Cocos Gold

by Ralph Hammond Innes

  The heat seemed to increase with every step we took. Insects hung around us in clouds, biting our flesh to a throbbing irritation. The sweat poured off us. Once I paused and looked back. The stream bed was a narrow gorge between the high jungle growth running down to the glaze of sun-whitened sand at the bottom. Up the gorge stumbled men of the “Sally McGrew,” sweating, cursing, but with their eyes still alight with the thought of treasure.

  Further up we came to a low waterfall. Here we had our first taste of the jungle. We had to cut our way round the fall. It was vicious work with hatchet and knife, and every frond seemed peopled with white ants that stung like fury. Above the fall the stream bed opened out. The banks became low and covered with flowers of brilliant color. There were no boulders here. We were on a stretch of sand. But behind the flowers and the tall grasses stood the jungle, solid and silent and menacing.

  I was just behind Sir Brian and I heard him say to the captain, “Presumably Irwin had to do this on his own with his electrical gadget. Seems to me we could have got to it easier from Chatham Bay.”

  “Possibly,” the captain answered. “But he doesn’t give directions from Chatham Bay.”

  “I still think we could get to the spot easier from Chatham Bay,” Sir Brian answered. “Let me have a look at the map a minute.”

  “It’s back on the ship—in my safe,” the captain answered.

  “Back on the ship?”

  “You don’t think I’d be such a fool as to bring it with me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  The captain glanced at Sir Brian and gave a snort. “Want to get your throat cut?”

  “I think you’re being unnecessarily cautious, Captain Legett.”

  “Think what you like,” the captain replied shortly.

  They went on in silence after that. A moment later somebody splashed alongside me and Sparks said, “Well, enjoying Cocos Island, Johnny?”

  “It’s a bit different to what I expected,” I admitted.

  He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. “You’ll get used to it,” he said and gave a strange laugh. A moment later he caught me by the arm and pointed into the water. “Look,” he said. It was a fish. It seemed to be staring, fascinated, at my boots, its tail undulating gently back and forth. It darted away as the first man passed us. But a moment later it was back again.

  “There’s another and another,” I said. They seemed to be gathering round us as though to look at the strange spectacle of men’s boots. They had no fear, and after the first once or twice did not even bother to dart away as the men splashed past us. One of them actually came close and nuzzled the leather of my boot. A sudden flash of yellow broke across the shadows, and Sparks caught my arm, pointing into the jungle. “See it?” It was perched on a long tendril of a parasitic growth that was stifling a cocoanut palm. Then it flew down to within a few feet, regarding us curiously. It was a small canary. “Come on,” Sparks said, “or we won’t get our share.” And he laughed. We were now the last of the straggling line of men splashing through the steaming water.

  A hundred yards or so further on, the jungle closed in on us again and the stream bed began to rise sharply over a series of ledges. The course wound in and out round giant outcrops of black rock from which lizards scuttled. The roots of trees showed in the steep banks and in places liana and vine tendrils bridged the narrow gap with an intricate lacing of arm-thick threads. Every now and then Sparks would stop to point something or other out to me. Once we paused to listen to a wild hog rooting in the undergrowth. It was then that I began to get anxious, for a bend of the stream hid the rest of the party from us. “Hadn’t we better catch up,” I suggested.

  “There’s no hurry,” he answered. “Sooner or later they’ll get held up by the jungle. They’ll be hacking at it for hours.”

  He spoke so certainly that I couldn’t help saying, “Have you been up here before?”

  He looked at me sharply. “Not this exact stretch,” he answered. “But I know what the island’s like.”

  “When were you here?” I asked.

  “Oh, a long time ago,” he answered. And after that we trudged on in silence. He didn’t hurry, but even so we constantly caught glimpses of the stragglers of our party ahead of us.

