"ARE WE ENTERING DANTE'S INFERNO ITSELF?"
When Scranton came with his weird story of Old He, I was, I confess,
not a little puzzled by his and Milton's reference to the extraordinary
scientific possibilities that it presented. At first I could not
imagine what on earth they meant. But I saw all those possibilities
very clearly now, and a thousand more I imagined. I knew a wild joy,
exultation, and yet at the same time the wonder and the mystery of it
all made me humble and sober of spirit. I admit, too, that a fear--a
fear for which I can find no adequate name--had laid its palsied and
cold fingers upon me.
In a few moments we reached that spot where the angel had vanished.
There we paused in curiosity, looking about; but nothing was to be
seen. The gallery--which from this point swung sharp to the right and
went down at a rather steep angle--was as silent as some interstellar
void.
"Bill," smiled Milton Rhodes, "he is idle who might be better employed."
And he started on, or, rather, down. A hundred feet, however--we were
now under the glacier--and he halted, turned his light full upon the
left-hand wall, pointed and said:
"There you are, Bill--the writing on the wall."
I pressed to his side and stood staring. The rock there was as smooth,
almost, as a blackboard; and upon it, traced in white chalk, were
three inscriptions, with what we took to be names appended to them.
That on the right was clearly a very recent one--had been placed there
doubtless, at the most but a few days since, by that "cavernicolous
Venus" that Milton Rhodes had seen for so fleeting a moment.
It was Milton's opinion that the characters were alphabetical ones,
though at first I was at a loss to understand how they could be
anything to him but an utter mystery. The letters were formed by
straight lines only. The simplest character was exactly like a plain
capital T, with, that is, the vertical line somewhat elongated. And
it was made to perform the office of another letter by the simple
expedient of standing it upon its head. The number of cross-lines
increased up to six, three at the top and three at the bottom; and
in one or two characters there were two vertical lines, placed close
together.
"Evidently," observed Milton Rhodes, "this alphabet was constructed on
strictly scientific principles."
For a space we stood there looking, wondering what was recorded in that
writing so strange and yet, after all, so very and beautifully simple.
Then Milton proceeded to place another record there, and, as he wrote,
he hummed:
"'When I see a person's name
Scratched upon a glass,
I know he owns a diamond
And his father owns an ass.'"
The inscription finished, we resumed our descent. The way soon became
steep and very difficult.
"That Aphrodite of yours," I observed as we made our way down a
particularly rugged place, "must have the agility of a mountain-goat."
"Your rhetoric, Bill Barrington Carter, is horrible. Wait till you see
her; you'll never be guilty of thinking of a goat when she has your
thoughts."
"By the way, what kind of a light did the lady have?"
"Light? Don't know. I was so interested in the angel herself that I
never once thought of the light that she carried. I don't know that she
needs a light, anyway."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Why, I fancy, Bill, that her very presence would make even Pluto's
gloomy realm bright and beautiful as the Garden of the Hesperides."
"Oh, gosh!" was my comment.
"Wait till you see her, Bill."
"I'll probably see her demon first."
"Hello!" exclaimed Milton.
"What now?"
"Look at that," said he, pointing. "I think we have the explanation
of that mysterious sound, which you thought was like that of a great
door suddenly closing: in her descent, she dislodged a rock-fragment,
and that sound we heard must have been produced by the mass as it went
plunging down."
"'Tis very likely, but--"
"Great Heaven!" he exclaimed.
"What is it now?"
"I wonder, Bill, if she lost her footing here and went plunging down,
too."
I had not thought of that. And the possibility that that lovely and
mysterious being might be lying somewhere down there crushed and
bleeding, perhaps dying or lifeless, made me feel very sad. We sent
the rays of our powerful lights down into those silent depths of the
tunnel, but nothing was visible there, save the dark rock and those
fearful shadows--fearful what with the secrets that might be hidden
there.
"The answer won't come to us, Bill," said Milton.
"No," I returned as we started down; "we must go get it."
The gallery at this place had an average width of, I suppose, ten feet,
and the height would average perhaps fifteen. The reader must not
picture the walls, the roof and the floor as smooth, however. The rock
was much broken, in some spots very jagged. The gallery pitched at an
angle of nearly forty-five degrees, which will give some idea of the
difficulties encountered in the descent.
At length we reached what may be called the bottom; here the tunnel
gave another turn and the pitch became a gentle slope. And there we
found it, the rock-fragment, weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, that
the angel had dislodged in her descent--which doubtless had been a
hurried, a wild one.
"Thank Heaven!" I exclaimed, "she didn't come down with it!"
"Amen," said Milton.
Then a sudden thought struck me, a thought so unworthy that I did not
voice it aloud. But to myself I said:
"It is possible that we may find ourselves, before we get out of this,
wishing that she had."
If a human being, one of the very best of human beings even, were to
voice his uttermost, his inmost thoughts, what a shameful, what a
terrible monster they would call him--or her!
And the demon? Where was the angel's demon?
I could give no adequate description of those hours that succeeded.
Steadily we continued the descent--now gentle, now steep, rugged
and difficult. Sometimes the way became very narrow--indeed, at one
point we had to squeeze our way through, so closely did the walls
approach each other--then, again, it would open out, and we would find
ourselves in a veritable chamber. And, in one of these, a lofty place,
the vaulted roof a hundred feet or more above our heads, we made a
discovery--a skeleton, quasi-human and _with wings_.
I made an exclamation of amazement.
"In the name of all that's wonderful and terrible," I cried, "are we
entering Dante's Inferno itself?"
A faint smile touched the face of Rhodes.
"Don't you," he asked, "know what this is?"
"It must be the bones of a demon."
"Precisely. Grandfather Scranton, you'll remember, wounded that
monster, up there by the Tamahnowis Rocks. Undoubtedly the bullet
reached a vital spot, and these are that creature's bones."
"But," I objected, "these are _human_ bones--a human skeleton with
wings. According to Scranton, there was nothing at all human about the
appearance of that thing which he called a demon."
"I admit," said Rhodes, "that this skeleton, at the first glance,
has an appearance remarkably human--if, that is, one can forget the
wings. The skull, I believe, more than anything else, contributes to
that effect; and yet, at a second glance, even that loses its human
semblance. For look at those terrible jaws and those terrible teeth.
Who ever saw a human being with jaws and teeth like those? And look at
the large scapulae and the small hips and the dwarfish, though strong,
nether limbs. Batlike, Bill, strikingly so. And those feet. No toes;
they are talons. And see that medial ridge on the sternum, for the
attachment of the great pectoral muscles."
"A bat-man, then?" I queried.
"I should say a bat-ape."
"Or an ape-bat."
"Whichever you prefer," smiled Milton.
"Well," I added, "at any rate, we have a fair idea now of what a demon
is like."
Little wonder, forsooth, that old Sklokoyum had declared that the thing
was a demon from the white man's Inferno itself. And this creature
so dreadful--well, the angel had one like it for a companion. When
Rhodes saw her, she was, of course, without that terrible attendant:
undoubtedly the next time, though--how long would it be?--she would not
be alone.
"Oh, well," I consoled myself, "we have our revolvers."