Authors: George England
"If I go—he goes, too!" the engineer swore to himself. "He'll never
have—Beatrice—anyway!"
Over and over they rolled, their grips tight-locked as steel. Now
Kamrou was on top, now Stern. But the chief's muscles were still
strong as ever; Stern's already had begun to weaken.
Strive as he might, he could not get another hold, nor could he throw
another ounce of power into that he already had. Up, up, slowly up
slipped the chief's arms; Stern knew the savage meant to throttle him;
and once those long, prehensile fingers reached his throat, good-by!
Then it seemed to him a voice, very far and small, was speaking to
him, coolly, impersonally, in a matter-of-fact way as though
suggesting an experiment.
Dazed as he was, he recognized that voice—it was the voice of Dr.
Harbutt, who once had taught him many a wily trick upon the mat;
Harbutt, dead and gone these thousand years or more.
"Why not try the satsu-da, Stern?" the voice was saying. "Excellent,
at times."
Though Stern's face was black and swollen, eyes shut and mouth all
twisted awry in this titanic struggle with the ape-hold of the huge
chief, yet the soul within him calmly smiled.
The satsu-da—yes, he remembered it now, strongest and best of all
the jiu-jitsu feats.
And, suddenly loosening his hands from the chief's throat, he clenched
his right fist, hard as steel.
A second later the "killing-blow" had fallen on the barbarian's neck,
just where the swelling protuberance behind the ear marked the vital
spot.
Terrible was the force of that blow, struck for his own life, for the
honor of Beatrice, the salvation of the world.
Kamrou gave a strange grunt. His head fell backward. Both eyes closed;
the mouth lolled open and a glairy froth began to trickle down.
The frightful grip of the long, hairy arms relaxed. Exhausted, Stern
fell prone right on the slippery edge of the boiling pit.
He felt a sudden scalding dash of water, steam and boiling spray; he
heard a sudden splash, then a wild, barbarous, long-drawn howling of
the massed Folk.
Lying there, spent, gasping, all but dead in the thick steam-drift of
the vat, he opened his eyes.
Kamrou was nowhere to be seen.
Seemingly very distant, he heard the copper drums begin to beat once
more with feverish haste.
A great, compelling lassitude enveloped him. He knew no more.
"What altitude now? Can you make-out, Allan?"
"No. The aneroid's only good up to five miles. We must have made two
hundred, vertically, since this morning. The way the propeller takes
hold and the planes climb in this condensed air is just a miracle!"
"Two passengers at that!" Beatrice answered, leaning back in her seat
again. She turned to the patriarch, who, sitting in an extra place in
the thoroughly overhauled and newly equipped Pauillac, was holding
with nervous hands to the wire stays in front of him.
"Patience, father," she cheered him. "Two hours more—not over three,
at the outside—and you shall breathe the upper air again! For the
first time the sunlight shall fall upon your face!"
"The sun! The sun! Oh, is it possible?" murmured the aged man.
"Verily, I had never thought to live until this day!
The sun!
"
Came silence between these three for a time, while the strong heart of
the machine beat steadily; and the engineer, with deft and skilful
hand, guided it in wide-swept spirals upward, ever up, up, up, back
toward the realms of day, of life, once more; up through the fogs and
clouds, away from heat and dark and mystery, toward the clear, pure,
refreshing air of heaven again.
At last Stern spoke.
"Well, father," said he, "I never would have thought it; but you were
right, after all! They're like so much clay in the potter's hand now,
for me. I see I can do with them whatever I will.
"I was afraid some of them might object, after all, to any such
proposition. It's one thing for them to accept me as boss down there,
and quite another for them to consent to wholesale transplanting, such
as we've got under way. But I can't see any possible reason why—with
plenty of time and patience—the thing can't be accomplished all
right. The main difficulty was their consent; and now we've got that,
the rest is mere detail and routine work."
"Time and patience," repeated the girl. "Those are our watchwords now,
boy. And we've got lots of both, haven't we?"
"Two passengers each trip," the engineer continued, more practical
than she, "and three trips a week, at the most, makes six of the Folk
landed on the surface weekly. In other words, it'll take—"
"No matter about that now!" interrupted Beatrice. "We've got all the
time there is! Even if it takes five years, what of that? What are
months or even years in the life-history of the world?"
Stern kept silence again. In his mind he was revolving a hundred vital
questions of shelter, feeding, acclimatization for these men, now to
be transported from a place of dark and damp and heat to the strange
outer regions of the surface-world.
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 re-establishment 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.