by Lin Carter
We took food and water, weapons and sleeping gear, leaving all else behind. The Bronston lamps we distributed between us, hanging them on the belts of our thermal suits by hooks designed for just such a purpose.
The stone stair was not easy to get to, lying all the way across the huge chamber; but a ledge of naked rock ran along the inner wall of the holy of holies. With great care we inched our way around the room to the platform, over the edge of the abyss, where the steps started down.
The steps of the stair were broad and shallow, and the stair itself was solid rock. In the dry, cold air no mold or moss or lichen grew here to make our footing slippery or unsafe. Only a man afflicted with vertigo would have felt any fear at entrusting himself to the stair.
For added safety, though, we kept close to the inner wall of the shaft and used the guard lines to tie ourselves together, just as mountaineers rope themselves together into a living chain, so that if one climber should slip and fall, the others could catch the line and save him.
For no particular reason, it was Bolgov who went first. He was the strongest of us all, I suppose, and he went warily, shining his lamp before him to study his footing.
And so we started down; outside, the day was nearly ended. Soon night would fall, black winged, over the ancient world whose thousand mysteries we had only begun to penetrate. But in all the numberless ages since the first night had fallen on the bright dawn of creation, I doubt if any man had ever embarked on a more weird and wondrous journey.
Our legs soon learned the rhythm and spacing of the stair. We lost all fear of falling or stumbling. At first we went down from step to step with exaggerated caution, sliding our shoulders against the smooth rock wall. But with time, repetition alleviated those fears, and we continued our descent more nimbly and with less hesitation. In truth, there was nothing to fear. The stair itself was cut from the solid bedrock of the planet, and the steps were broad enough for us to have made the descent three abreast.
Yhoom . ..
Always I had considered it a myth, nothing more. The Underworld of the Gods, the region of the dead? Well, every race had some such netherworld in its legends. There was the Egyptian underworld of Amenti, to which Anubis conducted the spirits of the dead, and where their hearts were tested in the balance against the Feather of Truth, under the stern eyes of Osiris and of Thoth … and the shadowy ghostlands of Sheol, in the myths of the primitive Hebrews … the grim Avernus of the Romans … and dark Hades of the Greeks … even the subterranean realms of Hel in the old Scandinavian sagas.
And the Doctor’s remark, noting the similarity between Ilionis and Babylon, made me think of the many nations that had dwelt in Mesopotamia, each sharing an identical myth of the Underworld. I remembered the subterranean region of the dead to which Ishtar descended, to win back the spirit of her perished lover, Tammuz, just as the Greek myths told how Orpheus once went down to the gloom of
Hades to beg the release of his bride, Eurydice, from Pluto and Persephone.
I remembered too the even older Sumcrian epic which told of the goddess Inanna who1 went weeping down into the netherworld of Na-an-gub, the “Great Below,” to implore the remorseless King of Shadows to return her beloved to the upper world again. And there came into my mind the lines of an old translation of the Sumerian epic 1 had read many years ago:
From the great above to the great below, the goddess, from the great above to the great below, Ishtar, from the great above to the great below, descendeth.
As we went down into the darkness, the verses of the old Sumerian poem echoed over and over in my mind.
From the land of light to the land of darkness, to the Netherworld she descended …
Step by step, we went down into a gloomy vastness no less strange and awesome than that into which the goddess had gone in the ancient poem. And I remembered to what she had come at last, her journey ended.
My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, to the Netherworld she came, to the dark house of Nergal, to the seven-gated palace.
Before the shadow-throne she knelt, to him who sat thereon she spake: “O Nergal, lord of darkness, prince of shadows, hear my mission. To the Netherworld have I come …”
My mind brooding on one of the oldest of all stories, I strode on down into the blackness, step after step after
step.
From time to time we halted to rest and eat a little and moisten our throats with water. On Earth such an ordeal would have been exhausting. Here on Mars, in this cold, dry air, weighing but a fraction of our normal weight, we were fatigued enough, but it was not the grueling ordeal it might have been.
