by Basil Copper
There was a grating noise as I still hesitated and then a muffled thump. That would be the lowering of the bar from the door. I crouched low and eased myself round the corner, careful not to make my presence known. I still wanted to give Zalor a last chance to prove his innocence of motive and if I revealed myself beforehand, he would be able to fabricate some quite innocuous reason for his presence in that place and at that time of the morning.
The grating noise continued and then the dim light of the torch disappeared within the vegetable store. I crept noiselessly towards the light and after a few moments found myself in front of the building. Zalor had drawn back only one half of the double portal, no doubt to shield the light from the outside, and I stood behind it to conceal myself. I need not have worried about such precautions; the man inside the store was far too preoccupied with his own affairs to have any time for further concealment.
He was now acting with a reckless disregard for noise and I could hear the swishing sound of straw being raked about; I peered round the edge of the rough timber door. Zalor had placed his torch on one of our generator casings so that its light shone on the floor and walls before him. All our equipment was stacked around in preparation for tomorrow's work; as I watched, Zalor completed piling the straw around it and scuttled to the far corner. He came back with a squat green can, which I recognised. It contained paraffin, of which we had quite a store in case of emergency, or for use in lamps if we were operating away from the tractors.
I did not need to wait any longer. The matchbox fell from Zalor's hand as I sent him sprawling in the fury of my first rush. He was up again quickly though, hissing something in that abominable language of his. I got in two good blows across his shoulders with the leather camel whip I had brought with me, I am glad to say, and the pig-like screams with which he greeted my ministrations were extremely satisfactory to me. He was a powerful fellow, though, despite his small stature and he closed with me fiercely, clutching at a curved-bladed knife he plucked from his belt.
I had dropped the whip in my anxiety to hold his knife- hand off and he got his boot up into my groin while I was doing this; a stabbing pain lanced through me, the room grew dim and I fell back against some boxes. He rushed at me again with the knife but cracked his knees against some low piece of metal equipment chance had left in that spot and collapsed with a howl. By this time I had got to my feet and who knows what would have happened had I not heard Scarsdale's welcome voice shouting from the square.
The dwarf hesitated, thrust his knife back into his belt with a garbled cry of hatred and was then gone through the door and into the night. I got to my feet and half-dragged myself to the door before I collapsed again. I must have presented a sorry sight, panting, covered with dirt and straw and gasping out an incoherent story as the gigantic form of the Professor loomed up in the dim glow of the torch.
He gripped me by the hand, his jaw tightening as he looked around the room. He led me to sit on one of the upturned crates and stopped my broken flow of words.
'On the contrary, my dear Plowright, you did extremely well,' he said. 'If these had been burned the Great Northern Expedition would have been finished. The fault is mine. I should have foreseen something like this and mounted a guard.'
The occasion was so unusual and the friendship between the Professor and myself so close at this moment that I told him about the stone tablet I had seen the dwarf drop. He was silent for a long moment.
'It makes no matter, Plowright,' he said. 'We have both perhaps been a little remiss but the major responsibility must be mine.'
'But what does all this mean?' I asked him.
'I should have mounted a guard,' Scarsdale said softly, as though he had not heard my question. 'Can you walk all right? We must tell the others and make sure there are no further interruptions tonight.'
He had locked up again and we were halfway across the square before I was able to repeat my question.
'There are those who do not wish us to find the resting place of the Old Ones,' Scarsdale said sombrely. 'Zalor was obviously of them or in their employ.'
We were at the tractor by this time and he paused at the door as I prepared to go in.
'I must have words with the Mir about this on our return,' he said grimly.
I went inside and brewed some tea for all of us, waiting for the running footsteps and excited questions Scarsdale's errand would arouse. There was no more sleep for me that night. When I had carried the urn of tea to the vegetable store where my colleagues were already servicing the equipment by the light of portable generating equipment, I went to drink mine by the edge of the town, looking over the Plain of Darkness; there was nothing to see but I knew that the sun would eventually arise from that direction.
I wondered whether Zalor was somewhere out there or if he had fled back in the direction of the ancient City of Zak. I wondered too how he would survive, or whether he had friends among the desert tribes. I smiled grimly to myself in the darkness. People like Zalor always survived. The headman, hastily roused by Scarsdale, had a party searching Nylstrom street by street but I guessed the dwarf would have his plans laid too well and that he would no longer be within the town. And so it proved when dawn eventually came.
Long before that I stirred to find Van Damm by my side. He joined me in my vigil until the distant rays of yellow light harshly illuminated the black plain of ash before us; the dawn wind sent faint whorls of dust moving uneasily on its surface. We looked in vain for any trace of Zalor.
Van Damm glanced at me sombrely. His face was haggard in the strange light of that ancient place.
'A bad business, Plowright,' he said. 'And an ill omen for this enterprise, I fear.'
Seven
1
The command tractor shifted and lurched on the Plain of Darkness, the immediate foreground of the windshield filled with whirling dust and cinders. I could see the Black Mountains rising from the raging dustclouds like some monstrous whale-like creature, they were so close. Scarsdale was silent at my side, now peering anxiously ahead, now making abstruse calculations with his slide-rule and mathematical instruments on the chart-table before him.
