Chapter VII The Rain of Mud
It was about four o’clock in the morning. A new thing happened—a strange new thing, almost unparalleled in the world’s history. The eruption had been hitherto confined to the central peak of Tarawera, known among the Maori tribes as Ruawahia; but now with a mighty explosion the south-west peak burst open, and flames came belching forth, with torrents of liquid fire. The force of the earthquake which accompanied it cracked the bed of the fairy lake. The water rushed through the hole upon the subterranean fires, and returned in columns of steam, forcing upwards the immense accumulation of soft warm mud at the bottom of the lake. The whole of this was blown into the air, and for fifteen miles around the mountain fell like rain. The enormous amount of steam thus generated could not find half vent enough through the single hole by which the water had poured in, and blew off the crust of the earth above it.
Showers of rock, cinders, and dust succeeded the mud, lashing the lake to fury—a fury which baffled all imagination. The roar of the falling water through unseen depths beneath the lake, the screech of the escaping steam, the hissing cannonade of stones, created a volley of sound for which no one could account, whilst the mud fell thick and fast, as the snow falls in a blizzard.
The geysers, catching the subterranean rage, shot their scalding spray above the trees. Mud-holes were boiling over and over, and new ones opening in unexpected places. Every ditch was steaming, every hill was reeling. For the space of sixty miles the earth quivered and shook, and a horrid sulphurous smell uprose from the very ground; while around Tarawera, mountain, lake, and forest were enveloped in one immense cloud of steam, infolding a throbbing heart of flame, and ascending to the almost incredible height of twenty-two thousand feet. Beneath its awful shadow the country lay in darkness—a darkness made still more appalling when the huge rock masses of fire clove their way upwards, to fall back into the crater from which they had been hurled.
As Mr. Lee caught his horse by the forelock, the first heavy drops of mud hissed on the frozen ground. In another moment they came pelting thick and fast, burning, blinding, burying everything in their path. The horse broke loose from his master’s hand, and tore away to the shelter of the trees. The heavy cart lumbering at his heels alone kept Beauty from following his mate. Hal caught his rein, Edwin seized his head, as the thick cloud of ashes and mud grew denser and blacker, until Edwin could scarcely see his hand before him.
“Get in! get in!” gasped the old rabbiter.
Edwin swung himself upon the horse’s back, and rode postilion, holding him in with all his might.
“The sick man first,” said Mr. Lee, almost choking with the suffocating smell which rose from the earth. He lifted the poor fellow in his arms, a comrade took him by the feet, and between them they got him into the cart. Hal had resigned the reins to Edwin, and taken his place, ready to pillow the unconscious head upon his knees.
“The Lord have mercy on us!” he groaned.
Mr. Lee groped round for Audrey. Her feet were blistering through her thin boots, as she sank ankle-deep in the steaming slime, which came pouring down without intermission. Her father caught her by the waist and swung her into the back of the cart. Another of the rabbiters got up on the front and took the reins from Edwin, who did not know the way. The other two, with Mr. Lee, caught hold of the back of the cart and ran until they came to their own camp. The tents lay flat; the howling dogs had fled; but their horse, which they had tethered for the night, had not yet broken loose.
Here they drew up, sorely against Mr. Lee’s desire, for he could no longer distinguish the glimmer of his charcoal fires, and his heart was aching for his children—his innocents, his babies, as he fondly called them—in that moment of dread. As the rabbiters halted, he stooped to measure the depth of mud on the ground, alarmed lest the children should be suffocated in their sleep; for they might have fallen asleep, they had been left so long.
“Not they,” persisted Edwin. “They are not such duffers as to lie down in mud like this; and as for sleep in this unearthly storm—” he stopped abruptly.
“Hark!” exclaimed his father, bending closer to the ground. “Surely that was a ‘coo,’ in the distance.”
Every ear was strained. Again it came, that recognized call for help no colonist who reckons himself a man ever refuses to answer.
Faint as was the echo which reached them, it quivered with a passionate entreaty.
“They are cooing from the ford,” cried one. But another contradicted. It was only when bending over the upturned roots of a fallen tree that the feeble sound could be detected, amidst all the fearsome noises raging in the upper air.
