Drome/Chapter 15
"She screamed at the demon, but it lunged toward us, flapping its great hideous wings and dragging her out after it onto the bridge."
Chapter 15
The Angel
The scream ceased as suddenly as it had come. I drew my revolver, snapped on the electric light and, stooping low, looked into that spot where, a few moments before, Milton Rhodes had so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.
Nothing but the unbroken rock be-fore me. And yet Rhodes had vanished. I turned the light full upon the low roof, and then I exclaimed aloud: the entrance was there!
I dropped to my hands and knees and moved under, the pack not a little impeding my movements. An instant, and I was standing upright, peering into a high, narrow tunnel, which some convulsion of nature, in some lost age of the earth, had rent right through the living rock.
Nothing was to be seen, save the broken walls, floor and roof, deep, eery shadows crawling and gliding as the light moved. The view, however, was a very restricted one, for the gallery, which sloped gently upward, gave a sudden turn at a distance of only thirty feet or so. What awaited me somewhere beyond that turn?
For a few moments I listened intently. Not the faintest sound—nothing but the loud beating of my heart. What had happened to Rhodes?
"Milton!" I called softly. "Oh, Milton!"
No answer came.
I grasped a projection of rock, drew myself up into the tunnel and advanced as rapidly and silently as possible, the light and the alpenstock in my left hand, the revolver in the right. But it was not very silently, what with the creepers. At times they grated harshly; it was as if spirit things were mocking me with suppressed, demoniacal laughter. Yet I could not pause to remove those grating shoes of toothed steel. Every second might be precious now.
I drew near the turn, the revolver thrust forward in readiness for instant action. I reached it, and, there just beyond, a dark figure was standing, framed in a blaze of light.
It was Milton Rhodes.
He turned his head, and I saw a smile move athwart his features.
"Well, we've found it, Bill!" said be.
I was now drawing near to him.
"That scream!" I said. "Who gave that terrible scream?"
"Terrible? It didn't sound terrible to me," said Milton Rhodes. "Fact is, Bill, I'd like to hear it again."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"'Tis so."
"Who was it? Or what was it?"
"Why, the angel!" he told me.
"Where is she now?"
"Gone, Bill; she's gone. When she saw me, she fetched up, gave that scream, then turned and vanished—around that next turn."
"What was she like, Milton?"
"I wish I could tell you! But how can a man describe Venus? I know one thing, Bill: if all the daughters of Drome are as fair as this one that I saw, I know where all the movie queens of the future are coming from."
I looked at him, and I laughed.
"Wait till you see her, Bill. Complexion like alabaster, white as Rainier 's purest snow! And hair! Oh, that hair, Bill! Like ten billion dollars' worth of spun gold!"
"And the demon?" I queried.
"I didn't see any demon, Bill." There was silence for a little space. "Then," I said, "the whole thing is true, after all."
"You mean what Grandfather Scranton set down in his journal—and the rest of it?"
I nodded.
"I never doubted that."
"At times," I told him, "I didn't doubt it. Then, again, it all seemed so wild and weird that I didn't know what on earth to think."
"I think," he said with a wan smile, "that you know what to think now—now when you are standing in this very way to Drome, whatever Drome may be."
"Yes. And yet the thing is so strange. Think of it! A world of which men have never dreamed, save in the wildest romance! An underground world! Subterranean ways, subterranean cities, men and women there"
"Cavernicolous Aphrodites!" said Milton Rhodes.
"And all down there in eternal darkness!" I exclaimed. "Why, the thing is incredible. No wonder that I sometimes find myself wondering if I am not in a dream!"
Said Milton Rhodes:
"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
"But come, Bill," he added, "don't let this a priori stuff bowl you over. In the first place, it isn't dark down there—when you get down far enough."
"In heaven's name, how do you know that?"
"Why, for one thing, if this subterranean world was one of unbroken darkness, the angel (and the demon) would be blind, like those fishes in the Mammoth Cave. But she is no more blind than you or I. Ergo, if for no other reason, we shall find light down there."
"Of course, they have artificial light, or"
"I don't mean that. If there had not been some other illumination, this strange race (of whose very existence science has never even dreamed) would have ceased to exist long ago—if, indeed, it ever could have begun."
"But no gleam of sunlight can ever find its way to that world."
"It never can, of course. But there are other sources of light—nebulas and comets in the heavens, for example, and auroras, phosphorus and fireflies here on earth. The phenomena of phosphorescence are by no means so rare as might be imagined. Why, as Nichol showed—though any man who uses his eyes can see it him-self —there is light inherent even in clouds."
All this, and more, Rhodes explained
to me, succinctly but
clearly.
"Oh, we'll find light, Bill," said he.
All the same this subterranean world for which we were bound presented some unpleasant possibilities, in addition, that is, to those concomitant to its being a habitat of demons
—and heaven only knew what be-sides.
"And, then, there is the air," I said. "As we descend, it will be-come denser and denser, until at last we shall be able to use these ice-picks on it."
Rhodes, who was removing his creepers, laughed.
