The Secret People Read online

  ‘But what are you all doing here?’

  ‘Just living here.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because we darn well can’t do nothing else. D’you think we’re here for fun?’

  Mark looked at their beards, and the rags which flapped about them.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘What’s the date?’

  Mark considered. Probably several days had elapsed during his unconsciousness, but he could remember the date of the Sun Bird’s crash.

  ‘It was the sixteenth of September when we fell in.’

  ‘The year, man.’

  He stared. ‘Why, 1964, of course.’

  ‘That makes six years for me.’

  ‘Seven for me,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Five,’ admitted the Arab.

  Mark’s eyes opened wide. He looked from face to face for a sign that this was a leg pull.

  ‘Seven years!’ He stared at Gordon. ‘You can’t mean it. Seven years – here, in these caves?’

  The other nodded and smiled a little grimly. ‘Oh yes, I mean it, all right.’

  ‘But – but I don’t understand. There must be ways out.’

  ‘There are ways out – must be any amount of them. The trouble is that we can’t get at them.’

  ‘Why not? You found your ways in.’

  ‘So did you, but it doesn’t help, does it?’

  ‘But you didn’t all come in down waterfalls.’

  ‘No. The real trouble is these little grey guys. They’ve got us penned up like we was cattle. And haven’t they just got the drop on us. Say, it’d be easier to crash out of Hell than out of this joint.’

  ‘But you don’t mean you’re here for good?’

  ‘You’ve said it, buddy. You too.’

  ‘But –’

  Mark was aware again of the feeling that this was all part of a nightmare, growing worse at every turn. Imprisoned in these caves for the rest of one’s life! It was fantastic, it couldn’t be true. He turned to Gordon, who was staring at the picture of the Arab village. There was something in his expression more disturbing than an hour of the American’s conversation.

  ‘It is quite true,’ the Arab’s voice assured him calmly.

  ‘It can’t be true. There must be a way out.’

  ‘If anyone had ever got out, this place would no longer be secure. That it is secret means that no one ever has got out.’

  Gordon interrupted. ‘No, that’s not so. I believe in my theory that –’

  ‘Oh, damn your theories,’ Smith cut in. ‘Even if they’re right, what the hell’s the good of them to us? Cut ’em out.’ He turned back to Mark. ‘The sooner you get a hold on the idea that you and me and all of us are in the cooler for keeps, the easier it’s gonna be for you.’

  Mark’s convalescence was a long business. When it irked him, and he grumbled at the waste of time, Gordon did his best to be reassuring.

  ‘For one thing, the phrase “waste of time” has no meaning in here,’ he said. ‘And, for another, you’re damned lucky to be convalescent at all. Candidly, you were in such a mess when you came in that we never thought you’d make it. Then you didn’t help things by getting out of here the minute you came round – it gave you a nasty relapse. Just lie there quietly, and don’t fret about things. It won’t do you any good to get what Smith calls “all het up”.’

  Mark did his best to obey, and during the time which followed, he came to know the three men well. His first hazy impressions had to be revised. Smith, for instance, was not altogether the pessimist he had appeared. So far from losing all hopes of escaping from the caves, as he had suggested, he was full of hopes. His insistence on its impossibility was seldom a genuine belief; far more often it was a defence, a kind of counter-suggestion set up to check his hopes from rising too high. Once, in a moment of unusual confidence, he admitted:

  ‘If I didn’t think we were going to get clear of this place sometime, I guess I’d have bumped myself off before now; but if I let myself get too worked up, I’ll probably have to bump myself off one day through sheer disappointment. Most of the time I expect the worst; it’s so good when it doesn’t happen.’

  A simple theory, Smith’s, of not tempting the gods. It had points in common with the practice of carrying an umbrella to persuade the sun to shine, or travelling with two spare wheels in order to avoid a puncture. Beneath his attempts to bluff fate, he was more hopeful than the others.

