The End of the Story (38 page)

“I don’t like this,” murmured Roverton. He and the others felt a growing disquietude, for which they could assign no determinate reason. They were

not reassured when the three lizard-monsters, followed by two more of a similar type, reappeared along the stream-bank. All were mounted by armed pygmies who, when they approached, made signs that the men should precede them along their line of march. The mutineers started down-stream, with the mounted guards and the whole assemblage following them.

Soon the bank grew narrower and the walls above more precipitous. The foothold narrowed to a yard-wide path, beside which the waters rushed with sullen vehemence in a series of torrential rapids teethed with yellow foam. Passing a turn in the wall, the men saw that the bank ended in a large cavern-mouth. Beyond, the cliffs rose perpendicularly from the torrent.

The three hesitated as they neared the cavern. What fate was before them they could not conjecture; but their sense of alarm and disquietude increased. They looked back and saw that the foremost lizard-thing was close upon them, yawning more horribly than the black cave in front. They thought of leaping into the stream; but the headlong torrent was full of sharp rocks; and a roaring from beyond the cliff betokened the nearness of a waterfall. The walls above the path were impossible to climb; so they entered the cavern.

IV

T
he place was quite roomy in contradistinction to the caves inhabited by the pygmies, and the men were not forced to stoop at any time. But, blinded with the daylight they had left, they stumbled over stones and against the winding walls as they groped in utter darkness. A gust of chill and noisome air came forth like a subterranean wind from the heart of the cavern; and one of the monsters was breathing at their heels. They could see nothing, could be sure of nothing; but perforce they must go on, not knowing if the next step would plunge them into some terrific pit or bottomless gulf. A sense of uncanny menace, of weird unhuman horror, increased upon them momently.

“This place is dark as the coal-cellars of Hades,” jested Roverton. The others laughed bravely, though their nerves were on edge with sinister expectation and uncertainty.

The draft of dank, mephitic air grew stronger. The smell of stagnant, sunless waters, lying at some unfathomable depth, mingled in the men’s nostrils with a nauseating reek as of bat-haunted catacombs or foul animal-dens.

“Phooey!” grumbled Deming. “This is worse than Gorgonzola and fox-guts all in one.”

The floor of the cavern began to slope downward. Step by step the descent steepened like some infernal chute, till the mutineers could hardly keep their footing in the dark.

Remote and faint, like a little patch of phosphorescence, a light dawned in the depths below. The walls of the cavern, dolorously ribbed and arched,

were now distinguishable. The light strengthened as the men went on, and soon it was all about them, pouring in pale-blue rays from an undiscerned subterranean source.

The incline ended abruptly, and they came out in a vast chamber full of the queer radiance, which appeared to emanate from roof and walls like some kind of radio-activity. They were on a broad semi-circular shelf; and, crossing the shelf, they found that it terminated sharply and fell sheer down for perhaps fifty feet to a great pool in the center of the chamber. There were ledges on the opposite side of the cavern at the same level as the one on which they stood; and there were smaller caves that ramified from these ledges. But apparently none of the caves were attainable from the ledge where the incline had ended. Between, were perpendicular walls that could afford no moment’s foothold anywhere.

The three men stood on the brink above the pool and looked about them. They could hear the shuffling of the first lizard-monster on the incline and could see the baleful glaring of its single eye as it came forward.

“This looks like the last page of the last chapter.” Roverton was now peering down at the pool. The others followed his gaze. The waters were dusky, stirless, dull, ungleaming, beneath the bluish glow from the cavern-sides. They were like something that had been asleep or dead for thousands of years; and the stench that arose from them suggested ages of slow putrefaction.

“Christ! What is that?” Roverton had noticed a change in the waters, an odd glimmer that came from beneath their surface as if a drowned moon were rising within them. Then the dead calm of the pool was broken with a million spreading ripples, and a vast head, dripping with loathsome luminescence, upreared from the waters. The thing was seven or eight feet wide, it was hideously round and formless and seemed to consist mainly of gaping mouths and glaring eyes all strewn together in a mad chaos of malignity and horror. There were at least five mouths, each of them large enough to devour a man at one swallow. They were fangless, and elastically distensible. Scattered among them, the eyes burned like satanic embers.

