The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  But not quite all. True, one of my captors had gone aloft, when, like an autumn storm, all these creatures as a flight of leaves before the tempest had swept from the place. The one on my right, however, remained. Still, he was not now holding me. But he was regarding me. And when he saw that he had my attention, he put out his wing, which he had till then furled round him, and touched me on the shoulder. I felt a slight plucking, as though two fingers had pulled gently at my short sleeve. I turned—what else was there to do? Whatever had been decided, it was clear that I wasn’t to be dined on instantly, and in the position I was in, one can do nothing but gain time. The creature also rose on its strange shrivel-sinewed legs, then hoisted its great membranous wings, until it stood, as we used to say, “with arms akimbo,” with the points of its wings just resting on its hips. I saw then why the second glimpse I had had of this species had made me think that it had three heads, for now the “shoulder” of the wing—what I was soon to learn was really the wrist—rose as high as the head. The creature seemed quite unafraid of me and, when it saw that it had caught my attention, it made off, with a queer hopping lilt, over the luminous dust.

  My nausea, if not my fear, had also gone. If you once got out of your head that this thing ought to be a man; if, for example, you thought of it as a bird or a flying squirrel, why, then your interest could down your disgust. I could see that it was covered with glossy fur, thick on the body, on the back of the head, and on the vast ears, and with a sort of velvet down even over the wing membranes. After some hundred strides or so, this carpet of glowing ground, which allowed me to study my guide, began to get dull, and, as I was peering to see my way, I felt again that plucking at my sleeve. In a few paces the ground had become quite dark, so I yielded myself to my guide. To and fro we wound; but after perhaps a quarter of an hour of this, we stopped; my sleeve was let fall and I waited. I’ve said they moved so quietly that in the dark I never could make out where they were, for even when hopping they partly spread their wings and so scarcely touched the earth. After a moment, though, I heard a slight grating, and this was followed, not long after, by a greenish glow. Against it I could see the grotesque form of my guardian crouched on the ground and evidently grinding two stones together. As he grated them they glowed. When they had become mildly incandescent, he handed them to me. They gave out no heat but smelt slightly of sulphur and, as long as one rubbed them against each other, emitted light enough for one to see one’s way.

  I judged I was in a small chamber. In the center was a block of stone that served as a table, for on it were three bowls. My guide waved me to them. I was to be fed, it seemed. And the feeding, if odd, was good. The first bowl held what looked to me like shrimp paste; the second I was more sure about: they were the fruits of the cactus, which, you know, if you can trouble to dethorn them, are more succulent than the best banana; and the third was a white liquid, which, when I’d smelled it and gingerly tasted it, surprised me most in that place, for it was common, ordinary milk—goat’s milk, and quite fresh. Once I had tasted, my hunger came on me, as hunger will when fear has kept it out of its rights too long. It filled me like a passion. I gulped the milk at one swallow, munched up the cactus fruit, and then, still ravenous, tackled the apparent shrimps. It was all good to me and, as happens with hunger, when I’d eaten, my mood changed like a tide. I was now quite ready to see what would happen.

  On looking up, I saw my captor-creature regarding me. I think it was then that my mind made itself up. I decided that, though they were as ugly as hell and, for all I knew, as deadly as vampires, I’d let the future be the future, if it was not farther away even than tomorrow. Granted that this creature that looked at me seemed to have a fixed scowl or leer: it never changed its expression. Well, I’d take for granted that all this was merely a mask and that behind that crest and fantastic make-up there was a human face or intelligence. I’d got over my disgust at their forms by arguing to myself that they weren’t horribly deformed humans but amazingly finished and successful featherless, but still flying, birds, fully winged squirrels. And now I was getting over my horror at their minds by the reverse process of making up my mind that, after all, they and I had, at base, the same mind. Of course, they weren’t human, but they might, I began to hope, prove humane. Surely it was human, in the decent sense of that rather ambiguous word, to give me a meal like that, and, beyond the fact that they had captured me, I had experienced no hardships yet at their hands. I must remain the explorer and not whine before I was hurt, or attack what I ought to study and what looked as though it would certainly repay investigation.

