III. THE CAVE OF THE RED HAND.

Harry and Donald were not frightened out of their love for exploring by their adventure up the creek. The next expedition they went on, however, was by land. They had heard a good deal of the Cave of the Red Hand in the Bulla Bulla Mountains, about ten miles from Wonga-Wonga; and one Saturday afternoon, directly after dinner, they started in search of the cave—Harry on his own horse Cornstalk, and Donald on his own mare Flora M‘Ivor. They knew that they had to steer for a very tall blasted gum tree that stood on the top of a ridge, and that when they had “rose the ridge,” as Australians say, they would find the mouth of the cave somewhere near at hand on the other side of the gully.
39

When they got down into the gully they dismounted, and hobbled their horses where there was a little feed; and then they began to look about them. It was some time before they found the cave’s mouth, but, whilst they were looking for it, they saw what neither of them had ever seen alive before, though they were Australian-born; and that was one of the shy birds after which the mountains were named. They got a full view of the dingy cock-pheasant, as he stood between two clumps of scrub, with his beautiful tail up like a lyre without strings. “Bulla, bulla, bulla, bulla,” he was gurgling like a brook; but, as soon as he saw the boys, he was off like a shot.
40

“Here it is!” at last shouted Harry, and when Donald ran up, he found his cousin standing outside a very gloomy-looking opening in the hillside, with a moustache and whiskers of almost black brushwood about the gaping mouth. On the rocky wall at the entrance, a red hand with outstretched fingers pointed inwards; and when the boys had lighted their lantern and groped their way into the cave, they found more red hands on the walls, and white hands too—some pointing forwards and some backwards, some up and some down.

“ON THE ROCKY WALL A RED HAND.”

“Don’t they look queer, Donald?” said Harry; “just as if they were murderers and people getting murdered poking their hands out of the stone. I wonder who did them, and what they mean.”
41

“Why, the black fellows don’t know,” answered Donald. “They say the old people did them, but they don’t know who the old people were. I expect a flood drowned them. Do you know the story the black fellows tell about the Flood? They say that somewhere or other in Australia the black fellows’ father lies asleep on the ground, with his head resting on his arm; and that he woke up ever so long ago, and that then all the country was flooded; and that when he wakes next, he will eat up all the black fellows. They say he is a giant—taller than that blue gum on the ridge. The old fellow puts them into a great funk. Up at our place I went out one day with a black fellow after honey. He caught a native bee, and stuck a bit of down on it, and chased it till it lighted on a tree, and then he climbed up with his tomahawk, and tapped till he found where the nest was. He cut out the combs and the bee-bread before you could say ‘Jack Robinson;’ but he took precious care to leave some of the honey for the old giant. If he’s asleep, though, I don’t see what good it would do him.”

“They’re a queer lot, the black fellows,” philosophically remarked Harry; “but they’re a long sight better than new chums—they were born in the colony just like us. A black fellow can ride like a native, but those Englishmen look so scared when a horse begins to buck.”
42

Just then, however, it was Harry’s turn to look scared, for a great grey owl, with round eyes that gleamed like polished guineas, brushed against his face, and directly afterwards two or three flying foxes floated by, looking in the dark very much like dirty cherubim off a tombstone.

Donald laughed to see how the owl and the great bats made Harry jump, when he had been talking so big the minute before. Presently they walked into a cloud of great dusky moths that came fluttering about the lantern like butterflies’ ghosts, and then they saw stalactites hanging down like sheets and chandeliers, and fruit and flowers, and plucked geese, and organ-pipes, and joining on to the stalagmites on the floor, and making columns and cloisters and great hour-glasses. Some of the stalactites rang in tune when they rapped them, like harmonicons. It would have been a very jolly place to wander about in, if the water had not dropped off the roof down the napes of their necks, and if they had not been obliged to look out so sharp to keep from tumbling down little precipices, or into the streams they could hear running, and the ponds they could sometimes see shining through the darkness.
43

They had scrambled down three or four of the little precipices (the cave’s floor was like a great rough flight of stairs) when they stopped to look at a pillar that was just like a huge candle with a “winding-sheet.”

“Why, there’s a red hand up there,” said Harry, pointing to the winding-sheet.

Donald could not see it, and so Harry put the lantern on to the end of a long stick he carried, and held it up to what he said was the hand. But still Donald could not see one.

“You must be blind, then,” said Harry impatiently; “there, don’t you see now?” and he pushed the lantern against the stalactite.
44

Down the lantern dropped, rolled over for a few feet, and disappeared. The boys joined hands, and groped with the stick after the lantern; but presently the end of the stick ran on without anything to stop it, and if they had not pulled themselves up very quick, they would have fallen down the deepest drop they had come to yet. At the bottom was a light, dancing about like a will-o’-the-wisp. The lantern had tumbled into one of the black subterranean streams, and soon, either the water put the candle out, or else the lantern was carried underground. At any rate, Donald and Harry were left quite in the dark.

