“Good old Peach!” Brendan put in. “He’s out patrolling!”
“It’s not him,” Lala said. “Not really. He’s gone to bed hours ago. It’s a dream image. He’s been wandering these corridors ever since my father descended to the Center and fell asleep. We’ll take his route.” We set out up the center tunnel, and soon his lantern flickered again, and old Peach stood before us, but looking past us, as if we weren’t there at all.
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Hello, Mr. Peach,” but of course he said nothing. He simply stood there, as if barring the way. Hasbro stepped toward him sniffing, but his head went right through Mr. Peach’s leg, and in that moment Mr. Peach started forward again and passed through Hasbro and then Brendan and the rest of us like a ghost. We watched the glowing lantern move away down the tunnel, floating along. It flickered again and was gone.
We walked on in silence, the path angling ever downward. Other tunnels opened onto our own, all of them leading away in random directions, some upward and some down. Some were choked with rocks, as if the ceilings had fallen in, and some of them revealed open, empty pits that were murmuring vague noises and what sounded like breathing. Sometimes I could hear voices or laughter, but always from very far away. Some of the voices were familiar, as if I was hearing them inside my own memory, and I recited Humpty Dumpty continuously and stayed carefully to the middle of our own tunnel, not going near the open pits.
After a time it came to me that I could see beyond our circle of lantern light. There was a sort of twilight ahead of us, like being outdoors on a moonlit night, except there wasn’t any moon. We had entered another vast cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites towering away either side, and with more visible in the far distance. None of them cast a shadow, and neither did we, as if the light were imaginary. I was just about to point this out when Brendan said, “Listen!”
I heard a noise like wind blowing through tree branches, a swishing and rustling, and then the sound of someone talking—not like the murmuring from the pits in the ground, but real human speech. It stopped abruptly, and there was a dead silence, and we all held our breath listening, and in the silence a voice said, “Bear left,” quite clearly. Then another voice said, “I tell you we took the wrong turning.” I had heard the Creeper speak maybe three sentences in my whole life, but I would never forget his voice, and it was him who had spoken last.
“We’re in the Whispering Gallery,” Lala said, with her hands cupped over her mouth so that the sound of her voice couldn’t fly away into the emptiness. “They might be very close or they might be far away. Sound carries in the Whispering Gallery.” She put her finger to her lips, and we nodded, and started forward again, moving as soundlessly as we could. The windy swishing continued, with now and then a clearly uttered sentence or the distinct sound of footfalls. Sometimes it sounded as if it came from ahead of us, sometimes from behind us.
Then in an otherwise silent moment, Perry coughed, and we all stopped dead still and held our breath. We heard a woman’s voice this time—Ms Peckworthy, no doubt—saying, “What’s that?” very sharply, as if frightened.
“It’s them!” said the Creeper’s voice.
We heard the scuffling of feet, distinctly now, very close, and Ms Peckworthy’s voice saying, “Don’t leave me behind!” And then the Creeper saying, “Don’t be a-clinging to me!” Then a light appeared, bobbing in the darkness, far away to our left—how far we couldn’t tell—and three dark figures were moving in the light.
“Krikey!” Perry said. “He’s got an elephant rifle!”
I didn’t know about the elephant part, but the Creeper had a rifle, right enough—an immense thing, slung over his shoulder. If we could see them, then of course they could see us. Instantly we were running again, deeper into the earth, and never mind the noise.
Chapter 23
The Darkness of Sleep
The sound of our own feet echoed around us, magnifying itself so that it sounded as if dozens of people were running, the sound rising in volume, the echoes stacking up on top of each other until there was a sort of landslide of noise. Then it stopped, and there was only the normal sound of our own running. We had left the Whispering Gallery behind, and were in a tunnel again, with another triple turning ahead. Lala led us straight into the center tunnel, with us following blindly, until we were too tired to run any farther. I had completely lost track of time and distance. I couldn’t say whether we had walked two miles or ten, and that began to trouble me, and questions began to come into my mind. “Where’s your father sleeping?” I asked Lala. “Is there a room down here?”