  Then we reached the waterfall. If it hadn’t been for that fall—well, probably my bones would be whitening now in the ant-infested jungle of Cocos Island. It was much like the previous fall. They had cut round it. But the earth here was slippery and the rocks, instead of being smooth, were sharp and jagged, as though the action of the water had uncovered the raw volcanic rock below the smooth-worn surface. I went up first, taking it at a run, my toes digging into the soft, slimy leaf mold. As I reached the top, I heard a slither behind me and then the scrabble of boots on rock and a curse. I looked back to see Sparks stagger up from the rocks at the bottom of the fall. He was cursing horribly and clutching at his dummy hand. “Are you hurt?” I called down to him. He didn’t answer, but doubled up, pressing his gloved hand between his legs. I started down toward him and then stopped.

  His teeth were biting into his lips with pain and his florid face was dripping sweat. But what made me stop was the sight of him peeling the glove from his injured hand. He stretched down and rinsed it in the water. And as he did so I saw it wasn’t a dummy hand at all. It was human flesh and bone, except that the fingers were missing. The shape of that fingerless hand was clouded for a moment by the red scum of blood that floated from it. But then the stream washed it clear, and down there in the water I saw it again, just as I’d seen it through the porthole of the ML—a big, powerful hand, with a thumb and four little mounds of flesh where the fingers should be.

  He looked up then. I suppose I must have been gaping down at him, recognition written all over my face. He gave a sort of bellow and started up after me. I turned and ran, stumbling through the rocks up the bed of the stream. My mind was a blank. The only thought in my head was that I must reach the captain before he caught up with me.

  As I stumbled round the next bend I saw two men ahead. I called to them. They turned. And then with a shock of terror I heard him call to them to hold me and saw that one of them was the Irishman, Mike, and the other was also one of the four that had come aboard just before we sailed. I stopped dead as they shouted an answer and came splashing toward me down the watercourse. Beyond them, two other men appeared. I had a sudden feeling of being trapped. In a flash I saw that it had all been planned. They had lagged behind the main party deliberately. I gave one frightened glance behind me and then fought my way up the steep bank and dived into the jungle.

  There were shouts and then the sounds of men plunging into the thicket behind me. I squirmed and twisted through a tangle of liana and vine trailers, climbing over the exposed roots of the great trees and forcing my way through dense masses of laurel and convolvuli. In a little open space, like a tunnel through the jungle, a canary swooped down from its nest among the trees and flapped curiously and without fear round my head. Above my head I caught a glimpse of the sun patterning the bole of a tree as it shone through the leaves. Then I was in a thick mat of exuberant undergrowth, the white ants falling from the leaves on to my clothes and hands and face. They bit wickedly, but I scarcely noticed them in my terror. Behind I could still hear the crash and curses of the men following me.

  An absolute network of liana cut across my path, covering a sheer slope of jumbled rock, and without thinking I seized hold of them and began to climb. It was as simple as swarming up the ratlines of a boat. In a moment I was above the denseness of the thicket, sitting on the crooked limb of a big tree with a shaft of sunlight striking down on me. I shifted into the shadow and sat quite still, praying that they would not be able to see me. I could hear them blundering about below. Then they stopped. They were quite close.

  “Do you hear anything, man?” It was a Welsh voice and, now that it was separated from the babel of the rest of the “Sally McGrew’s” crew, I thought I could recogn
ize it as the voice of the Welshman on the ML.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Anything over there, Mike?” Gone was the soft voice and suggestion of an Irish brogue that had belonged to Sparks. This was the harder, more commanding tone of the skipper of the ML.

  “No. Seems kinda quiet all of a sudden.”

  “Blast the kid. He’s gone to ground.”

  “What do we do now, Nat?”

  “Back to the ship. The boy’s no loss. The map’s in the captain’s safe. I heard him say so himself. How many of the crew are with us, Taffy?”

  “Four,” the Welshman answered. “Maynard, Roberts, Gault, and Sax. Stevens got cold feet.”

  “How much does Stevens know?”

