The greatest adventure
Tomorrow we begin packing my part of the show to the circus tent."
Before sunrise the next morning Edith and Ole were stirring in
preparation for their trip. They were off with the first ray. The
Captain having assured Lane that the cold, windless spell was certain
to continue, Edith coaxed her father into giving his consent at the
last minute. She departed with the Captain's heartfelt blessing and his
best thermos bottle full of hot chocolate. What souvenir the blessed
girl might bring back to him today he could only speculate, but he
hoped it would be another oil well of even vaster dimensions than her
first.
What Edith and Ole expected to find on their private expedition they
kept to themselves. Neither had the least suspicion of the handsome
surprise which Nature had generously prepared for their welcome.
Turning sharply to the west as soon as the airplane lost sight of the
ship, Edith steered a straight line toward her find. Ole as navigator
gave her the signals keeping her on the course. She made the propeller
hum. Not being interested in the dreary Antarctic landscape she
shot over it at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, the limit of the
machine's capacity.
The dim blue line on the horizon raced forward to meet them. Slackening
her speed to eighty miles an hour Edith spiralled down like a seagull.
Reaching the level of the lip she circled for a turn near the
precipitous wall and then, to Ole's horror, made a nose dive for the
bottom of that vast well. Cutting out the engine presently she tilted
to forty-five degrees, and glided down, down to the sunlight of the
blue plain below.
"Where are we going?" Ole gibbered in his fright.
"Down there, of course. It looks nice and sunny. I'm half frozen."
"What if we can't land?"
"Then we must fly out again."
"But suppose something goes wrong with the engine?"
"Then we shall be a pair of scrambled eggs with no toast, but only the
hard ground, beneath us."
The sunlight swam up to meet them, and to their astonished eyes was
revealed an azure river winding through a green plain. Dropping
lower they saw the huge trees rush out, and then, farther away, the
innumerable silvery plumes of the pampas grass undulating to the warm
breeze. Entranced they saw the long billows of light rising and falling
like the swell of a silver tide. Here, sunk deep in the icy heart of
the Antarctic Continent lay a paradise of flowing water and luxuriant
vegetation.
Accepting it for what it was they flew on in silence, looking for
a spot to land. For once Ole was without a theory. Later he hatched
several. The probable solution of the mystery was not, however, his
work alone. Drake supplied the egg; Ole merely brooded on it and gave
it wings wherewith to soar.
The dense vegetation by the river thinned here and there into rolling
meadows of lush grass. They flew over these, seeking more level ground
for a landing. At last they spied what they sought, a long sandy spit
cleaving a still blue bay in the river.
They made a perfect landing. Then, when they stood with their numbed
feet on the warm sand they realized the wonder of the place and its
beauty. They were almost in the centre of the vast well. Twenty-five
miles distant in whatever direction they looked towered up the sheer
blue cliffs fifteen thousand feet above the floor of the valley.
Age-old ice bound the brows of those precipices, and over the circular
opening to the sky howled the winter blizzards of the Antarctic,
powerless to freeze the water in this blue river or blight the
tenderest flowers of the valley's perpetual spring. By what miracle
had time preserved this deep garden against the advancing cold? Dying
ages had piled on the once tropical regions above a crushing desolation
of ice a thousand feet thick. While overhead the yelling gales of
winter warred against themselves with whirlwinds of frozen sleet and
splintered shafts of clanging ice, only rain fell through this mild
atmosphere above the valley. How had this spot, this very heart of a
forgotten paradise retained its life-giving warmth, while all about lay
the stark body of life frozen cold in the death of ages? Or had it
always been as they now saw it? These were questions which they could
only ask themselves but not answer.
"This is more beautiful than a California valley," Edith sighed, "and
on a far grander scale than any of them. No other valley in the world
is an almost perfect circle like this one, nor is there another with
cliffs like those to shelter it. Those walls are three miles high."
"Less about a fifth of a mile," the precise Ole corrected her. "I
watched the barometer as we dropped down. Say two and four-fifths miles
high."
"Ole, you are impossible."
They strolled off the sandy spit to ascend a little knoll whence they
might obtain a view of the whole valley. Not until they had been
walking about five minutes did they notice the oppressive discomfort of
locomotion. Thinking that it must be due to their own thawing out in
this mild air after the long flight through zero temperature, they took
off their heavy sheepskin tunics. Another ten yards and they stripped
their Jaegers.
"At this rate," Edith laughed, "we shall be shedding our skins before
we reach the top of the hill."
Ole, puffing like an overfed porpoise, tried hard not to look shocked.
He took a mental oath not to shed another rag. Respecting his modesty
Edith forbore her next impulse and toiled up the slope lugging only her
outer garments. She wished she were Eve and he Adam.
"I know what it is," Ole exclaimed, not stopping to do his theorizing.
"We are two and four-fifths miles below the surface of the earth,
aren't we?"
"Three," said Edith. "But it's too stuffy to argue. Go on."
"Then we are at the bottom of a mine. I mean," he explained
laboriously, "it is just as if we were at the bottom of a mine. All
that air is crushing us."
"You do seem to bulge more than usual," Edith admitted.
