by H. F. Heard
And indeed the service had come to an end. For now my eyes sank from the giant cantor and his choir of rock-clinging, dark seraphs and saw the second thing, the thing he brooded over and the six pallbearers had carried, In what seemed to me in the strange light a glossy cocoon, there lay wound what I could not doubt was a dead man-bat. As the chanting closed, the six again came forward and raised the body with their fingertips. The chant swelled again; they swung the corpse to the rhythm, and when the cry reached its climax the body was cast into the stream. I saw it flash into the water and the glowing stream sweep it over the brink into that huge censer on the rim of which I stood. When I looked up again, the procession on the other side of the river had re-formed and was sweeping back into the darkness out of which it had emerged.
After a pause, my guide touched me, and, my mind still running on this strange drama, a drama which had both moved me and reassured me, I followed him, hardly wondering what he would want with me next. But after a little while, when the glow was gone and I was being led by his delicate touch, I began to feel that we were not getting home—if I may use such a human word for my abysmal cell. We were too long away; and then, too, I felt another touch which I had not felt all the while I had been below. A fine, delicate wisp of a touch on the face, and for a moment I could not think what that could be. But I stopped trying to place it when I saw that there was light ahead. It was the old green stuff, but when we came up with it, it was almost as bright as that in the Hall of Audience. And it showed a scene almost as remarkable.
The whole place—and this was certainly a cavern not much less in size—gleamed as though it were canopied and arrased in silk. And, indeed, the more I looked, the more certain I was that it was. We walked through the large arch entrance, and my guide led me right up to the tapestried wall. Then I had a slightly unpleasant reaction—for the whole surface was hung, quilted, festooned with spider’s web. And on it spiders almost as large as tarantulas were running and weaving. My guide put out his vast, webbed hand and took hold of the stuff, and it drew aside like a thick curtain. He held it out for me to touch as we passed through, and I must say I didn’t like the contact, but I could judge it was as smooth and strong as silk. We passed under this canopy and came into a grotto where the tissue of the webs was all knotted and bossed with little bags. I realized these were the egg containers. My guide collected a number of these and put them in a small pouch. The spiders seemed to pay no attention to him. We passed out of this vast hatchery and went through some long galleries where, again with a phosphorescent glow, were growing masses of a rich lichen or fungus, rather like truffles. From these he picked some specimens, and then, turning to the left, he led me along by the hand.
I do not think it was more than a quarter of an hour before I saw my den glimmering before me. My guide went off and returned with my lunch, for which I must own I was ready, and this time he served me two more dishes. In one was the truffle-fungus. I tried this cautiously, but it was delicious. However, when I came to my other extra course and looked into the little pot in which it was served, I drew back. There was a sort of fine white miniature caviar in it. Still, caviar or no, shad roe or not, I might eat fishes’ eggs but not these. I had no doubt what they were. They were the eggs of those giant spiders. When I looked up at my guide, he cocked his head on one side and pointed to my mouth. But I shook my head and closed my lips. He made a flourish of his wings which well expressed amused consent and, as I had finished if I was going to refuse this pièce de résistance of their menu, he bowed me to the door. Back we went to our classroom, where he attempted to make clear—as far as I could judge—their agriculture and spider-keeping, but in spite of all his skill I don’t think I was taking in very much. He did not lecture long then, but left me to my thoughts and the dark after, I suppose, about half an hour.
The next day, perhaps because he saw that I was getting out of my depth as far as blackboard demonstrations went, he proposed another tour with the usual courtly flourish of his wing. Out we set again into the dark, until, after I had been led a considerable distance, I once again saw some light—but not much. Indeed, these galleries I was now entering were as poorly lit as any I had been able to see in at all. But they made up for it by something else. I don’t want to give you a wrong impression by a word that has mainly a rather dismal accent on it, but I must say that the first way that I knew we were coming to something unusual was not by sight, or even by sound, but by smell. It wasn’t bad, I want to make clear. But it was—how shall I put it?—excessively musky, rather overwhelming. Then I began to hear: there seemed to be a lot of twittering ahead, or a kind of cheeping or whistling. At last, light came to my aid, but hardly to my reassurance.
