The greatest adventure
useless. For it is impossible to bake the soil over thousands of square
miles to a depth of several feet. I am assuming from tangible evidence
that the plague of life had passed so far beyond control that the very
soil was impregnated with its germs.
"What would they do? What could they do but seal every mile of the
infected soil? No air must reach the life spores. Light must be
excluded. They systematically set about burying the fertility of their
continent under millions of tons of air tight cement."
"But why should they bring slow starvation on themselves," Edith
objected, "if, as you say, they had not created any dangerous animals
to prey on them, but only the merest beginnings of life?"
"For one very good reason, my darling angel child. We may assume that
their intelligence was higher than ours. Otherwise they could not have
created life. Knowing enough even to blunder onto the secret of life
they certainly would be competent to decide whether their creation was
in line with orderly, normal evolution. Finding that their artificial
life spores all were but the potential ancestors of abominations to
be evolved to maturity millions of years in the future, they looked
forward to the probable state of the world as a result of their
mistake. They foresaw hell on earth.
"There was no immediate danger. There was not even the possibility of
slight discomfort for millions upon millions of years. But there was
the absolute certainty at the end of ages of a world that a decent
beast wouldn't live in. They weighed one against the other--the
certainty of continued happiness for their race for a few million years
longer against the equal certainty of hell on earth forever thereafter.
And they decided that their protracted happiness, even their continued
existence, was not worth its deferred cost.
"I have said that they were intelligent. The deliberate sacrifice
of their own happiness for a future that would never dream of their
existence, proves my assertion. It is your stupid man who has the soul
of a hog. Drake, you go on."
"Let me first knock the stuffing out of one of Ole's numerous
theories," Drake began. "Then I can go on where the Doctor stopped.
Ole maintains that the intelligent beings--I won't call them human,
for they were too unselfish to deserve the epithet--who depicted all
those acres of fantastic monsters actually saw the creatures whose
outlines they pressed into the wet cement. He contends that the artists
drew from living models. That I flatly deny. I admit that they saw
the models which inspired them. But they saw with the mind's eye
only. Lane, I believe, is right. They actually created nothing more
terrifying to behold than tiny specks of jelly."
"You must prove your theory," Ole exploded, rising bodily in his
sleeping bag to defend his offspring.
"It proved itself the first time I saw your precious photographs. Of
all those thousands of different monsters represented in your pictures,
not one was in a posture that by any stretch of the imagination could
be called natural. Every last one of them is drawn in some grotesque
attitude that would set an Apache artist's teeth on edge. There has
been a deliberate and successful attempt to make each posture unnatural
in at least one detail. The variations are not mere conventions. They
are systematic, infinitely various, and exceedingly ingenious.
"That gave me my first clue. Whatever race designed those inscriptions
had done its best to convey the information that the beasts were in a
definite sense, imaginary. They were not imaginary in the sense that a
fire breathing dragon is fictitious. By the help of half a ton of books
I learned that such creatures were not flesh and bone impossibilities.
They _might_ have come into being if natural evolution had started from
different beginnings. Lane helped me a lot on this. My own first guess
was merely a jump in the dark.
"Being ideal representations of non-existent but possible creatures,
what could they signify? The answer was immediate: the results of an
elaborate scientific prophecy.
"Even I, unscientific antiquarian as I am, have heard of those
astronomers who predicted the exact spot in the heavens in which a
planet--Neptune--that no human eye had ever seen, would be found at
a definite time on a certain night. And in spite of Lane's harsh
estimate of my scientific incompetence, I have also admired that
splendid discovery by the Scotch mathematician who foresaw from his
equations our wireless waves and described their behavior a generation
before wireless became practical.
"Knowing these antiquarian scraps of scientific history I let my
imagination loose. If it is possible for us to predict unseen planets
and foretell in detail great scientific advances, why should not a more
intelligent race beat us at our own game? We predict only physical
things. Why shouldn't Lane, if he had brains enough, predict the future
course of a hen's life from an examination of the unhatched egg?"
"No reason at all," Lane laughed. "Some day they will do better than
that. You should let your imagination go."
"It might never come back to earth if I let loose altogether. Well,
I made my working guess. I supposed that the authors of those
inscriptions were predicting the distant evolution of some form of
life. Taking that as a foundation I tried what I could build.
"You remember my remarking the entire absence of human figures from
the inscriptions. Not one of those thousands of creatures represented
could by any flight of the imagination be considered above brute
intelligence. The artists had taken great trouble to depict in each
instance a savage, almost brainless stupidity.
"Now I had also noticed immediately the vivid and life-like pictograms
of sanguinary battles. Putting these two facts together, the total
absence of all higher intelligence and the repeated depiction of
terrible conflicts, I reached what seemed an obvious conclusion.
