The greatest adventure
"Flying rests my back. I'll be better in a week or two."
Edith rose to retire. As she went out she shot Ole a significant
glance. Mumbling an excuse he followed her.
"Why not take a revolver tomorrow?" she whispered.
"No use. I couldn't hit the side of the ship at ten yards."
"But suppose we do get caught again? That stuff may take hours to act.
I doubt whether it is a poison at all. Father really knows nothing
about it."
"What can we do? A guess is better than nothing. Besides, I don't mean
to get caught."
"Neither do I. Oh, that awful brute. I shall have a ghastly nightmare.
Good-night, Ole."
They were off at sunrise in the stinging cold. Drake for a spell at
breakfast had grown quite peevish, not to say profanely rude, when Ole
harmlessly asked him to pass the butter. The memory of what Drake
had said was food and warmth to Edith on the freezing spin south.
Having nothing to cheer him but the shadowy prospect of sticking an
over-developed lizard with wings in the gullet, Ole froze. It was with
reckless relief that he shed his sealskin when at last they landed.
Today they had come down in the centre of a five mile meadow. Unless
the enemy flew they were safe.
Ole had brought the Captain's strongest binoculars. With these he
now slowly swept every mile of the vast precipices, blue in the hazy
distance. On each of the six sapphire shadows he lingered a full five
minutes. The dim shadows, he decided, might be weather stains on the
cliffs. If nothing more a three thousand foot stain should be worth
investigating.
"You take a look, Miss Lane."
"Those are caves full of mist," she said decisively, handing back the
glasses. "Which one shall we try first?"
"The nearest. That one to the southeast. If we don't like what we find
this is a good place to fall back on."
"You think we may wish to turn tail in a hurry?"
"We can't tell," he said uneasily. "I am no coward."
"Of course you are not. Neither am I. Shall we go?"
"My eyes are better than yours, Miss Lane. Remember, I have been half
my life at sea."
"Well?"
"I thought I saw things moving at the base of those cliffs. They were
only shadows."
"Afraid of a shadow, Ole?"
"Yes," he admitted frankly. "Show me something real and I'll fight it
like the next man. Put me up against a nightmare the devil himself
never dreamed of and my legs turn to water. Now you know how I feel."
Impressed by his outspokenness she held out her hand for the glasses.
Long and curiously she searched the base of the cliff.
"I believe you are right. There is something over there at the foot of
the precipice. How far away from it are we?"
"About twenty-three miles."
"Even if the shadow were an elephant's we couldn't make it out at that
distance."
"Not with these glasses," he admitted.
"Has it struck you that those moving things can't possibly be shadows?"
"Why not?" he queried nervously.
"Because that whole sector of the cliffs is itself in deep shadow."
"I hadn't thought of that," the unpractical builder of theories
admitted. "Are you going on?"
"Yes."
"No woman ever got the better of me yet, and I'm damned if a kid in
short skirts is going to make a monkey of me now."
"Ole!"
"Oh, it's all right, Miss Lane. The Captain isn't here."
"You behave yourself or I'll leave you with the reptiles."
Flying as slowly as was possible they cautiously approached the
mysterious stain on the southeastern wall. At that hour of the morning
the shadow of the precipice lay in a great blue crescent on the valley
before them. Soon entering the shadow they experienced a sudden drop in
spirits. To the superstitious Ole the semi-twilight was a gloomy omen
of disaster.
Edith began to wish she had been less daring. Hating to back out after
her bold front to Ole she kept her forebodings to herself. Nevertheless
she had a strong premonition of trouble. The thought that the motor
might fail them at a critical moment almost made her sick. Swallowing
hard she anxiously scanned the terrain for a safe landing place. To her
joy she observed a gentle three mile grassy slope from the base of the
precipice to the edge of the pampas.
They were now near enough to make out the nature of the stain. It was
indeed what they had first guessed, a colossal archway over half a mile
high in the face of the sheer cliff. Smoky with blue mist it might
have been either a huge cave or the entrance to a tunnel under the
continent. If the latter, Edith made a sudden resolution to explore it
to the end--some day. At present she felt too shaky. Her nervousness
soon received a shock that acted as a counter irritant.
Ole had been making efficient use of the binoculars.
"Let me have the wheel," he said presently, "while you take a look with
the glasses."
They were now within five miles of the cliffs. Although it was not
exactly a sane proceeding, they changed places in mid-air. Ole now
became the pilot and Edith the observer.
Her first observation stopped her heart for two sickening seconds. The
green slope at the base of the cliffs was a crawling den of gigantic
monsters. The huge, torpid beasts blundered and crawled over one
another's sluggish carcasses like blind salamanders. Evidently they
were just awakening to greet the sunlight which in a few hours would
stir them into activity. The vast cave or tunnel no doubt was their den
and breeding place.
"Fly lower," Edith ordered, "and let us see what the brutes look like."
Her stomach had resumed its normal position.
Without the flicker of an eyelash the stolid Ole obeyed. No snippy
kid in short dresses could outdare him. He dropped sharply to the
fifty-foot level, let out the motor to its limit and shot straight as a
bullet toward the misty cavern. Edith shrieked. She had met her master.
