"No one could be blamed for becoming shaky at sight of such an unbelievable, terrifying place," Doc smiled.
"Yeah — it’d give anybody the jitters!" Monk grinned.
Johnny was using the magnifying lens on the left side of his glasses to inspect unusual plants.
"The more I see of this place, the more astounding it becomes," he declared. "Notice there are few flowering plants or trees of the type which shed their leaves."
"Evolution practically stopped in this crater many ages ago," Doc offered.
Johnny began to wax eloquent. "No doubt this was once part of some land continent, probably the Asiatic. The prehistoric animal life entered and were trapped here in some manner — "
"Trapped — how?" Monk grunted.
It was some little time before this question was answered. They moved forward, seeking more open ground. They found it upon a knoll from which an extensive view could be obtained.
"Golly!" muttered Monk, as he gazed at the frowning heights of the crater rim. "We must be at sea level, or below. This crater looks like it was better’n ten thousand feet deep!"
Doc’s golden eyes ranged the crater edge as great a distance as possible. Due to the gloominess of the light which penetrated the clouds above the pit, the opposite wall of the crater was lost to sight. Long plumes of steam arising from what were obviously streams of boiling-hot water, helped hinder vision.
The day was really a hot, wet, ghostly gray twilight.
"I do believe I’ve seen moonlight brighter than this!" Long Tom said.
But they could get a fair idea of their surroundings. The utter denseness of the jungle was a thing to cause awe.
As they stood on the knoll, another sudden rainstorm came. Steam rolled from the hot mud lake like fluffy cotton. The violent downpour seemed to occur several times each day.
"The tremendous rainfall is caused by the moist hot air lifting to the cold air at the top of the crater, where it condenses and falls back as rain," Doc Savage explained. "The great rainfall also explains the plant growth being so rank it is nearly a solid mass."
He glanced about appraisingly.
"This vegetation is only slightly less dense than that which flourished during what scientists call the coal age."
"You mean it was jungle like this that made coal beds?" Monk grunted.
"Exactly. Let a landslide cover some of this jungle, or let water and mud cover it, and in the course of a few ages, we would have an excellent chance of a coal vein. Partial decomposition without access to air would do the work."
* * *
FURTHER appraisal of their amazing domicile led Doc to level a mighty bronze arm.
"There, brothers, is the explanation of these prehistoric life forms being forced to remain here through the ages!"
Johnny, the geologist, quickly comprehended what Doc meant.
"At one time a path gave access to the crater," he declared. "Some natural upheaval, probably an earthquake shock, destroyed the means of getting in and out. And the dinosaurs were forced to stay."
"Through the aeons of time that they have remained here, the outer sides of this cone weathered down. The land sank. Oceans rushed in. And this crater became Thunder Island, supposedly an active volcanic cone projecting from a seldom-visited section of the southern seas."
Monk scratched his bullet of a head. "But, Doc, how do you account for these critters not changin’ through the ages, like they did in the outer world?"
"Evolution," Doc smiled.
"But evolution is a changing — "
"Not necessarily," Doc corrected. "Evolution is a change in animals and plants and so on, as I comprehend it. But those changes are caused by slowly altering surroundings. For example, if an animal lives in a warm country, its fur will be light, or it may have no fur at all. But if the country turns cold, the animal must grow a heavy coat, or perish. The acquiring of that fur coat is evolution.
"Conditions here in this crater have remained exactly as they were ages ago. The air is warm. There is a great deal of rain. The luxuriant plant growth makes food plentiful. Probably the seasons down here are alike the year around.
"So the prehistoric animals trapped here experienced no necessity for changing themselves to fit altered conditions, because conditions did not alter."
"That sounds reasonable," Monk admitted.
After this, silence fell. It was a somber quiet. They were thinking of Renny. They believed him dead, on the evidence of what they had seen — his hat and the gore surrounding it.