"The authors of the inscriptions, I inferred, were predicting their
own annihilation by an enemy as yet not fully created. Further they
predicted the subsequent reign of brutal anarchy and unintelligence.
The inscriptions were a forecast of what was to happen in the course
of evolution. Intelligence, they predicted, was to disappear from the
earth. Brute force, nature gone mad, and a chaos of living things were
to rule in the place of dethroned order.
"So much for the prophecy. Now for the recorded history. Almost at the
first glance I recognized that two distinct periods of art, separated
by a vast interval of time, were represented in the inscriptions.
Between the earlier and the later the technique of pictorial design
had changed fundamentally. The art of both periods is developed almost
to perfection. Nevertheless, ages separate the two schools, and they
belong to the same race. I need not bore you with the evidence. It
is of the same sort as that which enables archaeologists to say at a
glance whether a sculpture is Greek or Egyptian and further to fix its
date relatively to some standard object.
"Notice now the extraordinary and significant detail. The two periods
of art, although widely separated in time, were of equal brilliance.
During the ages between the first and second there had been no decline.
We have no parallel to this in recorded history. A few centuries, or
at most two or three thousand years, sees the rise to approximate
perfection and the sure descent to mediocrity.
"This fact puzzled me more than all the other difficulties together,
and it still is baffling although to a lesser degree. I was totally
unable to decide which inscriptions were the earlier. The inscriptions
of both periods depicted struggles and, so far as I could see for
a long time, struggles of almost identical character. What was the
obvious conclusion? The earlier inscriptions prophesied the ghastly
conflict, the later recorded its occurrence. I became convinced that
the forgotten race early foresaw its extinction in the shadowy future,
lived for ages in undiminished vigor anticipating destruction, and
finally was overwhelmed in the height of its power, surviving only long
enough to leave a record of impending and absolute defeat.
"I then tried on this hypothesis to decide which set of inscriptions
was the earlier. The net result was nil. Either the problem was beyond
me or I had gone stale.
"The intense scrutiny was not however a dead waste. A suspicion which
had long been germinating in my subconscious mind struggled up to
certainty. One set of inscriptions undoubtedly and possibly the other
also, was in cipher. The actual conflict depicted was merely the symbol
of a deeper war. It was not beast against beast, but beast against
intelligence. Unmistakably the battles of one set of inscriptions were
symbols of a conflict that was not material. What then could have been
its nature?
"By a process of exclusion I decided that the only rational guess
was a struggle against natural laws. The conflict was not material;
it could not be against spirits. It therefore most probably was
intellect against brute nature, the endless struggle of intelligence to
be master of itself and creator of its own fate. The symbolic set of
inscriptions, I decided, must record the struggles of the long extinct
race to subdue nature. In short the inscription must be a summary of
the more important scientific discoveries and technical achievements of
the race.
"The next question was, why should they wish to conceal their
scientific knowledge? My answer was immediate. It was also, I am
now convinced, inadequate. The scientific knowledge of the race, I
reasoned, must have been entrusted to a particular cult whose business
it was to increase and apply the store of wisdom. To prevent disasters
this cult by means of hieroglyphics and symbolic language would conceal
from the uninitiated all dangerous discoveries. Only a history of the
severe struggle to master the secrets of life and the material universe
would be recorded, so that later generations of seekers should not
repeat the experiments and encounter the same dangers.
"It was now natural to ascribe the purely symbolic, or scientific,
writings to the earlier period. The later inscriptions I took to be
a record of the destruction of the race by the creations of its own
science. The ruin which their scientists early predicted overtook them,
and the perishing race left a warning to intelligent life, should such
ever again inhabit the world, not to repeat the uncontrollable blunder
which had destroyed its first perpetrators.
"This hypothesis received a startling confirmation when we discovered
that lump of black cement with the embedded inscriptions. The interior
inscriptions, those which had been cemented over, belonged to what I
had decided was the earlier period; those on the face of the fragment
to the latter. Evidently the attempt at concealment had been much more
thorough than I dreamed. The race not only disguised their dangerous
scientific knowledge in ambiguous symbolism; it actually buried the
obnoxious wisdom beneath several inches of a cement as hard as diamond.
"What could have driven them to such drastic caution? Only the
desperate determination to obliterate the last traces of their
scientific knowledge. Any why? Because in the final conflict they had
found its consequences terrible beyond belief.
"As to the nature of their dangerous knowledge and the aspect of the
monstrous catastrophe which it engendered, I can only follow Lane in
his speculations. That race blundered onto the secret of life. Creating
it, they fashioned the seeds of abominations. This they realized. And
they foresaw that with the lapse of ages evolution would breed from