REFUGEES OF THE LOWLANDS.
Tad and I struggled upward into the tunnel-passage. The fact that with
Arturo and Nereid, and some two thousand of the Middge people, we at
last reached the surface I have already made evident. I need not detail
those weary, despairing days and weeks in the darkness. It may have
been a march of several hundred miles. I do not know. I would have said
it consumed a year, rather than those weeks.
We came upon Nereid and Arturo within a few hours. The passage was
strewn with the Middge refugees. Out of the million in the abyss,
perhaps a hundred thousand actually got into the tunnel. And only two
thousand survived. We passed them hourly; families resting, encamped,
to take up again the burden of the march. We passed them dead, or
dying--burned and maimed at the tunnel-entrance, or before they got
into the tunnel--struggling on now, falling at last.
The tunnel was heavy with gases. Sometimes, when we thought our last
choking breath had been drawn, side rifts would seem to bring us purer
air. We had started without equipment or food, or water, but there
were hundreds of loaded _arras_ in the long line of refugees. We
very soon found one whose owner had succumbed. Arturo and Nereid, when
we overtook them, we found them well supplied. They had waited until
a wave of flame had surged to the tunnel-entrance. They had even gone
back there once; then despaired of us, and left.
We heard, soon after we four were again together, a muffled, terrible
roar far away in the earth, and felt the tremble of it. It was the
earthquake under the Pacific, though we could no more than guess it
then. The tunnel shook; part of the roof near us fell, crushing a score
of the Middge. We saw then that behind us the tunnel was blocked. The
air ahead soon grew purer. No Middge could follow us, but those in
advance were in less distress. We made better time, but at that it
seemed an endless struggle.
Weeks of August’s close, and of September. We lost all possible track
of them. We did not know until afterward that it was probably September
29 when the first pitiful little vanguard of our party reached the new
world.
The food and water were running low. The _arras_ had all given out
and were abandoned. The changing air-pressures, the new quality of air,
affected us all somewhat, but the animals were stricken, a few at a
time. We left them, pitifully breathless, gasping.
There was one stage of the march where for what might have been a week
we were halted by a subterranean river torrent. We waited, helpless,
despairing. But the water in the cross passage into which our tunnel
abruptly ended, at last roared away. New air came to us, dank, with a
rotting, salt tang to it.
We traveled, those final days, with the surviving Middge scientists.
They told us that they had a weapon; a huge affair, for long range
operation. It was not assembled. But when we reached the surface--
Ah, how many times in those days of struggle we voiced the thought:
“When we reach the surface!” To come out upon a friendly earth. To
join, with this weapon, the earth’s armies against the Gians. “When we
reach the surface--”
“Why,” said Tad, “everything will be all right then. What can those
Gian women and men do against our earth? Say, what is this Middge
weapon?”
Good old Tad! His spirits never flagged. There were moments when his
cheering voice to the Middge--the laugh which they could understand
though his words were foreign--helped many a despairing family to get
up and plod on farther.
Nereid did not know what the Middge weapon was. They did not care to
talk about it now. But in the times of rest there was much talk of our
food and water supply. If it would only last us to the surface. Ah,
when we reached the blessed surface!
* * * * *
I think I shall never forget that moment when we struggled out into the
dim light of the Lowlands. I stood with Tad and Arturo, half blinded.
But of them all only we three had eyes that would adjust to the light.
We stood in a cave-mouth, seemingly upon a mountainside. There were a
score of ramifying caves beneath us. The Middge were crowding up into
them. The light! The blessed, frightening daylight! We could hear the
Middge babbling about it. Safety at last!
We three stood, with our pupils contracting--and at last we could see.
It must have been nearly noon; through a rift in the dark clouds the
sun momentarily showed.
Our blessed sun! Here again in our own world! But we stared,
unbelieving. Foul mist hung about us, thick with the heavy, choking
smell of ooze and slime. Beneath us, a thousand feet or more, a land
surface lay in a tumbled mass of black crags. A river flowed tumultuous
in a gorge. Behind us a great slimy plateau spread into the misty
distance. Ooze caked by the daylight heat lay red and black upon it.
Dark peaks, rounded and blurred, showed looming against the far horizon.
Our world? It seemed perhaps a lunar landscape. No, for there were
clouds and dank mist enshrouding everything. A strange world, an
infernal landscape, not of this planet, nor even of the moon.
Disappointment, such as I had never known before, flooded me. Not a
living being to be seen here in all this desolation! Why, I could seem
to see out over this tumbled waste for hundreds of miles! Safety here,
with our food and water nearly gone? Why, we were as far from safety as
any ancient explorer of the Polar icefields, standing lost upon a berg,
surveying the desolation around him!
In a chain of dank slimy grottos close under the surface of this
plateau-like elevation, the Middge clustered to await our communication
with earth civilization. In a score of dim caves, the families grouped
together, setting up small shelters of garments and robes, like tents,
for privacy. The night came. Small glowing hand torches sprang with
points of dim light. Strange encampment of struggling humans, here in
the new world, waiting to be rescued!
Arturo, Tad and I came to prominence. The Middge leaders were already
working on their war equipment. With Nereid for interpreter, we were
questioned on where we were, and what was best to do. But we did not
know where we were! This had been the Pacific Ocean. No islands were
near here; in all this desolate panorama there had been no mountain top
with any sign of verdure.
Could we travel on foot, here on this land? We did not know. A
mile or two a day, perhaps; climbing the crags, descending into
valleys, avoiding mountain torrents, picking our way over the caked
ooze--struggling as men on foot have struggled over Polar icefields!
But in which direction? How far to the nearest mountain top where
people might be living? We could not say.
