The Journey
Darkness. The soft, blanketing night of the age of fungoids had fallen
over all the earth, and there was blackness everywhere that was not good
to have. Here and there, however, dim, bluish lights glowed near the
ground. There an intermittent glow showed that a firefly had wandered
far from the rivers and swamps above which most of his kind now
congregated. Now a faintly luminous ball of fire drifted above the
steaming, moisture-sodden earth. It was a will-o'-the-wisp, grown to a
yard in diameter.
From the low-hanging banks of clouds that hung perpetually overhead,
large, warm raindrops fell ceaselessly. A drop, a pause, and then
another drop, added to the already dank moisture of the ground below.
The world of fungus growths flourished on just such dampness and
humidity. It seemed as if the toadstools and mushrooms could be heard,
swelling and growing large in the darkness. Rustlings and stealthy
movements sounded furtively through the night, and from above the heavy
throb of mighty wing-beats was continuous.
The tribe was hidden in the midst of a tangled copse of toadstools too
thickly interwoven for the larger insects to penetrate. Only the little
midgets hid in its recesses during the night-time, and the smaller moths
during the day.
About and among the bases of the toadstools, however, where their spongy
stalks rose from the humid earth, small beetles roamed, singing
cheerfully to themselves in deep bass notes. They were small and round,
some six or eight inches long, and their bellies were pale gray.
And as they went about they emitted sounds which would have been chirps
had they been other than low as the lowest tone of a harp. They were
truffle-beetles, in search of the dainty tidbits on which epicures once
had feasted.
Some strange sense seemed to tell them when one of half a dozen
varieties of truffle was beneath them, and they paused in their
wandering to dig a tunnel straight down. A foot, two feet, or two yards,
all was the same to them. In time they would come upon the morsel they
sought and would remain at the bottom of their temporary home until it
was consumed. Then another period of wandering, singing their cheerful
song, until another likely spot was reached and another tunnel begun.
In a tiny, open space in the center of the toadstool thicket the
tribefolk slept with the deep notes of the truffle-beetles in their
ears. A new danger had come to them, but they had passed it on to Burl
with a new and childlike confidence and considered the matter settled.
They slept, while beneath a glowing mushroom at one side of the clearing
Burl struggled with his new problem. He squatted upon the ground in the
dim radiance of the shining toadstool, his moth-wing cloak wrapped about
him, his spear in his hand, and his twin golden plumes of the moth's
antennæ bound to his forehead. But his face was downcast as a child's.
The red mushrooms had begun to burst. Only that day, one of the women,
seeking edible fungus for the tribal larder, had seen the fat, distended
globule of the red mushroom. Its skin was stretched taut, and glistened
in the light.
The woman paid little or no attention to the red growth. Her ears were
attuned to catch sounds that would warn her of danger while her eyes
searched for tidbits that would make a meal for the tribe, and more
particularly for her small son, left behind at the hiding-place.
A ripping noise made her start up, alert on the instant. The red
envelope of the mushroom had split across the top, and a thick cloud of
brownish-red dust was spurting in every direction. It formed a pyramidal
cloud some thirty feet in height, which enlarged and grew thinner with
minor eddies within itself.
A little yellow butterfly with wings barely a yard from tip to tip,
flapped lazily above the mushroom-covered plain. Its wings beat the air
with strokes that seemed like playful taps upon a friendly element. The
butterfly was literally intoxicated with the sheer joy of living. It had
emerged from its cocoon barely two hours before, and was making its
maiden flight above the strange and wonderful world. It fluttered
carelessly into the red-brown cloud of mushroom spores.
The woman was watching the slowly changing form of the spore-mist. She
saw the butterfly enter the brownish dust, and then her eyes became
greedy. There was something the matter with the butterfly. Its wings no
longer moved lazily and gently. They struck out in frenzied, hysterical
blows that were erratic and wild. The little yellow creature no longer
floated lightly and easily, but dashed here and there, wildly and
without purpose, seeming to be in its death-throes.
