Jem and Zac looked at each other.
‘It’s the Lonely Isles, isn’t it?’ said Zac. ‘Just call for help. We can talk to ’em when they answer.’
‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing yacht Freya. Can anyone hear us? Over?’ He kept trying for ten minutes with no response, so they turned the radio volume up so they could hear it in the cockpit, and went back upstairs.
The sun was climbing. Ella hadn’t moved, but she was breathing steadily, and her pulse was less fluttery.
‘What are we gunna do?’ said Jem. ‘We can’t raise anyone on the radio – maybe it got damaged – there’s stuff all over the cabin.’
‘At least we’ve got plenty of food and water,’ said Tyler. ‘And I’m starving. Let’s have something to eat while we work out what to do.’
He and Zac went below and clattered around in the galley. They passed up bread, cheese, tomatoes and lettuce, and some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. A little while later, his hands wrapped around a sandwich, Tyler suggested they go ashore in the dinghy and have a look around.
Jem looked worried. ‘We can’t leave Ella. What if something happened and we couldn’t get back? We should stick together.’
Maddy agreed with him, but Zac sided with Tyler. ‘There’s nothin’ else we can do for Ella at the moment, so I reckon we should just go and have a look around. We’ll be fine. What more trouble can we get into now?’
In the end Jem agreed. It was a good excuse to get off the boat and onto dry land, anyway.
‘Don’t take too long!’ warned Maddy, who stayed behind, as they pushed off from the yacht. They rowed ashore and tied the dinghy to the roots of a big dead tree that stuck out into the water. Everything around them was completely still in the warm sunlight, which was already heating up the metallic-looking sand under their feet.
‘How come this sand’s black?’ said Zac, scuffing his feet and wriggling his toes. ‘All black ’n’ sparkly. Weird, ay. Sand’s supposed to be yellow!’ It glittered in the bright sun.
Jem gazed around at the little bay. It was roughly oval in shape, and completely surrounded by tall dark cliffs, except where the beach intervened. It was impossible to make out the entrance. The cliffs must overlap each other, he thought, so you can only see the gap from the right angle. A solitary seabird glided in the still air. Some skeletons of trees lay along the beach. Behind it, the land sloped upward, covered in sparse dry grass. There wasn’t a sound to be heard.
‘Well, let’s have a look.’ He picked up his backpack, and set off along the beach towards the patch of vegetation at the far end. It turned out to be a tiny creek, trickling from a soak halfway up the gully, providing water for the trees and bushes that grew along it.
‘At least we know there’s fresh water here,’ said Jem after he tasted it. There was nothing else to see, so they headed back to where they started, and faced the slope.
It was shorter than it looked from the bottom. It only took them a few minutes to find their way up it, and Jem, reaching the top first, stopped suddenly. Tyler and Zac cannoned into him. Below them, on the other side, was a vast green jungle, completely hidden from the outside in a huge cauldron-shaped hollow.
‘Hooley dooley, look at that!’ breathed Tyler. ‘It’s like something out of a movie!’
They stared wordlessly for a few moments. A pair of sea eagles soared above the treetops and swooped out of sight. The way down into the green forest was easy, and sloped gently. There almost seemed to be a natural path running down into it.
Halfway down, Jem stopped and said, ‘I think we should go back. C’mon, this could take ages and what if we got lost in there? It looks pretty thick, and we don’t know where we’re going anyway.’
Reluctantly Tyler and Zac agreed, and they turned and went back the way they had come, and rowed back to the Freya.
As the dinghy bumped gently against the side of the yacht, Maddy caught the rope and tied them to the stern.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I thought you were just gunna walk along the beach for a bit, not disappear like that!’
‘Sorry,’ said Jem. ‘Anyway, we’re back now. How’s Ella?’
As they climbed into the boat and stepped up into the cockpit, Jem was relieved to see Ella sitting up, drinking a cup of tea.
‘She woke up right after you left,’ said Maddy. ‘You really should’ve stayed.’
‘It’s okay Maddy. I’ll be fine. It was just a bump on the head.’ Ella patted her on the knee.
