Numbers of the strange folk were loitering on the causeway or coming down to join the throng which now ascended; many clambered lithely up onto the wall, and, holding to the rods or to each other—for the stones, like everything here, were wet and glairy—watched with those singular-hued and squinting eyes of theirs the passage of the strangers.
Stern and Beatrice, their breathing now oppressed by the thickening smoke which everywhere hung heavy, as well as by this fresh exertion in the densely compressed air, toiled, panting, up the steep incline.
The engineer was already bathed in a heavy sweat. The intense heat, well above a hundred degrees, added to the humidity, almost stifled him. His bound arms pained almost beyond endurance. Unable to balance himself, he slipped and staggered.
“Beatrice!” he called chokingly. “Try to make them understand I want my hands freed. It’s bad enough trying to clamber up this infernal road, anyhow, without having to go at it all trussed up this way.”
She, needing no second appeal, raised her free arms, pointed to her wrists and then at his, and made a gesture as of cutting. But the elder boatman of Stern’s canoe—seemingly a person of some authority—only shook his head and urged the prisoners upward, ever upward toward the great and growing light.
Now they had reached the top of the ascent.
On either hand, vanishing in shadows and mist, heavy and high walls extended, all built of black, cut stone surmounted by cressets.
Through a gateway the throng passed, and the prisoners with them—a gateway built of two massive monoliths of dressed stone, octagonal and highly polished, with a huge, straight plinth that Stern estimated at a glance never could have weighed less than ten tons.
“Ironwork, heavy stonework, weaving, fisheries—a good beginning here to work on,” thought the engineer. But there was little time for analysis. For now already they were passing through a complex series of inner gateways, passages, detours and labyrinthic defenses which—all well lighted from above by fire-baskets—spoke only too plainly the character of the enclosure within.
“A walled town, heavily fortified,” Stern realized as he and Beatrice were thrust forward through the last gate. “Evidently these people are living here in constant fear of attack by formidable foes. I’ll wager there’s been some terrible fighting in these narrow ways—and there may be some more, too, before we’re through with it. God, what a place! Makes me think of the machicoulis and pasterns at old Carcassonne. So far as this is concerned, we’re back again in the Dark Ages—dark, dark as Erebus!”
Then, all at once, out they issued into so strange a scene that, involuntarily, the two captives stopped short, staring about them with wide eyes.
Stretching away before them till the fog swallowed it—a fog now glowing with light from some source still mist-hidden—an open plaza stretched. This plaza was all surrounded, so far as they could see, with singular huts, built of dressed stone, circular for the most part, and with conical roofs like monster beehives. Windows there were none, but each hut had an open door facing the source of the strange, blue-green light.
Stern could now see the inside of the wall, topped with torches; its crest rose some five feet above the level of the plaza; and, where he could catch a glimpse of its base between the huts and through the crowding folk, he noticed that huge quantities of boulders were piled as though for instant use in case of attack.
A singular dripping of warmish water, here a huge drop, there another, attracted his attention; but though he looked up to determine its source, if possible, he could see nothing except the glowing mist. The whole floor of the enclosure seemed to be wet and shining with this water; and all the roughly clad folk, now coming from the huts and concentrating toward the captives, from every direction, were wet as well, as though with this curious, constant, sparsely scattered rain.
Not a quadruped of any kind was to be seen. Neither cat nor dog was there, neither goat nor pig nor any other creature such as in the meanest savage villages of other times might have been found upon the surface of the earth. But, undisturbed and bold, numbers of a most extraordinary fowl—a long-legged, red-necked fowl, wattled and huge of beak—gravely waddled here and there or perched singly and in solemn rows upon the huts.
“Great Heavens, Beatrice,” exclaimed the engineer, “what are we up against? Of all the incredible places! That light! That roaring!”
He had difficulty in making himself even heard. For now the hissing roar which they had perceived from afar off seemed to fill the place with a tremendous vibrant blur, rising, falling, as the light waxed and waned.
