They muttered agreement and he went on: “The men will be the first to follow me—old business of women and children last—with the exception of Vladimir who’s to stay behind and help the girls out in case they get a fit of nerves at the last moment. You’ve all got to come—whether you like it or not because we can’t afford to waste explosives, and this first time we’ll have the value of surprise. They can never have come up against such things before—so it’s our one big chance to establish ourselves on that quay. See what I mean?”
Further murmurs conveyed their understanding.
“Right then. Now, once we are all out of the sphere we’ve got to adopt a definite formation and stick to it. We shall form three ranks. Count Axel and myself will be in front. Behind us the second rank will march four abreast. Sally and Camilla in the centre with Nicky and Doctor Tisch on either flank. Our third and last rank will consist of Bozo and Vladimir walking behind the two girls. I’ve placed them in the rear-guard on purpose because they are the strong men of the party and it is essential that our biggest strength should be concentrated to protect our backs. Are you ready now?”
“Yes,” said Camilla in a whisper, “we’re ready.”
Then, just over an hour after he’d made his first appearance the McKay again crawled through the hole.
The great herd still crouched on the quay, peering into the darkness with their blank pale eyes. As the McKay’s feet splashed into the few inches of water there was a rustle among them and they all stood up.
“Hello there?” he shouted, but the shrill cries broke out again and their arms lifted.
He was prepared this time and slipped behind the sphere. It formed good cover and not one of the shower of stones touched him. Then, as it slackened he came round the sphere’s side and lobbed a bomb right over the quay wall into the midst of the nude grey-white figures. After it he flung a second, then two more which he took from his pockets. As the fourth sailed into the air the first exploded. There was a stab of flame among the densely packed mass, then a shattering crash which reverberated through the whole vast cavern.
The McKay never saw what happened for he had dodged back behind the sphere to avoid the continuous rain of stones. Three more crashing explosions followed and he knew that his home-made grenades had not let him down. The stones ceased clanging on the sphere. He peered out. The quay was empty but for four little heaps of whitish-grey writhing figures who twittered now in a pain-racked falsetto. Axel and Nicky were already outside the sphere. Bozo was coming through the hole. The rest soon followed and fell in as he had ordered, the two girls together in the middle. The McKay only paused to see that they were properly placed in formation then he yelled:
“Come on now,” and splashed through the water at a run towards the quay.
He and Axel carried two bombs apiece, the other men one each, but there was no need to use them. Except for the little piles of dead and stricken creatures the great deep quay ran back into the darkness as desolate as though no multitude had ever occupied it.
“Give me a leg up now,” the McKay cried to Count Axel as they reached the slimy eight foot wall. The Count obeyed and the McKay scrambled over the edge on to a flat surface. He paused to flash his torch round. No walls were visible—only the dripping roof above, and nothing stirred in the deep shadows ahead. He turned to help Count Axel up.
“So far so good,” murmured the Count. “You keep a look out and I’ll give a hand to the others.”
The McKay swung round to face the darkness again. In his left hand just beyond the edge of his wooden shield he held his torch, in the other a bomb ready for any emergency. The revolver was thrust into the top of his trousers and the steel lever through his braces. For a couple of minutes he stood there—feet firmly planted, legs wide apart, his ears keen to catch the patter of bare feet on the rocky floor, his eyes intent and watchful.
“We’re all here now,” Count Axel reported softly. Somehow, in this tense darkness, none of them felt like speaking above a whisper and the McKay’s reply was only just audible.
“All right—form up as before and follow me.”
He gave them a moment to fall into their ranks then, with Count Axel beside him he advanced warily.
Apart from the treble whimpering of the wounded submen no sound stirred the stillness. This strange new world was one of silence and eternal darkness.
The McKay walked on, the others followed. All of them advanced with slow, instinctively cautious, steps; fearing that the enemy might spring out on them from behind some hidden corner at any moment, and all the time the beams of their torches flickered hither and thither, stabbing the blackness with eight shafts of light—yet finding nothing.
They passed within twenty feet of one of the heaps of grey-white creatures. Sally felt physically sick as she glimpsed the leprous limbs splashed with blood and the naked torsos twisted so unnaturally, but Doctor Tisch had her firmly by the arm. One of the group, temporarily knocked out by the explosion but otherwise apparently unharmed was crawling in their direction. The Doctor’s torch lit his face—stupid, bestial, repulsive; the high nostrils in his parrot-beaked nose distended and quivered, his heavy eyelids flickered down over his pale eyes as though, despite his blindness, he knew and feared the light. In a second he turned and scuttled away without a sound.
A nauseating smell arose from the heap of corpses. The McKay had been among men who had met sudden death from high explosives before and he knew that it was not the smell of entrails or spilled blood, nor had there been time for the carcasses to putrefy. This was like the revolting stench of bad fish and came, he guessed as much from the still living as the dead, when he remembered Nicky’s description of how these people had gorged themselves on their catch while it was still raw.
After advancing two hundred yards he halted. His torch had just picked out a blank wall straight ahead of him. He went a little nearer to examine it. The wall rose sheer to the high ceiling and stretched, as far as he could see, unbroken on either side.
