Works of Robert W Chambers

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Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1165

by Robert W. Chambers


  Slap — slash — slush went the waves, hitting the shore with a clashing sound almost metallic. Vision and hearing told us that the water in the lake was rocking like the contents of a bath-tub.

  “G-g-good Lord!” whispered Brown. “Is there a v-volcano under that lake?”

  “Did you see that huge, glittering shape that seemed to fall into the water?” I gasped.

  “Yes. What was it? A meteor?”

  “No. It was something that first came out of the lake and fell back — the way a trout leaps. Heavens! It couldn’t have been alive, could it?”

  “W-wh-what do you mean?” stammered Brown.

  “It couldn’t have been a f-f-fish, could it?” I asked with chattering teeth.

  “No! No! It was as big as a Pullman car! It must have been a falling star. Did you ever hear of a fish as big as a sleeping car?”

  I was too thoroughly unnerved to reply. The roaring of the surf had subsided somewhat, enough for another sound to reach our ears — a raucous, gallinacious, squawking sound.

  I sprang up and looked at the row of tents. White-robed figures loomed in front of them. The heavy artillery was evidently frightened.

  “The heavy artillery was evidently frightened.”

  We went over to them, and when we got nearer they chastely scuttled into their tents and thrust out a row of heads — heads hideous with curl-papers.

  “What was that awful noise? An earthquake?” shrilled the Reverend Dr. Jones. “I think I’ll go home.”

  “Was it an avalanche?” demanded Mrs. Batt, in a deep and shaky voice. “Are we in any immediate danger, young man?”

  I said that it was probably a flying-star which had happened to strike the lake and explode.

  “What an awful region!” wailed Miss Dingleheimer. “I’ve had my money’s worth. I wish to go back to New York at once. I’ll begin to dress immediately—”

  “It might be a million years before another meteor falls in this latitude,” I said, soothingly.

  “Or it might be ten minutes,” sobbed Miss Dingleheimer. “What do you know about it, anyway! I want to go home. I’m putting on my stockings now. I’m getting dressed as fast as I can—”

  Her voice was blotted out in a mighty crash from the lake. Appalled, I whirled on my heel, just in time to see another huge jet of water rise high in the starlight, another, another, until the entire lake was but a cluster of gigantic geysers exploding a hundred feet in the air, while through them, falling back into the smother of furious foam, great silvery bulks dropped crashing, one after another.

  I don’t know how long the incredible vision lasted; the woods roared with the infernal pandemonium, echoed and re-echoed from mountain to mountain; the tree-tops fairly stormed spray, driving it in sheets through the leaves; and the shores of the lake spouted surf long after the last vast, silvery shape had fallen back again into the water.

  As my senses gradually recovered, I found myself supporting Mrs. Batt on one arm and the Reverend Dr. Jones upon my bosom. Both had fainted. I released them with a shudder and turned to look for Brown.

  Somebody had swooned in his arms, too.

  “Somebody had swooned in his arms, too.”

  He was not noticing me, and as I approached him I heard him say something resembling the word “kitten.”

  In spite of my demoralization, another fear seized me, and I drew nearer and peered closely at what he was holding so nobly in his arms. It was, as I supposed, Angelica White.

  I don’t know whether my arrival occultly revived her, for as I stumbled over a tent-peg she opened her blue eyes, and then disengaged herself from Brown’s arms.

  “Oh, I am so frightened,” she murmured. She looked at me sideways when she said it.

  “Come,” said I coldly to Brown, “let Miss White retire and lie down. This meteoric shower is over and so is the danger.”

  He evinced a desire to further soothe and minister to Miss White, but she said, with considerable composure, that she was feeling better; and Brown came unwillingly with me to inspect the heavy artillery lines.

  That formidable battery was wrecked, the pieces dismounted and lying tumbled about in their emplacements.

  But a vigorous course of cold water in dippers revived them, and we herded them into one tent and quieted them with some soothing prevarication, the details of which I have forgotten; but it was something about a flock of meteors which hit the earth every twelve billion years, and that it was now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic cell.

  Which flattered them, I think, for, seated once more at the base of our tree, presently we heard weird noises from the reconcentrados, like the moaning of the harbour bar.

  They slept, the heavy guns, like unawakened engines of destruction all a-row in battery. But Brown and I, fearfully excited, still dazed and bewildered, sat with our fascinated eyes fixed on the lake, asking each other what in the name of miracles it was that we had witnessed and heard.

  On one thing we were agreed. A scientific discovery of the most enormous importance awaited our investigation.

  This was no time for temporising, for deception, for any species of polite shilly-shallying. We must, on the morrow, tear off our masks and appear before these misguided and feminine victims of our duplicity in our own characters as scientists. We must boldly avow our identities and flatly refuse to stir from this spot until the mystery of this astounding lake had been thoroughly investigated.

  And so, discussing our policy, our plans for the morrow, and mutually reassuring each other concerning our common ability to successfully defy the heavy artillery, we finally fell asleep.

  III

  Dawn awoke me, and I sat up in my blanket and aroused Brown.