I went back to steering on a compass bearing, conscious that in a little more than an hour we should be off the plain and into the foothills of the mountains; Scarsdale had told us that there was some vegetation and we intended to follow up a shallow valley which eventually rose steeply and would take us to our destination. I only hoped the tractors would be robust enough to raise us on to the plateau which would lead us to the cave formations of which the Professor held such high hopes. Once again I marvelled at his tremendous vitality and strength in undertaking such a colossal journey on foot and with such an ill-equipped expedition as the earlier one.
When the excitement over Zalor's treachery had died away in Nylstrom and all the headman's searches had failed to discover the dwarf within the town, Scarsdale had held a brief council of war. We had decided to press on to the object of our journey as soon as possible. To that end the technicians among us had proceeded with the overhaul of the tractors and Number 4 had been left in the vegetable store, padlocked and under day and night guard. I was set to boiling water for the tanks of the three remaining vehicles, for that would be our biggest lack once we were among the mountains. I also took charge of gathering what fresh vegetables and fruit there was available, which would make a welcome change from the material in our tinned supply.
From the night of my fight with Zalor, Scarsdale had insisted on breaking out the weapons and we all wore sidearms; some, in addition carried rifles. I found the heavy pistol strapped to my waist in its webbing holster a tremendous nuisance and I had very little idea how to use it so that I felt I should be a greater danger to my companions in an emergency, rather than to any supposed enemy.
I took a last group of still photographs of our helpful headman and his people; and staged the few cinema shots necessary for this section of the route. I had stayed behind to record the scen
e as the villagers waved off the three remaining tractors into the unknown distances of the Plain of Darkness and once I had stopped the whirring motor of my machine and carried it and the heavy tripod off across the desert to where Scarsdale had halted to pick me up, I could not help reflecting on the contrast this scene would make with that of the splendour of the departure from Zak; the Plain was doubly sombre in the light of our later knowledge.
The Professor and I continued in Number 1 Command vehicle, with Van Damm alone in the middle and with Prescott and Holden in the third vehicle at the rear. Scarsdale had hoped to cross the plain in four hours or so at our maximum cruising speed but in the event it was nearer six before I heard his warning mutter; I altered my steering vector and the tractor's treads grated over solid rock as we slid upwards out of the warm dust and into the welcome shade of some stunted trees. A stiff breeze was blowing down the gully and when I had steered the tractor about a mile down the arid draw in which we found ourselves, the Professor decided to make camp. The sun was already low in the sky but as it now set from us across beyond distant Nylstrom, our shadows were long on the ground before us and the dark replicas of our strange vehicles were stencilled on the rocky floor of the valley as we pulled the machines into a rough circle and cut the motors.
2
For two days we followed the winding contours of the valley, every hour rising higher and higher into the mountain range, whose arms almost imperceptibly and inevitably closed in behind us until we all had the feeling that we were in a giant's grip. The wind increased daily, blowing in gusts from the heart of the range, but it did not trouble us as the desert wind, as there was little dust to obscure our view. It did, however, add to the difficulties of steering and our vehicles tended to yaw from side to side so that one wearied at the handles and muscles craved relief from the buffeting, which went on hour after hour.
It was growing steadily colder too, though the sun shone as regularly as hitherto; this did not bother us at first but we were then aware, during our frequent halts, that the breeze was a chilly one and we were beginning to feel the benefit of the sheepskin-lined coats which was one of Scarsdale's strange-seeming requisitions for the expedition's stores. The way twisted and wound upwards and for most of the time we were steering the tractors at half-speed through mazes of gigantic boulders and among formations of weirdly striated rock.
But there had been no major difficulties; the tractors were standing up well to the wear and tear of this difficult going and, most important of all, there had so far been no impossible places; no doubt due to Scarsdale's detailed surveying of the route on his previous journeyings. If there had been one impassable section then that would have made the Expedition untenable; apart from our using the tractors as mobile bases, there was the sheer impossibility of transporting the masses of stores and equipment along these miles of pitiless moraine.
The territory through which we were advancing was quite featureless; black rock; boulders; stunted trees; above, a perpetually blue sky; ahead, the eternal probe of the restless wind in one's teeth and the jumble of rocks which indicated the next bend.
We were too close in now to see what peaks lay ahead and so far as one was aware we were not high enough for snow. Scarsdale still continued in his mysterious and inscrutable way. Though his charts, log books and tables of weird hieroglyphs multiplied on the chart-table in the command vehicle at night, he gave no detailed hints of what we might soon expect.
We had been several days on our journey to the plateau when I myself broached the matter one evening; he shook his head, with an enigmatic smile.
'We are not close enough yet,' was all he would say. 'Time enough when we are within the Galleries.'
He had with him a translation of the blasphemous book. The Ethics of Ygor, which had been typed on ordinary foolscap sheets and he would be lost for hours in its study most evenings, the smoke from his pipe curling upwards vertically in the still air of the tractor. While in the desert we had kept within the machines whenever we stopped. There was good reason for this, of course; the tractors were air- conditioned and the sand and grit constantly blown about made eating and conversation in the open air a misery.