  While I ate, the creature kept on rubbing the stones—otherwise they lost their glow in about five seconds. But when I’d finished, he stopped and pointed to a corner of the room. There was a rock sill and on it a heap of hay and leaves. This gave me rather a “turn,” as people say. It looked a little too like a cattle pen or manger—some kind of fold used for some creature they had once kept—and then disposed of? But beggars can’t be choosers or captives too curious. And, now that I was relaxed with food, my tiredness was the next thing to assert itself. You’ll agree I’d had some rough going, and, what’s more, most of the time my heart had been beating harder than it should. Yes, I’d take my rest, even though it were in the stall of a beast that had been led thence to be butchered, even though this might be my last bedding-down. So, obeying the gesture, I threw myself on the leaves and straw, kicked off my boots, and, as the glow from the stones sank into complete darkness, I felt my own eyes sink down. I was asleep before I knew it.

  The same glow woke me, and I saw my “snap-dragon” illuminated monster standing by my bunk frotting the two glowing stones in its hands. “Hands?” you’ll say. Yes, I’d tumbled to a further point in their build. You see, naturally, since I came up, I’ve studied all I could on the subject. The birds, of course, did give up their possibility of hands in order to get wings and ruthlessly sacrificed their fingers just to have wing-spread. But the Chiroptera—that’s the technical name, you know, for all the mammals that managed to use their hands for wings, and the bats are only one large lot of these flyers—didn’t sacrifice their fingers. Instead, they used them to stretch that curious extension of their skin until they had sails like a windmill. But, and this is their strong point, they still kept their fingers right at the end of their wings. At the tips of these huge, spread hands they had, and have, fingertips. Instead of sacrificing their fingers, they have immensely enlarged them. Indeed, no animal has a larger hand than these hand-flyers. Man is simply a creature of great, stumping legs and poor, little, stump-fingered hands. Of course, these creatures haven’t got the opposable thumb. But as my jailer frotted the stones, I could see how they had got over that problem. He could bring two of his fingers together, as delicately and as firmly as a practiced Chinese puts together his chopsticks and grasps a piece of food. Oh, yes, I found out a mass of lore about the bats. Jove, they are an interesting lot—but I mustn’t bore you with all that, at least now. Why, their hands and their power of flight, all that, though wonderful enough, is only the least interesting part of their powers. Their powers of speech and guidance, detection, steering themselves in the dark, are all much more interesting, and in all that they are as far ahead of us as their delicate membranous hands are wider than our little puds.

  Well, as soon as my guardian—perhaps it is unfair to call him jailer—saw that I was awake, he beckoned me. Slipping on my boots, I shambled off after my light-hopping friend—fiend by all appearances—friend by all behavior so far. Well, we didn’t go far on that trip—only into the next cavern, which wasn’t much larger than my bed-chamber. Arrived there, he waved me to a bench, and I found on it the same fare which I’d had for my first meal. But I wasn’t there simply to be restauranted. I was, would you believe it, to be instructed as I was fed—food for the mind as well as food for the body. My guide had let fall the glow-stones, and, instead, was smoothing the thick dust, or fine sand, on the floor, and, as he turned it
over and smoothed it, it began to glow. Evidently the new surface, exposed to the air, oxidized, or phosphoresced—I don’t know anything about chemistry. But anyhow, when the sand had been stirred, turned over, and smoothed enough, then the new surface would glow brightly for, say, twenty minutes or more, better in some places than in others. I never saw better illumination than that which the sand gave in the great Hall of Audience. But here it was good enough, considering the smallness of the chamber. My allotted companion—for I think it was the same one, though, of course, with such masked creatures one couldn’t be sure, for it was hard to pick out character in such contortions of countenance—when he had satisfied himself that he had roused this infernal but unburning fire sufficiently, looked at me. Then, thinking, I judged, that he had my attention, he crouched and turned to a slab of what I afterward found by close inspection was a fine face of slate.