“We’ll turn right,” he muttered, “anyhow this will serve to protect our backs if we are attacked.”
They followed him, keeping their formation, but treading with a little more confidence now that one of their flanks was secured from surprise. The curve of the wall was hardly perceptible in the pitch blackness, but after a few moments it brought them back to the edge of the quayside and appeared to continue round the curve of the harbour without a break.
“This will be the opposite end to where the bathysphere came in,” said the McKay. “It looks as if the cavern is an oval shape cut lengthwise by the quay. We’d better about turn and try the other way.”
“Oh, I’m so tired!” Camilla leaned heavily on Nicky who was her flank guard, “I can hardly walk another step!”
“That goes fer me too sister,” Bozo mumbled, “I’m not meself somehow since your boy-friend put me to sleep.” His thick skull had saved the back of his head from being split open when Vladimir had smashed it against the steel side of the sphere, but ever since he regained consciousness he had been suffering from a worse headache than he had ever experienced after a bout of drunkenness on illegal hooch, and now he felt that, instead of a head he carried the bathysphere—rolling from side to side on his thick neck.
Sally stretched out a hand and touched the McKay on the arm. “Can’t we stay here and sleep a little,” she pleaded. “We’re safe from drowning in the sphere now and anyway—what’s the use of going on?”
“Sure. What’s the use?” agreed Nicky who had also been knocked out temporarily that day and was feeling utterly done in after his spate of terrified energy in helping to remove the machinery from the bottom of the sphere. “What do you hope to find if we go on—the Ritz-Carlton Grill Room round the corner or a handy Lyons?—For God’s sake let’s call it a day.”
“I was hoping to find a cave with a narrow entrance where we’d be reasonably safe for the time being,” said the McKay slowly. “What do you think Count?”<
br />
“I am for remaining here,” Count Axel replied at once. “If we were fresher I would say ‘push on’ but half our party, at least, are unfit to proceed any further. It might even be necessary to carry them later and that would be a terrible handicap if we were attacked. Our present position is not so bad. We are in a triangle of which the wall forms one side and the quay another, so we have only one of three sides to defend. Let us remain here for a few hours until we are rested.”
The McKay nodded. “All right then—we’ll park down for the night.”
His decision was an unutterable relief to the party. Camilla, Sally and Nicky were already sitting on the rocky floor, gratefully seizing the opportunity for even a short rest, while the stronger members of the group sagged as they stood, dumb now—their energies at the lowest ebb from their terrible experiences in the last fifteen hours.
No rocks or boulders were available for them to form a barrier across their exposed front, so for a moment, the McKay considered the possibility of erecting trip-wires fifty feet out in the darkness to give them warning of any hostile approach. He had the necessary material, salved from the bottom of the sphere, but there was nothing to which wires could be attached on that even floor and improvising supports meant fetching more gear from the abandoned bathysphere. The business would involve at least two hours hard work for the whole party so he had to give up the idea and they all sank down, unprotected at the extremity of the quay wall where they stood.
The McKay arranged that he and Axel should take the first watch and that Vladimir and the Doctor should relieve them after two hours had passed. He did not dare to make the spells of duty longer in case he and Axel dropped off into a doze. They were both feeling the strain and fatigue of the nightmare sequence of events as much as the others and only refrained from showing it in the same degree because the one had reserves of mental strength to draw upon and the other the life-long habit of responsibility.
Vladimir tried to make the two girls as comfortable as possible. He sat between them with his back against the wall and, placing an arm round each of their shoulders drew their heads down on to his broad chest. The other men curled up on either side of them, so weary that they hardly noticed the hard discomfort of the unyielding rock. Only the McKay and Count Axel remained, some feet in front of the group, side by side, still wide awake and watchful.
For a moment or two the six huddled figures by the wall endeavoured, in a groping way, to straighten out in their minds the extraordinary series of happenings which had brought them to their present situation. It was now one-thirty in the morning—eight and a half hours since the sphere had been carried into this undersea cavern, and in all that time their thoughts had been concentrated on immediate emergencies. They had not had one moment to speculate on their utterly miraculous escape from death or any explanation for the existence of this hidden world in which they found themselves. Now, their brains were so clouded with fatigue that they could not attempt to grapple with the problem and almost instantly surrendered to a heavy, death-like sleep.
The McKay and Count Axel, out in front, dared not relax and began to devise means to keep themselves alert. Fortunately a breakdown of the electricity supply from the ship when the bathysphere was on the bottom, was a normal possibility which the Doctor had foreseen, so the dozen torches which he had stowed in the ball against such an emergency were all new and large in size; but now, light was infinitely precious. In this grim underworld there could be no dawn to hope for and once the batteries ran out they would be completely at the mercy of anything which might steal upon them in the darkness. The McKay suggested that, to economise their light he and Axel should only use one flash every half minute—alternately. The necessity for regular switching on and off would help to keep them wakeful and, for the same reason it would be best to talk.
