"Take it. I was beginning to feel lonesome, anyway."
He bowed gravely and ordered the porter to bring in his things. I
decided he was a musician. Only artists go in for such lovely hair. But
he undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance
in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when,
looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to
move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself
heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the
entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver
hair had already turned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness
that we had entered the Tube. For some time I lay awake thinking of
"Dutch" and the ultimate failure of his life's dream, as he had outlined
it to me, and then I sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I was awakened by a terrible shock that hurled me up against the side of
the compartment. A dull, red glow poured through the port-hole, lighting
up the interior with a weird, bloody reflection. I crept painfully up to
the port-hole and looked out. The strangest sight that man has ever
looked upon met my eyes. The side of the wall had blown out into a
gigantic cavern, and with it the rest of the cars had rolled down the
bluff a tangled, twisted mass of steel. My car had almost passed by, and
now it still stuck in the tube, even though the last port-hole through
which I peered seemed to be suspended in air. But it was not the wrecked
cars from which rose such wails of despair and agony that held my
attention, but the cavern itself. For it was not really a cave, but a
vast underground city whose wide, marble streets stretched away to an
inferno of flame and lava. By the terrible light was lit up a great
white palace with its gold-tipped scrolls, and closer to me, the golden
temple of the Sun, with its tiers of lustrous yellow stairs--stairs worn
by the feet of many generations.
Above the stairs towered the great statue of a man on horseback. He was
dressed in a sort of tunic, and in his uplifted arm he carried a scroll
as if for the people to read. His face was turned toward me, and I
marveled even in that wild moment that the unknown sculptor could have
caught such an expression of appeal. I can see the high intellectual
brow as if it were before me at this moment--the level, sympathetic eyes
and the firm chin.
* * * * *
Then something moving caught my eyes, and I swear I saw a child--a
living child coming from the burning city--running madly, breathlessly
from a wave of glowing lava that threatened to engulf him at any moment.
In spite of all the ridicule that has been showered upon me, I still
declare that the child did not come from the wreckage and that he wore a
tunic similar to the one of the statue and not the torn bit of a
nightgown or sheet.
He was some distance from me, but I could plainly see his expression of
wild distraction as he began to climb those gleaming stairs. Strangely
lustrous in the weird light, was that worn stairway of gold--gold, the
ancient metal of the Sun. With the slowness of one about to faint he
dragged himself up, while his breath seemed to be torn from his throat
in agonizing gasps. Behind him, the glowing liquid splashed against the
steps and the yellow metal of the Sun began to drip into its fiery
cauldron.
The child reached the leg of the horse and clung there.
... Then suddenly the whole scene began to shake as if I had been
looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse
in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark
sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon
my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into
unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice
of my friend as he said:
"--an earthquake fault."
After what seemed to me aeons of strange, buzzing noises and peculiar
lights, I at last made out the objects around me as those of a hospital.
Men with serious faces were watching me. I have since been told that I
babbled incoherently about "saving the little fellow" and other equally
incomprehensible murmurings. From them I learned that the train the
other way was washed out, a tangled mass of wreckage just like my car,
both terminus stations wrecked utterly, and no one found alive except
myself. So, although I am to be a hopeless cripple, yet I am not sorry
that the skill and untiring patience of the great English surgeon, Dr.
Thompson, managed to nurse back the feeble spark of my life through all
those weeks that I hung on the borderland; for if he had not, the world
never would have known.
As it is, I wonder over the events of that night as if it had not been
an experience at all--but a wild weird dream. Even the gentleman with
the mass of silver hair is a mystery, for he was never identified, and
yet in my mind's recesses I can still hear his cultured voice asking
about the extra berth, and mentioning his pressing mission to Paris. And
somehow, he gives the last touch of strangeness to the events of that
fatal night, and in my mind, he becomes a part of it no less than the
child on the stairs, the burning inferno that lit the background, and
the great statue of that unknown hero who held out his scroll for a
moment in that lurid light, like a symbol from the sunken City of the
Dead.