“No, you don’t, not a wire net,” Baltasar muttered under his breath.
But to his surprise the “devil’s” knife was whetted to the task. As the divers heaved at the net for all they were worth to get it on shore the “devil” was deftly widening the gash he had already made.
“Heave-ho, my hearties,” Baltasar shouted urgently.
But at the very moment when their quarry seemed as good as in their hands the “devil” dropped through the gash into the water, sending up a cascade of sparkling spray, and was gone.
The men stopped heaving in desperation.
“That’s some knife-cutting wire as you’d cut a loaf of fresh bread,” Baltasar said admiringly. “The underwater blacksmiths must be a darned sight better’n ours.”
Staring into the water Zurita had the air of a man who had lost all his fortune at one stroke.
Then he raised his head, tugged at his bristly moustache and stamped his foot.
“But no, damn you, this isn’t the end! ” he exclaimed. “I won’t give up if I have to starve you in your bleeding cave. I’ll spare no money, I’ll hire divers, I’ll have nets and traps put everywhere but I’ll get you! “
Whatever Zurita was lacking in, it was certainly not purpose and courage. This he had got with the hot blood of Spanish conquistadors that ran in his veins. And then he thought the thing was worth a fight, all the more so considering the “devil” was not half as formidable as he had feared.
A creature that could be made to tap the riches of the world for him would repay itself many times over. Zurita was going to have it, be it even guarded by Neptune himself.
DR. SALVATOR
Nor did Zurita go back on his word. He had had the mouth of the cave and the waters nearby crossed and recrossed with barbed wire and sturdy nets with ingenious traps guarding the few free passages left. But there was only fish to reward him for his pains. The “sea-devil” had not shown up once. In fact he seemed to have disappeared altogether. His dolphin friend put in a daily appearance in the bay, snorting and gambolling in the waters, apparently eager for an outing. But all in vain. Presently the dolphin would give a final snort and head for the open sea.
Then the weather changed for the worse. The easterner lashed up a big swell; sand whipped from the sea-bed made the water so opaque that nothing could be seen beneath the foamy crests.
Zurita could spend hours on the shore, watching one huge white-headed breaker after another pound the beach. Broken, they hissed their way through the sand, rolling over pebbles and oyster shells, onto his very feet.
“This can’t go on,” Zurita said to himself one day. “Something must be done about it. The creature’s got his den at the bottom of the sea and he won’t stir from it. Very well. So he who wants to catch him must pay him a visit. Plain as the nose on your face.” And turning to Baltasar who was making another trap for the “devil” he said:
“Go straightway to Buenos Aires and get two diving outfits with oxygen sets. Ordinary ones won’t do. The ‘devil’s’ sure to cut the breathing tubes. Besides we might have to make quite a trip underwater. And mind you don’t forget electric torches as well.”
“Thinking of giving the ‘devil’ a look-up?” asked Baltasar.
“In your company, old cock. Yes.”
Baltasar nodded and set off on his errand.
When he returned he showed Zurita besides two diving suits and torches two long elaborately-curved bronze knives.
“They don’t make their kind nowadays,” he said. “These’re ancient knives my forefathers used to slit open the bellies of your forefathers with—if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Zurita didn’t care for the history part of it but he liked the knives.
Early at dawn the next day, despite a choppy sea, Zurita and Baltasar got into their diving suits and went down. It cost them considerable effort to find a way through their own nets to the mouth of the cave. Complete darkness met them. They unsheathed their knives and switched on their torches. Small fish darted away, scared by the sudden glare, then came back, swarming, mosquito-like, in the two bluish beams.
Zurita shooed them away: their silvery scales were fairly blinding him. The divers found themselves in a biggish cave, about twelve feet high and twenty feet wide. It was empty, except for the fish apparently sheltering there from the storm or bigger fish.
Treading cautiously they went deeper into the cave. It gradually narrowed. Suddenly Zurita stopped dead. The beam of his torch had picked out from the darkness a stout iron grille blocking their way.
Zurita could not believe his own eyes. He gripped at the iron bars in an attempt to pull the grille open. It didn’t give. After a closer look Zurita realized that it was securely embedded in the hewn-stone walls of the cave and had a built-in lock.
They were faced with still another riddle.
The “sea-devil” had apparently even greater intelligence than they had ever credited him with. He knew how to forge an iron grille to bar the way to his underwater den. But that was utterly impossible! He couldn’t have forged it actually under the water, could he! That meant he didn’t live underwater at all or at least that he went ashore for long stretches of time.
Zurita felt his blood throb in his temples as though he had used up his store of oxygen in those few minutes under water.
He motioned to Baltasar and they went out of the cave, and came up.
The Araucanians who had been on tenterhooks waiting for them were very glad to see them back.
“What do you make of it, Baltasar?” said Zurita after he had taken off his helmet and recovered his breath.
The Araucanian shrugged his shoulders.
“We’ll be ages waiting for him to come out, unless, of course, we dynamite the grille. We can’t starve him out, all he needs is fish and there’s plenty of that.”
“Do you think, Baltasar, there might be another way out of the cave—inland I mean?”