Terribly confusing all these new sense-impressions were to Stern and Beatrice in their unnerved and weakened state. And, staring about them as they went, they slowly moved along with the motion of their captors toward the great light.
All at once Stern stopped, with a startled cry.
“The infernal devils!” he exclaimed, and recoiled with an involuntary shudder from the sight that met his eyes.
The girl, too, cried out in fear.
Some air-current, some heated blast of vapor from the vast flame they now saw shooting upward from the stone flooring of the plaza, momently dispelled the thick, white vapors.
Stern got a glimpse of a circular row of stone posts, each about nine feet high—he saw not the complete circle, but enough of it to judge its diameter as some fifty feet. In the center stood a round and massive building, and from each post to that building stretched a metal rod perhaps twenty feet in length.
“Look! Look!” gasped Beatrice, and pointed.
Then, deadly pale, she hid her face in both her hands and crouched away, as though to blot the sight from her perception.
Each metal bar was sagging with a hideous load—a row of human skeletons, stark, fleshless, frightful in their ghastliness. All were headless. All, suspended by the cervical vertebrae, swayed lightly as the blue-green light glared on them with its weird, unearthly radiance.
Before either Stern or the girl had time even to struggle or so much as recover from the shock of this fell sight, they were both pushed roughly between two of the posts into the frightful circle.
Stern saw a door yawn black before them in the massive hut of stone.
Toward this the Folk of the Abyss were thrusting them.
“No, you don’t, damn you!” he howled with sudden passion. “None o’ that for us! Shoot, Beta! Shoot!”
But even as her hand jerked at the butt of the automatic, in its rawhide holster on her hip, an overmastering force flung them both forward into the foul dark of the round dungeon. A metal door clanged shut. Absolute darkness fell.
“My God!” cried Stern. “Beta! Where are you? Beta! Beta!”
But answer there was none. The girl had fainted.
CHAPTER XXVI
“YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!”
Even in his pain and rage and fear, Stern did not lose his wits. Too great the peril, he subconsciously realized, for any false step now. Despite the fact that the stone prison could measure no more than some ten feet in diameter, he knew that in its floors some pit or fissure might exist, frightfully deep, for their destruction.
And other dangers, too, might lie hidden in this fearful place. So, restraining himself with a strong effort, he stood there motionless a few seconds, listening, trying to think. Severe now the pain from his lashed wrists had grown, but he no longer felt it. Strange visions seemed to dance before his eyes, for weakness and fever were at work upon him. In his ears still sounded, though muffled now, the constant hissing roar of the great flame, the mysterious and monstrous jet of fire which seemed to form the center of this unknown, incomprehensible life in the abyss.
“Merciful Heavens!” gasped he. “That fire—those skeletons—this black cell—what can they mean?” He found no answer in his bewildered brain. Once more he called, “Beatrice! Beatrice!” but only the close echo of the prison replied.
He listened, holding his breath in sickening fear. Was there, in truth, some wait
ing, yawning chasm in the cell, and had she, thrust rudely forward, been hurled down it? At the thought he set his jaws with terrible menace and swore, to the last drop of his blood, vengeance on these inhuman captors.
But as he listened, standing there with bound hands in the thick gloom, he seemed to catch a slow and sighing sound, as of troubled breathing. Again he called. No answer. Then he understood the truth. And, unable to grope with his hands, he swung one foot slowly, gently, in the partial circumference of a circle.
At first he found nothing save the smooth and slippery stone of the floor, but, having shifted his position very cautiously and tried again, he experienced the great joy of feeling his sandaled foot come in contact with the girl’s prostrate body.
Beside her on the floor he knelt. He could not free his hands, but he could call to her and kiss her face. And presently, even while the joy of this discovery was keen upon him, obscuring the hot rage he felt, she moved, she spoke a few vague words, and reached her hands up to him; she clasped him in her arms.
