Soon a dim pearly light began to show far below us, a light that
puzzled me. In the world above, I knew, it must be dawn, but how this
was connected with the growing light below, if it was so connected,
baffled me.
And now we reached the end of the shaft down whose sides we had come.
It ended abruptly, and below on each side lay a great open space,
obscured by drifting clouds of mist. But the stair did not end with
the shaft. It dropped straight on down, a free, unsupported spiral
of gleaming metal, winding down into the obscuring mists that hid
its lower length. It was an eery thing to see, that gigantic twisted
stairway, like a great corkscrew, vanishing down into the mists, like
some pathway of the gods from heaven to earth. And it could hardly have
been hung there by less than gods, I thought. No metal or material ever
known to me would have been able thus to hold its unsupported weight in
the form of this stair, yet there it was, seemingly tossed there in
godlike indifference to the laws of mechanics. In its way, it was as
great a wonder as the great building above. As that thought came to me,
the light around us began to grow, to redden like the sunrise, and the
mists cleared, drifted away in masses, vanished. And there, beneath me,
lay the pit.
I can only describe that pit by saying that it was like the inside of
a round, squat bottle, the neck of the bottle being the shaft down
which I had come. This great cavern below me was roughly circular in
shape, all of four miles in diameter, and a mile from its level floor
to its glowing roof. For that roof was glowing. Looking up at it as we
marched on down, I saw that set in it were scores of brilliant globes
of glass, from which a flood of growing light, golden light, sunlight,
_daylight_, was pouring down.
I saw now that the spiral stair down which we marched reached down to
the pit's floor, and touched it near its center. And I saw, too, that
all of the great cavern's floor, from one towering side to another,
was covered with mass on mass of white, roofless buildings, of all
shapes, covering the floor of the pit and huddling closely beneath the
perpendicular walls of smooth rock.
At the center of this great mass of buildings, directly below us, was
a great open clearing, or plaza, and it was there that the stairway
touched the pit's floor. And from this plaza, clear to the circling
walls, nine streets branched out, radiating in every direction like the
spokes of a wheel. Along those streets moved great masses of men, and
these were the dwellers in the city, the people of the pit.
So it was that I looked first on the city of the pit, the city of
the Raider, and its people, over whom his shadow had been cast. And,
looking, I wondered if there in the massed crowds below were Lantin
and Cannell, and if it were possible to find them, here.
Again our guards ordered us forward, and we marched on. But now only
a low wall on each side protected us from the abyss, and there was no
wall on the right side against which to cling. But our guards seemed to
mind this not at all, and I judged that they had made many trips up and
down the stair, to be thus hardened to its dangers.
As we descended, Denham explained to me in a low voice the origin of
the lights on the roof. These were merely lenses of a kind, he said,
which diffused into the cavern real sunlight brought from above. I had
already seen and puzzled at the glass globes set on pedestals through
the city of cylinders above, but now saw their purpose. Those globes
received the sunlight, transmitted it in some unknown fashion down to
the globes on the roof, which gave it forth again. Thus it was that day
and night in the pit were the same as in the world above, and the light
there waxed and waned in accordance with the rising and setting of the
sun which these people never saw.
We drew closer and closer toward the ground, and now I saw that at
the stair's end, where it touched and debouched on the pit's floor,
it was closed by a high, heavy gate of metal, barred and spiked, and
that on our own side of this gate was a force of some fifty of the
guards, armed with long spears and also with curious little cylinders
of shining metal which they carried in their belts, and which I guessed
were weapons of a kind unknown to myself.
As we came down toward them, these guards drew aside and unlocked the
big gate. Our own captors unshackled us, and then pushed us through it
unceremoniously, so that we stood in the clearing or plaza. And the
gate was quickly shut and locked behind us.
Standing there, I forgot all else in the fascination of the scene
around me. Across the open plaza, which was smoothly floored with
stone, a great multitude of people were coming and going, and it was
that shifting throng that held my gaze. For in it were men of every
race and land and time, men of the far past and men of my own time,
all seized and brought here by the Raider to mix and mingle in one
vast, variegated throng. Even that first glance showed me that there
must be thousands, tens of thousands of men prisoned in this gigantic
under-city, and it showed me, too, that even as among the guards
and slaves above, there were no women. All were comparatively young
men, few being over middle age, and nearly all had the appearance of
warriors.
Men of a thousand different centuries passed and repassed there before
my eyes, men who had been flashed through the ages and brought there by
the same alien being that had seized Cannell before my eyes, and that
had seized, only a few hours before, the five newcomers who had come
down the great stair with Denham and me.
For these, these crowds and masses of men that choked the streets and
squares and buildings of this city of hell, these were the spoils of
the Raider, gathered together for some unholy purpose of his own, and
prisoned here in the pit, far beneath the city of the Kanlars. In a
living panorama of the past, they streamed by me, a brilliant, barbaric
throng.
