by H. F. Heard
But at last I did slow down and, after a moment or two, I stopped. I stretched my feet first, and, sure enough, they could be waved as far as I liked. I raised my hand. There was smooth rock a foot above my face. I switched on my torch. I was lying in the gleaming duct which now was only gently sloping from my head to where my feet stretched out into a black hole. Facilis descensus Averno, I thought, and put the rest of the quotation out of mind. Anyhow, I had arrived at a new stage and level. Cautiously I pressed myself forward. I reached the lip of my small tunnel. I got my legs out—for the mouth flared quite a bit—and there I sat up—there was just room—and swung my torch to and fro, surveying the next scene into which I had been switched, as by a revolving stage.
I was sitting in a land of sill or ledge, a seat, if you will. For the duct that had delivered me had this, its opening, some four or five feet above a floor, an arena: a real arena, for it was sand-covered—a space, I suppose, of a couple of hundred feet across, as fine a circular area as you ever saw in a circus, smooth and empty, as though waiting for a troupe to run in and begin performing. And they might; for all around there were grotto entrances just like the one in which I was perched. I judged it must have been some vast form of a sinkhole into which had drained, during the last Pluvial Period, the streams which had cut the limestone into the channels and ducts down one of which I had made my rapid entrance. These streams must have carried with them and spilled on the floor all this sand, through which in time the water itself had percolated away. The walls of the place were also quite theatrical. For they were all pillared, pilastered, paneled, and fluted with stalactite shafting and ribbing and molding—rather like the old Alhambra Music Hall in long-ago London. And as the ribs and vaultings ran up to the great natural dome they took on more fantastic shapes, spanning and bracketing like winged caryatids, pendentive to the roof. Naturally, they were at every angle and arc, soaring and careening, some seeming to rise vertically, others appearing to dive headlong. And all this energy of movement frozen into dully gleaming stone, as though over some pandemonic flight or ballet there had been poured an imprisoning gum.
I swung my light to and fro to study this fabulous tracery of fan-vaulting. The whole billowing elevation was so fantastic that, as the beam flickered over the deeply shadowed limbs and members of the fretwork, one could not help imagining that they themselves might be shifting and fluttering. Finally, so convincing did that fancy grow that it became not so much fun to imagine as fear to think it might possibly—impossibly—be somehow true. You know, when you’re alone like that, you, just a little gobbet of soft stuff, right down, swallowed deep in the stony gizzard of the earth, you have to take care. Fancy’s all right to play with where, if it should show signs of getting out of hand and getting the upper hand, you can blow it away with a lungful of laughter drawn from the bright air. But if you’re where your own laugh might itself get loose, crossbreed in a thousand dark holes with obscene echoes, and come back at you as a blast of insane mockery, then, I say, you must take care. It’s up to you to listen, watch, pin down that shifty whispering thing before it can get off on its own, grow in the shadow, and lunge out of the dark, pouncing onto you from the back. So I listened and watched as, vault after vault, spandrel and pendant, I picked off with my torch each fantastic body and made it endure steady, illuminated analysis. One by one they had to yield, to go back into simple, dull, rigid stone. I was the only master here. The rest was simply shelves and steps, should I wish to clamber.
Yet one of those details was a bit stubborn, I must own. For it was hard to get it into the full light; another contorted shaft gave it unfair cover. It seemed almost seeking a protecting shadow, and, whenever I tried to get my beam right onto it, the outer rib seemed to extend a little farther, or the inner one to draw back. Well, you know, if you get looking at a thing like that too long and just can’t get the hang of it and properly explain it away, then you’re back again at the danger spot from which that ill sort of fancy can rise round you. It will start its misbegotten crossbreeding on the fact you’re failing to domesticate, and, hey-presto, you’ll find you’ve raised a monster instead of laying it. So the advice, of course, is: lay off the pretty little puzzle before it turns itself into an ugly, insane certainty. Naturally, that’s what I did. And, sure enough, when I’d gone my watch-round once again and inspected all the other carvings, covings, and roof-grottoes and come back to my problem-piece, it had settled down and become as commonplace geology as all the rest.
