The world below
world. You fear the Dwellers, who, as I understand, eat and use violence
as I do. I understand that you supply them with fish, which seems
inconsistent with your objection to the slaughter of meaner creatures
around you.”
She replied, “I know that you are telling me the truth as you see it;
and some kind of supremacy you may have in your place, though it must
be, indeed, a strange one. I cannot suppose that there are other
creatures with bodies weaker than yours, more quickly tired, or more
awkward. Are all its animals wearers of those tattered things in which
you conceal yourself so quaintly?”
I replied, “Our bodies are doubtless better adapted to their familiar
conditions than for those in which I now find myself, as our clothes are
also. The lower animals--with some unimportant exceptions--have no outer
coverings. Should we dispense with our clothes we should consider that
we had descended to their level. We wear them from shame, from
self-respect, and to enable us to endure the climatic changes, and the
severities of the colder portions of the earth on which we dwell.”
“I can well understand,” she said, “that you are ashamed to show your
bodies to other animals, or even to each other, but can you really say
that you cover them from climatic changes? Your face and hands are bare,
which would be of all parts the most sensitive. If you can harden them
to such exposure, could you not harden the remainder of your bodies
also, and feel the joys of sun and wind and water, as all creatures
should?”
“The custom of wearing clothes among my own kind,” I answered, “is very
ancient, and is universally practised. Whether it be for warmth or
ornament, or from causes more difficult of definition, it would be
impossible for any one of us to break it. He would be persecuted or
destroyed by his fellows. You must understand that we have no individual
freedom. In my own land this loss of discretion has been reduced to an
absurdity, there being so many laws to be obeyed that it is impossible
for any one--even those who give them unceasing study--to know all that
there are. Also, we pay men to make more laws continually, so that, in
theory, we may be brought into yet closer bondage, but in practice that
is a thing which is barely possible, and as new laws are made, others
fall into disuse and forgetfulness, because it is beyond human capacity
to observe so many. We do not want more laws, but we have started a
machine in which we ourselves are involved, so that we have no power to
stop it. Many of us despise the laws that we have already--so far as we
understand them--and break them whenever we can do so to our own
advantage, and with sufficient secrecy. Others respect them so greatly
that they will do mean and base things without shame, if the law require
them, thinking it to be sufficient apology.”
“It is too strange,” she answered, “to be understood, unless it be told
more fully, and our time is too short for that, but I have not replied
to your question concerning the fish-feeding of the Dwellers. I see
clearly what you mean, but it is a thing which had been done from the
beginning. It was arranged by our Leaders, and we have not thought to
question it. It is true that the Dwellers, though they are superior to
your kind beyond comparing, are of more animal bodies than we. They must
be fed, and their food, in part, is the fish, which themselves live by
the destruction of others, and are destroyed by them continually. We
divide the shoals and drive those that become excessive into the great
tanks which extend beneath the mountains, where the Dwellers do with
them as they will. I neither doubt nor excuse it. The mackerel that we
drive, or the deep-sea salmon, will eat even of their own kind, and the
fruits of death are in their own entrails while we drive them. They obey
us, as is natural, without protest, and this thing which we do has never
troubled our peace.
“You say that you are supreme, and we are not. I think you can have
supremacy only amidst a very low creation. It is something which, until
now, we have neither sought nor heeded. In all the oceans we have held
it without challenge.
“But I think the difference is not there. It is that you are not sure of
yourself. Your own thoughts, or even your own body, may resist your
will. You are like the state of which you tell me, wherein laws are
confused and changing, and may be broken by those who make them.
“Of all this we know nothing, and therefore, were I in the midst of the
Dwellers, whose powers are terrible, I should walk in greater freedom
than you could do in your own land, whatever be your supremacy among
inferior things. But I am hindering your mind from the adventure which
is before us. It is yours to direct it, as our Leaders rightly saw, for
we are contending against creatures who are more of your own kind than
ours. Let me know what is your purpose, and I will give you all the aid
I may, either with mind or body.”
As she concluded thus, we reached the place where the trench we followed
stopped abruptly before a rising bank, and we knew that we were at the
end of the divided fields, and could no longer travel in the same
concealment. Steps led here to a trodden path, which we left immediately
for the lesser risk of a hillside which was covered with gigantic
boulders, between which we moved cautiously upward, while the day was
slowly dying, the western sky showing, for the first time in my
experience, something of the sunset-light of my familiar world, in a
cloud-born glory of yellow and purple light above the mountains.
My companion answered my thought: “It is the season of storms
approaching. In three days’ time there will be cloud, and great winds,
and hidden skies. It is nothing to us, but for those that live on the
earth’s surface it must be distasteful.”