It crashed helplessly against the ground and lay there, moving feebly.
The woman hurried forward. The wings would be new fabric with which to
adorn herself, and the fragile legs of the butterfly contained choice
meat. She entered the dust-cloud.
A stream of intolerable fire--though the woman had never seen or known
of fire--burned her nostrils and seared her lungs. She gasped in pain,
and the agony was redoubled. Her eyes smarted as if burning from their
sockets, and tears blinded her.
The woman instinctively turned about to flee, but before she had gone a
dozen yards--blinded as she was--she stumbled and fell to the ground.
She lay there, gasping, and uttering moans of pain, until one of the men
of the tribe who had been engaged in foraging near by saw her and tried
to find what had injured her.
She could not speak, and he was about to leave her and tell the other
tribefolk about her when he heard the clicking of an ant's limbs, and
rather than have the ant pick her to pieces bit by bit--and leave his
curiosity ungratified--the man put her across his shoulders and bore her
back to the hiding-place of the tribe.
It was the tale the woman had told when she partly recovered that caused
Burl to sit alone all that night beneath the shining toadstool in the
little clearing, puzzling his just-awakened brain to know what to do.
The year before there had been no red mushrooms. They had appeared only
recently, but Burl dimly remembered that one day, a long time before,
there had been a strange breeze which blew for three day and nights, and
that during the time of its blowing all the tribe had been sick and had
wept continually.
Burl had not yet reached the point of mental development when he would
associate that breeze with a storm at a distance, or reason that the
spores of the red mushrooms had been borne upon the wind to the present
resting-places of the deadly fungus growths. Still less could he decide
that the breeze had not been deadly only because it was lightly laden
with the fatal dust.
He knew simply that unknown red mushrooms had appeared, that they were
everywhere about, and that they would burst, and that to breathe the
red dust they gave out was grievous sickness or death.
The tribe slept while the bravely attired figure of Burl squatted under
the glowing disk of the luminous mushroom, his face a picture of
querulous perplexity, and his heart full of sadness.
He had consulted his strange inner self, and no plan had come to him. He
knew the red mushrooms were all about. They would fill the air with
their poison. He struggled with his problem while his people slumbered,
and the woman who had breathed the mushroom-dust sobbed softly in her
troubled sleep.
Presently a figure stirred on the farther side of the clearing. Saya
woke and raised her head. She saw Burl crouching by the shining
toadstool, his gay attire draggled and unnoticed. She watched him for a
little, and the desolation of his pose awoke her pity.
She rose and went to his side, taking his hand between her two, while
she spoke his name softly. When he turned and looked at her, confusion
smote her, but the misery in his face brought confidence again.
Burl's sorrow was inarticulate--he could not explain this new
responsibility for his people that had come to him--but he was comforted
by her presence, and she sat down beside him. After a long time she
slept, with her head resting against his side, but he continued to
question himself, continued to demand an escape for his people from the
suffering and danger he saw ahead. With the day an answer came.
When Burl had been carried down the river on his fungus raft, and had
landed in the country of the army ants, he had seen great forests of
edible mushrooms, and had said to himself that he would bring Saya to
that place. He remembered, now, that the red mushrooms were there also,
but the idea of a journey remained.
The hunting-ground of his tribe had been free of the red fungoids until
recently. If he traveled far enough he would come to a place where there
were still no red toadstools. Then came the decision. He would lead his
tribe to a far country.
He spoke with stern authority when the tribesmen woke, talking in few
words and in a loud voice, holding up his spear as he gave his orders.
The timid, pink-skinned people obeyed him meekly. They had seen the body
of the clotho spider he had slain, and he had thrown down before them
the gray bulk of the labyrinth spider he had thrust through with his
spear. Now he was to take them through unknown dangers to an unknown
haven, but they feared to displease him.
