by Talbot Mundy
THE PILLAR OF LIGHT
I
DAY broke on the Red Sea, pale and hard-yellow, like low- grade molten brass. The big revolving light on Matthew Island ceased to turn; its reddish rays sickened and waned and died; the dirty, shark-infested waves — oily and breakerless — reflected the molten shimmer of the sky, and the humidity increased by a degree or two.
No birds twittered. There was nothing, either animal or human, amid the awful desolation of the Twelve Apostles, that seemed glad to greet the dawn. Aloes were the only thing that grew there, unless you count the sickly-looking patch of vegetables, some twenty feet by twenty, that succeeding reliefs of sergeants had coaxed on to the bald, hot hideous rock to make them homesick.
Sergeant Stanley, of the Fifty-Fifth (“God’s Own”), arose from his sleepless cot as a bugler turned out the shirt sleeved guard. There followed in time-accustomed sequence the growled command — sweet-toned ‘reveille,’ wasting its sweetness over unresponsive desolation, the click of arms presented, and the Union Jack rising up a white-smeared flagpole; it flapped once or twice, and then drooped despondently “Order Um-m-ms! commanded Stanley. “Guard... dismiss!”
Another twelve-hours’ sun-baked idleness was under way.
Stanley saw to the sweeping of the guard-room, and the making of the serried rows of beds; then he strolled to the one and only bungalow, to ask whether or not his officer was up as yet. A Somali boy answered that he was not up. Stanley turned, and the boy followed him along the winding foot-path that descended down the cliff-side to a ledge of rock beside the sea.
Near the bottom of the path they were preceded by a thousand scampering crabs, which fought with each other for the right of way and flopped into the water noisily, like frightened ghouls caught prowling after dawn. The Somali boy singled out the largest of them and crushed it with a well-aimed stone; instantly a hundred other crabs cut short their scurry to the sea to tear it into little pieces and devour it.
“Ugh!” growled Stanley. “You, Twopence! What in blazes d’you mean by that? Isn’t there hell enough on this rock without your adding to it? Get back d’you hear — back to your master!”
The Somali grinned, but he obeyed. He knew the temper of the white man marooned on the Twelve Apostles, and he could gage the consequence of disobedience pretty accurately, from experience. Stanley kicked the struggling crabs into the sea, and watched for a while the huge fin of a tiger shark scouting to and fro in lazy, zigzag sweeps that scarcely produced a ripple on the blood-hot water.
As the sun grew higher, the oily waves died down — beaten down it seemed, by the brazen reflection of the sky, and from the distance, growing gradually nearer, came the steady thug-thug-thug of a propeller. Big, black, bristling with iron wind-scoops, a Peninsular and Oriental liner hurried past, slam-banging down the Red Sea at sixteen knots to make a head-wind for her passengers.
“Not so much as a signal!” muttered Stanley to himself. “Lord help ’em, they think they’re suffering! Punkahs above the tables, and lemonade, and ice! Open sea ahead of ’em, all the worst of it behind, and can’t even run a string o’ flags up to pass the time o’ day!’
The sun turned paler yellow yet, and as it rose a yard or two above the cast-iron ring of the horizon, the sea below where Stanley stood turned pale green and transparent. He could look down into it, and see the million rainbow-tinted fishes feeding on each other — the everlasting cannibal-fight for the survival of the biggest. A shark, sneaking amid the coral out of reach of larger sharks, swept suddenly among the fish in lightning flashes.
Then, to digest his bellyful, he came and rested lazily beneath the ledge of rock where Stanley stood. And the long arm of a giant octopus reached out, flicking at the end like a beckoning finger, and pulled him — struggling — fighting — plunging downward to the parrot-beak below. Stanley shuddered. “That’s no way to die!” he muttered. Then he glanced again over to the hurrying liner, and his look hardened into something scarcely civilized.
“It’s for the likes o’ them that the likes of us are festering here; let ’em pay the price! Let ’em say then if it’s worth it!”