Baltasar hadn’t thought of that.
“It’s an idea though. Why didn’t we have a look round first,” said Zurita.
So he started on a new search.
On shore Zurita came across a high solid white-stone wall and followed it round. It completely encircled a piece of land, no less than twenty-five acres. There was only one gate, made of solid steel plates. In one corner of it there was a small steel door with a spy-hole shut from inside.
A regular fortress, thought Zurita. Very fishy. The farmers round here don’t normally build high walls. And not a chink anywhere to have a peep through.
There was not a sign of another habitation in the immediate neighbourhood, just bald grey rocks, with an occasional patch of thorny bush and cactus, all the way down to the bay.
Zurita’s curiosity was roused. For two days he haunted the rocks round the wall, keeping a specially sharp eye on the steel gate. But nobody went in or out, nor did a single sound come from within.
One evening, on board the Jellyfish, Zurita sought out Baltasar.
“Any idea who lives in the fortress above the bay?” he asked.
“Salvator-so the Indian farm-labourers tell me.”
“And who’s he?”
“God.”
The Spaniard’s bushy black eyebrows invaded his forehead.
“Having your joke, eh?”
A faint smile touched the Indian’s lips.
“I’m telling you what I’ve been told. Many Indians call Salvator a God and their saviour.”
“What does he save them from?”
“Death. He’s all-powerful, they say. He can work miracles. He holds life and death in the hollow of his hand, they say. He makes new, sound legs for the lame, keen eyes for the blind, he can even breathe life into the dead.”
“Carramba! “ muttered Zurita, as he flicked up smartly his bushy moustache. “There’s a ‘sea-devil’ down the bay, and a ‘god’ up it. I wonder if they’re partners.”
“If you take my advice we’ll clear out of here, and mighty quick, before our brai
ns curdle with all these miracles.”
“Have you seen anyone who was treated by Salvator?”
“I have. I was shown a man who had been carried to Salvator with a broken leg. He was running about like a mustang. Then I saw an Indian whom Salvator had brought back to life. The whole village say that he was stone-dead with a split skull. Salvator put him on his feet again. He came back, full of life and laughter. Got married to a nice girl too. And then all those children-“
“So Salvator does receive patients?”
“Indians. They flock to him from everywhere-from as far away as Tierra del Fuego and the Amazon.”
Not satisfied with this information Zurita went up to Buenos Aires.
There too he learned that Salvator treated only Indians with whom he enjoyed the fame of a miracle-worker. Medical men told Zurita that Salvator was an exceptionally gifted surgeon, indeed a man of genius, but very eccentric, as is often the case with men of his calibre. His name was well known in medical circles on both sides of the Atlantic. In America he was famed for his bold imaginative surgery. When surgeons gave up a case as hopeless Salvator was asked to step in. He never refused. During the Great War he was on the French front where he operated almost exclusively on the brain. Thousands of men owed him their lives. After the Armistice he went back home. His practice and real estate operations landed in his lap quite a fortune. He threw up his practice, bought some land near Buenos Aires, had a high wall built round it (another of his eccentricities), and settled down there. He was known to have taken up research. Now he only treated Indians, who called him God descended on earth.
Finally Zurita found out that before the War right where his present vast holding lay Salvator had had a house with an orchard also walled in on all sides. When Salvator had been away in France the house had been closely guarded by a Black and a pack of ferocious bloodhounds.
Of late Salvator had lived a still more cloistered life. He wouldn’t receive even his old university colleagues.
Having gleaned all this information, Zurita decided to take illness so as to get inside the grounds.
Once again he was in front of the stout steel gate guarding Salvator’s property. He rapped on the gate. Nobody answered. He kept rapping on it for some time and still there was not a stir inside. His blood up, Zurita picked up a stone and started battering the gate, raising a din fit to wake the dead.
Dogs barked somewhere well inside and at last the spy-hole was slid open.
“What do you want?” a voice asked in broken Spanish.
“A sick man to see the doctor-hurry up now, open the door.”
“Sick men do not knock in this way,” came the placid rejoinder and an eye peeped through at Zurita. “Doctor’s not receiving.”
“He can’t refuse help to a sick man,” insisted Zurita.
The spy-hole shut; the footsteps died away. Only the dogs kept up their furious barking.
Venting some of his anger in choice invective, the Spaniard set out for the schooner.
Should he lodge a complaint against Salvator in Buenos Aires, he asked himself once he was aboard. But what was the use? Zurita shook in futile rage. His bushy black moustache was in real danger now as he kept tugging at it in his agitation, making it fall like a barometer showing the doldrums.
Little by little, however, he quietened down and set to thinking what he should do next.
As he went on thinking his sunburnt fingers would travel up more and more often to give a flip to his drooping moustache. The barometer was rising.
At last he emerged on deck, and to everybody’s surprise, ordered the crew to weigh anchor.
The Jellyfish stood for Buenos Aires.
