CHAPTER XII
STALKED BY PIGMIES
Smith had noticed before leaving Palmerston that the wind had risenand was blowing steadily from the north-west. He was very anxious notto miss Port Moresby, the principal harbour in British New Guinea, forhe hoped, in spite of what the Resident at Palmerston had said, to beable to replenish his stock of petrol there, knowing very well thatamong the smaller islands of the South Pacific the places where petrolwas kept must be very few. He determined, however, if he should failto make Port Moresby, to steer straight for Ysabel Island. If itturned out to be impossible to obtain petrol, he would have to resignhimself to the inevitable, return to Australia on the gunboat that hadbeen dispatched to relieve the castaways, and endure asphilosophically as he might the consequences of overstepping hisleave.
His course lay across the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Bydaybreak, if he were able to keep up full speed through the night, heshould have passed the northernmost end of the Yorke Peninsula, and itmight then be possible to take his bearings by the group of islands inthe Torres Straits. On leaving these islands behind him he should sooncome in sight of the mountain chain running from the middle of theGulf of Paqua to the south-eastern extremity of New Guinea. He mightexpect to sight these mountains from a very great distance, and inparticular, if he could distinguish Mount Astrolabe, the square,flat-topped mountain lying behind Port Moresby, he would have nofurther anxiety about his position.
The engine was working as well as ever, and by keeping over the sea,Smith was able to avoid any gusts or cross-currents of air that mightbe set up by irregularities in the conformation of the land. Takingturns as usual with Rodier at the wheel, he was able to get a fewhours of sleep; about an hour and a half after daybreak he descriedthe strange shape of Mount Astrolabe towering nearly four thousandfeet into the sky, and in less than a quarter of an hour afterwards hecame to the coast, a little to the west, as he judged, of PortMoresby.
The aspect of the coast was far from inviting. There were longstretches of mangrove forest lining the shore, from which unpleasantexhalations arose, affecting his sense of smell even at the height ofa hundred feet. Beyond rose limestone hills, very scantily wooded,with a plentiful crop of rocks and stones. There was scarcely a patchof level ground to be seen. He came almost suddenly upon the port,lying in a hollow of the hills, and for some time looked in vain for asuitable landing place. The aeroplane, circling over the harbour, wasseen by the sailors on the ships and the people on the quays, and itsappearance brought all work to a standstill.
At length Smith discovered at the north end of the little town a spotwhere landing was just possible if the descent was not endangered bythe wind. He felt more nervous than at any other time during hisvoyage, and was on the alert to set the propellers working at thefirst sign that the wind was too strong for him. To his great reliefhe came safely to the ground, with no other misadventure thancollision with a huge eucalyptus tree at the edge of the clearing.Without loss of time he made his way down to the town, and accostingthe first white man he met, asked to be directed to the residence ofthe Administrator.
"You're a stranger, I guess," said the man, who had not seen theaeroplane. "Come from Sydney?"
"No, from Port Darwin."
"Gosh! We don't often have vessels from there. How's my friend Mr.Pond?"
"I don't know him."
"Well, that's real strange. I thought everybody knew Dick Pond; he'slived there fifty years or more. Say, what's up?" he asked of a manhurrying in the opposite direction.
"It's down. Didn't you see it or hear it?"
"Hear what?"
"The aeroplane."
"An aeroplane! You don't say so."
"It's a fact. Wonder you didn't hear it. It made a noise like athousand humming birds, and came down not half-a-mile over yonder.Some German fellow, I shouldn't wonder, from Constantine or Finsch.Hope we're not in for trouble; I'm off to see."
"So will I. Go straight on, stranger; you see that constable there?Well, turn down by him, and you'll come to the Administrator's inabout five minutes."
Smith had taken off his overalls, so that his appearance attracted nomore than a passing glance from the sailors, clerks, merchants, andnatives whom he met hurrying towards the spot where the aeroplane haddescended. He found the Administrator's house without difficulty. Nothaving a card, he gave his name and rank at the door. TheAdministrator was at breakfast with his family when Lieutenant Smithwas announced. Imagining that a war vessel had unexpectedly put in atthe harbour, he rose and went to the door to greet his visitor andinvite him to his table. A look of disappointment crossed his facewhen he saw a dirty, unshaven object before him, dressed in stainedbrown serge, offering no resemblance to the trim spick-and-spanofficer he had expected to see.
"I'm sorry to trouble you, sir," said Smith, "I'm in need of somepetrol, and--"
"I don't keep petrol," said the Administrator shortly. "You've comehere by mistake, no doubt. There's no petrol for sale in the port, tomy knowledge."
"That's awkward. I'm afraid I must go on without. The aeroplaneuses--"
"The aeroplane! What aeroplane?"
