Читать книгу Men Against the Sea онлайн

21 страница из 57

“I fear you are right. They jettisoned us; it is not likely that their treatment of the plants will be any more tender. And I loved them as though they were my own children!”

We returned to the beach, where we found that the others had been no more successful than ourselves; but the exploring party had gotten out of the cove, although how they had managed it no one knew. Captain Bligh had found a cavern in the rocky wall, about one hundred and fifty paces from the beach; and the hard, foot-trampled ground within showed that it had been often used in the past. The cavern was perfectly dry; not so much as a drop of water trickled from the rocks overhead. One find we made there was not of a reassuring nature. On a shelf of rock there were ranged six human skulls which, an examination convinced me, had been those of living men not more than a year or two earlier. In one of these, the squamosal section of the temporal bone had been crushed, and another showed a jagged hole through the parietal bone. I was interested to observe the splendid teeth in each of these skulls; there was not one in an imperfect condition. These relics, gleaming faintly white in the dim light of the cave, were eloquent in their silence; and I have no doubt that they might have been more eloquent still, could they have conveyed to us information as to how they came to be there.