Gone now was all sight of the land that they had left. Unlike balloonists who always see dense clouds or else the earth, they now saw nothing. All alone with the sun that rushed behind them in their skimming flight, they fled like wraiths across the emptiness of the great void.
Stern glanced at the barometer, and grunted with surprise.
“H’m! Twelve thousand four hundred and fifty feet—and I’ve been jockeying to come down at least five hundred feet already!” thought he. “How the devil can that be?”
The explanation came to him. But it surprised him almost as much as the noted fact.
“Must be one devil of a wind blowing up out of that place,” he pondered, “to carry us up nearly four thousand feet, when I’ve been trying to descend. Well, it’s all right, anyhow—it all helps.”
He looked at the spinning anemometer. It registered a speed of ninety-seven miles an hour. Yet now that they were out of sight of any land, only the rush of the wind and the enormous vibration of the plane conveyed an idea of motion. They might as well have been hung in mid-space, like Mohammed’s tomb, as have been rushing forward; there was no visible means of judging what their motion really might be.
“Unique experience in the history of mankind!” shouted Stern to the girl. “The world’s invisible to us.”
She nodded and smiled back at him, her white teeth gleaming in the strange, bluish light that now enveloped them.
Stern, keenly attentive to the engine, advanced the spark another notch, and now the needle crept to 102 1/2.
“We’ll be across before we know it,” thought he. “At this rate, I shouldn’t be surprised to sight land any minute now.”
A quarter-hour more the Pauillac swooped along, cradling in her swift flight to westward.
But all at once the man started violently. Forward he bent, staring with widened eyes at the tube of the fuel-gage.
He blinked, as though to convince himself he had not seen aright, then stared again; and as he looked a sudden grayness overspread his face.
“What?” he exclaimed, then raised his head and for a moment sniffed, as though to catch some odor, elusive yet ominous, which he had for some time half sensed yet paid no heed to.
Then suddenly he knew the truth; and with a cry of fear bent, peering at the fuel-tank.
There, quivering suspended from the metal edge of the aluminum tank, hung a single clear white drop—alcohol!
Even as Stern looked it fell, and at once another took its place, and was shaken off only to be succeeded by a third, a fourth, a fifth!
The man understood. The ancient metal, corroded almost through from the inside, had been eaten away. That very morning a hole had formed in the tank. And now a leak—existing since what moment he could not tell—was draining the very life-blood of the machine.
“The alcohol!” cried Stern in a hoarse, terrible voice, his wide eyes denoting his agitation. With a quivering hand he pointed.
“My God! It’s all leaked out—there’s not a quart left in the tank! We’re lost—lost in the bottomless abyss!”
CHAPTER XXII
LIGHTS!
At realization of the ghastly situation that confronted them, Stern’s heart stopped beating for a moment. Despite his courage, a sick terror gripped his soul; he felt a sudden weakness, and in his ears the rushing wind seemed shouting mockeries of death.
As in a dream he felt the girl’s hand close in fear upon his arm, he heard her crying something—but what, he knew not.
Then all at once he fought off the deadly horror. He realized that now, if ever, he needed all his strength, resource, intelligence. And, with a violent effort, he flung off his weakness. Again he gripped the wheel. Thought returned. Though the end might be at hand, thank God for even a minute’s respite!
Again he looked at the indicator.
Yes, only too truly it showed the terrible fact! No hallucination, this. Not much more than a pint of the precious fluid now lay in the fuel tank. And though the engine still roared, he knew that in a minute or two it must slacken, stop and die.
What then?
Even as the question flashed to him, the engine barked its protest. It skipped, coughed, stuttered. Too well he knew the symptoms, the imperative cry: “More fuel!”
But he had none to give. In vain for him to open wide the supply valve. Vain to adjust the carburetor. Even as he made a despairing, instinctive motion to perform these useless acts—while Beatrice, deathly pale and shaking with terror, clutched at him—the engine spat forth a last, convulsive bark, and grew silent.