They made light loads of their mushrooms and such meat-stuffs as they
had, and parceled out what little fabric they still possessed. Three men
bore spears, in addition to Burl's long shaft, and he had persuaded the
other three to carry clubs, showing them how the weapon should be
wielded.
The indefinitely brighter spot in the cloud-banks above that meant the
shining sun had barely gone a quarter of the way across the sky when the
trembling band of timid creatures made their way from their hiding-place
and set out upon their journey. For their course, Burl depended entirely
upon chance. He avoided the direction of the river, however, and the
path along which he had returned to his people. He knew the red
mushrooms grew there. Purely by accident he set his march toward the
west, and walked cautiously on, his tribesfolk following him fearfully.
Burl walked ahead, his spear held ready. He made a figure at once brave
and pathetic, venturing forth in a world of monstrous ferocity and
incredible malignance, armed only with a horny spear borrowed from a
dead insect. His velvety cloak, made from a moth's wing, hung about his
figure in graceful folds, however, and twin golden plumes nodded
jauntily from his forehead.
Behind him the nearly naked people followed reluctantly. Here a woman
with a baby in her arms, there children of nine or ten, unable to resist
the Instinct to play even in the presence of the manifold dangers of the
march. They ate hungrily of the lumps of mushroom they had been ordered
to carry. Then a long-legged boy, his eyes roving anxiously about in
search of danger followed.
Thirty thousand years of flight from every peril had deeply submerged
the combative nature of humanity. After the boy came two men, one with a
short spear, and the other with a club, each with a huge mass of edible
mushroom under his free arm, and both badly frightened at the idea of
fleeing from dangers they knew and feared to dangers they did not know
and consequently feared much more.
So was the caravan spread out. It made its way across the country with
many deviations from a fixed line, and with many halts and pauses. Once
a shrill stridulation filled all the air before them, a monster sound
compounded of innumerable clickings and high-pitched cries.
They came to the tip of an eminence and saw a great space of ground
covered with tiny black bodies locked in combat. For quite half a mile
in either direction the earth was black with ants, snapping and biting
at each other, locked in vise-like embraces, each combatant couple
trampled under the feet of the contending armies, with no thought of
surrender or quarter.
The sound of the clashing of fierce jaws upon horny armor, the cries of
the maimed, and strange sounds made by the dying, and above all, the
whining battle-cry of each of the fighting hordes, made a sustained
uproar that was almost deafening.
From either side of the battle-ground a pathway led back to separate
ant-cities, a pathway marked by the hurrying groups of reinforcements
rushing to the fight. Tiny as the ants were, for once no lumbering
beetle swaggered insolently in their path, nor did the hunting-spiders
mark them out for prey. Only little creatures smaller than the
combatants themselves made use of the insect war for purposes of their
own.
These were little gray ants barely more than four inches long, who
scurried about in and among the fighting creatures with marvelous
dexterity, carrying off, piece-meal, the bodies of the dead, and slaying
the wounded for the same fate.
They hung about the edges of the battle, and invaded the abandoned areas
when the tide of battle shifted, insect guerrillas, fighting for their
own hands, careless of the origin of the quarrel, espousing no cause,
simply salvaging the dead and living débris of the combat.
Burl and his little group of followers had to make a wide detour to
avoid the battle itself, and the passage between bodies of
reinforcements hurrying to the scene of strife was a matter of some
difficulty. The ants running rapidly toward the battle-field were hugely
excited. Their antennæ waved wildly, and the infrequent wounded one,
limping back toward the city, was instantly and repeatedly challenged by
the advancing insects.
They crossed their antennæ upon his, and required thorough evidence that
he was of the proper city before allowing him to proceed. Once they
arrived at the battle-field they flung themselves into the fray,
becoming lost and indistinguishable in the tide of straining, fighting
black bodies.
Men in such a battle, without distinguishing marks or battle-cries,
would have fought among themselves as often as against their foes, but
the ants had a much simpler method of identification. Each ant-city
possesses its individual odor--a variant on the scent of formic
acid--and each individual of that city is recognized in his world quite
simply and surely by the way he smells.
