Plainly he saw it would be a task of unparalleled skill, delicacy, and difficult accomplishment; but his spirits rose only the higher as he faced its actual details. After all that he and Beatrice had been through since their wakening in the tower, he feared no failure to solve any questions that now might rise. By care, by keeping the Folk at first in caves, then gradually accustoming them to stronger and brighter light, more air, more cold, he knew he could bridge the gap of centuries in a few years.
Ever adaptable, the human body would respond to changed environments. Patience and time—these would solve all!
And as for this Folk’s barbarism, it mattered not. Much better such stock to rebuild from than some mild, supine race of far higher culture. To fight the rough battles of life and reestablishment still ahead, the bold and warlike Merucaans were all that he could wish.
“Imagine me as a school-teacher,” suddenly exclaimed the girl, laughing: “giving the children A B C and making them read: ‘I see the cat’—when there aren’t any cats nowadays—no tame ones, anyhow! Imagine—”
“Sh-h-h!” cautioned Stern. “Don’t waste your energies imagining things just yet. There’s more than enough real work, food-getting, house-building in caves, and all that, before we ever get to schools. That’s years ahead yet, education is!”
Silence again, save for the strong and ceaseless chatter of the engine, that, noisy as a score of mowing machines, flung its indomitable challenge to gravitation out into the fathomless void on every hand.
“Allan! Allan! Oh, a star! Look, look! A star!”
The girl was first to see that blest and wondrous thing. Hours had passed, long, weary hours; steadily the air-pressure had sunk, the vapors thinned; but light had not yet filtered through the mists. And Allan’s mind had been sore troubled thereat. He had not thought of the simple reason that they were reaching the surface at night.
But now he knew, and as she cried to him “A star!” he, too, looked and saw it, and as though he had been a little child he felt the sudden tears start to his weary eyes.
“A star!” he answered. “Oh, thank God—a star!”
It faded almost at once, as vapors shrouded it; but soon it came again, and others, many more; and now the first breath of the cool and blessed outer air was wafted to them.
Used as they had been, all these long months—for now the year had turned again and early spring was coming up the world—used to the closed and stifling atmosphere of the Abyss, its chemicalized fogs and mists, the first effect of the pure surface-air was almost intoxicating as they mounted higher, higher, toward the lip of the titanic gulf.
The patriarch, trembling with eagerness and with exhaustion—for he was very old and now his vital forces were all but spent—breathed it only with difficulty. Rapid was his respiration; on either pallid cheek a strange and vivid patch of color showed.
Suddenly he spoke.
“Stars? You see them—really see them?” faltered he. “Oh, for my sight again! Oh, that I might see them once, only once, those wonderful things of ancient story! Then, verily, I should be glad to die!”
Midnight.
Hard-driven now for many hours, heated, yet still running true, the Pauillac had at length made a safe landing on the western verge of the Abyss. Again the voyagers felt solid earth beneath their feet. By the clear starlight Stern had brought the machine to earth on a little plateau, wooded in part, partly bare sand. Numb and stiff, he had alighted from the driver’s seat, and had helped both passengers alight,
The girl, radiant with joy, had kissed him full upon the lips; the patriarch had fallen on his knees, and, gathering a handful of the sand—the precious surface of the earth, long fabled among his Folk, long worshipped in his deepest reveries—had clasped it to his thin and heaving breast.
If he had known how to pray he would have worshipped there. But even though his lips were silent, his attitude, his soul were all one vast and heartfelt prayer—prayer to the mother-earth, the unseen stars, the night, the wind upon his brow, the sweet and subtle airs of heaven that enfolded him like a caress.
Stern wrapped the old man in a spare mantle, for the night was chill, then made a crackling fire on the sands. Worn out, they rested, all. Little they said. The beauty and majesty of night now—seen again after long absence—a hundred times more solemn than they had ever known it, kept the two Americans from speech. And the old man, buried in his own thoughts, sat by the fire, burning with a fever of impatient longings for the dawn.
Five o’clock.
