is dreams were of falling. Always when he half roused to consciousness he was aware of that smooth, even descent, and he knew it had continued for hours.
Once he saw black walls slipping smoothly past, upward, always upward. Gropingly he tried to marshal his facts into some understandable sequence. He was falling, falling toward the center of the earth, and this that he saw was not rock, or any metal such as he knew.
"It's all different," he told himself dully, "new kind of matter. Rock would flow; this stands the pressure." But he knew the air pressure had built up tremendously. The blood was pounding in his ears. He wanted to sleep.
It was the heat that awakened him. The air was stifling him, suffocating. He was struggling to move his heavy body, fighting against this nightmare of heat when he opened his eyes and knew that he was in a place of light. First to be seen were walls, no longer black, no longer even with the characteristics of rock, or even metal. Here, as Rawson had sensed, was new material to form the core of a world. It would have been red in an ordinary light. It was transformed to orange, strangely terrifying in the blazing flood of yellow brilliance that came from the tunnel's end.
Rawson's brain was not working clearly. An unendurable weight seemed pressing upon him—the air pressure, he thought, to which he had not yet become accustomed. And the air, itself, hot—hot!
A breeze blew steadily past toward that place of yellow horror at the tunnel's end. Yellow, that reflected light; but its source was a searing, dazzling white in the one brief instant when Rawson dared turn his eyes.
Hands held him erect, red, gripping hands. One, whose body seemed molten copper in that fierce glare, approached. His hand described a circle over Rawson's bare chest. Straight lines radiated out from the circle, lines of stabbing pain for the helpless man. He had seen the same emblem in the temple of fire, again in the big room where Phee-e-al had stood.
* * *
he living sacrifice was prepared. Burned into his bare flesh was the emblem of their legendary sun-god. The priests, their bodies coated with a flashing coppery film that must somehow be heat-resistant, had him in their grasp.
The red warriors had fallen back. Then Phee-e-al appeared; he joined the march of death of which Dean Rawson formed the head. Voices were chanting—somewhere a trumpet blared. Then Rawson, moving like one in a dream, knew the priests were guiding him toward that waiting, incredible heat.
The tunnel's end was near. About him was an inferno where heat and hot colors blended. The whole world seemed aflame, but beyond the tunnel's end was a seething pit upon which no human eyes could look and live.
One glimpse only of the unbearable whiteness beneath which was the lake of fire, then the chains of his stupor broke and Dean Rawson struggled frenziedly in the grip of two copper giants.
They had been chanting a shrill monotonous refrain. They ceased now as they fought to throw the man out past that last ten paces where even they dared not go.
Rawson was beyond conscious thought. Eyes closed against the unendurable heat, he fought blindly, desperately, then knew his last strength was going from him. Still struggling he opened his eyes; some thought of meeting death face to face compelled him.
* * *
hideous coppery face glared close into his own. Miraculously it vanished, disappeared in a cloud of white. Then the blazing walls were gone—there was nothing in all the world but rushing clouds of whiteness, shrieking winds, the roar of an explosion—and cold, so biting that it burned like heat.
Vaguely he wondered at the hands that still clutched at him. Dimly he sensed other bodies close to his, other hands that tore him free where he lay, still struggling with the priests, upon the floor. A narrow opening was in the wall, a blur of darkness in the billowing white clouds. They were dragging him into it, those others who held him, and they were white—white as the vapor that whirled about him.
Ahead, the girl of his former dreams was guiding him, her hand cool and soft in his. Others helped him; he ran stumblingly where they led down a steep and narrow way.
The White Ones! In a vision they had reached out to him before. Was this, too, a dream? Was it only the delirium of death? That burst of cold—had it truly been liquid fires, wrapping him around?
Dean Rawson could not be sure. He knew only that his fate lay wholly in the hands of these White Ones—and that hideous eyes in the coppery face of a priest had glared at them as they fled.
* * *
CHAPTER XVI
The Metal Shell
She was motioning for him to follow.
ean Rawson had passed through a nerve-racking experience. It was not a question of courage—Rawson had plenty of that—but there are times when a man's nervous system is shocked almost to insensibility by sheer horror. Not at once did he realize what was happening.
The Voice of the Mountain heralds Rawson's Messianic coming to the White Ones in their hour of need.
Perhaps it was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of fighting animals—cat-beasts—whose snarls had risen to screaming, squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that echoed through that narrow passage.
