04 Volcano Adventure (13 page)

Just a few minutes now and everything would be decided, for better or worse.

It happened sooner than he expected. His air died down, failed completely, and he found himself sucking a vacuum. He took his hand away from Roger long enough to turn the little lever on his tank that switched on the five-minute reserve.

He felt for Roger’s lever to see if the boy had turned it on - he had. Then he explored to see if the doctor had done the same - he had not. Hal twisted the lever so that new air would rush into the scientist’s lungs.

He felt other hands now, probably Omo’s and Captain Ike’s. It was good that they were all together. They must stand by each other. They had only five minutes now before the reserve air would fail - five minutes to escape from their underwater tomb.

Hal rose towards the surface, drawing the others with him. He had laid his plans. It would do no good to go

hunting for holes. There might not be a hole for hundreds of yards and the chances of their finding it were very slim.

If they scattered and went in different directions one or two of them might find holes but the rest would perish. They must stay together and work together.

He rose until his head grazed the pumice roof.

He took the block his head had touched, drew it down into the water, and pressed it into Roger’s hands. Then he gave Roger a push.

The boy guessed his brother’s plan. The blocks were to be removed one by one to make a hole in the roof. Each block must be taken several yards away before it was released or it would simply pop back into the hole. Roger left his rock at a safe distance and came back for another. In the meantime Hal had been initiating the others. Dr Dan joined him in plucking chunks from overhead and passing them to Roger, Omo and Captain Ike who carried them away.

Presently a light broke through; after the removal of a few more blocks there was a man-sized hole.

Then Hal seized Roger and in spite of that young gentleman’s efforts to make somebody else go first he was pushed up through the hole. He scrambled out on the roof. He reached down and helped the next man up -Dr Dan.

The doctor noticed that the hole was beginning to close again. He worked above to keep it open while the men below removed more blocks. Then up came Omo, Captain Ike and, finally, Hal. The last man was hardly out before the opening closed again.

The men breathed the last of the tank air, then dropped the intakes from their mouths. The evil gases had thinned and the heat was no longer intolerable.

The next thing was to get to the ship. It lay fifty yards away. That did not seem far; but moving over the roof was more of a job than it appeared to be. Although the blocks were wedged tightly together and, in some cases, lightly cemented to each other by the heat, it was unsafe to trust one’s full weight on any one spot. Also the roof was thicker in some places than in others.

So they went along on all fours, sometimes even lying flat, the better to distribute their weight, and inching forward as if on thin ice. At one time Dr Dan’s foot went through and he would have followed it if Captain Ike and Omo had not been close enough to pull him out. After this incident the doctor lay for a moment, breathing hard. But he pulled himself together and the crawl to the ship continued.

Only when they were all safely aboard did he let go completely. In the middle of a sentence he dropped to the deck and was at once sound asleep - or had he fainted? Hal could not be sure which.

Just to make certain that the man had not died of heart attack Hal felt for the pulse. The fact that it was going like a power hammer indicated that the doctor was far from dead. ‘Let’s get him into his bunk,’ Hal said. Omo unstrapped the aqualung and he and Hal carried the limp figure down to the cabin. They stripped off the wet clothes, towelled down the body, and tucked the doctor still sound asleep into his bunk.

Hal and Roger were glad to crawl into their own bunks for a few hours’ sleep. Omo curled up on the open deck for a nap, ready to jump into action at any moment.

Captain Ike was too anxious about his ship to take rest. He strode up and down the deck muttering and grumbling, watching the spurts of flame from the cliff, the firelight of burning villages, the blazing fountains that shot up irregularly from the thirty craters.

Above all he watched the weather. His seaman’s nose told him that the huge cloud of steam, smoke, and gas that shut out the sky was very much like the clouds that announce a hurricane. Not knowing much about volcanoes, he couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t trust those rolling, tumbling masses that seemed to be fighting battles with each other as they were carried here and there by’ contradictory air currents.

Forked lightning leaped back and forth, as if the giants of the upper air were making war upon each other with huge yellow spears. In other parts of the cloud there was a different kind of lightning that came in sudden sheets instead of spears. It was as if someone were hanging out washing on the clothes lines of heaven and then suddenly snatching it away again.

‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it, I don’t like it.’ Each time Captain Ike put his foot down he said, ‘I don’t like it.’

Then he stopped in amazement and looked up at the

masts. They were glowing like the illuminated hands of a watch. A shimmering ghostly light bathed them from top to bottom. Even the rigging was all lined with light.

‘A good sign!’ cried Captain Ike.

Omo started up. ‘Did you call?’

‘No, lad. But look what we got here. Ghosts have come aboard.’

‘That is very bad,’ said Omo. ‘Our people believe those are the spirits of the dead. Something very bad will happen.’

‘Nonsense. Don’t you know what this is? It’s St Elmo’s Fire. St Elmo protects sailors. This is a sign he’s looking after us. We’re going to get out of here okay.’

‘Isn’t that just a white man’s superstition?’

‘White men don’t have superstitions. It’s just you browns who have the superstitions.’

But he had no sooner said it than doubt struck him. How could he say that the brown man’s notions were any more foolish than the white man’s? He had known some pretty silly whites and some very sensible Polynesians.

‘Oh well, perhaps we’re both wrong,’ he admitted. ‘The science fellows say it ain’t ghosts at all, just electricity. Look at that!’

An orangey-coloured star glowed just above the point of the foremast. Captain Ike stared. ‘Spooky, ain’t it? Some say it’s the Star of Bethlehem that will lead us safe.’

‘But our people say…’

‘There we go again,’ laughed Captain Dee. ‘It never happens except when there’s lightning so it’s probably electric, as they say. And there’s a blue star perched on the mainmast. The orange, they tell me, is a positive discharge and the blue is negative. Listen to it!’

A distinct hissing or crackling sound came from the illuminated masts and rigging. It grew louder when lightning flashed overhead and died away whenever the sky went dark. For more than an hour the orange and blue blurs of light, vaguely star-shaped, burned above the mastheads. Then they disappeared as a heavy fall of rain hit the ship.

With the rain came wind, wild blundering wind that seemed to come in circles rather than in straight lines. The ship was anchored fore and aft but the anchors began to drag. Now it seemed that the Lively Lady would be carried against the rocky slope of one of the small islands, and now that she would be dashed into the

cliff.

Hal and Roger came tumbling up, but there was little that anyone could do. Man was weak and small indeed in the grip of the volcanic storm. Dr Dan, if he had been awake, might have told the why of what was going on, but could have done nothing to prevent it.

The crater lake began to twist and bounce under the wind and the floating pumice scraped up and down on the ship’s hull. At every grind and scratch, Captain Ike winced.

‘Won’t be a speck of paint left on her!’ he lamented. ‘We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t scrape a hole in her hull.’

The heat was now a thing of the past. The men, soaked to the skin, were chilled by the rain and wind.

And still there was heat, plenty of it, where the craters

tossed up their fire into the face of the rain and the houses burned in spite of the downpour. Frequent earthquakes rumbled, starting avalanches on the cliffs and opening new cracks and fissures.

At dawn the storm abated but the earthquakes continued. After each one there could be heard several loud explosions that did not seem to come from the quakes themselves nor from the craters. Evidently they woke Dr Dan, who came on deck at sunrise.

‘Those big bangs - what are they?’ asked Captain Ike.

‘Steam explosions,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Those quakes open up big cracks in the earth. If the cracks are under water, the water rushes down into them and strikes the hot lava. There it is changed into steam and that makes an explosion.’

Omo brought some hot food from the galley. The tropic sun began to dry out the wet clothes and warm the chilled bodies.

But there was small comfort in the fact that they were still trapped within a live volcano. They might save themselves by landing where the cliffs were low and crossing the island to the outer beach where they could be taken aboard the Matua.

But how about the Lively Lady ? ‘I won’t leave her,’ insisted Captain Ike. Nor did anyone else want to leave her. Their ship had become a trusted and loyal friend and they would not abandon her. But how could you ride a ship over a wall twenty feet high?

‘Let’s up anchor and take a look at that channel,’ said Captain Dee. ‘It may be open now.’

