The world below
temperature? I don’t want to stumble into a glacial epoch, without even
a fur collar in which to face it.”
“You need have no fear of that,” said the Professor, “you will be at
least thirty-thousand years away from the nearest glacial epoch, and
Templeton didn’t seem to have suffered either from change of air or an
excessively high temperature.”
“He took plenty of clothes when he went back,” young Danby added, “but
he said it was much easier to throw off clothes you didn’t want than to
put on those you hadn’t got, and he didn’t know where he would be going,
‘it might be up, or it might be down!’--whatever that meant.”
“It doesn’t sound as though he had much confidence in the resources of
the future world,” I said doubtfully, “and there are about fifty
questions I should like to ask, but they wouldn’t make much difference,
even if you knew the answers, which you probably don’t.
“I’ve got to-morrow to make any preparations that seem worth while. I’ll
take the cheque now, Professor, if you will be so kind as to draw
it,--and I’ll give you a note to-morrow which will clear you with Clara,
if I follow Templeton’s example.”
CHAPTER II
THE EMPTY DAWN
The room which the Professor had constructed for his experiments was
circular, walled in an iron-grey metallic substance, empty, and, when
the door closed upon me, it was in absolute darkness.
Waiting there, I had a curious and disquieting consciousness, as of
absolute vacancy, such as a disembodied spirit might feel before its
next incarnation, but nothing happened, neither did the Professor return
as he promised. I knew that the two minutes were long past, but there
was no movement in the room, and no break in the darkness. Had he misled
me, I wondered, and was I the victim of some quite different
experiment,--perhaps of how much strain the human mind could endure, and
yet retain its sanity? And why was the room so much colder?--and the air
against my face was damp, as though a mist were rising.
I looked round, and saw nothing,--upward, and the three great stars of
Orion’s belt showed through the fog, and the upper part of the
constellation; and other stars were in the central heavens, but lower
down the mist hid them.
If I were indeed transported to some remote and future time, at least
the same stars were there, with little change, even of their positions
in the heavens.
It was a moment when any source of confidence was needed. I had imagined
many ways in which a strange world might appear around me, but I had
overlooked the possibility that I might arrive in the night-time. But
there I was, standing on something which felt hard and very smooth, and
afraid to move a step in the darkness.
How long I stood there I have no means of knowing. The mist increased,
and the night continued dark, and very strangely silent.
Fortunately, I had clothed myself warmly, in a suit of close-fitting
leather garments, with the fur turned inward. I had brought sandwiches
which I had calculated would be sufficient for two days, if other food
should be hard to gain, and I ate some of them, and then as the hours
passed, I grew too tired to stand, and sat down on the hard pavement
beneath me. It felt like very smooth and polished stone, and I reached
out on either hand, thinking to feel some joining which would confirm
this supposition, but could find nothing. As the hours passed, I tried
to lie and sleep, but only those who have done this for the first time
on a hard and level surface will understand my discomfort.
Yet I slept at last, and waked again, feeling both cold and hunger, and
ate and slept, and waked and ate and slept again, till I became aware
that all the food was gone, and still the night continued.
Then fear came, indeed.
Had Templeton come to this, and had he fired his foolish pistols into
the mocking stillness of a perpetual and lifeless night?
The silence was absolute.
An ordinary English night is full of joyous, furtive, or defiant sound.
A tropic night is full of life and movement, and noon is the time of
quietness.
The owl hoots even above the silence of the Arctic snow.
But here there was no faintest distant call, nor any whisper of
movement.
Yet I recalled that Templeton had been once, and returned, so once at
least he must have seen daylight. Then I realised that the darkness was
less dense, and the stars were dimmer.
Dawn approached, but how slowly!
I must have watched for hours while the sky flushed faintly, and still
the darkness was but slightly lifted.
Gradually, very gradually, the strange scene opened.
Sloping downward, and stretching as far as sight could reach toward the
coming sun, was one unbroken plain of purple-brown, on which were
growths of one kind only, compact and round, and averaging some eight
feet in height, like gigantic cabbages in shape, and of a very vivid
green.
Behind me rose a high grey cliff, so smooth and straight that I doubted
whether it were of natural formation, or the work of some directing
intelligence.
Between the cliff and the great plain there was a strip of smooth and
lucent paving, about twenty feet in breadth, on which I had rested while
the long night passed.
As the familiar sun rose slowly, a gradual gold spread over the vivid
green that sloped toward it, till the whole expanse shone with a
dazzling splendour; and as the rising light struck across the path on
which I stood, it showed a shining band of opalescence that stretched
right and left to the horizon limits, beneath the background of the
dark-grey wall.
The sky was of a deep unbroken blue, and the whole scene was one of
great though alien beauty.
