by Mike Ashley
“The lunar and solar attractions that control earthly tides are at this time in unique conjunction. The result will be a period of several hours during which the channel between the two isole becomes a dry bed. This phenomenon is not unknown, of course.”
She paused to smile, and David White was struck by the brightness and gentleness of her expression.
“Students of the Bible,” Speranza Verde went on, “will recall the parting of the Red Sea upon the command of Moses. It is my belief that this event was in fact a tidal anomaly similar to that which is about to occur. When we reach our destination, Captain Alexandre informs me, Rosny will rest upon her Wells tracks and use them for any needed short-distance travel. You may rest assured that we will be safe from the waters during this period, but we must all complete our work before the Marée rushes back upon us, however. Our period of safety, according to my calculations, will be approximately four hours, thirty-two minutes, and sixteen seconds.”
“I say, I say,” Sidwell-Blue put in. He had long since recovered his pipe and was puffing furiously away at it, challenging the ability of the air-circulator to keep up with his production of bluish smoke. “I say, are you sure this won’t be dangerous? Perhaps we should try this another time, don’t you know.”
From her position in a corner of the cabin, Captain Alexandre put in, “Quite sure, Sir Shepley. There is nothing to fear.”
“And as for another time,” Speranza Verde put in, “do you know how long it is since Moses parted the Red Sea? That is how often this peculiar phenomenon occurs. If we do not take advantage of our opportunity, we will all be several thousand years old before another such presents itself.”
“Well,” Sidwell-Blue stammered, “well, if you’re really certain, C-Captain. And, ah, D-Doktor. But, but, it strikes me that this is a dashedly dangerous undertaking. You know, I’ve always worked in the museum, don’t you know. This is all quite new to me, this racing about like a pack of Alan Quatermains and Captain Nemos.”
Out of the corner of his eye Colonel White saw what appeared to be a grey-cloaked and death-white-masked figure streak across the room and launch itself through the air. It bounced off the paunch of the unsuspecting Herr Schwartz, eliciting a startled grunt and a violent exclamation, then landed with a skid in the centre of the nautical chart that had been spread on the conference table.
“The apologies of Rosny, Mein Herr,” Captain Alexandre laughed. “Madame et Messieurs, may I present My Lady Bast, our ship’s mascot and mouser par excellence.”
The large cat studied each of the conferees in turn, directing a piercing glance from golden eyes that punctuated a snowy white face while she twitched her powder-grey tail thoughtfully. She made her opinion obvious, redirecting her attention from the conferees to the task of washing her paws.
“You should not barnyard animals on a ship carry,” Herr Schwartz growled, “unless they are cargo to market being transported.”
Captain Alexandre ignored the German’s complaint. She stroked the luxurious fur; My Lady Bast twitched her ears in response. Captain Alexandre compared the time according to her watch, with that indicated by the ship’s clock. She nodded to the hydrologist, Speranza Verde, then to the others. “I think it is time to begin your explorations. I will remain aboard Rosny. You understand the constraints of time under which you operate.”
At Captain Alexandre’s command the submersible rose to the surface of the Fleuve Triste. Colonel White found himself standing between Dottore Verde and Monsieur Rouge. A polished metal railing surrounded Rosny’s deck. Sea water dripped from it and ran from the submersible’s deck into the fleuve.
The sky above was still black. The tropic stars blazed like the flames that astronomers stated that they were.
Each of the explorers carried an electro-atomic powered portable lantern. Further, Colonel White noted to his amusement that the costume of each showed a mysterious bulge which he took to reveal the presence of a clandestinely carried firearm. Even Dottore Verde was so armed. Her weapon, he inferred, was most likely a small but efficient Gilsenti automatic pistol.
Now the sun’s first rays illumined the western sky, and within moments the edge of the solar disk appeared over the waters of the Sahara Sea. Bright points of light danced across the brine.
