“Those things could easily devour a man,” meditated Roverton.“I’d hate to be caught in one of them. Let’s get out of this if there is a way out.”
He led the way along the sluggish stream. As they went, they saw many more of the gigantic flying insects, which paid no apparent attention to them. After they had gone a few hundred yards, Roverton almost trod on a black creature shaped like an enormous blindworm, which was crawling away from the stream. It was three feet long. Its movements were extremely torpid, and the men passed it with a shudder of repulsion, for the thing was more loathsome than either a snake or a worm, since it combined the size of the one with the aspect of the other.
“What’s that?” Roverton had stopped, and was listening. The others also paused and listened intently. Then they all heard the sound of dull, muffled blows, at an indeterminate distance in the fog. The sound was quite rhythmic in its repetition, but ceased at intervals. When it stopped, there was a sharp, shrill, multitudinous cheeping.
“Shall we go on?” Roverton had lowered his voice cautiously.“We’re without weapons; and hell knows what we’ll get into. We may find intelligent beings; but there’s no means of knowing beforehand whether or not they will prove hostile.”
Before his companions could answer, the fog parted and revealed a singular spectacle. No more than a hundred yards down the stream, a dozen pygmy-like beings, about two feet in height, were gathered around one of the purple
masses. With instruments whose general form suggested knives and axes, they were cutting away the moss-like integument from the mass and hewing great slabs of the white, fleshy material within. Even at that distance, it could be seen that the mass was quivering convulsively, as if it felt their blows.
Suddenly the hewing was suspended. Once more the cheeping sound arose. The pygmies all turned and seemed to be gazing toward Roverton and his companions. Then the sound changed and took on a high, chirping note, like a summons. As if in answer, three monstrous creatures appeared from the fog. Each of them was twenty feet in length, they were like fat lizards in their general form and had an indefinite number of very short legs on which they crawled or waddled with amazing swiftness. Each of them had four saddles of a fantastic type arranged at intervals along its back. They crouched down, as if at a word of command, and all the pygmies swung themselves with incredible celerity into the saddles. Then, to an accompaniment of shrill pitterings, the unearthly cavalcade advanced upon the travelers.
III
There was no time to even think of fleeing. The speed of the lizard-creatures was far beyond that of the fleetest runner: in a few instants they loomed upon the three men, surrounding them and hemming them in with their mammoth length. The creatures were both grotesque and terrible, with their squat, toad-like heads and their puffed bodies mottled in sinister designs with dull blues and rusty blacks and clayish yellows. Each of them had a single bulging eye that glowed with a ruddy phosphorescence in the middle of its face. Their ears, or what appeared to be such, drooped along their jowls in wrinkled folds and hung down like wattles. Their riders, seen close at hand, were equally bizarre and hideous. Their heads were large and globular, they were cyclop-eyed, but possessed two mouths, one on each side of an appendage like the trunk of an elephant, which depended almost to their feet. Their arms and legs were of the normal number, but seemed to be very supple and boneless, or else had a bone-structure radically different from that of earth-vertebrates. Their hands were four-fingered and were webbed with translucent membranes. Their feet were also webbed, and terminated in long, curving claws. They were altogether naked; were seemingly hairless; and their skin displayed a leaden pallor. The weapons they carried were made of some purplish metal, colored like permanganate of potash. Some were halberds with short handles; and others were crescent-shaped knives weighted at the top of the blade with heavy knobs.
“God!” cried Roverton. “If we only had elephant-guns and automatics!”
The pygmies had stopped their mounts and were gibbering excitedly as they stared with their round orbs at the earth-beings. The sounds they made were scarcely to be duplicated by human vocal chords.
“Mlah!mlah!knurhp!anhkla!hka!lkai!rhpai!” they chattered to each other.
“I guess we’re as much of a novelty to them as they are to us,” observed Adams.