But here just the opposite rule obtained. Though the air was cold and the wind blew chill, whenever Scarsdale called a halt over his radio link and all three vehicles drew into a rough laager, we all of us, without anyone ever putting it into words, foregathered in the open air, lit fires and cooked our food. Huddled in our sheepskin jackets and hoarding our precious gatherings of wood we drank our nightly tea-ration and made the mountains echo with our animated talk.
Van Damm in particular made his own attitude plain; I could read it well enough on his face, though he never put the feeling into words. We were whistling in the dark, his taut features said to me every night, as he gazed apprehensively around him at the dark rock whose jumbled surface was lit by the flickering flames of our necessarily feeble fires. We all felt it now; the mountains were closing in on us and inside the tractors the feeling was only emphasised. When we were asleep this did not matter; but until then we preferred to chat among ourselves; lounge outside; braving the wind, downing the hot sweet tea in thirsty gulps and constantly scanning what little we could see of our surroundings. But I noticed that none of us strayed outside the triangle of tractors, in which the fires formed the cheerful focal points. So far as we knew there was no wild-life in the mountains and no dangerous crevasses into which we might fall; but still we did not wander.
Day was a different matter but even there I noticed my companions rarely ventured more than a hundred yards or so from our established camp. The only exception was Scarsdale; he was, of course, as I knew, absolutely fearless and sometimes at night he would disappear for as long as half an hour at a time, on some mysterious expedition of his own. On the first occasion this happened I was consumed with alarm and was about to call my companions when he emerged from the darkness, the small round glow of his pipe illuminating his bearded features. His notebook was in his hand and there was an excited look in his eyes, but I had learned my lesson by now and I did not venture to question him.
But I remembered that he had traversed this way alone and with none of the advantages that we five currently enjoyed and once more I marvelled at the tenacity and endurance of the man; he had moral integrity as well as physical endurance and there were times as the weeks lengthened, that I came near to adulation of our leader. The Great Northern Expedition was certainly the highest point in my wanderings in a life not entirely devoted to mundane things, and even though the Professor's purpose remained shrouded in obscurity I felt I would have followed him almost anywhere he chose to lead us.
We were four days traversing the gulley; towards the end the scree and the shattered boulders which lay like great shards of rock fallen from a region as remote as the moon, made progress maddeningly slow. But the tractors behaved extraordinarily well; I think each of us, underneath, harboured a fear that the motors of the machines might overheat or that breakage of vital components would strand us here. For that reason those of us who were driving nursed the vehicles along.
It was unlikely, I reasoned, that all three of the machines would break down, but stranger things had happened; I cast my mind back to my own adventures in the Arizona Desert and Crosby Patterson's terrible and unique fate and pictured what might happen to us were we thrown on our own resources and have to return on foot. That outcome was unthinkable and I preferred instead to concentrate on my immediate duties.
I was pleased, during the second day, when Scarsdale announced to me that he would himself take over the controls of the command tractor. This left me for other duties, not least those-of my photographic recording activities and I secured one of the best sequences of the entire movie record the following afternoon, with my series of swooping pans and tracking shots from the windows of our vehicle, as we crawled inexorably into the higher plateau of the Black Mountains.
It was a fearsome landscape into which
we were slowly edging our way and Scarsdale had still not revealed to us our exact destination or what our role would be; he sat now, bracing himself in the padded seat, his great hands firm and steady on the levers, gently coaxing the power under his hands. The command vehicle would shudder, hang sicken- ingly on the edge of some unseen rock shelf and then with a lurching motion, step quietly into a higher plane and then proceed again smoothly enough until the next obstacle was met.
The mountain walls ahead now completely blotted out the sky and for the last day or so the sun had disappeared; everything around us was in purple shadow and then we came out again round a shoulder of hill and a high sun, spilling in from behind us somewhere cast a pallid glimmer on the blackness of the shoulder of mountain beyond. Nowhere was there any sparkle of light or any relief in the sombre shade of these oppressive peaks; the wind still blew steadily but seemed to have lost some of its sting and the noise of our motors thrown back from the rocky walls each side of us seemed less sacrilegious.
On the afternoon of the final day the grating noise beneath the tractors' treads finally ceased and we lurched along in an odd silence; it was near lunch-time when this happened and Scarsdale gave the order over the radio for the party to halt for the break. I was down and out of the cabin door almost before we had stopped and I gave an exclamation. Scarsdale joined me at the door, with an amused expression in his eyes.
I then saw the reason for the unexpected silence. Stretching behind us, like the slime-track left by a gigantic slug was our own trail, every scratch and indentation on the tractor treads reproduced exactly on the surface of the gulley. I printed my own foot-mark behind me as I ran back towards Van Damm's tractor, which was just turning the bend. The entire floor of the valley was lined with black sand, a unique and extraordinary sight; if it had not been for the perennial blue of the sky above us the effect would have been overwhelming in its morbid darkness.