CHAPTER VII
INTO THE BLACKNESS
Bill and Abington came to and entered a narrow, straight-walled gorge. It had a loose, sandy bottom and every indication that ages before it had been a watercourse with the floods of glacial rainfall sluicing down to the valley. Presently Bill, plowing laboriously ahead to a certain spring he remembered in a cave up this ravine, gave a grunt and stopped short.
In the peculiar, amethystine veil of the afterglow which lay upon the hills like a cunning stage effect of, colored lights, he pointed a finger stiffly to a certain mark in the sand. Abington limped forward and joined him.
“I see the gosh-awful is here ahead of us,” he said listlessly. “Well, it will be obliged to wreck us personally this time, Bill, since all our worldly goods are literally on our backs. We may get a sight of it at last.”
“That all you care?” Bill stared at him. “Maybe I’d feel that way about it, too, if I had a gun to defend myself with. You’re making a big mistake, professor. You’ll see it before you’re through.”
“Possibly.” Abington’s tone was skeptical. “How far is it to the spring?”
Bill did not reply. He was still staring at the strange tracks that were too large for any sheep one could imagine, yet not shaped like cattle tracks, nor much resembling the elk they had discussed last night. Blurred though they were in the fine sand, they were yet easily distinguishable to being the same hoof prints they had seen across the valley.
The tracks did not look very fresh, and after a brief study of them Abington took the lead, perhaps because he was armed and Bill was not.
Presently Abington stopped and pointed to a cleft in the rocks. “Whatever it is, it turned out of the gorge and went up there,” he said. “Pretty good climbing, even for a sheep.”
“I’ll go ahead and show you the spring,” Bill volunteered and Abington chuckled to himself.
Bill looked back at him with sullen eyes. “All right for you, professor—with two guns handy,” he said resentfully. “Put you in here with just your bare hands and maybe you wouldn’t be so damn nervy, yourself.”
“I’d probably wait until I saw some danger before I became alarmed.”
Bill muttered something under his breath, and stepped out more briskly. Both were thirsty, but since they had left the western side of the valley with one canteen nearly full, the need of water had not yet become acute. It was the tramp across the valley with packs too heavy for them that had told on the tempers of the two men—with Abington’s bruised foot and Bill’s nervous dread of pursuit for good measure.
The spring proved to be well protected, in a water-worn cave that seemed to offer excellent shelter. A tangle of nondescript oak bushes grew near the entrance and drew moisture from the overflow which, though slight, was yet sufficient for the scant vegetation.
The cave itself was not large, with a fine sandy floor and a lofty arched roof of irregular blocks of the red sandstone which was the regular formation of these hills. A lime dyke broke through here and there in sharp peaks and ridges in a fairly continuous outcropping roughly pointing toward the river.
Abington slipped off his pack, drank from the spring and sat down against the wall of the cave to unlace his boot from his lame foot.
Bill began gathering dry twigs and branches and set about making coffee and frying a little bacon. “We oughta git a sheep or something,” he grumbled, breaking a long moody silence. “This time of year there’s generally sheep running in through here.”
“I’ll take a hunt, when my foot has had a rest. We can manage for a day or two,” Abington replied without looking up.
“Say, you’d be in a hell of a fix if you broke your leg,” Bill sneered. “You’d starve to death before you’d trust me with a gun, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s meat for to-night. To-morrow will take care of itself.”
“Yeah, maybe it will—and it’ll leave us to do the same,” Bill retorted. “What the heck are you scared of, professor?”
“Nothing at all. Not even your gosh-awful. Will you fill that corn can with water for me, Bill? I’ll try a cold compress on the foot.”
Bill did as he was requested and a sight of the discolored foot stirred him to sympathy. Abington, he suddenly saw, must have suffered cruelly all day, though he hadn’t said anything about it. Bill remembered too that Abington had remained awake all last night while he himself had slept. But it was not Bill’s way to apologize.
“That’s a hell of a looking foot!” he growled. “Hot water beats cold. After supper I’ll heat a can of water—”
“After supper I’m going to sleep,” Abington rebuffed him. “Cold water will do.”
“Have it your way—it’s your foot,” snapped Bill, and relapsed into his morose silence.
It was not an agreeable supper, and neither spoke while they drank coffee and ate bacon and fried corn from the same frying pan.
