Gallows on the Sand

by Morris West

  “What happens if you find anything down there?” asked Pat.

  “For small things there is a weighted fish-basket, which Johnny lets down on a line each time we descend. For big things like”—Nino grinned broadly—“like a treasure-chest, we put a sling under it and haul it on board. . . . Now, if there are no more questions, we should take the gear aboard and get to work.”

  “I’ve got a simple question,” said Pat. “It’s got nothing to do with diving. Where does Nino sleep?”

  It was Johnny Akimoto who answered that one—a little too quickly, I thought, though I could not imagine why.

  “Nino sleeps in the big tent with Renboss. I will sleep aboard the Wahine.”

  And that was that. A simple question, a simple answer, with no dark thoughts behind them. I could not even tell myself why they worried me.

  Forty minutes later the Wahine was anchored outside the reef, with the Dona Lucia sixty feet under her keel.

  Nino Ferrari and I sat on the hatch-cover drinking strong sugared tea, while Johnny spliced a cord handle on a fish-basket and Pat squatted native-fashion beside me, listening to Nino’s final instructions.

  “When we go into the hatch you will have to be careful. Outside the light you will not be able to see very much. But remember there will be beams, covered with coral and shellfish, and small projections of all kinds. Brush against them and you may cut your breathing-tubes.”

  The same thought had occurred to me. It wasn’t a happy prospect. Pat shivered with excitement at the thought of the nameless terrors of the world she had never seen. She turned to Nino.

  “What about the other things, Nino? The sharks and . . . and. . . .”

  Nino laughed. “And the monsters that they show you on the films? There are monsters in the deeps, yes, but they do not normally live in the holds of ships. There are fish that are dangerous to the diver, just as there are animals that are dangerous to him on land. But for the most part the fish is as wary of the diver as he is of them. For the rest”—he crossed himself simply—“the hand of God reaches down even into the great waters.”

  “They that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.”

  The quotation came simply and surprisingly from the girl at my side.

  “They cry to the Lord in their trouble and He brings them out of their distress.” Nino added the tag in liquid Italian, then smiled and stood up. “Time to go down, my friend. Harness up.”

  We buckled on our gear and went overside, steadying ourselves on a cleated rope. This time I had a large fiat rubber-sealed torch with a big reflector clipped on my belt. We swam round to the anchor-cable and followed it down into the blue twilight. Nino was behind me as we went down and I looked back to see him give me a small signal of approval. Then we were on the bottom, two men-fish standing in a waving meadow whose grasses were stirred by a soundless wind. The wreck of the Dona Lucia was thirty feet away, straight ahead of us.

  I swam over to Nino and floated beside him. I touched his shoulder and pointed eagerly. He grinned behind his mask and gave me thumbs-up. Then we saw Johnny’s weighted basket sliding down to us through the twilight, and we moved off.

  I led Nino up the sloping weed-covered deck and showed him the dark gaping hole with its fringe of weeds. He shone the torch into the blackness, and in the pool of light I saw a waving of red sea-grasses, the naked arms of small branch-coral and a cavalcade of small bright fish, which swam leisurely out of the light into the surrounding darkness.

  Nino snapped off the torch and motioned me upwards. At the top of the incline, under the first canted platform, there was a bulkhead, broken by a door which was now no more than a narrow dark hole fringed with weeds. Nino flashed the torch again, snapped it off after a brief scrutiny and went on again. Whether the opening led to cabin or companionway we could not tell —yet.

  The bulkhead on the first platform was similarly broken. But the opening led this time obviously to a cabin. Possibly the captain’s. This would be our first area of search after we had completed the survey of the poop. The next deck area was narrow and surrounded by carved bulwarks and surmounted by some sort of finial carving. I should have liked to scrape away the weeds and barnacles and coral to examine it more closely, but our time and our air-supply and our strength were all limited. We could not spend them on antiquarian trifles.

  Then Nino took control. Motioning me to follow him he turned and swam downward to the cabin deck and waited for me outside the narrow black entrance.

