The vast cliff was now dimly visible in the glare of the great flame, the steady roar of which was drowned by the tumult of the rain.
Stern saw that the village was sheltered under a tremendous overhang of the black rock; he understood why the ancestors of the Folk, coming to these depths after incredible adventurings and long-forgotten struggles, had settled here. Any exposed location would have been fatal; no hut could have withstood the torrent, nor could any man, caught in it, have escaped drowning outright.
Amazed and full of wonder at this terrific storm, so different from those on the surface—for there was neither wind nor lightning, but just that steady, frightful sluicing down of solid tons of rain—Stern made his way back to the patriarch’s house.
There he met Beatrice, just awakened.
“No chance to raise the machine to-day!” she called to him as he entered. “He says this is apt to last for hours and hours!” She nodded toward the old man, much distressed.
“Patience!” he murmured. “Patience, friends—and peace!”
Stern thought a moment.
“Well,” said he, at last, making himself heard only with difficulty, “even so, we can spend the day in making ready.”
And, after the simple meal that served for breakfast, he sat down to think out definitely some plan of campaign for the recovery of the lost Pauillac.
Though Stern by no means understood the girl’s anxiety to leave the Abyss, nor yet had any intention of trying to do so until he had begun the education of the Folk and had perfected some means of trying to transplant this group—and whatever other tribes he could find—to the surface again, he realized the all-importance of getting the machine into his possession once more.
For more than an hour he pondered the question, now asking a question of the patriarch—who seemed torn between desire to have the wonder-thing brought up, and fear lest he should lose the strangers—now designing grapples, now formulating a definite line of procedure.
At last, all things settled in his mind, he bade the old man get for him ten strong ropes, such as the largest nets were made of. These ropes which he had already seen coiled in huge masses along the wall at the northern end of the village, where they were twisted of the tough weed-fiber, averaged all of two hundred feet in length. When the patriarch had gone to see about having them brought to the hut, he himself went across the plaza, with Beatrice, to the communal smithy.
There he appropriated a forge, hammers, and a quantity of iron bars, and energetically set to work fashioning a huge three-pronged hook.
A couple of hours’ hard labor at the anvil—labor which proved that he was getting back his normal strength once more—completed the task. Deftly he heated, shaped and reshaped the iron, while vast Brocken-shadows danced and played along the titanic cliff behind him, cast by the wavering blue gas-flames of the forge. At length he found himself in possession of a drag weighing about forty pounds and provided with a stout ring at the top of the shank six inches in diameter.
“Now,” said he to Beatrice, as he surveyed the finished product, while all about them the inquisitive yet silent Folk watched them by the unsteady light, “now I guess we’re ready to get down to something practical. Just as soon as this infernal rain lets up a bit, we’ll go angling for the biggest fish that ever came out of this sea!”
But the storm was very far from being at an end. The patriarch told Stern, when he brought the grapple to the hut—followed by a silent, all-observant crowd—that sometimes these torrential downpours lasted from three to ten sleep-times, with lulls between.
“And nobody can venture on the sea,” he added, “till we know—by certain signs we have—that the great rain is verily at an end. To do that would mean to court death; and we are wise, from very long experience. So, my son, you must have patience in this as in all things, and wait!”
Part of that afternoon of forced inactivity Stern spent in his favorite habit of going about among the Folk, closely mingling with them and watching all their industrial processes and social life, and trying, as usual, to pick tip words and phrases of the very far-degenerated speech that once had been English but was now a grammarless and formless jumble of strange words.
Only a few of the most common words he found retained anything like their original forms—such as w’hata, water; fohdu, food; yernuh, iron; vlaak, black; gomu, come; ghaa, go; fysha, fish; and so on for about forty others.
Thousands upon thousands of terms, for which no longer any objects now existed among the Folk, had been of course utterly forgotten; and some hundreds of new words, relative to new conditions, had been invented.
The entire construction was altered; the language now bore no more resemblance to English than English had borne to the primitive Indo-Germanic of the Aryan forefathers. Now that writing had been lost, nothing retarded changes; and Stern realized that here—were he a trained philologist—lay a task incomparably interesting and difficult, to learn this Merucaan speech and trace its development from his own tongue.
But Stern’s skill was all in other lines. The most that he could do was to make some rough vocabularies, learn a few common phrases, and here or there try to teach a little English. A deeper study and teaching, he knew, would come later, when more important matters had been attended to.
His attempts to learn and to talk with these people—by pointing at objects and listening to their names—were comparable to those, perhaps, of a prehistoric Goth turned loose in an American village of the twentieth century. Only the patriarch had retained the mother-tongue, and that in an archaic, imperfect manner, so that even his explanations often failed. Stern felt the baffling difficulties in his way; but his determination only grew.
The rain steadily continued to drum down, now lessened, now again in terrific deluges of solid black water churned to white as they struck the sea and flung the froth on high. The two Americans passed an hour that afternoon in the old man’s hut, drawing up a calendar on which to check as accurately as possible, the passage of time as reckoned in the terms of life upon the surface.
