They blasted their way out. When the gory job was done they were
scarlet from boots to hair. Crawling out under the smoking shoulders of
the butchered giant they saw Edith circling dangerously near the rocks,
risking herself and the plane in her eagerness to help should her
chance come. They signalled that all was well, and she wheeled farther
from the shattered wall.
During their long descent Edith had lost sight of the men among the
huge blocks littering the sides of the crater. She rediscovered them a
second after she observed the monster starting to back in response to
her father's kick. With her binoculars she made out her father peering
through the entrance to the cave. Until that moment she had not seen
the monster. From her height it was as inconspicuous as an ant crawling
about among the jumbled blocks. Unless one knew exactly where to look
it was safe from detection.
Her feelings as she watched the gigantic brute trying to break its way
into the cave may be imagined. The three muffled detonations in rapid
succession, the third of which blew off the monster's head, reassured
her. Someone's brain was still working in that cave. She saw the entire
carcass of the brute bound from the ledge as if in astonished pain.
Descending with a dead slap that echoed round the crater, the massive
body struck the ledge, the enormous hind legs kicked convulsively, the
powerful tail thrashed the flying blocks of cement, and with a last
shudder from shoulder to rump the monster became still. The neck was
not withdrawn. Guessing what had happened Edith sighed her thankfulness
and stood by to help.
"Well," said Anderson, "is that a day's work? Does anyone want to go
farther down?"
"Let us go down another hundred feet," Drake proposed. "So far we have
passed only half a dozen blocks showing traces of inscriptions. I
should like if possible to photograph one unbroken record. Ole has a
pocket camera."
"Very well," the Captain agreed. "You and Ole keep in sight of this
ledge while Lane and I take a look round the cave. There may be an ooze
of oil at the back. Didn't you smell petroleum, Doctor, when we were
waiting for that shot to go off?"
"I can't say that I did, but then I was so busy waiting. Drake, why
don't you try that other unbroken bluff over to the left? If our theory
is right you should find inscriptions, if anywhere, either on what was
the surface of the cement before the explosion or on a concealed layer
some inches deeper into the cement. If you can find an unbroken stretch
you will have the revised version of the prehistoric fight. What we
want is the original history. Look for a place where only a few inches
of the outer surface have been flaked off by the explosion."
While Lane and Anderson explored the cave, Drake and Ole descended in
quest of inscriptions. Edith hovered above the climbers like an anxious
robin over her fledglings.
"That's for you," Ole remarked with a grin.
"Mind your own business," Drake snapped.
Reaching the unbroken cliff which Lane had pointed out they found it
blank.
"There's another over there," Ole observed hopefully, indicating a
smooth vertical expanse about a thousand yards to their left.
"Yes, but if we go there we shall be out of sight of the ledge."
"It's safe enough." He glanced up at the circling airplane. "Take my
tip and don't let her see you running away."
With a muttered comment on Ole's meddlesome stupidity Drake started
over the intervening blocks like an excited crab. His impetuosity was
rewarded.
"Hurry up with your camera," he shouted. "This is just what we want."
They regretted keenly that Ole had not packed a hundred pounds of films
instead of his dynamite. Five or six acres of cliff was covered with
representations of monsters in every conceivable posture. Evidently
this was a record of importance.
Both strata of inscriptions were represented on the cliff. In several
places the impact of the bombarding blocks from the eruption had flaked
off great scales from the outer layer of cement, baring the original
inscriptions. The unscarred surface bore the revised version. After
deliberating they decided to photograph the entire cliff in three
dozen sections--the limit of Ole's films. This seemed better than
concentrating on individual inscriptions. Drake hoped from enlargement
of the three dozen pictures to obtain a complete record of everything
on the cliff.
Anderson and Lane meanwhile were busy in the cave. To the Captain's
disappointment they found no trace of oil.
"You have that lake beyond the blowholes," Lane expostulated. "Isn't
that enough?"
"No. I want to endow a school of whales."
"For that rotten pun you deserve to lose everything from your shirt to
your soul. Let us get into the fresh air. This vile dust is choking me."
"It has a mouldy smell, hasn't it?"
"You're right," the Doctor agreed. "I wonder what it is." His interest
was aroused.
"Take some out to the daylight and see. These matches were made by the
devil only to burn my fingers."