On one such rest stop Dr. Keresny called another mystery to our attention.
“Have you noticed the walls of the shaft?” he inquired. “However this pit came to be, it was no natural cataclysm, no cavern hollowed out by geological forces.”
He was right, of course. The shaft was four sided, the walls themselves smooth and regular. Far too smooth and regular to have been the work of nature. For that matter, too smooth and regular to have been the handiwork of man! At least, not the work of man armed with any tools known to me: I pointed this out to him, in return.
“You’re right, my boy … marvelous! The rock is as smooth as glass. Not so much as the scratch of a single chisel stroke to mar its perfect regularity . .. amazing!”
It was amazing. It was also a little frightening. For I could not believe that either natural forces or the work of men could have hollowed out this world-deep shaft that went down and down to the very bottom of the world.
And that left only … the supernatural.
Had this abyss been the work of the gods themselves, the Timeless Ones?
But that was nonsense, of course. There are no gods.
Or are there?
I had thought Ilionis a myth, but we had walked its shadow-thronged way and looked upon the sepulchers of its long-forgotten kings . ..
I had believed dim Yhoom nothing but a legend, but even now we were descending into its gloomy vastnesses …
If two myths are proven true, dare you question the reality behind a third?
Into the Netherworld we descended . ..
When we were simply too weary to continue any further
that night, we slept, huddled against the wall of the pit, wrapped in our sleeping furs, taking guard by turns.
And woke hours later to continue on down.
There was no such thing as day or night here, no sun to lighten our path, no moons to glimmer through the night. And as we continued on down, the air grew richer in oxygen and warmer.
“Ivo, I believe we can dispense with these accursed masks,” Keresny said to me. I let them remove their respirators, and they seemed to take no hurt from it. I suppose the air would, in fact, grow thicker and more breathable at the depth we had now reached; and if any heat lurks at the heart of Mars, it would be warmer down here, which it was. So we went on in relative comfort now. Indeed, before long we began to feel almost uncomfortable, so much warmer had the abyss become. We unseamed our thermal suits at the throat, and the Martians threw off their heavy cloaks.
We had no instruments to measure the rate of our descent, nor could we accurately estimate the depth to which we had come by this time. But surely we had penetrated more deeply beneath the surface of the planet than had any man before us.
An amusing thought struck me, and I grinned. I was not going to enjoy climbing all the way back up to the temple again! Maybe we could find a shortcut…
We went on down, losing track of the hours after a time, losing all notion of day and night.
I noticed that my watch had stopped. That was odd, because the bead-sized energy cell was supposed to power it forever. Not that it really mattered very much, I suppose, but the thought did trouble me faintly. It was a sort of omen, somehow. As if we had crossed beyond the barriers of time.
As if we now stood in eternity …
And then, all at once, we came to a place where there
were not any more stairs leading down.
It took us a few moments to comprehend the fact, for by this point we were so accustomed to following that vast, endless, zigzagging stairway down and down that it was hard to realize the truth.
We had come to the bottom.
And we stood at the threshold of an amazing world.
First we were conscious of a sense of indescribable depth, as if we had descended into the very core of the planet and somehow sensed the ponderous weight of all those millions of tons of stone and metal that hung above us. This depth sensation was quite beyond anything in my experience; a queer oppressiveness hovered in the air. I felt like weary Atlas, shouldering up the heavens.
Then we became gradually aware that there was light, even at this depth. A dim saffron glow, sourceless, and casting no shadow. As our eyes slowly became accustomed to the queer yellowish radiance, we found it shone from outcroppings of some flaky, quartzlike mineral that bulged from tiie walls of the cavern here and there. These bosses of unknown crystal or metal were perhaps radioactive or at least phosphorescent. We could put no name to the glimmering stuff, which did nothing to detract from the oppressiveness we all felt.
As we became used to the queer saffron glow, we began to see just where we were. We stood at the foot of the stone stair, at one end of an immense cavern whose stony roof arched far above our heads. Directly above us yawned the black pit: ahead of us lay the trackless unknown.