Now all across the eastern sky, shrouded as it was with the slow, silent mist-wreaths rising ghostly from the Abyss, delicate pink and pearl-gray tints were spreading, shading above to light blues and to purples of exquisite depth and clarity.
No cloud flecked the sky, the wondrous sky of early spring. Dawn, pure as on the primal day, was climbing from the eastern depths. And, thrilled by that eternal miracle, the man and woman, hand in hand, awaited the full coming of the light.
The patriarch spoke.
“Is the sun nigh arisen now?” he queried in a strange, awed voice, trembling with eagerness and deep emotion. “Is it coming, at last—the sun?”
“It’ll be here now before long, father,” answered Stern.
“From which direction does it come? Am I facing it?” he asked, with pitiful anxiety.
“You’re facing it. The first rays will fall on you. Only be patient. I promise you it shall not fail!”
A pause. Then the aged man spoke again.
“Remember, oh, my children,” said he, with terrible earnestness, “all that I have told you, all that you must know. Remember how to deal with my people. They are as children in your hands. Be very patient, very firm and wise; all will be well.
“Remember my warnings of the Great Vortex, so very far below our sea, the Lanskaarn, and all those other perils of the Abyss whereof I have spoken. Remember, too, all the traditions of the Cave of Records. Some day, when all else is accomplished, you may find that cave. I have told you everything I know of its location. Seek it some day, and find the history of the dead, buried past, from the time of the great catastrophe to the final migration when my ancestors sought the lower sea.”
Another silence. All three were too deeply moved for any speech. And ever mounting higher, brighter and more clear, dawn flung its glories wide across the sky.
“Help me that I may stand, to greet the day!” at last the patriarch said. “I cannot rise, alone.”
Stern and the girl, each taking an arm, got him to his feet. He stood there facing the east, priestlike in venerable and solemn worship of the coming sun.
“Give me each a hand, my children,” he commanded. In Stern’s hand, strong, corded, toil-worn, he laid the girl’s.
“Thus do I give you each to each,” said he. “Thus do I make you one!”
Stern drew Beatrice into his arms. Blind though the old man was, he sensed the act, and smiled. A great and holy peace had shrouded him.
“Only that I may feel the sun upon my face!” breathed he.
All at once a thinning cloud-haze let the light glow through.
Beatrice looked at Stern. He shook his head.
“Not yet,” he answered.
Swiftly uprose the sun. The morning wind dispelled the shrouding vapors.
“Oh, what is this warmth?” exclaimed the patriarch, trembling violently. “What is this warmth, this glow upon my face? This life, this—”
Out toward the east he stretched both hands. Instinctively the priestlike worship of the sun, old when the world was still in infancy, surged back to him again after the long, lost centuries of darkness and oblivion.
“The sun! The sun!” he cried, his voice triumphant as a trumpet-call. Tears coursed from his blind eyes; but on his lips a smile of joy unutterable was set.
“The sun! At last! The—”
Stern caught his feeble body as he fell.
Down on the sands they laid him. To the stilled heart Stern laid his
ear.
Tears were in his eyes, too, and in the girl’s, as Stern shook his head, silently.
Up over the time-worn, the venerable, the kindly face they drew the mantle, but not before each had reverently kissed the wrinkled forehead.
“Better thus,” whispered the engineer. “Far better, every way. He had his wish; he felt the sunshine on his face; his outgoing spirit must be mingled with that worshipped light and air and sky—with dawn—with springtime—”
“With life itself!” said Beatrice.
And through her tears she smiled, while higher rose the warm, life-giving sun of spring.
BOOK III: THE AFTERGLOW
CHAPTER I
DEATH, LIFE, AND LOVE
Life! Life again, and light, the sun and the fresh winds of heaven, the perfect azure of a June sky, the perfume of the passionate red blooms along the lips of the chasm, the full-throated song of hidden birds within the wood to eastward—life, beauty, love—such, the sunrise hour when Allan and the girl once more stood side by side in the outer world, delivered from the perils of the black Abyss.
