Two Thousand Miles Below by Charles Willard Diffin (best authors to read .TXT) 📖

hey stopped and stood panting in one of the wider passages. He heard nothing but the endless rush of the wind. For the first time Rawson became aware of his own almost naked condition.

The mole-men had prepared him for the sacrifice. They had decked him with a loin cloth of woven gold. It felt cold to the touch, and Rawson did not doubt its being made of fine threads of the precious metal. About his neck hung a gold chain with a heavy object suspended; he tore it off, and found again a representation of a golden sun. The copper priests had arrayed him to meet their fire-god, and again Rawson wondered at the emblem they employed.

"What in the name of the starlit heavens," he demanded silently of himself, "could this buried race know of the sun?"

The others were watching him. In the glow of that strange light held by the girl he saw them smiling. They were congratulating one another with odd, soft-syllabled words. And Rawson, ignorant of their tongue, was mute, when his whole soul cried out to thank them.

He gripped the hands of the men. They were as tall as himself, their gaze level with his own. Their faces were human, friendly; their eyes sparkled and smiled into his. Then he turned to the girl.

She had seen the method of greeting this stranger employed. She extended her hand—a white hand, slim, soft, cool. And Rawson, choking with emotion, knowing that here was the one who had first seen him and who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand, held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to the slender fingers in a quick caress.

When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.

Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and the wind pressed against them unceasingly.

he White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of glass. Rawson's bare feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now. The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the white figure of the girl where her light was flashing on endless walls of red.

In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air, that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow, unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the whole earth when they came at last to an open room.

It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and shook him through and through with its single note.

Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound, he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But his eyes were searching the big room.

he great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin. The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in so great a space that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid red matter.

The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines of entrances to many dark passages like the one through which they had come. The red rock-mass seemingly had been riven and torn, and apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against the rush of outgoing air. Rawson felt the same current sweeping and whirling gustily about him.

Now his companions were across the room, and between him and them in the center of the floor he saw the mouth of a black well, a pit some twenty or more feet across. Directly above, where the red rock stuff formed a domed ceiling, he found a counterpart of the pit below—another great bore or open shaft, roughly circular. Apparently it went straight on up and was a continuation of that lower pit.

"This room was cut out," Rawson was thinking, "by the white people or the mole-men—Lord knows who, or when, or why. Cut out around this big shaft...."

His thoughts trailed off. Even thinking seemed impossible under the battering of the roaring noise that pounded about him. Then another thought pierced through the bedlam. He had found the source of the uproar.

hat upper shaft, the hole that went on up, must be plugged. There was no outlet that way, and this air that drove endlessly upward from the room must be coming from the lower shaft. It was striking up into that upper cavity.

An organ pipe, truly. But whence came the unending blast of air to keep that gigantic instrument in operation? Rawson dropped to his knees and crept slowly across the floor toward the pit. He must test his theory—see if that was where the air was driving in.

Just short of the brink he stopped. The girl had called—a cry of alarm. She was running swiftly toward him, circling the pit. And Rawson, as she tugged at him, trying to draw him back, knew that she had mistaken his motive. She had thought he was going to cast himself down.

He did not need to go farther. He was close to the edge. And now, even above that roaring sound he heard the rush of the column of air. He seated himself on the stone floor and smiled up at the girl reassuringly. Her eyes that had been dark with fear changed swiftly to a look so sweetly, beautifully tender that Dean Rawson found himself thrilled and shaken by an emotion that set his nerves to quivering even more than did the sonorous vibration from above.

Her companions had joined her. Dean saw her eyes regarding them steadily. Then, as if reaching some sudden final conclusion in her own mind, she dropped swiftly to her knees beside him, raised one of his hands in hers and pressed her soft lips against it.

And Dean, even had he known their language, could not in that moment have spoken. There had been something in the look of her eyes and the soft touch of her lips that of themselves went far beyond words.

"You darling," he was whispering softly to himself as the girl sprang to her feet and walked swiftly away, the others following.

"An angel, no less—down in this damned place!"

e wondered, as he watched the flickering light far across the room, what destination they could be bound for. Surely no one so radiantly beautiful could inhabit a world of endless dungeons like that where the mole-men lived. But if not that, then what? Where would their next journey take them? And in what direction would they go?

Again Rawson's thoughts were submerged beneath his own weariness. This air that beat about him had seemed cool after the terrific heat that drove in off the Lake of Fire. Now he realized that the air itself was hot. His one spurt of strength and energy had been expended.

He watched the men disappear into one of the passages, but he roused himself when they returned. They were clinging to a strange device, a metal cylinder that floated in air above their heads like a dirigible on end. It was about eight feet in diameter and some fourteen feet in height; both upper and lower ends were rounded. A cage of parallel bars enclosed it from end to end; like springs of steel they extended from top to bottom where they curved in and were attached to the rounded ends.

awson sat up quickly and stared in startled amazement at the thing glinting like polished aluminum in the light. And his engineer's mind responded as much to that smooth finish and the evident workmanship that had entered into the making of this thing as it did to the object itself.

The girl placed her light on the floor. She, too, reached up and gripped a bar of the protecting cage to which the others were holding. With her added weight and strength they drew it down almost to the floor. Rawson knew by their efforts that they were dealing with something actually buoyant, a metal balloon. One of the men, still putting his weight on the bars, reached in and opened a door in the smooth shell. He stepped inside, and a moment later the big shell dropped to the floor and, still vertical, stood on the lower rounded end of the protecting cage, rocking gently as the hot whirling wind hit it.

They were communicating among themselves by signs. Rawson saw them motioning. Speech was useless in that roaring, pandemonium-filled room.

She was motioning for him to follow. One of the men circled that central pit, came beside Rawson and helped him to his feet, steadying him as they crossed the room. The girl had entered the big metal shell. Dean saw the glow of her torch shining through the open doorway and through two other windows of crystal glass.

The big room had grown dimmer. The high ceiling was lost in murky shadows. All the room was dark save where that light struck upon walls and floor to make them glow blood-red. The waiting lighted shell seemed a haven of refuge. To get inside, close the door, lock out some of this unendurable, battering sound—it was all Rawson asked, all he could think.

The door closed. He was within the shell, standing on a smooth metal floor. The others were beside him. Dully he wondered what wild adventure was ahead.

e had expected—he hardly knew what. But there should have been machinery of some sort. If this weird balloon thing was actually to carry them, there must be some mechanism, some propelling power. And instead he saw nothing but the shining walls of the circular room and at the exact center, reaching from floor to ceiling, a six-inch metal post that thickened to a boxlike form on a level with his eyes. There was a plate on the side of that box, a cover, and clamps that held it in place, and on an adjoining side two little levers, one near the top of the box, the other near the bottom.

His one all-inclusive glance showed him bull's-eye windows in the ceiling. There were more of them in the floor. One curved bar, circling the room, was mounted on brackets against the wall. They were telling him by signs that he was to put his hands on it and hang on. One of the men was beside that central post. He too gripped