Rescue On Nim's Island by Orr Wendy Read Free Book Online

said Edmund.
    ‘Just wait till you get inside,’ said Nim.
    She put on her headlamp and slid in through the hole. She slid a bit faster than she meant to, because of showing the boys how, and landed harder than her knees wanted. She spat on her hands and rubbed the blood off before anyone saw.
    Tristan followed, pulling a mini torch out of his pocket. Edmund put on a headlamp and slid through last, with Fred still on his shoulder.
    Nim stopped in the glowing cavern for them to catch up. Tristan was staring around in awe: he bumped into her, then Edmund bumped into him, and then Fred got frightened and jumped from Edmund’s shoulder to Tristan’s and across to Nim.
    ‘Ouch!’ said Tristan. Fred’s claws weren’t actually sharper when he was frightened, but he dug them in deeper.
    ‘Don’t disturb the bats!’ Nim shushed, rubbing Fred’s head.
    She slipped around the big stalagmite into the side tunnel. Her headlamp lit up the leaf pattern in the rock.
    Edmund shrugged his daypack off his back and pulled out a paintbrush.
    ‘You can’t paint it!’ Nim hissed.
    ‘I can do something better,’ said Edmund.
    Very gently, he began brushing the wall around the fossil. Whitish dust drifted away, and the pattern stood out as clearly as if it had just been pressed into clay. It wasn’t a fern – it was seaweed.
    ‘Cool!’ said Tristan. ‘What’s that other thing?’
    On the wall where Edmund had started brushing, a spark of blue danced in the torchlight.
    ‘Oh,’ Nim said sadly. She ran her fingers over the bulge that she’d thought might be a fossilised branch. But she was very sure that fossils weren’t blue, and just as sure that something this big couldn’t be anything to do with the delicate sea plant.
    Tristan rubbed with his hand, and Edmund started brushing again. More blue appeared, with sparks of fire dancing inside it.
    ‘It’s an opal!’ Edmund exclaimed.
    They all ran their hands over the wall, feeling from the ridge where the blue started, up, down and along.
    ‘It’s huge!’ Tristan breathed.
    Nim was still disappointed that it wasn’t a fossil, but the more of the fiery blue she saw, the more beautiful it seemed. She got out her chisel and chipped gently away at the rock above where whatever-it-was began.
    Edmund got a smaller brush out of his daypack and gave it to Tristan.
    ‘I’ve got a comb too,’ said Tristan, and they all laughed. But even as they joked about brushing and combing the rock’s hair, they kept on doing it. The shape stood out more and more clearly as the boys brushed away the flakes of rock that fell from Nim’s chisel. Then Tristan ran his comb over the bulge itself, and when Edmund brushed those dirt crumbs away, more sparks of blue and green glowed from the wall.
    They went on working. When Nim had chiselled all around the outside of the shape, she used the spike on her pocketknife to pry the last bits of limestone away from the edges. The boys went on brushing. The opal grew and grew.
    ‘It’s like finding buried treasure!’ Tristan exclaimed.
    After a while they stopped to eat the coconut and bananas, and an energy bar Tristan had in his pocket. Then they went on uncovering whatever was on the wall.
    It was a round shape, longer than Nim could spread her arms wide, and curved out gently in the middle.
    ‘Here’s something else,’ said Edmund, brushing just below it.
    Very delicately, Nim picked around it with her spike. Edmund flicked the crumbs off, brushing and brushing until a long, thin piece of opal appeared.
    ‘It looks like a bone,’ said Tristan.
    Edmund brushed a bit more. The blue-green, sparking-with-red opal was long and thin and knobbly.
    ‘Like a tailbone,’ said Nim.
    Edmund brushed more carefully still, flicking out the grains of dirt around the knobbles.
    Nim went back to the big shape. She’d uncovered the outside nearly all the way around now: an oval ring of hard, shining stone in the softer rock of the wall. There was a wide