The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  But could he tell me more, more about their actual selves, more about those strange minds, which had won, perhaps, to a height of outlook equal to ours but from a different base and looking out from a different angle? I felt like a man in a cloud-piercing skyscraper who suddenly notices, penetrating the cloud bank, another spire alongside his, and in that tower can see, at the topmost room, someone making signals to him. I simply must find out all that could be told. My teacher’s way certainly did not lack ingenuity, and I believe I did grasp what he was trying to convey. At least I have no doubt he was trying to get over to me the answer to the question which he saw was in my mind. First, he drew a number of lines, two series of parallel lines one above the other. Then, on the lower, like a clef mark in music, he sketched perfectly unmistakably the human ear, my ear. He proceeded to add, in the same place on the line above, a sketch of his ear, the bat’s huge organ of hearing. Next he made a series of dots up and down these bars, where the two sets were nearest each other, and, as he did this, he emitted a series of squeaks, which, though very high up, I could recognize as a kind of scale. And, after that, he went on, making dots higher and higher up the upper scale. I heard no accompanying note, but, before he made a dot, he would point to his throat and I could see it swell. I felt sure he was emitting sounds too high for me to hear and that he was showing this fact diagrammatically on his chart.

  Well, after a lesson or two of this sort, I had pretty clearly in my mind another difference, another alternative that this Homo or Vir vespertilio had made to man’s particular advance. True, we have music, but for our sense of things and our delight in them we mainly depend on sight. They, on the other hand, had sight and no little power in plastic art and expression, but mainly their life and their powers of expression depended on hearing and on the production of sound. Indeed, he went some distance to demonstrate not only how they took in but how they gave out. He showed me a drawing which he helped me to understand by repeatedly pointing to his throat as he made it. So I have no doubt he was showing me his larynx. Later, he made two drawings of a throat. One showed a small larynx, and when he had drawn that he pointed to me. Then he drew a second, twice the size, and pointed to his own. Once he had, as it were, showed me what organ he was trying to explain, he rubbed out his two outlines and drew again the large larynx but with much more detail. I wish I’d known as much then about that piece of anatomy as I’ve mugged up since. But as I studied away at what’s now known about bats’ throats, a great deal of that drawing did come back to my mind. I expect you don’t know—I had no idea—all the work that has been done on that queer subject. There’s a learned man in London called Hartridge, and he’s found this very odd throat of these very odd animals is hand and fist with their very odd ears; indeed, their great ears would be no use unless they’d developed a larynx to play up to them, as you might say. They produce out of that sound box of theirs no fewer than four kinds of noises, or, if that is too crude a way of putting it, four different ways of playing on the air and making it carry messages for them. Yes, the air is their element, no doubt about it. They have a buzz which I could just hear if I was very close to them. Then they have an echo-sounding device so that they can catch the returning sound as it bounces off any object while they are flying and can, if they need to, thread their way blindfold through a maze of threads and never touch one of them. They send this out—some seven thousand cycles a second is its pace—every quarter of a second. But that isn’t all. On top of that they have yet another voice so high-pitched that it rises to thirty and even seventy thousand cycles a second. This they send out whether they are flying or hanging still. It is some sort of supersonic conversation. Sometimes, in this, there is a click which we may hear. I think he may have meant to tell me that the click, which he made, was a kind of period or full stop, like the little slap and slide of the hands which finger-talkers use when they close a sentence. But just think of it—they can produce certainly several of these sounds simultaneously, and yet making these sounds mustn’t interfere with their huge intake of breath as they fly nor with their catching and eating their insect diet on the wing. Dr. Hartridge thinks they must have no less than three vibrating structures in their larynx, and again I think my bat teacher tried to make me understand that. But you can see not only the wonder of the whole thing but the difficulty of making such a half dumb-and-deaf creature as we are understand such superspeech and superhearing!