"I've come from Port Darwin in my aeroplane, and am going on at onceto the Solomon Islands. I think I can just about manage it, so I won'tdetain you any longer, sir."
"Come now, let me understand. You have come from Port Darwin--byaeroplane! Where is it?"
"About half-a-mile beyond the town, sir."
"But--from Port Darwin--across the sea?"
There was nothing for it. Once more Smith retailed the outline of hisstory, the Administrator listening with growing amazement. In themidst of it a young Englishman came up, out of breath with running.
"Good morning, sir," he panted. "An aeroplane has just come down;people say it is a German. What had we better do?"
"Keep our heads, I should think," said the Administrator. "Mr.Williams--my secretary--Mr. Smith. The aeroplane is Mr. Smith's, andhas come from Port Darwin in ten hours. Just run down to the harbour,Williams, and tell Captain Brown to send up all the petrol there is inthe launch, and a few gallons of machine oil as well. Be as quick asyou can."
The secretary opened wide eyes.
"Where's it to be taken, sir?"
"To the aeroplane, as quickly as possible."
The young man ran off, looking as though he had received a shock.
"This will give us excitement for a twelve-month, Mr. Smith," said theAdministrator. "It's lucky I can help you. I have just returned from atour of inspection, and there are a few gallons of petrol in mymotor-launch: not very much, I'm afraid, but better than nothing. I'mafraid I was rather short with you just now, but you'll admit thatthere was some excuse for me."
"Don't mention it, sir."
"It's the queerest thing I ever heard in my life; in fact, I'm onlyjust beginning to believe it. Come in and have some breakfast; it'llbe an hour or more before they get the petrol up, and I'd like my wifeand youngsters to hear about it from your own lips. You'd like a wash,eh? Come along."
He led the way to his bath-room, turned on the water, arranged thetowels, and bidding Smith come to the first room downstairs on theleft when he was ready, he went off to prepare his family for theguest.
Smith was by this time used to the exclamations of wonder, the volleysof questions, the compliments and gusts of admiration which his storyevoked. He came through the ordeal of that breakfast-table with thecoolness of a veteran under fire. His hostess asked whether sailing inthe air made him sea-sick; her elder son wanted to know the type ofengine he favoured, the quantity of petrol it consumed per hour, andwhat would happen if he collided with an airship going at equal speedin the opposite direction. The younger boy asked if he might have aride in the aeroplane; the girl begged Smith to write his name in heralbum. The governess sat with clasped hands, gazing at him with theadoring ecstasy that she might have bestowed on a godlike visitantfrom another sphere. Presently the Administrator said--
"Now get your hats on. We'l
l take Mr. Smith up in the buggy and seehim off."
When they reached the aeroplane they found Rodier demolishing some ofthe good things provided by Mrs. Martin, the centre of an admiringcrowd of curious white men and wonder-struck natives. Two Papuanconstables were patrolling around with comical self-importance. Thepetrol had arrived. When it was transferred to the aeroplane theAdministrator insisted on drinking Smith's health in a glass of Mr.Martin's beer, and then called for three cheers for the airmen. Hisdaughter had brought her kodak and took a snapshot of them as they satin their places ready to start. The natives scattered with howls ofaffright when the engine began sparking, the constables being easilyfirst in the stampede, one of them pitching head first into theeucalyptus. The engine started, the men cheered, the women wavedhandkerchiefs, and as the aeroplane soared up and flew in thedirection of the coast the whole crowd set off at a run to gain aposition whence they might follow its flight with their eyes.
For some time Smith steered down the coast, intending to cross theOwen Stanley range as soon as he saw a convenient gap. After abouttwenty miles, however, he ran with startling suddenness into atropical storm. It was as though he had passed from sunlight into adark and gloomy cavern. Rain fell in torrents, and he knew by theextraordinary and alarming movements of the aeroplane that the windwas blowing fiercely, and not steadily in one direction, but gustily,and as it seemed, from all points of the compass. For the first timesince leaving the Euphrates he was seriously perturbed. It was truethat the force of the wind did not appear to be so great as it hadbeen before his meeting with Monsieur de Montause on the Babylonianplain; but his situation was more perilous than then, for he waspassing over hilly country, and the vertical wind-eddies wereinfinitely more difficult to contend with. To attempt to alight wouldbe to court certain destruction; his only safety was to maintain ashigh a speed as possible, trusting to weather through. He judged bythe compass that the wind was blowing mostly from the south-east,almost dead against him. Fearing lest the enormous air-pressure shouldbreak the planes if he strove to fly in the teeth of the wind, hedecided to swing round and run before it for a time, in the hope thatit would drop by and by. As he performed this operation the aeroplanerocked violently, and he thought every moment that it must be hurledto the ground; but by making a wide circle he got round safely, andkeeping the engine at full speed he retraced his course, soon seeingPort Moresby again, far below him to the left. He had no means ofexactly determining the rate at which he was now travelling under thejoint impulse of the wind and his propellers; but from the way inwhich the landscape was slipping past him he thought the speed couldhardly be less than two hundred and twenty miles an hour.