‘Are you okay? Does it hurt or anything?’ asked Jem worriedly.
‘A little. I have a headache, that’s all. You did a good job of bandaging me up, thank you,’ she smiled, touching the white crepe bandage around her forehead. ‘And you also did an amazing job of getting Freya in here and out of that whirlpool! All of you! You must have been paying attention. I’m so very grateful to you.’ She blinked away a couple of tears, and smiled at them.
‘So, where are we? This looks like it must be the sanctuary inside the island that the map talked about.’ She gazed around, shielding her eyes from the bright sun.
Jem, Tyler and Zac told her what they had seen over the hill. Ella was intrigued.
‘It sounds like a place capable of supporting a few people. We’ll have to have a better look.’
That night, Jem dreamt the same dream again. He was standing on a windswept cliff overlooking the sea. There was a figure some distance away, facing out to sea. It was the dark-haired boy, and he leaned into the howling wind as if he was about to jump. His tattered shirt flapped loosely around his thin frame so that he looked like a stick figure, a scarecrow. As Jem walked towards him, the boy turned and began speaking to him. Jem strained to hear what he was saying, but the wind whipped the words out to sea. When he woke in the morning, he lay in his bunk for a while remembering the boy, and wondered again what he was trying to tell him.
The next day, when Ella felt strong enough to climb into the dinghy and go ashore with them, they set off on an expedition into the forest. This time they took some useful things with them, such as torches, matches, some food and water, a small first aid kit, and wore their walking shoes. Stepping onto the shore, Ella bent down to scoop up some of the black sand and studied it.
‘This is volcanic sand,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘I didn’t think there were any volcanic islands this far south.’
When they climbed up the hill, and the vista of the green forest spread out beneath them, she shook her head in amazement. ‘It’s an old caldera! A volcano erupted here many thousands of years ago, and blew out into this huge bowl shape. Pollux is the other half, and the strait must have formed where it was weakest and most easily eroded away. Over time the rain and wind wore down part of the volcanic rock and turned it into the black beach sand back there, and provided the soil to grow that forest.’ She turned to the others. ‘You’re in charge of this part of the expedition. I might be the expert on the water, but you are definitely more at home here on the land. I’ll follow you,’ and with that she waited for them to file ahead of her down the gentle slope.
As soon as they reached the floor of the caldera, they saw strange marks. Here and there among the trees were signs of old stumps, long dead, the saw-marks of some long rusted bow saw still visible in the flat cuts on the surface.
‘Hey, look! People have been here,’ said Tyler.
‘Wow, we found it!’ said Zac in wonder. ‘We actually found it!’
Maddy wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘How do we know someone didn’t just land here once and cut some timber? Not the people from England, just some sailors passing, or some people from the mainland?’
‘You’re so negative Maddy,’ said Tyler.
‘After all we’ve been through to get here, of course this is it!’ Zac agreed with him.
Ella shook her head. ‘Maddy’s quite right. We shouldn’t make any assumptions. A good researcher evaluates what he finds on its own merit, not on what he wants it to e
xplain. We need to look further, see if there’s more convincing evidence.’
They headed across the valley, through the trees, till Jem stopped. ‘We dunno where we’re going, and we could get lost if it gets any thicker. Let’s go back to the start, and work round the bottom of the slope. Looks like there’s a lot of big rocks ’n’ stuff. C’mon.’ He was so glad to be back in his own element again, on land, where he knew how things worked. And where there were no dark watery depths to be lost in.
They stopped after a couple of hours in a little clearing, and sat down on the grass to eat. The sun was already high overhead, but the green canopy above shaded them and kept them cool. As they ate biscuits and fruit, Tyler regaled them with stories about old Japanese soldiers on remote islands in the Pacific, left behind when World War II ended, still defending their positions even after fifty years had passed.
‘Our teacher told us at school, true God! Nobody told these old guys the war’d finished, and they just kept livin’ in the bush, stealin’ chooks from the local village, or livin’ off the land on some uninhabited islands. They musta gone crazy on their own all that time. The teacher said that the Japanese had to send special people to talk ’em into comin’ out and goin’ back to Japan. They thought that the leaflets dropped from planes telling ’em it was all over and to come out, was just a trick by the enemy.’