  It was an eerie moment. I had subdued, by practice, my first fears of the twilight world under the water . . . subdued but not destroyed them. Now they came trooping back full-size with new fears added—fear of the darkness, fear of the unknown monsters that might lurk where the light did not shine. My flesh broke out in goose-pimples again. Then Nino smiled behind his mask and laid his hand on my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. He snapped on the torch.

  There were no monsters. There were only fish. Fish and weeds and water and beyond them a new darkness which my own torch would help to dissipate. I switched it on and followed Nino through the festooned weeds into the cabin.

  Out of the comer of my eye I saw a pair of big round eyes staring at me, and a round thick-lipped mouth that slobbered continually. I whirled and flashed the light.

  It was a big blue groper. He flicked his tail and swung off into the shadows. Nino turned and signalled me to come beside him. We stood together on the sandy uneven floor and played our torches on the wall of sea-growth ahead of us.

  To me, the novice, it was a disappointing sight. There were projections that might have been beams. There was a recess that might have been a bunk alcove. There was a shapeless mass, waist-high, that might have been a cabin table. Beyond that—nothing . . . nothing but the shifting outlines of weeds and sea-grasses and the flutter of small fish in and out of their roots.

  We turned the light upwards. Hanging weeds brushed our faces. I put up my hand and felt the faint outline of a beam under the slimy growth. I shone the light ahead of it and saw a large encrustation that looked vaguely like a hanging lamp. I struck at it with my knife. It snapped off and dropped slowly and weightlessly to the sandy floor.

  Nino made an impatient gesture that said, “Leave it,” and knelt down on the weed-covered sand.

  I did the same. I saw him scraping with his knife among the weeds and sand and coral stumps. He was testing the depths of incrustation over the planks. Eighteen inches down we struck wood, pulpy and waterlogged.

  Nino stood up and made a gesture of negation. No treasure-chests can be hidden under eighteen inches of sand. Nino then moved over to the far comer of the cabin where the slope of the floor had caused the sand to pile up into larger and deeper drifts.

  A canny professional, Nino. He knew his business. He went down on his knees again and began scraping the sand away with, knife and hands, probing carefully ahead with his fingers. I chose a spot three feet away from him and began to work in the same fashion.

  I had not been digging for more than three minutes when my hand struck something that was unmistakably wood. I shifted the lamp, but I could see nothing.

  Sudden fever took possession of me and I started digging frantically, like a dog for a buried bone. In an instant Nino was beside me, wagging his finger in a reproving gesture, showing me in dumb-show that this was a dangerous way to work. Then he knelt down and began digging with me. The sand rose in swirls and eddies above us, blinding us. No sooner had we clawed out a handful than two more flowed into fill the space we had left. But, after an interminable labour, we managed to clear enough to identify my find.

  It was the brass-bound comer of an old sea-chest.

  At that precise moment we heard a crack that sounded like the snapping of a tree-branch. It was the warning shot. Time to return to the surface.

  I looked at Nino. I pointed to the box. I made gestures, pleading with him to stay down a little longer. He shook his
head. His eyes were grim behind the mask.

  “Topside!” he signalled.

  Slowly, terribly slowly, we staged upward to the Wahine, while the sand settled once more round the sea-chest in the Dona Lucia.

  Chapter 13

  NINO and I stretched on mattresses under the canvas awning amidships. Pat served us cool beer and cigarettes, while Johnny, singing in the galley, prepared the pashas’ meal—fillets of red emperor, caught while we were at the bottom of the sea, fritters of sliced bully-beef and saratoga chips, canned peaches and preserved cream, fresh from the ice-box. We must eat well, rest well. So Nino had ordered, so it was done.

  And, as we lay there in the warm shade, rocked by the gentle swing of the sea. Nino read me lesson number two.

