The greatest adventure
hot. Keep on compressing them far enough and they get red hot--if gases
ever do behave in such a revolutionary way.
"Compression," he answered offhandedly, as if the effort had cost
him no labor. "Compression heats up the gas. When the wave passes it
presses the gas into a small volume next to the roof. That makes it
red hot. Then it escapes through the blowholes. Friction on the sides
makes it hotter still. Of course it catches fire--high up in the air,
high enough so the rush of escaping gas can't blow out the flame. It
couldn't light up, could it, before it reached the air? Then the tide
falls, air has to rush in to fill up the place left by the falling oil
and water, and the flames are sucked down."
"Tides don't rise and fall every thirteen minutes. Your theory is up
the spout."
"My theory is irrefutable. Of course tides don't happen every thirteen
minutes. But haven't you ever seen the way the water swings back and
forth, up and down, when you set it going in a long bathtub?"
"I do bathe occasionally when I'm in civilization. And you may be sure
I shall spend a month in the first real tub I see. Yes, I may even have
time to try your experiment."
"When the tide rushes into some vast underground cavern, half filling
it, big waves must be set up travelling back and forth, up and down
along the trough. Suppose the wave comes in by a long tunnel into a
vast hole, and has to squeeze out by another tunnel. In trying to
squeeze out all at once the waves will be started at the wall above the
tunnel. And all the time the hole is filling up, compressing the gas
against the roof. Now suppose it takes a wave thirteen minutes to run
the length of the underground tank. Then it will force up the gases at
a particular place once every thirteen minutes.
"As it passes the place," he went on with enthusiasm that fed upon
itself, "the air will be sucked down again. That explains our first
blowholes. Now for these. The tank under them must be much longer. The
waves therefore take a longer time to pass under. It follows that the
flame jets will burn much longer. Which was to be proved."
"You have proved also," she pointed out, "that the flame pillars will
be dead for half an eternity. We must wait at least until the next
full moon raises the gas for our torches. And by then we shall be in
Heaven--I hope."
"No, I think every tide must raise the gas enough to send up a flame.
Of course at full moon the flame will be hotter and last much longer."
"And where does your blessed salt water come from to float the oil and
gas and raise the tides?"
"Where all salt water comes from--the sea."
"These tunnels, or others like them--bigger and longer, of course--must
stretch far out under the floor of the Antarctic ocean."
He became encyclopaedic, explaining how, gradually weakening under the
pressure and seeping of ages of water, the bottom of things aqueous had
suddenly given way letting the ocean burst down to the subterranean
fires, flooding them and the innumerable tunnels. This, he said,
accounted for everything. The oily stew of prehistoric monsters which
he and the Captain had witnessed was merely the backwash, the jetsam
of the sudden deluge which had drowned out perhaps a dozen of the
interconnected paradises such as the one Edith and he had discovered.
Some day the floor of the unruined one would give way too and there
would be another grand boiling up of monsters somewhere between South
Georgia and Cape Horn. Or the accumulating gas under its rock bottom
might suddenly hurl it skyward at some tide higher than the usual one.
The origin of these vast tunnels and semitropical paradises in the
frozen continent he was as yet unable to explain. At them his theory
balked, baffled. He doubted now whether the monsters of the stew had
been so recently dead as he and Anderson imagined. Their freshness and
the still uncoagulated blood of the baby devil they had fished up could
be rationally explained on a twenty-four hour immersion in warm oil and
water.
Theorizing thus freely Ole was happy despite the ever present, all
enveloping, stinking darkness. Edith's respectful silence flattered
him. He outdid himself. Never before had he lectured to an audience
so sympathetically appreciative. During his interminable harangue he
forgot even to strike a match. When finally he did, Edith's eyes were
closed. She was fast asleep.
Although deeply chagrined Ole considerately let her sleep. Taking out
his pipe he rammed it full of twist. The coarsely cut tobacco refusing
to burn he reached into his pocket for his knife. Only when he was
about to cut up the tobacco in his palm did he remember what he had
done to the blade. In a cold sweat he closed the knife and returned it
to his pocket. A scratch, for all he knew, might be deadlier than the
fangs of a hundred cobras. Any way he would take no chance of a slip in
the dark.
Refilling his pipe he tried again to smoke. Finally he compromised at
the rate of a match to a puff. It became a continuous performance. The
tobacco in that smoke-fouled atmosphere reeking with an unspeakable
corruption lacked the rich, nutty flavor emphasized by the billboards,
yet it was some consolation. The matches, especially their heads,
tasted even better than the tobacco smoke.
The devil betrayed him just as he broached the fourth box of matches.
He became aware of a wet, dragging noise. Instantly he had a theory
that made him sick. Those filthy scavengers also had eyes. Not only the
bat birds were by nature lovers of the light. One of those huge foul
brutes, dripping corruption at every move, was wallowing toward Ole's
friendly little beacon in the universal darkness.
The noise stopped. Then a measured slopping announced that the filthy
monster had paused to lick itself. Having swabbed off its lunch, or
having performed its unseemly toilette, it sighed prodigiously and
rattled the grating armor of its horny scales. Once more there was
silence.