“A room? There might be any number of rooms,” Lala said, “but there’s no bedroom, if that’s what you mean—more like a sort of cave, and not till we get to the center.”
“What center would that be?” I asked.
“The land at the center of the Earth,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Look here, Peach,” Perry said to her. “What Perkins is asking is how far do we have to go? I mean…”
“All the way to the center,” she replied. “Just like I said. It’s neither far nor near.”
Lala has her own special way of answering and yet not answering, which can make me impatient.
“You mean to Pellucidar?” Brendan put in. “Like in the books?”
“If you’d like,” she told him.
“I’d like that very much,” Brendan said.
“I mean, if you’d like to call it that. That’s what my father calls it.”
“I’m rather confused,” I said in my pleasantest voice. “We’re on our way to wake up your father…?”
“To not wake him up,” Lala said. “To make sure he doesn’t wake up. And we’ve got to hurry. We don’t want him waking up before we get there, you see.”
“If you mean get to the center of the Earth,” I said, “then I don’t see. I can’t believe we’re going to get there at all. It’s 3,959 miles to the center of the Earth. We might as well try to walk to Africa.”
“But we don’t have any reason to walk to Africa,” Lala said.
“If the Earth is hollow,” Brendan put in, “then we’re not going to the center center anyway, Perkins. We’re going to the outside of the inside, which can’t be nearly so far.”
“Or the inside of the outside,” Lala said, “depending.”
“That’s right,” Brendan said. “Depending.”
“Still, that’s a mighty fur piece,” Perry put in. “Calculate it for us, Perkins.”
I tried to figure it out as we walked along, using pi, but I couldn’t be sure, because of course we couldn’t know for certain the diameter of the interior world, although Admiral Byrd guessed that it was about 4,000 miles across when he flew down into it. That would take up nearly half the diameter of the Earth itself, and yet it would still be two thousand miles beneath our feet, although there was the atmosphere to think about. But even if there were a thousand miles of atmosphere, and we didn’t have nearly so far to go, it would still take us weeks or months of walking to get there. If you dug a well to the very center of the Earth and dropped a stone down the well, it would take forty-five minutes to fall. We weren’t falling down a well, we were walking down a tunnel, and although the tunnel was sloping downward, it was only just barely. Probably it would be easier to walk to Africa.
“It’s impossible,” I said. “Even if we were climbing straight down a ladder we would starve to death on the way. It’s too far.”
And it was true. We hadn’t brought any food. We hadn’t brought any water, only a can of lamp oil. Unless there was something that we didn’t know, it was a fool’s errand that we were on. And now when I thought of food, I thought of the dinner I hadn’t eaten, and suddenly I was hungry and thirsty and wished I hadn’t thought about it at all. The St. George Lodge seemed ever so far away, and Mrs. Wattsbury’s roast pork and potatoes and applesauce was a feast that I had squandered hours and hours ago. It would have been better to feed it to t
he hedgehogs, like Brendan did.
“It’s all relative anyway,” Lala said.
“Relative to what?” I asked, for how could distance be relative in any way that made a difference to us?
“Relative to who, you mean,” Lala said.
“Perkins means relative to whom, actually,” Perry said, in the voice of the ugly grammar devil that often inhabits his mind.
“We’ve entered the realm of the Sleeper, now,” Lala said. “All the whoms in the world can’t change that. Only the Sleeper can change things now. Everything is relative to him, don’t you see? And we’d best hope he doesn’t change things very much, at least not while we’re in the Passage.”
I still most certainly did not see, and I was just about to say so when the tunnel opened up into another grotto. It was impossible to say how large, because the lantern didn’t make enough light to illuminate it. But there was a sound like wind blowing through open spaces, and it felt perfectly immense. The trail, if that’s what you’d call it, was still clear, running out ahead of us, like a dark ribbon of stone laid into the floor, and I was anxious to follow it to the other side of the grotto, because the open darkness surrounding us seemed to be full of invisible things—a room full of memories all swirling around like restless ghosts. It sounds weird, but I can’t say it any more clearly than that.