Hardly more real than a disordered nightmare now, the terrible fall into those depths, the captivity among the white barbarians, the battles and the ghastly scenes of war, the labors, the perilous escape.
All seemed to fall and fade away from these two lovers, all save their joy in life and in each other, their longing for the inevitable greater passion, pain and joy, their clear-eyed outlook into the vast and limitless possibilities of the future, their future and the world’s.
And as they stood there, hand in hand beside the body of the fallen patriarch—he whose soul had passed in peace, even at the moment of his life’s fulfilment, his knowledge of the sun—awe overcame them both. With a new tenderness, mingled with reverent adoration, Stern drew the girl once more to him.
Her face turned up to his and her arms tightened about his neck. He kissed her brow beneath the parted masses of her wondrous hair. His lips rested a moment on her eyes; and then his mouth sought hers and burned its passion into her very soul.
Suddenly she pushed him back, panting. She had gone white; she trembled in his clasp.
“Oh, your kiss—oh, Allan, what is this I feel?—it seems to choke me!” she gasped, clutching her full bosom where her heart leaped like a prisoned creature. “Your kiss—it is so different now! No, no—not again—not yet!”
He released her, for he, too was shaking in the grip of new, fierce passions.
“Forgive me!” he whispered. “I—I forgot myself, a moment. Not yet—no, not yet. You’re right, Beatrice. A thousand things are pressing to be done. And love—must wait!”
He clenched his fists and strode to the edge of the chasm, where, for a while, he stood alone and silent, gazing far down and away, mastering himself, striving to get himself in leash once more.
Then suddenly he turned and smiled.
“Come, Beta,” said he. “All this must be forgotten. Let’s get to work. The whole world’s waiting for us, for our labor. It’s eager for our toil!”
She nodded. In her eyes the fire had died, and now only the light of comradeship and trust and hope glowed once again.
“Allan?”
“Yes?”
“Our first duty—” She gestured toward the body of the patriarch, nobly still beneath the rough folds of the mantle they had drawn over it.
He understood.
“Yes,” murmured he. “And his grave shall be for all the future ages a place of pilgrimage and solemn thought. Where first, one of lost Folk issued again into the world and where he died, this shall be a monument of the new time now coming to its birth.
“His grave shall lie here on this height, where the first sun shall each day for ages fall upon it, supreme in its deep symbolism. Forever it shall be a memorial, not of death, but life, of liberty, of hope!”
They kept a moment’s silence, then Stern added.
“So now, to work!” From the biplane he fetched the ax. With this he cut and trimmed a branch from a near-by fir. He sharpened it to a flat blade three or four inches across. In the deep red sand along the edge of the Abyss he set to work, scooping the patriarch’s grave.
In silence Beatrice took the ax and also labored, throwing the sand away. Together, in an hour, they had dug a trench sufficiently deep and wide.
“This must do, for now,” said Stern, looking up at last. “Some time he shall have fitting burial, but for the present we can do no more. Let us now commit his body to the earth, the Great Mother which created and which waits always to give everlasting sleep, peace, rest.”
Together, silently, they bore him to the grave, still wrapped in the cloak which now had become his shroud. Once more they gazed upon the noble face of him they had grown to love in the long weeks of the Abyss, when only he had understood them or seemed near.
“What is this, Allan?” asked the girl, touching a fine chain of gold about the patriarch’s neck, till now unnoticed.
Allan drew at the chain, and a small golden cylinder was revealed, curiously carven. Its lightness told him it was hollow.
“Some treasure of his, I imagine,” judged he.
“Some record, perhaps? Oughtn’t we to look?”
He thought a moment in silence, then detached the chain.
“Yes,” said he. “It can’t help him now. It may help us. He himself would have wanted us to have it.”
And into the pocket of his rough, brown cassock, woven of the weed-fiber of the dark sea, he slid the chain and golden cylinder.
A final kiss they gave the patriarch, each; then, carefully wrapping his face so that no smallest particle of sand should come in contact with it, stood up. At each other they gazed, understandingly.
