: Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles by Sweven Godfrey - Science fiction; Islands Fiction; Utopias Fiction; Dystopias Fiction; Voyages and travels Fiction; South Pacific Ocean Fiction; Imaginary places Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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RIALLARO

RIALLARO

INTRODUCTION

THE MYSTERIOUS SHOT

"DEAD, for a ducat, dead," roared Somm, as he shouldered his gun and rushed to the beach. Nothing had come within reach of shot all afternoon till, in the thickening twilight, a flash of broad wings in the distance awakened our camp. "A wounded albatross," shouted both my companions, as they peered through the shuttling grey of the evening, and watched the south wind, still wild with the force of storm, shepherd some baffled creature of wings up towards our nestling-place. "Some still stranger bird," I thought, as we seized our guns and ran to the edge of the cliff. The sudden descent of night checked further question; and as the winged thing gleamed along the face of the precipice, three shots echoed across the sound, and, in a lull of the fitful gusts, we heard a dull plunge in the water far below.

It seemed but a few minutes till we met Somm in the rocky hollow that was the harbour for our boat; he had rowed out and back, and was leaning over some dark object that lay in the stern. Not a sign of feather or anything that gleamed was there about it. It was the form of a human being, apparently dead. We bore it up through the bush with the tender care that diggers are wont to give to the corpse of a comrade. Our burden was so light that we expected to look upon a thin, emaciated body. But, as we laid it in the flicker of our hut fire, we were amazed to see the rounded form and ruddy cheeks of the dead stranger.

We stripped him of his wrapping,--a strange muslin-like transparent toga,--and searched for the gunshot wound. Except for one broad bruise, there was no mark on the body. And then it began to dawn upon us that this had nothing to do with the flashing wings, or our shots, that we were guiltless of human blood. It was a case of drowning, but not yet dead. And we set to work to draw the clogging water from his heart and lungs. Slowly the breath began to come and the blood to circulate. The bosom heaved and we felt ourselves in the presence of another and a stranger human soul. What he was, whence he came, whirled through our minds in silence. Faint and in need of rest he manifestly was. We poured some stimulant down his throat and laid him on one of our rude beds of manuka and fern. We saw him fall into a deep and healthy sleep. And dawn was already threatening the east with flickering light when we went into the open and drew a long, sweet breath.

We consulted together over the strange occurrence, and determined to search the fiord for traces of the winged thing that flashed out at our shots. Before we had gone far, we found a pair of huge fans that had drifted into one of the frequent channels amongst the rocks. They were not of feathers, but of some strong, transparent, and almost weightless material that did not wilt in the sun or the wet. We lifted them, and there hung by them dragging in the water filmy strings like the long tentacles of a medusa. We cut them adrift, and bore the strange wing-like floats up to our cliff. Each of them seemed to move on a pivot with ease, and almost rose on the gentle breeze into which the storm had now died. After full examination of them, we laid them far back in the cavern, which we used as our storehouse and larder, and thought no more about them.

We cooked and ate our morning meal, and then spread out over the bush that overlooked the waters of the sound, forgetful of the stranger whom we had left in one of our huts. We were in search of gold, and, having found faint traces of it on the small, fan-like beaches that intervalled the sheer precipices on our side, we had been prospecting several months for the alluvial pocket or the reef from which the glittering specks had wandered down. The following week we were rewarded with success; but, as we have no desire to have our noble solitude disturbed by the noise of a frenzied, gambling crowd,--we are but woodmen and sealers and photographers to the outside world when it intrudes in the shape of tourists,--I shall not mention at present the name of the New Zealand fiord in which we live.

I was working up a watercourse, panning the sand and dirt that lay in the crevices and occasional levels, at times startled by a weka that impudently slid through the undergrowth and eyed me close at hand, or by the harsh call of the kea, as it flew from some resting-place and circled in the air. Rudely awakened from my absorption, I looked out on the marvellous scene that lay at my feet; precipice towered over precipice, often forest-clad from base to summit. Almost sheer below me slept the waters of the sound, landlocked as if it were a lake. Only the indignant cry of the kea, or the weka's raucous whistle, or the echo of a distant avalanche ever broke the silence of this solitary land. Never did it cease to throw its shadow on my thoughts or stir their sense of beauty or their sadness.

Absorbed in contemplation of its sublimity, I sat for a moment on a rock that rose out of the bush. I almost leapt from it, startled; a voice, unheralded, fell "like a falling star" through the soundless air. I had heard no footstep, no snap of trodden twig or rustle of reluctant branch. My senses were so thrilled with the sound that its purport shot past them. There at the base of the rock stood the strangest figure that ever met my eyes.

It was the sea-trove we had left sleeping in the hut--a small, well-knit frame like that of a north-country Englishman; but folded though it was in the slender gauzy garment we had unwound from it the night before, I felt conscious of a radiance that seemed to rid it of its opaque substantiality; it was as if lit from within; the face was luminous and clear, like the star-limpid waters of the fiord at night. My eyes were drawn to search the depths; yet the veil of flesh and blood still hid all but the aurora-like flashings of thought and feeling that swept in and out across the features. There was the play of some strong inward tumult, the revival, I soon found, of long-dead memories. I sat dumb as a stone, too much moved to break the silence, too much awed by the face to know what to say. It seems that my face too, with its weather-beaten vigour of northern life, had stirred the nature of the stranger to its depths; a long-forgotten existence had surged up in him from the darkness of the past, and he was recovering it feature by feature. I have often watched the conflict of cloud and wind, of light and gloom, across the torn azure of night's infinity before the coming of a tempest; but the sight did not approach in intense magnetism the dizzy chase of shadow and gleam across this singular countenance.

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