VII
From that point forward my impressions
are scarcely to be relied on - indeed, I still possess a final, desperate
hope that they all form parts of some daemonic dream or illusion born of
delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through
a kind of haze - sometimes only intermittently.
The rays of my torch shot feebly
into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously
familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one
place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber
over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely
stalactited roof.
It was all the ultimate apex of
nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing
only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous
masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight
of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new
and abnormal. Again and again I looked
nervously down at myself, vaguely
disturbed by the human form I possessed.
Onward through the blackness of
the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered - often falling and bruising
myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of
that daemonic gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast
beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.
Some rooms had totally collapsed;
others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal - some
fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered - which I recognised
as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth
have been, I dared not guess.
I found the downward incline and
began its descent - though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm
whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here
the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath.
I knew there were two more cellar
levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled
the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards
now - for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work
and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the posthuman beetle race
it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I
trembled anew.
It cost me a terrible effort to
vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running
start - but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand
wall - where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear
of dangerous debris - and after one frantic moment reached the other side
in safety.
At last, gaining the lower level,
I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were
fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything
was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps
which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised,
would take me under the city to the central archives.
Endless ages seemed to unroll as
I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now
and then I could make out carvings on the ages-tained walls - some familiar,
others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a
subterrene house - connecting highway, there were no archways save when
the route led through the lower levels of various
buildings.
At some of these intersections I
turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into
well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what
I had dreamed of - and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up
outlines of the archway I remembered.
I shook violently, and felt a curious
surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course
through the crypt of one of those great windowless, ruined towers whose
alien, basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin.
This primal vault was round and
fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework.
The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see
the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines
- indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched
by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs
or inclines.
In the dreams, the downward aperture
had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open-black and
yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless
caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to
think.
Later, clawing my way along a badly
heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly
caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing
through a vast, empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls
nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the
metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not
far from the archives. What had
happened to it I could not conjecture.
I found the corridor again beyond
the mountain of detritus and stone, but after a short distance encountered
a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously
sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to
afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments
when the least shift of equilibrium might have
brought down all the tons of superincumbent
masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know.
It was sheer madness that impelled
and guided me - if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not - as
I hope - a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make - or dream
that I made - a passage that I could squirm through. As I wiggled over
the mound of debris - my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply
in my mouth - I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged
floor above me.
I was now close to the great underground
archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering
down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining
stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came
at last to a low, circular crypt with arches - still in a marvelous state
of preservation - opening off on every side.
The walls, or such parts of them
as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled
with typical curvilinear symbols - some added since the period of my dreams.
This, I realised, was my fated destination,
and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could
find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels,
I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the
annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and
strength to last as long as that system itself.
Blocks of stupendous size, poised
with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness,
had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core. Here, after
ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in
all its essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled
with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
The relatively easy walking from
this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness
hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile
speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered
aisles beyond the archway.
I was past being astonished by the
familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors
loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others
bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough
to shatter the titan masonry.
Here and there a dust-covered heap
beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken
down by earth tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters
proclaiming classes and subclasses of volumes.
Once I paused before an open vault
where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst
the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner
specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection.
It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something
in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly
unusual.
The odd mechanism of the hooked
fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless
and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected,
was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin
metal covers opening at the top.
Its tough cellulose pages seemed
unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied
the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text-symbols unlike either
the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship
- with a haunting, half-aroused memory.
It came to me that this was the
language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams - a mind
from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and
lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time
I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing
with the non-terrestrial planets.
As I ceased poring over this incredible
document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence
quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with
the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles
of aisles and corridors - recognising now and then some familiar shelf,
and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions
which made my footfalls echo incongruously
in these catacombs.
The very prints of my shoes behind
me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if
my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those
immemorial pavements.
Of the particular goal of my insane
racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force
of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollection, so that
I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
I came to a downward incline and
followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but
I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to
beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted
to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and
pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe
with a combination lock.
Dream or not, I had once known and
still knew. How any dream - or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend -
could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex,
I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought.
For was not this whole experience - this shocking familiarity with a set
of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity
of everything before me with what
only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested - a horror beyond all
reason?
Probably it was my basic conviction
then - as it is now during my saner moments - that I was not awake at all,
and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
Eventually, I reached the lowest
level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason
I tiled to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was
a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor.
As I drew near it I recalled what
thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and
closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account
I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt
vault where a similar trap-door had yawned.
I felt a current of cool, damp air
as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction.
Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
When I came to the space I saw that
the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead, the shelves began again, and I
glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with
dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a
fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover
why.
Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon,
for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the
heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals of the deafening clatter
of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that
I realized why I shook so violently.
Not the heap, but something about
the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch
it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be - there were
places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months
before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were
dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness
was highly disquieting.
When I brought the torchlight close
to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw - for the illusion
of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines
of composite impressions - impressions that went in threes, each slightly
over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints,
one in advance of the other four.
These possible lines of foot-square
impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone
somewhere and returned. They were, of course, very faint, and may have
been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling
terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the
heap of cases which must have clattered down not long
before, while at the other end
was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down
to abysses past imagination.
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