"This place is dark as the coal-cellars of Hades," jested Roverton The others laughed bravely, though their nerves were on edge with sinister expectation and uncertainty.
The draft of dank, mephitic air grew stronger. The smell of stagnant, sunless waters, lying at some unfathomable depth, mingled in the men's nostrils with a nauseating reek as of bat-haunted catacombs or foul animal-dens.
"Phooey !" grumbled Deming. "This is worse than Gorgonzola and fox-guts all in one."
The floor of the cavern began to slope downward. Step by step the descent steepened like some infernal chute, till the mutineers could hardly keep their footing in the dark.
Remote and faint, like a little patch of phosphorescence, a light dawned in the depths below. The walls of the cavern, dolorously ribbed and arched, were now distinguishable. The light strengthened as the men went on; and soon it was all about them, pouring in pale-blue rays from an undiscerned subterranean source.
The incline ended abruptly, and they came out in a vast chamber full of the queer radiance, which appeared to emanate from roof and walls like some kind of radioactivity. They were on a broad semi-circular shelf; and, crossing the shelf, they found that it terminated sharply and fell sheer down for perhaps fifty feet to a great pool in the center of the chamber. There were ledges on the opposite side of the cavern at the same level as the one on which they stood; and there were smaller caves that ramified from these ledges. But apparently none of the caves was attainable from the ledge where the incline had ended. Between, were perpendicular walls that could afford no moment's foothold anywhere.
The three men stood on the brink above the pool and looked about hem. They could hear the shuffling of the first lizard-monster on the incline and could see the baleful glaring of its single eye as it came forward.
"This looks like the last page of the last chapter." Roverton was now leering down at the pool. The others followed his gaze. The waters were dusky, stirless, dull, ungleaming, beneath the bluish glow from the cavern-sides. They were like something that had been asleep or dead for thousands of years; and the stench that arose from them suggested ages of slow putrefaction.
"Good Lord ! What is that ?" Roverton had noticed a change in the waters, an odd glimmer that came from beneath their surface as if a drowned moon were rising within them. Then the dead calm of the pool was broken with a million spreading ripples, and a vast head, dripping with loathsome luminescence, upreared from the waters. The thing was seven or eight feet wide, it was hideously round and formless and seemed to consist mainly of gaping mouths and glaring eyes all strewn together in a mad chaos of malignity and horror. There were at least five mouths, each of them large enough to devour a man at one swallow. They were fangless, and elastically distensible. Scattered among them, the eyes burned like satanic embers.
One of the lizard-monsters had crawled forth on the shelf. Scores of the pygmies were crowding beside and behind it, and some of them now advanced till they were abreast of the men. They stared down at the fearsome thing in the pool and made uncouth gestures and genuflections with heads, hands and long prehensile trunks, as if they were invoking or worshiping it. Their shrill voices rose in a rhythmically wavering chant.
The men were almost stupefied with horror. The creature in the gulf was beyond anything in earthly legend or nightmare. And the rites of the obeisance offered by the pygmies was unbelievably revolting.
"The thing is their god," Roverton cried. "Probably they are going to sacrifice us to it."
The ledge was not thronged with pygmies; and the lizard-monster had pushed forward till the three men had no more than standing room on the brink of the gulf, in a crescent-like arc formed by its body.
The ceremony performed by the pygmies came to an end, their genuflections and chantings ceased, and all turned their eyes in a simultaneous unwinking stare on the mutineers. The four who were mounted upon the lizard-creature gave vent in unison to a single word of command.
"Ptrahsai! " The monster opened its maw and pushed forward with its squat jowl. Its horrible teeth were like a moving porticullis. Its breath was like a fetid wind. There was no time for terror, and no chance to resist: the men tottered and slipped on the narrowing verge, and toppled simultaneously into space. In his fall Roverton clutched automatically at the nearest of the pygmies, caught the creature by its trunk, and bore it along as he hurtled through the air. He and his companions plunged with a huge splash into the pool and sank far below the surface. With a concerted presence of mind they all came up as dose to the cavern-wall as they could and began to look for possible foot-holds. Roverton had not lost his grip on the pygmy. The creature howled ferociously when its head came above the water, and tried to claw him with its long toenails.
The precipice was bare and sheer from the water's edge, with no visible break anywhere. The men swam desperately along it, searching for an aperture or a ledge. The thing of mouths and eyes had begun to move toward them, and they felt sick with terror and repulsion at the sight of its slow, phosphorescent gliding. There was a damnable deliberation, a dreadful leisureliness in its motion, as if it knew that there was no way in which its victims could evade the elastic yawning of those five abominable mouths. It approached, till the cavern-wall beside the swimmers grew brighter with the foul effulgence of its looming head. They could see beneath and behind the head the distorting glowing of a long, formless body submerged in the black abysses of the pool.
Roverton was nearest to the monster when it came abreast. Its malignant bulging eyes were all bent upon him and its foremost mouth opened more widely and slavered with an execrable slime. Now it loomed athwart him, and he could feel the unutterable corruption of its breath. He was driven against the cavern-wall; and, managing to steady himself for a moment, he pushed the pygmy toward the approaching mouth. The pygmy yelled and struggled in a frenzy of fear till the awful slobbering lips had closed upon it. The monster paused as if its appetite and curiosity were appeased for the nonce; and the three men took advantage of this to continue their exploration of the wall.
