THE ANGEL
The scream ceased as suddenly as it had come. I drew my revolver,
snapped on the electric light, and, stooping low, looked into that
spot where, a few moments before, Milton Rhodes had so suddenly and
mysteriously disappeared.
Nothing but the unbroken rock before me. And yet Rhodes had vanished.
I turned the light full upon the low roof, and then I exclaimed aloud:
the entrance was there!
I dropped to my hands and knees and moved under, the pack not a little
impeding my movements. An instant, and I was standing upright peering
into a high, narrow tunnel, which some convulsion of nature, in some
lost age of the earth, had rent right through the living rock.
Nothing was to be seen, save the broken walls, floor and roof, deep,
eerie shadows crawling and gliding as the light moved. The view,
however, was a very restricted one, for the gallery, which sloped
gently upward, gave a sudden turn at a distance of only thirty feet or
so. What awaited me somewhere beyond that turn?
For a few moments I listened intently. Not the faintest sound--nothing
but the loud beating of my heart. What had happened to Rhodes?
"Milton!" I called softly. "Oh, Milton!"
No answer came.
I grasped a projection of rock, drew myself up into the tunnel and
advanced as rapidly and silently as possible, the light and the
alpenstock in my left hand, the revolver in the right. But it was not
very silently, what with the creepers. At times they grated harshly;
it was as if spirit-things were mocking me with suppressed, demoniacal
laughter. Yet I could not pause to remove those grating shoes of
toothed steel. Every second even might be precious now.
I drew near the turn, the revolver thrust forward in readiness for
instant action.
I reached it, and there just beyond, a dark figure was standing, framed
in a blaze of light.
It was Milton Rhodes.
He turned his head, and I saw a smile move athwart his features.
"Well, we've found it, Bill!" said he.
I was drawing near to him.
"That scream?" I said. "Who gave that terrible scream?"
"Terrible? It didn't sound terrible to me," smiled Milton Rhodes. "Fact
is, Bill, I'd like to hear it again."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"'Tis so."
"Who was it? Or what was it?"
"Why, the angel herself!" he told me.
"Where is she now?"
"Gone, Bill; she's gone. When she saw me, she fetched up, gave that
scream, then turned and vanished--around that next turn."
"What is she like, Milton?"
"I wish that I could tell you! But how can a man describe Venus? I know
one thing, Bill: if all the daughters of Drome are as fair as this one
that I saw, I know where all the movie queens of the future are coming
from."
I looked at him, and I laughed.
"Wait till you see her, Bill. Complexion like alabaster, white as
Rainier's purest snow! And hair! Oh, that hair, Bill! Like ten billion
dollars' worth of spun gold!"
"Gosh."
"Wait till you see her," said Milton.
"And the demon?" I queried.
"I didn't see any demon, Bill."
There was silence for a little space.
"Then," I said, "the whole thing is true, after all."
"You mean what grandfather Scranton set down in his journal, and the
rest of it?"
I nodded.
"I never doubted that, Bill."
"At times," I told him, "I didn't doubt it. Then, again, it all seemed
so wild and unearthly that I didn't know what to think."
"I think," he said with a wan smile, "that you know what to think
now--now when you are standing in this very way to Drome, whatever
Drome may be."
"Yes. And yet the thing is so strange. Think of it. A world of which
men have never dreamed, save in the wildest romance! An underground
world. Subterranean ways, subterranean cities, men and women there--"
"Cavernicolous Aphrodites!" said Milton Rhodes.
"And all down there in eternal darkness!" I exclaimed. "Why, the thing
is incredible. No wonder that I sometimes find myself wondering if I am
not in a dream."
Said Milton Rhodes:
"'_All_ that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.'
"But come, Bill," he added. "Don't let this _a priori_ stuff bowl you
over. In the first place, it isn't dark down there--when, that is, you
get down far enough."
"In Heaven's name, how do you know that?"
"Why, for one thing, if this subterranean world was one of unbroken
darkness, the angel (and the demon) would be blind, like those poor
fishes in the Mammoth Cave. But she is no more blind than you or I.
Ergo, if for no other reason, we shall find light down there."
"Of course, they have artificial light, or--"
"I don't mean that. If there had not been some other illumination, this
strange race (of whose very existence Science has never even dreamed)
would have ceased to exist long ago--if, indeed, it ever could have
begun."
"But no gleam of sunlight can ever find its way down to that world."