I was in a catacomb, and on shelves and ranges were depending line upon line of these bats, and each one had something huddled up in its arms. They swung to and fro as though propelled by a draft, but as far as I could judge there was none save that which they themselves disturbed. Then I gathered—of course, it was “Rock-a-bye baby in the rock top.” This was the great nursery or hatchery. I looked down, and, sure enough, near the floor on both sides ran a kind of dry trough in which swarmed the little ones, some creeping over it and emitting piping sounds as they waddled, writhed, and convoluted.
I know that motherhood is supposed to cast a warm and rosy light on every form of creature. But somehow those long lines of inverted diabolized madonnas, swaying by their feet from the cornices—their strange heads with vast drooping ears hanging down upside down toward me, their hideous little infants wrapped in those skinny shrouds, the whole review billowing to and fro as they rocked their young to slumber—why, it was all the worse because it seemed such a parody of motherhood! As I looked about and up at this fantastically corbeled roof, it gave me no sense of a nursery. Rather, I felt I was in some huge ancestral vault of a lost people, where, hanging in the last tattered lapse of decay, the obliterated banners of the forgotten dead had drooped forever. Or, if that’s too romantic, here was a Stygian laundry in which the souse of dirty linen had merely had its grime redistributed and the dismal parodies of garments had been hung up to drip out their moisture. The floor, acrawl with every stage of immature monster, made this nightmare nursery give me the creeps.
Fortunately, my guide didn’t require comment or testimonial from me—he was showing me the facts, and I was happily free to keep my comments to myself. After we had strolled a little in that place, and I had picked my steps to avoid treading on one of the black crawlers on this hardly glowing floor, I was positively glad to find myself back in the dark and with no contact but the slight pull on my sleeve.
The next day—I mean after the next sleep—I was given one more lecture. He was, I could see, just clearing up a point or two for me. The nursery was just referred to in a sketch or two, but I had no curiosity to know more about it, and he little power to tell me more. Then he did succeed in showing me that the spiders were used not only for food from their eggs but also for their webs, which made such tackle as these creatures required. Sometimes it was necessary—indeed, I thought I had seen one or two in the nursery—to make slings and hammocks for those who through some disability could not hang themselves up, and such things were woven out of the strong, silk thread the giant spider provided.
Well, now I can tell you briefly what the whole thing meant for me—I mean what all his patient effort had conveyed to me. I had learned one or two things. First, that their life was one in which they had succeeded in achieving a simplicity which did not require the immense gear with which we heavier creatures have cluttered ourselves. And, further, I began to realize that all this heaping together of what we call goods has grown up mainly from two things: our passion for wrapping ourselves up, and our craving for masses of food. We are always storing where moth and rust and weevil consume—like some aimless ant. Their food was actually, in the main, a huge intake of air, with compressed energy from insects, and sugar and starch which they got from leaves and honey and the fr
uits they collected. I never discovered they drank milk now. Perhaps they had given that up. All these things Nature gave them. They were more self-sufficient, less toil-tied than even the old Polynesians. This did not, however, mean slackness—quite the reverse. They were too vital to accumulate. For isn’t accumulation the sign of a sluggish nature that can’t properly eliminate, can’t fully oxidize? Their amazing energy, which in its expression showed itself in flight, and in its generation showed itself by those vast lungs, gave them no need for clothes. They had retained that down which we once had, and their great wings shrouded them when they slept, while their bodily heat—unlike any other species of bat but like that of the birds—was, I judged, far higher than our half-lizard warmth. Their metabolism must have been gigantic. I remember that when this idea dawned on me, I thought I would pluck up my courage and try—actually take the initiative—and touch one of them. An occasion came when my teacher, at his blackboard, was turning to me and I was able to touch his shoulder to point out another part of the design which I was failing to understand. Sure enough, no fever patient I’ve ever felt glowed as that dark flesh glowed under my touch. And more: I felt, under my froglike pat, a small shudder of goose flesh pass under his skin. The reason why I had not felt their queerly noticeable high heat when they first tackled me was, I found, because they had held me mainly by their huge thumbnail or claw, which, of course, was as cold as horn—it was the talon by which they suspended themselves when they roosted—while the membrane of the wing was nearly as cool as a bird’s wing feathers.