"We’d better be moving," Doc said at last. "First, we will visit the neighborhood of the hot mud lake, on the chance some supplies might have spilled out of our plane. In case you haven’t noticed it, we’re practically out of ammunition."
The others hastily examined their guns. They found only a few cartridges in each weapon. Monk, naturally the most reckless, had but four cartridges left.
"Throw the lever which changes your guns to single-shot operation," Doc directed. "We’ve got to count every bullet. Although the weapons are virtually useless against these prehistoric monsters, they will be effective upon Kar."
"Kar!" Ham clipped. "I had nearly forgotten that devil! Have you noted any signs of him, Doc?"
"Not yet. But we are not giving up our pursuit. Not even these big dinosaurs can keep us from Kar."
* * *
THEY visited the hot mud lake. So terrific was the heat of the lavalike stuff that they could not approach within yards. Too, they dreaded a sudden eruption, such as had been caused by the plane plunging into the lake.
Such geyser displays apparently came often. Great splatters of mud, now cooled, decorated the steep slope for some distance below the hot lake.
"Imagine one of them droppin’ on the back of your neck!" Monk mumbled.
"Better still, imagine what would happen to the crater floor if this broke!" Ham pointed at the lavalike dike retaining wall which confined the horseshoe-shaped body of super-heated, jellylike mud well upon the crater side.
"It would be too bad on a pig, if he happened to be down on the crater bottom, huh?" Monk suggested. Then he watched Ham’s features assume the inevitable flush of ire.
They found no speck of equipment from the plane. The craft was hopelessly gone.
To show there was no chance of salvaging it, Doc cast a small chunk of wood out on the crusted lake surface.
So hot was the crust that the wood smoldered and quickly burst into flame!
"Golly!" muttered Monk. "Let’s get out of here before that thing takes a notion to cut up!"
"We shall skirt the crater," Doc decided. "You notice the larger vegetation grows near the edges. In the center is a series of small streams. These bodies of water run sluggishly, and are hardly more than elongated bog holes."
"How about lighting a fire and getting some breakfast?" suggested the taxidermist, Oliver Wording Bittman.
Bittman had indeed regained much of his nerve. But it was with a patent effort that he was striving to maintain the standard of calmness before peril set by Doc and his men.
"No fire," Doc replied. "It might show Kar our whereabouts, if he is in the crater. Anyway, we have nothing to cook."
"The breakfast part of his idea still sounds good to me," spoke up Long Tom. "What do we eat, Doc?"
"I’ll try to find something," Doc smiled.
They betook themselves from the vicinity of the mud lake.
"Quite a climb!" Ham puffed as they descended the steep slope.
Ham, amazingly enough, had retained his sword cane through all the excitement of the parachute leap and the horror of the ensuing night. He was seldom without that secret blade. But, although it was mightily effective upon human opponents, it was virtually useless against the giant dinosaurs. The tempered blade would snap before it could be forced through one of the thick, wood-hard hides.
However, Ham very soon got a chance to use his sword cane.
An animal about the size of a large calf suddenl
y bounded up before them. It had four spongy looking antlers, two in the usual spot atop the head, the other pair down below the eyes. It had a cloven hoof and looked edible.
With a swift spring that would have been a credit to even Doc’s brawny form, Ham ran the strange animal through with his sword cane.
"We eat!" he grinned.
* * *
"I HAVE an idea how we can build a fire without the smoke being noticed," Doc offered. He had suddenly discovered he was hungry. "We’ll kindle a blaze near one of these streams of boiling water from which steam arises."
"Talk about necessity being the mother of ideas!" Monk grinned.
They kindled a fire, although experiencing difficulty with wet wood. Too, another sudden deluge of rain nearly put out the flames. But at length they had their breakfast cooking.
"What are we eatin’?" inquired Monk.
"A primitive type of deer," decided Johnny, the geologist.
By dipping a corner of his handkerchief into the boiling stream beside which they had built their fire, then permitting the wet cloth to cool and tasting it, Doc ascertained the water was drinkable, although it had a saline quality.