“Flowers? Some kind of service?” asked the girl.
“Yes. All we can do for him will be too little!”
Together they brought armfuls of the brilliant crimson and purple blooms along the edge of the sands, where forest and barren irregularly met; and with these, fir and spruce boughs, the longer to keep his grave freshly green.
All about him they heaped the blossoms. The patriarch lay at rest among beauties he never had beheld, colors arid fragrances that to him had been but dim traditions of antiquity.
“I can’t preach,” said Stern. “I’m not that kind, anyway, and in this new world all that sort of thing is out of place. Let’s just say good-by, as to a friend gone on a long, long journey.”
Beatrice could no longer keep back her grief. Kneeling beside the grave, she arranged the flowers and the evergreens, on which her tears fell shining.
“Dust unto dust!” Stern said. “To you, oh Mother Nature, we give back the body of this friend, your son. May the breeze blow gently here, the sun shine warm, and the birds forever sing his requiem. And may those who shall come after us, when we too sleep, remember that in him we had a friend, without whom the world never again could have hoped for any new birth, any life! To him we say good-by—eternally! Dust unto dust; good-by!”
“Good-by!” whispered the girl. Then, greatly overcome, she arose and walked away.
Stern, with his naked hands, filled the shallow grave and, this done, rolled three large boulders onto it, to protect it from the prowling beasts of the wild.
Beatrice returned. They strewed more flowers and green boughs, and in silence stood a while, gazing at the lowlier bed of their one friend on earth.
Suddenly Stern took her hand and drew her toward him.
“Come, come, Beatrice,” said he, “he is not dead. He still lives in our memories. His body, aged and full of pain, is gone, but his spirit still survives in us—that indomitable sold which, buried alive in blindness and the dark, still strove to keep alive the knowledge and traditions of the upper world, hopes of attaining it, and visions of a better time to be!
“Was ever greater human courage, faith or strength? Let us not grieve. Let us rather go away strengthened and inspired by this wonderful life that has just passed.
In us, let all his hopes and aspirations come to reality.
“His death was happy. It was as he wished it, Beatrice, for his one great ambition was fully granted—to know the reality of the upper world, the winds of heaven and the sun! Impossible for him to have survived the great change. Death was inevitable and right. He wanted rest, and rest is his, at last.
“We must be true to all he thought us, you and I—to all he believed us, even demigods! He shall inspire and enlighten us, O my love; and with his memory to guide us, faith and fortitude shall not be lacking.
“Now, we must go. Work waits for us. Everything is yet to be planned and done. The world and its redemption lie before us. Come!”
He led the girl away. As by mutual understanding they returned to where the biplane lay, symbol of their conquest of nature, epitome of hopes.
Near it, on the edge of the Abyss, they rested, hand in hand. In silence they sat thinking, for a space. And ever higher and more warmly burned the sun; the breeze of June was sweet to them, long-used to fogs and damp and dark; the boundless flood of light across the azure thrilled them with aspiration and with joy.
Life had begun again for them and for the world, life, even there in the presence of death. Life was continuing, developing, expanding—life and its immortal sister, Love!
CHAPTER II
EASTWARD HO!
Practical matters now for a time thrust introspection, dreams and sentiment aside. The morning was already half spent, and in spite of sorrow, hunger had begun to assert itself; for since time was, no two such absolutely vigorous and healthy humans had ever set foot on earth as Beatrice and Allan.
The man gathered brush and dry-kye and proceeded to make a fire, not far from the precipice, but well out of sight of the patriarch’s grave. He fetched a generous heap of wood from the neighboring forest, and presently a snapping blaze flung its smoke-banner down the breeze.
Soon after Beatrice had raided the supplies on board the Pauillac—fish, edible seaweed, and the eggs of the strange birds of the Abyss—and with the skill and speed of long experience was getting an excellent meal. Allan meantime brought water from a spring near by. And the two ate in silence, cross-legged on the warm, dry sand.
The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction Megapack 01 Page 90