The droning roar of the propeller roused the lethargic brutes to a
trumpeting rage. A hideous forest of writhing necks shot up; flat,
brainless heads swayed up to spit their hatred and their venom at the
breaker of their bestial sloth, and the obscene red membranes of the
huge brutes' aborted wings clattered impotently against their bloated
bodies. The fetid stench of their breath mingling with the reek of
their foul lair defiled the morning with an unforgettable sickness.
A flashing vision of innumerable eyes red with brainless ferocity,
a din of yellowed fangs clashing after their unattainable prey, the
penetrating breath of a living decay, and the hideous flight was a
memory.
Was Hansen insane? Again Edith shrieked as he shot full speed into the
blue mists of the cavern. Shutting her eyes she instinctively braced
herself for the obliterating crash.
It never came. Whether or not she fainted she doesn't know. Ole swears
she did.
When she opened her eyes she thought for one wild moment that she was
in hell. The blue mists had given way to a rapidly flickering crimson
glow. The oppressive heat all but stifled her. Great gushers of flame
thundering up from the floor of the vast tunnel flattened and curled in
fronded fire over the arched rock half a mile above. Down the endless
distance colonnades of pillared flames dwindled in vistas of alluring
terror, enticing the damned to their torments.
Ole had been less rash than he seemed. While Edith was taking her fill
of the den over which they shot he, like a born navigator, was minding
his own business. As the blue entrance of the tunnel rushed forward
to meet him he saw that its interior was approximately straight and
sufficiently well lighted for safe flying. The chance he took was
negligible. A mile from the entrance he sighted the first flaming well,
and thereafter the tunnel became a well lighted corridor, broad and
lofty, ideal for rapid flight. Danger of a collision with one of the
roaring flame pillars was nil, the highway down the tunnel being over a
mile broad and the avenue of flame wells at least half a mile wide at
its narrowest point.
Those three thousand foot pillars of flame were absolutely without
smoke. Ole's reasonable theory--inadequate, as later events
proved--made them vast natural gas jets. He recalled that there are on
record in Asia oil wells and escapes of natural gas which have been
flaming continuously for over two thousand years. Therefore, he said,
this probably was the same sort of thing on a much grander scale. The
age-long action of water opening fissures in the rocks had first let
vents into the subterranean oil and gas reservoirs. Then the heat of
chemical reactions between the water and the minerals in the rocks had
ignited the gas. This detail of his theory led him seriously astray.
Had he chanced upon the true explanation of how those gas pillars took
fire--which any competent physicist would have guessed at once from the
peculiar behavior of the flames over the blowholes which Anderson had
discovered--he would not have rushed like a fool into the trap which
nature had prepared for him.
Granting the ignition of the gas the astute Ole reflected that the
rest of the inferno explained itself. Intense heat and the constant
high pressure of escaping gas had enlarged the first vents into huge
circular wells, up which the solid flames shot until they impinged on
the rock roof three thousand feet above. Doubtless, he reflected, the
red hot rocks up there were constantly flaking. In time an avenue of
blowholes would burst through the roof of rock and ice for some later
explorer, far in the future, to find and wonder over. He inferred
naturally that under Anderson's trough of blowholes there probably
extended another vast tunnel through the solid rock. The six shadowy
arches which he and Edith had observed on the wall of their circular
valley no doubt were all of one kind. The continent must be, in this
strange region, a vast rabbit warren with tunnels branching in all
directions, some even to the sea.
At this point of his meditations Ole experienced his first qualm. Those
other blowholes onto which the party had blundered differed in one
significant respect from those which the future explorer of his musings
was to discover. The escape of gas and flames through the first was
intermittent and its period strangely regular. The periodicity of the
first blowholes was the disturbing peculiarity. These gushing wells of
fire in the tunnel seemed to be continuous. Did they ever go out like
the others? Ole's imagination leapt ahead of the racing machine. What
if those pillared flames should suddenly drop down their vents and
disappear? In the dark he must smash himself against the tunnel wall
like a ripe tomato.
This squeamish reflection passed from his mind to make way for another.
One detail of his inadequate blowhole theory received a sudden and
disconcerting confirmation. Half a ton of red hot rock shattered itself
with a crash on the floor of the tunnel not a hundred yards to the
right of his course. The whole roof must be cracking under the fierce
bombardment of flames from those thousands of gigantic blast furnaces.
For the first time he now noticed the stifling heat of the tunnel.
The rushing air positively scorched. What if his petrol tank should
explode. And what if a red hot fragment of stone set fire to the
airplane? Ole began to sweat from a combination of too many clothes,
too much heat and too little nerve. He was not having the best time in
the world. Nevertheless he shot on like a courageous fool at a hundred
and twenty miles an hour down that vast tunnel into the bowels of the
earth. No snippy little kid in short dresses should make a monkey of
him.
The kid had recovered her senses. She was having a heavenly time. Her
one regret was that her father had not seen all those nice beasts. She
must take him back an egg if the beasts were that sort.