‘D’you reckon anyone could still be living here?’ asked Maddy hesitantly. ‘I mean, could some of the settlers have survived?’ She glanced around the clearing, and Jem felt a sudden chill, as if they were being watched.
Tyler laughed. ‘Mads, they’d be a hundred years old! I don’t reckon anyone who came here in 1912 is still gunna be around!’ He laughed again.
‘Well, not the original ones,’ said Jem, ‘but they could’ve had kids, and then those kids had kids of their own, and so on, couldn’t they?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s not impossible. But you would think that someone might have noticed fires or smoke at some time over the years.’ Ella munched her apple thoughtfully.
‘Well, if anyone’s still livin’ here, I hope they’re not gunna be scared of us, and attack us or nothin’. We should keep our eyes open,’ said Zac, staring around at the forest as if he expected crazy old soldiers to come screaming out of the bushes at them.
Jem agreed. ‘Anyway, we should keep going till about midday, then head back again, or we’ll be walkin’ in the dark.’
The walls of the valley were solid rock. It was smooth and shiny – Ella said it was probably basalt – and here and there it had broken into rubble piles, which they skirted around, but occasionally long cracks and small caves showed up, havens for birds and small animals. The valley was otherwise quite flat, carrying tall stands of healthy timber. Birds flew up squawking every so often, and some kind of ground bird could be heard scuttling away in the undergrowth as they passed. They came across a creek at one point and began to follow it, but the scrub alongside it became too dense, and they went back to the rocks again.
After another couple of hours of scrambling over rocks and pushing their way through thick undergrowth, Tyler stopped under a shady tree, and said, ‘It’s got to be lunchtime.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Maddy. ‘This is such a waste of time. I’ve got green ants and prickles all over me. There’s nothing here!’
Zac nodded, and Ella looked tired.
‘Okay,’ said Jem. He glanced up at the sun. ‘It’s about midday anyway. If we go on any longer, we won’t have enough daylight to get back again, so let’s have lunch and then go. We can have another look tomorrow in the other direction.’
It was late afternoon when they finally reached the bottom of the slope they had climbed down that morning. Jem stopped and pulled out his water bottle and took a long drink. Tyler, Zac and Maddy had another look at the tree stumps. They were grey and weathered, but plainly had been cut by humans with a saw. Tyler found the rusty head of an old mallet lying among some rocks nearby. He placed it on top of the nearest stump.
‘Ya never know,’ he grinned. ‘The owner might come lookin’ for it!’
That night they sat in the cockpit, staring out at the walls of the caldera guarding the cove.
‘I reckon,’ said Jem, ‘that if we’re gunna have a proper look over this island, then we should take a bit of camping gear and spend the night. It’s stupid coming back when we’ve only got halfway, and it’s not that big – we’d get right across it in a full day, easy.’
The others agreed, but Ella looked worried. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her forehead creasing in a frown. ‘Your parents might not be happy about you doing something like that. What if there are wild animals, or snakes?’
‘You don’t get snakes on volcanic islands,’ said Tyler. ‘Not unless they’ve been brought there. I read about it in a book. Places like New Zealand and Lord Howe Island – they don’t have snakes ’cause they rose up out of the sea.’
‘And there won’t be any wild animals to worry about – we haven’t heard any dingoes, and they’d be howlin’ their heads off after we been crashin’ around everywhere,’ added Zac.
Jem nodded. ‘There might not be any animals on this island, only birds ’n’ insects ’n’ stuff.’
‘Good thing Mum made us take those compressed foam mattresses,’ said Maddy. ‘They don’t weigh anything, and it’s not cold at night. It’ll be fun, really it will.’
‘And plenty of food – we need to take plenty of food with us,’ said Tyler. ‘I’ll organise the food. You never pack enough, Maddy!’
