Limanora the island of progress
itself for the investigation of the new phenomena and the sinking
of lava-wells, and only two could be spared for an inspection of the
volcanoes of their old home. Thyriel and I were chosen to make the
expedition. For we had lately been accorded the high privilege of
marriage, and comradeship in danger was the usual and natural welder
of the new bonds. As soon as the review was over we had to set forth
on our venture, and we were instructed to return with all the speed we
could manage.
We did not need such instructions; our own quickened enthusiasms were
incentive enough. We knew that the reports by the idrovamolan of events
occurring so far to the south could not be wholly trusted; for these
regions were too often enveloped in mist or blinding snow-storm, and it
was difficult to float the observer in the teeth of their furious winds
and impossible to send the telepathic line of light to such a distance.
Even if electric, aural, and visual records had been gathered by means
of the machine-reporters, they would not have been minute enough for
the purposes of the Leomo. There was generally needed therefore a
personal inspection of the lands away to the south, whenever there were
unusual perturbations in the great mountain and its precincts.
To have been selected for this difficult duty was honour so great as
to stir us to unwonted effort. A few hours after the duty had been
assigned us we had everything on board our faleena, and from the
hill of farewells we had started, full of eagerness to do our best
for our people. We were too happy in our new comradeship and in our
extraordinary task to allow any sense of separation or fear of disaster
to cloud our thoughts. So anxious were we to be on our way that we
scarcely looked back at our companions and guardians, as they stood
watching our flight after giving us of their magnetism.
Nothing occurred to make the voyage south especially memorable. We did
notice far below us in the night one or two dark masses that were not
identifiable with anything in our maps. But we set them down as great
icebergs, borne out of their usual course; and the cap they seemed to
bear we took for a turban of mist round their heads. From our later
observation of the southern lands, we afterwards judged that they were
temporary volcanic islands thrown up on the line of shallow water by
the renewed violence of the fires below.
A great storm met us as we approached the ice-cliffs of the Antarctic;
nothing could be seen for the drift of snow and hail through the air,
and we were forced to rise high into the atmosphere beyond the region
of winds and tempests and clouds. For days we could see no break in the
massed blackness below us. We chafed at the delay but knew that it was
inevitable; for even if we could have landed in safety, we should have
been able to see nothing for the thickness of the driving snow-storm,
and we would assuredly have imperilled our faleena in attempting to
come to earth in the baffling winds.
At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmosphere lessen in force
and caprice, and we knew that the disturbances below would gradually
vanish. The sun seemed to gather power, and we saw the cloud-floor
rend like an ice-sheet on flooding waters. The fifth morning broke
brilliant and clear. There lay the heaving surface of the ocean blue as
the sky, and away to the south gleamed on the horizon the knife-edge of
far-stretching ice. But there was something new and strange beyond it.
Thick smoke trailed heavily above it, and a dozen new points of light
made it lurid.
We had drifted far to the north, and anxiously we turned the prow of
our airship towards the old home of the race. We seemed to wing our way
with inordinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the new
phenomena and to carry the report back to Limanora. Every league nearer
made us more certain that some great disturbance had occurred in the
crust of the earth. The sea was covered with the débris of a world of
ice. Huge icebergs swam lazily breasting the swell, or clashed against
each other in splintering collision; in some of them we could see the
dark motes that marked them as portions of the vast graveyard we had
once visited. Closer still to them we could see many of the long-buried
bodies emerging from their tombs of frost, like Lazaruses still bound
in their grave-clothes. It was a strange sight, this phantom-like
resurrection at the touch of sunlight.
Over the unguided procession of icy funeral-barges, bearing their
century-sheeted dead to burial in the ocean, we hurriedly winged to
land. There were still more striking sights in store for us. The
appearance of the cliffs and mountains had been completely changed.
It looked, as we approached, as if what had formerly been a great
plateau had been ridged and furrowed by some titanic plough; and where
a dozen smoke-vents had once borne witness to the living fires beneath,
hundreds belched forth ashes or sent a red tongue of molten lava oozing
and licking down their slopes.
We had to change our landing-place far to the west; for dozens of miles
had been added to the eruptive area and the cliffs where we used to
land were scarred by explosion or were tottering before the assaults
of the billows. The storm that we had encountered had evidently been
the companion, if not the result, of this vast upheaval and at the same
time had hidden from us, as we hovered above the clouds, the titanic
pyrotechny.
We flew along the cliff-line, till we reached a region that seemed
untouched by the orgasm of the earth. Our airship we piloted into a
cleft or valley which, we thought, could protect it from any showers
of ashes or torrents of lava that might approach. But to guard against
possible disaster, we adjusted our wings and took with us as much of
the minute stores of sustenance as we could carry in our garments. We
securely fastened down the faleena, so that no storm might bear it
away; and then we rose into the air on our wings above the smoke and
steam that hung over this region.
