The world below
I stopped myself sharply with the thought that it might be something
different from wholesome water, in this place where all was strange, but
I had drunk well by then. I looked round and saw a heap of large cakes
of a dark-brown bread-like substance. There were nine of these neatly
piled, and behind them was a white slab in the wall, on which there were
three blue paintings, like Chinese picture-writing, one under the other,
each about a foot deep, and too high on the slab for me to examine them
nearly.
I shredded off a great slice from the bread with the axe, and found it
good, and sat down and ate heartily.
After I had eaten, I felt so refreshed that I thought that I would rest
for a few minutes only, and resume my exploration, but I must have
fallen asleep, I don’t know for how long,--I had been awake already
beyond the length of my accustomed day,--but I woke as from a long
night’s rest, hungry and thirsty again, and I ate and drank awhile, and
hesitated whether I should turn back, and hope for a clear passage, or
continue down, to find I knew not what of fear or horror at the end. But
the thought of those squatting forms above was not encouraging, and to
go down is easier than to climb, and so at last I decided to continue
downward.
For many hours I continued. Always there was the steady spiral of
descent, the opal light, the high wide dove-grey walls, the steel-grey
flooring, which looked so hard, but was so soft and springy to the
tread. And always--I should have mentioned it before--a steady current
of air came upward. I cannot say “blew” upward, it was too gentle, and
too absolutely regular. It was of an exhilarating freshness, and like a
cushion on which to lean forward, in a descent which might otherwise
have been too steep.
So I went on, never knowing what might open before me at the next step
of the turning way, but with a mind which became dulled with the
monotony of the passage, so that I went on at last in a semi-conscious,
dream-like condition that took no count of time,--_there was a sound
behind me_. There was something with a heavier tread than mine that
pursued me downward. With an instinct of unreasoned terror I commenced
to run. And so doing, I kept ahead, but I gained little. I looked back,
but the curving passage was bare. Only I heard the tread, which I could
not distance.
A sense of the uselessness of flight steadied me, and I recalled my
resolution to meet the unknown boldly, as the safest way.
I stopped, stepped back against the wall, and waited. Then he strode
past, and was gone in a moment. He was a man of giant size, with a skin
yellower than old ivory, and of a curious smoothness. He wore no
clothes, but had a sack or basket hanging upon his back, and round his
waist a belt with bright metal studs or clips, from which, three on each
side, six of the frog-like apes that had pursued me hung by a leg,
swinging and writhing, and snapping with fierce teeth against the flanks
of their captor,--teeth which made less mark on the polished smoothness
of the skin than if it had been the ivory to which its colour compared
it.
So much I noticed as he passed. He gave no sign that he saw me.
I was still standing there when I heard him returning.
This time he picked me up, as a gardener might pick up an earwig, and
dropped me over his shoulder into the basket he carried.
I fell among moss, of a coarse growth, like sea-weed, but very soft and
yielding. It was of a sage-green colour, and of a very pleasant odour,
which I cannot describe. A new scent is, like a new colour, beyond
imagination.
I burrowed deeply into the softness of the moss, and feared and
wondered. But the present comfort was very great, and I reflected that I
had not been hurt, and that for such strength so to lift me meant that I
had been picked up very gently.
I think I should have slept, had he not lifted the basket from his
shoulders, and lowered it to the ground, closing the top, which drew in
with a short thong, as he did so.
For a few moments I lay still, and then wriggled through the moss till I
could see out of the opening, which was wide enough for a considerable
view, though not sufficient for me to escape.
I saw that we were in a cavity, like that in which I had rested
previously.
There were the same furnishings, and on the wall-tablet the giant was
painting a fourth mark, below three which were there already.
He had taken off his belt, and thrown it into a corner, with the six
captives still fastened to it.
He now pulled one of them off, and taking it between thumb and finger,
shredded the four limbs. While he did this, the creature made no sound,
but the wide jaws snapped continually.
Laying down the limbless body, he proceeded to peel and eat the limbs as
one might shred off the skin of a banana. They did not bleed, the flesh
being like a stiff jelly, of a bright-red colour, and veined with a
gristly white substance, giving an appearance like the flesh of a
pomegranate.
Hideous as these creatures were, it shocked me to see this callous
tearing of one that still lived, apparently with undiminished vitality;
but the eater’s face, as I now saw it, had no suggestion of savagery.
Rather it was melancholy and preoccupied, and as he ate he talked
continually to himself in a plaintive monotone, though with an organ
volume.
I reflected that men who are otherwise humane will swallow a living
oyster, of the skinning of eels, of the fish that are boiled alive in
Indian kettles, and of a hundred cruelties to which custom has inured
mankind, and thought I understood, however incompletely,--which, of
course, I did not.
