The greatest adventure
their beginnings, innocuous enough at the time and for millions of
years to come, a swarming, uncontrollable multitude of monstrosities
without intelligence.
"Lane has outlined their probable motives in choosing for themselves
wholesale destruction. Until we shall have spent several years on the
inscriptions we can venture no theory as to how they created life."
"I have a theory!" Ole exploded. He had been suffering for twenty
minutes.
"Pipe down," the Captain ordered. "Lane, how do you account for all
those dead monsters over there by the blowholes? And for the thousands
on the beach, to say nothing of the half million I saw boiling up from
the bottom of the ocean?"
"Easily. Those originators of life destroyed their creation, I pointed
out, by burying the fertile soil of their continent under millions of
tons of air-tight cement. A job like that takes time. The longer they
worked at it the slower became their rate of progress. And for a very
simple reason. As the cemented region grew the food supply diminished.
They took care, of course, to cement over the most dangerous places
first, leaving the lighter work for the last few survivors of the race."
"Now where did they get the rock and other material for making their
untold millions of tons of the hardest cement?"
"Out of the ground, of course. Mines."
"Exactly. That crater we were in today is the ruin of one of their
mines. The vast circular depression that Ole and Edith visited is
another. It fortunately is still undestroyed. That black barrier you
are so determined to explore is the ruined floor of another, heaved up
by the explosion of vast quantities of oil and natural gas. How many
more there may be dotted about this frozen continent I hope some day to
discover.
"Well, as I see it, they mined out those enormous holes to get
material for their cement. The execution of so vast a project as
theirs demanded the highest intelligence and extraordinary engineering
skill. I suspect that they sunk those pits so deep in order to utilize
the internal heat of the earth. In their day, millions of years ago,
the heat at comparatively shallow depths must have been much greater
than it is today in our deepest mines. For the same purpose, and also
perhaps in the search for rarer minerals required in making their
time-outlasting cement, they drove enormous tunnels, galleries and vast
pockets far into the rocks at every stage of their work. We have heard
the tides of oil and water surging along them under our feet.
"Now for your animals. The race in its prime having cemented all the
most dangerous regions, the diminishing survivors had only to complete
the project by cementing the easier places. Their task was to seal the
mines and subterranean chambers. The mines are these vast holes in this
forsaken wilderness. The one we explored this morning certainly has
been plastered with cement. They did a thorough job. That black wall
must have been yards thick before the gas explosion blew the whole
interior to bits.
"The first engineers, foreseeing that the last survivors must perish
of starvation before the completion of their work, took the precaution
of making the sides of their mines perpendicular. It was extremely
improbable that every square yard of the floors, walls and roofs of the
open mines and subterranean galleries would be safely cemented over
before the last worker perished. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acres
of free soil would be left exposed to the light, air and moisture. The
dangerous life seeds polluting these extensive uncemented areas would
live and develop, and with the lapse of ages evolve into abominations.
That is why they made those pits, three miles deep, with perpendicular
walls as smooth as glass. Whatever bred in those mines and galleries
would live and die there. Soil and heat alike eventually becoming
exhausted, the last vestiges of life in the mines and tunnels would
perish. We happen to have arrived before the natural end, which may not
come for millions of years yet.
"Why don't we find the mighty engines which those great workers must
have used? Those which they left exposed to the air were rust a million
years ago. Stone will outlast iron, and this cement, hard as diamond,
would outlast the finest steel. As for such of their machines as they
used in their tunnels and caves, I confidently expect to find traces,
perhaps even one or two complete engines. For I intend to explore
thoroughly every mile of those subterranean galleries from here to the
South Pole if necessary, and from there to far under the floor of the
Antarctic ocean.
"I am convinced that the age-long action of heat and water has slowly
widened the tunnels and extended them far out under the ocean. The roof
of one of these, weakening under the same course, gave way, letting in
the ocean. You saw the backwash of oil and dead beasts blown up by the
steam when the returning wave burst through to the subterranean fires.
The monsters, I suspect, came from another such paradise as the one Ole
and Edith discovered. I shouldn't wonder if it turned out to be the
one you are set on visiting.
"I have also a theory, as Ole might say, concerning the origin of your
oil. These monsters have been living, evolving, multiplying and dying
in the galleries and uncemented mines for millions of years, literally
for ages of geologic time. Their constantly decomposing carcasses are
responsible for the lakes and oceans of oil which, I feel confident,
swing their black tides deep down under this polar ice cap.