Many of them were unknown in race to me, but many others I could
recognize by their dress or features. There were Egyptians,
shaven-headed men in long white robes, strangely aloof and silent in
that noisy gathering. They carried short swords and bows, and I noticed
that every one of the figures that passed before me wore weapons of
some sort. I saw Assyrians, here and there, ravagers of the ancient
world, wolf-faced, black-bearded men with burning eyes, clad in strange
armor.
Three courtly, spade-bearded Spaniards sauntered by, carrying
themselves as proudly as on the day when their galleons ruled the seas.
A hulking, shock-headed savage clad in evil-smelling skins shambled by,
with a giant gnarled club in his hand, his receding brow and jutting
jaw proclaiming him a troglodyte, a man of the world's dawn. And right
behind him came two stern-faced men in medieval armor, with the cross
of the Crusaders blazoned on their battered shields.
Indians passed, with bow and tomahawk, hawk-faced and alert.
Clear-skinned Greeks, laughing at some jest of their own. Chinese,
quiet and inscrutable, whose eyes narrowed even further as they caught
sight of the two wizened Tartars who had come down the stair with us.
A tall frontiersman in suit of buckskin, with bowie knife in his belt,
strode past, conversing with a helmed Phoenician sea-captain. And
everywhere, clustering always together in little groups, were Romans,
legionaries in tunic, breastplate and helmet, with bronze short-swords,
who looked contemptuously on all other races in the passing throng.
* * * * *
A hand descended on my shoulder, and I turned, startled, to find that I
had completely forgotten the Englishman, Denham, who stood behind me.
"Deuced strange, at first, isn't it?" he asked, smilingly, gesturing
toward the moving pageant of the past, around us. Before I could
answer, he went on, "You'd best come with me, now."
"Where?" I asked.
"Why, to my own barracks," he answered. "That's what these buildings
are for, you know, but as a newcomer, you'd be in trouble here in a
minute, without someone to answer for you. And, too, I want you to meet
my own friends."
He looked at me more sharply. "I take it that you're no great friend
of--" and he stopped, raising his eyes eloquently upward.
"The Raider?" I asked, and when he nodded I said, "Not I! I'm here to
find a man--two men."
"Find a single man here?" asked Denham, sweeping his hand around the
crowded streets in a hopeless gesture. "It's impossible! And what would
you do when you found him? Escape? That, too, is impossible. How would
you get up the stair, through the city of the Kanlars? And even if you
achieved the impossible and did get through, there would be no place
to go, for all around the city above is nothing but wild, uninhabited
country where they would easily hunt you down."
"No matter," I told him; "once I got clear of the city above, I could
make good my escape."
He looked at me with sudden interest. "So," he murmured; "and perhaps
if my friends and I could help you--," but then he checked himself.
"I must see them," he said, "before saying more."
I nodded, a new line of thought opening up to me, and then with Denham
leading, we went on down one of the branching streets. In that street
was a replica of the noisy, motley throng that filled the plaza,
and their cries filled the air with a babel of a thousand different
tongues. I noted, though, that many spoke in the language of the
Kanlars, and guessed that it was that tongue which served more or less
as a means of communication between the thousands gathered here, a
supposition I later found to be correct.
Most of the buildings along the street seemed to be the barracks Denham
had spoken of, housing the city's occupants, though some of them
appeared to be wine-shops of a sort, judging from the drunken men who
reeled out of them. An inquiry to my companion elicited the information
that the only food of the city was the same golden liquid which had
been furnished me above, and which I learned was made artificially
directly from the soil itself. Thus the cycle of foodstuffs in my own
time, where a plant draws its substance from the soil and is then
eaten, or where an animal feeds on the plants sprung from the soil, to
be eaten by us in turn, was entirely eliminated by the Kanlars, who
manufactured their food directly from the soil itself, recasting the
chemical composition of it to produce the yellow fluid. This yellow
liquid, I learned, was made by slaves in the city above and was piped
down to the city below and dispensed to the hordes there in the little
buildings which I had assumed to be wine-shops. It seemed that while
the stuff was a perfect food when taken in small quantities, yet when
an excess was drunk it produced a violent intoxication. And as it was
dispensed freely, it was not wonderful that there were great debauches
of drunkenness in this under-metropolis.
One result of that we saw, for all along the street there was fighting,
deadly battles between men of far-differing times and races. There was
no interference in these combats, for there were none of the guards or
Kanlars through all the city, the occupants being left to fight their
own battles on the principle of the survival of the fittest. An excited
ring of spectators was gathered round each combat, shouting at and
cheering the opponents, not dispersing until the fighting was over. As
we passed the scene of one such duel, I saw the victor dragging away
the body of his late enemy.
"Where is he taking it?" I asked of Denham, motioning toward the
receding figure.