The little tribe of human beings passed precariously behind a group of a
hundred excited insect warriors, and before the following group of forty
equally excited black insects. Burl hurried on with his following,
putting many miles of perilous territory behind before nightfall. Many
times during the day they saw the sudden billowing of a red-brown
dust-cloud from the earth, and more than once they came upon the empty
skin and drooping stalk of one of the red mushrooms, and more often
still they came upon the mushrooms themselves, grown fat and taut,
prepared to send their deadly spores into the air when the pressure from
within became more than the leathery skin could stand.
That night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puff-balls, which at a
touch shot out a puff of white powder resembling smoke. The powder was
precisely the same in nature as that cast out by the red mushrooms, but
its effects were marvelously--and mercifully--different; it was
innocuous.
Burl slept soundly this night, having been two days and a night without
rest, but the remainder of his tribe, and even Saya, were fearful and
afraid, listening ceaselessly all through the dark hours for the
menacing sounds of creatures coming to prey upon them.
And so for a week the march kept on. Burl would not allow his tribe to
stop to forage for food. The red mushrooms were all about. Once one of
the little children was caught in a whirling eddy of red dust, and its
mother rushed into the deadly stuff to seize it and bring it out. Then
the tribe had to hide for three days while the two of them recovered
from the debilitating poison.
Once, too, they found a half-acre patch of the giant cabbages--there
were six of them full grown, and a dozen or more smaller ones--and Burl
took two men and speared two of the huge, twelve-foot slugs that fed
upon the leaves. When the tribe passed on it was gorged on the fat meat
of the slugs, and there was much soft fur, so that all the tribefolk
wore loin-cloths of the yellow stuff.
There were perils, too, in the journey. On the fourth day of the tribe's
traveling, Burl froze suddenly into stillness. One of the hairy
tarantulas--a trap-door spider with a black belly--had fallen upon a
scarabæus beetle, and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead.
The tribefolk, trembling, went back for half a mile or more in
panic-stricken silence, and refused to advance until he had led them a
detour of two or three miles to one side of the dangerous spot.
Long, fear-ridden marches through perilous countries unknown to them,
through the golden aisles of yellow mushroom forests, over the flaking
surfaces of plains covered with many-colored "rusts" and molds; pauses
beside turbid pools whose waters were concealed by thick layers of green
slime, and other evil-smelling ponds which foamed and bubbled slowly,
which were covered with pasty yeasts that rose in strange forms of
discolored foam.
Fleeting glimpses they had of the glistening spokes of symmetrical
spiders'-webs, whose least thread it would have been beyond the power of
the strongest of the tribe to break. They passed through a forest of
puff-balls, which boomed when touched and shot a puff of vapor from
their open mouths.
Once they saw a long and sinuous insect that fled before them and
disappeared into a burrow in the ground, running with incredible speed
upon legs of uncountable number. It was a centipede all of thirty feet
in length, and when they crossed the path it had followed a horrible
stench came to their nostrils so that they hurried on.
Long escape from unguessed dangers brought boldness, of a sort, to the
pink-skinned men, and they would have rested. They went to Burl with
their complaint, and he simply pointed with his hands behind them. There
were three little clouds of brownish vapor in the air, where they could
see, along the road they had traversed. To the right of them a
dust-cloud was just settling, and to the left another rose as they
looked.
A new trick of the deadly dust became apparent now. Toward the end of a
day in which they had traveled a long distance, one of the little
children ran a little to the left of the route its elders were
following. The earth had taken on a brownish hue, and the child stirred
up the surface mould with its feet.
The brownish dust that had settled there was raised again, and the child
ran, crying and choking, to its mother, its lungs burning as with fire,
and its eyes like hot coals. Another day would pass before the child
could walk.
