IX
I have said that our study of
the decadent sculptures brought about a change in our immediate objective.
This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to the black inner
world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we were now
eager to find and traverse. For the evident scale of the carvings
we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either
of the neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless
cliffs about the great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the Old
Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To
behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible
of resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin
the quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.
It was
now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our
torches burn on forever. We had don so much studying and copying
below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours
of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula would
obviously be good for only about four more--though by keeping one torch
unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we might
manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would not do to be
without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the
abyss trip we must give up all further mural deciphering. Of course
we intended to revisit the places for day and perhaps weeks of intensive
study and photography--curiosity having long ago go the better of horror--but
just now we must hasten.
Our
supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant
to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but we did
let one large note book go. If worse came to worst we could resort
to rock chipping--and of course it would be possible , even in case of
really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another
if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last
we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.
According
to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel mouth
could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood; the
intervening space showed solid looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable
still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the
basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of a vast five-pointed structure
of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify
from our aërial survey of the ruins.
No such
structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded
that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been totally
shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel
would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the
next nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening
river course prevented our trying any of the more southern tunnels on this
trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were choked it was doubtful
whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one--about
a mile beyond our second choice.
As we
threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass--traversing
rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering
up ramps crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, encountering
choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely
preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing
our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and
once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight
poured or trickled down--we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured
walls along our route. Many must have told tales of immense historical
importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the
need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while
and turned on our second torch. If we had had more films we would
certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming
hand-copying was clearly out of the question.
I come
now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather
than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the
rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's mouth--having
crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed
wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently
elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship--when,
shortly before 8:30 P.M., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first
hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose
we would have been warned before. At first we could not precisely
say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few
seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state
the thing without flinching. There was an odor--and that odor was
vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening
the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course
the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now.
There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of
indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat
without further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath
to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must
have suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did
not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational
instinct which made us dim our single torch--tempted no longer by the decadent
and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressive walls--and
which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the
increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
Danforth's
eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who
first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked
arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It
did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion,
and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath
seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature
of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places
there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we
thought there was a hint of parallel tracks as if of runners. This
was what made us pause again.
It was
during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the other odor
ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more frightful
odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place
under the known circumstances--unless, of course, Gedney--for the odor
was the plain and familiar one of common petrol--every-day gasoline.
Our
motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists.
We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have
crawled into this nighted burial place of the aeons, hence could not doubt
any longer the existence of nameless conditions--present or at least recent
just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity--or
anxiety--or autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney--or
what not--drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought
he had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical
piping--potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection
report, despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy
peaks--which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown
depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left--of
what had disappeared, and of how the madness of one lone survivor might
have conceived the inconceivable--a wild trip across the monstrous mountains
and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry--
But
we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite.
We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that
a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute.
Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional
flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression
we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.
More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon
we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too
correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air.
Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able
to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
The
torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked corridor
in which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction;
and from on of them the gasoline odor--quite submerging that other hint
of odor--came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily,
we saw beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away
of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror
might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest.
I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time before
making any further motion.
And
yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was
one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured
Crypt--a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet--there remained no
recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively,
though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment, however,
Danforth's sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris had
been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. Though
what we say in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the
less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a
rough leveling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly
scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline
must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at this
extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not
be other than a sort of camp--a camp made by questing beings who, like
us, had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let
me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was
concerned, all from Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened
as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated
books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial
and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments
of fur and tent cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions,
a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled
papers. It was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the papers
and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst.
We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might
have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the prehuman
vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.
A mad
Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on
the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed
gave mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared
rough, hasty sketches--varying in their accuracy or lack of it--which outlined
the neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly
represented place outside our previous route--a place we identified as
a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed
in our aërial survey--to the present five-pointed structure and the
tunnel mouth therein.
He might,
I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously
compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial
labyrinth. though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But
what that art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those
sketches in a strangle and assured technique perhaps superior, despite
haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they
were taken--the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones
themselves in the dead city's heyday.
There
are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for
our lives after that; since our conclusions were now–notwithstanding their
wildness--completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to
those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were made--for
have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But
I think I can detect something of the same spirit--albeit in a less extreme
form--in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph
them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we
were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and
curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course
we did not mean to face that--or those--which we knew had been there, but
we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found
the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within, to
whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate
gulf--the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance,
too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking another.
They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.
Looking
back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new
emotions took--just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened
our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we
feared--yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking unconscious
wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. Probably
we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there
was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shown
on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized
it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings,
but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something
about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams,
made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar
importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered
by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures
in which it figured--being indeed among the first things built in the city.
Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant.
Moreover, ti might form a good present link with the upper world--a shorter
route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which
those others had descended.
At any
rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches--which quite
perfectly confirmed our own--and start back over the indicated course to
the circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have
traversed twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss
would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey -- during
which we continued to leave an economical trail of paper--for it was precisely
the same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul-de-sac; except
that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend
to basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain
disturbing marks in the debris or litter underfoot; and after we had passed
outside the radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly conscious--spasmodically--of
that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched
from our former course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch
a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh
omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic
outlet for the Old Ones.
About
9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly
glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew
lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able
to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast
circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very
great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic
ruins, bu we could see much though it even before we emerged. Beyond
there stretched a prodigious round space--fully two hundred feet in diameter--strewn
with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one
we were about to cross. The walls were--in available spaces--boldly
sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite
the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic
splendor far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered
floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom
lay at a considerably lower depth.
But
the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding
the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally
up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those
once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon.
Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the
descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature
from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the subglacial
level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering
held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel.
We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what
we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was
excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower--a highly remarkable
circumstance in view of its exposure--and its shelter had done much to
protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we
stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous cylinder bottom--fifty
million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure
ever to meet our eyes--we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily
up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we recall from our aërial
survey, meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning
gulf we had seen fro the plane had been at the top of an approximately
twenty-foot mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths
of its circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins.
According to the sculptures the original tower had stood in the center
of an immense circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six
hundred feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row
of needlelike spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had
obviously toppled outward rather than inward--a fortunate happening, since
otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked.
As it was, the ramp showed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that
all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently cleared.
It took
us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those
others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our
own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere.
The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane
than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial
exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region.
Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips--even after all
we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over
the debris of the great floor, there came a sight which fro the time excluded
all other matters.
It was
the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the
ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened
from our view. There they were--the three sledges missing from Lake's
camp--shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging
along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand
portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and
intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar
enough--the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins,
tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious
contents--everything derived from Lake's equipment. After what we
had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this encounter.
The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin
whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others
as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for
there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched
with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and
wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage. They were the
bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.
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