04 Volcano Adventure (6 page)

Sky-rockets soared up through the smoke and a volley of rocks struck the bottom of the bell. There was a long rumbling and then a terrific crash as if a hundred locomotives were meeting head-on. The crater god lifted the bell as easily as if it had been a baseball and hurled it against the cliff. Broken glass tumbled into the bell. Smoke and gas flooded in through the gaping hole.

Hal stuffed his shirt into the hole. It was not a very good cork. Some gas would come through it and around it. But if the crane motor didn’t fail and if there was nothing to interrupt their ascent they might reach the top in time.

The light was changing from firelight to daylight. Now and then they could catch a glimpse of the sky through the smoke. But Hal’s rising hope was checked when Dr Dan reminded him of the ledge on which they had stuck during the descent.

‘Well strike it again on the way up,’ said Dr Dan. ‘If we hit it too hard we might break the cable. Too bad I can’t telephone those fellows to slow down.’

He had hardly finished speaking when the roof of the cage struck the ledge with a jarring bump and the bell’s ascent was checked. Fortunately the cable still held. But the margin of the rocky shelf firmly pressed down upon the roof of the bell so that further ascent was impossible.

‘I was hoping we could slide by,’ said the volcano man. ‘But it doesn’t seem to be on the cards. There’s not very much that we can do. If we had a boat hook we could push ourselves off. But this tub doesn’t seem to be equipped with boat hooks. Perhaps the chaps upstairs will have an idea.’

He tucked the shirt more tightly into the hole.

‘Breathe as lightly as you can so that we don’t use up the good air any faster than necessary.’

The men above did realize what had happened for they could see the bell clearly when the smoke parted. They tried lowering it a few feet and then raising it. This was done repeatedly, but every time the steel roof caught under the ledge and refused to slip by.

Roger looked anxious, forgetting his own hurt feelings. He had been pretty sore at not being allowed to go down in the bell. He felt that the Japanese regarded him as only a youngster and of no real importance to the expedition.

‘How did they happen to bring you along?’ Mr Sanada had said. ‘You can’t be more than fifteen years old.’

Roger, big for his age, actually had a year to go yet before he would be fifteen, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess age doesn’t matter so much as experience.’ ‘Oh, so you’ve had a lot of experience with volcanoes?’ ‘Quite a bit.’ He wouldn’t tell the man that this was only the second volcano he had ever seen in his life.

‘I suppose it takes a lot of study to become a volcanologist.’ ‘Yes, it does.’

Mr Sanada was looking at Hira with new respect. ‘I’m afraid I under-rated you. I thought you were just a kid who had come along for the ride. Now I see you’re a trained scientist - quite remarkable in one so young.’

Roger turned away to hide a laugh. It was fun bluffing this fellow. But somehow he wasn’t quite happy about it. Truth to tell, he was a little ashamed. Oh well, now that be had made the bluff, he would have to live up to it. He fried to look important, and to make scientific remarks about the crater and its boiling contents.

But when he saw the bell in great danger he dropped his pretence and was just an anxious boy worrying about his brother.

After all attempts to get the bell past the ledge had failed, the man at the crane stopped trying. He turned off

his motor. The Japanese gazed blankly at each other. Mr Sanada turned to Roger.

‘You’re a trained volcano man,’ he said. ‘What do you think we should do?’

Roger felt very small. If there had been a hole as big as a mousehole he would have crawled through it.

‘I… don’t… know,’ he admitted.

‘What do you do in similar cases?’

‘Well,’ stumbled Roger, ‘we … usually send a man down. He could push the bell out a couple of inches -then it would get by the rock.’

‘Of course!’ exclaimed Mr Sanada. ‘Why didn’t we think of that? We have plenty of rope here and we can let you right down to the ledge.’

‘Me!’ cried Roger.

‘Yes - not that any one of us wouldn’t be willing to go. But this is obviously a job for a man who knows volcanoes.’

Roger gulped. He looked down to the ledge. The stinging smoke and suffocating gases flooded up into his face. He stood up, feeling green and cold. The Japanese were waiting, and Mr Sanada was looking at him curiously.

‘Where’s the rope?’ said Roger.

It was brought and he had it looped about his chest just as he had seen Dr Dan put it on.