Indeed, it was on this last day he ever lectured me that I was able to make this discovery, as I was puzzling to make out what he was actually bent on conveying by one of his charts.
On that last day he was, I felt sure—now I know with almost absolute certainty—trying to put over something to me which his skill of hand nevertheless failed to carry through. After all, when you think of what a gap yawns between the most vivid illustration of a concrete thing and any actual thought about it, still more between facts and thoughts which are abstract, it was wonderful enough that we had gone as far as we had. What he did, as he began this lecture, was to draw first on the right side of his slate two fairly parallel lines almost from top to bottom. At the bottom they converged slightly and were stopped by a short joining line; at the top they expanded a little and were left unclosed. The thing looked a little like a long trumpet with its mouth upward, and around that mouth he put a little fringe of what looked more like fur or small fronds. Was this some sort of enlargement of the giant bat’s thorax or vocal tubes, I wondered? The next thing, anyhow, left me rather more in the dark. For now he started on the left hand side of his slate, and there he drew a circle and enclosed that circle in two fat brackets. I asked myself, has his mind gone on a tangent; is this a beginning study for the eye? But just as I’d thought that most likely, the whole thing was made impossible by his drawing a series of dots from the circle to the tube on the other side of his slate. He looked round at me, quickly saw I didn’t understand, and uttered a quite human sigh of disappointment—which, incidentally, made me smile, and I found that it was so long since I’d given way to that form of relief that, upon my word, my face muscles there were quite stiff.
When I returned from my self-interest, my illustrating guide was now putting masses of dots all up the tube, until like a spray they foamed from the mouth. Yes, I felt sure, that’s meant to be outbreathing. But what it was meant to convey to me, again I was at a loss. He looked at me, again seemed to question, and next, as though he had done his best, rubbed out this chart and began another. In this the top of the tube was shown, the circle was again drawn—this time without brackets—and then a number of beautiful designs made up by dots were patterned on the space above the tube mouth. Then by the mouth of the tube a small “x” was made, and at that the artist turned, and, with his wing finger still on the cross, looked at me and finally pointed at me with his other wing finger. But, no, I couldn’t understand, and after a moment he gave up the effort. He looked once more at his chart, and then with a few sweeps he had wiped it all out. He bowed to me and I could not help feeling there was something final in that salutation. I bowed also.
I kept my green glimmer of sand alive by turning it over and smoothing it into incandescence, for somehow I didn’t want to be left in the dark, in a double sense. Now that I had understood so much, I wanted to know more. When you are stunned by too strange an experience, curiosity cowers. But as soon as that silly, paralyzing concern for one’s own skin leaves one for a moment in peace, out pops interest, and one wants to know more, just because it is so odd and strange. And I felt now I was on the threshold of a discovery as great, perhaps, as any that man had ever made.
I must have re-roused the luminosity in the sand a good many times, and that meant that some hours must have gone by, when I saw, standing at the other side of my glow, one of these wing-shrouded figures. I’d come to recognize the one who had been attached to me sufficiently to be pretty sure that this was another. But he made no effort to make a contact with me. He had simply brought me my evening meal, and when I had eaten it—I must say tonight I left aside my paté of insects and my caviar of spiders’ eggs—I sought my manger bed. But sleep didn’t seek me, and I don’t think I had slept more than a few minutes when I found I was being touched by that strange, delicate, bamboo-tip, wing-finger contact. I turned over, and the sand had been roused so that I could see my breakfast had been brought, and more, that what had brought it was my old friend—so quickly does friendship grow up, in one who is marooned, toward any live thing that befriends him. It was milk and cactus fruit. I thought that showed an extra tact, that he had noticed I had left my solid protein diet last night.