At this moment a buzzing sound was heard, and Colonel White along with his companions turned his eyes skyward. The daily flight from Rome to Serkout appeared, the sun’s early rays reflecting off its polished metal exterior. The Bleriot trimotor’s propellers were powered by Curie electro-atomic engines similar to those that furnished Rosny’s propulsion. The aeroplane’s passengers, business travellers, tourists, diplomats, might well be gazing downward at Rosny even as Rosny’s explorers were gazing upward at the Bleriot.
Now there came a great rushing, roaring sound; the submersible rocked, bounced once, and settled on to the rocky sand at the bottom of the Fleuve Triste. The Curie engine hummed and the submersible’s Wells tracks found their footing on the sand and steadied the submersible.
“Alors,” Captain Alexandre announced with a smile, “Madame et Messieurs, we are here. You have my permission to depart my ship. I wish you well, and shall expect your safe return in four hours, thirty-two minutes, sixteen seconds.”
She exchanged handshakes with Jemond Jules Rouge and Shepley Sidwell-Blue. Herr Schwartz instead offered a bow and click of his heels. With Speranza Verde she exchanged a brief embrace, and with Colonel Dwight David White a crisp military salute.
The explorers clambered down the ship’s ladder. Standing on the still moist sand of the Fleuve Triste they found it drying rapidly. The tropical sun seemed to have sprung into a brilliant and cloudless sky. Here and there specks of crystal in the Sahara sand reflected as points of brilliance.
Speranza Verde had brought with her the Roentgen-Daguerre plates that she had shown David White the night before, and Herr Schwartz carried a smaller version of the nautical chart that had been left on the conference table aboard Rosny.
A grey and white streak whizzed past the exploration party, raced up a sandy hillock and disappeared.
“That, was M-My Lady Bast, My Lady Bast!” Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue exclaimed. “The creature will be lost. The w-water will rush back in f-our hours and she will be l-lost.”
“Too bad for her,” Herr Schwartz growled. “But a good thing she did, the way showing us to the finds.” He held the map before him and pointed in the direction My Lady Bast had taken. “March!” he commanded.
My Lady Bast had left behind a track of feline footprints in the drying sand. The explorers followed the cat’s trail. The sun’s rays had already dispersed the chill of night air, and this small stretch of seabed was assuming the torrid glare it had known before the creation of the world’s newest sea.
Upon reaching the crest of a hillock the explorers were able to look back and see the submersible Rosny resting upon her Wells treads. Sailors moved on her decks polishing metalwork and cleaning hardwood, looking for all the world like miniatures performing in a puppet theatre. And in the other direction appeared a vision denied to human eyes by the dark waters of the Sahara Sea for three decades, and before that by the white sands of the erstwhile Sahara Desert for ten times as many millennia.
These were the rocks, dressed and polished, rising but a short distance from their position, that hid the secret of the Sahara.
Herr Siegfried Schwartz and Sir Shipley Sidwell-Blue raced ahead and dropped to their knees. Bending to examine the carven rocks on which they knelt, the ill-matched pair resembled nothing more than two worshippers come to make obeisance at an ancient shrine.
The uppermost rocks of the formation reflected the sun’s rays with a white brilliance; those lower in the ancient structure were still protected from direct illumination by the intervening crest. Schwartz and Sidwell-Blue were running their hands over the carven rocks, studying the figures placed there untold ages before by hands long since turned to dust.
As the
sun’s illumination spread and the shadows crept away solar brightness struck a glittering point so cleverly concealed within the intricacies of a carving as to be for all practical purposes invisible. As it did so the rock in which it had rested for thousands of years in utter darkness fell away from the kneeling explorers. There was exposed before them a dark opening, its walls as smooth and as carefully crafted as those of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
There was a flash of grey as My Lady Bast, returning from some place of concealment, streaked past the explorers and disappeared into the blackness.
Herr Schwartz switched on his electro-atomic lantern and sent its rays into the blackness, flashing them this way and that. Still on his knees, the German started down the passageway. As he did so – Colonel White took note – he reached inside his jacket and drew a weapon which White immediately identified as a Bergmann Model Five automatic pistol.