The rabbiters felt about for their spades, and throwing out the mud from the cavity, knelt low in the loosened earth. They could hear it now more plainly.
Mr. Lee pressed his ear to the freshly-disturbed mould, and listened attentively. The cry was a cry of distress, and the voice was the voice of his friend.
The rabbiters looked at each other, aghast at the thought of returning to the thick of the storm. It was bad enough to flee before it; but to face the muddy rain which was beating them to the earth, to breathe in the burning dust which came whirling through it, could any one do that and reach the ford alive? Not one dare venture; yet they would not leave the spot.
At break of day they said, “We will go.” They were glad of such shelter as the upheaved roots afforded. It was a moment’s respite from the blistering, blinding rain. But whilst they argued thus, Mr. Lee was striding onwards to the seven black heaps, in the midst of which he had left his children.
The fires had long gone out; the blackness of darkness was around him. He called their names. He shouted. His voice was thick and hoarse from the choking atmosphere. He stumbled against a hillock. He sank in the drift of mud by its side. A faint, low sob seemed near him; something warm eluded his touch. His arms sought it in the darkness, sweeping before him into empty space. Two resolute small hands fought back his own, and Cuthbert growled out fiercely, “Whoever you are, you shan’t touch my Effie. Get along!”
“Not touch your Effie, my game chick!” retorted Mr. Lee, with the ghost of a smile in spite of his despair.
“Oh, it is father! it is father!” they exclaimed, springing into his arms. “We thought you would never come back any more.”
He thought they would never stop kissing him, but he got them at last, big children as they were, one under each arm, lifting, dragging, carrying by turns, till he made his way to the cart. Then he discovered why poor Effie hung so helplessly upon him. Both hands had tightly clinched in the shock of the explosion, and her feet dragged uselessly along the ground.
“She turned as cold as ice,” said Cuthbert, “and I’ve cuddled her ever since. Then the mud came on us hot; wasn’t that a queer thing?”
They snugged poor Effie in the blanket, and Audrey took her on her lap.
“I’m not afraid now,” she whispered, “now we are all together. But I’ve lost the kitten.”
“No,” said Audrey; “I saw it after you were gone, scampering up a tree.”
Mr. Lee was leaning against the side of the cart, speaking to old Hal.
They did not hear what he was saying, only the rabbiter’s reply: “Trust ’em to me. I’ll find some place of shelter right away, down by the sea. Here, take my hand on it, and go. God helping, you may save ’em at the ford. Maybe they are half buried alive. It is on my mind it will be a dig-out when you get there. The nearer the mischief the worse it will be. When our fellows see you have the pluck to venture, there’ll be some of ’em will follow, sure and sartin.”
“We are all chums here,” said Mr. Lee, turning to the men. “Lend me that spade and I’m off to the ford. We must answer that coo somehow, my lads.”
“We’ll do what we can in the daylight,” they answered.
“I am going to do what I can in the darkness,” he returned, as he shouldered the spade and crossed over for a last look at his children.
Audrey laid her hand in his without speaking.
“You are not going alone, father, when I’m here,” urged Edwin, springing off the horse. “Take me with you.”
“No, Edwin; your post is here, to guard the others in my absence.—Remember, my darlings, we are all in God’s hands, and there I leave you,” said Mr. Lee.
He seized a broken branch, torn off by the wind, and using it as an alpenstock, leaped from boulder to boulder across the stream, and was up the other side of the valley without another word.
Cuthbert was crying; the dogs were whining; Audrey bent over Effie and rocked her backwards and forwards.
The cart set off. The mud was up to the axle-tree. It was slow work getting through it.
The rest of the party were busy dragging their tents out of the mire, and loading their own cart with their traps as fast as they could, fumbling in the dark, knee-deep in slush and mud.
As Beauty pulled his way through for an hour or more, the muddy rain diminished, the earth grew hard and dry. The children breathed more freely as the fresh sea-breeze encountered the clouds of burning dust, which seemed now to predominate over the mud.
They could hear the second cart rumbling behind them. The poor fellow who had been struck by the lightning began to speak, entreating his comrades to lay him somewhere quiet. “My head, my head!” he moaned. “Stop this shaking.”