  I think, as much as anything, it was this dawning sense of their uncanny superiority that kept me, in spite of all the friendliness of their actions to me, deeply uneasy. One might have got over their looks by the simple, if not very gracious, device of feeling superior to them, treating them as a kind of pet that was trying to be human and live up to the height of one’s unquestionable superiority as a man. But to have to own that in this grotesque make-up there lurked an intelligence far better equipped than one’s own to know everything one might be doing—that prevented any sense of security or settledness spreading in my mind. I just couldn’t say what might be the limit of their understanding, and so, of course, I could have no assurance as to what might be their intentions toward me. I wasn’t up against an animal. I was confronted with another type, and in some ways a far more successful variant, of man. It was that fact which would every now and then bring back into my mind with full force my original overwhelming terror. Indeed, I had no right to call them another sort of man. That again was simply my feeble little fear trying to get out of its fix by pretending to pride of place. They were another of Life’s efforts to evolve a wholly intelligent animal, a creature that might take the initiative successfully against its environment and, yes, against all other living rivals.

  Often, during those literally dark days, I would wake up in my crib and lie staring at the darkness, when the luminous dust with which I had been supplied had died down and I was weary trying to keep the dark at bay by the feeble glow from the frotting stones. I would gaze into that sepulchral gloom and think that between me and my own native upper air, the world of daylight and humanity, lay those twisted lengths of labyrinth and—sentinel-poised on every ledge, hanging like living portcullises from every cornice and over every arch, these ultra-vigilant black angels. Their huge, soft, silently turning ears no doubt listened to every move I made as I tossed about on my straw and would be at the alert should I put a foot to the floor. No, the very idea of escape was ridiculous. Nor, as was perhaps to be expected, had my teacher touched on that topic, and till he did I was, perforce, dumb.

  Days went past and always the same diet. But that, as it happened, did give me an opportunity to ask a question. One day when I was munching the mid-waking—one couldn’t call it the midday—meal, my instructor was drawing fresh charts, having to do, I think, with the semicircular canals in their heads, to explain why they could, and did, sling themselves upside down and sleep thus, hanging by their thumbnails—though, of course, with both those huge ears open. I was draining my milk, when suddenly it occurred to me to point to the cup and then point vaguely around me, so as to hint that I wondered where in a place like that such a liquid food could be obtained. For a moment he thought I wanted more, rose, almost spread his wings, and was reaching with one of them for the cup. Then he seemed to understand—they were certainly quick on the uptake—nodded, and crouched down again. Taking his chalk, he drew with a beautiful clear outline a goat. I once more made my gesture, “Where?” He looked at me for some time, and I had an increasing misgiving that I must have asked a question I would have been wiser to have left alone. But finally he turned again to his slate. Quickly and as clearly he drew a cow and then drew a line diagonally through it as though canceling it. But a moment after, evidently wondering whether I would take the meaning, he drew the ribs and most of the other big bones appearing through the outline, and there was a dead enough cow to convince one what he was trying to convey. Next—and again I had no doubt I had the right connection he intended—he showed a man shaking both his fists. It was as
clear as the blessed daylight that I had lost, that the man had lost the cow. I could not avoid the question in my mind: Were not these the actual creatures who had made cattle-keeping impossible for the native Mexicans of the district? But his mind was evidently following another trail. He drew the udder of the cow and showed it being milked. I think the sense which he would have had me take—whether it was the truth or no—was that they, or some of their species, had milked the cows dry, and then the farmers had let them die; so these illicit milkers were thieves only and not cattle killers. Certainly I had eaten no meat down there. And it was a meaning which I was, not unnaturally, very willing to believe. For it was far more reassuring to think that it was milk they needed and not the other rather richer liquid diet usually associated with bats that take suck!

