"Good God! Osbart," I cried, "is this the place—is this where we are to lie?"
He smiled with vain love of a mystery, and pointed to the figures of the strangers, who, it seemed, were hanging like monkeys to the sheer face of the cliff, three of them, clad in rags but wearing vast sombreros, as though the sun would shine down such a chimney as this.
"Men and brothers," he said drolly, "particular friends of the skipper, and very ready with the knives, Strong. I'll introduce you when we go ashore——"
"Ashore!" I cried, "ashore in such a pit as this?" It amused him as a child's answer amuses the grown man.
"Oh," said he, "their wives can cook famously if you do not mind the garlic. Have a care how you make love to them, Strong, for I assure you the señors are a hasty people. We must now go below, I think—yes, the Captain is about to give the order. But it will not be for many minutes—and then, my boy, as good a breakfast as ever you ate in your life."
Well, I had no words for it, nor could any have been spoken. Black's loud command, "All hands below!" sent us immediately to the depths, and we crowded there in the corridors as though it were but the delay of an instant, as it proved to be. Rising as swiftly as she had sunk, the Zero came to the surface once more, and the hatches were opened. I stepped to the platform, to be blinded by a flash of radiant light, to see strange figures awaiting me, and to know that we had come up in the bowels of the mountains and that there were the Caves of Vares of which the Captain had spoken.
A prison, you say. Aye, but what a prison! No scene more wonderful has ever been opened to the eyes of man. Let all else but the Caves of Vares fade from Black's story and it will still be read through the generations.
And of these caves I was to be the master for many days. I shall now tell you how that came to be.
CHAPTER XIX
WE BRING THE TREASURE ASHORE
Had it not been for the wonder of the scene, my mind would have cast itself back to the method of our entry, and that, I think, would have affrighted me beyond any ordinary curiosity concerning the place.
Recall how we had sunk below the waters of the outer basin, then risen as quickly to find ourselves in the first of the caves. Passing, I suppose, through a natural tunnel, we had come to this black bower of the sea. Had we happed upon such a cave by accident—as lads will by any seashore—we should have found it dank, and dark, and dripping. Not so at Vares. Here a master-magician had been at work, I doubt not for many years. Great arc lamps flooded the water as with beams of unearthly light. There was a wide landing-stage with steps leading to a kind of natural platform which ran quite round this vast dungeon of the deep. I saw countless tunnels radiating outward from a common centre; while high above me, as upon the roof of an unimagined cathedral, star-like clusters of lamps dazed the senses with their suggestion of altitude.
A circular cave with an infinity of tunnels radiating from it. A glorious flood of the purest light—a platform to step upon, and, at the stairs' head, the figures of twenty wild men who shouted and huzza'd at Black's coming as at the welcome of a king. This was my first impression of Vares. When we had made the Zero fast at the quay prepared for her, we followed the leader of the men through the central tunnel, and again I shrank at the wonder of it. A palace had been revealed to me as at the touch of a wizard's wand. I stood n wonderland, and my tongue could utter no word.
Here was a room of vast size, square in shape, but with a natural apse as its western end. I judged that it would have been in black darkness but for the number of the electric lamps which glowed in every nook and cranny. So many were they that the stupendous apse seemed nothing else than an arch of golden light, while there was not a ledge of the schist-like walls which had not its ornaments of balls. Trembling in the air with all its suggestion of reserve power, was the hum of a dynamo which fed this abundance—and even a stranger might imagine that the rise and fall of the tides in the caverns was the motive force Black had employed so cleverly. The same force drove the fans by which the cavern was ventilated, and the air came in as pure and sweet as from the morning sea.
Of the furniture of the great cave I could get but a vague notion upon my entry. Not only was there much of it, but it was so fantastic, and had come from so many countries, that the eye was confused and all sense of proportion clean gone from me. A table, to be sure, ran down the centre of the cavern and glimmered with gold and silver plate. I saw piles of bear-skins, chiefly of the polar bear, just as I had seen them years ago in the Rue Joubert at Paris. There were cabinets a-many, and few that were not filled with rare china of the cloisonné enamel of Japan. From China had come vases and porcelain of the Ming and Kang-Hi periods; and in contrast to this patronage of art, there stood a long open table covered from end to end with models of ships and guns, which would have delighted any boy.
Black had spoken to me of his love of pictures, and I was surprised to see so few of them in the cavern. One gruesome thing, in which a ship's crew was about to roll their captain in a spiked barrel, hung in a niche above a considerable fireplace; but it was meretricious and quite unworthy of the Captain's keen judgment; while the others were mere chromos and not to be named at all. It occurred to me, even at this time, that the atmosphere of the place must be unsuitable to any work of art; and yet against that stood the fact that the cave seemed as dry as a bone. When I detected an electric heater with twenty bulbs standing where the fire should have stood, I began to understand how this great brain had solved the riddle, and what science had done to link the nineteenth century to B.C. 7000.
Now, all this was the mental note I made upon my entry into the cavern. I have told you of the uncouth company of Spaniards which received us there, and of the resounding cheers with which they hailed the Captain; but presently I discovered that cheering was not the chief business of their lives, for they began to wait upon us all directly we had passed the door—and one of them, a burly man with a Jew's nose and ear-rings, called out our names from a slip of paper and doffed his sombrero hat as each man answered him Mine was the third name on the list and when I cried "Here," a Spaniard of the company at once stepped up to me and said he was my servant.
"A little Engleesh, my lord," he said, laughing all over his face. I turned to Osbart and asked what he would have me to do.
"Why," said the Doctor, "to wash yourself I must be supposing," and he laughed as though it were the best thing he had said for a long while. "Look at yourself in a glass, man," cried he, very pleased with himself; "you have the face of a nigger minstrel. Upon my word, Strong, you would make a living at Ramsgate if I could find you a banjo; just take a peep at yourself, and then ask for a camera. Why, man, you'll make a famine in soap when you begin."
I reminded him that he himself could hardly sit for a figure of one of the Graces—for the truth was that no man had washed upon the Zero since the hour of the terror—and then I turned to follow the Spaniard. The bedroom to which he led me lay beyond the second of the tunnels counting from the centre. The sea had hewed it ages ago from a stratum of a beautiful green stone, so pure that it might have been aquamarine. A heavy curtain covered the arch by which you entered in, and a second curtain shut it from a bath-room which was nothing more or less than a deep natural pool, whose depths were lighted by a cluster of electric lights set in a silver sconce. Here the Spaniard left me with a profound bow and the intimation that he would "very much come back when the señor shall singee out," a term, I suppose, he had got from the pirates.
You will know that I had left Ice Haven with hardly a rag to my back. I was, therefore, both surprised and delighted to find new clothes set out upon my bed, both underlinen and a fine shirt of silk, with a very good suit of grey flannels which I was to find very useful in the caves. A dressing-table of French buhl had been