By-and-by they reached a hut. They were entering one of the great sheep-runs, where the rabbiters had been recently at work. Here the carts drew up, and roused its solitary inmate. One of the rabbiters came round and told Hal they had best part company.
“There are plenty of bold young fellows among Feltham’s shepherds. We are off to the great house to tell him, and we’ll give the alarm as we go. He’ll send a party off to the hills as soon as ever he hears of this awful business. A lot of us may force a way. We’ll take this side of the run: you go the other till you find somewhere safe to leave these children. Wake up the shepherds in every hut you pass, and send them on to meet us at Feltham’s. If we are back by daylight we shall do,” they argued.
“Agreed,” said the old man. “We can’t better that. Dilworth and the traps had best wait here. He will sleep this off,” he added, looking compassionately at his stricken comrade.
Out came the shepherd, a tall, gentlemanly young fellow, who had passed his “little-go” at Trinity, got himself “ploughed” like Ottley, and so went in for the southern hemisphere and the shepherd’s crook.
Pale and livid with the horror of the lone night-watch in his solitary hermitage, he caught the full import of the direful tidings at a word. His bed and his rations were alike at their service. He whistled up his horse and dog, and rode off at a breakneck gallop, to volunteer for the relief-party, and send the ill news a little faster to his master’s door, for his fresh horse soon outstripped the rabbiters’ cart. Meanwhile old Hal drove onward towards the sea. A shepherd met him and joined company, breathless for his explanation of all the terrors which had driven him from his bed. He blamed Mr. Lee for his foolhardiness in venturing on alone into such danger.
Freed at last from the clayey slime, Beauty rattled on apace. Cuthbert was fast asleep, and Edwin was nodding, but Audrey was wide awake. She gathered from the conversation of the men fresh food for fear. The “run” they were crossing was a large one. She thought they called it Feltham’s. It extended for some miles along the sea-shore, and Audrey felt sure they must have journeyed ten or fifteen miles at least since they entered it. Thirteen thousand sheep on run needed no small company of shepherds. Many of them lived at the great house with Mr. Feltham; others were scattered here and there all over the wide domain, each in his little shanty. Yet most of them were the sons of gentlemen, certain to respond to the rabbiters’ call. Again the cart drew up, and a glimmer of firelight showed her the low thatched roof of another shanty. Hal called loudly to a friend inside.
“Up and help us, man! There is an awful eruption. Tarawera is pouring out fire and smoke. Half the country round will be destroyed before the morning!”
Down sprang the shepherd. “We are off to Feltham’s; but we must have you with us, Hal, for a guide. We don’t know where we are wanted.”
Edwin was wide awake in a moment. The men were talking eagerly. Then they came round, lifted the girls out of the cart, told them all to go inside the hut and get a sleep, and they would soon send somebody to see after them.
Hal laid his hand on Edwin’s shoulder. “Remember your father’s charge, lad,” he said, “and just keep here, so that I know where to find you.”
It was still so dark they could scarcely see each other’s faces; but as Edwin gave his promise, Audrey sighed a startled sigh of fear. Were they going to leave them alone?
“Must,” returned all three of the men, with a decision that admitted of no question.
“Afraid?” asked the shepherd, in a tone which made Edwin retort, “Not a bit.”
But Audrey could not echo her brother’s words. She stood beside him the picture of dismay, thinking of her father. Hal’s friend Oscott picked up a piece of wood and threw it on the dying lire; it blazed up cheerily.
“My dear,” said Hal, in an expostulating tone, “would you have us leave your father single-handed? We have brought you safe out of the danger. There are numbers more higher up in the hills; we must go back.”
“Yes, yes,” she answered, desperately. “Pray don’t think about us. Go; do go!”
Oscott brought out his horse. The shepherd smiled pityingly at the children. “We’ll tell the boundary-rider to look you up. He will bring the dog his breakfast, and I have no doubt Mrs. Feltham will send him with yours.”
With a cheery good-night, crossed by the shepherd with a cheerier good-morning, intended to keep their spirits up, the men departed.
