by John Wyndham
The smoky stratum deepened; the cave grew more fearful in murky penumbra. The yellow columns above the five fires intensified, appearing almost as writhing solids. It was a mere matter of time till the pall above should creep down to drive them from the wall. Beyond the fires, to windward of the choking smoke, the slingers stood waiting; behind them, others filled the passages impassably. Sheer clogging of numbers alone would defeat an attempt to rush.
The defenders, too, waited. They could do nothing else. The fate of the first party to go over the top had proved a potent lesson. They could no longer look to Smith or any other as leader. That fatalism which they had thrown off at the need for action came seeping back, tinged now with resentful desperation. The tunnel upon which so many of them had worked for years would never be used now. The phrase, ‘any time now’ had even less meaning than before. The last ray of their hope was narrowed by a closing iris of smoke until it became that ultimate pinpoint of light without which they could not live. It was that last, feeble glimmer which set one and then another pair of eyes roving towards the shadowed wall in unadmitted faith that a figure might yet emerge crying: ‘We’re through.’ But no such figure showed. The wall and the tunnel they had hewn through it receded into a blacker and blacker distance …
‘If only there were something we could do,’ Gordon was muttering. ‘To be smoked out like a lot of rats …’
There came a sudden noise, reverberating, booming in the shadows behind them. A hundred pairs of eyes switched like one towards it, boring the impenetrable. A sudden cry from the Negro, Zickle – ‘Water!’ Then other voices, on rising, panicky notes – ‘Water! … Water! …’
Long minutes of chaos, kaleidoscopic. Shouts. Men gasping, cursing, dropping from the wall. Beyond, shrill pygmy voices rising in alarm. A last, disregarded volley from the slingers. Screams from the passage mouths. Fighting to escape, trampling one another, jammed in the tunnels? A hand on Mark’s arm, rigid as a clamp. Gordon’s voice, calm and firm among the hubbub. What’s he saying?
‘Wait. You’ll be trampled.’
Wait! With the water gushing in to drown them all?
A wrench which failed to shake the clamp loose. Smith’s voice:
‘Plenty of time – plenty of time. Wait.’
First panic ebbing. Fighting for control. Behind it all, the rush of the water. Tons of it, spewing into the cave, reaching out to swamp and choke. Partial victory. It’s a big cave – take a lot of water to fill it. Screams and shouts from the passages. Fighting, tearing one another to bits like animals – mad with fright. Gordon talking calmly to Smith:
‘Let ’em get clear; the tunnel’s narrow, it can’t pass much water. Plenty of time.’
What tunnel? Things began to get clearer. Their tunnel, of course. It was through. Must have come up under the New Sea. Never thought of that possibility. The tunnel which was to lead to freedom … Mark began to laugh with an odd giggle.
Gordon shook him violently.
‘Stop it.’
Mark tried, but could not. It was irresistibly funny – the tunnel which was to lead to freedom …
Something hard and angular hit his jaw.
‘Shut up – do you hear?’
The shaking went on. He stopped laughing. Queer, it hadn’t been very funny after all. The shaking ceased.
‘Sorry,’ he said. Smith grunted, rubbing his knuckles.
Ed came ambling along the wall with several others trailing after him.
‘Crazy bunch o’ saps,’ he observed, nodding in the direction of the passages. ‘Can you beat it?’ He spat disgustedly over the parapet. They listened for a moment to the sounds of strife mingling with the rush of the water.
‘Gees, and I thought some of those guys got brains – if they have, they’re on vacation right now.’
‘Some of ’em’ll get out,’ said Smith.
‘Sure they’ll get out – an’ for what? To be chased by the water. You know darned well there ain’t no way for it to get outa this place. They’ll go right up to the big first cave by the entrance – and then what? Jest wait right there until the water ups and catches ’em. Ain’t that a hell of a fine way to die?’
They turned and looked over the ground behind the wall. The water was visible now; its edge had advanced to within a few feet of them and was crawling rapidly forward, stirring the loam to mud.
‘Well, it’ll soon put out those Goddam fires,’ Ed murmured philosophically.
‘Look there.’ Gordon pointed to the white circle of a puff-ball, just visible in the gloom. It was swaying and bobbing erratically on the flood.
‘Well, what about it?’
‘It’s floating. These trunks will float, too. A couple of them lashed together would make a good raft for three or four men.’
‘But we’d only go up there.’ Mark looked up at the smoke curtain over the roof.
‘No. We can float them out through the passages as the water rises. Float them right out to the first cave, and then –’
He stopped suddenly as Ed’s huge hand smote him on the back.
‘Atta boy! You’ve said it. Gimme some cord, somebody; I’m gonna get busy.’
The binding of several stone clubs was speedily untwisted. Within a few minutes all the men were lashing the thick, white trunks into pairs. The water rose and trickled through the wall as they worked. The five fires went out in bursts of steam and fierce sizzlings. The first completed raft was thrust over the parapet, and fell with a splash. Its two builders climbed after it. Another splash followed, and another, until all the rafts bobbed in the muddy water. Ed looked up at the last pair.