"We will have to make a vertical descent of three and one-half miles below the level of the sea—a vertical descent of near five miles from this spot where we stand, Bill—before we reach a pressure of even two atmospheres."
"The density then increases rapidly, doesn't it?"
"Oh, yes. Three and a half miles more, and we are under a pressure of four atmospheres, or about sixty pounds to the square inch. Throe and a half miles farther down, or ten and one-half miles in all below the level of the sea, and we have a pressure upon us of eight atmospheres. Fourteen miles, and it will be sixteen atmospheres. At thirty-four miles the air will have the density of water; at forty-eight miles it will be as dense as mercury, and at fifty miles we shall have it as dense as gold."
"That will do!" I told him. "We can never get down that far."
"I have no idea how far we can go down, Bill."
"You know that we could never stand such pressures as those."
"I know that. But, as a matter of fact, I don't know what the pressures are at those depths. Nor does any other man know. What I said a moment ago is, of course, according to the law; but there is something wrong with the law, founded upon that of Mariotte—as any physicist will tell you."
"What's wrong with it?"
"At any rate, the law breaks down as one goes upward, and I have no doubt that it will be found to do so as one descends below the level of the sea. If the densities of the atmosphere decrease in a geometrical as the distances from sea-level increase in an arithmetical ratio, then, at a distance of only one hundred miles up, we should have virtually a perfect vacuum. The rarity there would be absolutely inconceivable. For the atmospheric density at that height would be only one billionth of. what it is at the earth 's surface.
"And what is the real density there?"
"No man knows or can know," replied Rhodes, "until he goes up there to see. But meteors, rendered incandescent by the resistance they, encounter, show that a state of things exists at that high altitude very different from the one that would be found there if our formulae were correct and our theories were valid. And so, I have no doubt, we shall find it down in Drome.
"Formulæ are very well in their place," he went on, "but we should never forget, Bill, that they are often budded on mere assumption and that a theory is only a theory until experiment (or experience) has shown us that it is a fact. And that reminds me: do you know what Percival Lowell says about formulæ?"
I said I didn't.
"'Formulæ,' says. the great astronomer, 'are the anesthetics of thought.' I commend that very highly," Milton added, "to our fiction editors and our writers of short stories."
"But"
"But me no buts, Bill," said Milton. "And w r hat do your scientists know about the interior of this old earth we inhabit, anyway? Forsooth, but very little, Billy me lad. Why, they don't even know what a volcano is. One can't make a journey into the interior of the earth on a scratchpad and' a lead-pencil, or if he does, we may be pardoned if we do not give implicit credence to all that he chooses to tell, us when he comes back. For instance, one of these armchair Columbuses (he made the journey in a machine called d2y by dx2 and came out in China) says that he found the interior in a state of igneous fluidity. And another? Why, he tells us that the whole earth is as rigid as steel, that it is solid to the very core."
"It seems," said I, "to be a case of
"'Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both.'"
"The truth in this case is not yet known," replied Rhodes, "though I trust that you and I, Bill, are fated to learn it."
He smiled a queer, wan smile.
"Whether we are fated, also, to re-veal it to the" world, our world—well, quién sabe?" said Milton Rhodes.
"Then," I remarked, my fingers busy removing my ice-creepers, "what we read about the state of things in the interior of the earth—the temperature, the pressure, the density—then all that is pure theory?"
"Of course. How could it be any-thing else? All theory, save, that is, the mean density of the, earth. And that mean density gives us something to think about, for it is just a little more than twice that, of the surface materials. With all this enormous pressure that we hear so much about and the resultant increase of density with depth, the weight of the earth certainly ought to be more than only five and one-half time's that of a globe of equal" size composed of nothing but water."
"Kind of queer, all right," was my comment.
"It is queer, all right—as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. However, as old Dante has it, 'Son! our time asks thriftier using.'"
As the last, word left his lips, I straightened up, the toothed shoes in my hand and, as I did so, I started and cried: "Hear that?"
Rhodes made no answer. For some moments we stood there in breathless expectation; but that low mysterious sound did not come again.
"What was that?" I said.
"I wish I knew. It was faint and—well, rather strange."
"It seemed to me," I told him, "to be hollow—like the sound of some great door suddenly closing."
My companion looked at me rather quickly.
"Think so, Bill?" he said. "I thought 'twas the sound of something falling."
There was a pause, during which pause we stood listening and waiting; but the gallery remained as silent as though it had never known the tread of any living thing.
"Well, Bill," said Milton Rhodes suddenly, "we shall never learn what Drome means if we stay in this spot. As for the creepers, I am going to leave mine here."
Milton then wrote a short note, which recorded little more than our names, the date of our great discovery and that we were going farther. This, carefully folded, he placed be-side the creepers and put a rock-fragment upon it. I wondered as I watched him whose would be the eyes that would discover it. Some inhabitant of this underground world, of course, and to such a one the record would be so much Greek. 'Twas utterly unlikely that anyone from that world which we were leaving would ever see that record. I wondered if we should ever see this spot again.
"And now, Bill," said Milton, "down we go!"
And the next moment we were going —had begun our descent into this most mysterious and dreadful place.