Authors: George England
"But," she objected, terrified at thought of losing him again: "but I
thought you said the Horde wrecked it!"
"So they did; but beasts like that probably couldn't destroy the vital
mechanism beyond possibility of repair. That is, not unless they
heaped a lot of wood all over it, and heated it white-hot, which I
don't think they had intelligence enough to do. In any event, what's
left will serve me as a model, for another machine. I really think
I'll have to have a try for it."
"Oh, Allan! You aren't going to venture out into the wilderness
again?"
"Why not, dearest? You must remember the forest is all burned now;
perhaps for hundreds of miles. And the Horde, the one greatest peril
that has dogged us ever since those days in the tower, has been swept
out with the besom of flame!"
"Which has also surely destroyed the machine, even if
they
haven't!"
she exclaimed, using every possible argument to discourage him.
"I hardly think so," he judged. "You see, I left it in a wide
sand-barren. I think, on the whole, it will pay me to make the
expedition. Of course I shan't take less than a dozen men to help me
bring it back—what's left of it."
"But Allan, can you find your way?"
"I've got to! That machine must positively be recovered! Otherwise
we're totally cut off from the Abyss. Colonizing stops, and all kinds
of hell may break loose below ground before I can build another
machine entire. There are no railroads running now to the brink," he
added smiling; "and no elevators to the basement of the world. It's
the old Pauillac again or nothing!"
The girl exhausted all her arguments and entreaties in vain. Once
Allan's mind was definitely made up along the line of duty, he went
straight forward, though the heavens fell.
Four days later the expedition set out.
Allan had made adequate preparations in every way. He left a strong
and well-armed guard to protect Settlement Cliffs. By careful thought
and chart-drawing he was able to approximate the probable position of
the machine. With him he took fifteen men, headed by Zangamon, who now
insisted he was well enough to go, and ably seconded by Frumuos.
Each man carried an automatic, and six had rifles. They bore an
average of one hundred cartridges apiece, and in knapsacks of
goat-leather, dried rations for a week. Each also carried fish hooks
and a stout fiber line.
The party counted on being able to supplement their supplies with
trout, bass and pickerel from countless untouched streams. They might,
too, come into wooded country, if the fire had left any to northward,
and here they knew game would be plentiful.
One thing seemed positive in that new world: starvation could not
threaten.
Cloudy and dull the morning was—yet well-suited to the needs of the
Folk—when the expedition left Settlement Cliffs. The convoy, each man
provided with eye-guards and his hands and face well painted with
protecting pigment, waited impatiently in the palisade, while Allan
said farewell to Beta and the little chap.
For a long moment he strained them both to his breast, then, the
woman's kiss still hot upon his lips, ran quickly up the path and
joined his picked troop of scouts.
"Forward, men!" cried he, taking the lead with Zangamon.
Some minutes later Beatrice saw them defiling over the long, shaking
bridge.
Through her tears she watched them, waving her hand to Allan—even
making the baby shake its little hand as well—and throwing kisses to
him, who returned them gaily.
On the far bank the party halted a minute to shout a few last words to
the assembled colonists that lined the parapet of the terrace.
Then they turned, and, striking northwest, plunged boldly into the
burned and blackened waste.
Long after the marching column had disappeared over the crest of the
second hill Beatrice still watched. Up on the cliff-top, with the
powerful telescope at her eye, she followed the faint, drifting line
of dust and ash that marked the line of march.
Only when this, too, had disappeared, merged in the somber gray of the
horizon, did she sadly and very slowly descend the path once more,
back to the loneliness of a home where now no husband's presence
greeted her.
Though she tried to smile—tried to believe all would yet be well, old
Gesafam, glancing up from her labors at the cooking-hearth, saw tears
were shining in her beautiful gray eyes.
Barbarian though the ancient beldame was, she knew, she understood
that after all, now as for all time, in every venture and in every
task, the woman's portion was the harder one.