"It never can, of course. But there are other sources of light--nebulas
and comets in the heavens, for example, and auroras, phosphorus and
fire-flies here on earth. The phenomena of phosphorescence are by no
means so rare as might be imagined. Why, as Nichol showed, though any
man who uses his eyes can see it himself, there is light inherent
_even in clouds_."
I have the professor's book before me as I write--J. P. Nichol, LL.D.,
Professor of Astronomy in the University of Glasgow--and here are his
own words:
"Whatever their origin, they [the auroras] show the existence of causes
in virtue of whose energy the upper strata of our atmosphere become
self-luminous, sometimes in a high degree; for, in northern regions,
our travelers have _read_ by their brilliance. But the Aurora is not
the only phenomenon which indicates the existence of a power in the
matter of our globe to emit light. One fact, that must have been
often noticed, forcibly impresses me with the conviction, that here,
through what seems common, truths of much import will yet be reached.
In the dead of night, when the sky is clear, and one is admiring the
brilliancy of the stars, hanging over a perfectly obscured earth, a
cloud, well known to observing astronomers, will at times begin to
form, and it then spreads with astonishing rapidity over the whole
heavens. The light of the stars being thus utterly shut out, one might
suppose that surrounding objects would, if possible, become more
indistinct: but no! what was formerly invisible can now be clearly
seen; not because of lights from the earth being reflected back from
the cloud--for very often there are none--but in virtue of _the light
of the cloud itself_, which, however faint, is yet a similitude of the
dazzling shell of the Sun."
After mentioning the phosphorescence of the dark hemisphere of Venus
and the belief that something similar has been seen on the unillumined
surface of our satellite, he continues thus:
"But the circumstance most remarkably corroborative of the mysterious
truth to which these indications point, is the appearance of our
midnight luminary during a total eclipse. By theory, she ought to
disappear utterly from the heavens. She should vanish, and the sky seem
as if no Moon were in being; but, on the contrary, and even when she
passes the very centre of the Earth's shadow, she seems a huge _disc
of_ bronze, in which the chief spots can easily be described by a
telescope."
And that, remember, when the moon is in the utter blackness of the
earth's shadow. Of course, another explanation has been advanced; but
it does not take the professor long to dispose of that.
"It has been put forth in explanation," he says, "that a portion of the
rays of the Sun must be reflected by our atmosphere and bent toward the
eclipsed disc, from which again they are reflected to the Earth--thus
giving the Moon that bronze color; but, the instant the hypothesis is
tested by calculation, we discern its utter inefficiency. Nor is there
any tenable conclusion save this:--That the matter both of Sun and
planets is capable, in certain circumstances whose exact conditions are
not known, of evolving the energy we term light."
All this, and more, Rhodes explained to me, succinctly but clearly.
"Oh, we'll find light, Bill," said he.
All the same this subterranean world for which we were bound presented
some unpleasant possibilities, in addition, that is, to those
concomitant to its being a habitat of demons--and Heaven only knew what
besides.
"And then there is the air," I said. "As we descend, it will become
denser and denser, until at last we will be able to use these ice-picks
on it."
Rhodes, who was removing his creepers, laughed.
"We will have to make a vertical descent of three and one half miles
below the level of the sea--a vertical descent of near five miles from
this spot where we stand, Bill--before we reach a pressure of even two
atmospheres."
"The density then increases rapidly, doesn't it?"
"Oh, yes. Three and a half miles more, and we are under a pressure of
four atmospheres, or about sixty pounds to the square inch. Three and
a half miles farther down, or ten and one half miles in all below the
level of the sea, and we have a pressure upon us of eight atmospheres.
Fourteen miles, and it will be sixteen atmospheres. At thirty-five
miles the air will have the density of water, at forty-eight miles it
will be as dense as mercury, and at fifty miles we shall have it as
dense as gold."
"That will do!" I told him. "You know that we can never get down that
far."
"I have no idea how far we can go down, Bill."
"You know that we could never stand such pressures as those."
"I know that. But, as a matter of fact, I don't know what the pressures
are at those depths. Nor does any other man know. What I said a moment
ago is, of course, according to the law; but there is something wrong
with the law, founded upon that of Mariotte--as any physicist will tell
you."
"What's wrong with it?"
"At any rate, the law breaks down as one goes upward, and I have
no doubt that it will be found to do so as one descends below the
level of the sea. If the densities of the atmosphere decrease in a
geometrical ratio as the distances from sea-level increase in an
arithmetical ratio, then, at a distance of only one hundred miles up,
we should have virtually a perfect vacuum. The rarity there would be
absolutely inconceivable. For the atmospheric density at that height
would be only _one billioneth_ of what it is at the earth's surface."