But while I was thinking that and getting some comfort from it, my ear began to be caught by a sound that somehow disturbed me. It was very low and far off, I judged, but it had a deep and melancholy subtone about it. It fluctuated and, as far as I could tell, was swelling in a series of waves. I turned to my guide to make my gesture which he now clearly understood was a question. But instead of making any effort to explain—perhaps he thought I had been too stupid last time—he turned round and waved me to the entrance. I followed him, and, as he went out, he presented me with my torch, which they had evidently picked up. I wondered whether this was a kind of granting me the freedom of the underground metropolis. Anyhow, it was a courteous gesture, and I was glad to see that its illumination, being chiefly in the ultra-violet, didn’t seem to dazzle their sight. With its aid I soon began to be able to perceive that we were to go back into the great hall. I had not been there since that highly disturbing initiation. And when I arrived my suspicion that I might be summoned to a second court was confirmed. True enough, everyone was in place. The whole of the vast walls and the craggy roof was hung with these living sable banners and shrouds. They swung from every point and clothed every space. The wide areas were mantled and quietly acrawl with this multitude which could find purchase almost anywhere and hang on in practically any position. But this time I didn’t have to wait for the huge creature-in-chief to mount its station. The king was already on his throne. I felt he really must be a king, this Venerabilis vespertilio. For his majestic span and stature, his strange ghostly tint and the obvious reverence with which he was treated by the rest made him so manifestly an Ancient of Days and the Father of this strange People.
He called the meeting to order with a few piercing notes and then, in the usual silence—as far as my ears were concerned—proceeded to address them. I could see all their black velvet ears swung like leaves in a wind toward him. After a statement of some ten minutes, his throat, I could see, had ceased to swell and vibrate, so the speech from the throne must be completed, I judged. Of course, from start to finish I hadn’t had a ghost of an idea that he was saying anything, as far as my hearing was concerned. This was a perfect form of censorship, I thought rather wryly. And it was a bit “wrymaking,” for I had no doubt, none at al
l, that it was my fate that had been discussed. A short chorus of squawks left me in no further doubt, either, that that fate had been agreed upon. As I had heard my own attendant join in, that gave me a faint hope. He might, I felt I had some slight grounds for hoping, have demurred or at least been silent, if my fate should have been awkward. But if he knew what had been decided, he made no attempt to convey the decision to me. As before, the chair-bat broke up the meeting by soaring into the vault, and, in ordered formation, tier by tier, rank and row and gallery and balcony of flyers made off in perfect procession after him.
I was left alone all that day—or, I should say, that space between two sleeping times—only my meals being brought to me, and at last, growing tired of tending my phosphorescent light, I let it die and curled up in my crib and fell asleep. I was awaked and somehow knew at once that this was not a morning call nor, in any sense to which I had become accustomed, an ordinary day. My guide was standing by the door and had just roused the dust to a glow. He then pointed to the entrance, and, picking up my torch, I went with him. But we didn’t go into the great hall or into what I called the lecture room. Instead, we threaded a long crevasse of a tunnel. It was smooth under foot—sand I felt it to be—a narrow cleft; no doubt the bed which some stream had followed and worn the floor of but not the ceiling. That I couldn’t see for long. The fissure must have been hundreds of feet deep, or high, if you like my floor point of view better than the surface standpoint. We wound about until I knew I was lost, and, indeed, I was getting quite tired following the hop and swoop of my leader. For when we came to a heap of stone—probably a fall from the roof; and there were a series of these—he would hop them or with one wing flap sail over them, while I had to clamber.