Darkness and Dawn

by George Allan England

  CHAPTER XXXII

  PREPARATIONS

  He woke to hear a drumming roar that seemed to fill the spacesof the Abyss with a wild tumult such as he had never known--a steadythunder, wonderful and wild.

  Starting up, he saw by the dim light that the patriarch was sittingthere upon the stone, thoughtful and calm, apparently giving no heedto this singular tumult. But Stern, not understanding, put a hastyquestion.

  "What's all this uproar, father? I never heard anything like that upin the surface-world!"

  "That? Only the rain, my son," the old man answered. "Had you no rainthere? Verily, traditions tell of rain among the people of that day!"

  "Rain? Merciful Heavens!" exclaimed the engineer. Two minutes later hewas at the fortifications, gazing out across the beach at the sea.

  It would be hard to describe accurately the picture that met his eyes.The heaviest cloudburst that ever devastated a countryside was but atrickle compared with this monstrous, terrifying deluge.

  Some five hundred miles of dense and saturated vapors, suddenlycondensing, were precipitating the water, not in drops but in greatsolid masses, thundering, bellowing, crashing as they struck the sea,which, churned to a deep and raging froth, flung mighty waves evenagainst the massive walls of the village itself.

  The fog was gone now; but in its place the rushing walls of waterblotted out the scene. Yet not a drop was falling in the villageitself. Stern wondered for a moment. But, looking up, he understood.

  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 overhangof the black rock; he understood why the ancestors of the Folk, comingto these depths after incredible adventurings and long-forgottenstruggles, had settled here. Any exposed location would have beenfatal; 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 fromthose on the surface--for there was neither wind nor lightning, butjust that steady, frightful sluicing down of solid tons of rain--Sternmade 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 heentered. "He says this is apt to last for hours and hours!" She noddedtoward 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 tothink out definitely some plan of campaign for the recovery of thelost Pauillac.

  Though Stern by no means understood the girl's anxiety to leave theAbyss, nor yet had any intention of trying to do so until he had begunthe education of the Folk and had perfected some means of trying totransplant this group--and whatever other tribes he could find--to thesurface again, he realized the all-importance of getting the machineinto his possession once more.

  For more than an hour he pondered the question, now asking a questionof the patriarch--who seemed torn between desire to have thewonder-thing brought up, and fear lest he should lose thestrangers--now designing grapples, now formulating a definite line ofprocedure.

  At last, all things settled in his mind, he bade the old man get forhim ten strong ropes, such as the largest nets were made of. Theseropes which he had already seen coiled in huge masses along the wallat the northern end of the village, where they were twisted of thetough weed-fiber, averaged all of two hundred feet in length. When thepatriarch had gone to see about having them brought to the hut, hehimself 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 hewas getting back his normal strength once more--completed the task.Deftly he heated, shaped and reshaped the iron, while vastBrocken-shadows danced and played along the titanic cliff behind him,cast by the wavering blue gas-flames of the forge. At length he foundhimself in possession of a drag weighing about forty pounds andprovided with a stout ring at the top of the shank six inches indiameter.

  "Now," said he to Beatrice, as he surveyed the finished product, whileall about them the inquisitive yet silent Folk watched them by theunsteady light, "now I guess we're ready to get down to somethingpractical. Just as soon as this infernal rain lets up a bit, we'll goangling for the biggest fish that ever came out of this sea!"

  But the storm was very far from being at an end. The patriarch toldStern, when he brought the grapple to the hut--followed by a silent,all-observant crowd--that sometimes these torrential downpours lastedfrom three to ten sleep-times, with lulls between.

  "And nobody can venture on the sea," he added, "till we know--bycertain signs we have--that the great rain is verily at an end. To dothat would mean to court death; and we are wise, from very longexperience. So, my son, you must have patience in this as in allthings, and wait!"

  Part of that afternoon of forced inactivity Stern spent in hisfavorite habit of going about among the Folk, closely mingling withthem and watching all their industrial processes and social life, andtrying, as usual, to pick tip words and phrases of the veryfar-degenerated speech that once had been English but was now agrammarless and formless jumble of strange words.

  Only a few of the most common words he found retained anything liketheir 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 nowexisted among the Folk, had been of course utterly forgotten; and somehundreds of new words, relative to new conditions, had been invented.

  The entire construction was altered; the language now bore no moreresemblance to English than English had borne to the primitiveIndo-Germanic of the Aryan forefathers. Now that writing had beenlost, nothing retarded changes; and Stern realized that here--were hea trained philologist--lay a task incomparably interesting anddifficult, to learn this Merucaan speech and trace its developmentfrom his own tongue.

  But Stern's skill was all in other lines. The most that he could dowas to make some rough vocabularies, learn a few common phrases, andhere or there try to teach a little English. A deeper study andteaching, he knew, would come later, when more important matters hadbeen attended to.

  His attempts to learn and to talk with these people--by pointing atobjects and listening to their names--were comparable to those,perhaps, of a prehistoric Goth turned loose in an American village ofthe twentieth century. Only the patriarch had retained themother-tongue, and that in an archaic, imperfect manner, so that evenhis explanations often failed. Stern felt the baffling difficulties inhis way; but his determination only grew.

  The rain steadily continued to drum down, now lessened, now again interrific deluges of solid black water churned to white as they struckthe sea and flung the froth on high. The two Americans passed an hourthat afternoon in the old man's hut, drawing up a calendar on which tocheck as accurately as possible, the passage of time as reckoned inthe terms of life upon the surface.

  They scratched this on a slab of slatelike rock, with a sharp ironawl; and, reckoning the present day as about October first, agreedthat every waking-time they would cross off one square.

  "For," said the engineer, "it's most important that we should keeptrack of the seasons up above. That may have much to do with ourattempts to transplant this colony. It would never do to take a peoplelike this, accustomed to heat and vapor, and carry them out into eventhe mild winter that now prevails in a present-day December. If wedon't get them to the surface before the last of this month, atlatest--"

  "W
e'll have to wait until another spring?" asked she.

  "Looks that way," he assented, putting a few final touches to thecalendar. "So you see it's up to us to hurry--and certainly nothingmore 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 haveshown you my book--my one and greatest treasure. The book!

  "You have told me many things, of sun and moon and stars, which aremocked at as idle tales by my unbelieving people; of continents andseas, mountains, vast cities, great ships, strange engines moved byvapor and by lightning, tall houses; of words thrown along metalthreads or even through the air itself; of great nations and wars, ofa hundred wondrous matters that verily have passed away even from theremotest memories of us in the Abyss!

  "But of our history I have told you little; nor have you seen thebook! 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 andfraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept theEnglish speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive.Only the book, the book!"

  His voice seemed strangely agitated. As he spoke he raised his handstoward them, sitting on the stone bench in the hut, while outside therain still thundered louder than the droning roar of the great flame.Stern, his curiosity suddenly aroused, looked at the old man with keeninterest.

  "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 myfather and my father's fathers, down through centuries--I know not howmany."

  "You mean the story of this Lost Folk in the Abyss?"

  "Verily! You have told me yours, of your awakening, of the ruinedworld and all your struggles and your fall down into this cursed pit.Listen now to mine!"