“I won’t.”
“Any help you want, you got.”
“I know that, Theo. You’re a good man.” I didn’t like to remind him that the trouble was going to be inside the fortress, where yelling wouldn’t do much good.
An ancient crewman with red hair was at the oars, which I was glad to see had been rag-wrapped at the oar-locks for silence; and in five silent minutes, Mai and I were splashing ashore on the rocks at the base of the northeast cliff-face. I took the small anchor and lashed it to the end of the rope, nodded to the boatman, watched while he rowed into a creek where the boulders hid all sight of him (I’d told him to wait a while before going back to the junk); I told Mai in a whisper to wait, and then began the steep climb up the cliff.
Sir Robert had been right; it was unscalable.
I pulled up short below a bulky overhang of rock that loomed out over the dark sea, darker than the night itself. My exploring fingers found that it was smooth granite, devoid of any kind of recess which would afford a footing, however hazardous. I wound one leg round an upshooting pinnacle of stone and leaned out, then tugged up the anchor on the end of the long rope; I swung it back and forth and then hurled it up as high as I could reach; it clanged horribly in the silence, and then came tumbling down again to reach the rocks below with another loud clang. As I clung to the cliff-face, I could only hope that the wind, strong and vicious here, would drown out the noise or at least carry it far from waiting ears.
On the third try, the rope snagged itself into a jagged V-shape of incised stone twenty yards to my right and above me. I tugged hard and found that the anchor was holding firm, so I let myself swing on the rope for a moment and then pushed hard with both feet against the wall and sent myself swinging far over to one side; my fingers found a hold and I dragged myself tight in, wondering if I’d exchanged a safe perch for a dangerous one.
Below me, the white tops of the waves were pounding against the black rocks in Kafkaesque fury; they were a terribly long way down, and I had not realized I had climbed so far. I held on by one hand and worked a piton slowly into a crevice, wiggling it and forcing it in and wishing it was safe to use a hammer. But the piton was tight, deep-lodged in the cleft, and I put a clove-hitch on it and tugged hard and found it firm. I swung myself up onto the now taut rope, balancing uneasily on the thin nylon and seeking the cliff-face for stability, and I groped around till I found another hand-hold, firmer here and in a much more broken surface.
The darkness was a terrible handicap. I could not see whether or not I was even going in the best direction, whether or not there were other insuperable barricades ahead of me; I was wondering if I should have tried the southwest side where the slope was gentler—and therefore, it seemed to me—more likely to be under surveillance if the island were indeed under the kind of tight security I would have expected.
I found a narrow ledge and crept along it in absolute silence, moving a foot at a time and then waiting a long while, ears alert, before moving on again. It seemed that I was over the hump, so to speak, so I crawled back and unsnagged the rope, pulling it back with me and letting the anchor at its end swing gently free; I left the piton where it was; I thought it might be needed for a descent.
The silence was astonishing now; even the sound of the waves below seemed muted when the wind, unaccountably, suddenly dropped. I moved back with infinite care along the ledge.
And now, now I could hear a faint sound that shouldn’t have been there at all. It was the sound of a man’s breathing.
How far will such a slight sound travel? A few feet? A few yards? He was close beside me somewhere then, waiting as I was waiting, watching as I too strained my eyes in the darkness. The wind came up again as suddenly as it had dropped and the sound was gone with it. I crouched, waiting and ready and tried hard to pinpoint the source; there, above me and a little ahead. Gently I pulled up the anchor till I felt its thirty-two pounds of iron in my hands, and I held it ahead of me like an animal trainer’s chair. I leaned into the cliff and peered ahead.
A shadow moved, a man’s head moving away from the darkness of the cliff and silhouetted momentarily against the sky. It did not seem to me that waiting around now would be any good so I pushed forward hard with both hands and flung the anchor at him. I saw the shadow grow larger as the arms came out and then it was gone, and there was a fierce and sudden tug at the rope that nearly hauled me off my feet. But I was waiting for it, bracing myself for a tug of war, and the harder he pulled from round that bend or wherever he was, the harder I pulled back. And then I suddenly let go the rope and leaped forward blindly, hoping that there might be somewhere to put my feet, there was.
I found myself on a flat outcrop just outside a small cave where my adversary had been waiting. He’d heard the abominable sound of the anchor striking the rock, and had come out to see what was going on; and there he was now on his back in the darkness, almost over the edge and falling into space, his arms flailing as he tried to recover his balance before I should reach him. If I’d pushed with my foot, he’d have gone over to smash himself to a bloody pulp on the rocks below. But instead, I drove the points of my fingers hard into his solar plexus—it was like hitting solid steel—and fell on him with my knee in his stomach. He grunted and twisted his head round, which was what I was hoping he’d do, so I hit again with my fingerpoints. I aimed at the superficial cervical, striking it hard enough to put him out momentarily, which was long enough for me to take my time and apply pressure to the auricular and the posterior scapular. I also bore down hard on the posterior thoracic, which would have killed him if I’d kept up the pressure for more than a second or two. But I had no quarrel with him; he was merely doing his job and telling me, incidentally, that all this trouble (if the trouble had really started yet!) was not, indeed, for nothing. There were other things than ghosts and devils on Siang-chu they don’t put out sentries.