The whirling screws hummed a lower note, then ceased their song and came to rest.
The machine lurched forward, swooped, spiraled, and with a sickening rush, a flailing tumult of the stays and planes, plunged into nothingness!
Had Stern and the girl not been securely strapped to their seats, they must have been precipitated into space by the violent, erratic dashes, drops, swerves and rushes of the uncontrolled Pauillac.
For a moment or two, instinctively despite the knowledge that it could do no good, Stern wrenched at the levers. A thousand confused, wild, terrible impressions surged upon his consciousness.
Swifter, swifter dropped the plane; and now the wind that seemed to rise had grown to be a hurricane! Its roaring in their ears was deafening. They had to fight even for breath itself.
Beatrice was leaning forward now, sheltering her face in the hollow of her arm. Had she fainted? Stern could not tell. He still was fighting with the mechanism, striving to bring it into some control. But, without headway, it defied him. And like a wounded hawk, dying even as it struggled, the Pauillac staggered wildly down the unplumbed abyss.
How long did the first wild drop last? Stern knew not. He realized only that, after a certain time, he felt a warm sensation; and, looking, perceived that they were now plunging through vapors that sped upward—so it seemed—with vertiginous rapidity.
No sensation now was there of falling. All motion seemed to lie in the uprushing vapors, dense and warm and pale violet in hue. A vast and rhythmic spiraling had possessed the Pauillac. As you have seen a falling leaf turn in air, so the plane circled, boring with terrific speed down, down, down through the mists, down into the unknown!
Nothing to be seen but vapors. No solid body, no land, no earth to mark their fall and gauge it. Yet slowly, steadily, darkness was shrouding them. And Stern, breathing with great difficulty even in the shelter of his arms, could now hardly more than see as a pale blur the white face of the girl beside him.
The vast wings of the machine, swirling, swooping, plunging down, loomed hugely vague in the deepening shadows. Dizzy, sick with the monstrous caroming through space, deafened by the thunderous roaring of the up-draft, Stern was still able to retain enough of his scientific curiosity to peer upward. The sun! Could he still see it?
Vanished utterly was now the glorious orb! There, seeming to circle round and round in drunken spirals, he beheld a weird, diffused, angry-looking blotch of light, tinted a hue different from any ever seen on earth by men. And involuntarily, at sight of this, he shuddered.
Already with the prescience of death full upon him, with a numb despair clutching his soul, he shrank from that ghastly, hideous aspect of what he knew must be his last sight of the sun.
Around the girl he drew his right arm; she felt his muscles tauten as he clasped her to him. Useless now, he knew, any further struggles with the aeroplane. Its speed, its plummetlike drop checked only by the huge sweep of its parachute wings, Stern knew now it must fall clear to the bottom of the abyss—if bottom there were. And if not—what then?
Stern dared not think. All human concepts had been shattered by this stupendous catastrophe. The sickly and unnatural hue of the rushing vapors that tore and slatted the planes, confused his senses; and, added to this, a stifling, numbing gas seemed diffused through the inchoate void. He tried to speak, but could not. Against the girl’s cheek he pressed his own. Hers was cold!
In
vain he struggled to cry out. Even had his parched tongue been able to voice a sound, the howling tempest they themselves were creating as they fell, would have whipped the shout away and drowned it in the gloom.
In Stern’s ears roared a droning as of a billion hornets. He felt a vast, tremendous lassitude. Inside his head it seemed as though a huge, merciless pressure were grinding at his very brain. His breath came only slowly and with great difficulty.
“My God!” he panted. “Oh, for a little fuel! Oh, for a chance—a chance to fight—for life!”
But chance there was none, now. Before his eyes there seemed to darken, to dazzle, a strange and moving curtain. Through it, piercing it with a supreme effort of the will, he caught dim sight of the dial of the chronometer. Subconsciously he noted that it marked 11.25.
