THE PATRIARCH'S TALE
"In the beginning," he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, "our people
were as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a great
breaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of the
earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of,
only dark. It circled about the earth--"
"By Jove!" cried Stern, and started to his feet. "That dark patch in
the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the
Hudson!"
"You mean--" the girl exclaimed.
"It's a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It's the
split-off part of the world!"
"Another satellite?"
"Of course! Hang it, yes! See now? The great explosion that liberated
the poisonous gases and killed practically everybody in the world must
have gouged this new planet out of the flank of Mother Earth in the
latter part of 1920. The ejected portions, millions of millions of
tons, hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of solid rock--and with
them the ruins of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha, and hundreds
of smaller cities--are now all revolving in a fixed, regular orbit,
some few thousand miles or so from the surface!
"Think! Ours are the only living human eyes that have seen this new
world blotting out the stars! This explains everything--the singular
changes in the tides and in the direction of the magnetic pole,
decreased gravitation and all the other strange things we noticed, but
couldn't understand. By Gad! What a discovery!"
The patriarch listened eagerly while Stern and the girl discussed the
strange phenomenon; but when their excitement had subsided and they
were ready again to hear him, he began anew:
"Verily, such was the first result of the great catastrophe. And, as
you know, millions died. But among the canyons of the Rocky
Mountains--so says the tradition; is it right? _Were_ there such
mountains?"
"Yes, yes! Go on!"
"In those canyons a few handfuls of hardy people still survived. Some
perished of famine and exposure; some ventured out into the lowlands
and died of the gas that still hung heavy there. Some were destroyed
in a great fire that the tradition says swept the earth after the
explosion. But a few still lived. At one time the number was only
eighteen men, twelve women and a few children, so the story goes."
"And then?"
"Then," continued the patriarch, his brow wrinkled in deep thought,
"then came the terrible, swift cold. The people, still keeping their
English tongue, now dead save for you two, and still with some tools
and even a few books, retreated into caves and fissures in the
canyons. And so they came to the great descent."
"The what?"
"The huge cleft which the story says once connected the upper world
with this Abyss. And--"
"Is it open _now_," cried Stern, leaning sharply forward.
"Alas, no; but you hurry me too much, good friend. You understand, for
a long time they lived the cave-life partly, and partly the upper
life. And they increased a great deal in the hundred years that
followed the explosion. But they never could go into the plains, for
still the gas hung there, rising from a thousand wells--ten thousand,
mayhap, all very deadly. And so they knew not if the rest of the world
lived or died."
"And then?" queried the engineer. "Let's have it all in outline. What
happened?"
"This, my son: that a still greater cold came upon the world, and the
life of the open became impossible. There were now ten or twelve
thousand alive; but they were losing their skill, their knowledge,
everything. Only a few men still kept the wisdom of reading or
writing, even. For life was a terrible fight. And they had to seek
food now in the cave-lakes; that was all remaining.
"After that, another fifty or a hundred years, came the second great
explosion. The ways were closed to the outer world. Nearly all died.
What happened even the tradition does not tell. How many years the
handful of people wandered I do not know. Neither do I know how they
came here.
"The story says only eight or ten altogether reached this sea. It was
much smaller then. The islands of the Lanskaarn, as we call them now,
were then joined to the land here. Great changes have taken place.
Verily, all is different! Everything was lost--language and arts, and
even the look of the Folk.
"We became as you see us. The tradition itself was forgotten save by a
few. Sometimes we increased, then came pestilences and famines,
outbreaks of lava and hot mud and gases, and nearly all died. At one
time only seven remained--"
"For all the world like the story of Pitcairn Island and the mutineers
of the 'Bounty'!" interrupted the engineer. "Yes, yes--go on!"
"There is little more to tell. The tradition says there was once a
place of records, where certain of the wisest men of our Folk placed
all their lore to keep it; but even this place is lost. Only one
family kept any knowledge of the English as a kind of inheritance and
the single book went with that family--"
"But the Lanskaarn and the other peoples of the Abyss, where did
_they_ come from?" asked Stern eagerly.
The patriarch shook his head.
"How can I tell?" he answered. "The tradition says nothing of them."
"Some other groups, probably," suggested Beatrice, "that came in at
different times and through other ways."
"Possibly," Stern assented. "Anything more to tell?"
"Nothing more. We became as savages; we lost all thought of history or
learning. We only fought to live! All was forgotten.
"My grandfather taught the English to my father and he to me, and I
had no son. Nobody here would learn from me. Nobody cared for the
book. Even the tradition they laughed at, and they called my brain
softened when I spoke of a place where in the air a light shone half
the time brighter even than the great flame! And in every way they
mocked me!
"So I--I"--the old man faltered, his voice tremulous, while tears
glittered in his dim and sightless eyes--"I ceased to speak of these
things. Then I grew blind and could not read the book. No longer could
I refresh my mind with the English. So I said in my heart: 'It is
finished and will soon be wholly forgotten forever. This is the end.'
