* * *
he pilot room was dark when they entered. Only the glow from the instrument panel showed the two men who were seated behind the wheel controls. One of them turned and nodded a welcome.
"Can't offer you gentlemen seats," he said, "but if you'll stand right here behind us you can see the whole works." He did not wait for a reply, but turned back toward the black night ahead.
Smithy glanced past him at the lighted instruments and found the altimeter. Twelve thousand—yes, there was nasty country hereabouts. Then he, too, stared out into the dark at the sky sprinkled with stars, at the vague blur of an unlighted world far below, and off at either side and behind them the quivering lines of cold light where starlight was reflected dimly from the spinning propellers.
Other wing lights winked out as he watched, and he knew that from that moment on, they were invisible from below—invisible to human eyes at least—that they were sweeping on through the darkness like some gargantuan night bird pursuing its prey.
"Flares ahead, sir," one of the pilots had spoken into the mouthpiece of his telephone, spoken lightly, reporting back to Captain Farrell. The words whipped Smithy's head about, and he, too, saw on a distant horizon, the beginning of a white glare.
They were fighting there—two hundred planes roaring downward, one formation following another. In his mind he was seeing it so plainly.
The white blaze of light dead ahead grew broader. It had not been as far distant as he had first thought, and the scene that he had pictured came swiftly to reality.
* * *
heir own ship was still at the twelve-thousand-foot level. Ahead, and five thousand feet below, tiny lights, red and white and green, lights whose swift motion made their hundreds seem like thousands instead, were weaving intricate patterns in the night. The flying lights of the fighting planes were on for the planes' own protection; and, too, no further concealment was possible in the glare that shone upward from below.
Settling downward were balls of blinding fire, flares dropped by the squadron of scout planes that had torn through in advance. They lighted brilliantly a valley which, a few hours before, had been one of many like it—square fields, dark green with the foliage of fruit trees, straight lines of crossing roads, houses, and off in the distance a little city.
And now the valley was an inferno of spouting flame. That city was a vast, roaring furnace under smoke clouds of mingled blood-red and black. The valley floor was a place of desolation, of drifting smoke and of flashing shell-bursts as the fleet swept in above.
The myriad lights of the planes had drawn into a circle, a great whirlpool of lines that revolved above a mile-wide section of that valley.
Beside Smithy a wheel control was moving. He clung to the pilot's seat as their own plane banked and nosed downward. And now he shouted aloud to Culver:
"The mole-men! There they are! Thousands of them!"
* * *
e was pointing between the two pilots as their own plane swept down. He could see them plainly now, clotted masses of dark figures surging frenziedly to and fro. For an instant he saw them—then that part of the world where they had been was a seething inferno of bursting bombs and shells.
Beside him Colonel Culver spoke quietly: "Caught them cold! That's handing it to them."
Their own plane had leveled off. With motors throttled they were drifting slowly past, only a thousand feet higher than the circling planes just off at one side. Culver's quiet tones rose to a hoarse shout: "The ships! My God, they're falling!"
His wild cry ended in a gasp. Beside him Smithy, in breathless horror, like Culver, was staring at that whirlpool of tiny lights that had gone suddenly from smooth circular motion into frenzied confusion, or vanished in the yellow glare of exploding gas tanks. The light of their own white flares picked them out in ghastly clarity as they fell.
Straight, vertical lines of yellow were burning planes. Again they made horrible zigzag darts and flashed down into view torn and helpless, while others, tens and scores of others with crumpled wings, joined the mad dance of death.
Smithy knew that he could never tear his eyes away from the sight. Yet within him something was clamoring for his attention. "They didn't do it from below!" that something was shouting. "Not down in that hell. There are more of them somewhere." Then somehow, he forced his eyes to stare ahead and outside of that circle of fearful fascination and he knew that for an instant he was seeing a single stab of green flame.
* * *
ne single light on the darkness of a little knoll that stood close beside this place of white flame and destruction. One light—and in the valley there had flashed a million brighter. It had shone but an instant, but, to Smithy, watching, it was the same he had seen when their own camp was attacked. And now it was Smithy who was abruptly stone cold.
One hand closed upon a pilot's shoulder with a grip of steel; his other pointed. "Down there—they're hiding back of that hill, picking off our ships from the side." And then, like a guiding beacon, a point of green showed once more.
The plane banked sharply while one of the pilots spoke crisp, clearly enunciated words into his phone. He listened; then: "Right!" he snapped. "Power dive for bow-gun firing. Level off for bombing from five hundred feet."
Off into the night they were headed. Then a left bank and turn brought the place of blazing flares and falling planes swinging smoothly into view; they were flying toward it.
* * *
gainst the white glare in the valley of death was a hill, roundly outlined. Then the ship's nose sank heavily down; and, from each broad wing, in straight, forward-stabbing lines, was the steady lightning of the Rickert batteries in action.
The pilot's room was a place of unbearable sound. The crash of gunfire, it seemed, must crush the glass wall like an eggshell by the sheer impact of its own thunder. In that pandemonium Smithy never knew when they flattened out. He knew only that the hill ahead twinkled brilliantly, and that each flashing light was an exploding shell. He knew when the hill passed beneath them.