“We must keep on lighting matches,” said Donald; “or, perhaps, we could make torches out of this stick-it seems dry. Where are the matches?—You had them.”
45

But when Harry felt in his pocket, the matchbox was gone. He felt in all his pockets, and Donald felt in all his pockets, but not a single match could they find. Then, at first, they did feel very much afraid, and I think you would have been afraid, too, however plucky you may be. The cave was pitch-dark where they had got to. They could hear water dripping and dashing and running all round about them—some of it a long way down. When they moved, they were forced to tap about with the stick like a blind man, and to slide their feet along the ground at a snail’s pace, for fear of suddenly tumbling down some deep pit or into a well-like water-hole. And if they could find their way back to the great steps they had come down, it would be very hard to find the proper places to ascend, and to scramble up them in the dark. It had not been easy scrambling down them, even with a lantern. No wonder Donald and Harry felt frightened. But funking, they knew, would do no good. If they sat down scared in a corner, there they would have to starve, most likely; for no one at Wonga-Wonga knew that they had started for the cave.
46

“Let’s say our prayers,” said Donald (it was Harry told me); and when they had said them, they gripped hold tight of one another’s hands, and set out.

At first they went quite wrong. After stumbling about for nearly half an hour, they had got again to the top of the precipice the lantern had tumbled down, instead of to the foot of the first one they had to climb up; but then they felt their way along by the wall of the cave, until they came at last to the bottom of the drop they wanted. They could not always keep by the wall. Every now and then their guiding-stick went splash into water. Sometimes, too, they ran full butt against rocks that knocked sparks out of their eyes, and made their noses bleed, and tore their clothes into ragged ribbons; and Donald lost one of his shoes, and Harry both of his, in some mud, as sticky as birdlime, that they floundered into. But, at last, as I have said, they came to the foot of the first great step they had to mount. They felt about with their stick, but for a long time they could find no foot or hand-hold. And when they did come by-and-bye to jutting big stones, they were no good, because a waterfall was tumbling down them. The stream it made below was not very broad, but it ran so fast that the boys could not pole how deep it was; and so they had to be very careful in crossing it, and they would not have been able to cross it at all, if it had not been for a great stone in the middle that the stick tapped against. As it was, Harry (who was more slapdash in his ways than Donald) went into the water up to his waist before he got to the other side.
47

When they had crossed, they seemed at first as far off from the cave’s mouth as ever; but, after ten minutes’ groping about, they got into a zigzag crack in the great step, through which, with more tearing of clothes and bruising of shins, they managed to wriggle up to the sloping platform above. They had learnt wisdom from experience, and did not try to strike right across it. Perhaps you have tried to walk right across a common in a fog, and have come out not far from the place you started from: well, Donald and Harry had discovered that making short cuts in the pitch-dark Cave of the Red Hand was like that, and so they tapped along the edge of the step until they came to the cave’s wall once more, and then followed that—running up against rocks, and floundering into mud and water as before—until they got to the foot of the next step. When they had climbed a good way up the last step they had to mount, they met with a great disappointment. There were no more stones sticking out for them to take hold of. They swished the stick backwards and forwards like a scythe, but it went over the rock just as if it had been a brick wall.
48

So they had to go back and try again, and it was so long before they found a mounting-place, that they began to lose heart, and fear that, after all, they would have to die in the cave, with nothing but the pointing red hand at the entrance to show where they were. But at last their heads rose above the edge of the great step, and there, far away, the moonlight was pouring in at the cave’s mouth, and making silver gauze of the mist just inside. Close by them the cave still looked very gloomy; but oh, how jolly they felt! When the owls and the flying foxes brushed against Harry now, he could have shaken hands—or wings—with them, they seemed so much like old friends welcoming him back to life.
49

It did not take the boys long to get out of the cave when they had the moonlight to guide them, and they did not stop long to look at the inwards-pointing red hand, at which they had looked so curiously when they were going to follow its direction. Then the faded red fingers seemed burnt up by the blazing sunlight; now they pointed dim beneath the dewy moonlight. When the boys thought of the dismal darkness the hand pointed to, they hurried by it as if it had power to push them back into the gloom. In spite of their hobbles, Cornstalk and Flora M‘Ivor had strayed a long way, and it was early Sunday morning before they and their riders got back to Wonga-Wonga.
50

The bleeding, battered, tattered boys were so full of their adventure that they were quite angry to find every one there sound asleep. They went to bed without waking even the dogs, and heard next day at breakfast that, as they had been seen riding in the direction of the next station, it had been thought that they had been kept there to spend the night. They felt doubly fortunate then in having got out of the Cave of the Red Hand, for no one, plainly enough, would have dreamt of looking for them in it.