At the Earth's Core
Page 5
V
SLAVES
As we descended the broad staircase which led to the main avenue ofPhutra I caught my first sight of the dominant race of the inner world.Involuntarily I shrank back as one of the creatures approached toinspect us. A more hideous thing it would be impossible to imagine.The all-powerful Mahars of Pellucidar are great reptiles, some six oreight feet in length, with long narrow heads and great round eyes.Their beak-like mouths are lined with sharp, white fangs, and the backsof their huge, lizard bodies are serrated into bony ridges from theirnecks to the end of their long tails. Their feet are equipped withthree webbed toes, while from the fore feet membranous wings, which areattached to their bodies just in front of the hind legs, protrude at anangle of 45 degrees toward the rear, ending in sharp points severalfeet above their bodies.
I glanced at Perry as the thing passed me to inspect him. The old manwas gazing at the horrid creature with wide astonished eyes. When itpassed on, he turned to me.
"A rhamphorhynchus of the Middle Olitic, David," he said, "but, gad,how enormous! The largest remains we ever have discovered have neverindicated a size greater than that attained by an ordinary crow."
As we continued on through the main avenue of Phutra we saw manythousand of the creatures coming and going upon their daily duties.They paid but little attention to us. Phutra is laid out undergroundwith a regularity that indicates remarkable engineering skill. It ishewn from solid limestone strata. The streets are broad and of auniform height of twenty feet. At intervals tubes pierce the roof ofthis underground city, and by means of lenses and reflectors transmitthe sunlight, softened and diffused, to dispel what would otherwise beCimmerian darkness. In like manner air is introduced.
Perry and I were taken, with Ghak, to a large public building, whereone of the Sagoths who had formed our guard explained to a Maharanofficial the circumstances surrounding our capture. The method ofcommunication between these two was remarkable in that no spoken wordswere exchanged. They employed a species of sign language. As I was tolearn later, the Mahars have no ears, nor any spoken language. Amongthemselves they communicate by means of what Perry says must be a sixthsense which is cognizant of a fourth dimension.
I never did quite grasp him, though he endeavored to explain it to meupon numerous occasions. I suggested telepathy, but he said no, thatit was not telepathy since they could only communicate when in eachothers' presence, nor could they talk with the Sagoths or the otherinhabitants of Pellucidar by the same method they used to converse withone another.
"What they do," said Perry, "is to project their thoughts into thefourth dimension, when they become appreciable to the sixth sense oftheir listener. Do I make myself quite clear?"
"You do not, Perry," I replied. He shook his head in despair, andreturned to his work. They had set us to carrying a great accumulationof Maharan literature from one apartment to another, and therearranging it upon shelves. I suggested to Perry that we were in thepublic library of Phutra, but later, as he commenced to discover thekey to their written language, he assured me that we were handling theancient archives of the race.
During this period my thoughts were continually upon Dian theBeautiful. I was, of course, glad that she had escaped the Mahars, andthe fate that had been suggested by the Sagoth who had threatened topurchase her upon our arrival at Phutra. I often wondered if thelittle party of fugitives had been overtaken by the guards who hadreturned to search for them. Sometimes I was not so sure but that Ishould have been more contented to know that Dian was here in Phutra,than to think of her at the mercy of Hooja the Sly One. Ghak, Perry,and I often talked together of possible escape, but the Sarian was sosteeped in his lifelong belief that no one could escape from the Maharsexcept by a miracle, that he was not much aid to us--his attitude wasof one who waits for the miracle to come to him.
At my suggestion Perry and I fashioned some swords of scraps of ironwhich we discovered among some rubbish in the cells where we slept, forwe were permitted almost unrestrained freedom of action within thelimits of the building to which we had been assigned. So great werethe number of slaves who waited upon the inhabitants of Phutra thatnone of us was apt to be overburdened with work, nor were our mastersunkind to us.
We hid our new weapons beneath the skins which formed our beds, andthen Perry conceived the idea of making bows and arrows--weaponsapparently unknown within Pellucidar. Next came shields; but these Ifound it easier to steal from the walls of the outer guardroom of thebuilding.
We had completed these arrangements for our protection after leavingPhutra when the Sagoths who had been sent to recapture the escapedprisoners returned with four of them, of whom Hooja was one. Dian andtwo others had eluded them. It so happened that Hooja was confined inthe same building with us. He told Ghak that he had not seen Dian orthe others after releasing them within the dark grotto. What hadbecome of them he had not the faintest conception--they might bewandering yet, lost within the labyrinthine tunnel, if not dead fromstarvation.
