X
Many people will probably judge
us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward tunnel and the
abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am not prepared to say
that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for a specific
circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations.
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind
of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness--the
first sounds had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain
wind whined faintly from its earthly heights. Well-known and mundane
though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more
unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly
have been--since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic
harmony.
Had
it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which
Lake's dissection report had led ut to expect in those others--and which,
indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we
had heard since coming on the camp horror--it would have had a kind of
hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from
other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however,
the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments--all our tacit
acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void
of every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous
note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness
an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead,
it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our
sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered
to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief--it
was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
The
muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor
whence we had come--regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel
to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a
direction--in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness--could
lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the
objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and seemed
at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we
entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our
trail blazing--with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance
from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges--when we left daylight
behind.
As the
glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detrius, we plainly discerned
some curious, dragging tracks; and one Danforth found a distinct print
of some sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The
course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass
prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were
glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement
levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to
start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed
vaguely to recall from our aërial survey as remarkably well-preserved.
Along our path the single torch showed a customary profusion of carvings,
but we did not pause to examine any of
these.
Suddenly
a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second
torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from
earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left
their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return
after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded
all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed.
This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize
at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and
dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces
was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle
equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten
us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive
dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those
others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled
into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which
had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin--albeit
of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins,
and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When
we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches
on the indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that they were all
eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size
reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones' sculptures,
and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the
same stock--undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner
region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied
their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was
the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment to be doubted; and this
evidence of the gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with
the most curious and subtly perturbing
fancies.
We wondered,
too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual domain.
The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had
at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest indifference
of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of
those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those
others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat
supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated
could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors
had obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones--an amicable relationship
which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones
remained. Regretting--in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science--that
we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them
to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now
so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin
tracks made clear.
Not
long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel
mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others
immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space
which made us gasp involuntarily--a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously
deep underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high,
with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one,
and that one yawning cavernously with a black, arched aperture which broke
the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It
was the entrance to the great abyss.
In this
vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadently
carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins
waddled--aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel
yawned indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its aperture adorned
with grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth
we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion
of vapor proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other than penguins
the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land
and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether
the trace of mountaintop smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well
as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak,
might not be caused by the tortuous-channeled rising of some such vapor
from the unfathomed regions of earth's core.
Entering
the tunnel, we saw that its outline was--at least at the start--about fifteen
feet each way--sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic
masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional
designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving
were marvelously well-preserved. The floor was quite clear, except
for a slight detrius bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks
of these others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became;
so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered
whether there were nay actually igneous manifestations below, and whether
the waters of that sunless sea were hot. After a short distance the
masonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions
and presented the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally
its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor.
Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded
in our diagrams; none of them
such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them welcome
as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back
from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct.
Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the
known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain
persons than most suspect--indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought
us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several
penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have
to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk
of about a mile to the abyss, but our previous wanderings had shown
us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on.
After
about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated,
and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed.
There was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due
to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly
ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material
shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent cloth
taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms
into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point
we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the side galleries,
and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills
must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now curiously
mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor--of what nature we
could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown
subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel
for which the carvings had not prepared us--a broadening and rising into
a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five
feet long and fifty broad, and with many immense side passages leading
away into cryptical darkness.
Though
this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches
suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several
walls between adjacent honycombings. The walls were rough, and the
high, vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor
had been smoothed off, and was free from all debris, detritus, or even
dust to a positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue through
which we had come, this was true of the floors of all the great galleries
opening off from it; and the singularity of the condition was such as to
set us vainly puzzling. The curious new fetor which had supplemented
the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so that it destroyed
all trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with its
polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling
and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.
The
regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion
of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course
amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths. Nevertheless we
resolved to resume our paper trailblazing if any further complexity should
develop; for dust tracks, of course, could not long be expected.
Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the
tunnel walls--and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change
which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We
realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at
the time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship
of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper
section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending
explanation--a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and
involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing
in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.
This
new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy
of detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following
the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections,
but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface.
Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving--a sort of palimpsest
formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it
was wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals
and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the
Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a parody than a perpetuation of that
tradition. We could not get it our of our minds that some subtly
but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind
the technique--an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible
for the laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike,
what we had come to recognize as the Old Ones' art; and I was persistently
reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned
in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of
carving was hinted by the presence of a used flashlight battery on the
floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.
Since
we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed
our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over
the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing
of the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse
because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels.
We saw and heard fewer penguins, but though we caught a vague suspicion
of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth.
The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor
ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness
of the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly,
we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead--obstructions which
were quite definitely not penguins--and turned on our second torch after
making sure that the objects were quite stationary.
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