DOOMED!
The aged man stood for a moment as though tranced at sound of
the engineer's voice. Then, tapping feebly with his staff, he advanced
a pace or two into the dungeon. And Stern and Beatrice--who now had
sprung up, too, and was likewise staring at this singular
apparition--heard once again the words:
"Peace, friends! Peace!"
Stern snatched up the revolver and leveled it.
"Stop there!" he shouted. "Another step and I--I--"
The old man hesitated, one hand holding the staff, the other groping
out vacantly in front of him, as though to touch the prisoners. Behind
him, the dull blue light cast its vague glow. Stern, seeing his bald
and shaking head, lean, corded hand, and trembling body wrapped in its
mantle of coarse brown stuff, could not finish the threat.
Instead, his pistol-hand dropped. He stood there for a moment as
though paralyzed with utter astonishment. Outside, the chant had
ceased. Through the doorway no living beings were visible--nothing but
a thin and tenuous vapor, radiant in the gas-flare which droned its
never-ending roar.
"In the name of Heaven, who--what--_are_ you?" cried the engineer, at
length. "A man who speaks English, _here? Here?_"
The aged one nodded slowly, and once again groped out toward Stern.
Then, in his strangely hollow voice, unreal and ghostly, and with
uncertain hesitation, an accent that rendered the words all but
unintelligible, he made answer:
"A man--yea, a living man. Not a ghost. A man! and I speak the
English. Verily, I am ancient. Blind, I go unto my fathers soon. But
not until I have had speech with you. Oh, this miracle--English speech
with those to whom it still be a living tongue!"
He choked, and for a space could say no more. He trembled violently.
Stern saw his frail body shake, heard sobs, and knew the ancient one
was weeping.
"Well, great Scott! What d'you think of _that?_" exclaimed the
engineer. "Say, Beatrice--am I dreaming? Do you see it, too?"
"Of course! He's a survivor, don't you understand?" she answered, with
quicker intuition than his. "He's one of an elder generation--he
remembers more! Perhaps he can help us!" she added eagerly. And
without more ado, running to the old man, she seized his hand and
pressed it to her bosom.
"Oh, father!" cried she. "We are Americans in terrible distress! You
understand us--you, alone, of all these people here. Save us, if you
can!"
The patriarch shook his head, where still some sparse and feeble hairs
clung, snowy-white.
"Alas!" he answered, intelligibly, yet still with that strange,
hesitant accent of his--"alas, what can I do? I am sent to you,
verily, on a different mission. They do not understand, my people.
They have forgotten all. They have fallen back into the night of
ignorance. I alone remember; I only know. They mock me. But they fear
me, also.
"Oh, woman!"--and, dropping his staff a-clatter to the floor, he
stretched out a quivering hand--"oh, woman! and oh, man from
above--speak! Speak, that I may hear the English from living lips!"
Stern, blinking with astonishment there in the half-gloom, drew near.
"English?" he queried. "Haven't you ever heard it spoken?"
"Never! Yet, all my life, here in this lost place, have I studied and
dreamed of that ancient tongue. Our race once spoke it. Now it is
lost. That magnificent language, so rich and pure, all lost, forever
lost! And we--"
"But what _do_ you speak down here?" exclaimed the engineer, with
eager interest. "It seemed to me I could almost catch something of it;
but when it came down to the real meaning, I couldn't. If we could
only talk with these people here, your people, they might give us some
kind of a show! Tell me!"
"A--a show?" queried the blind man, shaking his head and laying his
other hand on Stern's shoulder. "Verily, I cannot comprehend. An
entertainment, you mean? Alas, no, friends; they are not hospitable,
my people. I fear me; I fear me greatly that--that--"
He did not finish, but stood there blinking his sightless eyes, as
though with some vast effort of the will he might gain knowledge of
their features. Then, very deftly, he ran his fingers over Stern's
bearded face. Upon the engineer's lips his digits paused a second.