It occurred to him now to increase his altitude, with the idea ofrising above the area of the disturbance. But he found that themountains on his right hand rose higher than he had supposed. Inproportion as he ascended, they seemed to rise with him. He saw theirsnow-clad tops stretching far away into the distance, and becameconscious of a great difference in the temperature. He began to feeldizzy and short of breath, and presently his eyes were affected, andhe saw everything as in a mist. When Rodier shouted that he wasfeeling sick Smith at once checked the ascent.
The aneroid indicated a height of 8000 feet, and it was clear from thegreater steadiness of the machine that it had risen out of the stratumof air affected by the storm. But Smith's satisfaction at this wassoon dashed by the discovery that there was something wrong with theengine. It missed sparking, recovered itself for a minute or two, thenmissed again. Smith looked anxiously below him. The nearest ground wasabout a thousand feet beneath; on his right the mountains still rosehundreds of feet above him, blocking the way to his true course.Hoping that the failure in the sparking was only temporary, Smithswung the aeroplane round, in order to take advantage of this calmregion of air and at least fly in the right direction. At the sametime he looked out anxiously for a spot to which he might descend ifthe defect in the engine proved persistent.
In a very few moments it was clear that to continue his flight wouldbe no longer safe, and he prepared to glide. While he was searchingfor a convenient landing place the sparking ceased altogether. Thewhole country was rugged; below, almost wholly forest land as far asthe eye could reach; above, bare rocks or scrub, and at the greatestaltitude, snow. The aeroplane flew on for a little by its ownmomentum, and Smith wasted a few painful seconds before, despairing offinding level ground, he began to descend in a long spiral.
As he neared the ground, Rodier's quick eye detected a little rivercutting its way through the forest, and at one spot a widening of itsbed, due, probably, to the action of freshets. Here there was a narrowspace of bare earth, the only clear spot in the landscape, and eventhis was surrounded with dense woodland. He pointed it out to Smith.There was no room for mistake or misjudgment. Smith knew that if hedid not strike the exact spot the aeroplane must crash into theforest that lined both banks of the river. Never before had so heavy ademand been made upon his nerve and skill. But the severe training ofthe Navy develops coolness and judgment in critical situations; hislong apprenticeship to aerial navigation enabled him to do the rightthing at the right time; and, thanks to the calmness of the air inthis lofty region, the machine answered perfectly to his guiding hand,and settled down upon the exact spot he had chosen, the little openstretch on the right bank of the stream, within eight or ten yards ofthe water.
His hand was trembling like a leaf when he stepped out on to the land.The teeth of both men were chattering.
"Mon Dieu!" cried Rodier. "That was a squeak, mister. Le diable demachine! It seem I do nothing at all but clean, clean, all the wayfrom London, and yet--"
"And yet down we come, 'like glistening Phaethon, wanting the manageof unruly jades,'" quoted Smith. "Still, we're safe, and I've knownmen killed or lamed for life getting off a horse."
"But with the horse you have the whip, with the machine you have onlythe rags to clean her with. Ah! coquine, I should like to flog you, togive you beans." He shook his fist at the engine.
Smith laughed.
"Beans would suit a horse better, Roddy," he said. "Let's be thankfulthe breakdown didn't happen while we were in the storm. That wouldhave been the end of us. Come on, we'll soon put things to rights.This loss of time is getting very serious."
They set to work to discover the cause of the failure. As theyexpected, the sparking plugs were completely clogged. Smith took thesedown to the stream to give them a thorough cleaning, while Rodieroverhauled the other parts of the machine. When, after half-an-hour'shard work, everything appeared to be in order again, they sat down tosnatch a meal, leaving the plugs to be replaced at the last moment.
While thus engaged, Smith scanned the surroundings with somecuriosity. The stream, in cutting its way through the hillside, hadhollowed it out in a gentle curve. The channel itself threaded thebase of a huge natural cutting, most of which was covered with trees,only the middle part, where the torrent had laid bare a path, beingcomparatively clear. All around were trees large and small, tall andstunted, leafy and bare. As Smith's eye travelled upward, he noticedabout a hundred and fifty yards distant, almost at the top of thegorge, a small ape-like form flitting across a part of the forest thatwas a little thinner than the rest.
"See that, Roddy?" he said.
Rodier looked round.
"What, mister?"
"An ape, I fancy, perhaps an orang-outang. I know they infest theforests of the Malayan archipelago, but I can't call to mind thatthey're natives of New Guinea."