Presently a hideous rasping proclaimed that the obscenity was
scratching its parasites. Again it sighed heavily, profoundly. The
companionable candle of its quest was perhaps but the disordered
illusion of an overloaded stomach. A long-winded, slobbering belch
automatically begot and confirmed this hypothesis in Ole's paralyzed
brain. He struck no more matches.
Should he wake Edith? If she made any sound the monster must find them.
On the other hand if she woke suddenly when the beast had crawled
closer, as it might, she would go mad from terror and be unmanageable.
He decided to rouse her as gently as possible.
"What is it?" she said, and remembered. "Oh--"
He clapped his hand over her mouth. Again thinking him demented she
struggled violently.
"Danger," he whispered in her ear. "Be quiet."
All her muscles tensed, she instantly became still. Then she heard the
dragging shuffle of some ponderous body approaching the airplane. In a
flash she realized what was upon them.
"Your knife," she whispered.
He opened the blade. Of what use was this toy against a mailed brute
weighing over a hundred tons? Yet it was his one weapon, and instinct
compelled him to be ready for his feeble best.
The creature heard their movements. Its lurching drag, bringing with
it a leprosy of smells, quickened. It was abreast of them, on Edith's
side. Was it going past the machine? In the sooty darkness the brute
blundered forward. Its horny side rasped and rocked the plane, all but
upsetting it.
For some seconds the slow brain of the brute failed to interpret the
unusual sensations. Then it registered, and the foul monster squatted.
The plane tipped sideways. A foot higher and it must capsize.
The dull brain proving inadequate for its problem, the huge brute
resumed its wallowing progress. Presently, to judge by the sounds, it
turned at right angles to the line of the machine, slewed round on its
belly and squatted. Was its head or its tail toward them? And in which
position could it hear the better? They soon learned.
One or other of the occupants of the machine moved slightly and
something creaked. For some ten seconds the brute took no notice. Then,
the significance of the noise penetrating its ganglia, the monster
moved slightly forward, directly toward Edith's side of the plane.
"Quick!" she cried, "the knife! Light!"
A cold breath, unutterably foul, blasted her own and extinguished Ole's
half handful of matches. But the flare had shown her where to aim. With
her whole body she struck at the brute's eye. The keen eight-inch blade
cut it like jelly. Her hand plunged into the slit, burying the knife.
No injury to the slow-witted creature's eye alone could account for
the terrible sound which tore the silence of the tunnel to tatters of
screaming agony. The green paste on the blade was indeed a venom. It
had shot along the blood vessels and the optic nerve directly to the
monster's brain.
Its every nerve was in hell. In its excruciating agony it bounded
furiously about the tunnel, missing the plane by bare yards, and
thundering down from its convulsive leaps in a writhing mass of torment
that shook the very rocks.
No human being could hear those terrible screams without pity. In the
minute and a half that it lived the wretched thing suffered all the
agonies of all the hells imagined by human beings since the beginning
of the world.
With a last shivering yell of absolute pain it was dead.
"Oh my God," Edith gasped, "I did it. Hell, hell, hell!"
In a paroxysm of sobbing she beat her clenched fists against her ears.
14
THE DEVIL CHICK
Their brother's death agonies had roused the bewildered scavengers in
a bellowing horde. Blundering into one another in the darkness, the
monsters fought and screamed till the roof shook. And the multitude of
reptilian birds, alarmed at the tumult, clattered down the black tunnel
in flapping clouds, screeching their fright or pain where they dashed
their brainless heads against the unseen walls. Their broken bodies,
raining down on the rock floor, flapped convulsively till the maddened
monsters trampled them to smears.
Twice when a batwinged bird became entangled for a moment in the guy
wires the plane jarred dizzily, and once a bellowing monster lumbering
from its pursuer set the whole machine spinning like a top. Unless the
pillars of fire burst forth soon it would be only a matter of minutes
until the plane was splinters and the bodies of its occupants pulp.
Above the jarring din they sensed a deeper tremor and a heavier
reverberation. The subterranean waves were buffeting their way through
the labyrinthine corridors beneath the tunnel. In a moment the solid
rock floor heaved like a swell of the sea, the blowholes roared, and
ten thousand pillars of flame burst thundering to the roof.
Panic-stricken, the huge monsters scuttled for their burrows in the
mountain of corruption. On a vast scale it was the scurrying of a
multitude of beetles when a board is lifted, letting down the sun on
their secret world.
Blinded by the sudden glare, clouds of the reptilian bat birds crashed
against the walls of the tunnel, breaking heads and wings and necks.
Most horrible of all, hundreds dashed directly into the pillared flames
to be roasted alive and shot to the rock vault, where they exploded.
Their steaming viscera rained upon the floor.
Before she realized what he was about, Ole had cranked the propeller
and was back in the machine. The impact of the bewildered scavenger had
reversed the plane.
"The shortest way," Ole shouted, and headed for the shambles.
Soaring over it, he plunged into the smoke and stench above. They
saw now the cause of the dimmer light above the festering pile. The