04 Volcano Adventure (11 page)

If the doctor should slip on a rafter and fall into a house he might very well drop into the arms of a hungry octopus. It was just such black holes as these that the octopus loved.

A shadow passed above and Hal looked up to see a lazy shark watching with great interest the antics of these strange humans. Then another shark moved in. Hal felt that he and his companions were becoming too popular.

Dr Dan came slowly walking towards Hal. He stopped and cupped his hand behind his ear as if he were listening. A dreamy smile lay on his face. It is common for one suffering from rapture of the depths to think that he hears lovely music, a great orchestra, or a heavenly choir.

Dr Dan raised his eyes and saw the sharks. They appeared to interest him but he did not seem to realize what they were. He swam up towards them and Hal was not quick enough to stop him.

The doctor came close under the bigger shark. Then with all his force he punched its white belly.

If he had done this to a tiger shark or a white shark he would not have lived to regret it Luckily this was a sand shark and although he was huge he was also a bit timid. He contented himself with switching his tail and swimming off.

The swing of the big tail caught the doctor on the side of the head, knocked off his mask and dislodged the air intake from his mouth. He began to sink slowly like a limp rag. Evidently the blow had knocked him unconscious. Without air, he would very quickly drown. Blood trickled from his forehead.

Hal and Roger already had him in their grip and were forcing him up towards the surface.

The other shark came nearer, attracted by the smell of blood. Hal could see it more clearly now and realized with a shock that this one was no sand shark. It was a mako, often called the man-eater because it does not hesitate to attack divers. Hal and Roger thrashed the water in a vain attempt to

frighten it away. At last they broke the surface and looked about for the ship. It lay a good five hundred yards distant. They could easily lose a leg or two to the mako if they tried to swim that far.

Hal dropped the intake from his mouth and shouted. The quick ear of Omo heard him and the Polynesian boy came running to the forepeak.

‘Bring the boat,’ shouted Hal. ‘Shark!’

Omo flung off the painter of the boat that lay on the water alongside the ship, jumped in and rowed with all his might. Hal and Roger faced the shark and beat the water with the palms of their hands. They knew it was hard to scare a man-eater, but they could only try.

The shark edged closer. Its ugly face appeared above the surface, then sank again. The boys shouted and slapped and were glad that Omo’s arms were strong.

The small boat came zipping over the water with the speed of a flying-fish. It seemed to worry the man-eater, and he hesitated to strike. He had just about made up his mind to it when the boat arrived and stopped with a savage back-churning of the oars.

‘What happened to Dr Dan?’ cried Omo as he hauled the limp form of the doctor into the boat. The others climbed in and they set out for the ship.

‘He went drunk,’ said Hal. ‘Then he lost his air.’

In a few moments the doctor was on the ship’s deck and was being manipulated to get the sea water out of him. After this was done, he lay unconscious for a good five minutes.

‘He’ll come out of it,’ Hal said. ‘His pulse is all right.’

At last the doctor’s eyes fluttered open and he looked lazily about. He pressed his hand against his temple. So he lay for several minutes, resting. Then he smiled at Hal, a rather bitter smile.

‘Well, my boy, you see I didn’t get the bends after all.’

The bends?’ said Hal. ‘I said you might get drunkenness of the deeps.’

‘Oh, is that something different?’

‘Quite different.’

‘Very well, then, I didn’t get your drunkenness of the deeps.’

Evidently the doctor remembered nothing of what had happened during the last dreadful half hour.

‘That was an interesting village,’ he said. So he did remember the village.

‘And an interesting shark,’ put in Roger.

Dr Dan looked up at him inquiringly. ‘There were no sharks, Roger. Perhaps you mistook some shadows for sharks.’

‘There were sharks, Dr Dan,’ Hal said. ‘And you had a run-in with them. But you didn’t know about it. You were drunk.’

Dr Dan looked at him a long time without answering. Then he sat up and began to unstrap the fins from his feet.

‘Hal,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t know what your game is. Whatever it is. I don’t like it. I thought you were a good sort. It seems I made a mistake.’

Roger came to his brother’s defence. ‘There really was a shark, Dr Dan.’

‘I saw it, too,’ Omo said.