One of the lizard-monsters had crawled forth on the shelf. Scores of the pygmies were crowding beside and behind it, and some of them now advanced till they were abreast of the men. They stared down at the fearsome thing in the pool and made uncouth gestures and genuflections with heads, hands and long prehensile trunks, as if they were invoking or worshipping it. Their shrill voices rose in a rhythmically wavering chant.

The men were almost stupefied with horror. The creature in the gulf was beyond anything in earthly legend or nightmare. And the rites of the obeisance offered by the pygmies were unbelievably revolting.

“The thing is their god,” Roverton cried. “Probably they are going to sacrifice us to it.”

The ledge was now thronged with pygmies; and the lizard-monster had

pushed forward till the three men had no more than standing room on the brink of the gulf, in a crescent-like arc formed by its body.

The ceremony performed by the pygmies came to an end, their genuflections and chantings ceased, and all turned their eyes in a simultaneous unwinking stare on the mutineers. The four who were mounted upon the lizard-creature gave vent in unison to a single word of command:

“
Ptrahsai!
” The monster opened its maw and pushed forward with its squat jowl. Its horrible teeth were like a moving portcullis. Its breath was like a fetid wind. There was no time for terror, and no chance to resist: the men tottered and slipped on the narrowing verge, and toppled simultaneously into space. In his fall Roverton clutched automatically at the nearest of the pygmies, caught the creature by its trunk, and bore it along as he hurtled through the air. He and his companions plunged with a huge splash into the pool and sank far below the surface. With a concerted presence of mind they all came up as close to the cavern-wall as they could and began to look for possible footholds. Roverton had not lost his grip on the pygmy. The creature howled ferociously when its head came above the water, and tried to claw him with its long toenails.

The precipice was bare and sheer from the water’s edge, with no visible break anywhere. The men swam desperately along it, searching for an aperture or a ledge. The thing of mouths and eyes had begun to move toward them, and they felt sick with terror and repulsion at the sight of its slow, phosphorescent gliding. There was a damnable deliberation, a dreadful leisureliness in its motion, as if it knew that there was no way in which its victims could evade the elastic yawning of those five abominable mouths. It approached, till the cavern-wall beside the swimmers grew brighter with the foul effulgence of its looming head. They could see beneath and behind the head the distorted glowing of a long, formless body submerged in the black abysses of the pool.

Roverton was nearest to the monster when it came abreast. Its malignant bulging eyes were all bent upon him and its foremost mouth opened more widely and slavered with an execrable slime. Now it loomed athwart him, and he could feel the unutterable corruption of its breath. He was driven against the cavern-wall; and, managing to steady himself for a moment, he pushed the pygmy toward the approaching mouth. The pygmy yelled and struggled in a frenzy of fear till the awful slobbering lips had closed upon it. The monster paused as if its appetite and curiosity were appeased for the nonce; and the three men took advantage of this to continue their exploration of the wall.

Suddenly they perceived a low aperture in the smooth cliff, into which the waters flowed with a gentle rippling. The aperture was narrow and its roof was not more than a foot above the surface. It might or might not afford an escape from the pool; but no other possible exit could be detected. Without hesitation Adams swam into the opening and the others followed him.

The water was still deep beneath them and they did not touch bottom anywhere. The walls of the little cavern were luminous at first; but the luminosity soon ceased and left them in absolute darkness. As they swam onward, they could no longer judge the extent of the air-space above them. At no time, however, were they compelled to dive beneath the surface; and they soon found that the cave was now wide enough to permit their moving side by side. They perceived also that they were caught in the flow of an ever-strengthening current which carried them on with considerable velocity. Since there was no sign of pursuit from the monster in the pool, the men began to feel a faint quickening of hope. Of course the stream might carry them to the very bowels of this terrific transstellar world, or might plunge at any moment into some dreadful gulf; or the roof might close in and crush them down beneath the noisome strangling waters. But at any rate they felt that there was a chance of ultimate emergence; and anything, almost, would be better than the proximity of the luminescent monster with mephitic breath and myriad eyes and mouths. Probably the cave in which they now swam was far too narrow to permit the entrance of its loathly bulk.

