by Don Wilcox
And yet the remaining twenty had fought on and accomplished the mission.”
Eighty out of a hundred lost!
The bitterness of that awful event swept over Allan now as he looked down upon the purple-ridged mountains of tragedy. His pulses were throbbing. There it had happened. But the scene had changed.
What was this new towering spire-shaped mountain? Where had it come from? Was it only a figment of his feverish imagination—something rising out of his tortured memories? A tombstone for eighty dead men—was that it?
The point of the great spire was rising toward him. He guided his parachute to the right. At once he was skimming down past the lofty point. This was the front side, in which the great blazing gem was set. He was floating down toward it. In another moment its colorful glow would catch him.
Was the plane coming back?
He heard it roaring over again and saw its shadow leap across the tower of stone. A twinge of conscience caught him for a brief moment. He had left the party abruptly. When Sue Carson gave him one of those looks as if she expected some sort of goodbye, he might have at least patted her hand. And Jimmy—well, Allan knew he had cut Jimmy right through the heart by suddenly telling him not to come along.
But Jimmy had not been able to see this mighty mountain spike. Why?
Allan, floating downward, studied the massive thing for its elements of reality. Once for an instant he seemed to be seeing down through its thousand-foot depth—and those tiny moving figures down there were men, dwelling within it.
But the mountain spire, which for a long moment seemed steamy and unreal, now began to darken into a solid, opaque form as it rose higher. Its thousands of stony spears pushed up out of the misty valley and silhouetted themselves against the morning sky.
The countless facets of the gigantic “diamond” which hung against the side of the shaft, began to glare, hot and bright, against Allan’s cheeks. He guided his parachute outward. The stabbing light was too intense. In terms of sound it would have been a deafening roar from a sustained explosion. As light, it was silent, yet the explosive quality was there in an almost blinding effect. Allan tightened his eyes against the brilliance.
Later he would try to guess the meaning of this giant of light. Later he would recall the accurate symmetrical cut, patterned after the “brilliant” design of a polished gem. At the moment it was enough to endure the fury of its merciless blaze. Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
There is something about a precious stone, he thought. He had heard tales of men in the diamond trade whose passions were so completely wrapped up in the glitter of gems that the glow of a perfect stone would virtually hypnotize them. What Allan was seeing in this strange moment would fill his mind’s eye for hours to come.
The heat diminished. He had fallen past. His forehead ached and his eyes swam with color, and he felt that millions of unknown rays had passed through his body as if he were a vacuum.
Where was he falling? · He tried to drift farther outward, knowing that the widening cone of the great shaft would presently obstruct his descent. He tried to look down, but he was still seeing color and more color, like fiery knife blades in his eyes.
He never knew just where he fell into the shaft. At some point during his descent he must have encountered its spear-like sides, but he kept going down and down. Presently he saw that the walls were all around him—filmy, translucent walls that shielded his burning eyes from the blazing out-of-doors. The light that seeped in was softened by the hues and tints of the mystical substances that formed the spire. Slits served as fantastic windows. The stone-like walls were thickening around him, with a weird candle-drip effect.
He had somehow entered, and now he was drifting down through the hollow tower toward a red stone floor a few hundred, feet below. Down . . . down . . . down . . .
A vast red-rock room was opening. The ribs of the great hollow tower above it brought streams of light down, like massive veins of Lucite. Allan swept the wide·floor with his eyes, looking for any signs of the people which he had once glimpsed. The room appeared to be an empty cathedral, ornamented with the weird and fanciful tracery that only nature can provide. Giant stalagmites projected upward from the floor. One of the smaller of these rock formations, about fifty feet tall, rose toward Allan, and a current of air swung his parachute over it. His descent ended with a jerk.
He drew himself onto a small ledge that provided footing while he disentangled himself from his harness. He worked quietly, keeping an ear on the alert for something more than hollow echoes of the great cavernous room.