In a strange country, knowing nothing of the dangers that might assail
the tribe while waiting for the child to recover, Burl looked about for
a hiding-place. Far over to the right a low cliff, perhaps twenty or
thirty feet high, showed sides of crumbling, yellow clay, and from where
Burl stood he could see the dark openings of burrows scattered here and
there upon its face.
He watched for a time, to see if any bee or wasp inhabited them, knowing
that many kinds of both insects dig burrows for their young, and do not
occupy them themselves. No dark forms appeared, however, and he led his
people toward the openings.
The appearance of the holes confirmed his surmise. They had been dug
months before by mining bees, and the entrances were "weathered" and
worn. The tribefolk made their way into the three-foot tunnels, and hid
themselves, seizing the opportunity to gorge themselves upon the food
they carried.
Burl stationed himself near the outer end of one of the little caves to
watch for signs of danger. While waiting he poked curiously with his
spear at a little pile of white and sticky parchment-like stuff he saw
just within the mouth of the tunnel.
Instantly movement became visible. Fifty, sixty, or a hundred tiny
creatures, no more than half an inch in length, tumbled pell-mell from
the dirty-white heap. Awkward legs, tiny, greenish-black bodies, and
bristles protruding in every direction made them strange to look upon.
They had tumbled from the whitish heap and now they made haste to hide
themselves in it again, moving slowly and clumsily, with immense effort
and laborious contortions of their bodies.
Burl had never seen any insect progress in such a slow and ineffective
fashion before. He drew one little insect back with the point of his
spear and examined it from a safe distance. Tiny jaws before the head
met like twin sickles, and the whole body was shaped like a rounded
diamond lozenge.
Burl knew that no insect of such small size could be dangerous, and
leaned over, then took one creature in his hand. It wriggled frantically
and slipped from his fingers, dropping upon the soft yellow
caterpillar-fur he had about his middle. Instantly, as if it were a
conjuring trick, the little insect vanished, and Burl searched for a
matter of minutes before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs
of the fur, resting motionless, and evidently at ease.
It was a bee-louse, the first larval form of a beetle whose horny armor
could be seen in fragments for yards before the clayey cliff-side.
Hidden in the openings of the bee's tunnel, it waited until the
bee-grubs farther back in their separate cells should complete their
changes of form and emerge into the open air, passing over the cluster
of tiny creatures at the doorway. As the bees pass, the little bee-lice
would clamber in eager haste up their hairy legs and come to rest in the
fur about their thoraxes. Then, weeks later, when the bees in turn made
other cells and stocked them with honey for the eggs they would lay, the
tiny creatures would slip from their resting-places and be left behind
in the fully provisioned cell, to eat not only the honey the bee had so
laboriously acquired, but the very grub hatched from the bee's egg.
Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it
away, but in doing so discovered three more that had hidden themselves
in his furry garment, no doubt thinking it the coat of their natural,
though unwilling hosts. He plucked them away, and discovered more, and
more. His garment was the hiding-place for dozens of the creatures.
Disgusted and annoyed, he went out of the cavern and to a spot some
distance away, where he took off his robe and pounded it with the flat
side of his spear to dislodge the visitors. They dropped out one by
one, reluctantly, and finally the garment was clean of them. Then Burl
heard a shout from the direction of the mining-bee caves, and hastened
toward the sound.
It was then drawing toward the time of darkness, but one of the
tribesmen had ventured out and found no less than three of the great
imperial mushrooms. Of the three, one had been attacked by a parasitic
purple mould, but the gorgeous yellow of the other two was undimmed, and
the people were soon feasting upon the firm flesh.
Burl felt a little pang of jealousy, though he joined in the consumption
of the find as readily as the others, and presently drew a little to one
side.
He cast his eyes across the country, level and unbroken as far as the
eye could see. The small clay cliff was the only inequality visible, and
its height cut off all vision on one side. But the view toward the
horizon was unobstructed on three sides, and here and there the black
speck of a monster bee could be seen, droning homeward to its hive or
burrow, and sometimes the slender form of a wasp passed overhead, its
transparent wings invisible from the rapidity of their vibrations.