"Living English!" he breathed in an awed voice. "These lips speak it
as a living language! Oh, tell me, friends, _are_ there now men of
your race--once our race--still living, up yonder? _Is_ there such a
place--is there a sky, a sun, moon, stars--verily such things now? Or
is this all, as my people say, deriding me, only the babbling of old
wives' tales?"
A thousand swift, conflicting thoughts seemed struggling in Stern's
mind. Here, there, he seemed to catch a lucid bit; but for the moment
he could analyze nothing of these swarming impressions.
He seemed to see in this strange ancient-of-days some last and
lingering relic of a former generation of the Folk of the Abyss, a
relic to whom perhaps had been handed down, through countless
generations, some vague and wildly distorted traditions of the days
before the cataclysm. A relic who still remembered a little English,
archaic, formal, mispronounced, but who, with the tenacious memory of
the very aged, still treasured a few hundred words of what to him was
but a dead and forgotten tongue. A relic, still longing for knowledge
of the outer world--still striving to keep alive in the degenerated
people some spark of memory of all that once had been!
And as this realization, not yet very clear, but seemingly certain in
its general form, dawned on the engineer, a sudden interest in the
problem and the tragedy of it all sprang up in him, so keen, so
poignant in its appeal to his scientific sense, that for a moment it
quite banished his distress and his desire for escape with Beatrice.
"Why, girl," he cried, "here's a case parallel, in real life, to the
wildest imaginings of fiction! It's as though a couple of ancient
Romans had walked in upon some old archeologist who'd given his life
to studying primitive Latin! Only you'd have to imagine he was the
only man in the world who remembered a word of Latin at all! Can you
grasp it? No wonder he's overcome!
"Gad! If we work this right," he added in a swift aside, "this will be
good for a return ticket, all right!"
The old man withdrew his hand from the grasp of Beatrice and folded
both arms across his breast with simple dignity.
"I rejoice that I have lived to this time," he stammered slowly,
gropingly, as though each word, each distorted and mispronounced
syllable had to be sought with difficulty. "I am glad that I have
lived to touch you and to hear your voices. To know it is no mere
tradition, but that, verily, there _was_ such a race and such a
language! The rest also, must be true--the earth, and the sun, and
everything! Oh, this is a wonder and a miracle! Now I can die in a
great peace, and they will know I have spoken truth to their mocking!"
He kept silence a space, and the two captives looked fixedly at him,
strangely moved. On his withered cheeks they could see, by the dull
bluish glow through the doorway, tears still wet. The long and
venerable beard of spotless white trembled as it fell freely over the
coarse mantle.
"What a subject for a painter--if there were any painters left!"
thought Stern.
The old man's lips moved again.
"Now I can go in peace to my appointed place in the Great Vortex,"
said he, and bowed his head, and whispered something in that other
speech they had already heard but could not understand.
Stern spoke first.
"What shall we call your name, father?" asked he.
"Call me J'hungaav," he answered, pronouncing a name which neither of
them could correctly imitate. When they had tried he asked:
"And yours?"
Stern gave both the girl's and his own. The old man caught them both
readily enough, though with a very different accent.
"Now, see here, father," the engineer resumed, "you'll pardon us, I
know. There's a million things to talk about. A million we want to
ask, and that we can tell you! But we're very tired. We're hungry.
Thirsty. Understand? We've just been through a terrible experience.
You can't grasp it yet; but I'll tell you we've fallen, God knows how
far, in an aeroplane--"
"Fallen? In an--an--"
"No matter. We've fallen from the surface. From the world where
there's a sky, and sun, and stars, and all the rest of it. So far as
we know, this woman and I are the only two people--the original kind
of people, I mean; the people of the time before--er--hang it!--it's
mighty hard to explain!"
"I understand. You are the only two now living of our former race? And
you have come from above? Verily, this is strange!"
"You bet it is! I mean, verily. And now we re here, your people have
thrown us into this prison, or whatever it is. And we don't like the
look of those skeletons on the iron rods outside a little bit! We--"
"Oh, I pray! I pray!" exclaimed the patriarch, thrusting out both
hands. "Speak not of those! Not yet!"