Lane scooped up a double handful of the dust and hurried to the
entrance.
"Spores," he announced excitedly.
Although he did not recognize it he had met the enemy.
"I'm no wiser," the Captain remarked.
"These are masses of seeds from some fern-like plant. Lord! I wish I
had a microscope. Haven't you ever seen the underside of a fern frond?"
The Captain nodded. "Well, all that brown stuff on it is millions of
fern seeds finer than dust."
"But this stuff is grayish green."
"That makes it all the more interesting. These are the spores, the life
germs, of some unknown plant. I am sure of it. We must take back all we
can carry. Cram your pockets."
Lane dived into the cave and set the example. Reluctantly enough
Anderson followed suit.
"Over by the wall where we haven't trampled the stuff should be a good
place," Lane continued. "Sift it through your fingers and save anything
not finer than dust."
Presently Lane rose to his feet with an exclamation of delight.
"Look what I've found!"
Anderson followed him to the light. The Doctor was lost in the
contemplation of a tiny desiccated frond of some plant that resembled a
fern yet most decidedly was not a fern. The dried foliage, more like a
rank mould than a decent plant, was of hair-like fineness.
"Where have I seen something like this before?" Lane muttered to
himself. "It was alive. Where the deuce was it?"
"In Heaven, before you were born," the Captain suggested. He also was
an admirer of Maeterlinck, having read Ole's bedraggled _Bluebird_.
"Rot," said the Doctor. He was not an admirer of the romantic Belgian.
"But your suggestion, by the law that action and reaction are equal and
opposite, recalls the place where I did see this plant growing. It was
next door to hell."
"San Francisco?" the Captain hazarded.
"No. On that beach of monsters. Ole blew the stomach out of one and in
the process ripped the lining. Some of this plant, as fresh as newly
cut lettuce, dropped out of the rent. I remember now. We planned to
collect some on our way back to the ship. When we returned we were too
heavily loaded to take on more. Also it was getting dark. So we had to
leave it till next day. By morning the oil and slush oozing into the
hole in the ice where the plant lay had made soup of everything. Well,
this more than makes up for our loss. I shall have a chance to settle
whether life remains dormant under the right conditions, practically
indefinitely."
"Ah, your theory of immortal whales?"
"The laugh will be on you when I make this greenish dust grow. The
chances are infinity to nothing that the living plant disappeared from
the earth millions of years ago."
Lane was wrong in his first statement. Less than twenty-four hours
later he found that the laugh was on him. And a nasty, sardonic laugh
it was at that. He spoke from insufficient knowledge.
Between them he and Drake had reconstructed the history of the perished
race whose records the rigors of the Antarctic solitudes had preserved
unviolated. Drake as decipherer, and Lane as scientist, working
together imagined themselves in possession of all the essential details
of the catastrophe which had swept intelligence from the Earth when the
poles were regions of perpetual summer. In the light of what happened
less than twenty-four hours after Lane's discovery of the greenish
spores, neither he nor Drake is now willing to claim finality for their
conclusions. Before the struggle in which they all but perished, both
were confident of their theory. It explained all the facts in their
possession and it was rational.
Their desperate fight for life showed them that they had not visualized
one half of the truth. What they had guessed was the obvious part.
Their failure to reconstruct a single less obvious detail has taught
them modesty. Neither Drake nor Lane will now admit that he knows more
than a small fraction of that obliterated history.
Lane moreover for the present is disinclined to speculate on the
obscure science behind the history. He prefers to leave fundamental
theories and explanations to Ole. And it may be said in passing that
Ole's most ambitious theory has already attracted numerous followers.
His fame, however, is rather mixed. His following is as large as
Lane's is select. For the notorious conservatism of professional
scientists holds them back in following Ole in regions where the more
adventurous layman rushes in whooping.
Lane had been so absorbed in his greenish spores that he failed to
note the disappearance of Ole and Drake. They came into sight just
as Anderson began to swear. Joining the others they voted it a day's
work, firmly strapped on their packs, and started up the thousand foot
scramble to the skyline. Topping it shortly before sunset they marched
fast and reached the site of their last night's camp before dusk. Edith
joined them presently.
"Shall we camp here?" she asked.
"We might as well," Anderson replied. "It is convenient to the crater.
