entrance from the sea and so retained the pool.

With one more brief and cursory examination of the rocky structure about him, he was turning away when something foreign about a slab of stone, that seemed a fragment of the solid wall, attracted his attention.

He laid his hand upon its top as if to pull it down. It came away so readily it all but fell on his feet. Behind it the crudest sort of masonry walled up a natural door.

Ten minutes later, standing on the heap of blocks he had tumbled rapidly down in forming a gap through four feet at least of this bulkhead, Grenville thrust his torch within a nichelike chamber of the cavern.

A low exclamation of astonishment burst from his lips at the vision thus suddenly encountered.

The place was a tomb for dead kings' gold and precious stones that threw back the gleams from his torch!

For fully a minute Grenville was motionless, there in the gap, surveying the treasure crypt.

The more his eyes became accustomed to the yellowish light and inky shadows, the more extensive became his estimate of the wealth the cave contained.

The symbols and trinkets of solid metal and glistening stones were arranged not only on rudely-hewn shelves about the cavern's walls, but likewise in several stone receptacles, like sarcophagi in miniature, cut from the tufa of the island. It was partially because of this feature of the hidden niche that Grenville concluded the property here had once belonged to either Indian or African native chiefs and that this was a mortuary house of guarded treasure.

There was, however, further confirmation of his theory. This was a crude inscription on the wall above the shelves and caskets. It was simply that same cartouch he had found on the map or parchment—once part of a living being—with the figure of a mummy in the oval. On either side of this the beetle or scarab was repeated.

The utter inutility of gold and gleaming jewels was momentarily forgotten as Grenville stared in from the wall. The island, its perils—everything save an underlying current of thought that wove about Elaine—had ceased for the moment to impress his newly dazzled senses. He withdrew his arm to plant his torch in the stones already removed. Then lustily heaving out stone after stone, like some naked god of the underworld, half revealed in the smoky glare, he began to demolish the barrier so carefully erected in the cave.

He had torn down nearly half the bulk of this uncemented wall, filling the larger cavern weirdly full of the crashing and thudding noises, when one of the fragments, tossed unthinkingly behind him, bounded from another rock and struck down his torch and its light.

Utter darkness instantly descended. He tried to grope his way quickly forward, thinking the torch might be recovered and blown to a flame again. But he stumbled, fell down upon his knees, and was bruised on the stones about his feet. When he finally found the torch with his hand, a rock lay squarely upon it; the last of its fire was gone.

Thoroughly disgusted with his carelessness, he stood undecidedly above the unseen ruin he had wrought. To attempt further work of removing the wall by the faint diffusion of light that entered from the outside world, was out of the question. To enter the crypt before the aperture could be considerably enlarged was equally impossible. Moreover, the treasure was safe, as he presently admitted.

As a matter of fact, he began to realize at last how futile had been his labor. He remembered, abruptly, where he was, the details of his helpless situation. Except as something to show Elaine, or to load her with as presents, the stuff in the cave was as worthless as so much dross.

There was nothing to do but retreat as he had come. This he presently did, reluctantly turning from the half-uncovered cavern and wading into the pool.

Without his torch, and swimming towards the light, he was now enabled, to some extent, to discern the limits of the cave. He could see a portion of the ceiling and a bit of the wall on his left. Both were featureless, to all appearances. The water's surface presented a more extensive aspect with the light thus spread before him, but its farther limits could not be descried, where its inkiness blended with the gloom.

When he came at length to the ledge that formed a natural dam across the entrance, thereby impounding the water, he looked it over with greater care than when he had first trod upon it, to determine where would be the likeliest spot for a blast to break it down.

There could be no debate upon this subject. Over against the upright wall, on the left-hand side looking out, the ledge not only narrowed down, where a pot-hole pitted