  As I felt that I’d solved the milk supply—that a few goats were still within flight distance, and that from these they brought me my drink—I thought I’d leave that subject alone for a bit—with its problems of “meum” and “tuum,” and the further and even more doubtful speculations as to actual diet, which would perhaps bring in “meum” and “tuum” in an even dimmer and darker light, as far as I was concerned, and the role I might be called on to play. About the cactus fruit I needed no information. The shrimps, however, I thought might be explained. I held up one in the faint light, which, of course, being green, made me unable to say whether the object itself was the proper shrimp pink. Nor was its actual shape really that of a shrimp, and, as it had been made into a kind of paste with an aromatic leaf, I couldn’t find a perfect specimen so as to be certain of its anatomy. I did then have a slight shudder when the next day he brought to the lecture a small pouch. Out of this he took a number of insects in various stages of hatching. I don’t know why we hate the thought of eating flies, grubs, and bugs. Lucullus, the great Roman epicure, I’ve been told, recommends highly the fat larvae that can be found hiding behind the bark of rotten trees, and the Arabs always eat fried locusts. But after that I noticed that if I did eat what I suppose should be called the meat course, I did not relish it as I had before. Such creatures of habit we remain. But if I didn’t eat it, I did feel lower. And I realized that these creatures, when they needed energy from food, got it better from such a diet than from meat. Evidently the enormous energy of the insect makes a form of protein very suitable for such creatures as these men-bats, who still need some actual food but must have it in very high concentration. After all, as I’ve read since, they are all insectivores. And so were we all when we were early mammals; our shape of teeth is said to show that still. Perhaps the next food fad will run: “Come to the real health restaurant and eat what’s your true natural food. Come where energy sizzles from your plate. Try one of our truly balanced menus—Fried butterfly, bluebottle-paste; paté of wood lice.” Anyhow, the fact that they actually preferred an insect to a mammal when it came to eating was certainly comforting. And as certainly—if this was a more abstract consideration for me in my position—considering how insects reproduce, starvation can never face a people who depend on a livestock which can out-breed any other form of life, “hands down.” They need never trouble to toil and plow and sow and reap and harvest, mill and bake, who depend on the greatest egg-layers that Nature ever devised.

  So time passed, but I really cannot tell you how long it was. One loses all count in a place where there is not only no calendar but no night or day, only one huge gloom lit faintly, waveringly, irregularly from a feeble green glow on the floor. But one “day,” instead of taking me to the slab and beginning a lecture, my guide waved me to the doorway which led from my two smallish chambers. Of course, that again started up the smoldering trepidation in the pit of my stomach. I kept on saying to myself that all he had done and conveyed had been friendly, civilized, human, aboveboard even. That, however, could not alter the fact that one could never know what on earth—or what under earth—might be lurking for one just around the next black corner. But I did set out with the feeling (which I think was not an unduly vain way of keeping up one’s courage) that few people, if any, could ever have had such an adventure. But then my mind took an unpleasant hop. What about possible Mexicans or prospectors who might have strayed in here—old toughs or wildly frightened simpletons who fought and kicked and tried to kill? Homo sapiens when he’s panicked isn’t an easy species to deal with gently. What of them? Well, I must keep my mind on the spot; sufficient unto the night must be the darkness thereof.

  So I went off with my guide, and, even when, in the dark after we had left the glow, I felt that queer little pluck on my sleeve (for he could judge exactly where I was and steer me, though I hadn’t a ghost of an idea where he was or where were the walls of living rock between which we were winding), I didn’t shrink—at least not much—and I certainly gave myself up to being led. We wound about a good deal, I judged. And then at last I was sure a glow was gaining ahead. And what was more, and even more cheering, it was not merely a glow of light but, I felt increasingly sure, of warmth. I suddenly realized how I longed for the sun—I who thought I was never really at my best till sunk in some subterranean cave. And how this dead-still, though really not chilly atmosphere, how it sank upon and pressed down one’s spirits! But the glow, when it burst on us, was not the sun, though it was light and heat also. I was a bit blinded, considering the dark we had been in, and I could see my companion veil his eyes in an odd but efficient way, by putting over them the great fur-fringed edges of his amazingly mobile ears.

