PREPARATIONS
He woke to hear a drumming roar that seemed to fill the spaces
of the Abyss with a wild tumult such as he had never known--a steady
thunder, wonderful and wild.
Starting up, he saw by the dim light that the patriarch was sitting
there upon the stone, thoughtful and calm, apparently giving no heed
to this singular tumult. But Stern, not understanding, put a hasty
question.
"What's all this uproar, father? I never heard anything like that up
in the surface-world!"
"That? Only the rain, my son," the old man answered. "Had you no rain
there? Verily, traditions tell of rain among the people of that day!"
"Rain? Merciful Heavens!" exclaimed the engineer. Two minutes later he
was at the fortifications, gazing out across the beach at the sea.
It would be hard to describe accurately the picture that met his eyes.
The heaviest cloudburst that ever devastated a countryside was but a
trickle compared with this monstrous, terrifying deluge.
Some five hundred miles of dense and saturated vapors, suddenly
condensing, were precipitating the water, not in drops but in great
solid masses, thundering, bellowing, crashing as they struck the sea,
which, churned to a deep and raging froth, flung mighty waves even
against the massive walls of the village itself.
The fog was gone now; but in its place the rushing walls of water
blotted out the scene. Yet not a drop was falling in the village
itself. Stern wondered for a moment. But, looking up, he understood.
The vast cliff was now dimly visible in the glare of the great flame,
the steady roar of which was drowned by the tumult of the rain.
Stern saw that the village was sheltered under a tremendous overhang
of the black rock; he understood why the ancestors of the Folk, coming
to these depths after incredible adventurings and long-forgotten
struggles, had settled here. Any exposed location would have been
fatal; no hut could have withstood the torrent, nor could any man,
caught in it, have escaped drowning outright.
Amazed and full of wonder at this terrific storm, so different from
those on the surface--for there was neither wind nor lightning, but
just that steady, frightful sluicing down of solid tons of rain--Stern
made his way back to the patriarch's house.
There he met Beatrice, just awakened.
"No chance to raise the machine to-day!" she called to him as he
entered. "He says this is apt to last for hours and hours!" She nodded
toward the old man, much distressed.
"Patience!" he murmured. "Patience, friends--and peace!"
Stern thought a moment.
"Well," said he, at last, making himself heard only with difficulty,
"even so, we can spend the day in making ready."
And, after the simple meal that served for breakfast, he sat down to
think out definitely some plan of campaign for the recovery of the
lost Pauillac.
Though Stern by no means understood the girl's anxiety to leave the
Abyss, nor yet had any intention of trying to do so until he had begun
the education of the Folk and had perfected some means of trying to
transplant this group--and whatever other tribes he could find--to the
surface again, he realized the all-importance of getting the machine
into his possession once more.
For more than an hour he pondered the question, now asking a question
of the patriarch--who seemed torn between desire to have the
wonder-thing brought up, and fear lest he should lose the
strangers--now designing grapples, now formulating a definite line of
procedure.
At last, all things settled in his mind, he bade the old man get for
him ten strong ropes, such as the largest nets were made of. These
ropes which he had already seen coiled in huge masses along the wall
at the northern end of the village, where they were twisted of the
tough weed-fiber, averaged all of two hundred feet in length. When the
patriarch had gone to see about having them brought to the hut, he
himself went across the plaza, with Beatrice, to the communal smithy.
There he appropriated a forge, hammers, and a quantity of iron bars,
and energetically set to work fashioning a huge three-pronged hook.
A couple of hours' hard labor at the anvil--labor which proved that he
was getting back his normal strength once more--completed the task.
Deftly he heated, shaped and reshaped the iron, while vast
Brocken-shadows danced and played along the titanic cliff behind him,
cast by the wavering blue gas-flames of the forge. At length he found
himself in possession of a drag weighing about forty pounds and
provided with a stout ring at the top of the shank six inches in
diameter.
"Now," said he to Beatrice, as he surveyed the finished product, while
all about them the inquisitive yet silent Folk watched them by the
unsteady light, "now I guess we're ready to get down to something
practical. Just as soon as this infernal rain lets up a bit, we'll go
angling for the biggest fish that ever came out of this sea!"
But the storm was very far from being at an end. The patriarch told
Stern, when he brought the grapple to the hut--followed by a silent,
all-observant crowd--that sometimes these torrential downpours lasted
from three to ten sleep-times, with lulls between.