  “No more than we agreed.”

  “Good. Come on then. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “The jungle will look after him,” was the answer. And they began moving back through the undergrowth, their voices gradually getting fainter, till at last I was alone in the stillness of the jungle. It was a frightening stillness, for it throbbed gently with the sound of insects. I thought of pythons and other snakes, and jaguars. I think in that moment of being alone I peopled the island with all the most deadly inhabitants of the jungles of the Amazon, so that a lizard sent me cringing against the trunk of the tree for fear it was a tarantula and the frigate birds became vultures waiting for me to die. My whole body seemed to throb with the sting of the white ants. I felt them crawling all over me and remembered stories of man-eating ants and flowers of brilliant hue that devoured human flesh.

  But at length, when I found myself still alive, though extremely uncomfortable, I plucked up courage and descended by the same tracery of liana by which I had climbed. Once on the ground my fear of pursuit returned and in an instant I had plunged forward, tearing my way through the jungle, my one thought being to put as much distance as possible between myself and those who had so nearly captured me. But almost immediately I was brought up short by an impenetrable thicket of thorn.

  It was then that my reason reasserted itself. They were going back to the ship. They’d given up the pursuit. What I had to do now was to reach Captain Legett and Sir Brian as soon as possible and warn them of what had happened. And then I remembered what Sparks had said—or rather Nat, The Rigger. I shall call him by that name now, for it was the name by which I was to get to know him best. The Rigger had said, “The jungle will take care of him.” And as I recalled those words, the impenetrable living silence of the place gripped me with sudden panic, for I realized that I had not the slightest idea how to retrace my steps. I stood quite still, listening for the sound of the stream up which we had been climbing. But all I heard was the lazy murmur of the insects and the throbbing of my heart. I had a sudden desire to run—in in any direction in the hope of getting out of this terrible, matted shadow of jungle. But I forced myself to stand still and to try and think.

  In the end I went by the sun. It had been in front of us as we had climbed the bed of the stream, and since I had entered the jungle to the left of the stream, I felt sure I must strike it again if I kept the sun over my left shoulder. But I reckoned without the almost incredibly precipitous nature of Cocos Island. I had not wormed my way through the tangled matting of undergrowth for more than a hundred yards before I was brought up by an almost perpendicular wall of loose stone and scree. I turned to the right and found myself standing on the lip of a two-hundred-foot drop. I began to climb back then, and kept on climbing.

  The sun was very hot indeed now and I was maddened by thirst and the bite of insects. But I remembered that the upper part of The Lookout was free of jungle. Once on the grass the going would be easy. And it was that thought that kept me going.

  I have never seen anything so terrible as the surface of Cocos Island. I have since discovered that there is hardly a level square foot in the whole island. It is a volcanic upheaval of rocks, tossed in jagged ridges and worn down by the rains into a surface of boulder and scree loosely held to the violent slopes by the matted tangle of liana and vine. Twice I fell, only by luck getting away with bruises and no broken bones. The second time I landed in a tree of sweet-smelling blossoms. There was a startled grunt. I had a momentary glimpse of shining tusks and wicked little red eyes peering at me. Then a wild boar went crashing past me and disappeared into the jungle.

  I climbed to the top of one hill only to see another ahead of me, with a dark gorge between. But at last I sighted The Lookout, with its single palm, straight in front of me. Before me lay a deep chasm, but at the top of the next hill the grass began. It took me half an hour to cross that chasm and when I reached the grass on the further slope I stopped, for I could go no further. It was grass all right. But it was jungle grass, six feet high and as thick as a man’s finger. It was like a cornfield sown with giant bulrushes, quite impenetrable.