He proceeded to boil a hunk of the primitive deer in the natural caldron.
"I did that once in Yellowstone Park," said Ham.
Doc and his men kept an alert watch for danger. They were not disturbed. The meat was palatable, but had a pronounced grassy taste.
It was a sober meal, what with the thought of Renny’s possible fate.
"The insects are interesting," remarked Long Tom. "There seem to be few butterflies, moths, bees, wasps or ants. But there’s plenty of dragonflies, bugs, and beetles."
"The insects you see are the less complex types, for the most part," Doc explained. "They aren’t quite developed enough to make cocoons or gather honey. They came first in the course of evolution."
Because the great warmth within the crater would not permit them to keep meat fresh even until the next meal time, they discarded the remainder of their primitive deer. They quitted the vicinity.
"We will now go ahead with our circling of the pit," Doc said. "There may be a path by which a climber as agile as a man might depart."
Monk let out a displeased rumble. "Ugh! You mean to say we may be stuck in here, Doc?"
"Did you notice a spot where you could climb out?"
"No-o-o," Monk admitted uneasily.
Traversing some little distance, they reached a particularly tall shrub. Monk climbed this to look around. He had no more than reached the sprawling top when his excited call came down to Doc and the others.
"Smoke! I see a fire!"
Doc ran up to Monk’s side with the agility of a squirrel.
Two or three miles distant across the crater bed, smoke curled from the jungle.
"Sure it isn’t steam?" Ham inquired skeptically from the ground.
"Not a chance," Doc replied. "It’s darker than steam."
"And I just saw a burning ember, apparently a leaf, in the smoke!" Monk added.
He and Doc clambered down to the ground.
One word was upon the lips of everybody. "Kar! You think it is Kar’s fire?"
"Can’t tell," Doc admitted. "But we’ll find out soon."
* * *
THEY went ahead hurriedly. Ham’s sword cane now came in doubly handy for slashing through the tangled growth. There were no forest lanes overhead — open stretches of branches through which Doc and Monk might have swung, anthropoidlike. They had to confine themselves to the earth.
Doc’s great bronze form came to an abrupt stop. Strange lights danced in his flaky golden eyes.
He was studying something he had found underfoot.
"What is it?" Long Tom inquired.
"Footprints."
"Let me see!" Oliver Wording Bittman hurried over.
Monk made an angry growl. "Kar?"
"No." A joyful brightness had lighted Doc’s golden eyes.
"What are you so tickled about?" Monk wanted to know.
"The footprints are Renny’s. I’d know those oversize tracks anywhere. Too, one of his shoes had a cut on the sole, and these tracks show just such a cut."
"Then Renny may be alive!"
They met Renny within the next few minutes. The elephant-like, big-fisted engineer had heard them. He came striding out of the tangled growth — the same as ever!
In one hand, Renny dangled the skin of a small, lemon-colored animal. In markings, this pelt resembled that of an undersized hyena.
"Here’s the history of my night!" Renny chuckled after greetings were exchanged.
Rapidly, he told of his wild ride on the great colossus with the three horns and the huge bony shield over its neck, of the playful thunder lizard in the lakelet, of his fight with the odorous and batlike flying reptile chick, and of the creature with the double row of upstanding, saw-teeth protuberance down its back.
He told of ducking into the handy trench, and of being buried. Then he came to the point where he shoved his person out into the hot night — and teeth had seized him.
Renny exhibited a small chewed spot on his shoulder. He shook the pelt of the hyenalike animal.
"It was this little thing bit me!" he laughed. "It made enough noise to be a lion. I choked the durn thing. I’m gonna make a pen wiper or somethin’ out of its hide to commemorate one of the worst scares I ever got. When it took hold of me, I sure thought the jig was up."
Doc suddenly remembered something. "That smoke! Did it come from a fire you made?"
"What smoke?" Renny asked vacantly. "I haven’t made any fire."
