The Secret People

'Ever so much. What's happened?'

'Never mind about that now. Just lie quiet. I'll get you some food.'

'I couldn't eat it, but I'd like a drink.'

'What sort? Tea?'

'Tea? Did you say tea?'

Mark laughed. 'Yes, tea. We're almost civilised again. You can have tea or cocoa, but there's no brandy left.'

'Tea,' Margaret chose firmly. 'You know,' she added, 'I never really thought I'd ever drink tea again.'

'Soon you'll be able to have all the tea in the world— we're going to get out of this.' Mark started up a small electric stove, and rummaged in a cupboard for the tea-caddy as he talked, 'just as soon as the others come back, we're going to cast off and slide away down the river.'

'The others?' she said. 'Who are they?'

'There's Smith who is tough, but has brains as well. He's American. There's Ed who is tougher and more American. And Gordon who is English, in spite of his name. He's an archaeologist. Just the three of 'em. There were more.'

'I heard that there were over a hundred of you.'

'Oh yes. What I meant was that our party was bigger. We had Zickle, the nigger, and Mahmud, who was some kind of Arab.'

'What happened to them?'

Mark hesitated.

'You ought to rest, you know.'

'Nonsense, Mark. I've been asleep for Heaven knows how long. I want to know what's happened. I don't understand it at all. You and the rest are supposed to be in the prison caves—not only in them, but besieged there —instead, you're wandering about here. And all the way with Miguel I didn't see a single pygmy. Tell me all about it while I drink the tea.'

Mark gave an account of the pygmy attacks, and their defeat.

'But didn't they try to smoke you out? Miguel said something-'

'Yes, that was their last move. They'd have brought it off, too, if the water hadn't come in.'

'Where from?'

'From the tunnel our people had been making. They must have got through just in time.'

'What happened to them?'

'I don't know.'

'But weren't they washed down?'

'We didn't see them. I expect they got jammed in there, poor devils.'

'What happened when the water came into your cave?'

'Luckily it couldn't come at a great rate, the tunnel was too small for that, so we had plenty of time to get ready.'

He went on to tell of the building of rafts from mushroom trunks. Margaret interrupted again:

'But what had happened to the pygmies?'

'Oh, they'd gone. One look at the water was enough for them—and we weren't far behind them. It wasn't very difficult to get along. The water really rose quite slowly— particularly when it had to flood the larger caves. What worried me most was that I couldn't remember whether it was a gradual rise all the way to the prison caves entrance. If so, we should be all right, but if there was a dip, or more than one dip on the way, we'd probably get trapped. But I needn't have worried, for there were no dips worth troubling about. The other worry was lest the pygmies might trap us. You know what they do when there's a break—knock in the passage at a strategic point, and sacrifice all the part that's beyond it. If they did that and we were on the wrong side of the fall, it would be all up.

'Luckily they didn't. We just kept on pushing the rafts ahead and making better time than the water. Once or twice we even had to wait until the water rose enough to float the front raft before we could get along. It was as simple as could be. We never got a glimpse of a pygmy or a "native" or anyone else the whole way. In fact, it was too good to last. The balloon went up when we reached the last big cave.

'Of course you've never seen that particular cave. It's one of the biggest in the whole place, I should think. At one end is the passage through which we came, and at the other is the only connection between that system and this. And it's a narrow connection, too. Quite a small passage, and before you can get at it, you've got to reach a ledge a hundred feet up the bare wall. Well, I hadn't thought a great deal on what we should do when we got there. I'd got a rough idea that we'd just sit on our rafts while the water rose and floated them up to the ledge, and I hadn't reckoned at all with what else we might find.

'We came in to discover one of the nastiest shemozzles I've ever seen in full swing. Every living soul in the prison caves had rushed there at the first alarm; the pygmies, the prisoners themselves, and the "natives", too, and the whole lot had arrived at just about the same time. On the ledge was a crowd of pygmies dangling ropes to haul their pals up, but everybody else wanted those ropes, too. Some of the prisoners were trying to climb up, and the little devils at the top were jerking to shake them off. The pygmies down below were hardly having a look in. Everybody else was dead sure that if anybody was going to be saved, it wouldn't be pygmies, and the little chaps were coming in for a rough time. But those up on top were just as sure that they weren't going to save prisoners while pygmies were left to drown. They succeeded in dislodging most of the climbers so that they fell on those below. If they couldn't get rid of them that way, they just cut the ropes and let 'em drop. Everyone that dropped from fifty or sixty feet laid out four or five of the scrappers below. So far as I could see, not a single prisoner had reached the top yet, and it didn't look as if any would.

'Already the water was ankle-deep at the base of the wall, and everyone there was pretty nearly mad with fright. I don't blame them—it's not a nice lookout when you know the water's going to rise and trap you. And swimming—which only a few of the prisoners and none of the pygmies knew—wouldn't help them. Those who could swim might have a little longer to wait for the end, that was all. As it was, the whole lot had lost their heads, and were hitting out wildly in a blind panic. And in the middle of it all we came out of the passage, shoving our rafts.

'It was a minute or two before anybody noticed us, but when they did—well, it beats description. They just forgot about their own scrapping, and came for us. We didn't stand a chance. There were only a few of us, and hundreds of them, wild with fright. There were fists and stones and a few knives, and the women raked with hands like claws. They'd have had our eyes out in a couple of minutes. Smith yelled to us to get back. Most of us did, but a few stuck to their rafts and tried to defend them—I don't know what happened to them. We saw them go down in the rush, and that was all.

'Then, of course, another scrap started. There wasn't a tenth the number of rafts-necessary to carry them all, and they started in to settle who was going to be saved, and who was going to drown. It was a nastier fight than I ever want to see again. The water down our end of the cave was waist-deep now and the prime tactic of the day seemed to be to thrust an opponent under and stand on him or her while one clutched firmly to the raft with one hand and defended the position with the other. The screeching and shouting in most of the languages of Africa and Europe was ear-splitting. We stood back with Smith and watched.

'What his plan was, I don't know. I thought at the time that he intended to let the rest put one another out of action before he charged in to recover some, at least, of the rafts. Even two would be enough for our particular party, for a couple of mushroom trunks would support a considerable number provided that they were content to cling to the sides instead of climbing on top. Possibly that was his idea; anyhow, we stood and watched with our backs to the tunnel through which we had just come. I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn't about time to take a hand when I got a nudge in the back. I looked round to find a big mushroom trunk which had drifted gently out of the tunnel on the rising stream.

'We needn't have made those rafts at all. The way we had come was simply full of floating logs and puff-balls. Whether they were the scattered remains of our rampart, or of fungi newly broken off by the water, I don't know, but, wherever they came from, there were plenty of them. The fighting round the rafts stopped almost at once, and there was a rush at the flotsam. Soon, there was more than enough rubbish drifting in to support the lot of us.