“Here too, notice?” Keresny breathed. “None of this is natural; it is all the work of intelligence, but God help us, what science could have wrought on this scale?”
He was right: the floor of the cavern had the same glossy and unnatural smoothness we had noted in the walls of the shaft. Never had I dreamed the science of the Ancients had attained the mastery of such forces as could have hollowed out this enormity at the world’s core!
We went forward toward the center of the vast cavern. Our boots rang on the glassy paving; echoes boomed and gibbered up the titanic dome and died in shuddering whispers overhead.
And then another marvel!
Suddenly radiance flared up about us. Far above our heads, globes of dark metal flashed with brilliance. Light blossomed from huge spheres that hung or hovered high at the narrow peak of the dome.
It was darkly crimson, that light, like the blood shed from ruptured and dying suns. But in the brilliant, sanguinary glare the dimmer saffron radiance of the mineral bosses waned and died. The spheres of ruby light were seven in number, and as they bloomed into fire, fat Huw blanched.
“Aiii, brothers!” the little minstrel whimpered. “Now are we come unto the very Underworld of the Timeless Ones! Know you not the old tales? Those are the Seven Scarlet Suns that lighten the impenetrable darkness of Yhoom!”
We gaped, craning our necks to observe the remarkable phenomenon. The seven spheres of ruby brilliance were set in a vast ring, a gyre of captive, crimson suns, and by their very light we could see clearly that they hovered without visible support high in the air. None could say what miracle of science or sorcery supported them aloft.
Kuruk clutched my arm in a viselike grip.
“Lord���look!” he breathed.
As if only the bloody radiance shed by the hovering ring of glowing orbs could render it visible, a pathway melted slowly into view. A zone of lambent scarlet luminosity ran as straight as a paved road from the foot of the stone stair where we stood across the immensity of the domed cavern to its farthest side, where a black, hemispherical opening yawned in the cavern wall. One moment before no pathway had been visible: now it blazed ominously before us.
“I gather that we are expected to travel in that direction,” the Doctor surmised wryly.
We examined the red way curiously. So far as we could tell by sight and touch alone, it was the same dark, adamantine, glassy smooth substance that paved the entire floor of the vast and echoing cavern. Perhaps the zone of lambent red had been painted there with some chemical which fluoresces to visibility only under the sanguine glare of the ringed artificial suns.
“Well, what’re we waitin’ for?” Bolgov grunted. “Noth-in’ around here, so let’s follow it and see where it leads.”
We switched off our Bronston lamps, as the bloody light from above seemed to provide sufficient illumination. We removed the length of line that had roped us together against the danger of falling and packed these things away in our gear, which we left behind us at the foot of the stairs.
I hesitated, then took up the Iron Crown wrapped in its sacred cloth. This I decided to bear with me, not only because I did not like to be parted from the precious thing, but because some intuition told me I might yet have occasion to use my Power before this weird adventure came to its conclusion.
Prince Kraa and the others retained their weapons, although Dhu argued that to go armed into the presence of the Timeless Ones was sacrilege. The Moon Dragon Prince dismissed this curtly.
“When a man ventures into the unknown, he is a fool to go unarmed,” he said. “But if the priest Dhu fears the sin of sacrilege, he may remain behind to guard our packs.”
The priest stiffly said he would accompany us, if only to intercede with the gods to spare us from their wrath. Kraa grinned and said nothing.
And so we set forth upon the scarlet way, under the glare of the imprisoned suns, to explore the mysteries of Yhoom.
13. Yhoom
The strange, bloody light made it difficult to make out any details and drowned all colors into tones of gray or brown or black. We crossed the cavern without mishap and approached the odd, hemispherical opening to which the glowing pathway led.
As we neared, we saw that a black, gauzy curtain hung across this portal. A vague uneasiness bade me caution the others against approaching it too quickly. I went forward alone and examined it carefully, not touching it.