"Now, one last thing, and I shall have done. We've been talking an hour
and it's time we all went to sleep. I am willing to bet my specimens,
including the incomparable devil chick, against your oil lake, that
when we visit the unruined mine the day after tomorrow, Edith and I
shan't find a single inscription on its walls. No other pit besides
the one we explored today, I am convinced, will show the trace of
an inscription. One record, the authors of the inscriptions rightly
surmised, would be sufficient. So why waste their labor in leaving a
score? The first record, the one which they later cemented over, was
inscribed near the beginning of their gigantic labor. They were just
about to cement over the walls of the first vast mine, now grown so
unwieldy as to be unmanageable. They decided to leave a record of the
harsh science which was driving them to suicide.
"Accordingly as they worked, they pressed into the unset cement the
secret symbolism of their fatal discoveries. This record they intended
as a warning to their successors should intelligence ever again visit
the earth. Thousands of years later, still toiling at their stupendous
task, they realized fully its crushing magnitude and the horror of
the doom which they labored to nullify. While their own end still was
thousands of years in the future they decided to obliterate forever
the record of the knowledge which had driven their race down the long,
slow way to death. Returning to their first mine they cemented over the
dangerous science which was their ruin. Now let us go to sleep."
"Not yet," Ole expostulated. "You have no theory of how they created
life. Your science comes to a dead halt. Now I have a theory--"
"Shut up, Ole!" the Captain roared. "We want to sleep."
"Shut up yourself!" Ole bellowed, struggling to his feet, sleeping
bag and all. "It is always 'shut up Ole.' The rest of you gab all day
and rave all night. I never get a chance to say anything. Now you are
going to listen to me and learn something for once. I have a theory,"
he shouted, "and you've got to accept it because it is common-sense and
the only true theory of life."
They were sound asleep already.
Ole however was not to be balked. He talked to the bags and, having
delivered himself, joined his audience in slumber.
Edith was the first to awake. She first noticed an oppressive warmth.
Not yet fully aroused she turned over on her side for a last nap. The
sense of discomfort increased. Her hair, she imagined, had fallen over
her face as she turned. Some strands evidently had got into her mouth.
Still lazy, she tried to eject the supposed hair with her tongue.
Failing, she used her fingers. The suspected hair having an unusual
feel she held it before her eyes for examination. In the semi-darkness
she saw that it was green. Startled, she looked more attentively. What
she saw was a mass of fern-like foliage of hair-like fineness.
It was the enemy.
20
DESPERATE
Edith's cries brought the others, unable to get out of their sleeping
bags, struggling to their feet. The mouths of the bags were choked with
thick masses of the hair-like vegetation.
Freeing their heads from the entangling meshes they stared out over
a dense, matted jungle of green hair five feet high. To the south
numerous vivid mounds marked the thickly overgrown carcasses of
the asphyxiated monsters. To the north stretched a dense mat of
impenetrable vegetation disappearing in a dark green cloud on the
horizon.
A hundred yards beyond the mounded monsters the tangled green mass
ended abruptly, save for a single band a hundred yards broad reaching
to the base of the black rocks. There the band stopped. It marked the
course which the men had taken across the ice on their return from the
crater.
Were their ears deceived? They stood motionless, five blunted pillars
festooned with great streamers and wreaths of the rank, fungus like
green weed, listening in fear to the rustling crepitation. The whole
mass was growing audibly.
Then they noticed a deep green discoloration of the ice on the west
side of the broad band between the blowholes and rocks. The edges of
the band were not sharp, like the edge of a cornfield. The green mass,
tapering down at the boundaries, merged with the ice and snow. The
green tinge on the ice far beyond the limit of growing vegetation was
the dust of innumerable spores blown from the living plants by the East
wind which rose with the dawn.
Attempting to move they found themselves bound from feet to armpits
by living ropes woven from thousands of growing, hair-like strands.
They fully realized their desperate situation only when Edith with a
frightened cry called attention to the airplane. It had disappeared
beneath a tangled mound of green ropes. Even if they could extricate
the machine it would be impossible to rise. That matted vegetation
would stop a thousand horsepower tractor in less than a hundred yards.
"It is those infernal spores," the Doctor said quietly. "See how our
track from the rocks to the blowholes is marked by the filthy weeds.
All that started from the dust Anderson and I shed from our boots and
our clothes as we marched. The sea of green rope between us and the
horizon grew up in the night from the spores we lost to the wind.
Evidently this stuff grows very slowly at first, then like a fire, or
we should have noticed it before we went to sleep. So much for theory.
Has anyone a plan for getting out of this? Don't get panicky. Take your
time."
"We might try to break our way through to the clean ice east of the
band," the Captain suggested, "and march round the stuff."
"Not much chance of beating it to the ship, I'm afraid. Still, that's
one plan. Any more?"
There was no response.
"Well," said Lane, "I suppose it is forward march. Not that I am
particularly anxious to return to civilization with this blunder on
my head. My stupidity has let loose one of the enemies which that
forgotten race gave its life to chain. Having done the asinine thing
I now see how it could have been avoided. Evidently these spores
require cold and moisture in order to grow like this. Possibly a low