CHAPTER XXXIII
THE PATRIARCH'S TALE
"In the beginning," he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, "our peoplewere as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a greatbreaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of theearth 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 inthe sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on theHudson!"
"You mean--" the girl exclaimed.
"It's a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It's thesplit-off part of the world!"
"Another satellite?"
"Of course! Hang it, yes! See now? The great explosion that liberatedthe poisonous gases and killed practically everybody in the world musthave gouged this new planet out of the flank of Mother Earth in thelatter part of 1920. The ejected portions, millions of millions oftons, hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of solid rock--and withthem the ruins of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha, and hundredsof 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 newworld blotting out the stars! This explains everything--the singularchanges in the tides and in the direction of the magnetic pole,decreased gravitation and all the other strange things we noticed, butcouldn't understand. By Gad! What a discovery!"
The patriarch listened eagerly while Stern and the girl discussed thestrange phenomenon; but when their excitement had subsided and theywere ready again to hear him, he began anew:
"Verily, such was the first result of the great catastrophe. And, asyou know, millions died. But among the canyons of the RockyMountains--so says the tradition; is it right? _Were_ there suchmountains?"
"Yes, yes! Go on!"
"In those canyons a few handfuls of hardy people still survived. Someperished of famine and exposure; some ventured out into the lowlandsand died of the gas that still hung heavy there. Some were destroyedin a great fire that the tradition says swept the earth after theexplosion. But a few still lived. At one time the number was onlyeighteen 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 theirEnglish tongue, now dead save for you two, and still with some toolsand even a few books, retreated into caves and fissures in thecanyons. And so they came to the great descent."
"The what?"
"The huge cleft which the story says once connected the upper worldwith this Abyss. And--"
"Is it open _now_," cried Stern, leaning sharply forward.
"Alas, no; but you hurry me too much, good friend. You understand, fora long time they lived the cave-life partly, and partly the upperlife. And they increased a great deal in the hundred years thatfollowed the explosion. But they never could go into the plains, forstill 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 worldlived or died."
"And then?" queried the engineer. "Let's have it all in outline. Whathappened?"
"This, my son: that a still greater cold came upon the world, and thelife of the open became impossible. There were now ten or twelvethousand alive; but they were losing their skill, their knowledge,everything. Only a few men still kept the wisdom of reading orwriting, even. For life was a terrible fight. And they had to seekfood now in the cave-lakes; that was all remaining.
"After that, another fifty or a hundred years, came the second greatexplosion. The ways were closed to the outer world. Nearly all died.What happened even the tradition does not tell. How many years thehandful of people wandered I do not know. Neither do I know how theycame here.
"The story says only eight or ten altogether reached this sea. It wasmuch 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, andeven the look of the Folk.
"We became as you see us. The tradition itself was forgotten save by afew. Sometimes we increased, then came pestilences and famines,outbreaks of lava and hot mud and gases, and nearly all died. At onetime only seven remained--"
"For all the world like the story of Pitcairn Island and the mutineersof the 'Bounty'!" interrupted the engineer. "Yes, yes--go on!"
"There is little more to tell. The tradition says there was once aplace of records, where certain of the wisest men of our Folk placedall their lore to keep it; but even this place is lost. Only onefamily kept any knowledge of the English as a kind of inheritance andthe 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 atdifferent times and through other ways."
"Possibly," Stern assented. "Anything more to tell?"
"Nothing more. We became as savages; we lost all thought of history orlearning. We only fought to live! All was forgotten.
"My grandfather taught the English to my father and he to me, and Ihad no son. Nobody here would learn from me. Nobody cared for thebook. Even the tradition they laughed at, and they called my brainsoftened when I spoke of a place where in the air a light shone halfthe time brighter even than the great flame! And in every way theymocked me!
"So I--I"--the old man faltered, his voice tremulous, while tearsglittered in his dim and sightless eyes--"I ceased to speak of thesethings. Then I grew blind and could not read the book. No longer couldI refresh my mind with the English. So I said in my heart: 'It isfinished 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! Hadyou not come from that better place, my thought would have beentrue--"
"But it isn't, not by a jugful!" exclaimed the engineer joyously, andstood up in the dim-lit little room. "No, _sir!_ She and I, we'regoing to change the face of things considerably! How? Never mind justyet. But let's have a look at the old volume, father. Gad! That mustbe some relic, eh? Imagine a book carried about for a thousand yearsand read by at least thirty generations of men! The book, father! Thebook!"