‘C’m’ on, you guys. Time to go places. Snap into it.’
They swarmed down into knee-deep water, and waded forward, pushing their rafts towards the passages. Behind them still sounded the roar of gushing water; around the walls it lapped slowly higher …
Part Three
* * *
1
Margaret woke, and her first sight was a rock roof. It was seven feet above her, but it seemed to press down. Those tons of stone could be suspended safely, she hoped, above her body, but there was no support to lift them clear of her spirit. All that weight rested full upon it, striving to crush her stubborn resistance. This was always the worst moment of her ‘day’. All defences were at their weakest, reserves at their ebb. She liked to keep her eyes closed when she woke, gathering strength before opening them.
How many times had she lain awake, but voluntarily blind, hoping futilely that it was a dream? She did not know. At first she had tried to keep some count of time, but she had missed once – or was it twice? She made two strokes on the wall, and then changed her mind and rubbed one out. Later she missed again. The record became a muddle. Anyhow, what was the good of it? Even if her sleeping periods did roughly correspond to nights in the world above, there was little to be gained from knowing how many days, weeks, months slipped away. It did not help. Indeed, it made things worse. Without dates one could imagine the world as one had last seen it. Dates meant change outside, and it was somehow bitter to think of a world which went on changing, of seasons coming and going, flowers blooming and dying while one lay here inmured, dead to it all.
Yes, dead to it – only death must be more peaceful. Why did she not kill herself? On every waking she asked the same question. Sometimes she had resolved to do it, but then, with the fuller return of consciousness, she had absolved herself. Time for that later; after all, there were still possibilities … When she had grown older, when her skin had lost its softness, and her hair become grey – when, in fact, there would be nothing to return to in the outside world; then she would do it.
She put up a hand and dragged a lock of hair forward over her face. Holding it out at full length, she could, by squinting uncomfortably, focus upon it. Presently she smoothed it back into place. Careful inspection had failed to reveal a single strand of grey among the dark red. There were stories of people whose hair had gone grey in a night – i
n view of the condition of her own, she was inclined to consider them fables; if they were not, she ought, she felt, to be snow-white by this time. Perhaps at the sides …?
An awkward business, this, and not a mirror to be had.
She sat up. A bundle of muddy-yellow fur in another corner uncurled, yawned widely and stretched itself. It sat back on its haunches, blinking at her.
‘Good morning, Bast.’
The cat yawned again and, dropping its eyes, began the morning toilet.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Bath time.’
She rose from the heap of fungus strips which did duty for a bed, and walked towards the entrance. It was necessary to stoop as she passed into the corridor; the place had been hewn by pygmies for the use of pygmies.
Outside, she greeted her guards. Her first resentment of them had long since passed off. What was the use? They no longer worried her; she had even begun to feel half sorry for them. At bottom they were nothing but simple, unmalicious little folk who had been cheated of life.
The usual procession formed up. First, two white dwarfs whose only garment was strictly utilitarian, consisting of a string about the waist for the purpose of supporting a stone knife. Then herself in that white suit which had been so smart, and was now so much the worse for wear. Finally, two more pygmies carrying slings and a pouch each of stones to supplement their knives. In this formation the five marched to the half-flooded cave which did duty as a swimming bath.
An air of ceremony had gathered about Margaret’s ablutions. The operation designed purely for practical ends had succeeded in becoming a popular spectacle. Numbers of impressed spectators, apparently with nothing to do, attended it as in other circumstances they might have attended the changing of the guard.
She seldom thought without a smile of the agitation which had accompanied her first swim. She had been in the water before her guards had realized her intention. The terrible howl of lamentation which greeted her reappearance on the surface could not be attributed entirely to disinterested anxiety for her safety. What penalties were visited on guards who allowed a semi-sacred person to elude them either by suicide or escape she never inquired, but probably they were painful. She had turned her head to look up at them, whereat the howls had languished, to be replaced by expressions of wonder. An excited gabble arose as she struck out, and when she swam back to the ledge, it was to land at the feet of a group astonished into awe and servility.
At that time she had been unable either to speak or to understand their language, but it needed no words to show that she had risen in their estimation. Her divinity, first suspected owing to her association with Bast, was now an established fact. She felt the difference in their regard, and resolved that the advantage should not be allowed to lapse. She pursued it by making her ‘daily’ swim a custom.
On this ‘morning’ – the habit of dividing her time into manageable sections persisted in the face of their inaccuracy – the ceremony was performed as usual. A crowd of a hundred or so persons who associated large quantities of water only with inundation and death was assembled on her diving-ledge, ready to admire and marvel.
The false modesty which had bothered her at first no longer troubled her as she slid off her clothes. Neither men nor women of the pygmies wore clothes in the ordinary course of things, and she knew now that they regarded hers not as a concealment, but as a badge of office. Her unclothed body they regarded with completely detached admiration. It looked, one of them had told her, as if there were light in it, white, but an utterly different white from the dead pallor of their own skins. For herself, she dreaded the time which must come when this translucence should thicken from lack of sunlight and air to an opaque chalkiness.
