Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

"Someone on this island set those lights so we'd run slam on the reef, you mean?" Monk muttered.

Ham said soberly, "Someone drew us a hundred miles off our course and wrecked us. We're up against something really sinister !"

"Kinda wish Doc was here," Monk announced.

The next moment, he was wishing it even more violently.

Attracted perhaps by the blue-white searchlight beam which had lanced out from the Seven Seas a moment after she had gone on the rocks, shadowy man-figures loosened from the darkly entwined mangrove thicket and bore down upon the castaways, brandishing short clubs and shrieking a harsh unintelligible gibberish.

The dimly seen attackers — 20-or-more — rushed out of the mangroves in a solid wave. Ham and Monk thrust Pat behind, then met the attack — Ham with his sword cane and Monk with his granite-knuckled fists.

Ham dropped two of the assailants with deft thrusts of the sword cane. He was careful not to allow the valuable cane — tipped with the unconsciousness-producing chemical — to be struck. In fact, Ham was more regardful of the cane than of himself.

Unexpectedly, there was an ugly-sounding whack . Ham staggered back groggily from a club which had bludgeoned past his guard. Dazedly, he saw the club lift again. But it did not descend. Not with any weight behind it. There was a rap of knuckles against a jaw as Monk's long arm jabbed out and knocked the club-swinger off his feet.

Ham recovered his balance and got his deadly sword cane into use again.

"Let's charge 'em!" Monk squawled.

"Right-o!" Ham agreed. "We'll try to break through into the mangroves!"

Side-by-side, they advanced into a rain of clubs — Monk's pummeling fists working like locomotive driving rods, Ham's sword cane darting in-and-out like an aroused snake. Pressing forward behind them, Pat scooped up rocks from the beach and threw them as fast as she could. Even Habeas Corpus did his part, squealing and grunting and gouging his sharp tusks into every foot and ankle that came within reach of his wood-rasp snout.

The varied strategy was too much for the attackers. They thought Ham's sword cane was dealing out death. They broke suddenly with hideous yells to go crashing away and disappear in the black recesses of the mangrove sink.

Monk picked up Habeas Corpus and swung him lustily by the long ears, much to the pig's squealing delight. Monk grinned. The action lighted up his unbelievably homely face, making it very pleasant to look at.

There was a little light now from the stars. Ham was making a quick examination of the anesthetized victims of his sword cane.

They were of different races and colors. And all wore loin cloths. Their necks were encircled with copper-studded collars made seemingly out of lizard hide.

A great blast of noise riveted Ham's attention. It was only Monk laughing.

"What's the matter, you hairy ape?" Ham demanded, suspiciously.

"I was thinkin' how you would look in the costume of the country: a loin cloth and a dog collar."

Ham bristled and gripped his sword cane tighter. "You wide-mouthed macaw … " he began.

Pat silenced him with tight-lipped words. "If you want more fighting, save your strength," she said. "They're coming back!"

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

A loud "plud" sounded in the wet sand near Ham's feet. In a second, the air was filled with heavy missiles. Habeas Corpus squealed .

"They're heaving rocks!" Ham shouted.

"They can throw more rocks than we can," Monk growled. "Let's get outta here."

Monk tucked one of the short thick clubs under his arm, grabbed up Habeas Corpus by the ears, and lunged into the shadowed thicket. Pat and Ham followed closely.

Pressing through the mangrove sink, they came out upon a height of land that was nothing if not weird . Volcanic rock — black lava sharp as broken glass — swallowed them up in a welter of fantastically shaped hills and gullies. Much of the razor-edged glass was in tilted sheets which were prone to slip and shatter under the weight of a footfall. Giant cactuses rooted in the crevices and dangled their spiny pads overhead, like hooded cobras ready to strike.

They lost all sounds of pursuit.

The low-raking clouds lifted and the three pressed on under the pale white light of equatorial stars.

"I hope we get somewhere quick," Pat said, appalled.

"They speak of the Galapagos archipelago as the 'World's End'," Ham remarked.

"They don't miss it much," Monk grumbled. "How we're goin' to find Johnny in this volcanic scrap heap, I dunno."

"Did either of you get the impression," Pat asked suddenly, "that our League-of-Nations attackers were being careful not to kill us?"

"Yeah," Monk admitted. "Even those rocks were not thrown too hard."

"They wanted us alive, I guess," Ham supplied.

"My guess, too. But why?"

"That's anybody's guess."

"We could sure use Doc Savageabout now!"

Climbing higher up the glassy slope, they passed through a belt of cold volcanic pits and cones where ages before the molten rock had bubbled like mush and cooled in scabrous pockmarks.

They came out on a wide plateau where nothing grew — not even the cobra-head cactus — and where the pits were smaller, clogged with earth, and so close together that it was necessary to skirt the region to make any forward progress.

Monk stopped suddenly.

"These pits are all in geometric order," he declared. "They're not volcanic pits like the ones below. They're man-made."

Ham stared. On the plain, the glassy rock had given way to a kind of reddish clay or hard-packed volcanic ash.

"Right," he clipped. "The pits are crumbling away now and mostly buried under loose earth. Hard to tell, but they must have been laid out originally with the regularity of cells in a honeycomb."

As they continued on, the honeycombpattern became more apparent as the pits were revealed in a less crumbling condition.

"These were dug later," Ham observed.

"Yeah," Monk agreed. "The farther we go, the fresher the pits look."

"Rut what are they for?" Pat wondered. "Say, this all gets queerer and queerer. What's it all about?"

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

"Listen!" Ham said, tensely.

Wafted on the miasmatic breeze came sharp, cracking sounds. There was unearthliness about the sounds as though they sprang from the air of their own volition.

"What is it?" Pat asked uneasily.

"No animal ever made a sound like that," Monk blurted.

Suddenly through and above the cracking sounds came a long-drawn wail which quavered up-and-down the scale in agony so appalling that a trickle of icy water seemed to be loosened on the back of each of the 3 listeners.

Pat gasped: "I never heard anything like it. Horrible!"

"A dying animal of some kind," Ham said.

"Dying man!" Monk corrected, grimly.

"Come on," Ham said, gripping his sword cane.

As they pressed forward, the pits in the rock-like ash actually became as sharply delineated as the cells in a honeycomb. A giant honeycomb! These pits were about 10 feet in diameter, and some 10 feet where they were not filled with loose earth. The mysterious cracking noises sounded louder.

"Ahead there," Ham rapped under his breath. "Look!"

"Shadows!" Pat gasped. "Like men moving!"

The 3 worked closer, holding to the concealment of the fringing thicket. White-pointed thorns tore at them, viciously shredding their clothes and piercing flesh. But they succeeded in approaching opposite the place where the shadows moved and from where the cracking -cutting noises issued. Here the plain stretched on. But the advancing line of pits came to an end.