The pygmies seemed to have arrived at a definite decision. They waved their weapons and chirped, and their lizard-steeds swung round in a semi-circle till all were in a position upstream from the mutineers. Then they advanced, and the pygmies pointed onward with their weighted knives and halberds as if enjoining the men to precede them. There was nothing to do but obey, for the lizard-creatures opened yawning mouths that were fanged like caverns of stalactites and stalagmites, when they drew near. Roverton and his fellows were forced to proceed at a marathon-like pace in order to keep ahead of them.
“They’re herding us like cattle!” Roverton cried.
When they came abreast of the purple-covered mass which the pygmies had been hewing into slabs, a halt was made and the slabs were loaded into large panniers which were then attached to the backs of the monsters by means of a curious harness that looked as if it were wrought of animal intestines. The men were herded in the center of the cavalcade while this work was going on. There was no possible escape; and they resigned themselves with as much scientific calm as they could muster.
After the loading had been accomplished, the pygmies resumed their advance along the stream, driving their captives before them. The fog had now begun to lift and disappear, and a dim yellow solar orb, slightly larger than our sun, became discernible low in the heavens above a remote horizon of serrate peaks. The river turned abruptly after a mile or so and wound away through the desolate plain toward a large lake or sea that filled the further distance with a semi-lune of dull purple. Here the cavalcade left the stream, marshalling its prisoners toward the far-off mountains.
The landscape grew barer and even more desert-like in its character as Roverton and his companions stumbled onward before the gaping maws of the monsters. There were no more of the insect-devouring shaggy masses, nor even insects themselves nor any other forms of life. The plain was like a vast level of dried primordial ooze, or the bed of some vanished ocean.
Hunger and weariness assailed the men. They were driven ever onward at a merciless, unremitting pace, till they panted for breath and their muscles grew leaden with fatigue. Hours seemed to pass; but the dim sun rose no higher above the horizon. It swung in a low arc, like the sun of sub-polar lands. The mountains drew no nearer, but receded on the vast vague skies.
The plain began to reveal details hitherto unnoticed. Low hills sprang up, the undulations deepened. Bare ravines of dark, sullen, semi-basaltic stone intersected it at intervals. Still there were no signs of life, no plants, no trees, no habitations. The mutineers wondered wearily where they were being taken, and when they would reach the destination sought by their captors.
They could not imagine what it would be like.
Now they were driven along a ravine in which ran a rapid stream. The ravine grew deeper; and sheer cliffs, increasing in height to a hundred feet or more, hemmed it in on each side. Rounding a sharp turn, the men saw before them a broad space of level shore, and above the shore a cliff that was lined with several rows of cavern-mouths and little steps cut in the stone. Dozens of pygmies, of the same type as their captors, were gathered before the entrances of the lower caves. An animated chattering arose among them at sight of the cavalcade and its prisoners.
“Troglodytes!” exclaimed Roverton, feeling in spite of his fatigue the keen interest of a man of science. He and his companions were immediately surrounded by the pygmies, some of whom, on closer inspection, appeared to be of a different sex from the ones they had first encountered. There were also a few infants, the smallest of which were little larger than guinea-pigs.
The members of the cavalcade dismounted and proceeded to unload the panniers with the assistance
of the others. The slabs of fleshy white substance were piled on the ground beside several large flat mortars of stone. When the unloading was completed, the pygmies laid some of the slabs in these mortars and began pounding them with heavy pestles. They made signs to the men, enjoining them to do likewise.
“I suppose the stuff is used for food,” surmised Adams. “Maybe it’s the staff of life among these creatures.” He and the others selected pestles and started to pound one of the slabs. The material was easily reduced to a fine, creamy paste. It gave off a pungent odor that was far from unpleasant; and in spite of certain highly repulsive memories the three men became conscious that they were extremely hungry.
When all the mortars were full of paste, the pygmies began to devour it without any further formality, using not only their webbed hands but their prehensile trunks to convey the stuff to their double mouths. They motioned to the men that they also should eat.
