Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  I moved in the direction of the sound.

  My foot struck something. I flashed my torch, and looked down. I had walked into a heap of broken pottery, bits of metal fittings, and other debris that looked like shells. Beyond this heap of stuff there was a stone structure like an altar, and, beyond that again, shallow hollows like stone couches cut into the floor.

  I went forward, cautiously, towards the altar. It had an upright front slab, and on this there was a bold drawing of a stork standing over a little stork in a protecting attitude, and over this the letters I.O.M. On the top was a Latin inscription, something about Aurelius Petronius Urbicus of the Julian tribe. I examined the pottery that lay round it. Some of it was lovely work, obviously Samian ware, and mixed with it were some fragments of thick green glass. The pieces of metal were covered with rust, and seemed to be mostly bits of buckles, but there were two small rusty knives with wooden handles, and a broken sword. Evidently nobody had lived in the place for centuries, for all the debris was of ancient make.

  As I was examining it, I could hear the murmuring sound quite distinctly. I had no doubt now that it was the sound of running water. I walked on towards it. The floor beyond the altar was cut into a series of stone couches, fifty or sixty at least, showing that all this space had been a living-place for men and women. Beyond the couches I came upon the water—a well that bubbled up from a circular opening in the rock and ran down the slope, in a channel that it had made for itself in the rocky floor. I now realised that I was parched with thirst, owing to the dust that had got into my mouth and throat. I tasted the water. It was quite sweet. I took a long drink, and felt much refreshed. I followed the stream downwards, walking very slowly, watching on all sides.

  After about twenty minutes, I saw what I thought at first was a jutting rock in front of me, but, when I came to it, I found that it was not a rock but another altar made of roughly hewn stones, kept together by some sort of cement. There was an inscription on the top of it, and a figure of a flying woman, with her hands stretched towards the slope in front. I looked in the direction in which the hands pointed, and saw a sharp break in the slope, as if it stopped abruptly not far from the foot of the altar. I went towards this break, and found a very steep incline, with a series of uneven ledges either cut into it by human hands or made by water. To right and left the slope was still steeper, and there were no ledges. The fact that they were in that one place seemed to indicate that they were artificial, and that I was following the road by which the early men had gone down. If they had been made by man, they were the first definite indication of direction I had got since I entered the darkness. In any case they seemed to be the only way of descent.

  I fixed my kit tightly, and began to clamber down the ledges. They were rather difficult to negotiate as they were very deep and roughly hewn.

  The steps proved to be, in the main, adaptations of natural ledges in the rock, and they were so high in some places that I had to climb down them with my face to the rock. As they went down, they became more difficult, and I began to fear that they were only natural ledges leading to a cliff shelf. After nearly an hour, however, I found, to my delight, that they were getting broader and shallower. Then suddenly they ceased.

  I looked round me. I was at the bottom of a cliff wall, and from my feet a rough rocky slope ran down with a rather steep incline. There was no sign of a path anywhere, nor any indication of direction. The slope, as far as my torch showed, was no longer smooth, but rough and stony, but it seemed passable, provided I went carefully.

  I had lost touch with the stream, and this troubled me somewhat, but, as there was no sound of running water anywhere, I had no choice but to go straight downwards. I began to move forward, picking my way between big boulders that looked as if they had been dropped from the earth roof above me. The ground between them was a mixture of dry earth and stones, very rough, but not impassable.

  From time to time I stopped to listen, but I heard nothing, not even the echo of my own steps, so that I assumed that there was a large empty space in front of the mountain I was descending. My torch showed me nothing but blackness outside the little circle of its light.