The limbs being gone, he picked up the trunk, and, twisting off the
gnashing head, he threw it down and proceeded to complete his meal. Such
offal as there was,--it was unlike that of any creature familiar to
me,--he collected neatly, with the peeled skin, and the severed head,
and opening the bag in which I lay, threw them in with me. I realised
afterwards that it was for the orderly deposit of such refuse, among the
aromatic moss, that he carried it with him.
Afterwards,--but not then. For as he shook and closed the bag the
severed head rolled against me, and the snapping teeth ripped the
leather of my left sleeve from wrist to elbow. Panic seized me at this,
beyond reason, and I was more terrified of one severed head than I had
been before of the whole animal. How, I thought, if we were both carried
in the bag together, and it were shaken against me? Already I felt its
wide mouth closing on my flesh, and biting deeper while I strove to
shake it free, with no body to strike at. How if there should be five
more heads tumbling about me? And how soon did they really die? Terror
edging my wits, I realised that because their bodies had not the thin
fluid of familiar blood, the head could only be very slowly affected by
the separation. Then how long might----? I struggled up to the mouth of
the bag. It was drawn too tightly for escape, though I could see through
it as before.
My captor lay stretched full length. An arm moved restlessly. More than
once he muttered the same words. _E-lo-ne, E-lo-ne_, so it sounded, with
a hopeless, falling cadence, infinitely sad.
Evidently I was forgotten, if I had ever held his thought beyond a
moment.
After a time he slept.
Then I struggled to kick back the moss, and gain a space to stand
upright, and swing the axe, and desperately I attacked the side of the
bag.
It proved unexpectedly easy, and then difficult.
The first stroke cut down a long slit with a rasping sound, and the
light shone through it. The next stroke made a parallel slit, and I
thought that a few more would bring my freedom. But I found that, though
I could make many downward slits, I could not squeeze myself through
them, and to cross-cut was a different matter. I hacked long and
desperately before I contrived a ragged hole, through which I crawled to
freedom.
As I escaped, my fear left me. I did not dread the sleeping giant one
tenth as much as the contact of the unbodied head, with its snapping
jaws, and small malignant eyes.
Deliberately, I drank and ate before I turned to take the upward way.
Of that long toil there is little that is worth a word, with so much
else for telling.
Somewhat the rising current of air must have buoyed me. Coming to the
higher resting-place, I slept long, and ate and drank before and after.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BIRDS
When I came again to the surface-world there was no sign of life around,
but a great stillness, and the dawn was breaking in an unimagined
splendour.
On my left hand, not distant, sank the ravine, black and terrible.
Beyond it was the distant forest of the nameless things. But before me,
to the reach of sight, the ground sloped downward, and was covered with
a level-surfaced growth, so close that I could only guess its depth, but
showing only a sea of leaves, not larger than a man’s hand, and of a
bright green, as though varnished; and these leaves the dawn-light
altered to reflected gold, so that my dazzled sight recoiled from a
splendour beyond endurance.
It was as though one should look straight at the noonday sun, to find a
glory not of one small-seeming orb, but of stretched leagues, and myriad
facets, of an equal brilliance.
But at length, as the sun rose, the light changed and faded. A thin mist
moved over the surface of the unending field of green, but was not dense
enough to hide it.
The green growth came to the very edge of the opal path, and looking
down I saw a tangle of sinuous macaroni-like stalks that twisted
restlessly, having leaves only at the top, on the close and level
surface; and as I watched, tongues like pink worms pushed upward, and
licked and wavered in the air, and drew backward. As the day advanced,
thousands of these pink tongues were thrust upward and withdrawn
continually, giving a wavering pinkness to the glossy green. It might
have had beauty to familiar eyes, but to mine it had a loathsome
strangeness, so that I was reluctant to walk beside it, and for some
time I sat at the cave-mouth and pondered. I was half tempted to descend
once more and face what might be in the depths below. Certainly, there I
had found water and something akin to human food, and evidence was in
that mighty tunnel itself of such work as no brute creatures could
contrive or fashion.
I reflected, was it not reasonable that there should be a less highly
cultured life on a planet’s surface, subject to wind and rain and all
inclemencies, than in the sheltered security of its vast interior? Was
it not an amazing thing that the men of my own time, fatuously imagining
communication with incredibly distant worlds, had been contentedly
ignorant of their own, ten miles below the surface; had made facile and
contradictory theories of its interior, none of which the few known
facts supported; and because they found some increase in the temperature
for a trivial distance downward, had been content to conclude, without
attempt at verification, that this heat increased indefinitely. How
diligently they searched the secrets of the most distant stars, while
they had scarcely scratched the surface of the one on which their lives
depended!
So I thought, but instinct conquered. I was a creature born to the wind
and rain, and not to the hidden depths beneath me. Even though these
bordering growths were but the kitchen-gardens of the intelligences
below,--as indeed they might be,--in a moment I saw it, wondering that I
had not seen it sooner. Great stretches of one plant in weedless soil.
Even if the life around me were but as that of insects, useful or