Authors: George England
Till late that night, sheltered in their cave, they talked of this
momentous step. Redly their firelight glowed upon their walls and
roof, where sparkled myriads of tiny rock-facets. Far below the rapids
of New Hope River murmured a contra-bass to their voices.
And in the canyon the sighing of the night-wind, pierced now and then
by some strange cry of beast-life from the forest beyond, heightened
their pleasant sense of security. Only the knowledge of approaching
separation weighed heavy on their souls.
From every possible standpoint they discussed the situation. Allan's
plan, viewed with the eye of reason, was really the only sane one.
Nothing could have been more absurdly wasteful of time and energy than
the idea of carrying the girl down into the Abyss each time and
bringing her up with every return.
Not only would it expose her needlessly to very grave perils, but it
would bisect the efficiency of the Pauillac. Allan realized, moreover,
that in the rebuilding of the world a time must inevitably come when
he could not always stand by her side. She must learn self-reliance,
harsh as that teaching might seem.
All this and much more he pointed out to her. And before midnight she,
too, agreed. It was definitely decided that he was to undertake the
transportation work alone.
Thus the matter was settled. But on that night there was little sleep
for either of them. For, on the day after the morrow was to commence
their first separation since the time they had awakened in the tower,
more than a year ago.
Separation!
The thought weighed leaden on Allan's heart. As for Beatrice, though
in the dark she hid her tears, she felt that grief could plumb no
blacker depths save utter loss. Only the thought of the new world and
all that it must mean steeled her to resignation.
Morning dawned, aflare with light and color, as
only a June morning in that semitropic wilderness could glow. Allan
and Beatrice, early at work, resolutely attacked their labor of
preparation.
First of all they laid in adequate supplies of fruit and game, both of
which, in that virgin wild, were to be had in a profusion undreamed of
in the old days of civilization. With an improvised lance Ahan also
speared three salmon in the rapids. The game and fish he dressed for
her and packed among green leaves in the cool recesses at the extreme
inner end of the cavern.
"No need whatever for you to leave the cave while I'm gone," he warned
her. "I'm not forbidding you to, because I'm not your master. All I
say is I'll be far happier if you stay close at home. Will you promise
me that, whatever happens, you won't wander from the cave?"
"I needn't promise, dearest. All I need to know is your wish. That's
enough for me!"
Together they set about fortifying the place. They built a rough but
strong barricade of rocks across the mouth of the cavern, leaving only
one small aperture, just sufficient to admit a single person on hands
and knees.
Allan fetched a rounded stone that she could roll into this door by
night and arranged a stout sapling to brace the stone immovably. He
supplied her well with fire-wood and saw to it that her bandoliers
were full of cartridges. In addition, he left her the extra gun and
ammunition they had found in the crypt under the cathedral.
With a torch he carefully explored every crevice of the cave to make
sure no noxious spiders, centipedes, or serpents were sheltered there.
From the Pauillac he brought his own cloak, which he insisted on her
keeping. This, with hers, would add to the comfort of the bed they had
made with fragrant ferns and grasses.
He fashioned, out of the tenacious clay of an earth-bank about half a
mile down stream, two large water-jars, and baked them for some hours
in a huge fire on the terrace in front of the cave.
When properly hardened he scoured them carefully with river-sand and
filled them one at a time, struggling up the hard ascent with a stout
heart—for all this toil meant safety for the girl; it was all another
step on the hard pathway toward the goal.
In her sleep that night he bent above her, kissed her tenderly, and
realized how inexpressibly dear she was to him.
The thought: "To-morrow I must leave her!" weighed heavy on him. And
for a long time he could not sleep, but lay listening to the night
sounds of the forest and the brawling stream. Once a deep, booming
roar echoed throughout the canyon, and thereto, hollow blows.
But Allan could not think their meaning. Only he knew the wild was
full of perils; and in his mind he reviewed the precautions he had
taken for her welfare. Bit by bit he analyzed them. He knew that he
could do no more Now Fate must solve the rest.