Suddenly they perceived a low aperture in the smooth cliff, into which the waters flowed with a gentle rippling. The aperture was narrow and its roof was not more than a foot above the surface. It might or might not afford an escape from the pool; but no other possible exit could be detected. Without hesitation Adams swam into the opening and the others followed him.
The water was still deep beneath them and they did not touch bottom anywhere. The walls of the little cavern were luminous at first; but the luminosity soon ceased and left them in absolute darkness. As they swam onward, they could no longer judge the extent of the air-space above them. At no time, however, were they compelled to dive beneath the surface; and they soon found that the cave was now wide enough to permit their moving side by side. They perceived also that they were caught in the flow of an ever-strengthening current which carried them on with considerable velocity. Since there was no sign of pursuit from the monster in the pool, the men began to feel a faint quickening of hope. Of course the stream might carry them to the very bowels of this terrific transstellar world, or might plunge at any moment into some dreadful gulf; or the roof might close in and crush them down beneath the noisome strangling waters. But at any rate they felt that there was a chance of ultimate emergence; and anything almost would be better than the proximity of the luminescent monster with mephitic breath and myriad eyes and mouths. Probably the cave in which they now swam was far too narrow to permit the entrance of its loathly bulk.
How long the three men floated in the swiftening current, it was impossible for them to know. As far as they could tell, there was no change in their situation; nor could they estimate how far they had gone in this underground world. The darkness weighed upon them, seemingly no less opaque and heavy than the water itself and the cavern-walls. They resigned themselves to the obscure progression of the stream, saving their strength as much as possible for any future emergency that might arise.
At l
ength, when it seemed that they were irretrievably lost in the solid abysmal murk, when their eyes had forgotten the very memory of sight, the darkness before them was pierced by a pinpoint of light. The light increased by slow, uncertain degrees, but for awhile they were doubtful as to its nature, not knowing whether they were approaching another vault of phosphorescence, or the actual outer daylight. However, they were thankful for its dim glimmering. The stream had become still swifter and rougher, with boulder-cloven rapids in which their descent was impetuous and dangerous. More than once the men were almost thrown against the dark and jagged masses that towered about them.
All at once the current slackened and the seething rapids died in a broad pool above which the arching of the lofty cavern-dome was now discernible. The light poured in a stream of pale radiance across this pool from what was evidently the cavern's mouth; and beyond the mouth a large sheet of sun-white water stretched away and was lost in the luminous distance.
All three men were suddenly conscious of a crushing, dragging fatigue — an overwhelming reaction from all the peril and hardship they had undergone. But the prospect of emergence from this underworld of mysterious horror prompted them to summon their remaining strength with sodden limbs, they swam toward the cavern-mouth and floated through its black arch into the silvery dazzle of a great lake. The lake was probably the same body of water they had seen from afar on the previous day. Its aspect was ineffably weird and desolate. High cliffs with many buttresses and chimneys overhung the cavern from which they had emerged, and ran away on either side in gradually descending lines till they ceased in long flats of ooze and sand. There was no trace of vegetation anywhere — nothing but the wart stone of the cliffs, and the gray mud of the marshes, and the wan, dead waters. And at first the men thought that there was no life of any kind. They swam along the cliff, looking for a place to land. The levels of ooze and sand were seemingly miles away; and their progress in the sluggish lake was excruciatingly slow and tedious. They felt as if the strange, lifeless waters had soaked them to the bone; and a deadly inertia dragged them down and drugged their very senses till everything became blurred in a monotone of faintness. They were all too exhausted to speak or even think. Dimly, despairingly, they plowed on toward the receding goal of the far-off shore. Somehow, they were aware that a shadow had fallen upon them, breaking the diffused glare of the foggy sun. They were too weary to look up, or even speculate as to the origin of the shadow. Then they heard a harsh, jarring cry and a beating as of stiff, enormous wings, and something swooped down and hovered above them. Turning their heads in the water, the three men saw an incredible sight. The thing that shadowed them was a mammoth bird-like creature with ribbed and leathern wings that were at least fifty feet from tip to tip. It suggested that prehistoric flying monster, the pterodactyl; and also it suggested a pelican, for beneath its seven-foot beak there hung a prodigious pouch. Scarcely crediting their eyes, the swimmers stared at the hovering apparition. It glowered upon them with malevolent orbs of fire big as dinner-plates; and then, with horrible swiftness, it descended. Adams, who was nearest, felt the huge beak close upon him and lift him from the water; and before he could realize what was happening he found himself in the interior of the pouch. Deming was seized and deposited beside him a moment later; and Roverton, who had instinctively dived beneath the surface, was retrieved and drawn out by the questing beak as if he had been a flounder, and joined the other two.