” ‘Tis no fabric at all, but a sort of shadow,” the boy Chaka marveled. And he was right; a phantom web of darkness stretched across the curious doorway, blocking our access and obscuring whatever lay beyond the portal from our scrutiny.
Huw roused himself, blinking sleepily.
“Eh, brothers! Have you not heard of the Web of Woven Shadows that hangs before the Bridge whereover the spirits of the dead must venture to judgment?”
An ominous cold radiated from the dark barrier. Whatever the thing was, I felt apprehensive and did not think it wise to try passing through it. Keresny stepped to where I stood and peered at the insubstantial screen of darkness.
“It could be a force barrier of some kind,” he speculated. “It cancels the vibrations of light or is somehow opaque to them���if only I had a subelectronic scanner with me, I could ascertain the nature of the screen!”
I donned the Crown and drew my Power about me like a mantle, while the others stepped back. The thought crystals set in the head piece vastly augment the mental powers of the wearer, and I thrust out at the web of darkness with the magnified power of my mind, sensing the interplay of strange forces���
And without warning the barrier of darkness was gone!
Had my telepathic probe triggered some response within the mechanism, or was the Web timed to cease operation at the approach of sentient beings? To these questions we had no answers. We went on, striding through the vast arch of dark stone without harm.
We emerged into another cavernous space, but here darkness reigned and no gyre of captive scarlet suns strove against the gloom. Moreover, the ground was rough and broken, and we began to wish we had brought the Bronston lamps with us, although none of us desired to retrace our steps to get them.
A dim greenish light strengthened about us, as our eyes adjusted to the dark. But this radiance shone from no ring of luminous spheres, but from a weird forest of hulking and monstrous growths.
As the clumped and towering shapes became clearly visible, we halted in amazement. For this queer forest was not of trees, but of fungoid growths���tremendous mushrooms, thousands of t
imes greater than anything we had seen. The fungi that grow on the surface of Mars are stunted, hardy forms: here in the warm, humid, richer air, they attained truly monstrous proportions.
Most of the stalked monstrosities that loomed up in our way were hooded in ominous scarlets, their smooth, glistening flesh mottled with poisonous hues. The weird fungoid growths swayed slightly to our step, and their repellent shapes and the semen like odor that exhuded from them, as from morels, brought to mind swaying and hooded vipers and the musky stench of cobras.
Mastering our almost instinctive revulsion, we stepped gingerly into the fungus forest. The ground was a crawling mass of fleshy tubers and sprouting fungi that squelched wetly underfoot, releasing a slimy, nauseous odor. But we went on, finding a pathway that wound between the obscene, glistening trunks. Overhead, like ghastly flowers of abnormal size, such as might flourish in a wizard’s garden, the hoods of ominous crimson, sharp yellow, or virulent green swayed and rustled.
The dim and sickly fight that shone dully from the monstrous growths may have been a natural luminosity or the phosphorescence of decay; we could not be certain. But by its ghastly light our features assumed a livid hue, like the faces of long-dead cadavers. And again Huw hearkened back to the legends of his people: “Aiii, brothers! Is it not all as the ancient legends tell? First, the Black Pit and at its bottom, the Zone of Saffron Light; and then the Cavern of the Seven Scarlet Suns, and beyond that, the green-litten abyss of Yhuu. Just as the sagas described it all!”
The Martians muttered amongst themselves. The old Prince was worried, and Kuruk looked grim enough, but terror shone nakedly in the glistening eyes and quivering features of the little hunchbacked priest.
Only the boy Chaka gazed around him eagerly, bright
eyes filled with wonder and delight at the strangeness through which we passed.
Ilsa stumbled, her feet slipping in the slimy tangle of the wormlike growths that squirmed underfoot. In staggering to recover her balance, she stumbled against a squat puff-ball, whose heavy head nodded and burst into a clinging cloud of musty-smelling spores. We slapped them from her clothing, but they flew into our faces and made us cough and sneeze.