High above us in the darkness now there were tiny flashes of light, little on-and-off twinkles like thousands of matches being struck and then immediately going out. Brendan said, “Fireflies,” but that didn’t sound likely, not this far underground. I remembered a film about the human brain that we had seen in science class. It showed nerve cells turning on and off with little flashes of light deep inside someone’s head, like electric sparks. Right then the nerve cells in my own brain started firing like crazy. I thought about Cardigan Peach out rowing on the lake and wandering through the tunnels when in fact he was not doing either of those things, and I thought about what we had seen out over the ocean when we were with Lala in the sea cave. I thought about bats in the belfry and the strange business of the Sleeper growing restless or waking up too soon. I thought about seeing my mother in the pool, when of course she couldn’t have been there, and I knew then that it must have been a memory of my mother, swimming up from the depths of my own mind.
And now we were passing through this vast room full of memories, or maybe dreams, all of them flitting around us like bats, and I knew that Lala hadn’t been talking nonsense at all. It wasn’t thousands of miles to the center of the Earth, not by the route we were taking. It couldn’t be measured in miles, which was just what she had meant when she said it was “relative.” And it was what Captain Sodbury had meant when he said what he said about being able to “participate” in the mind projections. He had thought it was nonsense, but it wasn’t. Suddenly I felt as if I were nowhere and no-when, but was traveling through the darkness of outer space. Or, I thought, through the darkness of sleep.
A light blinked on now, exactly as if someone had flipped a switch. We weren’t in a cavern, but more like a real room in a house or in a museum. It was vastly high, full of ancient wooden furniture. There was an immense clutter of it, piled helter-skelter. There were chairs and tables and dressers and big wardrobe cabinets and beds and grandfather clocks, all of it heaped up, piece upon piece, all the way to the distant ceiling. The walls were covered with strange wallpaper, with odd designs in colors that were deep but faded, like old bloodstains or autumn leaves.
A human figure had appeared in among the furniture now, or else he had always been there but I hadn’t seen him. He was creeping and crawling along, high up, near the ceiling. He wore a nightshirt and nightcap, and his hair stuck out from under the nightcap in a wild way. There was a sort of panic in the air now, and I could feel fear rising in my throat, like the moment before you awaken from a nightmare, and your heart is going like crazy and you can barely breathe.
The figure climbed across tabletops on his hands and knees. He crept monkey-like across chairs, up and over the backs of old sofas and in behind wardrobes, disappearing among the shadows and then reappearing farther on, sometimes coming to a dead end and then turning and going back, sometimes pulling himself through very narrow spaces, clearly trying to make his way to the floor, although he didn’t quite seem to know the way, only that he meant to climb deeper and deeper until he reached it.
“Keep walking,” Lala whispered. She was looking downward, unhappily. It’s Giles Peach, I thought. Lala’s father! As we walked, we seemed to be drawing the room along with us, as if we were part of the dream, and couldn’t simply leave. The nameless fear was rising in me, like water filling up a bucket. I could smell the dusty furniture and feel the hard surface of tables against my knees, and I began to feel as if I myself were high overhead, looking down on all of us below. I saw an age-dark, wooden wardrobe closet just ahead of me, with its door gaping open, and it came into my mind that if I crawled into the darkness of that closet I might find a secret entrance through its floor, and make my way downwards, deeper and deeper into the dim clutter of furniture below.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,” Lala said softly into my ear. “Say it. Say it until I tell you it’s safe to stop. Say it now.”
And so I said it, over and over, and by saying it the spell was broken, and I was myself again, and the room with its furniture and crawling man winked away, and was gone in the darkness.
“Don’t stop,” Lala said, and so all of us kept on murmuring the rhyme as we walked, letting the words go round and round in our heads, filling it up so that other things were kept out.