As Schwartz disappeared into the darkness he was followed by Jumond Jules Rouge and Speranza Verde, each brandishing a lantern and a firearm; Rouge’s weapon was a Lebel revolver and Verde the Gilsenti that White had expected.
Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue alone stepped aside as Colonel White moved toward the opening. “I th-think it would be b-best if one of us s-stood guard out here, C-Colonel, don’t you know? Just in case, w-well, don’t you know, in case of need.”
David White nodded and followed Speranza Verde into the darkness.
The tunnel slanted downward into bedrock. To David White’s surprise the air tasted fresh. He could see only a short distance ahead, thanks to the procession of bodies, but at length he heard a grunt and a guttural exclamation, followed by a series of increasingly excited vocalizations as first Schwartz, then Rouge, than Speranza Verde emerged from the slanting passage.
White paused momentarily, pointing his lantern this way and that, then dropped the few feet from the mouth of the passageway into the chamber. Two men and a woman had separated in the chamber; flashing beams from their lanterns criss-crossed in a virtual museum of unknowable antiquity. Statues cast great monolithic shadows in the flashing lantern-beams. Some were tiny and were exhibited on plinths as high as his own waist; others were of human size. At the far end of the chamber a figure rose to herculean heights, its details concealed by distance and darkness.
The walls were covered with paintings that appeared as fresh as though they had been created this very day. The scenes portrayed were those of nature, of forests and rivers, of hippopotami and crocodiles and okapi, the beasts that must have roamed the once-fertile plains of the Sahara before it had dried to form the desert now covered by the waters of the sea.
Colonel White paced slowly past paintings executed with impressive craftsmanship and skill. Yet there was something disquieting and unpleasant about the images.
The paintings, he inferred, represented a chronology, for after a time there appeared among the beasts of the forest primitive human figures, and even more disquietingly, other figures that were those of neither humans nor beasts, but of something . . . other. He thought briefly of the fierce-looking lantern fish that had studied the explorers through the cabin glass of Rosny even as they had studied it.
The lantern fish, of course, was fitted by nature with fins for propulsion and with a form adapted to life beneath the surface of the sea. But the creatures in the paintings appeared as if they were distant evolutionary relatives of the lantern fish, great, pop-eyed, piscine beings. White remembered a lecture in a long-ago classroom, where he had heard a savant expound upon the theory that whales, dolphins, sea lions and seals had all evolved from marine creatures on to the land, and had then returned at some time to their ancestral home to become once again creatures of the deep.
Could the unpleasant beings pictured on the carven walls have followed a parallel but opposite evolutionary path, emerging from the sea to live on the surface of the earth even as mammals were returning from the land to live beneath the sea?
More panels of ancient art revealed an ongoing march of progress, if progress it might be called, as both humans and piscines advanced. Cities appeared, and great sky-going machines. The two civilizations developed side by side but there was little commerce and no friendship between them, until in a series of paintings portraying a terrible war the human civilization was destroyed and that of the fish-men emerged triumphant.
There was a yowl from the end of the gallery and White whirled to see My Lady Bast rising on her hind legs, her coat standing on end to give her the appearance of a beast three times her actual size. Her paws were raised and her sabre-like claws were extended. Her needle-sharp teeth seemed to have grown into the fangs of a feline many times her size but no less outraged than was My Lady Bast.
She stood poised before the great statue that ended the gallery, and as Colonel White and his companions stood in stupefaction she dropped to all fours, ran forward, launched herself into the air and caught at the convolutions of the lowermost part of the statue.
The brilliant beams of four Curie lanterns followed the cat as she clawed and fought her way upward on the statue. The thing was monstrous, a variant of the horrible image that Speranza Verde had shown Colonel White the night before.
The thing was fitted with tentacle-like stalks, uncounted numbers of them, some terminating in sucker-like mouths, others in shining eyes. It had a head, or what must serve as a head, shaped like a five-pointed star, each extremity of this bearing a great, dark eye.