"Verily, I laid the book to rest as I soon must be laid to rest! Had
you not come from that better place, my thought would have been
true--"
"But it isn't, not by a jugful!" exclaimed the engineer joyously, and
stood up in the dim-lit little room. "No, _sir!_ She and I, we're
going to change the face of things considerably! How? Never mind just
yet. But let's have a look at the old volume, father. Gad! That must
be some relic, eh? Imagine a book carried about for a thousand years
and read by at least thirty generations of men! The book, father! The
book!"
Already the patriarch had arisen and now he gestured at the heavy
bench of stone.
"Can you move this, my son?" asked he. "The place of the book lies
beneath."
"Under there, eh? All right!" And, needing no other invitation, he set
his strength against the massive block of gneiss.
It yielded at the second effort and, sliding ponderously to one side,
revealed a cavity in the stone floor some two feet long by about
eighteen inches in breadth.
Over this the old man stooped.
"Help me, son," bade he. "Once I could lift it with ease, but now the
weight passes my strength."
"What? The weight of a book? But--where is it? In this packet, here?"
He touched a large and close-wrapped bundle lying in the little crypt,
dimly seen by the flicker of the oily wick.
"Yea. Raise it out that I may show you!" answered the patriarch. His
hands trembled with eagerness; in his blind eyes a sudden fever seemed
to burn. For here was his dearest, his most sacred treasure, all that
remained to him of the long-worshipped outer world--the world of the
vague past and of his distant ancestors--the world that Stern and
Beatrice had really known and seen, yet which to him was only "all a
wonder and a wild desire."
"Lay the book upon the bench," he ordered. "I will unwrap it!"
Complex the knots were, but his warped and palsied fingers deftly
undid them as though long familiar with each turn and twist. Then off
came many a layer of the rough brown seaweed fabric and afterward
certain coverings of tough shark-skin neatly sewn.
"The book!" cried the patriarch. "Now behold it!"
"_That?_" exclaimed Beatrice. "I never saw a book of that shape!"
"Each page is separately preserved, wherefore it is so very thick,"
explained the old man. "See here?"
He turned the leaves reverently. Stern, peering closely by the dim
light, saw that they were loosely hung together by loops of heavy gold
wire. Each page was held between two large plates of mica, and these
plates were securely sealed around the edges by some black substance
like varnish or bitumen.
"Only thus," explained the patriarch, "could we hope to save this
precious thing. It was done many hundreds of years ago, and even then
the book was almost lost by age and use."
"I should say so!" ejaculated Stern. Even sealed in its air-tight
covering, he saw that every leaf was yellow, broken, rotten, till the
merest breath would have disintegrated it to powder. A sense of the
infinitudes of time bridged by this volume overwhelmed him; he drew a
deep breath, reached out his hand and touched the wondrous relic of
the world that was.
"Long ago," continued the old man, "when the book began to crumble,
one of my ancestors copied it on gold plates, word by word, letter by
letter, every point and line. And our family used only that book of
gold and put away the other. But in my grandfather's time the
Lanskaarn raided our village and the gold plates went for loot to make
them trinkets, so they were lost.
"My father meant to begin the task again, but was killed in a raid. I,
too, in my fighting youth, had plans for the work; but blindness
struck me before I could find peace to labor in. So now all that
remains of the mother tongue here is my own knowledge and these
tattered scraps. And, if you save us not, soon all, all will be lost
forever!"
Much moved, the engineer made no reply, yet thoughts came crowding to
his brain. Here visibly before him he beheld the final link that tied
these lost Folk to the other time, the last and breaking thread. What
history could this book have told? What vast catastrophes, famines,
pestilences, wars, horrors had it passed through? In what unwritten
cataclysms, in what anguish and despair and long degeneration had the
human mind still clung to it and cherished it?
No one could tell; yet Stern felt the essence of its unknown story. An
infinite pathos haloed the ancient volume. And reverently he touched
its pages once again; he bent and by the guttering light tried to make
out a few words here or there upon the crackled, all but perished
leaves.
He came upon a crude old woodcut, vague and dim; then a line of text
caught his eye.
"By Gad! 'Pilgrim's Progress'!" he exclaimed. "Look,
Beatrice--'Pilgrim's Progress,' of all books! No wonder he says
'Verily' and talks archaic stuff and doesn't catch more than half we
say. Well, I'll be--"
"Is this then not the English of your time?" asked the patriarch.
"Hardly! It was centuries old at the epoch of the catastrophe. Say,
father, the quicker you forget this and take a few lessons in the
up-to-date language of the real world that perished, the better! I see
now why you don't get on to the idea of steamships and railroads,
telephones and wireless and all the rest of it. God! but you've got a
lot to learn!"
The old man closed up the precious volume and once more began wrapping
it in its many coverings.
"Not for me, all this, I fear," he answered with deep melancholy. "It
is too late, too late--I cannot understand."
"Oh, yes, you can, and will!" the engineer assured him. "Buck up,
father! Once I get my biplane to humming again you'll learn a few
things, never fear!"
He stepped to the door of the hut and peered out.
"Rain's letting up a bit," he announced. "How about it? Do the signs
say it's ready to quit for keeps? If so--all aboard for the dredging
expedition!"