Once he was completely unconscious, I used my flashlight to see just who I’d been fighting with in the darkness: a big Chinese with a bull-neck and short-cropped hair, and dragons tattooed all over his arms. A Northerner. I stripped off his belt and bound his arms behind his back in case he came round too quickly—though I didn’t think he would in much less than a couple of hours—and ripped his shirt and used it to gag him. I tied his thumbs together as well as his pinkies and finally put a clove-hitch around his ankles and his knees, doubling his legs back up to fasten the loose ends of rag around his neck. It was mostly improvisation, but it would take him a long, long time to wrestle himself free.
I used my light again and examined the cave very thoroughly. A small crevice in the rocks was about all it was, but there was a big demijohn of drinking water, a bottle of rice-wine, a half-eaten loaf of bread with some scraps of pork wrapped in a cloth, a length of light cord with a wicket basket on the end of it. I measured the cord and estimated that it was just long enough to reach the rocks on the beach if someone passed by there from time to time with victuals.
But there was no sign of what I was searching for; a telephone line or a radio, or any other means of communication. Whatever my unconscious friend had deduced from the clanging of that damned anchor, there was no one he could communicate his worries to. He’d been left there to cope with any worries himself, and not to bother his betters with them. It was certain that there would be other guards all over the island; and I wondered if there were many others, or indeed any others, on this route that I had chosen.
I was about to move on, when I heard a low whistle from down below there. I froze. A whistle is just about as unidentifiable a sound as you’ll ever come across, but somehow I was sure it was not Mai, nor even the hidden boatman—if he was still there. I waited. In a moment, the whistle came again, more impatient-sounding now. Very quickly I took the wicker basket and snaked it down over the edge until it hit bottom. Holding the string taut, I could feel it bouncing about on the other end, and there was the whistle again. I pulled up my little load and found that a friendly benefactor had filled it up for me. I craned my neck over the edge; and though I could see absolutely nothing down there except the white caps of the waves, I clearly heard a throat-clearing cough and then a soft oath in Mandarin. I pulled back into the cave and examined the basket: more bread, more pork, another bottle of wine; I wondered how long the guard up here was meant to stay on duty.
I waited a while till I was certain the passing patrol was well in its way along the rocky beach, and then I struggled on with my climb. The going was easier now, except for one long patch where the face of the cliff was smooth as glass. But here, and without much trouble, I got the anchor swung over and wedged tight in a stand of roots among sandstone boulders. I made a little noise, but not so much as I had made on that damned granite. I swung myself over, reached up and pulled, and in a very few minutes was at the top of the cliff. I took a good look around, found nothing to alarm me, tied one end of the rope round the solid tangle of ancient, stubby roots that here, on this barren rock, had never quite succeeded in becoming trees, and dropped on it over the edge. I went down hand over hand, very quickly, and in a moment was standing back on the wet rocks of the shore again.
There was silence. I stared carefully around me, and then I saw Mai rise slowly out of the water where she had been hiding from the patrol. She came to me, dripping wet, and threw her arms round me and held me tight.
I whispered: “Did they scare you?”
She looked up at me and smiled and shook her head.
“Three men, with rifles.”
“Soldiers?”
“Not soldiers.”
“Good.”
“They put something, food I think it was, in a basket that came down on a string, did you see? That means there’s a guard up there.”
I said: “It means there was a guard. They sent me up some pork chops and a bottle of wine.”
She began to laugh then, silently but with a genuine amusement, and I said: “A rope to climb. I’ll go up first.”
She nodded, and I kissed her, and climbed hand over hand up that damned rope, gripping the knots in the V of my fingers and pulling myself up inch by inch. Thin nylon-rope is not the easiest thing in the world to climb; it cuts into the hands if there’s any weight on it, and I weigh two hundred pounds and when I reached the top, my hands were a bloody mess I squatted on the edge and waited for Mai, and gave her a helping hand over the top, and we sat down in the dry weeds to rest for a very brief moment and get our wind back, and then I pointed, put my mouth close to her ear, and whispered: “There. The vent that leads into the fortress.”
It was a black hole in the blacker earth, an incision carved in the low, steep rise of land there. The sky was dark; the earth was darker still; and the entrance to the vent was the darkest of them all.
We moved over to it carefully and felt around the smooth-cut stone it had been carved from; it was a hole not more than two feet square, a tight and alarming tunnel in the rock that might or might not lead us to where I wanted to go.
It was hard to get my shoulders into the confined space, and they scraped along the walls as I inched my way forward. I was flat on my back and using only my heels for propulsion, with my arms raised cut beyond my head, searching for whatever might be there. I could feel Mai’s comforting touch on my ankles as she slid her slender body—plenty of room here for her!—along after me.
And then my groping arms found what I feared might be there, though it was not marked on Robert Hart’s map; there was an iron grille cemented into the solid granite just ahead of us, a grille of three one-inch bars in each direction, horizontal and vertical. But, judging by the rustless feel of them, they hadn’t been there for very long, a year or two at the most.
It seemed, for the moment at least, to be the end of the line.
I said: “Well, I’ll be damned if that’s going to stop us.”
CHAPTER 12
I risked using the flashlight.
The heavy bars were welded at the cross-joints and cemented at the right-angled corners into the granite in which the vent had been cut. I examined the cementing carefully; as I suspected, the one-inch iron lugs had been slid into two-inch drilled holes, which could only mean that the lugs were straight and not bent over at the ends as they ought to have been, and perhaps would have been, if the cliff had not seemed to be unclimbable. It looked as though the cement were Portland, and the fresh waters on the coast here are heavily alkali—a bad combination; they should have used Portland-Pozzolana, which would have given better adhesion.