Already the patriarch had arisen and now he gestured at the heavybench of stone.
"Can you move this, my son?" asked he. "The place of the book liesbeneath."
"Under there, eh? All right!" And, needing no other invitation, he sethis 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 abouteighteen inches in breadth.
Over this the old man stooped.
"Help me, son," bade he. "Once I could lift it with ease, but now theweight 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. Hishands trembled with eagerness; in his blind eyes a sudden fever seemedto burn. For here was his dearest, his most sacred treasure, all thatremained to him of the long-worshipped outer world--the world of thevague past and of his distant ancestors--the world that Stern andBeatrice had really known and seen, yet which to him was only "all awonder 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 deftlyundid them as though long familiar with each turn and twist. Then offcame many a layer of the rough brown seaweed fabric and afterwardcertain coverings of tough shark-ski
n 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 dimlight, saw that they were loosely hung together by loops of heavy goldwire. Each page was held between two large plates of mica, and theseplates were securely sealed around the edges by some black substancelike varnish or bitumen.
"Only thus," explained the patriarch, "could we hope to save thisprecious thing. It was done many hundreds of years ago, and even thenthe book was almost lost by age and use."
"I should say so!" ejaculated Stern. Even sealed in its air-tightcovering, he saw that every leaf was yellow, broken, rotten, till themerest breath would have disintegrated it to powder. A sense of theinfinitudes of time bridged by this volume overwhelmed him; he drew adeep breath, reached out his hand and touched the wondrous relic ofthe world that was.
"Long ago," continued the old man, "when the book began to crumble,one of my ancestors copied it on gold plates, word by word, letter byletter, every point and line. And our family used only that book ofgold and put away the other. But in my grandfather's time theLanskaarn raided our village and the gold plates went for loot to makethem trinkets, so they were lost.
"My father meant to begin the task again, but was killed in a raid. I,too, in my fighting youth, had plans for the work; but blindnessstruck me before I could find peace to labor in. So now all thatremains of the mother tongue here is my own knowledge and thesetattered scraps. And, if you save us not, soon all, all will be lostforever!"
Much moved, the engineer made no reply, yet thoughts came crowding tohis brain. Here visibly before him he beheld the final link that tiedthese lost Folk to the other time, the last and breaking thread. Whathistory could this book have told? What vast catastrophes, famines,pestilences, wars, horrors had it passed through? In what unwrittencataclysms, in what anguish and despair and long degeneration had thehuman mind still clung to it and cherished it?
No one could tell; yet Stern felt the essence of its unknown story. Aninfinite pathos haloed the ancient volume. And reverently he touchedits pages once again; he bent and by the guttering light tried to makeout a few words here or there upon the crackled, all but perishedleaves.
He came upon a crude old woodcut, vague and dim; then a line of textcaught his eye.
"By Gad! 'Pilgrim's Progress'!" he exclaimed. "Look,Beatrice--'Pilgrim's Progress,' of all books! No wonder he says'Verily' and talks archaic stuff and doesn't catch more than half wesay. Well, I'll be--"
"Is this then not the English of your time?" asked the patriarch.
"Hardly! It was centuries old at the epoch of the catastrophe. Say,father, the quicker you forget this and take a few lessons in theup-to-date language of the real world that perished, the better! I seenow why you don't get on to the idea of steamships and railroads,telephones and wireless and all the rest of it. God! but you've got alot to learn!"
The old man closed up the precious volume and once more began wrappingit in its many coverings.
"Not for me, all this, I fear," he answered with deep melancholy. "Itis too late, too late--I cannot understand."
"Oh, yes, you can, and will!" the engineer assured him. "Buck up,father! Once I get my biplane to humming again you'll learn a fewthings, never fear!"
He stepped to the door of the hut and peered out.
"Rain's letting up a bit," he announced. "How about it? Do the signssay it's ready to quit for keeps? If so--all aboard for the dredgingexpedition!"
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