Socotra Cave Rescue

Summary

The Shah Alam anchored in a sheltered bay on Socotra to fill her water casks, and lost two men to what lived in the cliffs. The party went in after them and brought both back alive.

Context

The spring lay a quarter mile inland at the foot of the cliff, issuing from a cave mouth, and watering the ship was a full day’s labour of casks carried in empty and out full. The bay was beautiful and completely silent — no bird call, no insect noise, nothing. Captain Aratoon had watered here before without trouble and said so.

Jumman went first. Katherine had seen the boy resting in the shade of the cave mouth; passing again, she found a small puddle of water, the impression of a barrel pressed into the mud, and no barrel, no boy, and no footprints. Freddy vanished shortly after, leaving his unlit torch lying on the ground.

Participants

While Ismail halted the watering and called the shore party together, Emma and Thomas questioned the lascars at the spring and learned Jumman had been gone for several cask runs. Georgiana and Ashby searched the beach, where Georgiana saw a small painted face watching them from the tall grass — a native child, not Jumman — and quietly told Ashby not to look; the two women withdrew without approaching and reported to the ship. Aratoon assumed the boy had wandered off after a coloured bird, and sent a lookout to the crow’s nest.

Holt had spotted movement disappearing into a cave entrance thirty feet up the cliff face. He tested the vines, committed his weight, made fifteen feet, and fell when one snapped — shouting “Avenge me” on the way down, while the crew exchanged money over the outcome and the lookout called the result from aloft. Georgiana, who has no particular fondness for him, patched him up.

The crew then fetched ladders and ship’s rigging and scaled the cliff properly. The party split: Holt and the crew to the upper entrance, Emma, Georgiana, Adrien, Thomas, Katherine and Ashby through the lower tunnel, marking their route with twine and chalk.

Outcome & Consequences

The two tunnels met in a vast junction thick with webbing. The crew put torches to the silk and it went up in a whoosh of flame, acrid smoke and ash, driving pale skittering shapes back to the edge of the torchlight. Adrien pushed forward with his torch to widen the ring of light and revealed what was deeper in: a wall of woven egg sacs, and pony-sized breeders crouched over it on braced front legs. The sight broke his composure entirely — instead of retreating he walked toward them, rapt, and it took a firm intervention from Georgiana to bring him back.

Suspended overhead were Freddy and Jumman in fresh cocoons, among older bundles nobody looked at closely. Emma climbed a human pyramid formed by the crew, cut Jumman free, and lowered him into Thomas’s arms. Holt scaled a second pyramid to reach Freddy; as he hacked at the silk a drone dropped from the ceiling and sank its fangs into his chest. He fought it off, felt the numbness spreading across his ribs, and then the pyramid went out from under him — sending Holt, Freddy and the spider to the cave floor together, the spider crushed flat between the two men.

The party carried both out into the sunlight. The spiders stopped dead at the shadow line and did not follow. Georgiana treated the bite with the same resigned competence she had shown after the fall, and the numbness receded. The crew finished the water run at speed, the lines were cast off, and the island fell away astern.

What carries forward: Holt is bitten and envenomed and owes Georgiana twice over. Adrien came out of the caves with a fascination rather than a fear, which is a problem of a different shape. Freddy owes his life to Holt and the crew, and Jumman owes his to the party. The nest is intact — one drone dead, the breeders unfought, the egg wall untouched — and the older husks hanging in that chamber were never examined.

Relationships

• Located at Socotra Limestone Caves — The cave system above the sheltered bay
• Participated in Socotran Cave Spiders — The predators that took both men
• Rescued Jumman — Cut down alive by Emma Wentworth and caught by Thomas Wyndham
• Rescued Freddy Cavendish — Cut down by Nathaniel Holt as the human pyramid collapsed beneath them
• Participated in Nathaniel Holt — Fell from the cliff, was bitten in the chest, and killed the drone in the collapse