Dr Dan looked up with a bitter smile. ‘So you are all in the plot against me. That amounts to mutiny, doesn’t it? Well, you won’t get away with it. I may have to put up with you until we reach Hawaii - then what a pleasure it will be to get rid of you and your ship.’

The news came crackling over the air:

‘Eruption at Niuafou.’

The Lively Lady trimmed her sails for Niuafou.

‘Sailors call it Tin Can Island,’ Captain Ike told the boys.

‘Because the people get their food in tin cans?’ guessed Roger.

‘As a matter of fact, the people live on coconuts and fish. No, there’s a stranger reason than that for calling it Tin Can Island. Ships carrying mail don’t bother to go inshore. Natives swim out to get the mail. The ship’s carpenter seals up all the mail in large biscuit this. When these are thrown overboard they float because of the air in them and the swimmers push them ashore. Now they sometimes come out in a canoe because a shark got one of their swimmers.’

‘I think I have some stamps from Tin Can Island in my stamp collection,’ said Roger.

‘Yes, stamp collectors are pretty keen to get them.

They’d better get them while they can. Some day that old volcano is going to blow Tin Can Island right off the map.’

It was only two hundred miles from Jack-in-the-Box to Tin Can, less than a day’s run for the Lively Lady.

The first thing to be seen was a pillar of smoke. Gradually the island beneath it came into view.

‘I’ve been looking it up in my geology manual,’ Dr Dan told Captain Ike, as the boys listened in. ‘This island is really one big volcano. It stands on the bottom of the ocean six thousand feet down. That means that the volcano is more than a mile high, but only the rim of the crater projects above the surface. Inside the crater is a lake three miles wide. There’s supposed to be a break in the rim - if we can find it, we can sail into the lake. Let’s try it.’

‘Doesn’t sound too good to me,’ said Captain Ike doubtfully. ‘Don’t like the idea of sailing my ship straight into an exploding crater.’

‘The lake isn’t exploding. The eruption is coming from vents in the rim.’

‘But the lake could blow up any time couldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it could. We have to take that chance. We’re here to study this thing, and how are we going to study it unless we get close to it?’

Captain Ike grumbled and chewed on the stem of his pipe. The boys had gone up to the crow’s-nest to get a better look at the strange crater-island.

Captain Ike lowered his voice. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you, Dan Adams. If you know what’s good for you, don’t get yourself into tight spots. It makes your nerves go haywire.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ exploded Dr Dan. ‘The boys have been filling your ears with wild stories. I must say I’m disappointed in those boys. They are tricky and under-handed, and the older one seems to have some idea of discrediting me so that I will be fired and he will get my job.’

‘Now be reasonable, Doc. How could he get your job knowing so little about volcanoes?’

‘That’s just the point,’ said Dr Dan. ‘He doesn’t know so little. He’s seen quite a number of volcanoes by this time and he’s been studying every book I have on board. I hate to give him credit for it but he has a sharp mind-he learns fast.’

‘So you’re afraid of him,’ Captain Ike taunted. ‘A boy not yet out of his teens!’

Dr Dan bristled. ‘I’m not afraid of anybody. But I don’t trust him, nor his brother, nor that Omo.’ ‘Do you trust me?’

Dr Dan shifted uneasily. ‘You talk like the rest of them.’

Captain Ike chuckled. ‘Put your mind at rest,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants to do you in. You’ve got the boys all wrong. I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I told you they saved your life when you went balmy during that dive.’

Dr Dan’s cheeks paled and his eyes fixed upon Captain Ike grew hard and bright. ‘That’s their story,’ he said. ‘You weren’t down there to see for yourself, were you? Yet you take the word of a couple of schoolboys against mine.’

Captain Ike could see that the doctor was getting dangerously angry.

‘Skip it.’ he said. ‘Forget it. Where did you say that channel was?’

‘Somewhere on this side. Probably over there at that low point.’

The doctor’s guess proved to be correct. As they came closer, they could see the pass into the lake. It was a very narrow pass, not more than thirty feet wide, but the Lively Lady easily slipped through. Then the little ship found herself, for the first time in her life, actually inside a volcano.

All around rose the crater wall. In most places it was about six hundred feet high but on the northern side reached almost a thousand.