“But one thing,” said Tad, “they’ll be planes flying over here. We must
go up in the daylight, many of us on top where they can see us.”
We built, that next day, a tent of white for a signal, and crowded
around it. The Middge came up, blinded by the light.
A plane went overhead. We could barely see it, just for a moment in a
rift in the clouds. It seemed ten thousand feet above us, at least.
It was a familiar model, we recognized its shape. But a bomb came
whistling down. Our little tent was gone. A score of the Middge lay
maimed and dying.
* * * * *
It was then that Nereid thought she had communicated with Polly,
sending her desperate plea: “_Don’t let them attack us!_”
She was sure she had reached Polly. And all that day she struggled to
communicate further. The night came--our second night in the Lowlands.
Nereid had a little tent to herself against the wall of one of the
caves. Arturo, Tad, and I had a shelter near it. We had discussed the
possibility of organizing a party to start on foot for help.
A week or two here, even with the starvation rations upon which the
encampment now was put, and our plight would be desperate. Nereid
opposed it--she still thought she could direct Polly to bring help to
us. And she believed, that evening sitting alone in her tent, that she
had reached Polly again. But she said nothing to us.
It may have been midnight. Arturo and Tad were asleep. Exhausted with
weeks of marching, this inactivity here was needed by us all. I had
been sleeping soundly. I do not know what awakened me--chance perhaps,
or fate.
I went to the flap of our little tent. The cave was in darkness; the
fantastic tents, with a dim light here and there, were silent.
I saw a figure moving, recognized it for Nereid. She had evidently
just come from her tent. I was alert at once; but instead of speaking
to her, I drew back, watching. There was a furtiveness about her; she
moved swiftly, silently across the grotto, her hair and veils floating
as she walked.
In a moment, I followed. She was headed into one of the small tunnels
that led a few yards upward to the open plateau. I lost sight of her
for a time; but when I was out upon the upper level I saw her again.
She moved along the rocks cautiously but swiftly and came to the edge
of a cliff that fronted the distant void of the abyss. I stood watching.
It was dark enough, so that she could see comfortably. The clouds hung
low over the plateau. The rounded rock spires, caked with ooze and
slime, were dark sentinels in the gloom. The further distance was solid
black; but in a moment moonlight broke through, edging the naked black
rocks with a green-white glow.
In a hollow down the precipitous slope, a tangled rotting mass of sea
vegetation lay slumped and limp in a dark pool of water which was
trapped in a basin of the rock. And miles away and a thousand feet
below where I stood, the moonlight slanted down through the clouds
in a great white shaft and fell upon a giant caldron of inky water,
painting it with white fire.
Against the moonlight Nereid flung a protecting hand to her eyes. She
sat on a rock. The clouds closed over us; the scene was dark when I
reached her.
“Nereid!”
She started, alarmed. Then relaxed. “Oh, it is you, Jeff.”
I sat beside her. “What are you doing up here?”
She hesitated, but she answered softly:
“I am very glad you came. I was frightened, to be up here alone. But I
thought I wanted to be alone. Polly is coming! I have reached her--I am
sure of it.”
“Polly!”
“Yes. With help for us. This morning I reached her.” She put a timid
hand on my arm. “You, Jeff my friend--you know I am trying my best. I
think I reached her this morning. And later, a few hours ago, I think
she understood me again. She is coming--”
If only she were! My heart was beating fast. “But not alone, Nereid?
She isn’t coming alone?”
“No. With others. I think she laughed when she told me there would be
others.”
* * * * *
“But you don’t know where we are--how could you tell her where to come?”
I stood up. Polly, with a searching party, here in this abyss--“But
Nereid, we must show some light.” I stared up at the impenetrable dark
mist hanging in a low ceiling above us. Nereid stood with me. She said
anxiously:
“Do you think there is a chance? I tried to describe these cliffs, this
level top, the cave mouths. It was two hours ago, I think, when she
said she was starting. Jeff, would she be that near here? Could any one
fly from your cities nearest here in a few hours?”
Polly, down here on one of the mountain-tops which had been a South Sea
island? It was possible. And the Marshall group, I thought, ought to be
within a thousand miles to the east, and the Carolines not much more
than half that to the south. Mountain ranges towering above the clouds
of these desolate Lowlands. Was Polly on her way down from them to seek
us?
“Nereid, we must show a light as a guide.”
She produced a globe from her robe. Futile little spot of radiance! We
held it aloft.
An hour or more passed. We sat on the rock, with the light between us.
Who could ever see us, tiny figures down in this barren, cloud-swept
waste?
There was not a sound; a heavy thick silence hung over the Lowlands,
with just a sullen murmur floating up from the tumbling water of the
lower levels to the north.
“Nereid, you’d better go down, I’ll stay here--”
“No.”
Another hour? We heard nothing. But from over us presently there seemed
movement. A blur in the cloud-bank; a blurred, nearing shape, hovering.
I leaped to my feet. Something quite close over us, stolen upon us. No
earthly airplane! A long, narrow, gray-white shape!
Nereid gave a little cry. I gripped her; started to run. But too late.
From above a light darted down in a narrow beam. It seized us, held
and pulled and sucked us upward. I did not lose consciousness. I clung
to Nereid. We were whirled, gasping, through the air. The gray shape
magnified, gigantic at our heads. Hands and arms came reaching down;
clutched us; the light vanished.
[Illustration: _The ray seized them, held them, pulled them
relentlessly up into the air._]
We were hauled, as swimmers are hauled from the sea, over a low rail
and flung to the aëro’s deck, with the tall gray figure of Rhana
imperiously surveying us.