Stanley was just one man of a hundred and fifty thousand who take their turns in guarding the Empire’s outposts, only his happened to be a rather more than usually awful turn. He was a railway porter’s son, dragged up in the slums a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street Station, and his history was like a thousand others: caught stealing; sent to truant-school by a paternal Government; claimed from the truant-school as soon as he was old enough, and broken in to selling newspapers and blacking boots and carrying handbags; taught to touch his forelock (he never had a hat in those days) to anybody who would tip him twopence; half-starved, wholly beaten, ever inch of him, and rubbed into the muck of poverty and vice and crime; taught that a gentleman is a free-handed cad with money, and that a smug is a man who has a sense of duty. And then -
At the age of eighteen, caught and coaxed and cajoled by a recruiting sergeant. Sworn, and drilled, and taught to clean himself. Treated like a man by his superiors, and exactly on his merits by his equals — a thing that he had never known before. Sardined in the bowels of a troopship, and introduced, along with prickly heat and fever, to a race who, from past experience, with Englishmen, believed the things he said because he said them. And, barely yet recovered from the shock of his new-found sahibdom, starved and frozen and led — led all the time by men who understood the business — through a hill campaign in Northern India.
Promoted after that to the rank of sergeant — a full-fledged, tested connecting-link between the bayonets and the brains. A man of pride and cleanliness bewildering to new recruits — straight-backed and polished as a service cleaning-rod.
But the desolation of the Twelve Apostles, as those Red Sea island rocks are named, had seeped into his soul. Even the British sergeant must be busy, unless he is to lose that indefinable, but absolutely certain Regimental grip that tightens up his moral fiber while it trains his muscles. There was nothing here to watch but fishes and the outlines of the eleven other barren crags. It was too hot to drill; the regulations allowed an officer to dispense with every routine that was not absolutely necessary to the preservation of good order and discipline. It was too lonely and wild and awful to do anything but quarrel with any one who was fool enough to speak.
A man could not swim for fear of sharks and worse things; he could not play games, because the ragged rock-surface was hot enough to raise blisters through the soles of ammunition boots; he could not read because the sweat ran into his eyes; and through the long, wet-blanket nights he could not sleep for prickly heat. It was hell, ungarnished. And there were five months and one week more of it ahead — for a second lieutenant, two sergeants, four corporals, and fifty men.
The Fifty-Fifth (and don’t forget that they are ‘God’s Own,’ and ready to prove it in close order at a moment’s notice) were stationed that year at Aden, fresh from a five year breeze-swept residence on Shorncliffe heights; and Aden is a perfectly good copy of the Inferno on its own account, with devils and deviltry thrown in. But Aden is absolutely child’s play — a pellucid, angel-haunted paradise — compared to any single one of the Twelve Apostles. And of all the Twelve, the one that men have christened Matthew is the worst — the baldest — the bleakest — the hottest — the one with most claim to be the model that Satan tried to imitate.
It was because of the coral-guarded natural wharf that Matthew was chosen and a light was built on it — two hundred feet above sea-level, and sixty-thousand candle-power; and because the coast-dwellers of the Red Sea practice piracy as a religion, and had yet to have instilled into them their latter-day disrespectful awe for the would-be Pax Britannica, the Fifty-Fifth were forced to send a six-monthly contingent to guard the brass and copper fittings that were worth a Red Sea Fortune.
Once a month, or thereabouts, the Admiralty steamboat came, with stores and year-old magazines for the lighthouse keeper, and mail from home (p
erhaps); and once in six months came the cockroach-ridden transport from Aden with the fifty man relief. In the interim was torment, in which pirates came no nearer than the sky-line to curse the warning pillar of light that prevented so many profitable wrecks.
Sergeant Stanley shuddered at the sea and at the aching sky-line, and then turned and shuddered at the baking rock behind him. He loafed up the path again and found the men squabbling at breakfast; it was beneath his dignity to join in the discussion, but there were four corporals to snub; he did that properly; and the other sergeant was a ten-year enemy of his. By the time he had insulted him sufficiently — with caustic service-comment on his method of maintaining discipline — he had worked himself into a frame of mind that looked on suicide as foolish only because it deprived the dead man of his power for harm. His mental attitude emanated from him like an aura, and was quite obvious in his perfunctory salute when he reached the bungalow again.
“Rounds all correct, sir!” he reported.
“Morning, sergeant!” said the one-starred representative of Empire, nodding to him from his long chair on the veranda, and hitching his pajamas into more official shape.