"All the natives of New Guinea are apes," said Rodier viciously. "AtPort Moresby they came round me like monkeys at the Zoo."
"There he is! Do you see him?"
Smith's hand stole mechanically to his hip pocket, where he kept hisrevolver. Then he smiled, remembering that the chances of stopping anorang-outang with a revolver bullet were about one in ten thousand.
"I don't see him, mister."
"He has disappeared. But, my word, Roddy, there's another, andanothe
r--four or five; look at them, in the undergrowth yonder. Idon't like this. They're savage beasts if offended, and if they attackus we shall be in rather a tight corner."
He rose, keeping his eye on the spot where the ape-like forms hadshown themselves for an instant, to vanish again. As his eye becameaccustomed to the gloomy depths of the forest, he became still morealarmed to see a number of black, apish faces at various points amongthe thick undergrowth surrounding the clearing. Another form flittedacross the thin open space in which he had seen the first.
"By George! he's got a bow in his hand. They're men! This is worsestill. The orang-outang is bad enough, but he avoids men, I believe,unless interfered with or alarmed. These forest savages are dead shotswith their arrows, and they'll look on us as intruders. If they're asspiteful as most of their kind we shall have trouble. Get yourrevolver ready, but we must pretend we haven't noticed them. You'vegot to replace those plugs; do it as quickly as you can. Don't lookround; I'll keep guard."
He saw several of the savages pass across in the same direction as thefirst, and now he noticed, what had escaped him before, that they werediminutive creatures, certainly not more than four feet high. He hadclearly stumbled upon a settlement of forest pigmies. From what he hadread of pigmy races he knew that it required extreme patience and agreat expenditure of time to win their confidence. That was out of thequestion now. His first impulse was to hail them, and try to makefriends of them by offering some small present; but he checked himselfas the thought flashed upon him that a movement on his part mightstartle them and provoke a discharge of their tiny arrows, which wereprobably poisoned. He could not doubt they had seen him long before hehad seen them, and had been for some time playing the part of silentspectators, being kept at a distance, perhaps, by the aspect of thestrange object which they had observed descending among them from thesky. It must be sufficiently alarming to their untutored eyes. Butafter a time their dread seemed to be overpowered by curiosity orhostility, and Smith saw, with alarm, that the little figures weregradually drawing nearer, flitting silently as shadows from tree totree, and hiding themselves so effectually, even when they came tocloser quarters, that nothing but the flicker of a brownish form amongthe undergrowth, or a round black head projecting from tree or bush,betrayed their presence.
"Nearly done, Roddy?" he asked, without turning.
"Pretty near."
With an outward calmness that corresponded little to his inwardsensations Smith lit a cigarette, racking his wits for some means ofkeeping the pigmies at a distance without provoking a cloud of arrowsor a dash in force. The half-circle was gradually becoming narrower.He fancied that their silent movements were checked when he began tosmoke, and this suggested to him that an appeal to their curiositymight hold them intent or awestruck until Rodier had finished histask.
"How much longer, Roddy?" he asked quietly.
"Three minutes."
Smith did the first thing that occurred to him. He took a letter fromhis pocket, tore it slowly into small pieces, and let the fragmentsfloat away on the breeze. This device appeared to be successful for afew seconds; but when the scraps of paper had disappeared or fallen tothe ground the pigmies resumed their stealthy silent advance. Smithhad another idea. Whistling the merry air of the "Saucy Arethusa," hetook two backward steps towards the aeroplane, seized a half-emptypetrol can, and strolled unconcernedly with it to the bank of thestream, which at this point formed a slowly moving pool. As he went heunscrewed the stopper, and on reaching the brink, he poured some ofthe petrol into the water. Then taking two or three matches from hisbox, he struck them together, and flung them into the petrol floatingon the surface.
The effect of his stratagem was immediate. The spectacle of waterapparently on fire was too much for the simple savages. For the firsttime they broke their silence, and were seen rushing up the woodedslope, uttering shrill cries of alarm. Only then did Smith becomeaware how numerous they were. The whole forest seemed to be alive withthem.
"Done, mister," cried Rodier.
Smith hurried back to the aeroplane, noticing as he approached severalsmall arrows sticking upright in the ground close to it.
"They shot at you when you turned your back," said Rodier. "Shall wefire at them?"
"No; leave them alone. I think they're scared now. But it's lucky Ithought of setting fire to the petrol, or they would certainly havebeen upon us, and there's such a crowd of them that we might have beendone for. Set the engine working. The noise will keep them away."
With some difficulty they turned the aeroplane round to face downstream, where there was a fairly level stretch of a few yards forrunning off. Vaulting on board, they started, and in five or sixseconds the aeroplane was humming along a hundred feet above thetrees.