How long the three men floated in the swiftening current, it was impossible for them to know. As far as they could tell, there was no change in their situation; nor could they estimate how far they had gone in this underground world. The darkness weighed upon them, seemingly no less opaque and heavy than the water itself and the cavern-walls. They resigned themselves to the obscure progression of the stream, saving their strength as much as possible for any future emergency that might arise.

At length, when it seemed that they were irretrievably lost in the solid abysmal murk, when their eyes had forgotten the very memory of sight, the darkness before them was pierced by a pinpoint of light. The light increased by slow, uncertain degrees, but for awhile they were doubtful as to its nature, not knowing whether they were approaching another vault of phosphorescence, or the actual outer daylight. However, they were thankful for its dim glimmering. The stream had become still swifter and rougher, with boulder-cloven rapids in which their descent was impetuous and dangerous. More than once the men were almost thrown against the dark and jagged masses that towered about them.

All at once the current slackened and the seething rapids died in a broad pool above which the arching of the lofty cavern-dome was now discernible. The light poured in a stream of pale radiance across this pool, from what was evidently the cavern’s mouth; and beyond the mouth a large sheet of sun-white water stretched away and was lost in the luminous distance.

All three men were suddenly conscious of a crushing, dragging fatigue—an overwhelming reaction from all the peril and hardship they had undergone. But the prospect of emergence from this underworld of mysterious horror prompted them to summon their remaining strength; with sodden limbs,

they swam toward the cavern-mouth and floated through its black arch into the silver dazzle of a great lake.

V

T
he lake was probably the same body of water they had seen from afar on the previous day. Its aspect was ineffably weird and desolate. High cliffs with many buttresses and chimneys overhung the cavern from which they had emerged, and ran away on either side in gradually descending lines till they ceased in long flats of ooze and sand. There was no trace of vegetation anywhere—nothing but the swart stone of the cliffs, and the grey mud of the marshes, and the wan, dead waters. And at first the men thought that there was no life of any kind.

They swam along the cliff, looking for a place to land. The levels of ooze and sand were seemingly miles away; and their progress in the sluggish lake was excruciatingly slow and tedious. They felt as if the strange, lifeless waters had soaked them to the bone; and a deadly inertia dragged them down and drugged their very senses till everything became blurred in a monotone of faintness. They were all too exhausted to speak or even think. Dimly, despairingly, they plowed on toward the receding goal of the far-off shore.

Somehow, they were aware that a shadow had fallen upon them, breaking the diffused glare of the foggy sun. They were too weary to look up, or even speculate as to the origin of the shadow. Then they heard a harsh, jarring cry and a beating as of stiff, enormous wings, and something swooped down and hovered above them.

Turning their heads in the water, the three men saw an incredible sight. The thing that shadowed them was a mammoth bird-like creature with ribbed and leathern wings that were at least fifty feet from tip to tip. It suggested that prehistoric flying monster, the pterodactyl; and also it suggested a pelican, for beneath its seven-foot beak there hung a prodigious pouch.

Scarcely crediting their eyes, the swimmers stared at the hovering apparition. It glowered upon them with malevolent orbs of fire big as dinner-plates; and then, with horrible swiftness, it descended. Adams, who was nearest, felt the huge beak close upon him and lift him from the water; and before he could realize what was happening he found himself in the interior of the pouch. Deming was seized and deposited beside him a moment later; and Roverton, who had instinctively dived beneath the surface, was retrieved and drawn out by the questing beak as if he had been a flounder, and joined the other two.

Utterly stunned, they groped about in the noisome darkness of the pouch and were thrown prostrate in a heap as they felt the monster rise and soar heavenward. There were eel-like things that squirmed beneath them; and they breathed a medley of suffocating stenches. They could see nothing;