“Morning, sir.”
Second-Lieutenant Brasenose laughed aloud, with all the cynicism of one- and-twenty fun-filled years.
“Come up and sit on the veranda!” he suggested. “Have some chota hazri with me — these eggs aren’t more than a month old!”
“It’ll be another bender of a day, sir!” said Stanley, taking the proffered seat, and wondering to himself at the whiteness of the skin that showed down the front of the pajama-jacket. “Tender as a chicken!” he thought.
“Just like any other day, sergeant! They mold ’em all on one pattern hereabouts! There’s no originality — rocks, Arabs, heat, Somalis — everything’s the same as it was in old King Solomon’s time! Go on, help yourself to eggs. Twopence! Where are you? Bring the sergeant a cup, can’t you! ‘Pon my soul, I believe the lighthouse-keeper’s been here since Solomon’s day too!”
“He’s the ignorantest man I ever talked to!” said Sergeant Stanley, sniffing at an egg suspiciously.
“That one no good?” asked the officer. “Chuck it away — try your luck on the next; my second one didn’t stink a bit!”
“It beats me, sir, how you keep your appetite!” said Stanley, with grudging admiration.
“The answer to that’s easy, sergeant. I keep busy! It’s perfectly obvious why you men don’t enjoy life on the island: you lie on your cots all day and smoke and quarrel until you’re peeved all to pieces. Any fool could explain that! What is puzzling is how the lighthouse-keeper enjoys himself so much. He simply loves his job. He doesn’t take any exercise beyond climbing up and down the tower every now and then; and he hardly ever reads; he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t smoke, and he eats his service rations and prefers ’em to soft tack; and ‘pon my soul and honor, I believe he’s the happiest man I ever met!”
“He’s too ignorant to understand, sir!” said Stanley.
“He understands natives well enough! answered Brasenose. “Have you noticed how he’s tamed his Somali assistants? A man who can tame Somalis isn’t ignorant — he’s wise!”
“I’d as soon tame sharks, sir!” answered Stanley.
Brasenose leaned back and looked at him through puckered eyes. “Have you tried catching ’em?” he asked.
“How — catching ’em, sir?”
“Hook and line — fun of the world! They fight you for half an hour sometimes. See here!” He bared a freckled forearm that was lean and brown and sinewy beyond belief. “I got all that catching ’em. Look at this!” He showed the callous where a thirty-fathom line had ripped across his fingers. “A shark did that — a thirteen-footer. Caught him out beyond the reef there — fought him for three-quarters of an hour, and gaffed him right in among the rocks. You ought to have seen the fun, too, when we got him into the boat! He thrashed about like a good ‘un and all but did for one of the boat-boys before we settled him at last with an ax! You ought to take to fishing sharks, sergeant — it ‘ud be no end good for you — keep your mind off grouching, and all that kind of thing, and give you enough exercise to keep you fit!”
“I’d get sunstroke, sir!” said Stanley, who had no enthusiasm left.
“Go out at night then. I go in the daytime, but there’s no reason why you should; they’ll take the hook all right at night. Take a whale-boat and two or three of the boys tonight, after I get back, and try your luck!”
“How about the men, sir?” suggested Stanley. “They’re in need of watching! They’re quarreling like wild-cats half the time, and if I go away for more than half an hour at a stretch, they fight!”
“There’s another sergeant, and I’ll keep a close eye on them myself. Take a whale-boat tonight. If you’re not back by daybreak it won’t matter — I’ll see to everything. Come up here and tell me what luck you’ve had after you get back.”
It almost amounted to an order, and Stanley, whose theories on sport had been picked up in the slums of Whitechapel and were closely associated with the art of sitting still and betting on a certainty, cursed him inwardly for an interfering jackanapes. To his face, though, he was civil.
“Very well, sire,” he answered, getting up to go. “Shall I take the barrack servants?”
“Yes; take four of them, if you like. And take some food along with you; they’ll eat it, if you won’t, and they’ll show you where the best fishing is — round between Simeon and Levi is a pretty good spot — tell ’em to take you there first. So long, sergeant!”