  Gordon had reached a mental stage verging upon acceptance of the inevitable. Only a firm belief in some of his theories – of which, Mark was to discover, he had many – had prevented him from long ago relinquishing all idea of return. Even so, he was not likely to sink into the despair which Smith feared. He had a power of dissociating himself from his surroundings and losing himself in the purely conjectural, without which he would indeed have been forlorn. He was not without moods of deep dejection, but even a chance word would often break their spell. A light of sudden excitement would flicker in his eyes, the thin face would come to life as though a mask had been cast off, and in a few moments he would be holding forth violently: passionately advocating theories which were sometimes sound common sense, and at others the extreme of fantasy. For the most part his words seemed to flow around Smith without causing a ripple of appreciation; though occasionally the big man would grasp a practical suggestion out of the flood of words, and haul it ashore with satisfaction.

  The Arab listened to the talk with little more comment than a grunt here and there. Mark was uncertain whether his silence covered fatalistic acceptance, or profound thought. Whichever it was, he seemed of all the party the least affected by the situation. When he did talk, it was usually to give reminiscences or to tell some Arab fable of which the point was completely incomprehensible to the European mind. His chief link with the others seemed to be a mutual admiration between Smith and himself. The big frame and the slow strength of the American found its complement in the wiry agility of the Arab.

  Mark, growing stronger, began to develop a more active interest in his surroundings, and a desire to know how he came to be in his present company. His own method of entry was, beyond doubt, unique. He demanded to know how Smith had found his way in.

  Smith pulled his ear thoughtfully, and looked at the others with some doubt. Mark realized that the three must know one another’s stories by heart.

  ‘I don’t mind. Carry on,’ said Gordon, and the Arab nodded amiably.

  ‘Well, it ain’t much of a yarn, but here it is. We – a company of us, that is – had been moved up to do some police work in the mountains north of Ghardaia – and let me tell you that if you don’t know where Ghardaia is, you ain’t missed much.

  ‘Now, the Frenchies have an idea that a guy who’s still alive after a couple of months in the Legion is so tough that he can’t be killed anyway. And they behave according. They dress you up in the heaviest clothes they can find, give you a camel-sized pack and send you hiking for thousands of kilometres where the sun’s shining twice as hot as it does any place else. I can’t say how many blasted, blistering miles we put away that day, but I do know they marched us till we was pretty near dead. Some of the poor devils were all but asleep on their feet, and I was as near all in as makes no difference.

  ‘I guess they didn’t mean us to fight. The big idea was to make a nice bright show of uniforms, and whatever local sheik it was that had gotten a bit above himself would just naturally curl up and reflect on the glory of la France. Yes, that was the idea, right enough. The trouble was the Arabs didn’t see it that way – maybe the uniforms didn’t look smart enough, or something. Anyway, they waited till we were about played out, and then took a hand. We were in the open, and they were on the cliffs above us, skipping about just like antelopes –’cept that they had guns – and taking playful pot shots – most of ’em bulls. It wasn’t so funny, and we got orders to do the only possible thing – leg it to the cliff foot and take cover.

  ‘T
here were a lot of caves there, all sizes, and not wanting to stay outside and have rocks dropped on our nuts, we made for ’em. And there we stayed put. They’d got us all nicely bottled up, and how! All you’d got to do for a fatal dose of lead poisoning was to take one look outside. Some guys who’d been told that Arabs can’t shoot tried it – once.

  ‘Maybe it sounds worse than it looked. Anyway, we weren’t worrying a lot – I reckon we all just wanted to sleep. It wouldn’t be long before somebody at headquarters missed us and started raising hell to know what we were at. We’d nothing to do bar sit tight and wait.