Ole ignored this verification of his theory.
"And," he continued, expounding the article on _abyss_ from the A
volume of his sample of the encyclopaedia, "the internal heat of the
earth can be felt at this depth. It gets so hot in the deep mines that
the miners have to stop going down, and just burrow out sideways like
moles."
"Thank Heaven," Edith sighed, "you don't own the entire Encyclopaedia
Britannica. I simply couldn't stand it all in this infernal heat."
"Miss Lane!"
"Oh, I shall swear in a minute. Don't mind me; it's my nerves."
At the crest of the hill they flung themselves panting on the thick,
mossy grass.
"I shall never growl at the cold again," Edith declared. "This place
must be like a steam bath when the sky is clouded up over the opening."
"And the clouds blanket in the radiation," Ole added appreciatively.
This evidently was a gem from the one masterpiece of Herbert Spencer's
which he possessed. It certainly seems unlikely that he found anything
so sensible in either the tattered "_Bluebird_" or his seven-figure
table of logarithms. "On such occasions the humidity must be very high."
"As muggy as lukewarm pea-soup for breakfast. I'm fed up. Let's get out
of here. Put on your clothes. It's less bother to wear than to carry
them."
As she stood up to shake on her sealskin a darker blue stain on the
azure of the distant wall caught her eye. Looking intently at the
deeper blue she imagined that she could see clear through the vast
cliffs into a dim azure world beyond. Then dismissing the illusion
with a laugh at her own fancifulness she started slightly at a new
aspect of the shadow. It was in the form of a perfect arch at least
three thousand feet high. Ole's remark about the miners burrowing out
sideways when the heat grew unendurable stuck in her mind with an odd
persistence. What if this were an old mine, disused since a million
years before the dawn of history?
"What do you see?" Ole demanded nervously. He was struggling with his
heavy tunic.
"Nothing. But you have a look. What is that shadow on the cliffs over
there?"
Ole stared long and hard. His seaman's eyes made out no more than
had Edith's. Not wishing to commit himself to an untenable theory
he wheeled slowly round, searching the whole hundred and sixty mile
precipice.
"There is another," he began cautiously, "three points east of south."
"Yes," said Edith, "and I have counted four more. That makes six in
all. Let's investigate."
"Right, Miss Lane. I'm with you."
Their lassitude vanished at the prospect of adventure. Joining hands
they raced down the little hill by a shortcut which would take them
through a clump of high bushes directly to the airplane. Laughing like
a pair of children off for a picnic they romped into the shade.
Suddenly a huge gray boulder blocking their path came to life with an
earth-shaking screech. Edith screamed and clung to Ole. He stood frozen
in his tracks, paralyzed with terror.
How they ever reached the plane they were unable afterwards to recall.
Edith remembers being thrown in bodily by Ole. He only has a blurred
memory of cranking the propeller, climbing and kicking madly at the
evil red eyes in a hideous serpent head that shot up after him on a
massive thirty foot neck. He swears that he struck one glaring red
eye just before the motor lifted and the heavy bodied brute flopped
on its belly in the sand, fanning the air with the vast spread of its
ineffectual, bat-like membranes.
12
TRAPPED
To the Captain's anxious inquiries the fliers replied that they had
returned early on account of the cold. Although sorely disappointed
that Edith had not discovered another oil-hole for him, Anderson said
nothing. He contented himself with putting Ole to the dirtiest job in
sight. Lane was far inland, superintending the caching of stores. Drake
had gone off somewhere to exercise his beloved dogs.
Edith and Ole conspired to keep their find to themselves until they
should have explored it thoroughly. They began to regret their panicky
flight straight back to the ship. Tomorrow, however, they would keep
their nerve and spend a heavenly day investigating the abode of the
dragon. A landing in the open should be sufficient protection from a
surprise. By avoiding clumps of brush, rock piles and the pampas they
might see much before being chased.
That evening they gathered in the Captain's cabin. The Doctor, having
unpacked his scientific paraphernalia, was absorbed in an attempt to
analyze the green venom which he had collected from the giant reptile
on the beach. The scanty equipment proving insufficient he put away his
test tubes with a sigh of disappointment.
"I shall have to wait for a living victim."
"Let me see your flask, Doctor," Ole begged.
"Have you a theory?" the Doctor laughed, handing over the pint of
thick, evil, green fluid.
"Not this time. But I have a knife."
To the astonishment of the party Ole proceeded to anoint the eight-inch
blade of his murderous knife with the sticky green venom.
"There," he said complacently, brandishing the knife to dry it, "nobody
gets fresh with me any more."
"It may be harmless," Edith remarked with a meaning look. "You had
better not put too much faith in that messy stuff."
"I'll chance it."
As he spoke he unconsciously fixed his eyes on Anderson. The Captain
stirred uneasily.
"Look here, Ole, I set you at that job this afternoon because all the
men were away with Lane."
"That's all right, Captain." Ole was not going to let his accidental
advantage slip. "It gave me a touch of lumbago. Can Bronson take my
watch tonight?"
"I'll take it myself if he can't. With lumbago like that you're not fit
to be on deck. Will you be able to fly tomorrow?"