Second-Lieutenant Brasenose went in, whistling, to dress, and then — after a careful inspection of the men and quarters — ran singing to the wharf, where he started off for another day’s hot but otherwise unqualified amusement. Stanley, when inspection was at an end and the men were sprawling on their cots again exuding discontent, stood down by the shore alone for a whole hour, gazing eastward to the hard horizon. Beyond it there was land. What kind of land was immaterial: it was not the Twelve Apostles!
That afternoon he packed stores into a whale-boat, and added fish-hooks and a line as an afterthought. He spent a whole hour choosing four from the ten half-naked barrack servants. It was noticeable that he picked the least contented.
That night, as the first rays of the giant revolving lantern lit on the oily sea, and began to sweep its surface in sixty-second, astronomically perfect, revolutions, they silhouetted for a second the form of a regulation helmet in the stern of a four-oared boat. The boat was headed east by northeast, and there lay no islands in its course.
Ten minutes later still, while Second-Lieutenant Brasenose — pajama- clad again and sun-burnt — sat writing up his daily official log, a knock came at his door, and it was followed by the grizzled, wrinkled face of the lighthouse-keeper, yellow in the lamplight.
“Has any one got leave of absence?” he demanded.
“Yes. Sergeant Stanley — and four boys. I was just writing in the log here that the climate and conditions seem to be very trying to the men. I told Stanley he may go shark fishing, to try and get rid of his grouch. If that’s a success, I shall try to get the men interested too.”
“Did you tell him where to go?” asked the lighthouse keeper.
“Yes — more or less. Between Simeon and Levi, I suggested.”
The lighthouse-keeper nodded, and closed the door behind him again without another word. Brasenose sat still and listened to his heavy foot steps crunching the coral in the direction of the light.
“Strange old codger!” he muttered to himself. “I wouldn’t care for his job! Lord! Fancy a lifetime of it!”
Fifteen minutes after that, the four-oared cutter from the lighthouse slid down the ways into the sea, and the phosphorus creamed and dripped and bubbled from its bows.
“Now hurry!” said the lighthouse-keeper, and some one grunted.
Then, with the short, quick, deep-in-the-middle stroke of Somali oarsmen, the cutter
sped into the night, east by northeast — a trail of phosphor- fire behind it, and a string of oar-dipped iridescent pools on either hand.
And, still five minutes later, the lighthouse-keeper paused at the threshold of his light to answer Brasenose’s question.
“Yes, that’s my cutter gone away.”
“What’s she after?” asked Brasenose. it was none of his business, but he was curious.
“Catching things!” said the lighthouse-keeper surlily. he shut the door in the Lieutenant’s face.
II
THERE was no moon, and the stars hung like round balls of polished metal beneath purple-black; the black waves followed one another lazily, showing only a splash of milk white foam here and there, but lighting up the whaleboat and the oars and the whale-boat’s wake with the phosphorus. The horizon only widened for a moment when a bigger wave than usual caught up the wave in front of it; then there was fire in that spot for half a second. Stanley leaned back in a corner of the stern, with his right arm hooked above the tiller, and one eye all the while on the Somali who was rowing stroke.
The Somali’s gaze was fixed on the big revolving light behind them; and Stanley would put the helm up or down in the direction of his nod. But no one spoke; the glow of Stanley’s pipe, the kunk-tunk of oars against the thole pins, and the heavy breathing of the boatmen were all that distinguished them from the Flying Dutchman’s jolly-boat.
The brown skins of the Somalis blended with the night; Stanley’s khaki shirt was of a piece with it; and the boat’s sides, dripping phosphorus, were but another splash of dancing light amid the luminous, life-laden blackness. They were low-sided — half-hidden in the trough of a beam-on Red Sea swell — rising over it second after second, only to sink between again, invisible. And behind them, up above their heads, the revolving light on Mathew kept up its ceaseless vigil, winking at them every sixty seconds with a bloodshot eye.
It irritated Stanley. He could feel it every time it revolved. It seemed to be taking one quick look at him every minute of the sixty that made up what seemed to be a year, as if it watched him to be certain where he was. He began to turn his head at the second he expected it, to catch the reddish gleam from the corner of his eye, and look away again; and when he fought that inclination, and gazed steadfastly ahead of him into the blackness, he caught himself wincing when the light was due.