I made no reply, for at that moment my glance fell on a Browning pistol
which lay amongst the loose stones I was treading. In the compelling
strangeness of the experiences through which I had passed I had given
little thought to those who had come here before me, but I remembered
now the arsenal of weapons with which Templeton had returned and
vanished.
I looked round, as though expecting him to appear before me. In the
growing gloom I searched round for some further sign, but could find
nothing. I opened my mind to my companion, but she could not help me,
though she searched with keener eyes than mine. I reflected that we were
a long distance from the spot on which I--and presumably he, but was
that certain?--had first arrived. If he had travelled so far, he might
have gone farther. The abandoned pistol was ominous, but perhaps he had
only thrown it away because his ammunition was ended. Possibly he had
left it there, intending to return. Possibly he dropped it by accident.
Anyway, it was useless to me, and I laid it down where I found it.
And as I rose, my companion’s mind, to which I was becoming increasingly
sensitive, interjected urgently: “Do not move, or fear. Look up to the
right hand.”
The ridge of the rocky hill we climbed stood out sharply against the
sunset light behind it, and above it rose the head and shoulders of a
giant form. He had stepped over to our side of the ridge, and stood
above us, one hand on the crest, as a man might lean his hand on his own
gate, and was gazing around, as one who is more occupied with his own
thoughts than with a familiar scene beneath him.
So he stayed for a moment, and then descended the hill with giant
strides, as the Titans may have moved when they found the earth too
small, and thought to own the heavens.
He might have crushed us under foot, as a plough-horse treads a
crouching mouse in the furrow, but we stood quiet and unmoving as he
went past without seeing us--or so I thought, but my companion differed.
“You cannot know the thoughts of the Dwellers,” she told me. “They are
not as we, or as you are. They are terrible in power, and, sometimes, in
forbearance also. But they are beyond our understanding.”
My own impression was different. I saw a Titan indeed, but one of my own
kind, and one, I thought, who was preoccupied with a great perplexity.
But whether he had seen us I could not tell.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ARSENAL OF THE KILLERS
The moon had not yet risen, but the starlight was brilliant, as we
climbed the path that led to the stronghold of the Killers.
As we approached it in the darkness it looked larger than it had
appeared to me in the vision, and our task more formidable.
At this high altitude the night began to be cold already, and I supposed
that the temperature might fall very low before the dawn of the next
day. I began to understand why I had found the stillness of the first
night so absolute, and why all creatures sought for rest and warmth
during a night-time so much longer than our own, and in which the change
of temperature might be so much greater.
But I had more urgent considerations to engage my thoughts. To rescue
the imprisoned Amphibian from a guarded prison in the midst of the
stronghold of the Killers, whether it were attempted by force or
strategy, appeared about equally hopeless, but the Leaders had laid this
task upon me, and whether they really believed me capable of performing
it, or had used me as a pawn in a larger purpose, I was equally
committed to the adventure.
My comrade also laid the responsibility upon me, as she clearly had the
right to do. I had her promise of unquestioning aid in anything for
which I might call upon her, and I had learnt to rely more than a little
upon her fearless serenity of mind, as well as upon the abundant
physical vitality which she shared with me so freely.
On the other hand, the more I relied upon her powers of spirit or body,
the more menacing became the fact that I was braving those who had
entrapped one of her own kind, of superior grade to herself, who
apparently could not escape unrescued.
Whether they had received warning of our coming I could not tell, but I
reflected that even though a report should have reached them that the
regiment of the Amphibians had passed into the mountains six score miles
away, they would not only suppose that no fear from that quarter would
be possible for a day at least (or much longer if they should judge by
their own speed of progression), but might not even think that any
hostility to themselves were intended, nor might it occur to them as
possible that an attack would be made in the night-time, when they might
suppose the custom of rest to be universal.
Even if they knew that two of us were wandering on the lower slopes, we
might only appear to them as prey to be sought in the morning, and, I
thought, with a sudden lightening of humour, they might be right in
their estimate.
On the balance of probabilities, I thought the better course would be to
approach them boldly, and try what might be done in secrecy while the
darkness was round us.
Indeed, when we gained the plateau, caution lacked opportunity, if we
were to advance at all. For outside the enclosure it was bare and flat
beneath the starlight, and a rat could have found no shelter.
Having crossed the open space as quietly as we could, we walked for some
distance along the outside of the enclosure. It was a back-sloping wall,
or roof, as I had seen it before, having no door or window in all its
length; but knowing that there were doors along the inner side, and that
the Killers slept within it, and not knowing how lightly they might do
so, or how thin might be the wall that divided us from them, we now
moved very silently till we came to the gateway. Here we paused in
surprise, for it was not only unguarded, but open.