The Brink of the Abyss
At last we were drawing near the mysterious light. It had now ceased to
flicker and shone with a steady greenish-yellow glare, so bright as to
illuminate the gallery with a weird radiance, wherein we could clearly
distinguish each other's features. The source of the light, however,
remained an enigma; while we, pressing on with increasing boldness,
were resolved to discover its nature or perish in the attempt.
In a few minutes we had reached the end of the corridor, and, turning
sharply, we found ourselves in a wider passageway penetrated by scores
of cross-galleries and ending, about a hundred yards beyond, in a
perfect blaze of greenish light.
"Lord in Heaven!" exclaimed the awe-stricken Clay, as we reached the
new thoroughfare. "Are we dreaming?--or am I simply crazy?"
"Guess we're both crazy!" I muttered. And then, shielding my eyes from
the glare and nerving myself for a supreme effort, I said, "Come on;
let's find out what's what!"
"Might as well die exploring!" he conceded grimly as we resumed our
pilgrimage.
I now noticed for the first time that Clay was walking with a slight
limp; I also noticed that his rude mining costume was not only soiled
with great streaks and blotches of black, but was ripped and torn in a
hundred places, exposing the bare skin every here and there, so that he
looked a perfect ragamuffin. But my own clothes, I could see, were in
an equally sorry condition.
As we slowly covered the hundred yards to the end of the second
gallery, Clay's mind seemed to center on somber thoughts. I could see
the bleak furrows on his long, lean, battered face; I could read his
disconsolate expression as, with a great hairy hand, he thoughtfully
stroked his dishevelled red locks. But I was little prepared for his
next words.
"Say, Frank, if anything happens to me, see that my old mother back in
Denver gets my watch as a remembrance. And tell her I was thinking of
her at the last--"
"The devil I will! Tell her yourself! What's getting into you, Phil?"
I interrupted, almost savagely. "Haven't you as good a chance as I of
getting out of this infernal mess?"
"I suppose I have, at that!" he acknowledged, wryly. "Guess it's both
of us, or neither!"
At this point our conversation was interrupted by our arrival at the
end of the second gallery, where we were to make a discovery compared
with which our previous surprises appeared insignificant.
I remember that it was Clay, who, preceding me by half a dozen feet,
was the first to stop short and gasp out his astonishment.
"God above!" I heard his swift exclamation; and I observed how,
stricken all but speechless, he gaped open-mouthed into the
green-lighted vacancy beyond. "God above!" he murmured a second time,
before a dumbfounded silence overwhelmed him.
At a bound I had gained his side; and I too, as I gazed in bewilderment
before me, seemed to have lost my tongue. "Merciful Heavens!" was all
I could mumble in my amazement. "Merciful Heavens, what's this?" And
I rubbed my eyes and pinched my sides, to make sure that I was not
dreaming.
How shall I describe that stupendous scene which suddenly unfolded
before us? Surely, the discoverer of a new planet could not have had a
deeper sense of awe and wonder! For it was literally a new world that
we beheld. The gallery had ended as if on the brink of a precipice; we
were staring down, through yellowish-green abysses, into a chasm as
wide and deep as the Grand Canyon of Arizona--as wide and deep, but
by no means as irregular--by no means so narrow at the bottom! Unlike
the great gorge of the Colorado River, it showed no unevenness of
structure; sheer stone walls, straight and precipitous as the walls of
a room, shot down beneath us a mile deep; sheer stone walls, equally
precipitous and straight, rose opposite us at a distance of more than
a mile, and between them spread the bare, level floor of the cavern,
which reached to our right and left to an incalculable remoteness.
An unspeakably weird sensation overcame me as I gazed, in the
thunderstricken silence, at that tremendous excavation. There was
such an atmosphere of unreality about it all that only by degrees
did my startled senses absorb the details--the gentle curve of the
ceiling, which, arching but a few hundred feet above us, revealed
fantastic figures, vaguely man-shaped, that stood out sharply in
cameo--the multitude of greenish-yellow bulbs which, square or rounded
or elongated into rods and spirals, studded the walls by the thousand
and hung in long strings from above--the small round openings like the
portholes of a vessel, which dotted the opposite side of the cavern in
inestimable myriads, confronting us in scores of horizontal lines, and
the little door-like apertures that opened at regular intervals all
along the cavern floor.
* * * * *
Long and intently we gazed into that miraculous abyss; many minutes
must have passed while we stood there spellbound. It was I that first
regained some measure of composure; with a shock, I saw my companion
standing entranced, so near the brink of the precipice that I trembled
for his safety.
With a hasty gesture, I pulled him back a step. "Better watch out,
Phil!" I warned, "else I won't have even your watch to bring back to
your mother!"
Like a man in a daze, he wiped a grimy hand over his carrot-colored
hair. "Good thing she can't see me now!" he gasped. "Lord preserve me!
she'd be offering up prayers for the soul of her poor boy lost in Hell!"
"Lost in Hell is right!" I acknowledged, grimly.
"If I hadn't bit my lips to make sure I was alive, Frank," he
continued, with an ugly grimace of his scarred face, "I'd think we had
both died and were wandering around somewhere in the devil's back yard!"
Before I had had time to reply, fresh alarm swept aver us both;
once more the earth wavered violently and the distant thunders and
detonations burst out with renewed fury. At the same time, a shaft of
violet light, from some unknown source, shot across the cavern with
lightning swiftness. Then, in the barest fraction of a second, waves of
orange light and of vermilion followed; then, while Clay and I stared
at each other in consternation, the greenish-yellow luminaries all
flickered and seemed about to be extinguished. Simultaneously, our ears
were struck by a distant blast of sound, a little like the notes of a
bugle; and the next instant, as the greenish-yellow lights regained
their former brilliancy, a scene of startling activity became visible
on the cavern floor.
Had we obeyed the dictates of our hammering hearts, we should have
turned and fled. The impulse to flee was, indeed, powerful within us;
but partly because we did not wish to seem cowards in each other's
eyes, and partly because of our insatiable curiosity, we fought down
our self-protective instinct, flung ourselves full-length upon the
gallery floor, crept to the edge of the abyss, and gazed across. And
there, in that recumbent position, like small boys secretly watching
a ball game, we witnessed a spectacle so unimaginably strange that I
cannot recall it even today without a shudder of the old horror.