She stood for a moment, a slim figure poised on the brink, while the watchers held an awed silence. Then up and out. Her arms spread in the grace of a perfect swallow. She cut the water twenty feet below with the merest spurting of a splash.
For a time she entertained them, laughing up at faces which could not banish all traces of apprehension. She turned and twisted as she would, flashing her white limbs in the dark water. She let herself sink and swam twenty yards under water, baffling them agreeably as to her direction. An excited ovation greeted her reappearance – she had performed a near-miracle. At length she headed with a long, reaching crawl for the landing-place.
An elderly pygmy, whose face contrived to appear wrinkled while giving an impression of being tightly stretched across his skull, joined her on the march back to her cave. He was distinguished by wearing a garment. Not an elegant garment, for it was roughly woven from narrow strips of fungus skin, and fashioned into a very brief tunic, but it served to set him apart from his fellows. Margaret greeted him as ‘Garm’ – to the end she was never quite certain whether this was a name or a title, but it did what was needed. He responded by asking after her health perfunctorily, and after that of Bast with greater concern. She answered briefly, knowing that he would talk no more until her cave was reached and the guards were out of hearing.
With Garm alone of the pygmies was she able to hold conversations. Once she had learned enough of the language to make herself clear, she had determined to learn more of the people, but from most her questions met only rebuffs. Occasionally they called forth angry replies; more usually, they were disregarded in such a manner as to show that the inquiries were in bad taste if not indelicate. They made allowances for her infringements of their lesser taboos – after all, was she not privileged as the attendant of a goddess? – but became surly when she overreached certain mysteriously placed bounds of decency. Their displeasure was not infrequent. Safe passage along the catwalk of one’s own racial code must be achieved through long experience; it is harder still to climb from it to another, and when that other is as involved as a maze and is entirely supported by incomprehensible misconceptions, a foot is bound to slip through the fabric from time to time. Margaret did her best to step warily after the first gross blunders, but it was not easy.
Garm was different from the rest. It is the stupid who become more bigoted with age, and Garm was not stupid. In his world he was a wise man who saw many inconsistencies in his people’s beliefs. His complacency had been early upset by theories which snapped from rotten roots, and he had begun to keep a watch for flaws upon which he nurtured a growing tolerance. Impious unorthodoxies appeared in his mind, clinging like lichens to its barrenness, finding nourishment scarce, yet surviving. Many youthful precepts and implanted conceptions had withered down to the stalks; only a hardy few now showed good foliage; fewer still were entirely untouched by the blight of inquiry.
All his life he had hidden his doubts, partly from fear, more from policy. Why should he show them? Either they would upset the established order of things, or else, and more likely, he would suffer punishment. Neither would be of the slightest use. Probably he would meet the usual fate of heretics, and he would have accomplished nothing but death for the sake of a very little knowledge.
He wanted to know more. The desire to learn had been the heaviest fetter on his tongue, and he was glad now that he had held his peace. The odds and ends of information he had gained from this woman prisoner were in parts wise, trivial or absurd. A few fitted into his jigsaw of beliefs, many were useless. But they were all interesting and new – perhaps he was the only man of his race to show interest in the new; he had never met another.
Conversation between the two was not easy. It was not enough that he had taught her his language. There were so many things in her life which were not in his, many words which whole sentences of his language failed to explain, so that he had perforce to learn something of hers. They talked now, and wallowed through swamps of misunderstanding in a mixture of the two.
Back in the cave, Margaret’s first concern was with Bast. As long as the cat lived she was safe. Should it die, she did not know what might happen. Had she been sure that such an event would ensure her banishment to the prison caves, Bast’s career would have been short. B
ut the pygmies held a belief in survival after death; a belief which they inconveniently extended to include animals. It was quite on the cards that she might be despatched to attend the cat on its journey through the shades. Cautious inquiry of Garm, who still retained views on the divinity of cats, did nothing to dispel this notion. After all, he pointed out, a sacred cat could scarcely be left to shift for itself, and who could be better suited to attend it than those who had looked after it in life? It might resent having strangers thrust upon it and be displeased with those who had sent them. A wise man tried to please even the whims of a goddess. Granting feline immortality, it all sounded uncomfortably logical. To Margaret, doubting any kind of immortality save that vicariously achieved through offspring, it was doubly vexing.
She examined the cat and made certain that it would take some time to chew through the present cord. Never again should Bast escape if she could help it; there had been more than enough trouble last time. Assured of its safety, she brought a small bowl from the corner. Bast looked at the contents, sniffed with that reserve common to cats, and began to eat with no reserve whatever.
There had been some preliminary dietetic difficulties. Bast had firmly refused fungus food in any form. Margaret, in a series of pictures which had excited general admiration, had succeeded in making the fact clear to the pygmy mind. This got them only a little farther, since it seemed that food and fungi were synonymous. Milk? But one could not draw a picture of milk. She tried her hand at a cow. It was not a success. Not only was it a bad picture of the ‘square-animal-with-a-leg-at-each-corner’ variety, but it rested very heavily upon a religious corn. Only later, when she saw carvings of Hathor, did she realize that she had been on dangerous ground.