  I cannot tell exactly how long I was going down this slope when the first flash of light came from above. I was looking down, trying to pick my way by the light of my torch, when, suddenly, the whole ground grew clear for a moment. The next moment it was dark again. I stopped and stared. The light had come from above—a vivid gleam, like a flash of lightning. I hadn’t seen it, only its reflection on the ground, but it had certainly come from above. I stood staring upwards. What could it be? Then it came again—a flash across the upper darkness. It was only for a moment, but, when it was gone, I still stared upwards. My heart was beating wildly. What was going to happen? There it was again—longer now—some electric or magnetic emanation from the upper dome of earth above. It was light and I could see the world into which I had come. Now it was coming in a series of flashes.

  I looked round me. A tumble of mountains was being revealed—a mass of dark slopes, sullen bare sheets of rock, like the one on which I was standing, running up into a pall of darkness that was split by these coruscating flashes. Between the mountain slopes, valleys, as savage as themselves, made black gulfs. Nowhere was there any sign of life, any movement, any vegetation; but the air seemed full of electricity.

  I should have been appalled by the landscapes revealed by the light: a land of utter desolation —a blasted, empty world that spread as far as my eyes could see, below me, above me, in peaks, valleys, whorls of black rock—a hideous jumble of depths and heights and deadly looking ravines without a vestige of life to be seen anywhere. What could there be in this jumble of hellish peaks but death! And yet I was not appalled. Having looked long at that world of chaos and night, I went on.

  The lights died away. It didn’t matter. My way lay downwards——

  Though I was walking in darkness, it wasn’t a total darkness, for the coruscations above had left something behind them—some sort of very dim gleams that flitted back and forward through the darkness. And I had my torch. I had got it recharged that morning, and it should be good for some time yet. When it was gone, I should be done for, if I hadn’t reached some sort of light.

  The most ordinary prudence should have made me try to get back while there was still time, but this my mind refused to consider. It hung on to the one thing that it had to do—to get down the mountain to where humanity might be found. For the moment even the search for my father, which had brought me to the pass in which I found myself, sank into unimportance compared with my need to get to men and know that I wasn’t alone under the blind surface of the earth. I might have tried to get back, but my instinct refused to accept this possibility. It drove me downwards, clinging to its one idea, dogged and limpet-like. I went on in this night, moving cautiously, steadily, feeling with every sense for pitfalls and obstacles. The light above died away completely, but I paid no heed to that. I went on, by the light of my torch, ever downwards, step by step and mile by mile, through a darkness so palpable that I seemed to be wading through it.

  The lights above began again, first in single flashes, then in a series of beams that lit up the ground almost continuously, like constant flashes of sheet lightning. The landscape was the same. No change in that ghastly desolation. I turned my eyes away from it, and fixed them on the ground. What was that in front of me—a stick? I rushed to it. It was only a long splinter of rock. I took it up, but could not throw off the idea that it was artificial. It might possibly have been made by men, from the length and the shape of it. I didn’t really believe that it was anything but a natural splinter of rock, but there was the possibility that it was a sort of stone sword dropped by a man. The mere thought of the possibility came between me and isolation. I held the sword in front of me, stabbing the ground with it for chasms or pitfalls.

  I must have gone on for a good while in this way, but I kept no count of time. I thought only of one thi
ng—grass, water, and life waiting for me below. I tried to keep my eyes averted from the wild defiles, the bleak shoulders of rock, the ghastly valleys of blackness, that rose and fell, as the flashes from above revealed the bowels of the earth to me. At the same time my mind kept going over calculations of space, reckoning the amount of time I had been travelling. I could see my wristlet-watch, but it had stopped. It couldn’t be possible that I was more than seven or eight hours in this underworld, yet it seemed to me to be several days since I had left the sunlight. At the thought I began the calculation all over again, counting steps, trying to calculate the height of the mountain, but always going forward, my head and my sword stuck out, my body drawn back.

