I am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when I saw what lay revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in the best Kultur of Prussia, I should not have been amazed, for geology and tradition alike tell us of great transpositions in oceanic and continental areas. What I saw was an extended and elaborate array of ruined edifices; all of magnificent though unclassified architecture, and in various stages of preservation. Most appeared to be of marble, gleaming whitely in the rays of the searchlight, and the general plan was of a large city at the bottom of a narrow valley, with numerous isolated temples and villas on the steep slopes above. Roofs were fallen and columns were broken, but there still remained an air of immemorially ancient splendor which nothing could efface.
Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, I was the most eager of explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river once had flowed; for as I examined the scene more closely I beheld the remains of stone and marble bridges and sea-walls, and terraces and embankments once verdant and beautiful. In my enthusiasm I became nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor Kienze, and was very tardy in noticing that the southward current had ceased at last, allowing the U-29 to settle slowly down upon the sunken city as an airplane settles upon a town of the upper earth. I was slow, to, in realizing that the school of unusual dolphins had vanished.
In about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the valley. On one side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza down to the old river-bank; on the other side, in startling proximity, I was confronted by the richly ornate and perfectly preserved facade of a great building, evidently a temple, hollowed from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this titanic thing I can only make conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude, apparently covers a continuous hollow recess; for its windows are many and widely distributed. In the center yawns a great open door, reached by an impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like the figures of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns and frieze, both decorated with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying idealized pastoral scenes and processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most phenomenal perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It imparts an impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate ancestor of Greek art. Nor can I doubt that every detail of this massive product was fashioned from the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It is palpably a part of the valley wall, though how the vast interior was ever excavated I cannot imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of caverns furnished the nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine grandeur of this awful fane—for fane indeed it must be—and today after thousands of years it rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless night and silence of an ocean-chasm.
I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight beam about in eager quest. The shaft of light permitted me to learn many details, but refused to show anything within the gaping door of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off the current, conscious of the need of conserving power. The rays were now perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And as if sharpened by the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to tread those eon-forgotten ways!
I produced and examined a deep-sea diving suit of jointed metal, and experimented with the portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have trouble in managing the double hatches alone, I believed I could overcome all obstacles with my scientific skill and actually walk about the dead city in person.
On August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way through the ruined and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archeological lore from sculptures and coins. Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my awe at a culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed unwatched to the sea. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be found, must unfold the mysteries at which I can only hint. I returned to the boat as my electric batteries grew feeble, resolved to explore the rock temple on the following day.
On the 17th, as my impulse to search out the mystery of the temple waxed still more insistent, a great disappointment befell me; for I found that the materials needed to replenish the portable light had perished in the mutiny of those pigs in July. My rage was unbounded, yet my German sense forbade me to venture unprepared into an utterly black interior which might prove the lair of some indescribable marine monster or a labyrinth of passages from whose windings I could never extricate myself. All I could do was to turn on the waning searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the temple steps and study the exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the door at an upward angle, and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything, but all in vain. Not even the roof was visible; and though I took a step or two inside after testing the floor with a staff, I dared not go farther. Moreover, for the first time in my life I experienced the emotion of dread. I began to realize how some of poor Kienze’s moods had arisen, for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses with a blind and mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the lights and sat thinking in the dark. Electricity must now be saved for emergencies.
Saturday the 18th I spent in total darkness, tormented by thoughts and memories that threatened to overcome my German will. Kienze bad gone mad and perished before reaching this sinster remnant of a past unwholesomely remote, and had advised me to go with him. Was, indeed, Fate preserving my reason only to draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed, and I must cast off these impressions of weaker men.
I could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of the future. It was annoying that the electricity should not last out the air and provisions. I revived my thoughts of euthanasia, and examined my automatic pistol. Toward morning I must have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to find the batteries dead. I struck several matches in succession, and desperately regretted the improvidence which had caused us long ago to use up the few candles we carried.
After the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a light. As I considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and developed a hitherto dormant impression which would have caused a weaker and more superstitious man to shudder. The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the rock temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Kienze carried back into the sea.