Then he stepped to the edge of the crater. He did not look down into it again - he didn’t dare. He turned his back to it and, while the men held the line taut, he let himself down over the edge.

Now he was dangling in space like a spider at the end of a thread. Down he went, rather jerkily, past the red wall. The explosions from below terrified him. He thought at that moment that if there was anything he would never want to do it was to be a volcanologist

The fumes were stifling. If he only had a gas mask! He was being cooked by the rising heat. Luckily there were strong air currents so that occasionally the heat and gas and smoke were carried away from him and then he could take in deep breaths of almost pure air. He made a practice of holding his breath until these moments came.

His feet struck the ledge. Now he was standing on the rocky shelf. He got down on his hands and knees and crept to the edge. The roof of the bell was caught firmly under the rim.

Roger looked up. He could see the Japanese peering down. He signalled for the bell to be lowered. There was a moment’s delay, then the bell eased down an inch or two.

Roger lay flat on the shelf, his head and shoulders over the edge. He could reach the roof of the bell. He signalled for the bell to be raised. Up it came, slowly. Roger, with his hands on the rim of the roof, pushed with all his strength. The bell cleared the ledge with an inch to spare and continued its ascent. As it went by, two grinning feces looked out to the boy on the ledge.

Roger was hauled up and arrived at the top a moment after the bell had landed. Dr Dan and Hal were released from their gassy prison. They were very happy, though dizzy and faint from the effects of the gas.

Hal looked proudly at his younger brother. ‘Good work,’ he said, and put his arm about the boy’s shoulders. Mr Sanada burst in with:

‘How fortunate we had a good man to send down after you! Remarkable - so young, and yet he’s made such a study of volcanology, visited so many craters - he was telling us about it.’

Dr Dan looked at Roger and chuckled. Roger blushed to the roots of his hair. What would the doctor think of him? He waited for Dr Dan to tell Sanada just how much he really knew about craters.

He glanced up. But there was no sarcasm on the doctor’s face, only a friendly smile, and all he told Mr Sanada was:

‘Roger is a good volcano man.’

The good ship Lively Lady sailed west.

Behind loomed a volcano sending up a mile-high column of rose-and-blue smoke. It was Mihara, into which Dr Dan and Hal had descended in the diving bell.

Ahead lay more volcanoes. Hal and Roger were not anxious to get to them too soon.

Their adventures on and in Mihara had tired them and they were glad to lie on the deck in the sun. They felt at home. How good it was to be in the arms of the Lively Lady once more.

It seemed a long time since they had set out from San Francisco in this gallant little sixty-foot, Marconi-rigged sailing schooner to capture creatures of the deep sea for their animal-collector father.

They had learned much about the Pacific and what goes on beneath its waves. They had found Captain Ike Flint a fine captain and a good friend. Now the ship had been chartered by the American Museum of Natural History for its study of Pacific volcanoes. But Captain Ike remained as master while Hal, Roger and their Polynesian friend, Omo, had been kept along with the ship. Dr Dan Adams believed that though they knew nothing

about volcanoes they were strong in body and brain and would be quick to learn.

Hal, as he stretched out wearily in the soft sunlight, hoped the doctor had not been disappointed.

He would have been encouraged if he could have heard the conversation up forward between Dr Dan and Captain Ike.

‘They’re tough,’ the doctor was saying. ‘Hal insisted on going down in the bell with me. When we got stuck, the kid came down at the end of a rope and pushed us off.’

Leather-faced little old Captain Ike chewed the stem of his pipe. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘After the things I’ve seen them do, diving for shark and octopus and such, I wouldn’t expect them to be scared by a bit o’ smoke and gas.’

Dr Dan smiled. ‘Captain, have you ever looked down into a crater?’

‘Can’t rightly say I have.’

‘Well, let me tell you it’s more than a bit of smoke and gas. The thundering racket, the heat, the earthquakes, the fountains of fire, the explosions, the flying rocks, the fumes - well, it’s hell let loose. And to go down into a crater - it can be pretty terrifying. I once had an experience …’

Captain Ike waited for him to continue, but the doctor’s face had become as still as marble and the eyes were fixed and staring as if made of glass.

‘You were saying …’ the captain prompted. But there was not the slightest movement in the scientist’s face or body. For a full minute he remained so. Then his features melted, his eyes moved, and life seemed to flow through him once more.

‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘where were we? Oh, I was telling you about the boys …’

But Captain Ike was thinking to himself: ‘This poor fellow remembers something that he might better forget.’ Kobo, the Japanese student in search of English, sat beside Hal and Roger and kept them talking in that language. He was learning fast.

Handsome, brown Omo in his perch in the crow’s-nest listened to the deck talk as he scanned the shore of Japan, looking for the passage that would take them to their next Japanese volcano.

‘Bungo!’ he cried at last. Three points to starboard.’ The little ship swung to the right to brave the tide rips and whirlpools of the Bungo Channel.

Then Japan’s inland sea, probably the most beautiful sea in the world, with its three thousand fantastic islands and its surrounding mountains crowned with old castles and temples, opened up before them.

The ship rounded to port, and ahead lay one of the strangest sights of the world - a whole mountainside bristling with geysers of steam. Among the geysers were houses, for this was the city of Beppu. Beyond rose a column of smoke from Aso volcano.

‘I suppose this is the only city on earth,’ Dr Dan told the boys, ‘where hot water doesn’t cost a penny. Poke a hole in the earth anywhere and up comes hot water or steam or both. Every house gets its hot water from underground. The water never stops coming up - taps can be left running all the time, it doesn’t matter. No wood or coal is needed in the kitchen stoves. Meals are cooked by steam from below. Factories run by steam. Powerhouses use steam to make electricity to light the city. Beppu is sitting on a red-hot boiler. Some day the boiler may burst, but until it does the people cheerfully use its power to run their city.’

‘Judging from those geysers,’ said Hal, ‘there’s more power than they can use.’

‘Yes, most of the steam just shoots up into the air and goes to waste. Most of the hot water runs down into the bay. There’s enough power here to run all of Japan, if it could be harnessed.’

The ship anchored in the bay close to the beach. Roger rubbed bis eyes.

These people must be headhunters!’

His brother laughed. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Look at all those heads lying on the beach.’

Sure enough, a row of human heads lay on the sand. They were all Japanese. Some were the heads of men, some of women. There were children’s heads, too. In some cases the eyes were closed; in others, they were open, as if the heads were still alive. Roger’s eyes nearly popped out when he saw some of the heads move and begin to talk to each other.

‘Come ashore,’ said Dr Dan. ‘When we get close to them you’ll see what it’s all about.’

They stepped out on to the dock and down on to the beach. Now Roger could see that the heads had bodies attached to them, but the bodies were buried in sand. Steam rose from the sand.

‘Beppu is famous for its sand bathing,’ said Dr Dan.

‘How would you like to try it?’

It seemed a curious way to take a bath, but the boys were willing to try anything. In the nearby bathhouse they paid a small fee, removed their clothes, put on trunks, then came out on to the beach.

Roger was the first to be buried. An old woman with a shovel dug a grave for him in the steaming sand, then told him to lie in it. He lay down, but immediately jumped out with a howl of pain for the wet sand was almost boiling hot.

All the Japanese heads laughed at him and chattered to each other. He could imagine what they were saying, ‘These foreigners - they can’t stand much.’

The old woman cried shame upon him. She took him by the arm and pulled and pushed him down into the steaming grave and before he could leap out again she began to shovel sand over him. When a neat burial mound had been raised, and nothing remained visible but his red-hot face, she knocked the breath out of him by giving the mound a final whack with the flat of her shovel.

Roger was quite sure he could not stand the sizzling heat for more than five minutes. But by the time the others were buried his pain had merged into blissful comfort, he felt his muscles and nerves untying their knots and time became of no importance. For an hour they all lay stewing happily and were sorry at the end of that time to see the old woman coming with her shovel to dig them out.

‘And now to see the boiling lakes,’ said Dr Dan. ‘Beppu has a dozen of them. The Japanese call them

jigoku, which means hell. And when you see them you’ll think the name fits.’

The first was Blood Hell and it was something to remember. A small lake of blood-red water boiled and rolled, let out great gusts of steam, and threw up jets of red liquid to a great height. ‘Iron sulphide,’ explained Dr Dan. ‘Sometimes it spouts three hundred feet high. And, believe it or not, this bit of a lake is five hundred feet deep.’ He busied himself with his instruments and notes.