Edwin put his arm round Audrey. “Are you really afraid? I would not show a white feather after all he said. Come inside.”
The hut was very similar to the one at the entrance of the gorge, with the customary bed of fern leaves and thick striped blanket. The men had laid Effie down upon it, and Cuthbert was kneeling beside her rubbing her hands.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered. “Our Audrey has gone over to the groaners.”
“No, she has not,” retorted Edwin. “But once I heard that Cuthbert was with the criers.”
“Where are we?” asked Effie piteously.
“Safe in the house that Jack built,” said her brother, wishing to get up a laugh; but it would not do.
Audrey turned her head away. “Let us try to sleep and forget ourselves.”
Edwin found a horse-rug in the hut, and went out to throw it over Beauty’s back, for the wind was blowing hard. There was plenty of drift-wood strewing the shore, and he carefully built up the fire. Having had some recent experience during the charcoal-burning, he built it up remarkably well, hoping the ruddy blaze would comfort Audrey—at least it would help them to dry their muddy clothes. The sound of the trampling surf and the roar of the angry sea seemed as nothing in the gray-eyed dawn which followed that night of fear.
He found, as he thought, his sisters sleeping; and sinking down in the nest of leaves which Cuthbert had been building for him, he soon followed their example. But he was mistaken: Audrey only closed her eyes to avoid speaking. She dared not tell him of their father’s peril for fear he should rush off with the men, urged on by a desperate desire to share it. “I know now,” she thought, “why father charged him to remain with us.”
Her distress of mind drowned all consciousness of their strange surroundings. What was the rising of the gale, the trampling of the surf upon the sand, or the dashing of the tumultuous waves, after the fire and smoke of Tarawera?
But Cuthbert started in his dreams, and Edwin woke with a cry. Shaking himself from the clinging leaves, now dry as winter hay, he ran out with the impression some one had called him. It was but the scream of the sea-gull and the moan of the storm. It should have been daylight by this time, but no wintry sun could penetrate the pall-like cloud of blue volcanic dust which loaded the atmosphere even there.
It seemed to him as if the sea, by some mysterious sympathy, responded to the wild convulsions of the quaking earth. The billows were rolling in towards him mountains high. He turned from the angry waves to rebuild his fire.
Did Oscott keep it as a beacon through the night on the ledge of rock which sheltered his hut from the ocean breezes? From its position Edwin was inclined to think he did, although the men in the hurry of their departure had not exactly said so. By the light of this fire he could now distinguish the outline of a tiny bay—so frequent on the western coast of the island—a stretch of sandy shore, and beyond the haven over which the rock on which he stood seemed sentinel, a sheet of boiling foam.
And what was that? A coasting steamer, with its screw half out of the water, tearing round and round, whilst the big seas, leaping after each other, seemed washing over the little craft from stem to stern.
He flung fresh drift-wood on his beacon-fire until it blazed aloft, a pyramid of flame. “Audrey dear, Audrey,” he ran back shouting, “get up, get up!”
She appeared at the door, a wan, drooping figure, shrinking from the teeth of the gale. “Is it father?” she asked.
“Father! impossible, Audrey. We left him miles away. It is a ship—a ship, Audrey—going down in the storm,” he vociferated.
She clasped her hands together in hopeless despair.
Cuthbert pulled her back. “You will be blown into the sea,” he cried. “Let me go. Boys like me, we just love wild weather. I shan’t hurt. What is it brings the downie fit?” he asked. “Tell old Cuth.”
“It is father, dear—it is father,” she murmured, as his arms went round her coaxingly.
“I know,” he answered. “I cried because I could not help it; but Edwin says crying is no good.”
“Praying is better,” she whispered, buttoning up his coat a little closer. But what was he wearing?
“Oh, I got into somebody’s clothes,” he said, “and Edwin helped me.”
“It is father’s short gray coat,” she ejaculated, stroking it lovingly down his chest, as if it were all she ever expected to see of her father any more.
“So much the better,” he answered, undaunted. “I want to be father to-night.”
“Night!” repeated Edwin, catching up the word, “How can you stand there talking when there is a ship going down before our eyes?”