  I didn’t know what to do. I felt I should never get out of the jungle. Behind me was a mile of tangled undergrowth covering treacherous slopes of loose rock. Ahead was this impenetrable elephant grass. I sat down in a piece of shade and tried to think. I was tormented by the heat and the innumerable insects. My clothes stuck to me as though I had just climbed out of a pool. Ants as big as the top joint of my thumb began to crawl over me. The more I brushed them off, the more they seemed to gather to. attack me. I got to my feet then “and in desperate fear fought my way to the right along the fringe of the grass.

  That was how I came across the path. It led up through the jungle grass, a narrow track of beaten earth on which the grass grew more sparsely. Whether the wild pig had made that track or it was the remains of an old path used in pirate days, I do not know. But it enabled me to go on up through the jungle grass. The heat was intense. It beat down upon my unprotected head and throbbed inside my temples so that I thought my skull would split open with the pain of it. The rough stems of the grasses tore at my clothes and skin as I pushed my way between them. I reached the top of another hill. For a moment the ground was flat. Then it fell away again. And as I stumbled down the slope I slipped and fell. I was too exhausted to get up. I just lay in the throbbing heat, my mind dazed, my body on fire with thirst and bites and scratches.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, but at length I became aware of a crashing sound in the jungle away to my right. At first I thought it was a wild pig. But then I realized that it was too regular. In an instant I sat up. I could hear men’s voices and the crashing sound resolved itself into the steady thrash of ax and bush knife carving their way through the jungle. I got up then and began to call. There were answering shouts. I called my name and heard Sir Brian’s voice in reply.

  At the bottom of the slope I found an intersecting path leading away to the right. A moment later I almost fell into the arms of Captain Legett. Somebody caught my arm and I saw Sir Brian’s face, all swollen and scratched, wavering over me. I tried to tell them what had happened, but my tongue was so swollen I could not speak. I think I was sick then. And when I came to, some one was pouring warm water from a bottle into my mouth. I swallowed painfully and tried to focus on the faces looking down at me. I recognized several of the crew. They were jammed into a narrow defile they had cut through the jungle grass.

  “Feeling better?” It was Sir Brian’s voice.

  I nodded and struggled into a sitting position. “The ship,” I gasped. “The mutineers have gone to take it. Nat, The Rigger, his four men, and four of the crew.” It all came out in a rush. But they didn’t move.

  “He’s delirious,” Sir Brian said.

  “What’s this about mutineers?” The captain’s voice seemed to go on booming in the pulsing heat long after he had ceased speaking.

  I told them then what had happened—how the man they knew as Sparks had got me to lag behind with his men and the members of the crew they had won over, how I had recognized him for the leader of the mutiny on the ML by his hand and how I had escaped from them in the jungle. When I had finished t
hey were silent, so that I could hear the jungle all round us again.

  “Is that the truth, boy?”

  I didn’t bother to answer, for I knew by the captain’s voice that he accepted what I had said.

  “He wouldn’t have made all that up,” Sir Brian said.

  “Do you know who of my crew have thrown in their lot with these rascals?” the captain asked.

  “They said who they were,” I answered, trying to remember the names. “There was Maynard, Roberts—” I hesitated. I couldn’t remember. “Stevens refused to join them at the last minute.”

  The captain straightened up then. “Stevens!” he called.

  “Yes, sir?” A big man with a harelip came forward.

  “Did any member of the crew approach you with the suggestion that you should join in a mutiny?” the captain asked.

  “It weren’t put like that exactly, sir,” the man replied.

  “Then how was it put?”

  “It was Mike, sir. He comes to me an’ says as how the crew ain’t going to get their share of the treasure. He suggests some of us cut along on our own. He says one of the officers is willing to lead us to the cave. At first I agreed. But then I didn’t like the sound of it.” His voice trailed away and he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  I saw the captain’s thick brows draw down over his eyes and I thought for a moment he was going to call hell-fire down on the wretched man. But all he said was, “You’ve sailed four voyages in the ‘Sally McGrew.’ You should have known me better.” Then he turned to the others. “There are fourteen of us and the boy here. I want eight volunteers to go back to Wafer Bay with me.”