  ‘But the local sheik didn’t see the fun of that. He’d started something, and he was going through with it. It’d probably be easier for him to explain away the disappearance of a whole company than to account for a few dead bodies. He was wholesale-minded, that fellow. We’d been there about an hour when there was hell’s own crash, away on the right. A couple of our men looked out to see what had happened – maybe they did, but it wasn’t much help to us, seeing that they got bullets through their heads for their trouble. The rest of us were content to sit tight and guess what particular form of hell-raising was going on outside. A half-hour later we knew for certain. There was a Gawdalmighty explosion right above us. Half the cliff face must have split off and come down with a run. Leastways, it was enough to bury the mouth of our cave, and put paid to four poor devils who were standing near. The wily sheik had hit on a swell idea for covering up his tracks, and it looked like we were buried alive … I reckon the guys in the other caves were; I ain’t seen none of ’em in these parts.

  ‘Well, that left three of us standing. Olsen, Dubois and me. And we had the choice of sitting down to die right there, or looking round the cave to see whether there wasn’t some other way out. We hadn’t a hope of shifting the tons of stuff in the entrance. After a bit we found a kind of a crack at the back. There was a draught through it, which meant it went some place. We shoved in and started hiking again, with a few bits of candle between us.

  ‘I don’t know how long it was before Olsen and me found ourselves looking down a split into one of those lighted tunnels – some days, most likely. And it’s no good my telling you the way those lights struck us; you must’ve felt the same way yourself when you first saw ’em. If it hadn’t been that Olsen saw ’em, same as me, I’d’ve thought I was nuts.

  ‘We’d lost Dubois. He’d fallen into a crevice some place back along, and broken his neck – poor devil. Olsen wasn’t in too good shape, either; he’d broken an arm, and pretty near knocked himself silly on a stalactite. But we’d made it – just.

  ‘A bunch of them white pygmies found us wandering around. They didn’t seem much surprised to see us. They brought up some food, and let us sleep a bit, then they marched us off here.’

  He stopped. Apparently he considered his tale was finished. From Mark’s point of view, it was scarcely begun.

  ‘But what is this place?’ he prompted. ‘You forget I’ve seen practically nothing of it except this particular cave.’

  ‘This? Oh well, you could call it a kind of jail. It’s a corner of their system of caves, and there’s only one way in to it. You were “out” when they lugged you along, or you’d have seen the way it is. They brought you down a tunnel much the same as the rest, only it stops short on a ledge. And that ledge is about a hundred feet up the side of one of the biggest of our caves. There’s no ramp, nor steps, nor nothing leading from it. They just put a rope round you and let you down in here, and that’s that. You can’t climb up a hundred feet of smooth rock – not even if you’re a human fly.’

  ‘But do you mean to say that nobody’s tried to get up?’

  ‘Tried? By gosh, they have. But there’s always some of the little grey guys watching for ’em. There’s marks near the bottom where somebody had a try at cutting handholes – they say he was stopped by a rock being dropped on his head. I once saw a fellow try to make a break for it. Frenchie, he was, and about half crazed, or he’d never have tried it. They’d just let down a new specimen into this corral when this guy thinks he sees a chance. He rushes out of the crowd of us watching, grabs the rope and starts climbing like a monkey. They let him get three-quarters of the way up before they cut the rope.’

  Mark remained almost as puzzled as before. Smith had been so long below ground that he failed to understand the bewilderment of a newcomer. Familiarity had wiped away his earlier amazement at this system of caves. Its existence had become an accepted, unsurprising fact, and the life within it a misfortune rather than an astonishment.

  ‘But who are these little white men? What are they doing here? Why don’t they come out?’

  The American shook his head.

  ‘That’s out of my line. Gordon has a theory about it. Get him to tell you some time. What’s interesting me right now is the dope you gave us. It makes things clearer.’

  ‘I gave you?’

  ‘Sure. The low-down on this New Sea stuff. There’s been something worrying them, we’ve seen that, but we couldn’t figure out just what it was. Now we’ve got it.’

  ‘Does it help?’

  ‘Help? Oh, it helps all right. It means when we get drowned down here we won’t have to worry any more about getting out.’