What he heard was a swish of silk, only a few feet beyond the stalagmite to which he had anchored.
The sound, so close at hand, startled him. He tried to peer around the post of stone without losing his footing.
Then came a familiar voice.
“Wait fer me, Captain!”
“You Jimmy! I thought I told you—”
“It was that big diamond, Captain. After I finally saw it, it pulled me right out of the plane, gosh-ding-it. I never aimed to—”
Jimmy stopped to catch his breath. Allan could see only his perspiring pumpkin face and one arm fighting the air. Yards of parachute silk had settled over him.
“Be with you in a minute, Captain. I anchored too quick and got my sails tangled. Say, what dya make of this port, Captain? Ain’t this a honey? If those eighty dead men are buried here, believe me, they’ve got a mighty fancy restin’ place.”
CHAPTER XI
“What are you clawing the air for?” Allan asked in a low voice.
“Spots,” said Jimmy. “I keep seein’ ‘em in front of my eyes. As one leopard said to the other leopard—”
“S-s-s-sh! Not so loud.”
“Have you seen anybody.”
“Not yet. That is, not since I came down through. Once when I was about a thousand feet up I thought I had a glimpse. Just now this looks like the emptiest place I ever fell into.”
Jimmy clawed at the air. “Spots. Spots. Wasn’t that the dangdest biggest hunk o’ cut glass you ever saw in your life?”
“That’s what I kept telling you.”
“I couldn’t see it at first. I kept seein’ the light, but I didn’t see any big tower of stone—or rock candy or what the devil ever it is—until I started sailing down. What’s come over us, Captain? This ain’t the way it was when we marched up the trail on that do-or-die mission.”
Allan didn’t have any ready answers. The best he could do was try to adjust his eyes to the deep colors of the vast cavernous room, gradually making out the avenues that tunneled off into the darkness. It was a world of almost perfect silence, he thought at first.
However, after they had packed their parachutes away and treated themselves to a lunch they had brought from Bunjojop, they were more alert to the details of their surroundings.
“Hear that soft hum? There it comes again,” Allan said.
“Somebody’s goin’ zoom, zoom, zoom on his big bass viol,” Jimmy suggested.
They caught their bearings to make sure they wouldn’t get lost from each other. Five purple stalagmites grouped together like an old man’s hand became their home base. Allan decided to call it the west side of the immense red-rock room. “Do you see it as west?” he asked Jimmy; but Jimmy said all he saw was spots.
They climbed down from the “Old Man’s Hand” and moved on tip-toe in search of the source of the rhythmic humming. At the same time Allan cast about for signs of the trail that had surely led along through this area. He couldn’t find any signs of it. His first guess, that the towering shaft with the big diamond must have been “constructed” over the trail somehow, during the past two years, didn’t satisfy his curiosity over the matter.
“If I could get up to one of those streaks of light, I might be able to look down on the old pass.”
“I don’t figure you could see through any of that stained glass,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe I could break a hunk of
it out.” Allan suggested. Then he looked up and up, through the hollow spire within which he had descended. It all looked pretty fragile. He saw Jimmy shaking his head dubiously. “Does it look as shaky to you as it does to me?”
“All I see is spots,” said Jimmy. “Listen. The bass viol—”
“All right, we’ll see if we can locate it,” Allan decided he had just as well pass over the mystery of the colossal diamond in the tower for the present. As long as the thing stood there, a solid enclosure, towering hundreds of feet above this cavernous world, bringing streams of light down into the darkness, he had better accept its benefits without troubling it. Still, he had a lingering curiosity to know what he would have seen if he had fallen on the outside. Were the skeletons of his eighty men out there somewhere, their white bones hanging over the spears of colored stone?
Or were the eighty here—within the mountain—alive—as Madam Lasanda had predicted?
Could it be that that tantalizing glimpse, from a thousand feet up, of dozens of human beings coming and going through these avenues of stone, was a glimpse of the eighty? Could it be?