How long had they been falling? In vain his wavering intelligence battered at the problem. Now, as in a delirium, he fancied it had been only minutes; then it seemed hours. Like an insane man he laughed—he tried to scream—he raved. And only the stout straps that had held them both prevented him from leaping free of the hurtling machine.
“Crack!”
A lashing had given way! Part of the left hand plane had broken loose. Drunkenly, whirling head over like an albatross shot in mid-air, the Pauillac plunged.
It righted, swerved, shot far ahead, then once again somersaulted.
Stern had disjointed, crazy thoughts of air-pressure, condensation and compression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that some gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to solve—it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like demon were flailing him until he answered—and that he could not answer!
He had a dim realization of straining madly at his straps till the veins started big and swollen in his hammering brows. Then consciousness lapsed.
Lapsed, yet came again—and with it pain. An awful pain in the ear-drums, that roared and crackled without cease.
Breath! He was fighting for breath!
It was a nightmare—a horrible dream of darkness and a mighty booming wind—a dream of stifling vapors and an endless void that sucked them down, down, down, eternally!
Delusions came, and mocking visions of safety. Both hands flung out as though to clutch the roaring gale, he fought the intangible.
Again he lost all knowledge.
And once again—how long after, how could he know?—he came to some partial realization of tortured existence.
In one of the mad downward rushes—rushes which ended in a long spiral slant—his staring, bloodshot eyes that sought to pierce the murk, seemed to behold a glimmer, a dull gleam of light.
The engineer screamed imprecations, mingled with wild, demoniac laughter.
“Another hallucination!” was his thought. “But if it’s not—if it’s Hell—then welcome, Hell! Welcome even that, for a chance to stop!”
A sweep of the Pauillac hid the light from view. Even that faintest ray vanished. But—what? It came again! Much nearer now, and brighter! And—another gleam! Another still! Three of them—and they were real!
With a tremendous effort, Stern fixed his fevered eyes upon the lights.
Up, up at a tremendous rate they seemed speeding. Blue and ghastly through the dense vapors, spinning in giddy gyrations, as the machine wheeled, catapulted and slid from one long slant to another, their relative positions still remained fixed.
And, with a final flicker of intelligence, Stern knew they were no figment of his brain.
“Lights, Beatrice! Lights, lights, real lights!” he sought to scream.
But even as he fought to shake her from the swoon that wrapped her senses, his own last fragment of strength deserted him.
He had one final sense impression of a swift upshooting of the lights, a sudden brightening of those three radiant points.
Then came a sudden gleam as though of waters, black and still.
A gleam, blue and uncanny, across the inky surface of some vast, mysterious, hidden sea.
Up rushed the lights at him; up rushed the sea of jetty black!
Stern shouted some wild, incoherent thing.
Crash!
A shock! A frightful impact, swift, sudden, annihilating!
Then in a mad and lashing struggle, all knowledge and all feeling vanished utterly. And the blackness of oblivion received him into its insensate bosom.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WHITE BARBARIANS
Warmth, wetness, and a knowledge of great weakness—these, joined with a singular lassitude, oppression of the lungs and stifling of the breath, were Allan Stern’s sensations when conscious life returned.
Pain there was as well. His body felt sorely bruised and shaken. His first thought, his intense yearning wonder for the girl’s welfare and his sickening fear lest she be dead, mingled with some attempt to analyze his own suffering; to learn, if possible, what damage he had taken in flesh and bone.
He tried to move, but found he could not. Even lying inert, as he now found himself, so great was the exertion to breathe that only by a fight could he keep the breath of life in his shaken frame.
He opened his eyes.
Light! Could it be? Light in that place?
Yes, the light was real, and it was shining directly in his face.
At first all that his disturbed, half-delirious vision could make out was a confused bluish glare. But in a moment this resolved itself into a smoking, blazing cresset. Stern could now distinctly see the metal bands of the fire-basket in which it lay, as well as a supporting staff, about five feet long, that seemed to vanish downward in the gloom.