I was now still further apprehensive as to the fate of Dian, and atthis time, I imagine, came the first realization that my affection forthe girl might be prompted by more than friendship. During my wakinghours she was constantly the subject of my thoughts, and when I slepther dear face haunted my dreams. More than ever was I determined toescape the Mahars.
"Perry," I confided to the old man, "if I have to search every inch ofthis diminutive world I am going to find Dian the Beautiful and rightthe wrong I unintentionally did her." That was the excuse I made forPerry's benefit.
"Diminutive world!" he scoffed. "You don't know what you are talkingabout, my boy," and then he showed me a map of Pellucidar which he hadrecently discovered among the manuscript he was arranging.
"Look," he cried, pointing to it, "this is evidently water, and allthis land. Do you notice the general configuration of the two areas?Where the oceans are upon the outer crust, is land here. Theserelatively small areas of ocean follow the general lines of thecontinents of the outer world.
"We know that the crust of the globe is 500 miles in thickness; thenthe inside diameter of Pellucidar must be 7,000 miles, and thesuperficial area 165,480,000 square miles. Three-fourths of this island. Think of it! A land area of 124,110,000 square miles! Our ownworld contains but 53,000,000 square miles of land, the balance of itssurface being covered by water. Just as we often compare nations bytheir relative land areas, so if we compare these two worlds in thesame way we have the strange anomaly of a larger world within a smallerone!
"Where within vast Pellucidar would you search for your Dian? Withoutstars, or moon, or changing sun how could you find her even though youknew where she might be found?"
The proposition was a corker. It quite took my breath away; but Ifound that it left me all the more determined to attempt it.
"If Ghak will accompany us we may be able to do it," I suggested.
Perry and I sought him out and put the question straight to him.
"Ghak," I said, "we are determined to escape from this bondage. Willyou accompany us?"
"They will set the thipdars upon us," he said, "and then we shall bekilled; but--" he hesitated--"I would take the chance if I thought thatI might possibly escape and return to my own people."
"Could you find your way back to your own land?" asked Perry. "Andcould you aid David in his search for Dian?"
"Yes."
"But how," persisted Perry, "could you travel to strange countrywithout heavenly bodies or a compass to guide you?"
Ghak didn't know what Perry meant by heavenly bodies or a compass, buthe assured us that you might blindfold any man of Pellucidar and carryhim to the farthermost corner of the world, yet he would be able tocome directly to his own home again by the shortest route. He seemedsurprised to think that we found anything wonderful in it. Perry saidit must be some sort of homing instinct such as is possessed by certainbreeds of earthly pigeons. I didn't know, of course, but it gave me anidea.
"Surely," replied Ghak, "unless some mighty beast of prey killed her."
I was for making the attempted escape at once, but both Perry and Ghakcounseled waiting for some propitious accident which would insure ussome small degree of success. I didn't see what accident could befalla whole community in a land of perpetual day-light where theinhabitants had no fixed habits of sleep. Why, I am sure that some ofthe Mahars never sleep, while others may, at long intervals, crawl intothe dark recesses beneath their dwellings and curl up in protractedslumber. Perry says that if a Mahar stays awake for three years hewill make up all his lost sleep in a long year's snooze. That may beall true, but I never saw but three of them asleep, and it was thesight of these three that gave me a suggestion for our means of escape.
I had been searching about far below the levels that we slaves weresupposed to frequent--possibly fifty feet beneath the main floor of thebuilding--among a network of corridors and apartments, when I camesuddenly upon three Mahars curled up upon a bed of skins. At first Ithought they were dead, but later their regular breathing convinced meof my error. Like a flash the thought came to me of the marvelousopportunity these sleeping reptiles offered as a means of eluding thewatchfulness of our captors and the Sagoth guards.
Hastening back to Perry where he pored over a musty pile of, to me,meaningless hieroglyphics, I explained my plan to him. To my surprisehe was horrified.
"It would be murder, David," he cried.
"Murder to kill a reptilian monster?" I asked in astonishment.
"Here they are not monsters, David," he replied. "Here they are thedominant race--we are the 'monsters'--the lower orders. In Pellucidarevolution has progressed along different lines than upon the outerearth. These terrible convulsions of nature time and time again wipedout the existing species--but for this fact some monster of theSaurozoic epoch might rule today upon our own world. We see here whatmight well have occurred in our own history had conditions been whatthey have been here.