After all, come to think of it, fancy started up in the caves. It was in an embossed dusk like this I’m telling of that all man’s cave art came shimmering and shuddering, bison-big and rhino-charging, right out onto the dull stone. Indeed, so obviously stone-simple had that piece of my canopy now become that I just couldn’t, do what I would, see again the queer suggestion of coming-alive sinisterness which had been almost too convincing five minutes before. So remarkable was the change, so vivid my memory, so impossible now to reconstruct that “eidetic form,” that I then could almost have believed that something up there must have moved off, stolen away, while I was resting my fancy-threatened eyes elsewhere. And just then, as if to keep me on the qui vive, as my eyes gave the all-clear, my ears chose to add, “Wait a minute. Was that anything?” The place, of course, was more silent than the tomb, and in a vault like that your own heart might almost wake an echo. Besides, far away, somewhere in this water-wrought set of uncharted chambers and labyrinthine ways, a last drop of water itself might have fallen, and its ultimate echo in turn fallen exhausted on the fine tension of one’s ear. But if it was a sound, was it the sound that is made by a splash, however small? Wasn’t it rather the sound, not of water, but of air, a sigh rather than a tear? And with this hint came another from an even vaguer sense. I fancied in that air, which was as still as deep water, something had moved, a faint fan, not a draft but a breath too gentle to sound as a sigh. Well, that gave me a chance to rouse myself. If there was, down here, even the faintest current of air, it must be moving in from some unseen entrance. Here was a clue I could and would follow.
I pushed myself forward and dropped lightly on my feet to the sand floor. When I was in the middle of the arena, I saw that the chamber, though nearly circular, had, in fact, a sort of apse at the end opposite to my entrance. On reaching this big embrasure, I made my next discovery. On my left, behind one of the stalactite shaftings that ran up to the roof on either side, the rock was fissured. Like a tall, Gothic, lancet window, the gap ran almost from roof to floor. But it gave no light. Indeed, it gave no answer to the flash of my torch but swallowed up the beam in complete darkness. I mounted the low sill and peered in—or should I say out? Then, at last, I got some sort of bearings. I was standing, apparently, at the tip of a sort of funnel. I mean by that that the walls splayed back, almost exactly at the angle of my perspective—at least for as long a distance as I could now gauge. This didn’t, of course, tell me much, but enough for the next step. For it was clear that here was the kind of funnel which could convey my spectral draft—though I had to own that the air in it, which I could now feel as I stood on its lip, was as still as that in the arena that lay behind me. Anyhow, here was a path and, what all of us speleologists love, one leading deeper. The slope, naturally, wasn’t a steep grade, and the floor was smooth—again, evidently water-worn, a spillway, no doubt, out of the cistern I had just left. So I made good going for that kind of terrain.
I don’t know how long I slithered quietly down that incline with the walls of the funnel opening up around me. Once or twice I did turn back just to throw my light up the way I’d come. It was curiously dizzying, looking up that convergent tube. At last the vault and sides spanned away into darkness ahead of me and the echoes of my shuffling came so faintly that I could judge the vastness of the hollow in which I was now inclosed. I had, however, now come to the level. I wondered whether this could be the bottom of some uniquely large subterranean lake—perhaps almost an underworld sea.
I threw my light to and fro. My spirits rose every moment. Here was a find to lift the heart of any of our tribe of explorers: a huge underworld world—a basement of the noisy first floor on which we spent all our time. Let the superficial have the superfices, let them have all the surface. For us the depths, and here were the depths, the abyss itself, offering a sanctuary, a home, a country for the refugee from rush and whirl, traffic and collision. That last vestige of uneasiness—the discomfort that I might not be the first who ever burst into that silent land, that I might be having to share this spacious lower berth with someone else, that I might not be the first-born being welcomed home by my parents, Darkness and Silence themselves, but might instead be only an intruder, trespasser, invader—all that left me.
So it was that I felt it only as an incidental pointing up of my general high and sharp interest when, at one of my torch-wavings, as I strolled ahead over the expanse of my new country, I thought I could pick out some object that broke the surface of the plain. I judged it at once as the growing base of a stalactite, and, as it was the first I’d seen in that supercavern, I instinctively shot my beam upward to see whether I could catch sight of its corresponding stalagmite pendant creeping down to meet it—in another ten thousand years or so! But not only could I not do so; I found that I couldn’t even be sure I could sight the roof at all. This was indeed, I realized now, a chamber of the Under-Gods.