I had imagined that I might find myself lost amidst the inexplicable
complexities of a civilisation different from anything of which I had
heard or known, or perhaps amidst enormous jungle growths, and beasts of
unfamiliar terrors. But here seemed only an interminable and barren
weirdness, offering neither menace to life nor any means by which to
support it.
So I thought, in a double error, as I was to learn very quickly.
The sun was by now almost completely visible, but there was no cry or
stir of life to break the silence, nor did any bird cross the blue
expanse above me.
The need to explore the new world in which I found myself was urgent.
There was no hope from inaction amid such surroundings. The cliff on one
side was a wall unclimbable. The purple soil, from which I could see
that a slight steam was rising, offered no invitation to lose myself
among the great green globes, which seemed to be its sole fertility.
There remained only the opal platform on which I stood, by which it
seemed that I might go on, to right or left, for ever.
With nothing to direct my choice, I turned southward, and strapping on
the knapsack in which I carried such things as I had brought with me,
but from which my stock of food was exhausted, and shouldering the
woodman’s axe, which was the only thing beside a heavy clasp-knife which
I carried as tool or weapon, I walked briskly forward.
CHAPTER III
DEATH?
I had gone no great distance, and the sun had yet scarcely cleared the
horizon, when I came to a high cavity in the cliff-wall.
It was of such height that an elephant would have looked a pigmy as he
passed inward, and of a shape too regular to have been formed without
the tools of some controlling mind.
The level sun shone into it, and illumed it, a very spacious tunnel, for
a considerable distance. Then it bent out of sight. I went inward a few
steps, and hesitated.
Anyone who, on a strange and lonely road, has reached a place where it
branches in two directions, without knowledge or sign to guide his
choice, will understand my feeling. Still in doubt, I walked back to the
cave-mouth, and then, down the middle of the opal way, came something
very swift and light. Someone who was neither man, nor beast, nor
monkey. Someone who ran without effort, but as in urgent and silent
fear.
She did not see me until she was level with the gap from which I watched
her, and when she did, she leapt sideways with incredible agility. The
leap took her to the very edge of the opal way, and her left foot
pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the
speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open
in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot,
and dragged its victim down.
There came one scream, intense and dreadful, high and shrill, and then I
watched a lithe furred human-seeming body which struggled against the
clinging, twisting arm which dragged her in.
The tentacles were very long and thin, and of a brick-red colour. The
one which reached her first was not thicker, toward its end, than a
man’s finger, but for a moment only was there any doubt of the issue.
Then a stronger tentacle got a firm grip of its victim’s body, and as it
did so the scream came again, but shriller, louder, and more exultant,
and I realised that it was the plant that screamed, and not the prize it
had captured.
I don’t think I should have interfered but for that second scream of
triumph, but there was something in its tone so hateful, so bestial,
that an impulse of pity for its victim broke across the blank amazement
of my mind, and with the feeling, as thought that answered thought, I
knew that she was calling to me to help her.
The axe lay ready to my hand on the cave-floor, and I picked it up and
ran forward.
I brought the blade down on the nearest tentacle with such force as
would have severed a branch of a well-grown tree, but it only dented a
skin that was soft and flexible, but tough, like rubber.
As I swung the axe again, a long arm caught me round both ankles and
pulled. Had I not been so strange to it, had it better gauged my
strength and weight, or had it not been occupied with its earlier
capture, I suppose that the next minute would have ended my experience,
but as it was, the clutch only stirred me to a desperation of terror
that brought the axe down with double force, and the severed limb fell
quivering to the ground.
As it did so, the creature screamed again. It was a cry of the most
utter terror, abject and hellish beyond any possibility of words to tell
it.
And the forest answered.
It answered in a hundred voices that screamed, and clamoured, and
questioned, and replied.
I had never known before the strength which panic and loathing may give
to human muscles.
Backward writhed the frightened tentacles, their victim dropped and
forgotten, and every axe-stroke that followed gashed or severed one of
them, and where they were cut through, a wine-red semi-liquid jelly
slowly welled from the gap.
I think as the creature contracted and closed its petals I might have
stayed the blows if it had not screamed for mercy on a note which gave
me a feeling of nausea, and a lust to kill, so that I struck till the
great flesh-like leaves were gashed and shredded; till, as the cries
continued, I realised that the centre of its life was underground,
beyond my power to reach it.
Then I lowered the axe, and looked round.
Dimly I was aware that my heart was beating wildly, and that I was
breathing with difficulty.
Still the forest was screaming around me in deafening tones of fear and
hate and menace.
I looked back to the comparative safety of the cave I had left, and I
saw the one that I had saved slowly dragging herself towards it, and as
I did so I was conscious that she knew my thought, and answered.
I became aware for the first time that the soil on which I stood was
hot, and that my feet were scorching.