“There’s your bass viol,” Jimmy whispered. He pointed. In the small alcove lay a ragged, unshaven man, sound asleep. He was coiled into a comfortable ball, and the saucer-like curve of his stone nest was well suited to his rotund form. This, Allan thought, is the way a cave-dwelling man would look if nature had given him the task of sitting on eggs and hatching human chicks.
This mass of lazy flesh was hatching nothing more than snores. He was an artist at snoring, Allan thought. The curve of the ceiling above his head resounded his favorite music.
Allan and Jimmy moved closer. Jimmy -whispered, “Look, Captain. It’s one of our gang!”
The chills struck through Allan’s spine. Jimmy was right.
“It’s Gallagher!”
The man’s face was bloated from drink, and his sleeping eyes were puffy. But he was recognizable in spite of the changes. The very purring action of his lips brought back his familiar look.
“It’s Gallagher,” Allan repeated in half whisper. “He’s a different Gallagher, but that’s who it is. By the devils of hell, it’s him, and he’s alive and breathing.”
“I see him,” Jimmy said without any breath at all. “An’ it ain’t spots in front of my eyes. It’s Gallagher!”
CHAPTER XII
Gallagher was only the beginning. Within the next two hours, before the big troubles began to fall on them. Allan and Jimmy were to identify several others. Some by sight. Others by voice. To Allan it was as if grass-grown graves had opened up, and the dead men had stepped out and paraded past.
Allan preferred not to linger long at Gallagher’s station.
“Aren’t we gonna wake him up, Captain?” Jimmy asked.
The snoring heap gave a snort and a groan and opened one eye. “Go way, lemme be. . . I’m not asleep. I’m watchin’ everything. Don’cha worry. Everything’s unner control.”
“Take it easy,” Allan said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get you out of this prison before long.”
“Huh? Who’s sayin’ what? Listen, Cappan, who says this is a prison? Huh? An’ who says I want out?”
“Never mind, Gallagher. If the rest of the crew are on hand, I’ll organize them and we’ll all find a way out soon.”
“What for? Who’s kickin’ ? I ain’t kickin’, am I?”
“Take it easy,” Allan said, “I’ll see you later.”
“ ‘Sall right, Cap pan, ‘sall right. See ya at that Glass Arena, Cappan. Better git yer uniform, Cappan. Ain’t got much time. Show starts at two, y’know.”
The drunken guard’s monolog trailed off into something incomprehensible. But “Captain” Allan Burgess had found his first living proof of the fortune teller’s prediction. A solid responsibility loomed before him. He crooked a finger at Jimmy, and they tiptoed across the wide red-rock room and ducked into the first shadows that the irregular walls afforded.
“Gosh-digety-whoosh!” Jimmy gasped. “He was three-fourths asleep an’ four-fifths drunk, and he still knew you was his captain, right off after two years. He knew with only one eye open.”
Allan frowned. His offer of good will had been rebuffed quite bluntly. He wondered how much Gallagher would remember when he came out of his drunken stupor.
“What was he sayin’ about the show?”
“Whatever it is,” Allan said, “we’d better plan to be there. We’ve got some things to learn about this place. We’d just as well start with the Glass Arena.”
“First feature starts at two, Captain. Gee, I wish Sue Carson was here.”
Allan felt Jimmy’s eyes searching him for a response.
“Don’t you, Cap?” Jimmy pursued. “Don’t you kinda miss that gal already?”
“She’ll get back to Bunjojop okay, don’t worry. And she’ll have Buni. But we’ll try to get word through to her as soon as we can. There’s got to be a whole Bunjojop tribe around here somewhere.”
“Maybe at the Glass Arena?”
“That’s my hunch too. If we can find the chief, we’ll get him to send out another scout to report our safe arrival.”
That appeared to ease Jimmy’s worries. The deep shadowed lines of his fat bronzed face softened. “She’ll be glad to know,·Captain. An’ I reckon she’ll be all right.”