Have you any reason for wishing to go farther back toward the oil lake?"
"Perhaps not. You can decide best. The wind seems to be rising. Up on
the three thousand foot level it is blowing half a gale--thirty miles
an hour from the north. Camped here in the open we shall have trouble
with the plane if the current descends during the night."
"There is only a four or five mile breeze blowing from the southeast
down here at present," the Captain pointed out. "So far as I can see
the weather is exactly what it has been the past nine days."
"All right. If you are satisfied I am. Only I thought if there is any
danger of the wind rising in the night it would be easier to manage
the plane in the shelter of the south bank of the oil lake."
"There is no danger, I am sure. This breeze won't go to more than six
miles an hour at any time during the night. Your speaking of the lake
reminds me of something. Will you take Ole and fly to the cache on the
south shore for more matches? He can dig them out."
"Of course. We shall be back in half an hour."
"And while you are there," her father begged, "dig up some sort of a
tin can for me. Bring one with a lid. I want to pack these precious
spores safely away."
"Very well. I shall bring a fresh tin of ship bread and we can have
a real feast. I know how to make a heavenly hoosh with hardtack and
corned beef. You may have the tin."
"And the rest of you the stew, I suppose?"
"If you go shares on your blessed spores," she laughed, "we'll do
likewise on the banquet."
When she returned Anderson thankfully emptied his pockets of the
greenish gray mess.
"Be careful," Lane admonished, hopping about excitedly on the frozen
snow. "You're losing half of the stuff. The breeze carries it off like
smoke."
The Captain did indeed lose about a pound and three-quarters. Finally
turning his pockets inside out he gave them a thorough dusting in the
breeze. Although Lane was more careful he also lost half a pound to the
wind.
"Well," he said, "I have enough any way." He slapped down the lid.
"With this I should be able to prove whether or not the life principle
can remain indefinitely in abeyance."
"The great Swedish chemist Arrhenius almost says it can," Ole informed
them. "He has a theory that life originates on planets by the life
seeds from another planet. The seeds drift across empty spaces for ages
till they strike a planet cool enough for life. When the life seeds
drift too close to the sun or some other star the heat destroys them."
Lane received Arrhenius' famous theory with the silence of disrespect.
He was already familiar with it as a speculation of the well known
physicists Tait and Stewart. To him it had always been the example
par excellence of the incompetence of the average scientist to reason
straight about another man's specialty. The Captain thought he saw the
point.
"The hen and the egg over again, isn't it? What starts life on the
first planet? How do your precious life seeds begin in the first place?"
"They're not mine," Ole retorted indignantly. "Arrhenius invented them.
The life came to the first planet from another planet."
"Exactly," the Captain sneered. "And when the chain is complete you
have perpetual motion. Go and patent it."
The dispute becoming personal, the pacific Drake intervened.
"Both of you are right. Ole can't he held responsible for any
foolishness but his own. Nor can you, Captain, be blamed for
criticizing a scientific theory. The ones that I have looked into are
all like that. They assume the egg in order to produce the hen to
explain the egg."
"And you," the Doctor hotly interposed, "being a bat-eyed archaeologist
are a competent critic of science. You may be able to read prehistoric
picture books but you couldn't tell the difference between evolution
and relativity. Just because you mess about with fossilized opinions
you set yourself up as a judge of modern science."
"Not at all," Drake retorted. "I only say that my training in
antiquities enables me to tell fresh eggs from Chinese. And if
Arrhenius' perpetual motion theory of the origin of life isn't a
scientific bad egg I have no nose. One doesn't need a brain to test
things as far gone as that."
"Now you two," said Edith, giving each of them a shake, "eat your hoosh
before it freezes. You can fight afterwards."
"We won't want to," Drake grinned, "with a gallon of food under our
belts."
"True," the Doctor agreed. "If those poor monsters over there had
been properly fed they might have made great pets. The struggle for
subsistence ruined their tempers."
"I wonder if the blowholes will perform tonight?" Edith asked.
"No," Ole confidently asserted. "By my theory they should not go off
till early tomorrow forenoon."
"Your theory be blowed," the Captain growled. He was jealous. "You're
always theorizing and always wrong."
But Ole was right. There was no flareup till nine o'clock the next
morning.
19