* * *
Chapter 19. ATTACK OF THE GNAWERS
"
IT’S Kar!" Ham muttered. "Kar made that fire!"
"Unless there are human beings residing in this place," Johnny pointed out.
"My thumb goes down on the idea that people may live in the crater," said Doc. "Thought that the comparatively defenseless human race could exist in here through the ages is a little preposterous. Anyway, we have seen no sign of monkeys or apes, which some evolutionists claim branched off from the same source stock as man."
"There’s not much doubt but that they did!" said Ham nastily, looking intently at Monk’s hairy, simian figure. "We have the living proof with us."
"A lot a shyster lawyer knows about evolution!" Monk grinned.
They set forth toward the fire again.
"Use caution!" Doc warned. "If it is only one of Kar’s men, we want to follow the chap to Kar. Or capture him alive and force him to tell us where Kar is!"
A stream of boiling-hot water barred their path. It was shallow, but too wide to leap across. They were forced to trail along it. But it only grew wider. It seemed to reach an indefinite distance. It was too hot for wading.
Doc solved the problem. Cutting two tough shoots not unlike bamboo, he fashioned a pair of makeshift stilts. The others quickly followed suit. With these, they negotiated the overly hot stream.
Oliver Wording Bittman, who wailed that he had never walked on stilts as a boy, was helped across the boiling water by Doc.
Soon after, the matlike jungle became horny with great upthrusts of rock.
At the very first of these stony juttings, Doc halted. He examined the rock with interest. He tapped at it quietly with his gun barrel. He borrowed Johnny’s glasses to use the magnifying lens on the left side.
"Hm-m-m!" he said thoughtfully.
If the bestial creodont which would have destroyed them except for the tobacco Doc threw in its eyes — if that animal was a mixture of many animals, so was this rock a mixture of many ores. Without proper apparatus for assaying, a great deal could not be told.
"What’s so interesting about that spotted dornick?" inquired Oliver Wording Bittman, fingering the scalpel on his watch chain.
"Just the wide variety of ores which it apparently contains," Doc replied.
Renny glanced at Doc. "You mean we may be near the region from which came the r
are element or substance which is the basis of the Smoke of Eternity?"
"It’s a thought," Doc admitted.
* * *
GREATER was their caution now. The strange rocks became more plentiful. Indeed, the jungle gave way to a wilderness of glistening, mottled stone. This shimmering waste stretched directly before them until it ended against the sheer cliff of the crater side.
They penetrated farther. Signs of rare metals were all about. But it was doubtful if any were present in sizable paying quantities.
"I’d like to spend a month in here, just classifying rock types," declared Johnny, the geologist.
Doc Savage appraised the stony fastness.
"I want to look this over," he said. "I can move faster alone. You chaps wait here. The fire is on the other side. I’ll scout that, investigating this rock formation en route, then return."
His friends spread out among the strange rocks, inspecting curious formations. A couple of them sidled back into the jungle, intent on seeing if they couldn’t locate some kind of an edible herb. A meat diet would soon get monotonous, especially a meat with as strong a grassy taste as their primitive deer.
Doc continued into the rocks. They became difficult to get through, as though they were broken glass, the glass being as thick as a house.
This region of strange rocks was larger than he had thought. It must extend for at least two miles. It pressed against the cliff base its whole length.
In order to see the better, Doc clambered atop a vitrified mass.
Spang!
A bullet hit beside him. It sprayed wiry bits of lead into his bronze skin.
A quick leap put Doc in shelter. He was already in safety when the satanic laughter of the echoes came hopping across the arid rock wilderness.
The shot had come from the direction of his own friends!
Hardly more than a bronze blur in the steam-made twilight, Doc sped for his men.
He found them in excitement.
"Who fired that shot?" Doc demanded.
"None of us. It came from the jungle — to the right."
"Where’s Bittman?"
Oliver Wording Bittman was not about!
Doc sprang away. Herculean sinews carried his bronze form over knife-edged boulders and ridges around which it took the others minutes to go.
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