The paste had a saline flavor and vaguely resembled a mixture of sea-fish with some nutritious root-vegetable. It was quite palatable on the whole; and it served to allay the pangs of hunger in a fairly satisfactory manner. At the end of the meal a sort of fermented beverage, yellow-green in color, was brought out in shallow vessels of earthen-ware. The taste was disagreeable and very acrid; but all fatigue disappeared after a few sips; and the mutineers were able to survey their situation with new hopefulness and courage.
Several hours were now spent in pounding up the remainder of the slabs. The paste was stored in broad-mouthed urns and these urns were carried into the lower caves. Roverton and his comrades were signed to assist in this work. The caves were too low to permit their standing upright and were very dark and shadowy, with many ramifications of irregular size. The furnishings were quite primitive, as was to be expected; though there was
a welcome degree of cleanliness. They were full of a smoke-like smell, and in one of them a little fire was burning. The fuel resembled some sort of peat. There were tiny couches covered with furless skins, probably those of creatures similar to the lizard-things.
The low sun had gone down behind the cliffs when the last urn was carried into the caverns. A cold green twilight gathered along the streams, thickened by the rising of wispy vapors. The lizard-monsters were led away to a cave larger than the rest, lying at some distance apart. Obviously it served as a kind of stable. Then the pygmies retired by twos and threes to their caverns, after indicating a grotto which the men were to occupy. Four pygmies, armed with their queer halberds and heavily weighted knives, remained on guard in front of the entrance.
Darkness flowed into the grotto like a rising sea of stealthy silent ripples. With its coming, an odd lethargy overpowered the men—a reaction from all the stress and strain and hardship they had endured, from the tax of all the new, unearthly impressions their nerves had sustained. They stretched out on the stone floor, using the little couches along the wall for pillows. In a few minutes they were asleep.
They awoke with the sound of myriad cheeping and chatterings outside their cavern in the pale mistiness of dawn.
“Sounds like a caucus,” surmised Roverton as he crawled toward the entrance. Peering out, he saw that more than a hundred pygmies, half of whom must have come from some other community, were collected on the stream-bank and were seemingly engaged in an earnest debate. All of them kept looking with their round orbs toward the cave occupied by the mutineers. Their words, expressions, gestures, were so remote from anything familiar to humanity, that it was impossible to guess the trend or import of their debate, or to know whether the decision at which they were arriving was friendly or inimical.
“They give me the creeps,” said Deming. “We don’t know whether they’re going to eat us or elect us for their tribal deities.”
Apparently at a word of command, the guards approached the cavern-mouth and motioned the men to come forth. They obeyed. Platters full of the white paste and cups of a sweetish ebon-black beverage were set before them; and while they ate and drank, the whole assemblage looked on in silence. Somehow, there seemed to be a change in the attitude of the pygmies; but the nature of the change, or what it might portend, was beyond surmise. The whole proceeding was extremely mysterious and had almost the air of some sinister sacrament. The black beverage must have been mildly narcotic, for the men began to feel as if they were drugged. There was a slight deadening of all their senses, though their brain-centers remained alert.
“I don’t like this,” murmured Roverton. He and the others felt a growing disquietude, for which they could assign no determinate reason. They were
not reassured when the three lizard-monsters, followed by two more of a similar type, reappeared along the stream-bank. All were mounted by armed pygmies who, when they approached, made signs that the men should precede them along their line of march. The mutineers started down-stream, with the mounted guards and the whole assemblage following them.
Soon the bank grew narrower and the walls above more precipitous. The foothold narrowed to a yard-wide path, beside which the waters rushed with sullen vehemence in a series of torrential rapids teethed with yellow foam. Passing a turn in the wall, the men saw that the bank ended in a large cavern-mouth. Beyond, the cliffs rose perpendicularly from the torrent.