"And nobody can venture on the sea," he added, "till we know--by
certain signs we have--that the great rain is verily at an end. To do
that would mean to court death; and we are wise, from very long
experience. So, my son, you must have patience in this as in all
things, and wait!"
Part of that afternoon of forced inactivity Stern spent in his
favorite habit of going about among the Folk, closely mingling with
them and watching all their industrial processes and social life, and
trying, as usual, to pick tip words and phrases of the very
far-degenerated speech that once had been English but was now a
grammarless and formless jumble of strange words.
Only a few of the most common words he found retained anything like
their original forms--such as _w'hata_, water; _fohdu_, food;
_yernuh_, iron; _vlaak_, black; _gomu_, come; _ghaa_, go; _fysha_,
fish; and so on for about forty others.
Thousands upon thousands of terms, for which no longer any objects now
existed among the Folk, had been of course utterly forgotten; and some
hundreds of new words, relative to new conditions, had been invented.
The entire construction was altered; the language now bore no more
resemblance to English than English had borne to the primitive
Indo-Germanic of the Aryan forefathers. Now that writing had been
lost, nothing retarded changes; and Stern realized that here--were he
a trained philologist--lay a task incomparably interesting and
difficult, to learn this Merucaan speech and trace its development
from his own tongue.
But Stern's skill was all in other lines. The most that he could do
was to make some rough vocabularies, learn a few common phrases, and
here or there try to teach a little English. A deeper study and
teaching, he knew, would come later, when more important matters had
been attended to.
His attempts to learn and to talk with these people--by pointing at
objects and listening to their names--were comparable to those,
perhaps, of a prehistoric Goth turned loose in an American village of
the twentieth century. Only the patriarch had retained the
mother-tongue, and that in an archaic, imperfect manner, so that even
his explanations often failed. Stern felt the baffling difficulties in
his way; but his determination only grew.
The rain steadily continued to drum down, now lessened, now again in
terrific deluges of solid black water churned to white as they struck
the sea and flung the froth on high. The two Americans passed an hour
that afternoon in the old man's hut, drawing up a calendar on which to
check as accurately as possible, the passage of time as reckoned in
the terms of life upon the surface.
They scratched this on a slab of slatelike rock, with a sharp iron
awl; and, reckoning the present day as about October first, agreed
that every waking-time they would cross off one square.
"For," said the engineer, "it's most important that we should keep
track of the seasons up above. That may have much to do with our
attempts to transplant this colony. It would never do to take a people
like this, accustomed to heat and vapor, and carry them out into even
the mild winter that now prevails in a present-day December. If we
don't get them to the surface before the last of this month, at
latest--"
"We'll have to wait until another spring?" asked she.
"Looks that way," he assented, putting a few final touches to the
calendar. "So you see it's up to us to hurry--and certainly nothing
more inopportune than this devilish rain could possibly have happened!
Haste, haste! We must make haste!"
"That's so!" exclaimed Beatrice. "Every day's precious, now. We--"
"My children," hurriedly interrupted the patriarch, "I never yet have
shown you my book--my one and greatest treasure. The book!
"You have told me many things, of sun and moon and stars, which are
mocked at as idle tales by my unbelieving people; of continents and
seas, mountains, vast cities, great ships, strange engines moved by
vapor and by lightning, tall houses; of words thrown along metal
threads or even through the air itself; of great nations and wars, of
a hundred wondrous matters that verily have passed away even from the
remotest memories of us in the Abyss!
"But of our history I have told you little; nor have you seen the
book! Yet you must see it, for it alone remains to us of that other,
better time. And though my folk mock at it as imposture and myth and
fraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept the
English speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive.
Only the book, the book!"
His voice seemed strangely agitated. As he spoke he raised his hands
toward them, sitting on the stone bench in the hut, while outside the
rain still thundered louder than the droning roar of the great flame.
Stern, his curiosity suddenly aroused, looked at the old man with keen
interest.
"The book?" he queried. "What book? What's the name of it? What date?
What--who wrote it, and--"
"Patience, friends!"
"You mean you've really got an English book here in this village? A--"
"A book, verily, from the other days! But first, before I show you,
let me tell you the old tradition that was handed down to me by my
father and my father's fathers, down through centuries--I know not how
many."
"You mean the story of this Lost Folk in the Abyss?"
"Verily! You have told me yours, of your awakening, of the ruined
world and all your struggles and your fall down into this cursed pit.
Listen now to mine!"