Then, in the night, close beside them and just outside the pilot-room glass, was a quick glow of red. The plane lurched and staggered. Smithy clung desperately to the seat ahead. The pilot was fighting madly with the wheel. The roar of bombs from astern, where the bombers had launched their missiles at the approaching hill, was unheard. In a world suddenly gone chaotic he could hear nothing. He knew only that the valley dead ahead was whirling dizzily—that it sank suddenly from sight.
They were crashing. That red glow—they had been hit. Then something hard and firm was pressing against him, pressing irresistibly. It was the last conscious impression upon Smithy's mind.
* * *
CHAPTER XIX
The Voice of the Mountain
n a strange new world surrounded by a group of kneeling figures of whom one, who called himself Gor, had spoken in Rawson's own tongue, Dean Rawson stood silent. It was all too overwhelming. He could not bring words together to formulate a reply. He only stood and stared with wondering eyes at the exquisite beauty of the world about him, a world flooded with a golden light, faintly tinged with green. Then he looked above him to see the source of that light and found the sun.
Not the sun that he had known, but a flaming ball nevertheless. Straight above it hung, in the center of the heavens, a gleaming disk of pale-green gold, magnificently brilliant. He saw it through lids half closed against its glare. Then his gaze swept back down the blue vault of the heavens, back to a world of impossible beauty.
Directly ahead was a land of desolation, radiant in its barrenness. For every rock, every foot of ground, was made of crystal. Nearby hills were visions of loveliness where the colors of a million rainbows quivered and flashed. Veins of metal showed the rich blues and greens of peacock coloring. Others were scarlet, topaz, green, and all of them took the strange sunlight that flooded them and threw it back in blendings radiant and delicate.
The little hills began a short distance off, two lo
w ranges running directly away. One on either side, they made brilliant walls for the flat valley between, whose foreground was barren rock of rose and white. But beyond the glistening barren stretch were green fields of luxuriant vegetation and in the distance, nestled in the green were clustered masses that might have been a city of men. Still farther on, a single mountain peak, white beyond belief, reared its graceful sweeping sides to a shining apex against the heavens of clear blue.
* * *
lowly Rawson turned. A hundred yards away, at his left, there was water, a sea whose smooth rollers might have been undulating liquid emeralds that broke to infinite flashing gems upon the shore. He swung sharply to the right and found the same expanse of water, perhaps the same distance away.
Then he turned toward the shell, which had been behind him and the shaft from which it had emerged, and into which the air was driving with a ceaseless rushing sound. Now, looking beyond them, he found the same ocean; he was standing on a blunt point of rock projecting into the sea. The rest of this world was one vast expanse of water.
Suddenly Rawson knew that it was unlike any ocean of earth. Instead of finishing on a sharply-cut horizon, that sea of emerald green reached out and still out, and up! It did not fall away. It curved upward, until it lost itself in the distance and merged with the blue of the sky. It was the same on all sides.
He swung slowly back to face the land that perhaps was only an island. The kneeling ones had raised their bowed heads. They were regarding him from shining, expectant eyes. Only the girl kept her face averted. Rawson spoke to none of them; the exclamations that his amazement and dismay wrung from his lips were meant for himself.
"It's concave! It curves upward! I'm on the inside of the world! And that sun is the center! But what holds us here? What keeps us from falling?" He passed one hand heavily across his eyes. The excitement of the moment had lifted him above the weariness of muscle and mind. Now fatigue claimed him.
"Sleep," he said dully. "I've got to sleep. I've got to. I'm all in."
Gor was beside him in an instant. "Whatever you wish is yours," he promised.
* * *
awson was to remember little of that journey toward the habitations of this people. Gor had spoken at times along the way: "... the Land of the Central Sun.... The People of the Light, peaceful and happy in our little world...."
Rawson had roused himself to ask: "Who it at the head of it? Who is the king, the ruler?"
And the tall man beside him had answered humbly: "Always since the beginning one named Gor has led. My father, and those who came before him; now it is I. And when I have gone, my little son will take the name of Gor."
He had glanced toward the girl and his voice had dropped into the soft, liquid syllables of their own tongue. She had smiled back at Gor, though her eyes persistently refused to meet those of Rawson.
Again Gor spoke in words that Rawson could understand.
"I think at times," he said, "it is my daughter Loah, my little Loah-San who really rules. I, knowing not who you were, did not approve of this expedition, but Loah insisted. She had seen you, and—" A glance from the girl cut him short.
The words lingered in Rawson's mind when he awoke. The horrible experience of the past days were no longer predominant. Even his own world seemed of a dim and distant past.
* * *
e awoke refreshed. He was in a new world and, for the moment, he asked nothing except to explore its mystery. He bathed under a fountain in an adjoining room, and grinned broadly as he wrapped the folds of the long golden loin cloth about him.
"As well be dead as out of style," he quoted. "And now to find Gor and Loah, and see what the devil all this is about—a talking mountain and a buried race that speaks first-rate American."
