opening my eyes, but when I felt movement beside me I rolled my head and looked into her face.
“The storm is over,” she said softly, and rose from the bed.
We walked out side by side into the early morning sunlight, blinking around us at the devastation which the storm had created. The island looked like the photographs of a World War I battlefield. The palms were stripped of their foliage, the bare masts pointed pathetically at the sky and the earth below was littered thickly with palm fronds and coconuts. The stillness hung over it all, no breath of wind, and the sky was pale milky blue, still filled with a haze of sand and sea.
From their cave Chubby and Angelo emerged, like big bear and little bear, at the end of winter. They too stood and looked about them uncertainly.
Suddenly Angelo let out a Comanche whoop and leaped four feet in the air. After five days of forced confinement his animal spirits could no longer be suppressed. He took off through the palm trees like a greyhound.
“Last one in the water is a fascist,” he shouted, and Sherry was the first to accept the challenge. She was ten paces behind him when they hit the beach but they dived simultaneously into the lagoon, fully clad, and began immediately pelting each other with handfuls of wet sand. Chubby and I followed at a sedate pace more in keeping with our years. Still wearing his vividly striped pyjamas, Chubby lowered his massive hams into the sea.
“I got to tell you, man, that feels good,” he admitted gravely. I drew deeply on my cheroot as I sat beside him waist deep, then I handed him the butt.
“We lost five days, Chubby,” I said, and immediately he scowled.
“Let’s get busy,” he growled, sitting in the lagoon in yellow and purple striped pyjamas, cheroot in his mouth, like a big brown bullfrog.
from the peak we looked down into the shallow waters of the lagoon and although they were still a Flittle murky with spindrift and churned sand, yet the whaleboat was clearly visible. She had drifted sideways in the bay and was lying on the bottom in twenty feet of water with the yellow tarpaulin still covering her deck.
We raised the whaleboat with air bags and once her gunwales broke the surface we were able to bale her out and row her into the beach. The rest of that day was needed to unload the waterlogged cargo, clean and dry it, pump the air bottles, jet the motors-aboard and prepare for the next visit to Gunfire Reef.
I was beginning to become, seriously concerned by the delays which had left us sitting on the island, day after day, while Manny Resnick and his merry men cut away the lead we had started with.
That evening we discussed it around the campfire, and agreed that we had made also no progress in ten days other than to confirm that part of the Dawn Light’s wreckage had fallen into the pool.
However, the tides were set fair for an early start in the morning and Chubby ran us through the channel with hardly sufficient light to recognize the coral snags, and when we took up our station in the back of the reef the sun was only just showing its blazing upper rim above the horizon.
During the five days we had lain ashore, Sherry’s hands had almost entirely healed, and although I suggested tactfully that she should allow Chubby to accompany me for the next few days, my tact and concern were wasted. Sherry North was suited and finned and Chubby sat in the stern beside the motors holding us on station.
Sherry and I went down fast, and entered the forest of sea bamboo, picking up position from the markers that Chubby and I had left on our last dive.
We were working in close to the base of the coral cliff and I placed Sherry on the inside berth where it would be easier to hold position in the search pattern while she orientated herself.
We had hardly begun the first leg and had swum fifty feet from the last marker when Sherry tapped urgently on her bottles to attract my attention and I pushed my way through the bamboo to her.
She was hanging against the side of the coral cliff upside down like a bat, closely examining a fall of coral and debris that had slid down to the floor of the pool. She was in deep shade under the loom of dark coral so I was at her side before I saw what had attracted her.
Propped against the cliff, its bottom end lying in the mound of debris and weed, was a long cylindrical object which itself was heavily infested with marine growth and had already been partially ingested by the living coral.
Yet its size and regular shape indicated that it was man, made - for it was nine feet long and twenty inches thick, perfectly rounded and slightly tapered.
Sherry was studying it with interest and when I came up she turned to meet me and made signs of incomprehension. I had recognized what it was immediately and the skin of my forearms and at the nape of my neck felt prickly with excitement. I made a pistol of my thumb and forefinger and mimed the act of firing it, but she did not understand and shook her head so I scribbled quickly on the underwater slate and showed it to her.
“Cannon.” She nodded vigorously, rolled her eyes and blew bubbles to register triumph before turning back to the cannon.
It was about the correct size to be one of the long ninepounders that had formed part of the Dawn Light’s armament but there was no chance that I should be able to read any inscription upon it, for the surface was crocodileskinned with growth and corrosion. Unlike the bronze bell that Jimmy North had recovered, it had not been buried in the sand to protect it.
I floated down along the massive barrel examining it closely and almost immediately found another cannon in the deeper gloom nearer the cliff. However, three-quarters of this weapon had been incorporated into the cliff, built into it by the living coral polyps.
I swam in closer, ducking under the first barrel and went into the jumble of debris and fallen coral blocks. I was within two feet of this amorphous mass when with a shock which constricted my breathing and flushed warmly through my blood I recognized what I was looking at.
Quickly and excitedly I finned over the mound of debris, finding where it ended and. the unbroken coral began, forcing my way up through the sea bamboo to estimate its size, and pausing to examine any opening or irregularity in it.
The total mass of debris was the size of a couple of railway Pullman coaches, but it was only when I pushed aside a larger floating clump of weed and peered into the squared opening of a gun port, from which the muzzle of a cannon still protruded and which had not been completely altered in shape by the encroaching coral, that I was certain that what we had discovered was the entire forward section of the frigate Daurn Light, broken off just behind the main mast.
I looked around wildly for Sherry and saw her finned feet protruding from another portion of the wreckage. I pulled her out, removed her mouthpiece and kissed her lustily before replacing it. She was laughing with excitement and when I signalled her that we were ascending, she shook her head vehemently and shot away from me to continue her explorations. It was fully fifteen minutes later that I was able to drag her away and take her up to the whaleboat.
We both began talking at once the moment we had the rubber mouthpieces out of the way. My voice is louder than hers, but she is more persistent. It took me some minutes to assert my rights as expedition leader and I could-begin to describe it to Chubby.
“It’s the Dawn Light sure enough. The weight of her armament and cargo must have pulled her down the instant she was clear of the reef. She went down like a stone, and she is lying against the foot of the cliff Some of her cannons have fallen out of the hull, and they’re lying jumbled around it-“
“We didn’t recognize it at first,” Sherry chimed in again, just when I had her quiet&led down. “It’s like a rubbish dump. just an enormous heap.”
“From what I could judge she must have broken her back abaft the main mast, but she’s been smashed up badly for most of her length. The cannon must have torn up her gundeck and it’s only the two ports nearest the bows that are intact, -” “How does she lier Chubby demanded, coming immediately to the pith of the matter.
“She’s bottom up,” I admitted. “She must have rolled as she went down.”
“That makes it a real problem, unless you can get in at a gun port or under the waist,” Chubby growled.
“I had a good look,” I told him, “but I couldn’t find a point at which we could penetrate the hull. Even the gunports are solid with growth.”
Chubby shook his head mournfully. “Man, looks like this place is badly hexed,” and immediately all three of us made the cross-fingered sign against it.
Angelo told him primly, “You talking up a storm. Shouldn’t say that, hear?” but Chubby shook his head again, and his face collapsed into pessimistic folds.