I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism. The coincidence was strange, but I was too sound a reasoner to connect circumstances which admit of no logical connection, or to associate in any uncanny fashion the disastrous events which had led from the Victory affair to my present plight. Feeling the need of more rest, I took a sedative and secured some more sleep. My nervous condition was reflected in my dreams, for I seemed to hear the cries of drowning persons, and to see dead faces pressing against the portholes of the boat. And among the dead faces was the living, mocking face of the youth with the ivory image.
I must be careful how I record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and much hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is most interesting, and I regret that it cannot be observed scientifically by a competent German authority. Upon o
pening my eyes my first sensation was an overmastering desire to visit the rock temple; a desire which grew every instant, yet which I automatically sought to resist through some emotion of fear which operated in the reverse direction. Next there came to me the impression of light amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed to see a sort of phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which opened toward the temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep-sea organism capable of emitting such luminosity.
But before I could investigate there came a third impression which because of its irrationality caused me to doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might record. It was an aural delusion; a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through the absolutely sound-proof hull of the U-29. Convinced of my psychological and nervous abnormallty, I lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium bromide solution, which seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the illusion of sound. But the phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in repressing a childish impulse to go to the porthole and seek its source. It was horribly realistic, and I could soon distinguish by its aid the familiar objects around me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of which I had had no former visual impression in its present location. This last circumstance made me ponder, and I crossed the room and touched the glass. It was indeed in the place where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light was either real or part of an hallucination so fixed and consistent that I could not hope to dispel it, so abandoning all resistance I ascended to the conning tower to look for the luminous agency. Might it not actually be another U-boat, offering possibilities of rescue?
It is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since the events transcend natural law, they are necessily the subjective and unreal creations of my overtaxed mind. When I attained the conning tower I found the sea in general far less luminous than I had expected. There was no animal or vegetable phosphorescence about, and the city that sloped down to the river was invisible in blackness. What I did see was not spectacular, not grotesque or terrifying, yet it removed my last vestige of trust in my consciousness. For the door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from the rocky hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame far within.
Later incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and windows, I became subject to the most extravagant visions—visions so extravagant that I cannot even relate them. I fancied that I discerned objects in the temple; objects both stationary and moving; and seemed to hear again the unreal chant that had floated to me when first I awaked. And over all rose thoughts and fears which centered in the youth from the sea and the ivory image whose carving was duplicated on the frieze and columns of the temple before me. I thought of poor Kienze, and wondered where his body rested with the image he had carried back into the sea. He had warned me of something, and I had not heeded—but he was a soft-headed Rhinelander who went mad at troubles a Prussian could bear with ease.
The rest is very simple. My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now become an inexplicable and imperious command which ultimately cannot be denied. My own German will no longer controls my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in minor matters. Such madness it was which drove Kienze to his death, bare-headed and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and a man of sense, and will use to the last what little will I have. When first I saw that I must go, I prepared my diving suit, helmet, and air regenerator for instant donning, and immediately commenced to write this hurried chronicle in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the manuscript in a bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 for ever.
I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Kienze. What I have seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This demoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully don my suit and walk boldly up the steps into the primal shrine, that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.
A DAUGHTER OF THE SEA, by Charles Wesley Sanders
Captain McAuliffe, going over the side of his ship, paused as he caught sight of Captain Winton coming along the wharf. Then McAuliffe slipped back to the deck and disappeared into his cabin.
Winton grinned maliciously.
“I got the fear o’ God into his heart at last, all right,” he said to himself. “I knowed he was a coward at bottom, and this proves it. He don’t want to meet me.”
Winton continued along the wharf as if he had not noticed McAuliffe’s action. He came to a corner on which a low warehouse stood. Without a backward glance, he passed around the corner. But once shut off from McAuliffe’s view, if the latter should come on deck, he stopped. The malicious grin was still on his lips.
In his cabin, McAuliffe waited long enough to give Winton time to climb the hill from the river to the street above. Then he emerged again and went over the side. He followed the course which Winton had taken. As he rounded the corner of the warehouse, he came face to face with Winton.