And, understanding nothing, filled with vague, half-insane hallucinations and wild wonders, he tried to struggle upward with a babbling cry:
“Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice—where are you?”
To his intense astonishment, a human hand, bluish in the strange glare, laid itself upon his breast and pushed him down again.
Above him he saw a face, wrinkled, bearded and ghastly blue. And as he struggled still he perceived by the unearthly light that a figure was bending over him.
“A man!” he gulped. “Man! Man! Oh, my God! At last—a man!”
He tried to raise himself upon his elbow, for his whole soul was flooded with a sudden gratitude and love and joy in presence of that long-sought goal. But instantly, as soon as his dazed senses could convey the terrible impression to his brain, his joy was curdled into blank astonishment and fear and grief.
For to his intense chagrin, strive as he might, he could move neither hand nor foot!
During his unconsciousness, which had lasted he could not tell how long, he had been securely bound. And now, awakening slowly, once more, fighting his way up into consciousness, he found himself a prisoner!
A prisoner! With whom? Among what people—with what purpose? After the long quest, the frightful hardships and the tremendous fall into the abyss, a prisoner!
“Merciful God!” groaned Stern, and in his sudden anguish, strained against the bonds, that drawn tight and fast, were already cutting painfully into his swollen, water sodden flesh.
In vain did he struggle. Terrible thoughts that Beatrice, too, might be subjected to this peril and humiliation branded themselves upon his brain. He shouted wildly, calling her name, with all the force of his spent lungs; but naught availed. There came no answer but the shrouding fogs.
The strange man bent above him, peering from beneath wrinkled brows. Stern heard a few words in a singular, guttural tone—words rendered dull by the high compression of the air. What the words might be he could not tell, yet their general sound seemed strangely familiar and their command was indubitable.
But, still half-delirious, Stern tried again to stretch up his arms, to greet this singular being, even as a sick man recovering from etherization raves and half sees the nurses and doctors, yet dreams wild visions in the midst of pain.
The man, however, only shook his head, and with a broad, firm hand,
again held the engineer from trying to sit up. Stern, understanding nothing clearly, relapsed to quietude. To him the thought came: “This is only another delusion after all!” And then a vast and poignant woe possessed him—a wonder where the girl might be. But under the compulsion of that powerful hand, he lay quite still.
Half consciously he seemed to realize that he was lying prone in the bottom of some strange kind of boat, rude and clumsy, strangely formed of singular materials, yet safe and dry and ample.
To his laboring nostrils penetrated a rank and pungent odor of fish, with another the like of which he never had known—an odor not unpleasant, yet keenly penetrant and all-pervading. Wet through, the engineer lay reeking in heat and steam, wrapped in his suit of heavy furs. Then he heard a ripple of water and felt the motion of the craft as it was driven forward.
Another voice spoke now and the strange man answered briefly. Again the engineer half seemed to comprehend the meaning, though no word was intelligible.
“Where’s the girl, you?” he shouted with all his might. “What have you done with her? If you hurt her, damn you, you’ll be sorry! Where—where is she?”
No answer. It was evident that English speech conveyed no meaning to his captors. Stern relapsed with a groan of anguish and sheer pain.
The boat rocked. Another man came creeping forward, holding to the gunwale to steady himself. Stern saw him vaguely through the drifting vapor by the blue-green light of the cresset at the bow.
He was clad in a coarse kind of brownish stuff, like the first, roughly and loosely woven. His long hair, pure white, was twisted up in a kind of topknot and fastened there by pins of dull gold. Bearded he was, but not one hair upon his head or chin was other than silvery white—a color common to all these folk, as Stern was soon to know.
This man, evidently seeing with perfect clarity by a light which permitted the engineer only partial vision, also examined Stern and made speech thereto and nodded with satisfaction.
Then he put half a dozen questions to the prisoner with evident slowness and an attempt to speak each word distinctly, but nothing came of this. And with a contemptuous grunt he went back to his paddle.
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