That fact, and the fact that I had seen no sign of any other stalactite or water deposits on this floor, sent me back to check on my find. I must have been wrong from the start. I swept my beam back and forth again. Not a hump of any sort broke the level. I satisfied myself that I must have glanced too quickly, and, too sure of what I’d seen, I had hurried on and gazed up to see where it could have come from. Still, again a little uneasiness did steal across the bright field of my explorer’s pleasure. And indeed the thing was still in my mind—though we both know how in that kind of lighting one can mistake things: after-images, shadows, and all that sort of thing—when, sure enough, there was another hump, or perhaps the same, right in the path of my beam! This time I was going to be careful and not be caught. I stood still and checked in my mind all I could see. It wasn’t much, for the object was pretty far off, I judged, at least pretty nearly at the limit of the visibility I commanded. But I could make out some things and was pleased to note that it did, on this long second look, appear as though it might be a stalactitic base. There was the frill or skirt, where the water deposits first spread, and next the gradual coil and swaith as the column begins to form and rise and take on its trunklike form, and then the bosslike head. Of course, if you wished to fancy, you could think it was a figure standing in your path. But, as I’ve said, I didn’t wish to do that sort of thing in that sort of place. I was there to enjoy solitude set with geology, not to give myself romantic shudders.
Now that I was sure of that, I determined to see again where the fall might come from. But once more I failed; the roof must be up there, but on the evidence of my senses I couldn’t have sworn to it: the rock evidently gave no gleam of response to my flickering signals. So I returned to my object. It was quite a little relief to find it there once more. But, do you know, then I became a little sorry that I had checked up on it so carefully. Why? Well, because I found that, in spite of all my care, I’d been wrong. I’ve told you what I had repeated to myself was—frill and train base, then swaith and coil round a wreathed trunk, and then the boss head. Well, my inventory was correct, right up to the top, but then I discovered I had failed to notice that there wasn’t one boss, but there were two other rather sharper crests each side of it. That, you’ll allow, is an unusual, though of course not an impossible, stalactite form. I came to the conclusion I must be seeing the object from a slightly different angle, holding my torch in not quite the same way, and that accounted for my making a missimplication of the form when I first checked on it. Well, the thing would be to go up to it and have a foreground inspection.
I took a good sweep round me to see if any other such humps had come into view and then, finding none, I straightened my beam—and was brought to a standstill. The object had gone. “Mirage.” I added that to “shadow effects” and “after-image impressions.” You know the Brocken specter—it’s cast by yourself on the mist in front of you? But then it has to have the sun behind you. There was no light behind me. I was puzzled, of course, a bit uneasy, naturally, but these two feelings came together to reinforce action. I couldn’t leave myself down here just seeing things that weren’t there. There’s no one, when you’re alone, to whom to say, “Did you see that?” You must just carry your own hands along and say to them, “Now, here’s the spot; can you feel anything where I saw something?” So I set my feet and my teeth and went along to where I believed I’d seen something. I don’t know whether I was relieved or the reverse, when, after going—I counted them—four hundred and fifty strides, I saw something on the sand. Relief was there. For one thing, it showed I could keep going straight and not be in for that dangerous roundabout which lost people describe. It was a relief to see that what I was looking at was not the print of my own foot. But I’m not sure that what I did see didn’t cancel out that relief. No, I wasn’t looking at the base of a stalactite. There was no trace of water-deposited rock on that sand floor. But there was a trace, never a doubt of it. I had seen something, and I had seen something that had moved. For here in the dust were markings, and there wasn’t a doubt of it—they were markings of feet. I’m not an anatomist—and less one then than now—but, of course, anyone who’s been out on lonely trails is used to studying barefoot marks: you know the print of a foot when you see it, and you know it is human. The thing that kept me staring there was—or I should say the three things were—footmarks.