The three hesitated as they neared the cavern. What fate was before them they could not conjecture; but their sense of alarm and disquietude increased. They looked back and saw that the foremost lizard-thing was close upon them, yawning more horribly than the black cave in front. They thought of leaping into the stream; but the headlong torrent was full of sharp rocks; and a roaring from beyond the cliff betokened the nearness of a waterfall. The walls above the path were impossible to climb; so they entered the cavern.
IV
The place was quite roomy in contradistinction to the caves inhabited by the pygmies, and the men were not forced to stoop at any time. But, blinded with the daylight they had left, they stumbled over stones and against the winding walls as they groped in utter darkness. A gust of chill and noisome air came forth like a subterranean wind from the heart of the cavern; and one of the monsters was breathing at their heels. They could see nothing, could be sure of nothing; but perforce they must go on, not knowing if the next step would plunge them into some terrific pit or bottomless gulf. A sense of uncanny menace, of weird unhuman horror, increased upon them momently.
“This place is dark as the coal-cellars of Hades,” jested Roverton. The others laughed bravely, though their nerves were on edge with sinister expectation and uncertainty.
The draft of dank, mephitic air grew stronger. The smell of stagnant, sunless waters, lying at some unfathomable depth, mingled in the men’s nostrils with a nauseating reek as of bat-haunted catacombs or foul animal-dens.
“Phooey!” grumbled Deming. “This is worse than Gorgonzola and fox-guts all in one.”
The floor of the cavern began to slope downward. Step by step the descent steepened like some infernal chute, till the mutineers could hardly keep their footing in the dark.
Remote and faint, like a little patch of phosphorescence, a light dawned in the depths below. The walls of the cavern, dolorously ribbed and arched,
were now distinguishable. The light strengthened as the men went on, and soon it was all about them, pouring in pale-blue rays from an undiscerned subterranean source.
The incline ended abruptly, and they came out in a vast chamber full of the queer radiance, which appeared to emanate from roof and walls like some kind of radio-activity. They were on a broad semi-circular shelf; and, crossing the shelf, they found that it terminated sharply and fell sheer down for perhaps fifty feet to a great pool in the center of the chamber. There were ledges on the opposite side of the cavern at the same level as the one on which they stood; and there were smaller caves that ramified from these ledges. But apparently none of the caves were attainable from the ledge where the incline had ended. Between, were perpendicular walls that could afford no moment’s foothold anywhere.
The three men stood on the brink above the pool and looked about them. They could hear the shuffling of the first lizard-monster on the incline and could see the baleful glaring of its single eye as it came forward.
“This looks like the last page of the last chapter.” Roverton was now peering down at the pool. The others followed his gaze. The waters were dusky, stirless, dull, ungleaming, beneath the bluish glow from the cavern-sides. They were like something that had been asleep or dead for thousands of years; and the stench that arose from them suggested ages of slow putrefaction.
“Christ! What is that?” Roverton had noticed a change in the waters, an odd glimmer that came from beneath their surface as if a drowned moon were rising within them. Then the dead calm of the pool was broken with a million spreading ripples, and a vast head, dripping with loathsome luminescence, upreared from the waters. The thing was seven or eight feet wide, it was hideously round and formless and seemed to consist mainly of gaping mouths and glaring eyes all strewn together in a mad chaos of malignity and horror. There were at least five mouths, each of them large enough to devour a man at one swallow. They were fangless, and elastically distensible. Scattered among them, the eyes burned like satanic embers.
One of the lizard-monsters had crawled forth on the shelf. Scores of the pygmies were crowding beside and behind it, and some of them now advanced till they were abreast of the men. They stared down at the fearsome thing in the pool and made uncouth gestures and genuflections with heads, hands and long prehensile trunks, as if they were invoking or worshipping it. Their shrill voices rose in a rhythmically wavering chant.
The men were almost stupefied with horror. The creature in the gulf was beyond anything in earthly legend or nightmare. And the rites of the obeisance offered by the pygmies were unbelievably revolting.
The End of the Story Page 29