They scratched this on a slab of slatelike rock, with a sharp iron awl; and, reckoning the present day as about October first, agreed that every waking-time they would cross off one square.
“For,” said the engineer, “it’s most important that we should keep track of the seasons up above. That may have much to do with our attempts to transplant this colony. It would never do to take a people like this, accustomed to heat and vapor, and carry them out into even the mild winter that now prevails in a present-day December. If we don’t get them to the surface before the last of this month, at latest—”
“We’ll have to wait until another spring?” asked she.
“Looks that way,” he assented, putting a few final touches to the calendar. “So you see it’s up to us to hurry—and certainly nothing more inopportune than this devilish rain could possibly have happened! Haste, haste! We must make haste!”
“That’s so!” exclaimed Beatrice. “Every day’s precious, now. We—”
“My children,” hurriedly interrupted the patriarch, “I never yet have shown you my book—my one and greatest treasure. The book!
“You have told me many things, of sun and moon and stars, which are mocked at as idle tales by my unbelieving people; of continents and seas, mountains, vast cities, great ships, strange engines moved by vapor and by lightning, tall houses; of words thrown along metal threads or even through the air itself; of great nations and wars, of a hundred wondrous matters that verily have passed away even from the remotest memories of us in the Abyss!
“But of our history I have told you little; nor have you seen the book! Yet you must see it, for it alone remains to us of that other, better time. And though my folk mock at it as imposture and myth and fraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept the English speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive. Only the book, the book!”
His voice seemed strangely agitated. As h
e spoke he raised his hands toward them, sitting on the stone bench in the hut, while outside the rain still thundered louder than the droning roar of the great flame. Stern, his curiosity suddenly aroused, looked at the old man with keen interest.
“The book?” he queried. “What book? What’s the name of it? What date? What—who wrote it, and—”
“Patience, friends!”
“You mean you’ve really got an English book here in this village? A—”
“A book, verily, from the other days! But first, before I show you, let me tell you the old tradition that was handed down to me by my father and my father’s fathers, down through centuries—I know not how many.”
“You mean the story of this Lost Folk in the Abyss?”
“Verily! You have told me yours, of your awakening, of the ruined world and all your struggles and your fall down into this cursed pit. Listen now to mine!”
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE PATRIARCH’S TALE
“In the beginning,” he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, “our people were as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a great breaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of the earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of, only dark. It circled about the earth—”
“By Jove!” cried Stern, and started to his feet. “That dark patch in the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the Hudson!”
“You mean—” the girl exclaimed.
“It’s a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It’s the split-off part of the world!”
“Another satellite?”
“Of course! Hang it, yes! See now? The great explosion that liberated the poisonous gases and killed practically everybody in the world must have gouged this new planet out of the flank of Mother Earth in the latter part of 1920. The ejected portions, millions of millions of tons, hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of solid rock—and with them the ruins of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha, and hundreds of smaller cities—are now all revolving in a fixed, regular orbit, some few thousand miles or so from the surface!
“Think! Ours are the only living human eyes that have seen this new world blotting out the stars! This explains everything—the singular changes in the tides and in the direction of the magnetic pole, decreased gravitation and all the other strange things we noticed, but couldn’t understand. By Gad! What a discovery!”
The patriarch listened eagerly while Stern and the girl discussed the strange phenomenon; but when their excitement had subsided and they were ready again to hear him, he began anew:
“Verily, such was the first result of the great catastrophe. And, as you know, millions died. But among the cañons of the Rocky Mountains—so says the tradition; is it right? Were there such mountains?”
“Yes, yes! Go on!”
“In those cañons a few handfuls of hardy people still survived. Some perished of famine and exposure; some ventured out into the lowlands and died of the gas that still hung heavy there. Some were destroyed in a great fire that the tradition says swept the earth after the explosion. But a few still lived. At one time the number was only eighteen men, twelve women and a few children, so the story goes.”
“And then?”
“Then,” continued the patriarch, his brow wrinkled in deep thought, “then came the terrible, swift cold. The people, still keeping their English tongue, now dead save for you two, and still with some tools and even a few books, retreated into caves and fissures in the cañons. And so they came to the great descent.”
“The what?”
“The huge cleft which the story says once connected the upper world with this Abyss. And—”
“Is it open now,” cried Stern, leaning sharply forward.
“Alas, no; but you hurry me too much, good friend. You understand, for a long time they lived the cave-life partly, and partly the upper life. And they increased a great deal in the hundred years that followed the explosion. But they never could go into the plains, for still the gas hung there, rising from a thousand wells—ten thousand, mayhap, all very deadly. And so they knew not if the rest of the world lived or died.”
“And then?” queried the engineer. “Let’s have it all in outline. What happened?”