These flew high in the air, but lower down, barely skimming the tops of
the many-colored mushrooms and toadstools, fluttering lightly above the
swollen fungoids, and touching their dainty proboscides to unspeakable
things in default of the fragrant flowers that were normal food for
their races--lower down flew the multitudes of butterflies the age of
mushrooms had produced.
White and yellow and red and brown, pink and blue and purple and green,
every shade and every color, every size and almost every shape, they
flitted gaily in the air. There were some so tiny that they would barely
have shaded Burl's face, and some beneath whose slender bodies he could
have hidden himself. They flew in a riot of colors and tints above a
world of foul mushroom growths, and turgid, slime-covered ponds.
Burl, temporarily out of the limelight because of the discovery of a
store of food by another member of the tribe, bethought himself of an
idea. Soon night would come on, the cloud-bank would turn red in the
west, and then darkness would lean downward from the sky. With the
coming of that time these creatures of the day would seek hiding-places,
and the air would be given over to the furry moths that flew by night.
He, Burl, would mark the spot where one of the larger creatures
alighted, and would creep up upon it, with his spear held fast.
His wide blue eyes brightened at the thought, and he sat himself down to
watch. After a long time the soft, down-reaching fingers of the night
touched the shaded aisles of the mushroom forests, and a gentle haze
arose above the golden glades. One by one the gorgeous fliers of the
daytime dipped down and furled their painted wings. The overhanging
clouds became darker--finally black, and the slow, deliberate rainfall
that lasted all through the night began. Burl rose and crept away into
the darkness, his spear held in readiness.
Through the black night, beneath deeper blacknesses which were the dark
undersides of huge toadstools, creeping silently, with every sense
alert for sign of danger or for hope of giant prey, Burl made his slow
advance.
A glorious butterfly of purple and yellow markings, whose wings spread
out for three yards on either side of its delicately formed body, had
hidden itself barely two hundred yards away. Burl could imagine it, now,
preening its slender limbs and combing from its long and slender
proboscis any trace of the delectable foodstuffs on which it had fed
during the day. Burl moved slowly and cautiously forward, all eyes and
ears.
He heard an indescribable sound in a thicket a little to his left, and
shifted his course. The sound was the faint whistling of air through the
breathing-holes along an insect's abdomen. Then came the delicate
rustling of filmy wings being stretched and closed again, and the
movement of sharply barbed feet upon the soft earth. Burl moved in
breathless silence, holding his spear before him in readiness to plunge
it into the gigantic butterfly's soft body.
The mushrooms here were grown thickly together, so there was no room for
Burl's body to pass between their stalks, and the rounded heads were
deformed and misshapen from their crowdings. Burl spent precious moments
in trying to force a silent passage, but had to own himself beaten. Then
he clambered up upon the spongy mass of mushroom heads, trusting to luck
that they would sustain his weight.
The blackness was intense, so that even the forms of objects before him
were lost in obscurity. He moved forward for some ten yards, however,
walking gingerly over his precarious foothold. Then he felt rather than
saw the opening before him. A body moved below him.
Burl raised his spear, and with a yell plunged down on the back of the
moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he could command.
He landed on a shifting form, but his yell of triumph turned to a scream
of terror.
This was not the yielding body of a slender butterfly that he had come
upon, nor had his spear penetrated the creature's soft flesh. He had
fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge, meat-eating beetles,
and his spear had slid across the horny armor, and then stuck fast,
having pierced only the leathery tissue between the insect's head and
thorax.
Burl's terror was pitiable at the realization, but as nothing to the
ultimate panic which possessed him when the creature beneath him uttered
a grunt of fright and pain, and, spreading its stiff wing-cases wide,
shot upward in a crazy, panic-stricken, rocket-like flight toward the
sky.