They started their course in a very general way. The Old Man’s Hand was to serve as home base. Keeping well out of the gaze of Gallagher, who was apparently stationed as a guard in the big red room below the tower, they would explore the tunneled avenues first to the west, then to the north.
Footsteps and voices broke in upon their plans. Six men came sauntering along through one of the avenues. The two in the lead were urging the others to hurry along, while one talkative fellow in the center of the group was trying to tell a funny story.
“That guy!” Jimmy whispered.
“Keep hidden,” Allan advised.
“That guy has told that same story fifty times!”
Allan was breathing hard. His men! The same men who had served under him on board ship, who had been picked for the most unusual naval mission deep in this black continent. His men, whose lives had ended over a precipice!
“Lee, Urmey, Olson, McAllister!” Allan whispered. “Smith and—”
“Ain’tcha goin’ to step out an’ make ‘em salute?”
“Not till I know my grounds,” Allan retorted. “Let’s don’t begin by bungling things.”
He observed their casual manners, their seeming lightheartedness, their unchanged habits of speech. Only their clothing was different. They wore sandals, light weight trunks and shirts, and leather belts from which a few tools or a coil of rope might hang. The shirts may have been a regulation uniform for these parts, Allan decided. They were green with a diagonal stripe of white; or they were dun colored, with a reddish brown triangle across the chest. The uniform of Gallagher, the guard, belonged in the latter category, unless its soiled and sandy condition put it in a class by itself.
“Listen,” Jimmy whispered. “More talk about the Glass Arena.”
The six men walked through the wide room, and once the story teller had finished, one of the others moved the party along by reminding them there was work to be done at the Glass Arena.
Allan and Jimmy followed them, keeping to the shadows. The avenue to the east of the red room curved and narrowed and darkened. Through purple light, the six men ahead became dim shadows. It was growing darker. Rocky obstructions hampered their progress. One needed to know the better paths through this jungle trail of fantastically shaped stones.
Other voices were coming, now, from somewhere in the rear. Allan and Jimmy hid back in the blackness and waited while two more parties passed.
“Jordan,” Allan whispered tensely. “And that’s Roderick and Brock with him.”
“The same old trio,” Jimmy breathed.
“Can you see ‘em?”
“Just the outline
.”
“Jordan’s still got that same hunch to his walk . . .”
Minutes later, as Allan and Jimmy moved on into the increasing darkness, they paused to hear sounds of voices from a new direction. Not from the avenue of deep purple light, but seemingly from somewhere above.
They crowded against a wall, and moved along from one niche to another, now in utter blackness, groping toward the source of the sounds. The voices had echoed dimly and had passed. But now more were coming.
Voices but no footsteps.
Allan cupped his ears toward the blackness over his head. Voices glided closer, in a jumble of echoes. Then for a moment they were clear and close, and he caught a wisp of some trifling conversation. And Jimmy might whisper, “That guy! And him, too. Same pair. Don’t he ever change stooges?”
By this time the voices would have glided away into a low rumble of echoes, and presently they were swallowed up in silence.
Allan patted the wall around him. He struck a match, but extinguished it instantly. More voices were drifting in.
“There’s a gash in the wall up there,” Jimmy volunteered. “Anyway there was a barrel-sized hunk of black.”
Allan’s quick glimpse bore out Jimmy’s observation, except in matters of dimension. “I’d have said kegsized. Anyway, there’s an opening into another room or something.”
“Air shaft, ya reckon?”
Allan chuckled. “Whoever put this mountain together specialized in honeycombs. It beats me how this all came about.”
“I figure there must have been a big artesian well, full of plastic, or somethin’, that busted loose soon after we was here. It all fountained up and spilled over like a meltin’ candle, and every place that used to be valley got covered over into a big room. D’ya reckon?”
“S-s-sh! More voices.”
“Stapleton . . . Underhill . . . Jennings . . .”