  No birds were singing. It seemed unusual, and I spoke of it to Brown. Never have I witnessed such a still, strange daybreak. Mountains, woods, and water were curiously silent. There was not a sound to be heard, nothing stirred except the thin veil of vapour over the water, shreds of which were now parting from the shore and steaming slowly upward.

  There was, it seemed to me, something slightly uncanny about this lake, even in repose. The water seemed as translucent as a dark crystal, and as motionless as the surface of a mirror. Nothing stirred its placid surface, not a ripple, not an insect, not a leaf floating.

  Brown had lugged the pneumatic raft down to the shore where he was now pumping it full: I followed with the paddles, pole, and hydroscope. When the raft had been pumped up and was afloat, we carried the reel of gossamer piano-wire aboard, followed it, pushed off, and paddled quietly through the level cobwebs of mist toward the centre of the lake. From the shore I heard a gruesome noise. It originated under one of the row of tents of the heavy artillery. Medusa, snoring, was an awesome sound in that wilderness and solitude of dawn.

  I was unscrewing the centre-plug from the raft and screwing into the empty socket the lens of the hydroscope and attaching the battery, while Brown started his sounding; and I was still busy when an exclamation from my companion started me:

  “We’re breaking some records! Do you know it, Smith?”

  “Where is the lead?”

  “Three hundred fathoms and still running!”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Look at it yourself! It goes on unreeling: I’ve put the drag on. Hurry and adjust the hydroscope!”

  I sighted the powerful instrument for two thousand feet, altering it from minute to minute as Brown excitedly announced the amazing depth of the lake. When he called out four thousand feet, I stared at him.

  “There’s something wrong—” I began.

  “There’s nothing wrong!” he interrupted. “Four thousand five hundred! Five thousand! Five thousand five hundred—”

  “Are you squatting there and trying to tell me that this lake is over a mile deep!”

  “Look for yourself!” he said in an unstea
dy voice. “Here is the tape! You can read, can’t you? Six thousand feet — and running evenly. Six thousand five hundred!... Seven thousand! Seven thousand five—”

  “It can’t be!” I protested.

  But it was true. Astounded, I continued to adjust the hydroscope to a range incredible, turning the screw to focus at a mile and a half, at two miles, at two and a quarter, a half, three-quarters, three miles, three miles and a quarter — click!

  “Good Heavens!” he whispered. “This lake is three miles and a quarter deep!”

  Mechanically I set the lachet, screwed the hood firm, drew out the black eye-mask, locked it, then, kneeling on the raft I rested my face in the mask, felt for the lever, and switched on the electric light.

  Quicker than thought the solid lance of dazzling light plunged down through profundity, and the vast abyss of water was revealed along its pathway.

  Nothing moved in those tremendous depths except, nearly two miles below, a few spots of tinsel glittered and drifted like flakes of mica.

  At first I scarcely noticed them, supposing them to be vast beds of silvery bottom sand glittering under the electric pencil of the hydroscope. But presently it occurred to me that these brilliant specks in motion were not on the bottom — were a little less than two miles deep, and therefore suspended.

  To be seen at all, at two miles’ depth, whatever they were they must have considerable bulk.

  “Do you see anything?” demanded Brown.

  “Some silvery specks at a depth of two miles.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Specks.”

  “Are they in motion?”

  “They seem to be.”

  “Do they come any nearer?”

  After a while I answered:

  “One of the specks seems to be growing larger.... I believe it is in motion and is floating slowly upward.... It’s certainly getting bigger.... It’s getting longer.”

  “Is it a fish?”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s impossible. Fish don’t attain the size of whales in mountain ponds.”

  There was a silence. After an interval I said:

  “Brown, I don’t know what to make of that thing.”

  “Is it coming any nearer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it look like now?”

  “It looks like a fish. But it can’t be. It looks like a tiny, silver minnow. But it can’t be. Why, if it resembles a minnow in size at this distance — what can be its actual dimensions?”

  “Let me look,” he said.

  Unwillingly I raised my head from the mask and yielded him my place.

  A long silence followed. The western mountain-tops reddened under the rising sun; the sky grew faintly bluer. Yet, there was not a bird-note in that still place, not a flash of wings, nothing stirring.

  Here and there along the lake shore I noticed unusual-looking trees — very odd-looking trees indeed, for their trunks seemed bleached and dead, and as though no bark covered them, yet every stark limb was covered with foliage — a thick foliage so dark in colour that it seemed black to me.

  I glanced at my motionless companion where he knelt with his face in the mask, then I unslung my field-glasses and focussed them on the nearest of the curious trees.

  At first I could not quite make out what I was looking at; then, to my astonishment, I saw that these stark, gray trees were indeed lifeless, and that what I had mistaken for dark foliage were velvety clusters of bats hanging there asleep — thousands of them thickly infesting and clotting the dead branches with a sombre and horrid effect of foliage.

  I don’t mind bats in ordinary numbers. But in such soft, motionless masses they slightly sickened me. There must have been literally tons of them hanging to the dead trees.

  “This is pleasant,” I said. “Look at those bats, Brown.”