He slept at length, not to waken till morning with its garish eye
peeped in around the crevices of the rock doorway. Returning from his
swim in the pool, he found Beatrice already making breakfast. They ate
in silence, overborne with sad and bodeful thoughts.
But now the decision had been made, nothing remained save to execute
it. Such a contingency as backing out of an undertaking once begun lay
far outside their scheme of things.
The leave-taking was not delayed. They both realized that an early
start was necessary if he were to reach the village of the Folk before
sleep should assail him. Still more, they dreaded the departure less
than the suspense.
Together they provisioned the Pauillac, back there on the rocky
barren, and made sure everything was in order. Allan assured himself
especially that he had fuel enough to last four or five hours.
"In that time," he told the girl, "I can easily reach the rim of the
Abyss. You see, I needn't fly northward to the point where we emerged.
That would be only an unnecessary waste of time and energy. I'm
positive the chasm extends all the way up and down what was once the
Mississippi Valley, and that the Great Central Sea is fed by that and
other rivers. In that case, by striking almost due west, I can reach
the rim. After that I can volplane easily till I sight the water."
"And then?"
"Then the power goes on again and I scout for the west shore and the
village. The sustaining power of that lower-level air is simply
miraculous. I realize perfectly well it's no child's play, but I can
do it, Beta. I can find the place again. You see, I'm perfectly
familiar with conditions down there now. The first time it was all new
and strange. This time, after all those months in the Abyss, why, it
will be almost like getting back home again. It'll be quite a
triumphal return, won't it? The chief getting back to his tribe, eh?"
He tried to speak lightly, but his lips refused to smile. She frankly
wept.
"There, there, little girl," he soothed her. "Now let's go back to the
cave and see that you're all right and safe. Then I'll be going.
Remember on the third night to kindle the big fire we've agreed on
just outside your door on the terrace—the beacon-fire, you know. I'll
have to reckon by the chronometer, so as to make the return by night.
The risk of bringing any of the Folk into daylight is prohibitive. And
the fire will be tremendously important. I can sight it a long way
off. It will guide me home—to you!"
She nodded silently, for she did not trust herself to speak.. Hand in
hand they returned along the path they had beaten through the rank
half-tropic growth.
One last inspection he gave to all things necessary for her comfort.
Then, standing in the warm, bright sunlight on the ledge before the
new home, he took her in his arms.
A long embrace, a parting kiss that clung; then he was gone.
Not long after the girl, still standing there upon the windswept
terrace overlooking New Hope River, heard the rapid chatter of the
engine high in air and rapidly approaching.
A swift black shadow leaped the canyon and swept away across the
plain. Far aloft she saw the skimming Pauillac, very small and black
against the dazzling blue.
Did Allan wave a hand to her? Could she hear his farewell cry?
Impossible to tell. Her ears, confused by the roaring of the rapids,
her eyes dazzled by the shimmer of the morning heavens and dimmed by
burning tears, refused to serve her.
But bravely she waved her cloak on high. Bravely she strove to watch
the arrow-flight of the swift bird-man till the tiny machine dwindled
to a moving blur, a point, a mere speck on the far horizon, then
vanished in the blue.
Choked with anguish, against which all her courage, all her philosophy
could not make way, Beatrice sank down upon the rocky ledge and
abandoned herself to grief.
Allan was gone at last! Gone—ever to return? At last she was alone in
the unbroken wilderness!
Eleven hours of incessant labor, care, watchfulness and
fatigue, three hours of flight and eight of coasting into the terrific
depths, brought Allan once more through the fogs, the dark, the heat,
to sight of the vast sunken sea, five hundred miles below the surface.
Throughout the whole stupendous labor he thanked Heaven the girl was
safely left behind, nor forced to share this travail and exhaustion.
Myriad anxieties and fears assailed him—fears he had taken good care
not to let her know or dream of.
