Peter Duck

by Arthur Ransome

  “Look out,” said Susan. “Don’t stir it up again. Get up as gently as you can.”

  But, no matter how careful they were, they could not move without filling the air once more with the fine dust that had settled over them all like a thick, ruddy brown blanket.

  “The beastly stuff’s everywhere,” said John, through his teeth, keeping his mouth as nearly closed as he could. “By gum, Susan, if you hadn’t thought of the sleeping-bags we might all have been choked. Look at the roof of the tent! Look at the beach!”

  The beach had changed colour. The bright sand they knew was now dark. As for the old staysail from the Wild Cat, that made the roof of their tent, it was no longer weather-beaten grey but ruddy brown. It might have been made out of thick felt.

  “What on earth’s happened?” said Nancy.

  “It must be one of those volcanoes somewhere,” said John.

  “Like Mont Pelée,” said Titty. “Hundreds of miles away, probably. Perhaps a whole mountain has been blown into the air.”

  “Into dust,” said Roger, “and this is it coming down again.”

  “It must be something like that,” said Nancy.

  “Just look at Swallow,” said John.

  The thwarts of the little boat were copper-coloured with the dust that had settled on them in that still air. Her bottom boards were covered with it. Dust seemed to have raised her gunwales.

  “Do help with Gibber’s bag,” said Roger. “He’s in an awful hurry to come out.”

  “You’ve tied a granny knot,” said Nancy.

  “Oh, bother!” said Roger. “Anybody might.”

  Nancy unfastened the knot. Gibber came whimpering out. He sniffed at once at the carpet of red dust that was stirring round their feet, and got a lot of it in his nose. Sneezing and chattering he jumped up on Roger, and clung to his neck.

  “What do you think we ought to do about sleeping?” said Susan doubtfully. “It won’t be safe to let them lie and breathe this stuff, and they’ll never go to sleep if we make them keep their heads in the bags.”

  But that question was almost instantly answered for her.

  “There’s wind coming,” said John. “From the sea this time. Look!”

  “Listen to it,” said Titty.

  With a loud hissing noise, that they heard above the roar of the surf, a line of white foam was rushing at the island from the Atlantic. The wind was upon them in a moment. They turned and leant against the wind as if it was a wall. For one half-second the air was again thick with the red dust, and then it was gone. The beach was once more bright sand. The wind had lifted the dust blanket from everything and blown it up into the forest.

  “Look out, the tent’s going,” cried Susan, as the squall rushed at them with new force. Roger, trying to balance himself against the wind, was blown forward on his face. Gibber lost hold of Roger’s neck and was blown helplessly up the beach.

  “Lie down,” shouted Nancy, dropping on her hands and knees.

  There were three or four loud cracks and the noise of ripping canvas. The old patched sail that had made their tent tore itself free from its fastenings, flung savagely round, swung the ridge-pole sideways, tossed away the supporting oars, and then rode up into the air, whirling like a scrap of thin paper, and was carried high up, over the tops of the trees, and out of sight. It was gone. They never saw it again.

  “Save the sleeping-bags!” cried John, throwing himself down on them and hanging on to all he could reach.

  Nancy, Susan, and Titty tried to save what they could of the camp from being blown away. Peggy had flung herself full length on the sand and was hiding her head in her arms so as not to see what was happening. Thunderstorms at home were bad enough. And this, though not a thunderstorm, was more than she could bear.

  “There’s one gone,” said Susan, “and THERE’S ANOTHER.”

  No one heard the first part of that sentence, but everybody heard the last, and Susan was herself surprised to find that she was shouting at the top of her voice. The squall had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. They could hear it in the distance, driving away over the tops of the trees, but here, on the beach, there was silence again, except for the surf, and after the savage shrieking of that wind, the noise of the surf seemed nothing at all, and it was as if Susan, for no reason at all, was shouting in an empty room.

  “Is that the end?” asked Peggy breathlessly.

  “It’s only the beginning,” said Nancy. “Have you got your bag?”

  “I don’t know where it is,” said Peggy wretchedly.

  “Come on and look for it,” said Nancy. “We’ll find it if it hasn’t blown up to the top of Mount Gibber with the tent.”

  The camp was a ruin, but, even so, Susan was grateful to the wind. Anything was better than to have to deal with that red dust. Four of the sleeping-bags were safe, five, counting Gibber’s, which Roger had hold of when he fell down. Two, Peggy’s and Titty’s, had been blown away. But, though dusk was now falling fast, it was still light enough to see and both were found about a hundred yards away, close to the edge of the forest. John and Nancy brought them back. John found his hat, half full of sand, in the diggings.

  They came back to what had once been a neat, trim camp, to find Susan shaking the old riding-lantern, which she had found on its side, some way up the beach.

  “Stick some more oil in, quick,” she said. “It’ll be dark in no time now. The little tin of oil’s in Swallow. It’ll be safe enough. But there’s hardly a drop in the lantern. Come on, you others. Each bring your own bag.”

  “I’ve found the box with the chocolate in it,” said Roger.

  “Trust you,” laughed Nancy. “What are you going to do, Susan?”