  Another time Mark put his questions to Gordon with greater success. The archaeologist, though he had been imprisoned longer than Smith, had contrived to keep his mind more supple. Not only had he retained an active interest, save for brief periods of depression, in the whys and wherefores of this subterranean race and its origin, but he possessed some capacity for seeing another’s point of view – a quality which could never have been characteristic of the American. Requests for information which Smith met with the assurance that there was ‘no hurry’ and that Mark would have ‘a hell of a long time to find it out in’, were treated by Gordon with some appreciation of the newcomer’s bewilderment. He enlarged upon Smith’s remark that their quarters were a ‘kind of jail’.

  ‘We’re in prison for safety,’ he explained. ‘Our safety, and theirs. There are two good ways of making a man keep a secret; one is to stop his mouth, and the other, to stop his heart. Why they choose the former, I can’t tell you; they don’t seem squeamish about things like that. Anyhow, this way’s just as effective, and it costs them nothing. We’ve got our own fungus caves, and we grow our own food in them. In fact the only real difference between their position and ours is that they can go out, but don’t want to, while we want to, but can’t.’

  ‘How many are there in here?’

  ‘It was somewhere about fifteen hundred last time we counted.’

  Mark, who had thought from the way the others talked that fifty or a hundred might be a likely estimate, stared. Fifteen hundred – ?

  ‘You do mean prisoners?’

  ‘Yes, prisoners. Counting all kinds. You’ll see them as soon as you’re strong enough to get about a bit.’ Gordon spoke for once in a way irritatingly reminiscent of Smith.

  ‘And none have ever escaped?’

  ‘That’s what they tell us, but I think they’re wrong there. It was probably a devil of a long time ago, but I think it’s been done – more than once.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ Gordon frowned slightly, ‘mind you, this is only a theory. I don’t say that the facts might not be explained another way, but I hold that it is a possible explanation. You remember that you saw a fungus forest?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What did it remind you of?’

  ‘I don’t quite –’

  ‘Didn’t it seem somehow familiar – as if you might have seen it before somewhere?’

  Mark fancied he saw what the man was driving at. He remembered how Margaret had remarked on their likeness to toadstools in a story-book picture. Gordon beamed when he heard it.

  ‘And what did she think of the white pygmies?’

  ‘That they looked like gnomes – only they had no beards.’

  The other spread hi
s hands in showman style.

  ‘Well, there you are. You did in some degree recognize the situation – it was not entirely unfamiliar to you although you thought it was. And what does that mean?’

  Mark, not having the least idea of what it might or might not mean, remained silent. Gordon continued:

  ‘It means that some suspicion, some faint rumour of such a place has leaked out into the world. All folk-beliefs have a rational beginning somewhere if you can find it. Men didn’t invent the tales of gnomes and trolls, nor the idea of giant toadstools. Someone had the tale from a man who had actually seen them – several men, perhaps, for the legends are widespread. In the course of time the stories became garbled, and at the hands of painters our pygmies underwent a transformation, but they were still dwarfs, and in most places were reported as being unfriendly to ordinary men.

  ‘I tell you, our pygmies are the originals. Centuries ago somebody who had been in here did get back to the world and tell them about it.’

  Mark looked extremely doubtful.

  ‘But nobody would have believed it – they’d have laughed them down. Just think what they’d say of us if we got out and told them about this without any proof.’

  ‘You’re getting your crowd psychology wrong. More primitive people were wiser in some ways than we are. They did not jeer at everything outside the immediate realities. The mass attitude right up to the Middle Ages was to believe until an assertion was disproved (and in some matters that attitude still persists), but the typically modern attitude is to disbelieve until proof is forthcoming. In the old days people believed in the sea-serpent, nowadays they wouldn’t believe in a kangaroo without photographs. They can still be hoaxed, of course, but the method has to be different. Besides, think of the peasants of old Europe; why should they be more surprised by hearing of small men who lived underground than by travellers’ tales of men with black skins who went naked? One is as credible as the other. The difference is that in the course of time one tale became substantiated, while the other for lack of evidence to support it decayed into what is called folk-lore. Just suppose the blacks had killed every white man they saw, wouldn’t their existence have become a myth, just as this people’s has? Of course it would.’