  As he turned his back to me, I made one more discovery and cleared up a small problem of which I told you a little while back. You remember the small puzzle about those first footprints I saw just before my capture? Well, that was now quite clear. For as this creature swept round to his “blackboard,” I saw how much more efficient was his figure than that of the birds, at least as far as flight went. For his huge wings—I’ve since found this is true of all the bats—were fastened not merely to his arms but to his legs as well. When he and his fellows flew, they flew as we swim, with all four limbs. So that fancy of mine, that the Grand Chiropter, when he took flight, was swimming as easily in air as we in the sea, that he was actually striding along, was true. Their great sails were spread by the vast extension of their fingers and were secured, as they swept down the whole length of the body and came to the foot, by a spur of bone which made an extension backward of the heel. It was the imprint of these spurs which had so puzzled me when I first saw their spoor. And now I could see further that in between the ankles the sail-membrane swept out, like a small train, so that it could act as a rudder, as do the tail feathers of a bird. The spurs could be tensed, so that the rudder-membrane could be trimmed and furled like a sail in a yachtsman’s hand. The span of the wing was so wide and free that he could, when on the ground, use his fingertips, as I’ve said, to handle things, the wing-tissue no more incommoding him than a wide sleeve incommodes us.

  Indeed, at this moment, he had picked up with a couple of these fingertips a small piece of some white, friable stone—perhaps chalk—and with this, with a beautiful skill in freehand drawing, he began to sketch. His first drawing was, I thought, rather a grim little joke. It was a human being, but simply the bones—in short, a skeleton. But, as soon as he had done that—and it was as well done as it was quickly drawn—he made another drawing of a skeleton alongside of it. I had no doubt after the first dozen strokes—it was a first-rate sketch of the skeleton of a bat. I don’t know much about anatomy, and knew less then, but, as he paused after each dozen strokes or so, leaving his finger on the spot but turning his head to me, I couldn’t fail to get the drift of his demonstration. Surely he was showing me a connection, the connection between himself and me. Yes, there it all was: the huge outspread hand, but with the fingertips retained. The huge thumb, not opposable across that vast palm, of course, but with its great hook of a nail able to grip down on its wrist, giving a grip the strength of which I had myself had physical experience. Then he turned to the enormously deep chest and showed how the muscles for flight were fastened on this great outthrust keel skeleton. Next, he sketched in, behind these ribs, the huge lungs and equally huge heart. Since then I’ve learned all about this, and it was all as he pointed out. And, of course, it wasn’t difficult to follow him, for if you were to fly, why then, of course, you’d need vast muscles in the chest and an equally big heart and lungs to keep those muscles supplied with blood.

  Well, I won’t bore you with detail, though it fascinated me then and does so perhaps even more now that I’ve had time to think it all over. For here, after the first lesson—and I was to have enough to put me pretty wise on this strange subject—here was a creature, a mammal that had come up alongside of man. Man was Homo ambulans—the ambling hominid. He gave up much of his strength and utterly barred himself from natural flight by forging for himself those massive posts, his legs. Thus he pounds and stumps along the world, pegged down. And his progress is by continually falling from one foot and catching himself on the other. The hand-winged animals had another choice. They chose to sacrifice legs, wizen them to no more than mere bird’s legs of fine bone and sinew, and so to throw their evolutionary weight forward and up into their shoulders and arms. With a flash, I came to see the drift of it all, or I think I ought to say the drive, the creative salience. Streamline your loins and let the expanding power within you, the élan vital, swell out into your chest. Let breathing, not eating, be your main channel of intake and energy. Eat ever more lightly and breathe ever more deeply and widely. Keep the fire of life blast-furnaced with air, with oxygen, a clean jet of flame, not a smoldering hearth loaded with gross, half-kindled, fume-yielding fuel, a stagnant crude-oil well, over which flickers an uncertain smoke-suffocated light.