  It was in the middle of one of these calculations that I heard the wail. I had been going on blindly, calculating, stumbling, crouching, stabbing with my sword, all in a thick silence, and then it came to me, far away from the left, out of the darkness. I straightened myself and listened. Yes, there was a sound like a distant wail. It died away. I began to think that I had imagined it. Then I heard it again, very faint, but quite clear. Now it was dying away in a series of gurgling sobs that rang back at me like faint laughter. I stood rigid, listening. The first sound that had come to me in the world of blackness! Silence fell again. I strained my ears, but there was nothing more. There was a slight stir in the air—the beginning of a very faint breeze coming up from below, and on it a faint smell that I couldn’t analyse.

  For a while I stood rigid, peering into the depths of darkness that lay downwards, but I saw nothing and heard nothing. I resumed my descent. I noticed that the movement of wind from below was getting somewhat stronger, and that the air was getting warmer. It was charged with some electric quality too.

  As I descended, my mind became full of wild imaginings. My torch must make me as conspicuous as a glowworm on a dark night. Anything might at any moment leap on me out of the darkness, but the gleams from above had died out completely, and I could not do without the light. I could not keep from imagining that I saw forms moving in the darkness. At every step I stopped to peer and to listen, but I saw and heard nothing.

  The descent stopped. I was on level ground. I flashed the torch round. I had reached a rough plateau of bare rock, which seemed to stretch away level in front of me. The ground near me was even—slabs of smooth rock—but to the left there was a sort of channel, like a dry stream-bed. I went over to it. It was certainly an old stream-bed. I followed it. There had been water there once. Perhaps men had camped by it.

  Suddenly, out of the darkness, I came on a round hummock of stone. The whole of the circular top was covered with the figure of a man treading on the prostrate form of a strange-looking animal which seemed to have two bodies, divided by a narrow waist-line, and several spindly legs.

  I stared at it. Once again I was in touch with the world of men. They had passed by this way. I was on the right road. Immediately my mood changed. From a despairing determination it swung round to confidence and hope. I repeated to myself that I was certainly on the track of men.

  And these sounds—they had come from the left hand—it was in that direction that life lay— whatever sort of life it was—I must go in that direction. The dry stream-bed ran over an almost even surface, in that direction also, with a slight downward slope.

  I followed it. I was intensely excited. The slight wind had died away, and with it the peculiar smell had ceased, but I felt sure that I was coming, at last, near some form of life.

  The channel had now turned more definitely to the left. The gleams of light from above had not returned. The darkness was complete, yet I had a feeling that on my right-hand side a mass of land rose up. The light had shown me that I was descending into a valley between two mountains —the mountain down which I had come, and another that barred the way over against it. It was probable that this channel that I was following was the bed of the valley.

  I must have been descending along this sloping valley floor for at least an hour, when, suddenly, in the middle of the channel, I saw the plant right under my feet. It was of a sort I had never seen before—almost like red frog-spawn—but it must be a plant, for it was anchored to the sand by thin trailing tubes. I seized it. It came away with me easily. Then, as I pressed it, it burst, squirting a red juice.

  I straightened myself, threw back my head, and laughed. They were right all the time—the legends, and the people who believed in them! There was a world here below—a world of life— and I was coming to it!

  Yes, there was another of the plants! Two of them!

  Then again there came to me the light rustle of wind, and with it a sound like the sound of falling water.

  I waited for no more, but hurried along the river-bed.

  Undoubtedly the valley was getting narrower. The sides of a gorge were closing on me; now the channel was merely a narrow passage between cliff walls, curving sharply—ah! I very nearly walked over the brink of a rock, so abrupt was the curve and the ending of the path. I pulled myself back, just at the brink, and stood staring in amazement at the view that opened up in front of me.

  I say “view,” but it was not a view. I was looking at a confused blur of darkness that was visible, because, through it, as through a mist, a strange glimmer made itself felt rather than seen. I was in the presence of light that was not the light from above—a light that was so confused that it was hardly light, yet undoubtedly a brightness.

  I stood staring at this strange world that I had reached. I had come to the end of the emptiness, of the vacant spaces. I had reached something different. I felt a sudden check in my confidence— a feeling almost of dismay—I had been expecting real life, real light. Could this be it? This the world I was seeking? This mass of indistinctness that was neither light nor darkness!