Always existed the chance that something might go wrong about the
machine and it be hurled, with him, into that black and steaming sea;
the possibility of landing not among the Folk, but in some settlement
of the Lanskaarn on the rumored islands he had never seen; the menace
of the Great Vortex, of which he knew nothing save the little that the
patriarch had told him.
All these and many other perils sought to force themselves upon his
mind. But Allan put them resolutely back and, guided by his
instruments, his reason, and that marvelous sixth sense of location
which his long months of battling with the wilderness had brought to
birth in him, swiftly yet carefully slid in vast spirals down the
purple, then the black and terrifying void that yawned interminably
below.
The beam of his underslung searchlight, shifting at his will, shot its
white ray in a long, fading pencil downward as he coasted. And hour
after hour it found nothing whereon to rest. It, too, seemed lost
forever in the welter of uprushing, choking vapors from the pit.
"Ah!
At last!
"
The cry, dull in that compressed air, burst triumphantly from his lips
as the light-ray, suddenly piercing a rift of cloud, sparkled dimly on
a surface shiny-black as newly cleft anthracite.
Allan threw in the motor once more and quickly got the Pauillac under
control. In a long downward slant he rushed, like some vast swallow
skimming a pool, over the mysterious plain of steaming waters. And
ever, peering eagerly ahead, he sought a twinkle of the fishermen's
oil-flares wimpling across the sunken sea.
Moment by moment he consulted his instruments and the chart he had
stretched before him under the gleam of the hooded bulbs.
"Inside of half an hour now," said he, "I ought to sight the first
flash of the flares upon the parapet—the glow of the flaming well!"
And a singular eagerness all at once possessed him, a strange yearning
to behold once more the strange, fog-shrouded, reeking City of the
Lost People, almost as though it had been home, as though these white
barbarians had been his own people.
Men! To see men once more! The idea leaped up and gripped him with a
powerful fascination.
So it was that when in reality the first faint twinkle of the
fishing-boats peeped through the mist—and beyond, a tiny necklace of
gleaming points that he knew marked the walls of the town—his heart
throbbed hotly and a cry of eager greeting welled from his soul.
Quickly the Pauillac swept him onward. Manoeuvering cautiously,
jockeying the great machine with that consummate skill he had acquired
from long practice, he soon beheld the dim outlines of the vast cliff,
the long walls, the dull reflections of the fire-plume, the slanting
slope of beach.
And with keen exultation, thrilled with his triumph and his greeting
to the Folk he came to rescue, he landed with a whir upon the reeking
slope.
To him, even before he had been able to free his cramped body from
the saddle, came swarming the people, with loud cries of welcome and
rejoicing. Powerfully the automatics he and Beatrice had used in the
Battle of the Walls had impressed their simple minds with almost
superstitious reverence. More powerfully still his terrible fight with
Kamrou, ending with the death of that great chief in the boiling vat.
And now, acknowledging him their overlord and ruler, whom they had
feared to lose forever, they trooped in wild, disordered throngs to
do him reverence.
In from the sea, summoned by waving flares, the fishing-boats came
plowing mightily, driven by many paddles in the hands of the strange,
white-haired men.
Along the beach the townsfolk thronged, and down the causeway, beneath
the vast monolithic plinth of the fortified gate, jostled and pushed
an ever-growing multitude.
Cries of "Kromno h'viat! Tai Kromno!" reechoed—"The chief has come
back! The great master!"—and the confusion swelled to a mighty roar,
close-pent under the heavy mists blued by the naphtha-torches.
But Stern noticed, and rejoiced to see it, that none prostrated
themselves. None fell to earth or groveled in his presence. Disorderly
and wild the greeting was, but it was the greeting of men, not slaves.
"Thank God, I've got a race of real men to deal with here!" thought
he, surveying the pressing throng. "Hard they may be to rule, and even
turbulent, but they're not servile. Rude, brave, bold—what better
stock could I have hoped for in this great adventuring?"
For a while even thoughts of Beatrice were crowded back by the
excitement of the arrival. In all his wonderful experience never
before had he sensed a feeling such as this.