“This, my son: that a still greater cold came upon the world, and the life of the open became impossible. There were now ten or twelve thousand alive; but they were losing their skill, their knowledge, everything. Only a few men still kept the wisdom of reading or writing, even. For life was a terrible fight. And they had to seek food now in the cave-lakes; that was all remaining.
“After that, another fifty or a hundred years, came the second great explosion. The ways were closed to the outer world. Nearly all died. What happened even the tradition does not tell. How many years the handful of people wandered I do not know. Neither do I know how they came here.
“The story says only eight or ten altogether reached this sea. It was much smaller then. The islands of the Lanskaarn, as we call them now, were then joined to the land here. Great changes have taken place. Verily, all is different! Everything was lost—language and arts, and even the look of the Folk.
“We became as you see us. The tradition itself was forgotten save by a few. Sometimes we increased, then came pestilences and famines, outbreaks of lava and hot mud and gases, and nearly all died. At one time only seven remained—”
“For all the world like the story of Pitcairn Island and the mutineers of the ‘Bounty’!” interrupted the engineer. “Yes, yes—go on!”
“There is little more to tell. The tradition says there was once a place of records, where certain of the wisest men of our Folk placed all their lore to keep it; but even this place is lost. Only one family kept any knowledge of the English as a kind of inheritance and the single book went with that family—”
“But the Lanskaarn and the other peoples of the Abyss, where did they come from?” asked Stern eagerly.
The patriarch shook his head.
“How can I tell?” he answered. “The tradition says nothing of them.”
“Some other groups, probably,” suggested Beatrice, “that came in at different times and through other ways.”
“Possibly,” Stern assented. “Anything more to tell?”
“Nothing more. We became as savages; we lost all thought of history or learning. We only fought to live! All was forgotten.
“My grandfather taught the English to my father and he to me, and I had no son. Nobody here would learn from me. Nobody cared for the book. Even the tradition they laughed at, and they called my brain softened when I spoke of a place where in the air a light shone half the time brighter even than the great flame! And in every way they mocked me!
“So I—I”—the old man faltered, his voice tremulous, while tears glittered in his dim and sightless eyes—“I ceased to speak of these things. Then I grew blind and could not read the book. No longer could I refresh my mind with the English. So I said in my heart: ‘It is finished and will soon be wholly forgotten forever. This is the end.’
“Verily, I laid the book to rest as I soon must be laid to rest! Had you not come from that better place, my thought would have been true—”
“But it isn’t, not by a jugful!” exclaimed the engineer joyously, and stood up in the dim-lit little room. “No, sir! She and I, we’re going to change the face of things considerably! How? Never mind just yet. But let’s have a look at the old volume, father. Gad! That must be some relic, eh? Imagine a book carried about for a thousand years and read by at least thirty generations of men! The book, father! The book!”
Already the patriarch had arisen and now he gestured at the heavy bench of stone.
“Can you move this, my son?” asked he. “The place of the book lies beneath.”
“Under there, eh? All right!” And, needing no other invitation, he set his strength against the massive block of gneiss.
It yielded at the second effort and, sliding
ponderously to one side, revealed a cavity in the stone floor some two feet long by about eighteen inches in breadth.
Over this the old man stooped.
“Help me, son,” bade he. “Once I could lift it with ease, but now the weight passes my strength.”
“What? The weight of a book? But—where is it? In this packet, here?”
He touched a large and close-wrapped bundle lying in the little crypt, dimly seen by the flicker of the oily wick.
“Yea. Raise it out that I may show you!” answered the patriarch. His hands trembled with eagerness; in his blind eyes a sudden fever seemed to burn. For here was his dearest, his most sacred treasure, all that remained to him of the long-worshipped outer world—the world of the vague past and of his distant ancestors—the world that Stern and Beatrice had really known and seen, yet which to him was only “all a wonder and a wild desire.”
“Lay the book upon the bench,” he ordered. “I will unwrap it!”
Complex the knots were, but his warped and palsied fingers deftly undid them as though long familiar with each turn and twist. Then off came many a layer of the rough brown seaweed fabric and afterward certain coverings of tough shark-skin neatly sewn.
“The book!” cried the patriarch. “Now behold it!”
“That?” exclaimed Beatrice. “I never saw a book of that shape!”
“Each page is separately preserved, wherefore it is so very thick,” explained the old man. “See here?”
He turned the leaves reverently. Stern, peering closely by the dim light, saw that they were loosely hung together by loops of heavy gold wire. Each page was held between two large plates of mica, and these plates were securely sealed around the edges by some black substance like varnish or bitumen.
“Only thus,” explained the patriarch, “could we hope to save this precious thing. It was done many hundreds of years ago, and even then the book was almost lost by age and use.”
“I should say so!” ejaculated Stern. Even sealed in its air-tight covering, he saw that every leaf was yellow, broken, rotten, till the merest breath would have disintegrated it to powder. A sense of the infinitudes of time bridged by this volume overwhelmed him; he drew a deep breath, reached out his hand and touched the wondrous relic of the world that was.
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