THE PILLAR OF LIGHT

I

DAY broke on the Red Sea, pale and hard-yellow, like low- grade molten brass. The big revolving light on Matthew Island ceased to turn; its reddish rays sickened and waned and died; the dirty, shark-infested waves–oily and breakerless–reflected the molten shimmer of the sky, and the humidity increased by a degree or two.

No birds twittered. There was nothing, either animal or human, amid the awful desolation of the Twelve Apostles, that seemed glad to greet the dawn. Aloes were the only thing that grew there, unless you count the sickly-looking patch of vegetables, some twenty feet by twenty, that succeeding reliefs of sergeants had coaxed on to the bald, hot hideous rock to make them homesick.

Sergeant Stanley, of the Fifty-Fifth (“God’s Own”), arose from his sleepless cot as a bugler turned out the shirt sleeved guard. There followed in time-accustomed sequence the growled command–sweet-toned ‘reveille,’ wasting its sweetness over unresponsive desolation, the click of arms presented, and the Union Jack rising up a white-smeared flagpole; it flapped once or twice, and then drooped despondently “Order Um-m-ms! commanded Stanley. “Guard… dismiss!”

Another twelve-hours’ sun-baked idleness was under way.

Stanley saw to the sweeping of the guard-room, and the making of the serried rows of beds; then he strolled to the one and only bungalow, to ask whether or not his officer was up as yet. A Somali boy answered that he was not up. Stanley turned, and the boy followed him along the winding foot-path that descended down the cliff-side to a ledge of rock beside the sea.

Near the bottom of the path they were preceded by a thousand scampering crabs, which fought with each other for the right of way and flopped into the water noisily, like frightened ghouls caught prowling after dawn. The Somali boy singled out the largest of them and crushed it with a well-aimed stone; instantly a hundred other crabs cut short their scurry to the sea to tear it into little pieces and devour it.

“Ugh!” growled Stanley. “You, Twopence! What in blazes d’you mean by that? Isn’t there hell enough on this rock without your adding to it? Get back d’you hear–back to your master!”

The Somali grinned, but he obeyed. He knew the temper of the white man marooned on the Twelve Apostles, and he could gage the consequence of disobedience pretty accurately, from experience. Stanley kicked the struggling crabs into the sea, and watched for a while the huge fin of a tiger shark scouting to and fro in lazy, zigzag sweeps that scarcely produced a ripple on the blood-hot water.

As the sun grew higher, the oily waves died down–beaten down it seemed, by the brazen reflection of the sky, and from the distance, growing gradually nearer, came the steady thug-thug-thug of a propeller. Big, black, bristling with iron wind-scoops, a Peninsular and Oriental liner hurried past, slam-banging down the Red Sea at sixteen knots to make a head-wind for her passengers.

“Not so much as a signal!” muttered Stanley to himself. “Lord help ‘em, they think they’re suffering! Punkahs above the tables, and lemonade, and ice! Open sea ahead of ‘em, all the worst of it behind, and can’t even run a string o’ flags up to pass the time o’ day!’

The sun turned paler yellow yet, and as it rose a yard or two above the cast-iron ring of the horizon, the sea below where Stanley stood turned pale green and transparent. He could look down into it, and see the million rainbow-tinted fishes feeding on each other–the everlasting cannibal-fight for the survival of the biggest. A shark, sneaking amid the coral out of reach of larger sharks, swept suddenly among the fish in lightning flashes.

Then, to digest his bellyful, he came and rested lazily beneath the ledge of rock where Stanley stood. And the long arm of a giant octopus reached out, flicking at the end like a beckoning finger, and pulled him–struggling –fighting–plunging downward to the parrot-beak below. Stanley shuddered. “That’s no way to die!” he muttered. Then he glanced again over to the hurrying liner, and his look hardened into something scarcely civilized.

“It’s for the likes o’ them that the likes of us are festering here; let ‘em pay the price! Let ‘em say then if it’s worth it!”

Stanley was just one man of a hundred and fifty thousand who take their turns in guarding the Empire’s outposts, only his happened to be a rather more than usually awful turn. He was a railway porter’s son, dragged up in the slums a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street Station, and his history was like a thousand others: caught stealing; sent to truant-school by a paternal Government; claimed from the truant-school as soon as he was old enough, and broken in to selling newspapers and blacking boots and carrying handbags; taught to touch his forelock (he never had a hat in those days) to anybody who would tip him twopence; half-starved, wholly beaten, ever inch of him, and rubbed into the muck of poverty and vice and crime; taught that a gentleman is a free-handed cad with money, and that a smug is a man who has a sense of duty. And then -

At the age of eighteen, caught and coaxed and cajoled by a recruiting sergeant. Sworn, and drilled, and taught to clean himself. Treated like a man by his superiors, and exactly on his merits by his equals–a thing that he had never known before. Sardined in the bowels of a troopship, and introduced, along with prickly heat and fever, to a race who, from past experience, with Englishmen, believed the things he said because he said them. And, barely yet recovered from the shock of his new-found sahibdom, starved and frozen and led–led all the time by men who understood the business–through a hill campaign in Northern India.

Promoted after that to the rank of sergeant–a full-fledged, tested connecting-link between the bayonets and the brains. A man of pride and cleanliness bewildering to new recruits–straight-backed and polished as a service cleaning-rod.

But the desolation of the Twelve Apostles, as those Red Sea island rocks are named, had seeped into his soul. Even the British sergeant must be busy, unless he is to lose that indefinable, but absolutely certain Regimental grip that tightens up his moral fiber while it trains his muscles. There was nothing here to watch but fishes and the outlines of the eleven other barren crags. It was too hot to drill; the regulations allowed an officer to dispense with every routine that was not absolutely necessary to the preservation of good order and discipline. It was too lonely and wild and awful to do anything but quarrel with any one who was fool enough to speak.

A man could not swim for fear of sharks and worse things; he could not play games, because the ragged rock-surface was hot enough to raise blisters through the soles of ammunition boots; he could not read because the sweat ran into his eyes; and through the long, wet-blanket nights he could not sleep for prickly heat. It was hell, ungarnished. And there were five months and one week more of it ahead–for a second lieutenant, two sergeants, four corporals, and fifty men.

The Fifty-Fifth (and don’t forget that they are ‘God’s Own,’ and ready to prove it in close order at a moment’s notice) were stationed that ye