There was no reason why it should be open and it wasn’t. After the ship had ploughed slowly and heavily through the drifting pumice, the path that led to the ocean was found to be still choked with rock. They gazed at it helplessly.

‘If we only had some dynamite,’ mourned the unhappy captain.

‘Dynamite,’ repeated the others. At that moment dynamite seemed the most precious thing in the world. But there wasn’t so much as a firecracker on board, let alone a stick of dynamite.

At one side of the pass a few feet above the water’s edge was a crack in the rock. Smoke was coming from it.

‘One of the quakes must have done that,’ the doctor said.

They all stared dully at the smoke rising from the crack.

Then Hal’s weary mind began to turn over, very unwillingly, like a cat that doesn’t want to be disturbed. A crack. Smoke. Smoke meant fire. It must be very hot down in there.

He turned to Dr Dan. ‘What were you saying about steam explosions?’

‘Just that when water gets into a crack and strikes hot lava it makes steam and you get an explosion.’

‘Enough of an explosion to blow that rock out of the pass?’

‘It would probably do a lot more than that,’ said Dr Dan. ‘What are you getting at?’

Hal hesitated. ‘It’s a crazy idea. Probably it wouldn’t work.’

Dr Dan said sarcastically, ‘Then why waste our time with it?’

But the others were not so easily satisfied. Captain Bee demanded:

‘What’s on your mind, lad?’

‘Well, I was just thinking, if water down that crack would make an explosion, why don’t we put water down the crack?’

‘How could we do it?’

‘With the deck hose.’

Roger began to dance. ‘Oh boy! That would blow the rock out of the pass and we could get out. Let’s go.!’

‘Hold on,’ said Hal. ‘It’s not so simple. It might blow out the rock - but at the same time it would blow us to Kingdom Come.’-

Gloom settled once more upon the group. It had seemed a brilliant plan and for a moment they had imagined themselves safely outside the murderous volcano. Now once again they were hopeless prisoners.

Dr Dan’s forehead was furrowed in thought. ‘I’m not so sure the plan wouldn’t work,’ he said.

‘But we have to bring the ship alongside to get the hose into the crack,’ said Hal. ‘An explosion would blast us to bits,’

‘Not necessarily. The explosion wouldn’t be immediate. It takes a little time for steam to form. If you set a kettle of water on a hot fire does it begin to steam right away?’

‘No, it may take ten or fifteen minutes.’

‘Exactly. Of course this fire is hotter than the fire in a stove. But we’ll balance that by putting in a lot more water than you could get into a kettle, or a thousand kettles. If we pump a ton or two of water into that crack it ought to take ten or fifteen minutes for it to generate enough steam to make an explosion. We’ll have time to haul off to a safe distance. I think you have something, Hunt,’ he acknowledged with a bitter smile. ‘I wish it had been my plan instead of yours, but I’m willing to go along with anything that will get us out of here.’

But Hal had another objection to his own plan. ‘The crack,’ he said. Tt will act like a safety valve. The steam will escape through the crack and there won’t be any explosion.’

‘Oh yes there will. How do you suppose all these other explosions occur? An earthquake makes a crack, water rushes in and makes steam that causes an explosion, in spite of the fact that some of the steam escapes through the crack. The point is that the crack is too small - it lets out only a tiny fraction of the steam. Think of a steam locomotive - you may see steam escaping from the valves but still there is enough to drive the pistons and pull a train a mile long. You see, the magic of steam is expansion. When water turns into steam it expands and must have sixteen hundred times as much space as when it was in the form of water. That means that enough water to fill a box four feet wide would change into a mass of steam as big as a house. That little two-inch crack won’t let out enough of it to matter. I think we’ll have an explosion, and a good one. Let’s try it.’

It was amusing to see how the doctor went to work to carry out the plan of the man he disliked so heartily. Hal thought it showed that Dr Dan, though a bit sick in the head, was still a good sport.

With Omo at the engine and Captain Ike at the wheel the ship was brought close alongside the rocks. Hal and Dr Dan climbed ashore with the hose and Roger, determined not to miss anything, came after them.