The boys had seen something like it before. It reminded them of Crater Lake in Oregon. There, too, a crater was filled with water, but it was a dead crater.

This was a live one. Only a few jets of steam rose from the lake itself. But on the western shore a row of small craters like chimneys sent up clouds of smoke and steam. They were the children of the great crater. Dr Dan counted them.

‘Thirty craters in action,’ he said.

That part of the rim was very savage and terrible. But the rest of the circular island was beautiful. It was heavily wooded with mangoes, coconuts, ironwood, pandanus, and other tropical trees and shrubs. Peeping from the trees were native villages. The boys counted nine of them.

‘It gets me,’ said Captain Ike. ‘All these people -living on the edge of a volcano.’

‘Thirteen hundred people live here,’ Dr Dan answered. ‘There have been five bad eruptions in the last century -still they hang on. Not that I blame them much.’ He looked about at the beautiful groves of trees and the cosy villages on top of the crater wall. ‘A nice place to live - so long as it doesn’t blow up.’

Only one man on board had been here before. That was the brown young sailor, Omo, who had been born in the South Seas and lived there all his life. He had once visited Tin Can in a trading schooner.

He pointed to a village perched on the highest point or the north rim. ‘That’s the village of Angaha,’ he said. ‘The high chief of that village rules the whole island. Once some of his people rebelled and went to the south rim and built their own village. They refused to pay taxes to the high chief. Their headman declared he would rather have his village destroyed by the gods than pay taxes to the high chief. He had hardly said these words before the ground opened up under his own house and hot lava began to spurt out. It killed him and burned his house and flowed out through the village. It burned every house to the ground and killed sixty people.’

‘And that was blamed on the gods,’ Hal said.

‘Yes. The gods get blamed for everything bad and thanked for everything good that happens. You see, the people don’t understand the scientific reasons for these things. For instance, when there’s an earthquake, they think it’s caused by their god Maui. He is supposed to be sleeping far down in the earth and when he rolls over, that makes an earthquake.’

‘He’s rolling over now,’ said Hal, as a violent shiver ran through the lake, making the Lively Lady dance. Landslides of rock and ash slid down the crater walls and splashed into the lake. Screams could be heard from the shore and Captain Ike, who was using the binoculars, reported, ‘That tumbled down several houses. The people are running around like frightened ants.’

‘I’m afraid they’re in for a bad time,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Thirty craters all going at once can make a lot of trouble.’

Ashes and cinders were raining down upon the deck. Now and then a larger chunk arrived. Hal picked one up - it was not very hot and it was extremely light.

‘It’s pumice,’ he said. ‘Just like that big rock we found on Mt Asama.’

He tossed it into the water and it floated. Patches of pumice like little yellow islands bounced up and down on the ripples.

Another object struck the deck with a loud thud. Roger went to pick it up.

‘Don’t,’warned Hal. ‘It’s hot!’

‘But the one you picked up wasn’t hot.’

‘I know, but it was pumice, full of air holes. That’s one of the blocks - I’ve been reading about them. And that’s a bomb,’ he added as something burst with a loud report only ten feet above their heads and the fragments fell about them.

‘Well, what’s the difference between a block and a bomb?’

‘A block is a piece of solid rock. A bomb is a block that is hollow inside and filled with gas. The gas explodes and blows the rock to bits.’

The god Maui rolled over again in his sleep. Avalanches thundered down into the lake. In the village of Angaha a stone church on the heights suddenly swayed, then dissolved, and fell flat. Showers of bombs were exploding over the houses, setting many of them on fire. The people were in a panic. Where could they go to escape the thirty monsters?

They ought to be evacuated,’ said Dr Dan. ‘But it would take a bigger ship than ours to carry them off. We’d better send for help.’

He went below and dispatched a message summoning any ships within call to come at once to remove the inhabitants of Tin Can Island.

He got only one response. It was from a steamer by the name of Matua. Its captain reported that his ship’s position was nearly two hundred miles from Tin Can and he could not promise to arrive before morning.

Blasts of fire shot up from the craters. At the same instant another violent earthquake shook the island and a great section of the ridge broke away and fell into the lake.