We passed other rooms, if you could call them that, which you can’t, really. I knew now that they were dreams—the Sleeper’s dreams—and not rooms at all. The realm of the Sleeper was the sleeping mind of Giles Peach, and the creeping figure had been Peach himself, or his sleeping self, crawling through the cluttered landscape of a dream. We saw him again on a grass-covered meadow with a clear stream running through it. That time there was no fear in the air, but something wonderful instead, almost like a song, which I could feel even though I was still reciting “Humpty Dumpty.” And still I didn’t stop with the rhyme, and when Brendan and Hasbro walked out onto the meadow, Lala and I grabbed them and pulled them back. We saw Lala’s father again on a road that stretched away toward rocky desert hills. He was leading a camel by a rope and was dressed in robes, like a figure from the bible. Then we saw him flying a bamboo airplane over the tops of forest trees, just like what we had seen when we were in the sea cave.
Then we were in a tunnel again, and the dreams were behind us. Far ahead of us a glowing disk of light hovered in the air. At first I thought it was Cardigan Peach’s lantern. But it held steady, not like someone walking with a lamp. It was bright and intense—sunlight shining through a cave mouth! I could suddenly smell outside air, and for the first time since leaving Patrick Cotter behind I felt as if I were in a real tunnel and not a dream tunnel.
Hasbro barked and ran toward the daylight, and Brendan started after him, and we were all running then, on and on. Just when it seemed to me that I had to stop to rest or else fall over with exhaustion, we found ourselves at the sunlit cave mouth, looking out over the interior world from halfway up a steep mountain. Perry blew out the lamp, and Hasbro barked again, and we were there!
The wind blew toward us, up from the distant valley floor, carrying on it the smell of flowers and jungle. In the distance away to our right, perhaps a couple of miles away, lay the waters of the interior sea along a rocky shore, and way off to our left stood a steep, dark range of misty cliffs, covered with dense jungles that crept down from the upper slopes. Smoke rose lazily from a volcano even farther off, and ranges of mountains rose beyond that. Overhead the misty glow of the interior sun shone in a blue sky, a sun that never set. There was perpetual daylight in the interior world. It might have been noon and it might have been midnight. I had no idea of time having passed at all in the tunnels, except som
ething like time in a dream, which can seem to go on forever, but really only takes moments.
For a while none of us moved, but only stood and gaped, breathing the air of the land that time forgot.
Then Lala said, “We’ve got to go back.”
Chapter 24
Savage Pellucidar
“You’re bonkers, Peach,” Perry said to her.
She shook her head. “We made a wrong turn. We must have.”
“But we’re here,” Brendan told her, gesturing toward the jungle below us, its trees hundreds of feet tall.
“We’re not here,” she said, “not where we’re supposed to be.”
I took out my camera and turned it on, and Lala looked at it and then at me in a sort of poisonous way, as if I’d just thrown trash all over the ground. But before I could say anything at all a pterodactyl flew out of a clearing below, rising up into the hazy blue sky and winging away over the forest toward the distant cliffs. It had a great long beak and little claws on its wings—wings that stretched twenty feet or more. Hasbro barked at it, as if even he was surprised to see it. Of course I zoomed my camera out and snapped a picture of it. I had my first real photo of a living dinosaur—the first real photo of a living dinosaur!
“Perkins!” Perry hollered at me, and I turned around to see that Lala was gone. She had bolted back into the cave. Our guide had deserted us! Brendan held a match to the lantern, and we plunged back into the darkness, hurrying to catch up with her. There had been a confusion of tunnels only a short way back, which was no doubt where she was bound, and once she got there, if she chose a different tunnel and simply went on without us, we would have no idea which tunnel she had taken. She doesn’t need us anymore, I thought—she doesn’t even need the lantern—and I was suddenly scared and angry both.
Before we had traveled fifty steps back into the tunnel, a light shone in the distance, just the tiniest glow. We stopped where we were and covered our own lamp with a jacket, and Brendan said, “Maybe it’s Cardigan Peach!” in a hopeful voice. For a moment I thought—or hoped—that maybe it was, but before we could start forward again, we heard running footsteps. Perry uncovered the lantern, and Lala burst into our circle of light, bowling right through us, heading back out toward the sunlight. “It’s them!” she shouted. “They’re after us!” Hasbro, being perhaps the most intelligent among us, turned and ran.
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