Winton laughed aloud. His merriment brought deep wrinkles into his weather-beaten face, especially about his mouth and eyes. He pulled himself up to his six feet two inches and looked down at McAuliffe, whose height stopped short of six feet.
They were both strong men, but there was a subtle as well as a gross difference in that strength. Winton was husky. He was built more heavily than even his height warranted. His legs were like tree trunks. He was rotund of waist, his shoulders massive. His unbuttoned shirt collar disclosed a bull neck. His eyes were slate-colored, cold, quick to show hate, never gentle. His close-cropped hair was red to its roots. He was human physical force at its best or worst.
McAuliffe tapered up from his feet. He was slender of leg, slender of hip, carrying no abdominal excess. But his shoulders spread out almost to the width of Winton’s, and his chest was deep. He had very black hair, close-cropped like Winton’s, and his eyes were a deep brown. He was rather thin of face, as if he had been drawn a trifle fine in the recent past. His composed dignity was a foil for Winton’s grinning malice.
“Whatcha duck below for, all of a sudden?” Winton asked, as they stood eye to eye.
“Why do you want to know, Captain Winton?” McAuliffe asked.
“I don’t want to know,” Winton retorted. “I know a’ready.”
“Why do you ask me, then?” “To hear you lie.”
McAuliffe caught at his breath. His hands hardened as they hung at his sides. Winton’s reply was not one to be lightly disregarded. The captain of a three-and-after fifty years ago had a reputation to maintain. He could not let another thus question his honesty. “Liar” was a strong word. That Winton had thus stigmatized him would pass like flame along the docks. It would be gossiped about at the ports of Great Lakes sailing ships. The eye of suspicion, silently questioning McAuliffe’s ability and intention of defending his name, would be on him.
The two men, as they stood there with the descending July sun at their backs, were both well aware that six months before Winton would have hesitated to venture to talk to McAuliffe like that. By nature a bully, Winton before that time had held McAuliffe in respect. He knew that there was no fear in McAuliffe’s heart then. McAuliffe had proved that a hundred times. And, habitually a silent man, he had never boasted. That silence in him had made the garrulous Winton pause. Winton was wont to measure men as much by what they said as by what they did. In McAuliffe he saw only a silent man of action.
This change in McAuliffe had been coincident with the return from school of Dora Colvin. She was the only daughter of Colvin Brothers, who kept a ships’ supply store on River Street. That she was a daughter of Colvin Brothers was a joke along the water-front.
It was said that her uncle was as much her father as her father really was. It was true that the uncle spent a little more on her than his brother did. He had suggested that she be sent East to finish her education, and there had been nearly a quarrel between the brothers as to who should bear the expense. They ended by dividing it. The uncle was a bachelor, uncertain of temper to every one except Dora. She, men said, could wind him about her little finger.
That was doubtless true; and, in fact, Dora could wind most men about her little finger. She was an amazing beauty, a big girl with copper-colored hair and wide, gray eyes. When her uncle and her father had started their store, she had been a tom-boy of thirteen. Her uncle and her father had been deep-sea men, and had come inland to settle down on account of Dora. They had never known anything but the sea, and so they took quite naturally to selling ships’ supplies.
Their aim was to make a lady of Dora. She was kept at her books, but her books seemed not to interest her unduly till she had passed through such grades as the lake village afforded. She liked the docks and she liked the decks of moored ships better than she liked the classroom. But just before she had gone away to be “finished,” a certain sedateness had come to her. When she had returned six months before, she was a self-contained young woman of the world.
Her home-coming caused a flurry among the male population of Lakeport. She was besieged by many men, from captains to roustabouts. But she was not to be easily won, and gradually those quickly discouraged left her alone. At the end of five months, only McAuliffe and Winton remained as steadfast wooers. And then Winton had been ordered from the house by Dora’s uncle. He had drunk a little too much black rum. The gossips observed that McAuliffe spent most of his time ashore at the Colvin home.
And so, “to hear you lie,” said Winton now. “Let me pass. Winton,” McAuliffe said coldly, as he stepped aside.
The Sea-Story Megapack: 30 Classic Nautical Works Page 11