At a good round pace, where open going permitted, the party
made way, striking boldly across country in the probable direction of
the lost aeroplane.
Some marched in silence, thoughtfully; others sang, as though setting
out upon the Great Sunken Sea in fishing boats. But one common purpose
and ambition thrilled them all.
A man less boldly resourceful than Allan Stern must have thought long,
and long hesitated, before thus plunging into a desolated and unknown
territory on such a hunt.
For, to speak truth, the finding of the needle in the haystack would
have been as easy as any hope of ever locating the machine in all
those thousands of square miles of devastation.
But Stern felt no fear. The great need of the colony made the
expedition imperative; his supreme self-trust rendered it possible.
From the very beginning of things, back there in the tower overlooking
Madison Forest, he had never even admitted the possibility of failure
in any undertaking. Defeat lay wholly outside his scheme of things.
That it could ever be his portion simply never had occurred to him.
As they progressed he carefully reviewed everything in his mind. Plans
and equipment seemed perfectly adequate. In addition to the
impedimenta already mentioned, a few necessary tools, a supply of
cordage for transporting the machine, and three bottles of brandy for
emergencies had been judiciously added to the men's burdens.
Each, in addition, carried a small flat water-jug, tightly stopped,
slung over his shoulder. Allan counted on streams being plentiful; but
he meant to look out even for the unexpected, too.
He had wisely taken means to protect their feet for the long tramp. In
spite of all their opposition he had made them prepare and bind on
sandals of goat's leather. Hitherto they had gone barefooted at
Settlement Cliffs; but now that w as no longer permissible.
The total equipment of each man weighed not less than one hundred
pounds, including tools and all. No weaklings, like the men of the
twentieth century, could have stood the gaff marching under such a
load; but these huge fellows, muscular and lithe, walked off with it
as though it had been a mere nothing.
Allan himself bore an equal burden. In addition to arms and provisions
he carried a powerful binocular, the spoil of a wrecked optician's
shop in Cincinnati.
Underfoot, as the column advanced in a long line, loose dust and
wood-ashes rose in clouds. The air grew thick and irritating to the
lungs.
Now and then they had to make a detour round a charred and fallen
trunk, or cut their way and clamber through a calcined barricade of
twisted limbs and branches. Not infrequently they saw burned bones of
animals or of Anthropoids.
Here and there they even stumbled on a distorted, half-consumed
body—a hideous reminder of the vanquished enemy—the half-man that
had tried to pit itself against the whole-man, with inevitable
annihilation as the only possible result.
The distorted attitudes of some of these ghastly, incredibly ugly
carcasses told with eloquence the terrified, vain flight of the Horde
before the all-consuming storm of fire, the panic and the anguish of
their extinction.
But Allan only grunted or smiled grimly at sight of the horrible
little bodies. Pity he felt no more than for a crushed and hideous
copperhead.
The country had been swept clean by the fire-broom. Not a living
creature remained visible. Moles there still might be, and perhaps
hares and foxes, woodchucks, groundhogs and a few such animals that by
chance had taken earth; but even of these there was no trace.
Certainly all larger breeds had been destroyed.
Where paradise-birds, macaws and paroquets had screamed and flitted,
humming-birds darted with a whir of gauzy wings, serpents writhed,
deer browsed, monkeys and apes swung chattering from the
liana-festooned fern-trees, now all was silence, charred ashes,
dust—the universal, blank awfulness of death.
Naked and ugly the country stretched away, away to its black horizon,
ridge after ridge of rolling land stubbled with sparse, limbless
trunks and carpeted with cinders.
A dead world truly, it seemed—how infinitely different from the lush,
green beauty of the territory south of the New Hope, a region Stern
still could make out as a bluish blur, far to southward, through his
binoculars.
By night, after having eaten dinner beside a turbid, brackish pool,
they had made more than twenty miles to northwestward. Stern thought
scornfully of the distance. In his Pauillac he would have covered it
easily in as many minutes.