"All right, father. What we want to ask is for something to eat and
drink, some other kind of clothes than the furs we're wearing, and a
place to sleep--a house, you know--we've got to rest! We mean no harm
to your people. Wouldn't hurt a hair of their heads! Overjoyed to find
'em! Now, I ask you, as man to man, can't you get us out of this, and
manage things so that we shall have a chance to explain?
"I'll give you the whole story, once we've recuperated. You can
translate it to your people. I ask some consideration for myself, and
I _demand_ it for this woman! Well?"
The old man stood in silent thought a moment. Plain to see, his
distress was very keen. His face wrinkled still more, and on his
breast he bowed his majestic head, so eloquent of pain and sorrow and
long disappointment.
Stern, watching him narrowly, played his trump-card.
"Father," said he, "I don't know why you were sent here to talk with
us, or how they knew you _could_ talk with us even. I don't know what
any of this treatment means. But I _do_ know that this girl and I are
from the world of a thousand years ago--the world in which your
ancient forefathers used to dwell!
"She and I know all about that world. We know the language which to
you is only a precious memory, to us a living fact. We can tell you
hundreds, thousands of things! We can teach you everything you want to
know! For a year--if you people _have_ years down here--we can sit and
talk to you, and instruct you, and make you far, far wiser than any of
your Folk!
"More, we can teach your Folk the arts of peace and war--a multitude
of wonderful and useful things. We can raise them from barbarism to
civilization again! We can save them--save the world! And I appeal to
you, in the name of all the great and mighty past which to you is
still a memory, if not to them--_save us now!_"
He ceased. The old man sighed deeply, and for a while kept silence.
His face might have served as the living personification of intense
and hopeless woe.
Stern had an idea.
"Father," he added--"here, take this weapon in your hand!" He thrust
the automatic into the patriarch's fingers. "This is a revolver. Have
you ever heard that word? With this, and other weapons even stronger,
our race, your race, used to fight. It can kill men at a distance in a
twinkling of an eye. It is swift and very powerful! Let this be the
proof that we are what we say, survivors from the time that was! And
in the name of that great day, and in the name of what we still can
bring to pass for you and yours, save us from whatever evil
threatens!"
A moment the old man held the revolver. Then, shuddering as with a
sudden chill, he thrust it back at Stern.
"Alas!" cried he. "What am I against a thousand? A thousand, sunk in
ignorance and fear and hate? A thousand who mock at me? Who believe
you, verily, to be only some new and stronger kind of Lanskaarn, as we
call our ancient enemies on the great islands in the sea.
"What can I do? They have let me have speech with you merely because
they think me so old and so childish! Because they say my brain is
soft! Whatever I may tell them, they will only mock. Woe upon me that
I have known this hour! That I have heard this ancient tongue, only
now forever to lose it! That I know the truth! That I know the world
of old tradition _was_ true and _is_ true, only now to have no more,
after this moment, any hope ever to learn about it!"
"The devil you say!" cried Stern, with sudden anger. "You mean they
won't listen to reason? You mean they're planning to butcher us, and
hang us up there along with the rest of the captured Lanskaarns, or
whatever you call them? You mean they're going to take us--_us_, the
only chance they've got ever to get out of this, and stick us like a
couple of pigs, eh? Well, by God! You tell them--you tell--"
In the doorway appeared another form, armed with an iron spear. Came a
quick word of command.
With a cry of utter hopelessness and heartbreak, a wail that seemed to
pierce the very soul, the patriarch turned and stumbled to the door.
He paused. He turned, and, stretching out both feeble arms to them--to
them, who meant so infinitely much to him, so absolutely nothing to
his barbarous race--cried:
"Fare you well, O godlike people of that better time! Fare you well!
Before another tide has risen on our accursed black beach, verily both
of you, the last survivors--"
With a harsh word of anger, the spearsman thrust him back and away.
Stern leaped forward, revolver leveled.
But before he could pull trigger the iron door had clanged shut.
Once more darkness swallowed them.
Black though it was, it equaled not the blackness of their absolute
despair.