Utterly stunned, they groped about in the noisome darkness of the pouch and were thrown prostrate in a heap as they felt the monster rise and soar heavenward. There were eel-like things that squirmed beneath them; and they breathed a medley of suffocating stenches. They could see nothing; but the gloom in which they lay was not absolute blackness, for the walls of the pouch were sufficiently permeable by light to create a blood-like dusk. The men could hear the loud beating of the leathern wings, could feel the rhythmic throb of their vibration; and while they were trying to habituate themselves to the unique situation they had the sense of being borne onward in vertiginous flight at a great altitude. Roverton was the first to speak.
"Of all the ineffable predicaments! Even a fiction-writer wouldn't dare to imagine this, I suppose the creature has a nest somewhere and it's carrying us home to provide food for its young or its mate."
"Or," suggested Adams, "having caught a supply of live meat, it's going off somewhere to secure its vitamins."
A faint laughter greeted the jest.
"Well," put in Deming, "we're getting a free ride, anyhow — for once we're not having to walk, run or swim."
Time passed in a doubtful, confused way. The beating of the wings had died to a swish of rushing air as about the unflapping level of flight of some giant vulture or bird of prey. Still there was the sense of prodigious speed, of horizon on horizon left behind, of plains and waters and mountains slipping away beneath in a swift recession.
The men grew sick and dizzy with the noxious air of their prison; they fell into periods of semi-consciousness from which they revived with a start. In the novel horror of their position, they almost lost the feeling of identity. It was as if they were part of some monstrous dream or hallucination.
After an undetermined lapse of time, they felt a slackening of the headlong flight and then heard once more the thunderous flap of those huge wings as the bird sank groundward. It seemed to descend from an alp-surpassing height, with tremendous velocity.
Now the descent was arrested with abrupt ease, like the stopping of an elevator. A sudden glimmering of light in the interior of the pouch, and Roverton and his companions were aware that the creature had opened its bill as if to seize something. Then, with a raucous, deafening cry, it began to thresh about as in some stupendous convulsion, and the men were thrown violently from side to side in the tossing pouch. It was impossible to imagine what had happened — the whole occurrence was supremely mysterious and terrifying. Adams and Deming were knocked almost senseless by the shaking they received; and Roverton alone was able to retain anything like full cognizance. He realized that the bird was engaged in some sort of struggle or combat. After a brief interval its heavings became less tumultuous and powerful; and at last, with one hoarse, diabolic shriek, it appeared to collapse and lay still except for an occasional shuddering that shook body and neck and was communicated to the pouch. These shudderings diminished in force and frequency. The bird was now lying on its side, and the light entered the pouch directly through its wide-open beak.
Making sure that his companions had recovered their senses, Roverton crawled toward the light. The others followed in turn. Wriggling out through the slimy mouth, from which a frothy blood-like fluid was dripping, Roverton stood up dizzily and looked around.
The scene upon which he bad emerged was wilder and madder than the grotesqueries of fever-delirium. For an instant he thought that the things about him were products of hallucination, were born of his overwrought nerves and brain. The flying monster was stretched on the ground and was wrapped from head to tail in the coils of something which Roverton could only designate to himself as a vegetable anaconda. The coils were pale-green with irregular brown and purplish mottlings and were manifestly hundreds of feet in length. They terminated in three heads covered with mouths like the suckers of an octopus. The coils had encircled the bird many times, and were evidently possessed of enormous constrictive power, for they had tightened upon their prey so that the body bulged between them in loathsome knots and protuberances. They were visibly rooted in a black, viscid-looking soil, and were swollen at their base like the bole of some ancient tree. The three heads had applied themselves to the back of their prostrate victim and were obviously drawing sustenance from it with their myriad suckers.
All around, in the veering vapors that rose from the ground like steam, there loomed the tossing tops and writhing trunks, branches and feelers of a medley of half-ophidian or half-animal plant-forms. They varied in size from vines that were no larger than coral snakes, to amorp
hous bulks with a hundred squirming tentacles, huge as the kraken of mythology. They were no less diverse than the plant-forms of a terrestrial jungle, and all of them were hideously alive. Many were devoid of anything that suggested leaves; but others had fingerlike fronds or a sort of foliage that resembled a network of hairy ropes, and which undoubtedly served the same purpose as a spider web, for in some of these nets queer, uncouth insects and birds had been caught. Others of the trees bore tumescent oval or globular fruits, and fleshy-looking flowers that could close like mouths upon their prey. Overhead, through the steaming vapors, a hot, swollen sun flamed down from an almost vertical altitude. Roverton realized that the bird-monster, flying at many hundreds of miles an hour, must have carried himself and his companions to a sub-tropic zone of the world in which they were marooned.
Adams and Deming had now crawled out and were standing beside Roverton. For once none of the three could utter a word, in the profound stupefaction with which they surveyed their surroundings. Instinctively they all looked for an avenue of escape in the rows of vegetable monstrosities that hemmed them in on all sides. But there was no break anywhere — only a writhing infinity of things that were plainly poisonous, maleficent and inimical. And somehow they all felt that these plant-entities were conscious of their presence, were observing them closely, and, in some manner not cognizable by human senses, were even discussing or debating them.
The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics) Page 21