But now all was different. Nothing remained save slow, laborious
plodding, foot by foot, through the choking desolation of the burned
world.
They camped near a small stream for the night, and cast their lines,
but took nothing. Stern gave this matter no great weight. He thought,
perhaps, it might be a mere accident, and still felt confident of
finding fish elsewhere.
Even the discovery of three or four dead perch, floating belly up,
round and round in an eddy, gave him no clue to the total destruction
of all life. He did not understand even yet that the terrific
conflagration, far more stupendous than any ever known in the old
days, had even heated the streams and killed there the very fish
themselves.
Yet already a vague, half-sensed uneasiness had begun to creep over
him—not yet a definite presentiment of disaster, but rather a
subconscious feeling that the odds against him were too great.
And once a thought of Napoleon crossed his mind as he sat there
silently, camped with his men; and he remembered Moscow, with a
strange, new apprehension.
Next morning, having refilled their canteens, they set out again,
still in the same direction. Stern often consulted his chart, to be
sure they were proceeding in what he took to be the proper course.
The distance between Settlement Cliffs and the machine was wholly
problematical; yet, once he should come within striking distance of
the scene of his disaster, he felt positive of being able to recognize
it.
Not far to the south of the spot, he remembered, a very steep and
noisy stream flowed toward the east, and, off to northwest of it rose
a peculiarly formed, double-peaked mountain, easily recognizable.
The sand-barren itself, where he had been obliged to abandon the
machine, lay in a kind of broad valley, flanked on one hand by cliffs,
while the other sloped gradually upward to the foot-hills of the
double mountain in question.
"Once I get anywhere within twenty miles of it I'm all right," thought
Allan, anxiously sweeping the horizon with his binoculars as the party
paused on a high ridge to rest. "The great problem is to locate that
mountain. After that the rest will be easy."
At noon they camped again, ate sparingly, and rested an hour. Here
Allan brought his second map up to date. This map, a large sheet of
parchment, served as a record of distances and directions traveled.
Starting at Settlement Cliffs he had painstakingly entered on it every
stage of the journey, every ridge and valley, watercourse, camp and
landmark. Once the goal reached, this record would prove invaluable in
retracing their way.
"If the rest of the trip were only indicated as well as what's past!"
he muttered, working out his position. "One of these days, when other
things are attended to, we must have a geodetic survey, complete maps
and plans, and accurate information about the whole topography of this
altered continent. Some time—along with a few million other necessary
things!"
The third day brought them nowhere. Still the brule stretched
on and on before them, though now, far to right, Allan occasionally
could glimpse a wooded mountain-spur through the binoculars, as though
the limits of the vast conflagration were in sight at least in one
direction.
But to left and ahead nothing still showed but devastated land.
The character of the country, however, had begun to change. The
valleys had grown deeper and the ridges higher. Allan felt that they
were now coming into a more mountainous region.
"Well, that's encouraging, anyhow," he reflected. "Any time, now, I
may sight the double-peaked mountain. It can't heave in sight any too
soon to suit
me!
"
There was need of sighting it, indeed, for already the party had begun
to suffer not a little. The perpetual tramping through ashes had
started cracks and sores forming on the men's feet. Most of them were
coughing and sneezing much of the time, with a kind of influenza
caused by the acrid and biting dust.
The dried food, too, had started an intolerable thirst, and water was
terribly scarce. The canteens were now almost always empty; and more
than one brook or pool, to which the men eagerly hastened, turned out
to be saline or hopelessly fouled by fallen forest wreckage, festering
and green-slimed in the cooking sun.
In spite of the eye-shields and pigments, some of the men were already
suffering from sunburn and ophthalmia, which greatly impaired their
efficiency. Their failure to take fish was also beginning to
dishearten them.
Allan pondered the advisability of suspending day travel and trekking
only by night, but had to give over this plan, for it would obviate
all possibility of his sighting the landmark, the cleft mountain.
Though he said nothing, the pangs of apprehension were biting deep
into his soul.