The Count agreed and, for what seemed an eternity they spoke in whispers, advancing every sort of fantastic theory to account for the nightmare place in which they had arrived, or speculating on the origin of the great herd of creatures who inhabited this subterranean domain. Even Count Axel was not bold enough to face the future squarely yet and he had formed a half belief that this was death. They had been so near the end when fighting to escape from the sphere that it seemed almost more reasonable to suppose that they had all died then—or even earlier, when the oxygen had given out without, perhaps, their being aware of it—than to credit the actual existence of their present surroundings.
The McKay’s practical mind revolted equally from any attempt to foresee their future. It was unknown—unknowable. Obviously they were cut off completely and forever from the world above. This was no prison from which one could plan escape, no seeming impasse out of which wits and bravery might still find a way. When their torches failed they would be encompassed about with blackest darkness, and when they had consumed the last of their meagre supplies hunger and thirst would come upon them. Death must surely follow—either at the hands of those abominable submen or from weakness and exhaustion. Yet the “will to live” is so strongly developed in the human consciousness that it never occurred to him not to play out the game of life to the very last trick.
At two-thirty he moved over to waken the reliefs and shook the Doctor into semi-consciousness, but when he saw Vladimir—his head fallen forward between those of the two girls—he knew that, to rouse the Prince, he must rouse them too so, instead, he shook Nicky by the shoulder.
Nicky started up and shuddered as though in the grip of some frightful dream but the McKay reassured him. Then he gave instructions about economising the light of the torches—told Doctor Tisch to wake him promptly at four-thirty, so that he could witness the changing of the guard—then he curled up on the hard floor at Sally’s feet. Count Axel dropped beside him.
The Doctor and Nicky sat out in front now, the small pile of bombs between them, staring nervously ahead into the pitchy blackness of the great cavern.
Their two-hour sleep had refreshed them but they still felt slow and groggy from their previous expenditure of nervous energy. They agreed, as the McKay and Count Axel had done, that to talk was the best way of preventing themselves dropping off to sleep, but they had little to say to each other.
Nicky’s contribution to the conversation consisted almost entirely of periodic exclamations—“Where the devil are we, Doctor?—Oh, God, I’m tired!—Doctor, what the hell are we going to do?” which he repeated at brief intervals.
The Doctor had not even the shadow of a theory to advance and could only mutter gutterally. “I haf no idea—no idea at all. Of our future I can guess nothing and for the present we can only obey the Herr Kapitan’s orders.”
It was almost at the end of their watch when they heard the muted patter of naked feet. The Doctor instantly flashed on his torch while Nicky sprang up and roused the others.
The McKay was wide awake at once: “Prepare for action” he said in a sharp whisper.
For a moment the other, newly awakened, members of the party could not get a grip of their surroundings. Automatically they stumbled to their feet, picked up their weapons, and adjusted the board shields over their left forearms. Then the pattering footsteps and the horrible smell of rotten fish which the advancing herd carried with them brought full realisation of past events and their present peril.
“It’s—it’s not a nightmare then?” Sally choked. “We’re really here—Oh, this is—”
“Silence!” the McKay cut her short. “If they can’t scent us they’ll believe we’re still in the sphere. Quick Doctor—put out that torch.”
They waited then, their blood throbbing again at full pulse through their arteries—tense and expectant—anticipating that the attack might open at any moment as they listened to that soft padding of innumerable footsteps in the darkness.
The sound ceased. The great cavern became silent as death. They could hear their own laboured breathing and judged tha the unseen horde had halted somewhere in the centre and the far end of the
big oval rock-roofed chamber.
Nothing happened. Camilla began to tremble. Sally put out a protective hand to her although little tremors of fear were running through her own body. The men were grouped round them, nervously fingering their weapons, ready instantly, at the McKay’s order to press the buttons of their torches.
Suddenly there came a noise like thunder—a dull heavy rumbling in the far distance. It continued for some minutes yet seemed to grow no louder. Then it stopped abruptly.
The McKay shifted his weight from one foot to the other Then this new silence was broken by the chirping and mutter ing of the herd out there in the darkness.
The thunder rolled again—this time much nearer. The unseen roof and walls of the cavern vibrated and quivered under the repercussion from the blows of some unknown force. The very air was tremulous.
Nicky cowered back against the wall. Camilla endeavoured to gulp down sobs engendered by the extremity of fear which seemed to grip her physically below the breasts. Sally was half fainting. The two leaned on each other for support or else their legs would have given way beneath them. The rest held their ground, white-faced and with protruding eyes which strained in vain to see one inch ahead in that impenetrable blackness.
Time passed. Not one of the little group could attempt to assess its duration but at last the thunder ceased again and now the shrill note of the submen’s chatter had risen to a fiendish clamour.
Vladimir felt his dark hair clinging damp about his temples. The Doctor’s soft collar was a wet rag round his neck. Everyone of the eight humans was sweating or shivering as they stood there—black night all about them—listening to those ghoulish cries.
A new note suddenly drowned the screeching. The thunder had turned to the roar and hiss of tossing water. A blur of silvery light appeared low down at the far end of the harbour. With horrifying suddenness it increased in size and leapt towards them.
They Found Atlantis Page 26