And there in the close, fetid dark, imprisoned, helpless, doomed, they kissed again, and once more—though no word was spoken—plighted their love and deep fidelity until the end.
“Hurt? Are you hurt?” he panted eagerly, as she sat up on the hard floor and with her hands smoothed back the hair from his hot, aching head.
“I feel so weak and dizzy,” she answered. “And I’m afraid—oh, Allan, I’m afraid! But, no, I’m not hurt.”
“Thank God for that!” he breathed fervently. “Can you untie these infernal knots? They’re almost cutting my hands off!”
“Here, let me try!”
And presently the girl set to work; but even though she labored till her fingers ached, she could not start the tight and water-soaked ligatures.
“Hold on, wait a minute,” directed he. “Feel in my right-hand pocket. Maybe they forgot to take my knife.”
She obeyed.
“They’ve got it,” she announced. “Even if they don’t know the meaning of revolvers, they understand knives all right. It’s gone.”
“Pest!” he ejaculated hotly. Then for a moment he sat thinking, while the girl again tried vainly to loosen the hard-drawn knots.
“Can you find the iron door they shoved us through?” asked he at length.
“I’ll see!”
He heard her creeping cautiously along the walls of stone, feeling as she went.
“Look out!” he warned. “Keep testing the floor as you go. There may be a crevice or pit or something of that kind.”
All at once she cried: “Here it is! I’ve found it!”
“Good! Now, then, feel it all over and see if there’s any rough place on it. Any sharp edge of a plate, or anything of that kind, that I could rub the cords on.”
Another silence. Then the girl spoke.
“Nothing of that kind here,” she answered depairingly. “The door’s as smooth as if it had been filed and polished. There’s not even a lock of any kind. It must be fastened from the outside in some way.”
“By Heaven, this is certainly a hard proposition!” exclaimed the engineer, groaning despite himself. “What the deuce are we going to do now?”
For a moment he remained sunk in a kind of dull and apathetic respair.
But suddenly he gave a cry of joy.
“I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Your revolver, quick! Aim at the opposite wall, there, and fire!”
“Shoot, in here?” she queried, astonished. “Why—what for?”
“Never mind! Shoot!”
Amazed, she did his bidding. The crash of the report almost deafened them in that narrow room. By the stabbing flare of the discharge they glimpsed the black and shining walls, a deadly circle all about them.
“Again?” asked she.
“No. That’s enough. Now, find the bullet. It’s somewhere on the floor. There’s no pit; it’s all solid. The bullet—find the bullet!”
Questioning no more, yet still not understanding, she groped on hands and knees in the impenetrable blackness. The search lasted more than five minutes before her hand fell on the jagged bit of metal.
“Ah!” cried she. “Here it is!”
“Good! Tell me, is the steel jacket burst in any such way as to make a jagged edge?”
A moment’s silence, while her deft fingers examined the metal. Then said she:
“I think so. It’s a terribly small bit to saw with, but—”
“To work, then! I can’t stand this much longer.”
With splendid energy the girl attacked the tough and water-soaked bonds. She worked half an hour before the first one, thread by thread yielding, gave way. The second followed soon after; and now, with torn and bleeding fingers, she released the final bond.
“Thank Heaven!” he breathed as she began chafing his numb wrists and arms to bring the circulation back again; and presently, when he had regained some use of his own hands, he also rubbed his arms.
“No great damage done, after all,” he judged, “so far as this is concerned. But, by the Almighty, we’re in one frightful fix every other way! Hark! Hear those demons outside there? God knows what they’re up to now!”
Both prisoners listened.
Even through the massive walls of the circular dungeon they could hear a dull and gruesome chant that rose, fell, died, and then resumed, seemingly in unison with the variant roaring of the flame.