Cuthbert ran up the rocky headland after his brother, scarcely able to keep his footing in the increasing gale. There, by the bright stream of light flung fitfully across the boiling waves, he too could see the little vessel tossing among the breakers. An Egyptian darkness lay around them—a darkness that might be felt, a darkness which the ruddiest glow of their beacon could scarcely penetrate.
“You talk of night,” Edwin went on, as the brothers clung together, “but it is my belief it has long since been morning. I tell you what it is, Cuth: the sun itself is veiled in sackcloth and ashes; it can’t break through this awful cloud.”
Young as they were, they felt the importance of keeping up the fire to warn the steamer off the rocks, and again they set to work gathering fuel. The men had said but little about the fire, because they knew it was close on morning when they departed, and now—yes, the morning had come, but without the daylight.
Old roots and broken branches drifted in to shore were strewing the beach. But as the boys were soon obliged to take a wider circle to collect them, Edwin was so much afraid of losing his little brother he dare not let go his hand. Then he found a piece of rope in the pocket of “father’s coat,” and tied their arms together. So they went about like dogs in leash, as he told Cuthbert. If dogs did their hunting in couples, why should not they?
Meanwhile Audrey, whose heart was in the hills, was watching landwards from the little window at the back of the hut. Edwin’s pyramid of fire shot fitful gleams above the roof and beyond the black shadow of the shanty wall. Beauty, who had never known the luxury of a stable until he came into the hands of his new masters, was well used to looking out for himself. He had made his way round to the back of the hut, and now stood cowering under the broad eaves, seeking shelter from the raging blast.
Where the firelight fell Audrey could faintly distinguish a line of road, probably the one leading to the mansion. To the left, the wavering shadows cast upon the ground told her of the near neighbourhood of a grassy embankment, surmounted by a swinging fence of wire, the favourite defence of the sheep-run, so constructed that if the half-wild animals rush against it the wire swings in their faces and drives them back. She heard the mournful howling of a dog at no great distance. Suddenly it changed to a clamorous bark, and Audrey detected a faint but far-away echo, like the trampling of approaching horsemen.
She pushed the window to its widest and listened. Her long fair hair, which had been loosely braided for the night, was soon shaken free by the raging-winds, and streamed about her shoulders as she leaned out as far as she could in the fond hope that some one was coming.
The knitted shawl she had snatched up and drawn over her head when she jumped into her father’s arms was now rolled up as a pillow for Effie. She shivered in the wintry blast, yet courted it, as it blew back from her the heated clouds of whirling ashes. Faint moving shadows, as of trees or men, began to fleck the pathway, and then a band of horsemen, galloping their hardest, dashed across the open.
Audrey’s pale face and streaming hair, framed in the blackness of the shadowing roof, could not fail to be seen by the riders. With one accord they shook the spades they carried in the air to tell their errand, and a score of manly voices rang out the old-world ballad,—
“What lads e’er did our lads will do;
Were I a lad I’d follow him too.
He’s owre the hills that I lo’e weel.”
Audrey waved her “God-speed” in reply. With their heads still turned towards her, without a moment’s pause, they vanished in the darkness. Only the roll of the chorus thrown back to cheer her, as they tore the ground beneath their horses’ hoofs, rose and fell with the rage of the storm—
“He’s owre the hills we daurna name,
He’s owre the hills ayont Dumblane,
Wha soon will get his welcome hame.
My father’s gone to fecht for him,
My brithers winna bide at hame,
My mither greets and prays for them,
And ’deed she thinks they’re no to blame.
He’s owre the hills,” etc.
The last faint echo which reached her listening ears renewed the promise—
“What lads e’er did our lads will do;
Were I a lad I’d follow him too.
He’s owre the hills, he’s owre the hills.”
The voices were lost at last in the howl of the wind and the dash of the waves on the angry rocks. But the music of their song was ringing still in Audrey’s heart, rousing her to a courage which was not in her nature.
She closed the window, and knelt beside the sleeping Effie with a question on her lips—that question of questions for each one of us, be our emergency what it may—“Lord, what wouldest thou have me to do?” She was not long in finding its answer.