  “You are a damn fool, Renn. After all I tell you about the way to work under water, you scrabble and scratch like a child looking for a lost toy. You work slowly, man . . . slowly. You save your air and your strength and you keep the nitrogen poison down as low as possible. Think you are making love to your girl here.” He cocked a wicked eye at Pat, who blushed and retreated to the galley. “. . . Gently, gently. You reach the same end in the same time. And the going is much more pleasant.”

  “All right, Nino. Round one to you. But why the blazes couldn’t we have stayed down a little longer. We’d have had that box clear in ten minutes.”

  Nino heaved himself up on his elbow and jabbed an accusing finger at me. His eyes flashed. His anger was theatrical.

  “So! The young cock wants to crow his own song, eh? Let me tell you something, smart one. You know how long it will take us to uncover that box? Fifteen—twenty minutes. You know what would have happened if we had stayed down? We would have needed another twenty minutes to stage up, another hour to rest. And still no box. Why? Because there was no sling ready to lift it up. When we go down this time, the sling follows us; and if we are lucky—if we are lucky, I repeat—we may get the box up in time.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then we leave it,” retorted Nino. “Do you think the fish will eat it? Do you think a mermaid will tuck it under her flipper and walk off with it?”

  He clapped his free hand to his forehead with a gesture of contempt and despair and rolled back on to his pillow. There was a roar of laughter from Pat and Johnny who had watched Nino’s triumphant little drama from the safety of the cockpit.

  Then dinner was served and, while we were eating, Pat put the question direct to Nino Ferrari.

  “This box you’ve found. Is there any chance of its being a treasure-box?”

  Nino shrugged eloquently.

  “Who knows, signorina? Maybe yes—maybe no. In my experience of these things, it is generally no. It is as well not to build up too many hopes. From the look of that cabin down there I should say we will not find too much. If we went scavenging through the rubbish we might find small things—a drinking-cup, a knife, a pewter plate. But they would be hard to distinguish under the growth and not worth the trouble.” He grinned engagingly. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, signorina, but this business of treasure-hunting is one long disillusion. I knew a man who made a fortune when he salvaged a load of plastic sheets. I knew another who found a treasure-ship—a real one, too—and lost his whole fortune because he couldn’t pump the mud away as fast as the sea could spread it.”

  Johnny Akimoto nodded his approval. This small, dark fellow from Genoa was a man after his own heart. The sea had spawned them both and they were both wise in her ancient ways. Then Johnny’s face clouded with sudden recollection. He hesitated a moment, then he spoke.

  “Renboss, Miss Pat thought I should not tell you this while you are working. I think now that I should tell you.”

  “Let’s have it, Johnny.”

  “While you were working down there, the aeroplane came again.”

  “The same plane?”

  “The same plane. The same movement. Round the island twice, three times. Then home again.”

  “Hell and damnation!”

  I leapt up from my mattress. Nino Ferrari pulled me down again.

  “If you want to go down this afternoon you stay where you are. What has happened that is new? You know this Manny fellow will spy on your work. No sense to spoil the work because you are angry with the spy.”

  Reluctantly I lay down again. I was boiling with anger. Johnny’s next words echoed my own thought.

  “I think this time it is more serious than the last.”

  “Why, Johnny?”

  It was Pat’s voice this time, questioning, earnestly.

  “Because, Miss Pat, this time he sees the Wahine instead of the work-boat. He knows that we have begun to work the wreck. He knows that whatever he plans to do must be done quickly.”

  I turned to Nino. “Johnny’s right, you know. Manny can’t delay too much longer. We’ve got to move faster.”

  Nino waved an eloquent hand. “Can we work any faster than we are working now? Can we do any more than we have planned to do? No. So why spoil your own digestion and mine? Today we work the cabin. Tomorrow we work the hold. We keep on working until this Manny fellow turns up——”

  “Sure, sure! And what do we do when he does turn up?”

  “I think maybe if we use our brains instead of our bottoms we give him the surprise of his life.”

  Nino chuckled and closed his eyes and not another word could I get out of him until it was time to go down again.

