I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a
change in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the
chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had
not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse.
From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply
descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about
the great abyss, down whose side paths, improved by the Old Ones, led
to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this
fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of
resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.
In was now eight p.m., and we had not enough battery replacements to
let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying
and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at
least five hours of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry
cell formula would obviously be good for only about four more--though
by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or
difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that.
It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs,
hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
mural deciphering. Of course, we intended to revisit the place for days
and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography--curiosity having
long ago gotten the better of horror--but just now we must hasten.
Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were
reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment
it, but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we
could resort to rock chipping--and, of course, it would be possible,
even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by
one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial
and error. So, at last, we set off eagerly in the indicated direction
of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where
we stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite
likely to be penetrable still at a subglacial level. The opening itself
would be in the basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of a
vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial
nature, which we tried to identify from our aërial survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had
been totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter
case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would
have to try the next nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north.
The intervening river course prevented our trying any of the more
southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring
ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant
an attempt on the next northerly one--about a mile beyond our second
choice.
* * * * *
As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map
and compass--traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges
and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of
débris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily
immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such
cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while
striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or
trickled down--we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls
along our route.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's
mouth--having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the
tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially
rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of
late workmanship--when, about eight thirty p.m., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.
If we had had a dog with us, I suppost we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the
formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reached
only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching.
There was an odor--and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably
akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the
horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course, the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it
sounds now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a
good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not
retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we
were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster.
Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe.
Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer
irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch--tempted no
longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly
from the oppressive walls--and which softened our progress to a
cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor
and heaps of débris.
Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris after we
had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors
on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked
through it. The irregular nature of the latter precluded any definite
marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the
dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel
tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the
other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a
more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances--unless, of
course, Gedney----For the odor was the plain and familiar one of common
petrol--every-day gasoline.
* * * * *
Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists.
We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must
have crawled into this nighted burial place of the æons, hence could
not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions--present
or at least recent--just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer
burning curiosity--or anxiety--or autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of
responsibility toward Gedney--of what not--drive us on.
Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at
the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical
piping--potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's
dissection report, despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth
echoes of the windy peaks--which he thought he had shortly afterward
half heard from unknown depths below.
I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left--of what had
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have
conceived the inconceivable--a wild trip across the monstrous mountains
and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry----
But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything
definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely
noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper daylight kept the
blackness from being absolute.
Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed débris formed an
impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew
stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until
very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been
all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from
the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going
to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture
opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked
corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various
states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odor--quite
submerging that other hint of odor--came with especial distinctness. As
we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a
slight and recent clearing away of débris from that particular opening.
Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue
toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think any one will wonder
that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first
impression was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse
of that sculptured crypt--a perfect cube with sides of about twenty
feet--there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so
that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway.
In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had discovered a
place where the floor débris had been disturbed. We turned on both
torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually
simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because
of what it implied.
It was a rough leveling of the débris, upon which several small objects
lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable
amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a
strong odor even at this extreme superplateau altitude. In other words,
it could not be other than a sort of camp--a camp made by questing
beings who, like us, had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked
way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was
concerned, all from Lake's camp, and consisted of: tin cans as queerly
opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches,
three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink
bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain
pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent cloth, a used
electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with
our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers.
It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked
at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found
certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have
prepared us, yet the effect of the sight, down there in the prehuman
vaults of a nightmare city, was almost too much to bear.
* * * * *
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of
those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those
insane five-pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he might
conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches--varying in their
accuracy--or lack of it--which outlined the neighboring parts of the
city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside
our previous route--a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower
in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aërial
survey--to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth
therein.
He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before
us were quite obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late
sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the
ones which we had seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could
never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured
technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of
the decadent carvings from which they were taken--the characteristic
and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead
city's heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not
to flee for our lives after that; since our conclusions were
now--notwithstanding their wildness--completely fixed, and of a nature
I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as
this. Perhaps we were mad--for have I not said those horrible peaks
were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the
same spirit--albeit in a less extreme form--in the men who stalk
deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study
their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was
nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity
which triumphed in the end.
Of course, we did not mean to face that--or those--which we knew had
been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by
this time have found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and
have passed within, to whatever night-black fragments of the past might
await them in the ultimate gulf--the ultimate gulf they had never seen.
Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the
north seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of
light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise
form our new emotions took--just what change of immediate objective it
was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not
mean to face what we feared--yet I will not deny that we may have had
a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden
vantage point.
Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself,
though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great
circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at
once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower in the carvings,
but appearing only as a prodigious, round aperture from above.
Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these
hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must
still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied
architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of
incredible age, according to the sculptures in which it figured--being
indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if
preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form
a good present link with the upper world--a shorter route than the one
we were so carefully blazing and probably that by which those others
had descended.
* * * * *
At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches--which
quite perfectly confirmed our own--and start back over the indicated
course to the circular place; the course which our nameless
predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring
gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our
journey--during which we continued to leave an economical trail of
paper--for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had
reached the cul-de-sac, except that it tended to adhere more closely to
the ground level and even descend to basement corridors.
Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks
in the débris or litter underfoot; and, after we had passed
outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly
conscious--spasmodically--of that more hideous and more persistent
scent. After the way had branched from our former course, we sometimes
gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls;
noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which
indeed seem to have formed a main æsthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About nine-thirty p.m., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose
increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and
whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight
ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were
coming to the vast, circular place, and that our distance from the
upper air could not be very great.
The corridor ended in an arch, surprisingly low for these megalithic
ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond,
there stretched a prodigious round space--fully two hundred feet in
diameter--strewn with débris and containing many choked archways
corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls were--in
available spaces--boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic
proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused
by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything
we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily
glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably
lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which,
eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound
spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart
of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or zikkurats of
antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective
which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had
prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to
seek another avenue to the subglacial level.
Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it
in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could
see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw
seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently
preserved up to the present top of the tower--a highly remarkable
circumstance in view of its exposure--and its shelter had done much to
protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
* * * * *
As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous
cylinder bottom--fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes--we saw that the
ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty
feet.
This, we recalled from our aërial survey, meant an outside glaciation
of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane
had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled
masonry, somewhat sheltered for three fourths of its circumference by
the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the
sculptures the original tower had stood in the center of an immense
circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred
feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of
needlelike spires along the upper rim.
Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward--a
fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered
and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad
battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways seemed to
have been half cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by
which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical
route for our own ascent, despite the long trail of paper we had left
elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our
waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and
any further subglacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie
in this general region.
Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips--even after
all we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over
the débris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time
excluded all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle
of the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto
been screened from our view. There they were--the three sledges missing
from Lake's camp--shaken by a hard usage which must have included
forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and débris,
as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places.
They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and
contained things memorably familiar enough: the gasoline stove, fuel
cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging
with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents--everything
derived from Lake's equipment.
After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure
prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we
stepped over and undid one tarpaulin, whose outlines had peculiarly
disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested
in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly
frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some
wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with care to prevent
further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing
dog.