Here were footmarks which, though they were of feet, gave my unskilled mind a sense that there was something damned odd about them—don’t ask me to be exact and say what. I’ve said I’m no anatomist and, even now, couldn’t tell you in clear language what was wrong with those prints. And the clinching thing about their oddness was the third thing—that they were here and—they weren’t there! To be exact—and I pored on those prints till they’re printed on my mind—there were a pair of footprints, side by side, or rather, for I remember it exactly, set out, splayed out at right angles from each other. The heels weren’t together, though. They were kept from being so by another odder feature. The prints would make you think that the person had been barefoot, pretty certainly, or only in a thin leather moccasin. But the odd little feature, the thing that kept him from putting his heels together, was the fact that he must have been wearing long, low spurs. You could see the trace of them in the dust running out from each heel as clearly as the print of the ball of the foot itself and the sharply indented toes. That problem of costume kept the whole eeriness of the thing off my mind for a moment. What (I’d almost said the devil), but what in the name of Providence was some—something doing down here in spurs! “Does the night-mare have a rider?” I said grimly to myself and then, not liking the flavor of my own joke, spat it out. And then a hope of sense and a sense of hope came into my mind; not much, but something to cling to. Those spurs, they might be grapples, heel grapples used for climbing. If this creature really stood with its feet at right angles to each other, then that might be so, because that was the way it climbed, digging in its heels, and then these spurs—or spines—would be naturally useful. I plucked up my courage. Science would applaud me. You see, the man who wanted to be all on his own now was glad to pluck up his courage with the thought that soon he’d be before an ever-so-sane and skeptical audience, they in tuxedos and he, no doubt, too; and after a good dinner and some sane banter, he’d be trying to make them believe that he’d found a fine sort of lizard somewhere down in a crack in Mexico.
But gaze as I would, there was nothing more to it. Had the thing dropped from the roof and hopped up there again? Well, I there and then made a sketch of the prints and then just went ahead—th
ankful for the small mercy I was evidently able to do so and not circle like a confused rat in a maze. And sure enough, after another six hundred strides, I found I had made progress, if only into literally a dead wall. Suddenly there loomed at me the rock. It gave no gleam back to my torch, and when I touched it I found it furred with some sort of inorganic or organic pile that swallowed up a ray of light just like a thick, black, dull-fibered velvet. I was within six feet of it before the narrowing of my beam to a circle told me it was being cast on something I should soon touch. The touch wasn’t reassuring; there was something uncanny in the very feel of it. But I had arrived. And I was able to tell myself that it was up this my lizard had climbed, and he must have hopped over the intervening space by managing to light on spots where the dust on the floor was too caked to give a good imprint. I turned my back to the wall and began a careful scanning of the roof. Now that I knew what to look for, now that I knew I wouldn’t see it, but could judge where it was by seeing my beam form a small faint disk, I took my soundings carefully. And, sure enough, time and again I did see the disk appear and so estimated that the roof was hanging above me at about that height. I was doing this systematically and every moment, as our ladies say, “gaining poise” by this kind of balancing exercise, when, suddenly, my new-found “quiet won by method” was all blown up to, and beyond, my speculative ceiling.
You’ll have gathered it was evidently not all at one level. Here and there I found my little circle; farther on, it would appear littler; farther on, I’d fail to get it at all. That would mean, wouldn’t it, that the roof was at various heights?—and some didn’t appear to be so very high—say, not more than forty or fifty feet, and that was more or less above my head. So I was giving most of my attention to that sector when a part of it gave me a small problem: it evidently projected. Once more my mind said, “Stalagmite-stalactite,” those passwords of our underworld, and once more their open sesame to light and sanity failed. For the thing I was looking at wasn’t like what I took it to be. It wasn’t, I’ve told you, more than thirty or forty feet from my upturned head—I mean its head wasn’t. For there was no doubt about it, as I stood gazing up, straining my neck—there, hanging head down from the vault, was some poor brute, hanged by the heels, his head slightly swaying. There we were, he and I, playing a sort of ghastly underworld charade, I stalactite, he stalagmite, with heaven and hell knows what dumb unseen audience laughing silently at the hellish humor of it all. There was no doubt the poor creature was dead. The body seemed utterly emaciated, a shriveled thing, that swayed a little in some ghostly draft that ran, I suppose, along the corbels of that monster crypt. But who the hell had caught the poor creature and hung it up there until, of course, it died from the blood flowing to its head? My mind ran back to that queer spurred foot. Had the odd creature that had stood in my path, had it waylaid an earlier traveler, killed him or bound him, and then, scrambling up this wall with his body, slung it like a string of withered onions or a smoked ham from the ceiling? Was this place, which I’d tried to think of as some vast antechapel to the cathedral of The Gods of Silence and the Abyss, simply the larder of some man-eating cave-newt? Birds have larders; that agreeably named bird, the butcher bird, has. That kind of frugality is evidently learnable by the simplest minds, and here supplies of fresh meat must be rare. So I would be a windfall and soon be mounted on these grim kitchen rafters.