  “We’ll get into the wreck till morning. All the crabs have been frightened away. It may be a bit smelly, but we can’t have Roger and Titty lying out in the open if there’s going to be a real storm.”

  “It’s going to be real enough,” said John. “There’s something altogether wrong. Something really big must be happening somewhere.”

  “Hurry up, you two,” said Susan.

  They made a hasty move from the wrecked camp in Duckhaven to the old wreckage that lay half-buried in the sand on the northern side of the rocks. It was already growing dark on the beach, and not even Susan herself would go through the hole between the ribs of the old wrecked boat until John brought the lantern. Susan had seen that there were no crabs in the wreck earlier in the evening, but that was before the coming of the cloud and the dust, and before the coming of that great squall off the sea that had blown the dust away and the tent with it. Besides, the crabs might easily have come back with the dark. But it did not take John more than a minute or two to pour some more oil into the old lantern, light it in that breathless air in which the match-flame burned without a flicker, and scramble over the rocks with it after the others. He put the lantern through the opening into the bows of the old boat and held it up inside. It lit up nothing but the grey ribs and dry, splitting planking of what had once upon a time lifted proudly over the seas. There were no crabs.

  “It’s all right,” said John, and climbed in. “Not a crab. There isn’t much room,” he added, bumping his head as he tried to stand up.

  “Stow yourselves down somehow or other,” said Nancy, taking command once more. “In you go. Better wriggle into your bags right away. There’s no point in poking our elbows into each other’s eyes, and we shall, if we all get in and try to settle down afterwards. Look out, Titty. That starboard elbow of yours is as sharp as a needle.”

  “Then there must be some point in it,” said Roger, but nobody laughed or tried to squash him. This was no time to bother about words.

  The lighting of the lantern seemed to bring the dark down on them like a curtain. John crawled out of the wreck again, to leave more room for the others while they were settling in, and found he could already hardly tell where the forest ended and the sky began. But presently he heard a new noise of wind, not, this ti
me, coming over the sea, but from the other side of the island.

  “There’s another squall coming,” he said as he crawled in, blinking in the light of the lantern at the five mummies who had stowed themselves along the ribs of the old boat. The boat was deep in the sand, and her bows, all that was to be seen of her, were cocked up at an angle, making a queer sort of shelter in which no one could lie down, though everybody could rest, on a slant, leaning against the planking with feet firm in the sand. The smaller of the diggers had, of course, been given the places farthest in, because the narrowing bows left less room there. The lantern, on the sand inside the wreck, lit up the monkey squatting beside it, Nancy’s jolly grin, and the anxious faces of Susan, Peggy, Titty and Roger. None of the faces seemed to have a body of its own, for all grew out of the sleeping-bags, and there was so little room in the wreck that it almost seemed as if instead of five sleeping-bags there was only one big one with five holes in it and a head out of each hole.

  “Come on in, then,” said Susan. “And you two had much better make up your minds to get to sleep.”

  But there was little sleep for anybody during that wild night. John had hardly had time to turn himself into a mummy like the others before the new wind swept down on them across the island.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Roger. “Breaking.”

  “It must be trees,” said Nancy, “but it sounds like someone tearing calico to pieces in a rage.”

  The wind came in furious gusts, rushing down from Mount Gibber across the forest, stopping altogether for a moment of almost frightening quiet, and then coming again from the opposite direction, from the sea, with a shrill hissing and the noise of the blown spray slapping on rocks and wreck. They never knew where the wind could come from next, and every squall seemed stronger than the one before it.

  “It’s blowing a lot harder than it did that day when we were hove to off Ushant,” said John, in a lull between two gusts.

  “They must be having an awful time in the Wild Cat,” said Susan.

  “It’s a good thing Captain Flint went off in such a hurry,” said Titty.

  There was a low chuckle from Nancy.

  “What is it?” asked John.

  “I was remembering Bill and the bacon fat,” chuckled Nancy.

  “Don’t,” said Titty. “Not even on land.”

  And then the wind came again, whistling through the planking of the old boat, and bringing with it the tremendous crashing noise of falling trees.

  It stopped, and there was a lull lasting for so long that the six treasure-hunters, stowed away in the wreck, began to believe that the worst must be over.

  “Well,” said Nancy to Peggy, “it wasn’t really much worse than it was on the island at home. And, anyhow, there was no rain.”

  “Or thunder,” said Peggy, as cheerfully as she could.

  But, as she spoke, they heard a new noise, not so much like thunder itself as like the slow, echoing rumbles when thunder is dying away. Only, instead of fading into silence, like the echoes of a clap of thunder tossed from cloud to cloud, this rumbling began low, and grew swiftly louder and louder until it became a deafening roar that went on and on, minute after minute, a tremendous chorus of noises in which the breaking of great trees seemed no more than the cracking of matchsticks in the overwhelming clangour of rock crashing against rock.

  Suddenly, with nobody touching it, the hurricane lantern fell over on its side. The monkey screamed. A violent tremor shook the old wreck like a bundle of sticks. Titty and Roger, up in the bows, bumped against each other. Nancy nearly fell sideways. John, stooping hurriedly down to pick up the lantern, hit his head against one of the timbers on the opposite side of the boat. That dreadful noise of splitting rocks and great stones rattling together came now from Duckhaven itself, not thirty yards away. In the light of the lantern that he had picked up before it went out, John saw startled faces and Roger’s hand reaching out.