  We were in a fair-sized hall, and, at the other end, flowing in considerable volume, was a luminous stream from which steam was rising. As we drew nearer I could see that the rock all around us was warm; that on which the stream flowed was evidently hot, and above the stream, as the cavern arch spanned over, I could see that in places it actually glowed. We took our way along the riverside until the cavern turned and came to an end in a dramatic way. I found myself standing on a ledge, and beside me the stream plunged and fell sheer. How far down it went, of course, I couldn’t gauge, for it was quickly lost in its own mists of steam. The note of any waterfall is, you know, strangely hypnotic, and the sound of this torrent pouring down into still farther depths of the earth, echoing from those glowing rocks, while the whole view was vague with clouds of vapor streaming over the great bosses of gleaming rock—all this dazed me. So I don’t know how long I stood vaguely watching that vague scene. But at some time I became aware of something blending with it, something that was not simply this vast natural sound.

  As we stood there with that deep note—or rather series of harmonics—ringing in my head, I thought I could hear above the deep diapason of the stream and the echoing rock an intensely high singing. At first, I thought it was just that singing in one’s head that either great silence or a vast, deep, all-embracing, unwavering sound will sometimes produce. But after a few moments I was sure that was wrong. No, the note was coming from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me. I looked up, for I had been gazing almost sleepily at that flow and plunge of waters. I caught sight of my strange companion perched on a ledge not far from me, like some odd survival of the pterodactyls still haunting this sunken world. But it was not the quaintness of this geological gargoyle that held my attention. It was his expression, shown, of course, not by his features, as we would say, but literally by the cast of his visage. His great ears were swung, his great lips protruded, so that as clearly as any signpost they pointed—pointed across this river Styx, or I should, I suppose, say Phlegethon. Not till then had I looked in that direction. Now I could see, through the swathes of fog that swept along over the current, that we were facing another cavern across the stream. It opened onto the opposite bank. Clearly, it was from this entrance that the high note, which now had swelled to something one might almost call a wail or a “keening,” came pulsing. It rose till it was as loud as, and far more piercing than, the thunder of the fall. And then through the fog I saw a procession. Never had I seen these fantastic creatures to such effect. The light
from the glowing rock lit them, the mists swathed them and made behind every one of them utterly demonic shadow-hauntings and Brocken specters of each gargoyle figure. They swarmed along, some flying low (for they could maneuver in any space), others skimming the ground, others walking. And as the procession reached the entrance of their cavern, it petaled out, like some dark flower or terrible upas foliage, and effloresced over the rock until the whole of that cave-mouth was covered, whorled, and festooned with clinging figures, all with their heads pointing in toward the center. As this discharged its final stamens from this flower-of-many-petals, I saw the reason for this rite. Six of the creatures were walking and bearing something over which their wings made a pall or canopy. As they reached the ledge opposite us, so that now the stream only divided us from them, they, too, fanned out. I saw two things: first, that behind them stalked the Great Chiropter, the Venerable Vespertilio. The glowing warm light, very different from the greenish glow in which alone I formerly had seen this majestic demon, made him look even more splendid. For splendid he was. His fur was a golden white, which glowed like metal where the gleams of light fell on it. His physical pattern was of a majestic symmetry. This, I could not help feeling, is the true angelic form, not that wretched effeminacy in a pleated nightgown with two doves’ wings pinned to its ineffectual shoulders. Here is something that is a real “cherub,” a real form of might, yet not a clumsy bull form but, as it should be, a bird, utterly inhuman and yet of that high nature of which man is a clumsy version.

  He stood now with his vast wings raised so that he drew the whole meeting within his waft of benediction, and as the chant swelled he beat out its cadences with great winnows of his vans while I could hear coming from his tall, sinew-coiled throat a note beside which the total accompaniment of all the rest of this demonic choir was only an obbligato. The music, when one thus heard it, megaphoned, as of course it was by the vast trumpet-mouth in which they were ranged, was as overwhelming—yes, and as wonderful—as their appearance; and that is saying much. It was quite terribly moving. Have you ever heard the sea elephants—those giant seals that weigh tons—roaring in their great mating challenges from rock to rock far out in the subarctic sea? This had something of the same inhuman music in it, but it was, as indeed it should have been, finer, keener, far more penetrating. I could catch harmonies, modulations, sequences, until the piercing quality of it was almost too much, and one felt that one must stop one’s ears and run. And then, when it had reached that agonizing climax, it swooped and sank into a beautiful minor dirge, and finally into something which my human fancy would have an Amen.