After dinner the saucepan was cleaned out and grog was served out in it—the last of our supply of rum. We had just lit our pipes and were settling ourselves down to a comfortable half-hour’s smoke and chat before turning in (to whom is a pipe so sweet as to one camping out under the stars after the day’s work?) when suddenly the doctor cried out, “Hullo, look at our beds!” I looked, and lo! to my dismay, those luxurious couches were under water.
I must explain that we had pulled up a quantity of grass and strewed it over the sand, so as to make a snug soft sleeping-place for the night. While we were enjoying our dinner, the river, unobserved by us, had risen considerably, and was now flowing over that portion of the step whereon we had made up our beds. There had been no rain to account for this, so I suppose that the sun, blazing down on the rocks, causes a great evaporation of water during the day, and that, consequently, the volume of the stream is greater after sunset.
So we had now to put aside our pipes and grog for a few moments and undertake some necessary engineering operations: we cleared away a channel through the natural dam of grass, stones, and sand at the lower edge of the step, and so gave a free passage to the swollen stream. The flood subsided at once, and our beds were above water again. The doctor, then, acting in his medical capacity, suggested that damp mattresses were unhealthy; so we threw a few handfuls of grass on the top of the sodden mass, and our beds were what we were pleased to call dry again.
We lit a fire of the dead wood and kept it alight all night, so that we could occasionally warm ourselves by it; for a wind had sprung up at sunset, which swept up the ravine from the sea, making us feel uncomfortably chilly, thinly clad as we were and having no blankets to cover us.
We soon found that it would be impossible for us both to sleep at the same time, for the land-crabs had smelt us out and swarmed down upon us from all sides. We kept watch and watch; while one slept the other tended the fire and killed the land-crabs, as they approached, with sticks and stones. The other crabs, as usual, fed on the dead. I have, in The Cruise of the Falcon, described the peculiarly uncanny way in which a land-crab eats his food. I saw this night, as I kept watch, at least twenty of them at a time devouring the carcasses of their slain friends. Each stood quite still, looking me straight in the face with his fixed outstarting eyes, and with an expression absolutely diabolical. He pulled the food to pieces with his two front claws, and then, with deliberate motion, brought the fragments of flesh to his mouth with one claw, and chewed them up with a slow automatic action, but still those horrible eyes never moved, but stared steadily into mine.
As we had no means of judging the time, it was difficult to divide the night into watches of even length, so we had to portion it out between us the best way we could.
XIII
A Narrow Escape
We started early on the following morning, November 23, and reached the summit of the landslip before the sun had heated the black rocks, and the layer of close air immediately over them, to that high temperature which we had found so insupportable on the previous day.
We managed to ascend the cliff which hangs over the landslip without accident, but it was anxious work, and we experienced a sense of relief when we found ourselves safe once more on the upper plateau.
From here we took a shortcut across the groves of tree-ferns towards the head of the cascade ravine, and came unexpectedly upon a green valley in the middle of the plateau which we had not seen before, and which is, without doubt, the most beautiful place on the island. At the bottom of it a cool stream flowed through thickly-growing ferns and grass. The scenery all round us was of a soft and pleasing character, very strange to us after the dreary barrenness of the mountain slopes beneath this elevated and almost inaccessible garden.
We might have been in some fair vale of Paraguay, instead of on the summit of rugged Trinidad. Here were gently sloping green hills that shut out all view of the jagged peaks. The vegetation was of a more luxuriant nature than in any other portion of the island; tall grasses, bushes, and plants of various kinds, most of them covered with flowers, carpeted the soft red soil, while the tall and beautiful tree-ferns stood in scattered clumps, casting a pleasant shade with their fronds of darker green. Even the dead trees were not so melancholy in appearance as elsewhere on the island; for from their branches—as well as from those of the older bushes and tree-ferns—there hung swaying festoons of a parasitic plant something like the Spanish moss that covers the pines and live-oaks of Florida, but more beautiful, for this was of a silvery white colour.
Besides those tyrants of Trinidad, the birds and land-crabs, mice, flies, ants, earwigs, and big spiders dwelt in this happy valley.
From here we walked to the head of our ravine, where the principal grove of tree-ferns crowns the cliffs, and now we looked down upon the Alerte, seeming very small from this dizzy height, “and yon tall anchoring bark, diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy almost too small for sight.” We observed that the wind was blowing rather freshly from an unusual quarter—northwest—making this a lee shore