Thereto, also, an irregular metallic sound, as of blows struck on iron, and now and then a shrill, high-pitched cry. The effect of these strange sounds, rendered vague and unreal by the density of the walls, and faintly penetrating the dreadful darkness, surpassed all efforts of the imagination.
Beatrice and Stern, bold as they were, hardened to rough adventurings, felt their hearts sink with bodings, and for a while they spoke no word. They sat there together on the floor of polished stone—perceptibly warm to the touch and greasy with a peculiarly repellent substance—and thought long thoughts which neither one dared voice.
But at length the engineer, now much recovered from his pain and from the oppression of the lungs caused by the compressed air, reached for the girl’s hand in the dark.
“Without you where should I be?” he exclaimed. “My good angel now, as always!”
She made no answer, but returned the pressure of his hand. And for a while silence fell between them there—silence broken only by their troubled breathing and the cadenced roaring of the huge gas-well flame outside the prison wall.
At last Stern spoke.
“Let’s get some better idea of this place,” said he. “Maybe if we know just what we’re up against we’ll understand better what to do.”
And slowly, cautiously, with every sense alert, he began exploring the dungeon. Floor and walls he felt of, with minute care, reaching as high as he could and eagerly seeking some possible crevice, some promise—no matter how remote—of ultimate escape.
But the examination ended only in discouragement. Smooth almost as glass the walls were, and the floor as well, perhaps worn down by countless prisoners.
The iron door, cleverly let into the wall, lay flush with it, and offered not the slightest irregularity to the touch. So nicely was it fitted that not even Stern’s finger-nail could penetrate the joint.
“Nothing doing in the escape line,” he passed judgment unwillingly. “Barbarians these people certainly are, in some ways, but they’ve got the arts of stone and iron working down fine. I, as an engineer, have to appreciate that, and give the remote descendants of our race credit for it, even if it works our ruin. Gad, but they’re clever, though!”
Discouraged, in spite of all his attempted optimism, he sought the girl again, there in the deep and velvet dark. To himself he drew her; and, his arm about her sinuous, supple body, tried to comfort her with cheering speech.
“Well, Beatrice, they haven’t got us yet! We’re better off, on the whole, than we had any right to hope for, after having fallen one or two hundred miles—maybe five
hundred, who knows? If I can manage to get a word or two with these confounded barbarians, I’ll maybe save our bacon yet! And, at worst—well, we’re in a mighty good little fort here. I pity anybody that tries to come in that door and get us.”
“Oh, Allan—those skeletons, those headless skeletons!” she whispered; and in his arms he felt her shudder with unconquerable fear.
“I know; but they aren’t going to add us to their little collection, you mark my words! These men are white; they’re our own kind, even though they have slid back into barbarism. They’ll listen to reason, once I get a chance at them.”
Thus, talking of the abyss and of their fall—now of one phase, now another, of their frightful position—they passed an hour in the stifling dark.
And, joining their observations and ideas, they were able to get some general idea of the conditions under which these incredible folk were dwelling.
From the warmth of the sea and the immense quantities of vapor that filled the abyss, they concluded that it must be at a tremendous depth in the earth—perhaps as far down as Stern’s extreme guess of five hundred miles—and also that it must be of very large extent.
Beatrice had noted also that the water was salt. This led them to the conclusion that in some way or other, perhaps intermittently, the oceans on the surface were supplying the subterranean sea.
“If I’m not much mistaken,” judged the engineer, “that tremendous maelstrom near the site of New Haven—the cataract that almost got us, just after we started out—has something very vital to do with this situation.
“In that case, and if there’s a way for water to come down, why mayn’t there be a way for us to climb up? Who knows?”
“But if there were,” she answered, “wouldn’t these people have found it, in all these hundreds and hundreds of years?”
They discussed the question, pro and con, with many another that bore on the folk—this strange and inexplicable imprisonment, the huge flame at the center of the community’s life, the probable intentions of their captors, and the terrifying rows of headless skeletons.
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