BIGGLES HITS THE TRAIL

 

by Captain W. E. Johns

 

 

VI.           MAROONED  (Pages 101 – 113)

 

After a hundred yards they stop and put the rubber on more securely.  Looking back, Biggles says “Those overgrown caterpillars.  They’ve stopped; the whole lot of them.  There’s not a movement.  They look as if they were all dead”.  Biggles goes back up the gorge to see.  Then he sees and hears somebody.  A man calling out help!  They see him on the lip of the cliff on the opposite crater.  He is holding a cudgel or club and seems to be fighting invisible opponents.  Biggles and Algy run over the apparently dead creatures to go and help.  “The lonely figure on the cliff saw them coming, and waved frantically.  “Help!  Make haste,” he screamed, in a strong Scots accent”.  Biggles asks how they can get up there and is told by the man to go through the cave.  “Watch out for the blue light.  It’s death,” shouted the man.  Running into the cave they see “all the apparatus of a small, compact power-station”.  A blue light is shone at them but Biggles fires and the light goes out.  As Biggles and Algy dash out onto the plateau “vague indistinct forms flittered about the wide plateau on which they now found themselves.  Most of them were concentrated round the man who, with his back to the edge of the cliff, was wielding a heavy iron bar like a flail.  Every now and then there was a crash of breaking glass, and each time he let out a grunt of satisfaction.  Queer high-pitched voices were calling in a strange language”.  Biggles opens fire.  “The dark shapes backed away before him.  “Keep it going, Jock,” he yelled, with the fighting madness on him”.  The man says they can’t go through the tunnel again as “they’ve turned on the current again”.  The man explains that the bugs can’t move when the current is off and he turned it off.  He says that’s why “The Chungs” came for him.  The exit to the plateau is now a solid wall of rock and the man uses his iron bar to tear out the black tubes that connect the door with the rock.  He says that will stop them but there is no other way off the plateau.  The aircraft can be seen from the plateau and Biggles lights a bonfire to draw the attention of the three distant figures.  He then fires his rifle three times “the universal distress call”.  Ginger gets in the aircraft and flies up to the plateau, landing the Explorer gently.  Dickpa and Malty get out and Ginger follows them.  The Scotsman introduces himself as Angus McAllister.  He says he has been here fifty years, even if he doesn’t look a day over fifty.  He was “close on forty” in 1885 when wrecked in the China seas in the clipper ‘Morning Star’.  He says his time is getting short and he has much to tell them.