Most horrifying of all, David White stood paralyzed with shock and fear. And know well, even the noblest of men know fear; it is the overcoming of this experience that comprises true courage. That which had paralyzed White was the sight of the five points of the statue’s face writhing and turning, turning horribly, until the eyes focused upon My Lady Bast the cat.
From all directions, tentacles tipped with horrid mouths and rows of teeth resembling those of giant, extinct sharks, wove toward My Lady Bast. From the cat there came a blood-freezing scream of raging ferocity as the pleasantly disposed ship’s mascot was transformed into a whirlwind of fury and violence.
My Lady Bast flew from the grasping, mouth-tipped tentacles, the points of her claws leaving a trail of punctures from which there spurted a steaming green ichor. Blobs of the foul liquid splashed on the great paving stones with which the room was floored. Each point of contact was transformed into a miniature cauldron that seethed and bubbled and from which a noxious greenish vapour arose.
The cat by now had reached the star-shaped head of the monstrous living statue. Using the claws of two paws while she clung to the monstrous visage with the others, she shredded one baleful eye, then moved to the next and the next. The monstrous living statue yielded to a series of spasms.
David White, watching the incredible battle of a feline analog of his Biblical namesake against this titanic alien Goliath, realized to his astonishment that the star-headed monster was actually terrified. He was aware that Siegfried Schwartz had drawn his Bergmann automatic and was firing at the monstrosity. Other members of the exploring party, Rouge, Speranza Verde, had drawn their own weapons and were pointing them upward.
Bounding forward to place himself between his comrades and the monster, David White waved his arms and cried out, “Careful! Careful! Don’t hit the cat!”
Even as the sound of two revolvers and an automatic pistol echoed off the walls and ceiling of the chamber, the great monstrosity, blinded now and bleeding green ichor from its wounds, gave forth a mighty roar that echoed and re-echoed through the hall. It gave a mighty spasm and My Lady Bast, the grey and white warrior, her grasp on the star-shaped head broken by the jolt, was flung from the monster. As if fully accustomed to flight she soared through the darkened reaches of the tomb, falling at last into the welcoming arms of Colonel David White.
But this was no gentle pussy. My Lady Bast had been transformed into a warrior-goddess and she was not so quick to resume her domestic mien. Raking claws shredded White’s military tunic and suddenly terrifying fangs s
napped within millimetres of his eye, removing a gobbet of flesh just at his cheekbone. Then My Lady Bast flexed powerful legs, launched herself from his torso and disappeared into the darkness of the tomb.
Rouge, Schwartz and Verde had advanced cautiously toward the monster. In its great spasm it had flung itself from its plinth and lay thrashing on the stone floor. Its mouths seemed to possess the power of speech independent of one another, and they uttered sounds that resembled human speech as a horrid parody of the human form might resemble a beautiful woman.
Siegfried Schwartz, surely crude and perhaps cruel as well, was by no means lacking in courage. He had advanced to within an arm’s reach of the monster and was speaking to it in a language which David White did not understand, but which he inferred to be that of ancient Egypt. Astonishingly, the monster seemed to hear and understand the German archaeologist, and to reply in a strange and terrible variant of the same language.
Without warning the monster managed to raise itself halfway to a vertical position. It turned its eye-tipped tentacles toward the roof of the chamber.
There, its rays focused through a lens of tinted mica, the sun casting a single, bright beam into the chamber. The beam had obviously been aimed, how many millennia before there was no way of calculating. In its light one of the painted panels on the tomblike wall seemed almost to come to life.
A row of half-human figures knelt in postures of worship. There was a man with the head of a falcon, a woman with the features of a lioness, a hawk-man, a woman in the grotesque form of a hippopotamus, a being with a human body and the head of a crocodile. David White did not know their names, but he recognized them as Egyptian deities. And they were kneeling in submission.
Before them stood a party of star-headed, tentacled monsters like the one whose statue had seemingly come to life only to be slain by the ferocity of a ship’s grey and white mascot. And behind the alien beings could be seen a sleek machine, obviously a vehicle that had brought its occupants from some home unimaginable to mere humanity.