Bill was tired and full of uneasy fears and he bitterly resented Abington’s action in regard to the guns. He was accustomed to the feel of a gun’s weight against his hip and the thought of facing trouble without a weapon gave him an uncomfortable feeling of helplessness. Add mystery to the hazard, and Bill reacted with a dread not far removed from panic.
Abington ate and drank his share, then forced himself to explore the cave with a lamp. He chose for himself a niche in one side of the wall near the entrance, where he would hear any intruder and would still be fairly well concealed.
At least, that was his idea when he settled himself in the recess. As a matter of fact not even his aching foot could keep him awake. He dropped almost at once into the deep dreamless sleep of exhaustion. When he opened his eyes it was to see the sunlight slanting into the cave—a circumstance which at first convinced him that it must be nearly noon, since the cave opening faced the south and the cañon walls were high.
After a brief space of mental fogginess, however, his mind snapped into alertness. He remembered that he had stooped to enter the cavern; the sunlight bathed the high-arched roof just over his head and brought into relief certain symbols—left there by the ancients, he had no doubt.
For a time he lay looking up at the roof, deciphering each crude character, his eyes tracing the lines which even in that sheltered place showed the erosion of many centuries. Some of the lines were dimmed; none retained the sharp outlines left by the engravers.
Now he knew that the cave had a high opening through which the sun was shining; a common occurrence in that old formation that had suffered the buffetings of wind and water for millions of years, and moreover had been rocked and twisted by many a primeval earthquake. He thought no more of the opening, but insensibly slipped under the spell of those ancient records, his imagination thrilling to each new sign as it caught his eye.
The story of a journey was depicted there, a journey of death, he judged from certain priestly emblems and the sign of burial. Perhaps they had attempted to depict the journey of the soul, though he could only guess at that, his speculations revolving around a figure of a dog or wolf, very similar to the jackal which in the belief of ancient Egypt was supposed to carry souls across the desert to paradise. He wondered, searching farther along the roof for further inscriptions.
Like an old rangeman riding up to a herd of strange cattle, unconsciously reading the brands and mentally identifying the owners, Abington could not seem to pull his mind away from that roof. Beyond the sunlit patch the carvings extended into obscurity so deep that, stare as he would, he could not distinguish the lines.
A sense of bafflement nagged at him. Just as the cattleman will follow a range animal for half a mile, seeking the vague satisfaction of seeing what brand had been burned into its hide, Abington sat up and put on his boots, and picked up the can of carbide and miner’s lamp which he used in preference to candles when exploring dark caverns. He started climbing up a tilted shelf of rock that offered a precarious footing for a man tall enough to bridge certain places where the shelf had dropped completely away and left gaps in what may once have been a steep narrow trail.
From the floor of the cave it looked impossible for anything save a fly or a lizard to climb to the roof. When he started, Abington had not expected to do more than reach a point from where he could view the shadowed writing at closer range. He kept going, however, while the lame foot protested with twinges of pain that gradually ceased as the muscles limbered. Presently he stood on a low irregular balcony, the writings just over his head.
This was something he had not suspected even while lying on his back studying the roof. He made his way along the ledge, forced to stoop so that he was soon walking like a gorilla with his hands sometimes touching the balcony floor. He became suddenly aware of an odd variation in the rough sandstone. The sharp, granular formation was worn down to a dull smoothness in the center of the ledge where he walked. It was a pathway polished by many shuffling feet—nothing else.
He turned a corner and peered into blackness; an ancient water channel was there, no doubt. Abington lighted a match, saw that the hieroglyphics continued along the wall. Waiting only long enough to light the carbide lamp, he set off along the narrow passage, pausing now and then to study the inscriptions as he went.
Broad chambers receded into blackness beyond the white light of his lamp and these he hastily explored before going on. Labyrinthine passageways were revealed as he turned the light this way and that, each opening inscribed with strange symbols carved in the rock at the sides.
“A gold mine of records!” Abington exclaimed to himself in the whisper that was his habit when alone. “The ancient people who lived here seem to have had a Scribblers’ Club of very active members! An ancient catacomb, or I’m mistaken. That, or else these symbols were carved with the express purpose of misleading one. H’m! An attempt to confuse the devil and thwart him in his search for the souls of the dead! Now here’s a pretty problem for an archaeologist. Let’s see if I am smarter than the devil!”