“And about time too,” Baltasar commented. “So much time and effort wasted. A curse on that ‘devil’ with a ‘god’ for a crony! “
THE SICK GRANDDAUGHTER
The sun was angrily hot. An old Indian, thin and ragged, was plodding along a dusty country road that ran through alternating fields of wheat, maize and oats. In his arms he carried a child covered against the sun with a little blanket very much the worse for wear. The child’s eyes were half-closed; an enormous tumour bulged high on its neck. Whenever the old man stumbled the child groaned hoarsely and its eyelids quivered. Then the old man would stand still to blow into its face.
“If only I can get it there alive,” he whispered and quickened his pace.
Once in front of the steel gate the old Indian shifted the child onto his left arm and gave the side door four raps with his right hand.
He had a glimpse of an eye through the spy-hole, the bolts rattled and the door swung open.
The Indian stepped timidly inside. Standing in front of him was a white-smocked old Black with a head of snowwhite hair.
“I’ve brought a sick child,” the Indian said.
The Black nodded, shot the bolts home and motioned to the Indian to follow.
The Indian looked round him. He found himself in a small prison-like court, paved with big flagstones, with not a blade of grass anywhere. A wall lower than the outer one divided the court from the rest of the estate. At the gateway in the inner wall stood a large-windowed whitewashed building. Near it squatted a group of Indians-men, women and children.
Some of the children were playing jackstones with shells, others were wrestling in silence. The old Black saw to it that they did not disturb the peace of the place.
The old man eased himself down submissively in the shade of the building and started blowing into the child’s bluish inert face. An old Indian woman squatting down beside him threw a glance at the pair.
“Daughter?” she asked.
“Granddaughter,” the Indian replied.
“It’s the bog spirit as entered your child. But he’s stronger’n any evil spirit, he is. Hell bring the poor thing back to health.”
The Indian nodded.
The white-smocked Black, who was making a round of the sick, stopped in front of the Indian and beckoned to him to go in.
The room that the Indian entered was big and bare, except for a long narrow table, covered with a white sheet, standing in the centre of the flagged floor. A second, frost-glass panelled door was opened and in strode Dr. Salvator, a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned man wearing a white smock. The black eyelashes and eyebrows were the only hair on his head. He must have taken to shaving his head long ago, for it wore as good a coat of tan as his face. An aquiline nose, a jutting chin and tightly compressed lips lent to his face a cruel, one might say, predatory expression. The cold look of his brown eyes sent little shivers down the Indian’s spine.
The Indian made a low bow and stretched his arms with the girl in them towards the doctor. With quick, sure and yet careful hands Salvator took the sick girl from the Indian’s arms, unwound the rags with which she was swathed and tossed them very neatly into a receptacle in the corner. The Indian made to retrieve them but was stopped in his tracks by a peremptory “Leave them where they are”.
Then Salvator laid the little girl on the table and bent over her. In profile now, he seemed to the Indian a bird of prey poised to strike. Salvator was examining the tumour with his fingers. These too struck the Indian’s imagination. They were long and amazingly supple and seemed to be able to bend not only downwards, but from side to side and even upwards. The Indian, normally a plucky man, tried to fight down the feeling of fear the extraordinary doctor had aroused in him.
“Excellent, splendid,” Salvator was saying, as if in admiration of what he saw. The examination over, Salvator turned to the Indian.
“Come in a month’s time, when the moon’s new again, and you’ll have your little girl back-healthy.”
And he took the girl behind the frost-glass door.
Meanwhile the Black had led in the next patient, the old woman with a swollen leg.
The Indian made a low bow in the direction of the frost-glass door and went out.
In exactly twenty-eight days the frost-glass door was opened again.
The little girl, sporting a new dress, lively and apple-cheeked, appeared in the doorway. There was alarm in her eyes as she caught sight of her granddad. The Indian lunged forward, picked the girl up, smacked her a kiss and examined her throat. The tumour was gone. There was only a tiny reddish scar where the girl had been operated upon.
The child kept pushing her granddad away with her hands and had even cried out when, kissing her, he pricked her with his stubbly chin. He had to let her down. Salvator came in. There was a flicker of a smile on his face as he patted the child’s head and said:
“Here, take your child. You were only just in time bringing her. Another few hours and even I would not have been able to recall her to life.”
The lips in the Indian’s crinkled face quivered and tears came into his eyes. He gave the little girl another hug, then fell on his knees before Salvator.
“You saved my granddaughter’s life,” he said in a stifled voice. “A poor Indian has nothing but his own life to repay you with.”
“What do I want with your life?” wondered Salvator.
“I may be old but there’s strength in my arms yet,” the Indian went on, not rising from his knees. “111 take the little one to her mother-my daughter-and then come back. My life is now yours-for what you’ve done for me. I will serve you like a dog. Please don’t say no, I beg you.”
Salvator pondered.
He was chary of taking new servants. Not that he didn’t need any. There was much work to do. Help Jim with the gardening, for instance. Come to think of it, he did need a servant. He would have preferred a Black, to be sure, but this Indian fellow seemed all right…
“You make me a gift of your life. Very well. I accept it. When can you come?”
“I’ll be back before the first quarter’s over,” said the Indian, kissing the hem of Salvator’s smock.
“What is your name?”
“Cristobal, Cristo for short.”
Alexander Beliaev Page 3