It was with great difficulty and some danger that we investigated the
state of the land where the lava-wells had been sunk. For the vents
spat out great showers of dust and ashes intermittently, and the
pall of smoke brushed this way and that as the light breeze rose and
fell. By dint of care and watchfulness we managed to see most of the
ridge-side that abutted on the ocean. Its whole appearance had been
changed. There was not a sign of our old lava-wells. The side of one
hill had been blown away, and a torrent of melted snow and ice raced
down the ravine. Vents had been broken out where there had been glacier
or precipice or rocky peak. But as yet none of the vents were low
enough to let the sea break over their lips. The worst of all had not
yet occurred.
We could not finish our investigation in the first day. So we lay down
in our faleena to sleep, as the brief darkness approached. We were
well content with our day’s work; and we would have slept easily and
well but for the tremors in the earth beneath us. Its very foundations
seemed at times to shake and threaten convulsion. Once we thought of
taking to the air again for safety, so billow-like were the movements
that tossed us as we lay.
However, morning broke without catastrophe, and we were soon busy at
our work of inspection. We flew to the other side of the range of
mountains in order to note how the shores of the inland sea had borne
the effects of the commotion in the crust of the earth. At first we
seemed to see no change, but when we had left our faleena and followed
the old line of cliffs, the magnitude of the disturbance impressed
us. New precipices stood beetling over the still waters, where we
remembered to have seen low shelving bays. We searched for the old
sections in which we had seen the stratification of civilised abode;
but the strange palimpsest of prehistoric history, a dozen times
rewritten by the toil and hope of man, had been again obliterated by
the finger of fire. A tongue of lava only just cool had licked out the
record of the dead ages. A tawny glacis of rock confronted us instead
of the panorama of thousands of years.
Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not
merely creative, but destructive. Still farther off we found vast
subsidences which had suddenly unveiled the secrets of many geological
epochs. Some of them had been titanic in the abruptness and extent of
their work; but the great ice-planes and ice-harrows had been already
smoothing and rounding or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only
in one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden record. A
bold hill had been cut through as by a sword and here had evidently
been built and overwhelmed village after village; we could discern here
and there traces of their employments suddenly abandoned, their looms
and ploughs and anvils embalmed in rock; and once or twice the forms
of the workers, tragically surprised at their work by the showers of
ashes, showed empty and void, the living tissues having fallen to dust
leaving only the shell, like the tunnel of a huge worm in the petrified
débris. We lingered over this open volume of human history longer
than we would have done had we been older and wiser, so deeply did it
touch the fountains of romance, and the dimmer twilight of the brief
antarctic night overtook us before our task was done.
When we awoke at dawn, we resumed our investigations, only to find
countless signs of renewed subterranean energy. We hurried to the
various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the
first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new
volcanic vents. We could have no hesitance as to the conclusion to
be drawn and the next steps to take. It would be impossible for us,
unprovided as we were with instruments and engines, to guard against
the threatening catastrophe. The best we could do would be to return
with all swiftness to Limanora and warn the elders of our family.
Perchance we should be able to anticipate the approach of any tempest;
and if temporary measures were taken, the coming winter might stop the
gaping mouths of ruin with her downward-creeping glaciers.
We hastened back to the slope on which we had left our faleena. Even
at a distance, as we swept down from aloft, we began to be troubled at
the changes in the landscape. Where there had been a great ice-cap
crowning a precipitous ridge, there was a gaping chasm; rock and
incrustation had been together blown to atoms. A new smoking cone was
brushing the azure with its cloud of dust; and, as we descended, we
found its streams of lava still licking and hissing their way through
the snow and ice that clothed its feet.
We recognised the features of the locality with difficulty, and it
was long before we fixed the valley in which we had left our airship.
Still we could see no trace of our trusty faleena; it had vanished.
After long search we came to the conclusion that it had been swept on
by a billow of molten rock and overwhelmed, and the realisation of the
calamity cast me despairing to the ground.
How different it was with Thyriel, I perceived, as soon as my dismay
allowed me to rouse my consciousness from its palsy. She was exploring
the edges of the tongue of fire; and up the side of the opposing hill
she found a section of our flight-car unmelted by the heat, broken off
by a bold jut of rock and left scarred by the fire and twisted by the
force of the sea of lava, yet recognisable in its outlines. Happily
it was the part that contained our store of sustenance and all our
equipments for a long wing-voyage, spare chest-and-shoulder engines and
the apparatus necessary for supplying them with electricity from the
air.