  When Brown spoke without lifting his head, his voice was so shaken, so altered, that the mere sound of it scared me:

  “Smith,” he said, “there is a fish in here, shaped exactly like a brook minnow. And I should judge, by the depth it is swimming in, that it is about as long as an ordinary Pullman car.”

  His voice shook, but his words were calm to the point of commonplace. Which made the effect of his statement all the more terrific.

  “A — a minnow — as big as a Pullman car?” I repeated, dazed.

  “Larger, I think.... It looks to me through the hydroscope, at this distance, exactly like a tiny, silvery minnow. It’s half a mile down.... Swimming about.... I can see its eyes; they must be about ten feet in diameter. I can see its fins moving. And there are about a dozen others, much deeper, swimming around.... This is easily the most overwhelming contribution made to science since the discovery of the purple-spotted dingle-bock, Bukkus dinglii.... We’ve got to catch one of those gigantic fish!”

  “How?” I gasped. “How are we going to catch a minnow as large as a sleeping car?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to manage it, somehow.”

  “It would require a steel cable to hold such a fish and a donkey engine to reel him in! And what about a hook? And if we had hook, line, steam-winch, and everything else, what about bait?”

  He knelt for some time longer, watching the fish, before he resigned the hydroscope to me. Then I watched it; but it came no nearer, seeming contented to swim about at the depth of a little more than half a mile. Deep under this fish I could see others glittering as they sailed or darted to and fro.

  Presently I raised my head and sat thinking. The sun now gilded the water; a little breeze ruffled it here and there where dainty cat’s-paws played over the surface.

  “What on earth do you suppose those gigantic fish feed on?” asked Brown under his breath.

  I thought a moment longer, then it came to me in a flash of understanding, and I pointed at the dead trees.

  “Bats!” I muttered. “They feed on bats as other fish feed on the little, gauzy-winged flies which dance over ponds! You saw those bats flying over the pond last night, didn’t you? That explains the whole thing! Don’t you understand? Why, what we saw were these gigantic fish leaping like trout after the bats. It was their feeding time!”

  I do not imagine that two more excited scientists ever existed than Brown and I. The joy of discovery transfigured us. Here we had discovered a lake in the Thunder Mountains which was the deepest lake in the world; and it was inhabited by a few gigantic fish of the minnow species, the existence of which, hitherto, had never even been dreamed of by science.

  “Kitten,” I said, my voice broken by emotion, “which will you have named after you, the lake or the fish? Shall it be Lake Kitten Brown, or shall it be Minnius kittenii? Speak!”

  “What about that old party whose name you said had already been given to the lake?” he asked piteously.

  “Who? Mrs. Batt? Do you think I’d name such an important lake after her? Anyway, she has declined the honour.”

  “Very well,” he said, “I’ll accept it. And the fish shall be known as Minnius Smithii!”

  Too deeply moved to speak, we bent over and shook hands with each other. In that solemn and holy moment, surcharged with ecstatic emotion, a deep, distant reverberation came across the water to our ears. It was the heavy artillery, snoring.

  Never can I forget that scene; sunshine glittering on the pond, the silent forests and towering peaks, the blue sky overhead, the dead trees where thousands of bats hung in nauseating clusters, thicker than the leaves in Valembrosa — and Kitten Brown and I, cross-legged upon our pneumatic raft, hands clasped in pledge of deathless devotion to science and a fraternity unending.

  “And how about that girl?” he asked.

  “What girl?”

  “Angelica White?”

  “Well,” said I, “what about her?”

  “Does she go with the lake or with the fish?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked coldly, withdraw
ing my hand from his clasp.

  “I mean, which of us gets the first chance to win her?” he said, blushing. “There’s no use denying that we both have been bowled over by her; is there?”

  I pondered for several moments.

  “She is an extremely intelligent girl,” I said, stalling.

  “Yes, and then some.”

  After a few minutes’ further thought, I said:

  “Possibly I am in error, but at moments it has seemed to me that my marked attentions to Miss White are not wholly displeasing to her. I may be mistaken—”

  “I think you are, Smith.”

  “Why?”

  “Because — well, because I seem to think so.”

  I said coldly:

  “Because she happened to faint away in your arms last night is no symptom that she prefers you. Is it?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you seem to think that tactful, delicate, and assiduous attentions on my part may prove not entirely unwelcome to this unusually intelligent—”

  “Smith!”

  “What?”

  “Miss White is not only a trained nurse, but she also is about to receive her diploma as a physician.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “When?”

  “When you were building the fire last night. Also, she informed me that she had relentlessly dedicated herself to a eugenic marriage.”

  “When did she tell you that?”

  “While you were bringing in a bucket of water from the lake last night. And furthermore, she told me that I was perfectly suited for a eugenic marriage.”

  “When did she tell you that?” I demanded.

  “When she had — fainted — in my arms.”

  “How the devil did she come to say a thing like that?”

  He became conspicuously red about the ears:

  “Well, I had just told her that I had fallen in love with her—”

  “Damn!” I said. And that’s all I said; and seizing a paddle I made furiously for shore. Behind me I heard the whirr of the piano wire as Brown started the electric reel. Later I heard him clamping the hood on the hydroscope; but I was too disgusted for any further words, and I dug away at the water with my paddle.

 

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