Ahead of him the girl was running. She held a light in her hand. Soft wrappings of cloth hung loosely from her waist; like her golden hair, it was flung backward in the strong draft of air against which they were struggling. She was outlined clearly before the red, rock-like masses where her light was falling; she was running swiftly, gracefully, like a wild, woodland nymph.
Two men, their milk-white bodies naked but for the thick folds of their loin cloths, were beside Rawson, helping him along. Two others followed. And, by their haste and their odd whispered words of alarm, he knew that pursuit had not been expected; they must have thought to get away unobserved.
Rawson felt his strength returning. He shook himself free from those who tried to aid him. He was amazed at how easily he ran: his weight was a mere nothing; his efforts were expended in driving his body against the blast of wind. The air seemed dense, thick; he had almost the feeling of forcing himself through water.
Ahead of him the girl darted abruptly through a narrow crack in the wall. Rawson followed—and then began a wild race through a network of connecting passages, a vast labyrinth of caves, more like fractures in this strange red substance which Rawson could think of only as rock, for lack of a more accurate name, until at last there was no sound except that of their own hurrying feet.
* * *
hey stopped and stood panting in one of the wider passages. He heard nothing but the endless rush of the wind. For the first time Rawson became aware of his own almost naked condition.
The mole-men had prepared him for the sacrifice. They had decked him with a loin cloth of woven gold. It felt cold to the touch, and Rawson did not doubt its being made of fine threads of the precious metal. About his neck hung a gold chain with a heavy object suspended; he tore it off, and found again a representation of a golden sun. The copper priests had arrayed him to meet their fire-god, and again Rawson wondered at the emblem they employed.
"What in the name of the starlit heavens," he demanded silently of himself, "could this buried race know of the sun?"
The others were watching him. In the glow of that strange light held by the girl he saw them smiling. They were congratulating one another with odd, soft-syllabled words. And Rawson, ignorant of their tongue, was mute, when his whole soul cried out to thank them.
He gripped the hands of the men. They were as tall as himself, their gaze level with his own. Their faces were human, friendly; their eyes sparkled and smiled into his. Then he turned to the girl.
She had seen the method of greeting this stranger employed. She extended her hand—a white hand, slim, soft, cool. And Rawson, choking with emotion, knowing that here was the one who had first seen him and who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand, held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to
the slender fingers in a quick caress.
When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.
Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and the wind pressed against them unceasingly.
* * *
he White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of glass. Rawson's bare feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now. The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the white figure of the girl where her light was flashing on endless walls of red.
In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air, that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow, unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the whole earth when they came at last to an open room.
It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and shook him through and through with its single note.
Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound, he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But his eyes were searching the big room.
* * *
he great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin. The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in so great a space that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid red matter.
The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines of entrances to many dark passages like the one through which they had come. The red rock-mass seemingly had been riven and torn, and apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against the rush of outgoing air. Rawson felt the same current sweeping and whirling gustily about him.
Now his companions were across the room, and between him and them in the center of the floor he saw the mouth of a black well, a pit some twenty or more feet across. Directly above, where the red rock stuff formed a domed ceiling, he found a counterpart of the pit below—another great bore or open shaft, roughly circular. Apparently it went straight on up and was a continuation of that lower pit.
"This room was cut out," Rawson was thinking, "by the white people or the mole-men—Lord knows who, or when, or why. Cut out around this big shaft...."
His thoughts trailed off. Even thinking seemed impossible under the battering of the roaring noise that pounded about him. Then another thought pierced through the bedlam. He had found the source of the uproar.
* * *
hat upper shaft, the hole that went on up, must be plugged. There was no outlet that way, and this air that drove endlessly upward from the room must be coming from the lower shaft. It was striking up into that upper cavity.
An organ pipe, truly. But whence came the unending blast of air to keep that gigantic instrument in operation? Rawson dropped to his knees and crept slowly across the floor toward the pit. He must test his theory—see if that was where the air was driving in.
Just short of the brink he stopped. The girl had called—a cry of alarm. She was running swiftly toward him, circling the pit. And Rawson, as she tugged at him, trying to draw him back, knew that she had mistaken his motive. She had thought he was going to cast himself down.
He did not need to go farther. He was close to the edge. And now, even above that roaring sound he heard the rush of the column of air. He seated himself on the stone floor and smiled up at the girl reassuringly. Her eyes that had been dark with fear changed swiftly to a look so sweetly, beautifully tender that Dean Rawson found himself thrilled and shaken by an emotion that set his nerves to quivering even more than did the sonorous vibration from above.
