As Ned steered the boat in towards the riverbank, a wild, booming bark echoed down the gorge. They all looked up. "What are those creatures? Are they men?" demanded Ned. "Some kind of strange hairy dwarfs?" There was fear and awe in his voice, as he stared up at the ranks of human-like shapes that lined the edge of the precipice high above them.
"Apes." Sir Francis called to him as he rested on his oar. "Like those of the Barbary Coast."
Aboli chuckled, then threw back his head and faithfully mimicked the challenge of the bull baboon that led the pack. Most of the younger animals leaped up and nervously skittered along the cliff at the sound.
The huge bull ape accepted the challenge. He stood on all fours at the edge of the precipice, and opened his mouth wide to display a set of terrible white fangs. Emboldened by this show, some of the younger animals returned and began to hurl small stones and debris down upon them. The men were forced to duck and dodge the missiles.
"Give them a shot to see them off," Sir Francis ordered. "It's a long one." Daniel unslung his musket and blew on the burning tip of the slow-match as he raised the butt to his shoulder. The gorge echoed to the thunderous blast, and they all burst out laughing at the antics of the baboon pack, as it panicked at the shot. The ball knocked a chip off the lip of the ledge, and the youngsters of the troop somersaulted backwards with shock. The mothers seized their offspring, slung them under their bellies and scrambled up the sheer face, and even the brave bull abandoned his dignity and joined the rush for safety. Within seconds, the cliff was deserted and the sounds of the terror-stricken retreat dwindled.
Aboli jumped over the side, waist deep into the river, and dragged the boat onto the bank while Daniel and Ned un stoppered the water casks to refill them. In the other boat Sir Francis and Hal bent to the oars and rowed on upstream. After half a mile the river narrowed sharply, and the cliffs on both sides became steeper. Sir Francis paused to get his bearings and then turned the longboat in under the cliff and moored the bows to the stump of a dead tree that sprang from a crack in the rock. Leaving Hal in the boat he jumped out onto the narrow ledge below the cliff and began to climb upwards. There was no obvious path to follow but Sir Francis moved confidently from one handhold to another. Hal watched him with pride. in his eyes, his father was an old man he must have long passed the venerable age of forty years yet he climbed with strength and agility. Suddenly, fifty feet above the river, he reached a ledge invisible from below and shuffled a few paces along it. Then he knelt to examine the narrow cleft in the cliff face, the opening was blocked with neatly packed rocks. He smiled with relief when he saw that they were exactly as he had left them many months previously. Carefully he pulled them out of the cleft and laid them aside, until the opening was wide enough for him to crawl through.
The cave beyond was in darkness but Sir Francis stood up and reached to a stone shelf above his head where he groped for the flint and steel he had left there. He lit the candle he had brought with him, and then looked around the cave.
Nothing had been touched since his last visit. Five chests stood against the back wall. That was the booty from the Heerlycke Nacht, mostly silver plate and a hundred thousand guilders in coin that had been intended for payment of the Dutch garrison in Batavia. A pile of gear was stacked beside the entrance, and Sir Francis began work on this immediately. It took him almost half an hour to rig the heavy wooden beam as a gantry from the ledge outside the cave entrance, and then to lower the tackle to the boat moored below.
"Make the first chest fast!" he called down to Hal.
Hal tied it on and his father hauled it upwards, the sheave squeaking at each heave. The chest disappeared and a few minutes later the rope end dropped back and dangled where Hal could reach it. He tied on the next chest.
It took them well over an hour to hoist all the ingots and the sacks of coin and stack them in the back of the cave. Then they started work on the powder kegs and the bundles of weapons. The last item to go up was the smallest. a box into which Sir Francis had packed a compass and backstaff, a roll of charts taken from the Standvasdgheid, flint and steel, a set of surgeon's instruments in a canvas roll, and a selection of other equipment that could make the difference between survival and a lingering death to a party stranded on this savage, unexplored coast.
"Come up, Hal," Sir Francis called down at last, and Hal went up the cliff with the speed and ease of one of the young baboons.
When Hal reached him, his father was sitting comfortably on the narrow-ledge, his legs dangling and his clay stemmed pipe and tobacco pouch in his hands.
"Give me a hand here, lad." He pointed with his empty pipe at the vertical crack in the face of the cliff. "Close that up again."
Hal spent another half-hour packing the loose rock back into the entrance, to conceal it and to discourage intruders. There was little chance of men finding the cache in this deserted gorge, but he and his father knew that the baboons would return. They were as curious and mischievous as any human.
When Hal would have started back down the cliff, Sir Francis stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "There is no hurry. The others will not have finished refilling the water casks."
They sat in silence on the ledge while Sir Francis got his long-stemmed pipe to draw sweetly. Then he asked, through a cloud of blue smoke, "What have I done here?"
"Cached our share of the treasure."
"Not only our share alone, but that of the Crown and of every man aboard, sir Francis corrected him. "But why have I done that?"
"Gold and silver is temptation even to an honest man." Hal repeated the lore his father had drummed into his head so many times before.
"Should I not trust my own crew?" Sir Francis asked.
"If you trust no man, then no man will ever disappoint you. "Hal repeated the lesson.
"Do you believe that?" Sir Francis turned to watch his face as he replied, and Hal hesitated. "Do you trust Aboli?" "Yes, I trust him," Hal admitted, reluctantly, as though it were a sin.