Gor was waiting for him in a room whose translucent walls admitted a subdued glow from outside. There was food on a table, strange fruits, and a clear scarlet liquid in a crystal glass. Rawson ate ravenously, then followed Gor.
Outside were houses, whose timbered frames of jet-black contrasted startlingly with the quartz walls they enclosed. The street was thronged with people who drew back to let them pass, and who dropped to their knees in humble worship. Like Gor, the men wore only the loin cloth, but for this gala day, that simple apparel added a note of flashing color. The long cloths wrapped about their hips, and brought up and about the waist where the ends hung free, were brilliant with countless variations of crimson and blue and gold. The same rainbow hues were found in the loose folded cloths that draped themselves like short skirts from the women's waists. Here and there, in the sea of white bodies and scintillant jeweled breast-plates, was one with an additional flash of color, where brilliant silken scarves had been thrown about the shoulders of the younger girls.
"From all the land," said Gor, "they have come to do you honor."
* * *
ardly more than a village, this cluster of strangely beautiful shelters for the People of the Light. Beyond, Rawson saw the country, pastures where animals, weird and strange, were cropping the grass so vividly green; fields of growing things; little crystal houses like fanciful, glistening toys that had miraculously grown to greater size. The dwellings were sprinkled far into the distance across the landscape. Beyond them was the base of the mountain, magnificent and glorious in its crystal purity of white, and the striations, vertical and diagonal, that flashed brilliantly with black jet and peacock green.
Rawson knew them for mineral intrusions, and knew that the mountain was only one crystalline mass of all the quartz formation that made of the world's inner core a gigantic geode, gleaming in eternal brilliance under the glow of the central sun. And still, in it all, Dean Rawson had seen a lack without which perfection could not be complete.
"Where is Loah?" he asked of Gor. "I thought—I had hoped...."
Something in Gor's face told Rawson that his companion was troubled. "She refused to come," he said. "But the wish of one of the great ones from the Land of the Sun is a command." He shouted an order before Rawson could put in a protest. A man darted away.
"Always happy, my little Loah-San," said Gor. His eyes held a puzzled look. "Always until now. And now she weeps and will not say why. Come, we will walk more slowly. There were questions you wished to ask. I will answer them as we walk."
"Questions?" exclaimed Rawson. "A thousand of them."
* * *
nd now for the first time since, at the top of a barren peak, in the dark of the desert night, his wild journey had begun, he found answers, definite and precise, to the puzzles he had been unable to solve.
Their speech—their language—how was it they could talk with him? He fired the questions out with furious eagerness, and Gor replied.
As to their speech—the Holy Mountain itself would explain. And yes, truly, this was the center of the world, or the sun above them was. The central sun did not attract, but instead repelled all matter from it—all things but one, the sun-stone, of which Gor would speak later.
Rawson pounced upon that and demanded corroboration.
"All the power of earth tends to draw every object to its center, yet we're here on an inner surface. We're walking actually head down. And our bodies, every stone, every particle of matter, ought by well-known laws to fall into that flaming center. But we don't! That proves your point—proves a counter gravitation. Then there must be a neutral zone. A place where this upward thrust is exactly equalled by gravity's downward pull.
"The zone of fire," said Gor. "You passed through it. Did you not see?"
"Saw it and felt it!" Rawson's mind leaped immediately to the next question.
"And we must have come through it at, surely, a thousand miles an hour. What drove us? That shell must have gone in from here. I can understand its falling one way, but not two. We should have come to rest in that very spot—and we'd have lasted about half a second if we had."
"Oro and Grah," said Gor. "Oro, the sun-stone, and Grah, the stone-that-loves-the-dark. But they are
not stones, neither are they metal. We find them deep in the ground, clinging to the caves. A fine powder, both of them."
"Still I don't get it," said Rawson. "You drive that shell in from here, and then you drive it back again."
"That, too, I will explain later. It is simple; even the Dwellers in the Dark—those whom you call the mole-men—have Oro and Grah to serve them."
* * *
or launched into a long account of their tribal legends, of that time in the long ago when an angry sun god had driven his children inside the earth; of how Gor, and the son of Gor, and his son's sons tried always to return.
Rawson was listening only subconsciously. They were circling the white mountain, ascending its lower slope. Now he could see beyond it as far as the land extended, and he was startled to find this distance so short. They were on an island, ten miles or so in length, and beyond it was the sea; he must ask Gor about that.
"It is all that is left," said Gor, when Rawson interrupted his narrative. "Once the land was great and the sea small—this also in the long ago—but always it has risen. The air we breathe and the water in the sea come from the central sun. The air rushes out, as you know; the water has no place to retreat."
Again he took up his tale, but Rawson's eyes were following the upward curve of that sea. They, seemed to be in the bottom of a great bowl; he was trying to estimate, trying to gage distance.
"... and so, after many generations had lived and died, they found the Pathway to the Light," Gor was saying. "It is our name for the shaft through which you came. This was thousands of your years ago, when he who was then Gor, and the bravest of the tribe, descended. Even then they were workers in metal and they knew of Oro and Grah. They were our fathers, the first People of the Light."
Two Thousand Miles Below Page 12