Her companions had joined her. Dean saw her eyes regarding them steadily. Then, as if reaching some sudden final conclusion in her own mind, she dropped swiftly to her knees beside him, raised one of his hands in hers and pressed her soft lips against it.
And Dean, even had he known their language, could not in that moment have spoken. There had been something in the look of her eyes and the soft touch of her lips that of themselves went far beyond words.
"You darling," he was whispering softly to himself as the girl sprang to her feet and walked swiftly away, the others following.
"An angel, no less—down in this damned place!"
* * *
e wondered, as he watched the flickering light far across the room, what destination they could be bound for. Surely no one so radiantly beautiful could inhabit a world of endless dungeons like that where the mole-men lived. But if not that, then what? Where would their next journey take them? And in what direction would they go?
Again Rawson's thoughts were submerged beneath his own weariness. This air that beat about him had seemed cool after the terrific heat that drove in off the Lake of Fire. Now he realized that the air itself was hot. His one spurt of strength and energy had been expended.
He watched the men disappear into one of the passages, but he roused himself when they returned. They were clinging to a strange device, a metal cylinder that floated in air above their heads like a dirigible on end. It was about eight feet in diameter and some fourteen feet in height; both upper and lower ends were rounded. A cage of parallel bars enclosed it from end to end; like springs of steel they extended from top to bottom where they curved in and were attached to the rounded ends.
* * *
awson sat up quickly and stared in startled amazement at the thing glinting like polished aluminum in the light. And his engineer's mind responded as much to that smooth finish and the evident workmanship that had entered into the making of this thing as it did to the object itself.
The girl placed her light on the floor. She, too, reached up and gripped a bar of the protecting cage to which the others were holding. With her added weight and strength they drew it down almost to the floor. Rawson knew by their efforts that they were dealing with something actually buoyant, a metal balloon. One of the men, still putting his weight on the bars, reached in and opened a door in the smooth shell. He stepped inside, and a moment later the big shell dropped to the floor and, still vertical, stood on the lower rounded end of the protecting cage, rocking gently as the hot whirling wind hit it.
They were communicating among themselves by signs. Rawson saw them motioning. Speech was useless in that roaring, pandemonium-filled room.
She was motioning for him to follow. One of the men circled that central pit, came beside Rawson and helped him to his feet, steadying him as they crossed the room. The girl had entered the big metal shell. Dean saw the glow of her torch shining through the open doorway and through two other windows of crystal glass.
The big room had grown dimmer. The high ceiling was lost in murky shadows. All the room was dark save where that light struck upon walls and floor to make them glow blood-red. The waiting lighted shell seemed a haven of refuge. To get inside, close the door, lock out some of this unendurable, battering sound—it was all Rawson asked, all he could think.
The door closed. He was within the shell, standing on a smooth metal floor. The others were beside him. Dully he wondered what wild adventure was ahead.
* * *
e had expected—he hardly knew what. But there should have been machinery of some sort. If this weird balloon thing was actually to carry them, there must be some mechanism, some propelling power. And instead he saw nothing but the shining walls of the circular room and at the exact center, reaching from floor to ceiling, a six-inch metal post that thickened to a boxlike form on a level with his eyes. There was a plate on the side of that box, a cover, a
nd clamps that held it in place, and on an adjoining side two little levers, one near the top of the box, the other near the bottom.
His one all-inclusive glance showed him bull's-eye windows in the ceiling. There were more of them in the floor. One curved bar, circling the room, was mounted on brackets against the wall. They were telling him by signs that he was to put his hands on it and hang on. One of the men was beside that central post. He too gripped at a projecting hand-hold. His other hand was on the lower lever.
Rawson knew his disappointment was unreasonable, but his weary mind was tired of mysteries. Some understandable bit of machinery would have been reassuring. And then in his next thought he asked himself what difference did it make. If this childish balloon thing were really capable of carrying them somewhere, what of it? It could only mean more of this hideous inner world that grew more unbearably fantastic with each new experience.
His life had been saved. True, but for what end? The girl's eyes were upon him, reading the expression on his face. She smiled encouragingly. Then Rawson's hands tightened upon the metal bar. The man who stood by the central post had moved one lever the merest trifle. Rawson felt the floor lifting beneath him. Then the shell, like a bubble of metal, pitched and tossed as the powerful air currents caught it.
* * *
is own lightness saved him from injury. He gripped the bar and held himself free of the wall. The round top of their strange craft grated against the domed roof. Then again the ship steadied and seemed motionless, and Rawson knew they had slipped up into the still air of that upper shaft.
Two Thousand Miles Below Page 10