  I tried to grasp it, to perceive it. Yes, the darkness was the thing that was there—the essential thing—but, below the darkness, as if on the ground, there was a flickering surface of greenish-bluish glimmering, on which the darkness seemed to rest. And above, in the darkness itself, there was here and there a suggestion of whitish blurs, as if of extremely dim light at a distance seen through a black fog. What was I looking at? It could not be a town or any collection of human dwellings, since there was complete silence, except for a slight swishing sound that seemed to fill the air. Yet what were the flickering glimmers of light below, and the suggestion of lights here and there above?

  Gradually, as I stood staring at it, my eyes grew accustomed to the strange visual conditions, and I began to pick out points in the confused glimmer of lower lights.

  There seemed to be a dim carpet of feeble spots of light mixed with darkness on the ground—if that was ground, but perhaps it was water, though it seemed to be sloping gradually downwards. No, it must be ground. There were lights both above and below; or rather, the darkness was sprinkled here and there, in the distance, with some sort of pale blurs that might be extremely faint lights lifted a little above the other lights upon the slope. What were they?

  I listened intently. The slight swishing sound was like a gentle wind waving through soft leaves.

  I felt the wind on my face, exhilarating, as if it held some quality full of life; yet the smell that was coming to me on it was a smell of sweet decay.

  I knelt down on the rock on which I was standing and peered down. I could see nothing at the foot of the rock, but, farther down, there seemed to be some sort of growths that gave out a dim luminosity. I had no choice but to use my torch if I were to try to discover what was at the bottom of the rock on which I was standing. I flashed its light over the brink. Yes, it was ground; a stony slope that began at the bottom of the rock, not more than three or four feet below me, and ran down gradually from it into the glimmering darkness. A few trailing things grew on it near me, but farther down they seemed to get thicker. I had certainly come to a world of life.

  I put my legs over the edge, dropped to the ground, and stood with my back to the rock. I felt my heart beating w
ildly. Up above, on the barren mountains, I had been alone, in a dead, empty world, but a safe one, as far as attack was concerned—a world, also, that reached to the upper earth and the wall through which I had come. I was now leaving that security.

  I could see little. I was still trembling with excitement, but there was a foreboding mixed with the excitement—a presentiment arising from the heavy odour of decay, the strange confusion of light and darkness. I had reached life at last, but I began to feel the barren rock-slopes that I had descended safe and familiar compared to it.

  For the first time since my fall through the trapdoor, it occurred to me that it might be advisable to go back and get help in my search. Only for a moment, however. The next moment I knew that I could not go back. Whatever I was to meet in this strange world, I would meet it. This strange confusion of smells, with decay at the heart of them, was not the only thing that was coming to me from the dimness. There was also vitality and the sharpness of life.

  There was no sign of any moving thing, and no sound except the slight rustling.

  I was coming to the ground-lights. I stared at them eagerly. Then I saw that they were only plants—small round plants like little greenish lamps. I went down to them, and looked at them more closely. They were little, upright growths like fungi, with caps which gave out a phosphorescent glow. One of them, in front of me, threw out such a bright green light that I could have read by it. I went over and plucked it. It was like a big mushroom, but, when I plucked it, I got a strong smell of garlic. At the same time a peculiar mixture of smells came to me from the plants that I was standing on. I thought I could distinguish a smell of fresh meal, mixed with a perfume of violets and one that I had never met before, rather pungent and unpleasant.

  It was amazing, this dark garden with its phosphorescent gleams and strange odours. I stood spellbound, looking down at it and over it at the dimness beyond. This, then, was the secret of the lights that I had seen below the darkness. But what were the pale blurs that I saw up in the air? I could see them now more clearly, some distance in front of me; and some of them seemed to be moving. I pulled myself together, and looked more closely.