"And what is the real density there?"
"No man knows or can know," replied Rhodes, "until he goes up there
to see. But meteors, rendered incandescent by the resistance they
encounter, show that a state of things exists at that high altitude
very different from the one that would be found there if our formulae
were correct and our theories were valid. And so, I have no doubt, we
shall find it down in Drome.
"Formulae are very well in their place," he went on, "but we should
never forget, Bill, that they are often builded on mere assumption
and that a theory is only a theory until experiment (or experience)
has shown us that it is a fact. And that reminds me: do you know what
Percival Lowell says about formulae?"
I said that I didn't.
"'Formulae,' says the great astronomer, 'are the anaesthetics of
thought.'
"I commend that very highly," Milton Rhodes added, "to our fiction
editors and our writers of short stories."
"But--"
"But me no buts, Bill," said Milton. "And what do your scientists know
about the interior of this old earth that we inhabit, anyway? Forsooth,
but very little, Billy, me lad. Why they don't even know what a
volcano is. One can't make a journey into the interior of the earth on
a scratch-pad and a lead-pencil, or, if he does, we may be pardoned if
we do not give implicit credence to all that he chooses to tell us when
he comes back. For instance, one of these armchair Columbuses (he made
the journey in a machine called d^2y by dx^2 and came out in China)
says that he found the interior in a state of igneous fluidity. And
another? Why, he tells us that the whole earth is as rigid as steel,
that it is solid to the very core."
"It seems," said I, "to be a case of
"'Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both.'"
"The truth, in this case, is not yet known, of course," replied Milton
Rhodes, "though I trust that you and I, Bill, are fated to learn
it--some of it, I should say."
He smiled a queer, wan smile.
"Whether we are fated, also, to reveal it to the world, to _our_
world--well, as for that, _quién sabe_?" he said.
"Then," I remarked, my fingers busy removing my ice-creepers, "what
we read about the state of things in the interior of the earth--the
temperature, the pressure, the density--then all that is pure theory?"
"Of course. How could it be anything else? All theory, save, that is,
the mean density of the earth. And that mean density gives us something
to think about, for it is just a little more than twice that of the
_surface materials_. With all this enormous pressure that we hear so
much about and the resultant increase of density with depth, the weight
of the earth certainly ought to be more than only five and one half
times that of a globe of equal size composed of nothing but water."[6]
[Footnote 6: "It has been calculated that at the depth of 35 miles,
air, subjected to the pressure of a column of matter of the mean
density of that at the surface of the earth, would acquire the density
of water; that at the depth of 173 miles, water itself, which is
eminently incompressible, would acquire the density of marble; and at
the centre, marble would have a density 119 times greater than at the
surface. _But the comparatively small mean density of the mass [of the
earth] proves that none of these effects take place._"--Brande.]
"Kind of queer, all right," was my comment.
"It is queer, all right--as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.
However, as old Dante has it, 'Son! our time asks thrifter using.'"
As the last words left his lips, I straightened up, the toothed shoes
in my hand; and, as I did so, I started and cried:
"Hear that?"
Rhodes made no answer. For some moments we stood there in breathless
expectation; but that low mysterious sound did not come again.
I said:
"What _was_ that?"
"I wish that I knew, Bill. It was faint, it was--well, rather strange."
"It was more than that," I told him. "It seemed to me to be
hollow--like the sound of some great door suddenly closing."
My companion looked at me rather quickly.
"Think so, Bill?" he said. "I thought 'twas like the sound of something
_falling_."
There was a pause, one of many moments, during which pause we stood
listening and waiting; but the gallery remained as silent as though it
had never known the tread of any living thing.
"Well, Bill," said Milton Rhodes suddenly, "we shall never learn what
Drome means if we stay in this spot. As for the creepers, I am going to
leave mine here."
The place where he put them, a jutting piece of rock, was a conspicuous
one; no one passing along the tunnel could possibly fail to notice the
objects resting there. Mine I placed beside them, wondering as I did so
if I should ever see this spot again.
Milton then wrote a short note, which recorded little more than our
names, the date of our great discovery and that we were going farther.
This, carefully folded, he placed beside the creepers and put a
rock-fragment upon it. I wondered as I watched him whose would be the
eyes that would discover it. Some inhabitant of this underground world,
of course, and to such a one the record would be so much Greek. 'Twas
utterly unlikely that any one from the world which we were leaving
would ever see that record.
"And now, Bill," said Milton Rhodes, "down we go!"
And the next moment we were going--had begun our descent into this most
mysterious and dreadful place.