  We checked the pressure in our air-bottles and tested the regulators, and while Pat helped us to harness up, Johnny tied the ballast-net on the end of the long slingcable. This would go down with us. We would carry the cable-end over to the wreck and dump the ballast-bag inside the door of the cabin. Then, when we had uncovered the box, Johnny would haul it to the surface while we were staging up. Before I put on my mask Pat kissed me on the lips and said, “Good luck, Renn. And try not to be too disappointed.”

  “I won’t. There’s a treasure topside, even if there’s none below.”

  Then I followed Nino Farrari over the side and felt the shock of the water on my skin, warm after its two-hour broiling on the deck. The ballast-bag followed us down and we carried it between us as we swam over the now familiar deck and up to the door of the cabin.

  The dark held no terrors for me now. The staring fish-eyes, the secret scurrying movements in the shadows, were all forgotten as I knelt with Nino on the rough floor and began steadily, rhythmically, to scrape away the sand from the sea-chest. Nino watched me shrewdly and nodded his satisfaction when he saw that I had learnt my lesson.

  Try to bury a kerosene-can in your kitchen garden. You’ll be surprised at the size of the hole you have to dig. Try to get rid of the same can six months later and you’ll find you have double the work on your hands. Tackle it on a wet week-end and you’ll be up to your knees in slush within ten minutes. Imagine two men attempting the same task in sixty feet of water, shifting with their bare hands two hundred years’ accumulation of fluid sand and trailing seaweed and coral growths. You will understand that Nino had not exaggerated the size of the job.

  I was working on the underside of the box, Nino on the upper. No sooner had I scraped away one handful of sand than more flowed down into the hole to take its place. The water around us was full of drifting particles which blurred our masks and vexed our patience. We had been working for, perhaps, fifteen minutes when Nino tapped my shoulder and beckoned me to look at his side of the box.

  I saw it—and my heart sank. The top of the box had been stove in, probably on the night of the wreck, and the inside of it was full of sand.

  The brass strips which had bound it were corroded and broken, the metal studs still left in the spongy wood were coated with coral cells and tiny molluscs. They scraped our hands as we plunged them into the box, screening the liquor sand for any trace of gold or jewels or ornaments.

  My hand closed round something hard, but when I brought it up it proved to be a corroded buckle—brass probably or pinc
hbeck. Nino brought up a broken, rusted knife. This too was of common metal. When he found another buckle, larger than the first, he made a rueful mouth behind his mask and signalled me to stop. His miming told me only what I knew already.

  The box was a very ordinary sea-chest. It had held nothing more valuable than its owner’s shore-suit and his buckled shoes and his sea-knife. The voracious sea-organisms had eaten everything but the knife and the buckles of his hat and shoes.

  For a moment we stood looking down at our pitiful find. Then Nino motioned me to help him and we lugged and heaved the rest of the box clear of the sand, and tipped its contents out among the seaweeds on the floor. We found nothing more than a pitted metal handle with a piece of porcelain still fixed to one end.

  Then we heard the smack of the bullet on the water. We tossed the box on the pile of sand in the comer and watched it settle weightlessly among the weeds.

  Clutching our few childish relics in our hands we made our hesitant way to the surface.

  “Tired, Renn?”

  Pat and I were sitting on the forward hatch-cover while Johnny steered us home through the channel and into the lagoon, and Nino, calm as a cat, was asleep on one of the bunks. Pat’s hand was in mine. Her dark head was resting against my shoulder.

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m tired. Nino was right. It’s wearing work.”

  “Are you disappointed, Renn?”

  “Yes. It’s crazy and childish and I don’t want any sympathy. I’m new to the business. I’ll have to learn to be patient. That’s all.”

  “Nino says you’ll start working the hold tomorrow.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Will it be difficult?”

  “No more difficult than the cabin. Except that there’s a lot more of it and the sand is ten times deeper.”

  “It doesn’t sound very promising, does it?”

  “No. It’s a matter of luck, that’s all.”

  She hesitated a moment, then went on, “Renn, I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?’’