  “Susan,” shrilled Roger. “Susan, is everything really all right?”

  Susan grabbed the reaching, frightened hand, but in that terrific din John could not hear her speak. He saw that Peggy had buried her face in Nancy’s sleeping-bag. Captain Nancy herself seemed to have larger eyes than usual, though she was comforting Peggy and the monkey both at once. The monkey had refused to go into his bag, after being tied up in it during the falling of the dust. Nancy looked at John. She was speaking. He could not hear her.

  “Is it an earthquake?” her lips seemed to say.

  “A big one,” yelled John at the very top of his voice.

  They felt one more violent shaking of the beach beneath them, and, after that, the noise began to lessen and change its character. It was as if from different parts of the island there came smaller echoes of that first tremendous roar. And then, once more, the winds flung themselves at the island and the noise of stone on stone was drowned altogether as a million trees creaked, broke, tore their roots from the earth and crashed headlong. A curious chemical smell came with the wind, and for a moment John feared that they were once more to be choked with that red dust. But the smell was blown away and, for the first time, almost gratefully, they heard heavy raindrops splash, like cupfuls of water thrown from a height, on the old cracked deck-planking of the wrecked boat.

  A few moments later, the water was pouring in on them through the seams of deck and sides, and they were desperately trying to keep it out of their sleeping-bags. This was so much less frightening than the earthquake, the feeling of the shaking ground, and the noise of rocks crashing against rocks, that they found themselves laughing at each other, not for any real reason, as they pulled up their bags, and burrowed their heads down, and turned the mouths of the bags into hoods to keep the water from running down their necks.

  The rain stopped at last. There was a strange quiet. That great downfall of water had flattened out the sea and all but silenced the surf. John put his head out through the door of their refuge.

  “It’s too dark to see anything,” he said. “But there’s very little wind.”

  “Is it all over?” asked Roger.

  “I don’t know,” said John.

  “It’s the first real earthquake we’ve ever had,” said Titty. “Not like that one that just rattled the washing-basins at home.”

  “Have some chocolate, Roger,” said Susan.

  Everybody had some chocolate and then, unexpectedly, tired right out, they fell asleep just as they were, neither lying nor sitting, hunched down in their wet sleeping-bags, in the old wreck, leaning against each other, or against the dripping planking. The monkey had found a new place for himself and slept curled up between Roger and Susan.

  *

  It was already long after dawn when John, waking, startled to find a lantern burning on the sand at his feet, surprised for a moment to see where he was, wriggled out of his bag and crawled out on the beach. He straightened himself stiffly and looked about him, and then banged on the outside of the wreck to wake the others.

  “Susan!” he called. “Nancy! Something’s happened. Mount Gibber’s disappeared.”

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  THE FINDING OF THE TREASURE

  THE OTHERS, STIFF, cramped and sleepy, tumbled one by one out of the old wreck and stared up the beach to the forest where, only the night before, at dusk, they had seen the black summit of Mount Gibber rising up above the trees.

  Mount Gibber had not disappeared, though John had thought so, on first seeing the strange, broken shape that was left where only yesterday had been that lofty peak. Those black, precipitous rocks were gone. The whole top of the hill had slid sideways and crumbled down into the forest. And of the forest itself only a wreck was left. It was as if a thousand giants had been at play, pulling up trees like grass. Far inland, there were still palms here and there, waving above the wreckage, but in wide stretches of the forest, between Mount Gibber and the eastern shore, not a tree was left standing. They had fallen, some one way and some another, as if they had been twisted
up, torn out of the ground, and flung aside.

  “It really was an earthquake,” said Titty.

  “Jibbooms and bobstays!” said Nancy. “I should just think it was.”

  But strange things had happened even nearer than the forest. Susan, as soon as she came out of the wreck, blinking in the light, and only half awake after sleeping for so short a time, and so uncomfortably, had made straight for the old camp. Mount Gibber might have disappeared or changed its shape, but Roger and Titty were still there, and breakfast had to be made and pitched into them at once. But she had hardly taken two steps towards Duckhaven before she saw that there, too, things looked somehow different. The rocks had shifted. There were deep clefts between them. They no longer seemed to be growing out of the sand.

  “John, John,” she cried. “Everything’s been changed.”

  “What about Swallow?” said John. “Come along, Nancy.”

  Titty heard that, and ran after the others, who were already climbing over the big rocks, every one of which had been stirred in its place. Peggy, Roger, and Gibber came too, but not so fast.

  Things were not so bad as, for one moment, John had feared. Duckhaven was still there, and still a harbour, in spite of the shifting of the rocks. Swallow was still there, and unhurt, though she had been lying on her starboard side before the earthquake and was now heeling over to port. John, Nancy, and Titty went over her anxiously, looking for serious damage. They found none, though all along the starboard side there was a wide strip of bare planking, from which all the new white paint had gone as if it had been rubbed off with sandpaper.