"To the bottom of the stair," was his answer. "There is an iron rule
that in any battle where a man is killed, the victor must carry the
body of his opponent to the stair and hand it over to the guards there."
"But why?" I asked. "For burial above?"
Denham smiled grimly. "You saw the slaves in the city above," he
said, "but did you notice how strange they were, how glassy-eyed and
stiff-moving?"
When I nodded, he said, "Well, the slaves of the city above are men who
have been killed here in the under-city."
At my exclamation of horror, he repeated his statement. "Man," he
exclaimed, "you do not know the power of the Kanlars. With the wisdom
that is theirs, such an accomplishment is child's-play."
"But how done?" I asked.
"Ask them," he answered darkly. "In some way they are able to bring
back the breath of life into the dead men, to repair the wounds that
killed them. They can make them live again, but not even the Kanlars
can bring back their souls. They are just living, walking bodies, whom
the Kanlars are able to control and to force to work their will in all
things. Dead-alive, and slaves to the Kanlars!"
I shuddered deeply, for the idea was soul-sickening. Yet I knew now
that Denham spoke truth, for I remembered how from my cell in the city
above I had seen Talerri, garbed as a slave, Talerri, whom I had killed
myself. It was an invention that would have aroused pride in the fiends
of lowest hell, thus to raise dead men back to life and use them as
servants. And I knew that this was but one of the dark evils that lay
concealed under the rule of the laughing, bright-haired Kanlars.
* * * * *
While we talked we had been moving along the crowded street toward the
distant wall of the pit. Finally, very near that wall, Denham turned
in at a low, long building that was of white stone, and roofless, like
most others in the city. I followed him inside, and looked around
curiously.
The building's interior was a single large room, shaded from the light
above by a suspended awning of green cloth. Ranged along the walls was
a triple tier of metal bunks, in some of which lay cloth and fur robes.
There was a long metal table at the room's center, and lounging in
chairs around it, and in the bunks, were a score of men who looked up
without interest as we entered.
Denham greeted them, and in reply they grunted lazily, looking at me
incuriously. I followed my companion to the farther end of the room,
where he seated himself in one of the bunks and motioned me to join him.
"My friends aren't here now," he said, "but they'll return before long."
A sudden curiosity prompted my next question. "How did you get here,
Denham?" I asked. "Was it--the Raider?"
"Naturally," he answered. "It was the Raider, as you call it, that
brought us all here, curse him. It was in the Colonial rebellion he got
me."
"The American rebellion?" I asked, striving to understand his
Eighteenth Century allusions.
"Of course," he answered. "We were quartered in Philadelphia, under
that old fool, Howe. He liked the city, y'know, the bottle and the
ladies. But the rest of us were itching for fight, and since we
couldn't fight the rebels, we soon took to fighting one another.
"There was a ball one night, and toward the end of it I began to have a
few words with a Hessian attached to our staff. We were both a little
scrambled, by then. Curse me if there weren't some fine cellars there!
But as to the German, he and I got hotter and hotter, until he finally
made the assertion that our commander was a fool. Personally, that was
my opinion also, but I couldn't allow the Dutchman to say so, and the
upshot of it was that we left the ball together and adjourned to an
open field near by to resume the argument, with our swords.
"Before we had made a half-dozen passes, there was a hellish sound of
wind, a big, gray cloud with burning green eyes seemed to drop down on
us from above, and then the bottom dropped out of the world. When we
came to our senses, we were standing up there in the big temple, with a
dozen others. Of course, we didn't know then that we had been brought
on through time, but we knew it was a damned strange place.
"They brought us down here, down the stair, and as soon as we were
turned loose here, we resumed our dispute, borrowing swords from two
bystanders. By luck, I pinked him. There was a big crowd around,
cheering us on, and it was then that I met D'Alord, who is one of the
friends I mentioned."
As Denham finished his story, I began to feel a sudden, utter
weariness, for I had not slept for many hours. I yawned and rubbed my
eyes, and at once Denham jumped up.
"Why, take the bunk, man," he ordered me. "Go ahead and sleep."
"But what of Lantin," I asked, "my friend? He's somewhere in the city
here, I'm sure, and I must find him."
Denham shook his head doubtfully. "What does he look like?" he asked.
When I had described Lantin to him, his face cleared a little, I
thought. "An elderly man, you said?" he questioned, and when I nodded,
he continued, "That should make it easier to find him, then. There are
hardly any but young men here, so your friend would be more conspicuous
and easily located. But you go ahead and sleep, and I'll find my
friends and look for your companion. If anyone can find him, we can."
I tried to thank him, but he waved my words aside with a smile and
walked out of the room. I sank back in the bunk and closed my eyes.
As drowsiness overcame me, there came to my ears the dull sound of
voices of the men in the room, with now and then a shout or bellow of
laughter. And even these faded from hearing as I sank, contentedly
enough, down into the green depths of sleep.
_CHAPTER 12_