"Life within Pellucidar is far younger than upon the outer crust. Hereman has but reached a stage analogous to the Stone Age of our ownworld's history, but for countless millions of years these reptileshave been progressing. Possibly it is the sixth sense which I am surethey possess that has given them an advantage over the other and morefrightfully armed of their fellows; but this we may never know. Theylook upon us as we look upon the beasts of our fields, and I learn fromtheir written records that other races of Mahars feed upon men--theykeep them in great droves, as we keep cattle. They breed them mostcarefully, and when they are quite fat, they kill and eat them."
I shuddered.
"What is there horrible about it, David?" the old man asked. "Theyunderstand us no better than we understand the lower animals of our ownworld. Why, I have come across here very learned discussions of thequestion as to whether gilaks, that is men, have any means ofcommunication. One writer claims that we do not even reason--that ourevery act is mechanical, or instinctive. The dominant race ofPellucidar, David, have not yet learned that men converse amongthemselves, or reason. Because we do not converse as they do it isbeyond them to imagine that we converse at all. It is thus that wereason in relation to the brutes of our own world. They know that theSagoths have a spoken language, but they cannot comprehend it, or howit manifests itself, since they have no auditory apparatus. Theybelieve that the motions of the lips alone convey the meaning. Thatthe Sagoths can communicate with us is incomprehensible to them.
"Yes, David," he concluded, "it would entail murder to carry out yourplan."
"Very well then, Perry." I replied. "I shall become a murderer."
He got me to go over the plan again most carefully, and for some reasonwhich was not at the time clear to me insisted upon a very carefuldescription of the apartments and corridors I had just explored.
"I wonder, David," he said at length, "as you are determined to carryout your wild scheme, if we could not accomplish something of very realand lasting benefit for the human race of Pellucidar at the same time.Listen, I have learned much of a most surprising nature from thesearchives of the Mahars. That you may appreciate my plan I shallbriefly outline the history of the race.
"Once the males were all-powerful, but ages ago the females, little bylittle, assumed the mastery. For other ages no noticeable change tookplace in the race of Mahars. It continued to progress under theintelligent and beneficent rule of the ladies. Science took vaststrides. This was especially true of the sciences which we know asbiology and eugenics. Finally a certain female scientist announced thefact that she had discovered a method whereby eggs might be fertilizedby chemical means after they were laid--all true reptiles, you know,are hatched from eggs.
"What happened? Immediately the necessity for males ceased toexist--the race was no longer dependent upon them. More ages elapseduntil at the present time we find a race consisting exclusively offemales. But here is the point. The secret of this chemical formulais kept by a single race of Mahars. It is in the city of Phutra, andunless I am greatly in error I judge from your description of thevaults through which you passed today that it lies hidden in the cellarof this building.
"For two reasons they hide it away and guard it jealously. First,because upon it depends the very life of the race of Mahars, andsecond, owing to the fact that when it was public property as at firstso many were experimenting with it that the danger of over-populationbecame very grave.
"David, if we can escape, and at the same time take with us this greatsecret what will we not have accomplished for the human race withinPellucidar!" The very thought of it fairly overpowered me. Why, we twowould be the means of placing the men of the inner world in theirrightful place among created things. Only the Sagoths would then standbetween them and absolute supremacy, and I was not quite sure but thatthe Sagoths owed all their power to the greater intelligence of theMahars--I could not believe that these gorilla-like beasts were themental superiors of the human race of Pellucidar.
"Why, Perry," I exclaimed, "you and I may reclaim a whole world!Together we can lead the races of men out of the darkness of ignoranceinto the light of advancement and civilization. At one step we maycarry them from the Age of Stone to the twentieth century. It'smarvelous--absolutely marvelous just to think about it."
"David," said the old man, "I believe that God sent us here for justthat purpose--it shall be my life work to teach them His word--to leadthem into the light of His mercy while we are training their hearts andhands in the ways of culture and civilization."
"You are right, Perry," I said, "and while you are teaching them topray I'll be teaching them to fight, and between us we'll make a raceof men that will be an honor to us both."
Ghak had entered the apartment some time before we concluded ourconversation, and now he wanted to know what we were so excited about.Perry thought we had best not tell him too much, and so I onlyexplained that I had a plan for escape. When I had outlined it to him,he seemed about as horror-struck as Perry had been; but for a differentreason. The Hairy One only considered the horrible fate that would beours were we discovered; but at last I prevailed upon him to accept myplan as the only feasible one, and when I had assured him that I wouldtake all the responsibility for it were we captured, he accorded areluctant assent.