Ella looked at them all, and closed her eyes briefly. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘you’re in charge. We’ll go tomorrow morning. But only for one night!’
The sun had barely cleared the horizon by the time they stood at the rim of the caldera the next morning. Each carried a loaded backpack with a thin cylinder of mattress strapped underneath. Jem gazed across the green sea of the forest canopy to the blue sea beyond it.
‘I reckon we should head across the middle, right to the other side of the island.’
‘How far d’you reckon it is?’ asked Tyler.
‘About four or five kilometres maybe. Hard to say,’ said Jem.
‘Well that won’t take us long – five ks is nothin’!’ said Zac confidently.
‘Yeah, but it’s not a straight line across a paddock. By the time we go around things and through thick scrub ’n’ stuff, it’ll be more like ten.’ He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and swept them around the horizon. ‘There’s a higher cliff top or somethin’ over there – we might be able to see it from the floor of the valley. Let’s head for that.’
Ella took a compass sight of the rocky outcrop, which was a dull grey mass against the pale blue sky, and they set off down the slope. They passed the old weathered stumps, and headed into the bush. Every so often, Ella stopped and took a new sighting. The forest wasn’t as dense as it looked from the edge of the caldera, and the walking was easier than the previous day. Sometimes the land rose up, and gave a view of the far side, and she could take a sighting off the outcrop again. As they went, she showed the others how to do it, and they took it in turns to pick a target, walk to it and take the next compass reading.
Here and there along the way, other trees had been cut down. Grey, weathered remains of sawn-off sections lay on the ground around the stumps. A little further on, Jem halted and stared into the bush to one side. ‘Look at that!’
It was a rusted length of heavy gauge wire, still twisted around a sturdy tree, and the wire had cut deep into the trunk. Nearby were the remains of old posts, some still standing upright in the ground at regular intervals. Rusted wire was still twisted around some of them, but the rest of it was long gone.
‘Well, ship builders didn’t build fences,’ said Tyler. ‘This has to be a sign of people living here! Who’d go to all the trouble of building a fence?’
Jem walked around the posts. ‘This isn’t a fence, it’s a yard. Or it was. It’s too small
to be a paddock.’
Ella and Maddy took cameras out of their packs, and photographed the posts.
‘Hmm,’ said Ella, putting the lens cap back on her camera, ‘someone kept animals penned up here, and a very long time ago it seems. This is extremely interesting.’
An hour’s walk brought them to a small clear creek. Regularly placed flat rocks made it possible to walk across the creek without getting their boots wet.
‘D’ya reckon that’s natural?’ said Tyler.
‘Nah,’ said Jem, ‘I don’t.’
He glanced around, but the bush was quiet and still, apart from a few birds in the trees. From here on, there were more signs of human intervention in the landscape, more thinned out areas of bush, and more stumps. As they walked along, Zac and Tyler chatted.
‘If those Japanese soldiers could survive for so long on a Pacific island, why not here? I mean, you start out with twenty people, some of them are gunna have babies and stuff,’ said Tyler. ‘There could be a whole colony of people still living here!’
‘Nah – we woulda seen somethin’ by now,’ said Zac. ‘Or they woulda heard us and come ’n’ seen who it was. Anyway they probably couldn’t grow enough food here. Look how hard it was for them fellas at Port Essington. Heaps of them people died there.’
‘Yeah but that was like a hundred and seventy years ago. These guys came much later, when there was better medicine and tinned food ‘n’ stuff. They coulda brought a heap of stuff with ’em and survived for ages. They mighta had to start eating the weaker ones, you know, like in a life raft,’ said Tyler with a wicked grin.
‘Yeah! They’d have to draw straws to see who was next, ay. And then …’
‘Shut up you guys! said Maddy. ‘You’re making me feel really creepy!’
She marched ahead of them, and caught up with Jem. The country was easy to walk through, and Jem hiked along wondering what had happened to the people who had cut down the trees and put up yards, wondering why he kept dreaming the same dream, and wondering what it all meant. He was staring at the ground, thinking about the dream, when Maddy cried out.
The Secret of the Lonely Isles Page 9