  We wade along waist-deep. Round us, as round a Laocoön, is swathed that weltering coil of intestine, yards and yards of it. Psychophysically, we are creatures still awash: our center of gravity is still below the heart, not on it, and deep below the brain. Perhaps we don’t wallow, all of us, but like some sort of sea-centaur we rear ourselves up from that water level on which we must rest. I began to see that it is all a matter of fuel, of what fuel you choose, or your race has chosen to power itself with. We are run on a mixture of pure gas, and, below that, a clumsy furnace stuffed with all sorts of low-grade fuels. Fishes can take only a little oxygen—and indeed I’ve just read that some can’t stand any at all, among them quite a lot of sharks—and fishes have to be eating nearly all the time. We divide our activities: we’re a creature not of the crest, as we flatter ourselves. In this important matter we’re no more than middlers. Breathing is more important to us than it is to fishes: we do take quite a lot of oxygen. But our standby is still gorging. These hand-flyers, with their proportionately huge hearts and lungs, were, I began to see, taking so much more pure gas, oxygen, as their straight energy, that beside them, if we weren’t fishes, we were little more than a kind of slouching amphibian. We were, and are still, mainly horizontal, rearing up on our hind legs for a few hours—even then having to take care we don’t tear our middles—and then having to lie down. When I saw these creatures literally walking on air—for the bat can fly upright as the bird cannot—there, at last, I saw true upright carriage and the rightful station to which it bears him who can win to it.

  Well, it took a little while for all that to sink in. And then there was the increasing difficulty of taking me any farther. Sketch how he would—and these creatures were wonderful cave-men artists: all of them drew naturally, and the place was scrawled over with wonderful, if wildly fantastic, designs—still there was the main difficulty of getting abstract ideas across; and there were plenty. How was he to tell me of their speaking, singing, et cetera? Well, first he began, cleverly enough, by drawing, very large, one of their heads for me. He showed me the immense ears, each turning freely, wonderful sound-catchers. No wonder they’d known as soon as I’d entered their underground domain. Then he stressed those huge lips with the fine bristles above and below them: heat, sound, and all-air-wave detectors. With scarcely a pause, I was able to give that universal assent, the nod of the head, and he quickly went on to another point. But what would he do, I began to question myself, when he came to trying to make me understand anything about their minds? Their form, I now grasped, was one more of those “convergencies” or “parallelisms” in which the basic primitive mammal form had gone ahead up through the epochs of evolution we used to call the Tertiary. And, while, with man and the apes, wings hadn’t been thought of (the apes had extended their arms to become swingers from the branches, and in man his legs were his locomotory inven
tion), these hand-flyers had taken the other way out of the wood, out of the primal forest tree in which the first tree-shrew, the primal mammal, had found his sanctuary and home. We had gone down to the ground and grounded on our huge legs. All the bat tribe had gone up, spread their hands on the air—surely a bolder venture, and certainly one which had enlarged their sphere and grasp. Of course, I could see that of all the foot and leg mammals, of all the mammals which had not tried to grasp the air with their hands but the earth with their feet, of these only one became man. So it had been with this fruit of the whole order of the hand-flyers. Of all the creatures who with their forward limbs launched themselves on the air (while we grounded heavily on our feet), of these really bolder pioneers, only one species—this Homo vespertilio, the bat man, or, as I prefer to think of them, Vir vespertilio, the truly virile bat—had won through on their amazing voyage of discovery.

  My teacher, too, had managed with his diagrammatic skill to show me something about their present senses. I could realize that hearing and, perhaps, a superfine sensitiveness to touch, to the actual touch of an air-wave, had been developed while we had trusted most to sight and let our ears shrink to little more than query marks on the sides of our heads, with no more right than to ask our eyes whether they would trouble to look and interpret what the ear could only vaguely wonder about.