CHAPTER VIII
THE GREAT CHAIN OF EVIL
Ordinarily John Abington thought fairly well of himself and he felt certain that these misleading characters could not prevent him from finding the way to the actual burial place. For one thing, he discovered that many of the passages—a miner would have called them drifts—had been hacked out by hand, with stone hammers and wedges. How long and arduous a task that had been, he could only conjecture.
In several of the drifts he found implements to prove his theory. After a glance or two that identified them with the early people he had been tracing, he went on and left the implements lying there for the present, knowing that he could return at any time and get them if he wished to do so.
It cost him several fruitless trips down long, winding ways that finally ended in blank walls, before he learned to mistrust the man-made passageways, which had evidently been cunningly constructed to deceive the devil himself—and any other unwelcome intruder.
He began to study more carefully the carvings placed at the openings of these zigzag passages, but after a while he was forced to admit to himself that he could make nothing of them. So far as he could determine with a cursory examination they all looked much alike, though he knew there must be some secret differentiation. He could only avoid such corridors as seemed to him the work of human hands, and go on.
Going on was not a simple thing, however. Many times he was forced to crawl on hands and knees along an old water channel with fine red sand packed hard and smooth, and at such times he caught himself looking for human footprints. That he found nothing of the kind in any of the old water channels seemed to him a proof that the ancient ones had traversed these black passages before the time of copious rainfall, else the sand would not have been so smooth and untrodden.
Frequently he was forced to climb up through crevices where the rocks were worn glossy—always, wherever rock lay underfoot, the same smoothness prevailed —until it seemed to him that he must soon emerge upon the crest of the high-turreted ridge which formed that wall of the cañon.
After a time that to Abington had been timeless, so absorbed was he in the fascinating quest of a final destination which these signs seemed to promise, he was recalled to practical things by the dimming of his carbide lamp. He held it close to his ear and shook it, but heard no sloshing sound in the small water compartment above the carbide.
He moved the tiny lever that permitted the water to leak drop by drop over the lumps of carbide to form the acetylene gas which burned with a clear white light until water or carbide—or both—were exhausted and the gas ceased to form, but the flame still burned feebly and threatened to go out altogether.
Abington glanced at his watch and gave a low whistle. No wonder the lamp was going out! His watch said that the hour was eleven thirty-five, though he would have sworn it was crazy if the lamp had not begun to fail.
He must have been prowling in there for three or four hours. That was as long as the lamp would burn with one filling of water. The previous evening he had wanted to make sure of a steady light in case they were disturbed during the night and he had put in fresh carbide and filled the small tank with water just before going to bed.
“Damned idiot! Brought the carbide can along, and no extra water!” he anathematized his carelessness.
After all, he was not so culpable, however, for he had intended to use the lamp for only a few minutes, to study the carvings on the cave roof. The can of carbide, lying beside the lamp, had gone into his pocket from force of habit, a good habit, too. If only he had slipped the quart canteen over his shoulder! But Abington’s work had taught him to manage comfortably with very little water and who would burden himself with a canteen when he was merely going to climb fifteen or twenty feet?
He shut off the lamp entirely, since it was folly to waste the flame while he sat there thinking over the unpleasant predicament in which his scientific zeal had led him. That little cat claw of light might serve to help him over a bad place, he reflected. As he sat there, he could recall several places which he would not care to negotiate in the dark. Furthermore, there had been trickles of water in some of the passages and one cavern held a pool.
It occurred to him that Bill would probably be worried. It was the first time he had thought of Bill since he started this strange underground journey. He remembered now that he had not seen Bill in the cave when he left it that morning. “He’ll think the gosh-awful got me in the night!” Abington grinned to himself.
Abington hated to go back without having discovered the secret of these writings, but common sense told him that the thorough exploration of this place was likely to take some little time. The problem now was to find his way back to the cave. He had little doubt that he could retrace his steps, though he realized that it would take some time, feeling his way along in the dark, as he would be compelled to do unless he found water.
He stood up, stooping under the low roof, and stared unseeingly into the blackness whence he had come, trying to recall the nearest point where he could find water. It was some little distance back, he knew. He had been climbing considerably in the last half hour or more and the walls were dry.
Well, he would have to help out with matches until he found water enough to fill his lamp. An inveterate smoker, he had a fair supply of matches; and now he lighted one and tucked it under the little lamp switch, so that he could have the benefit of the blaze down the full length of the wood.
That first match having helped him down a rough channel where the boulders were trickily piled, he felt his way along the wall as far as he dared go before lighting another. Walking in alternate darkness and light, he made his way for some distance.
Inevitably the time arrived when he paused, hesitating between a left-hand turn and a right, with a black hole directly in front of him. It cost Abington two matches to decide that he knew none of these passages, that he had not come this way at all.
He was about to retrace his steps to a point where he was sure of the landmarks when, far away, he heard the faint drip, drip, drip of water falling on rock. At first, standing there in black silence save for the intermittent tinkling, he could not tell where the sound came from.
By walking a few feet down each passage, however, he eliminated first the left passage and then the right, and so went straight ahead down a gentle incline with roof so high that a match flame failed to reveal it, and so narrow that his shoulders brushed the walls on either side as he walked. He judged it to be a natural fissure running through the hill, an old watercourse; the ridge seemed honeycombed with them.
That particular match having burned itself out, Abington walked on in darkness, frankly relieved at the near prospect of water. He was willing now to admit to himself that he was very thirsty, and that the hunger gnawing at his stomach could be easier borne if he had a drink.
It would be a relief, too, to have a decent light once more and he promised himself grimly that this time he would not loiter along, studying hieroglyphics as he went. They could wait until he came in again prepared to explore the place thoroughly and chalk the different turnings so there could be no blundering in the future. So, thinking of future precautions, he stepped out over the lip of a small precipice and fell headlong into water.
He came up spluttering sentences which might have surprised Bill, who had found him always controlled in his speech. Abington fumbled for the edge of the pool, found it and hung on with one hand while he explored with the other for room to lift himself out on the rock. Grimly he clung to the lamp, which was doubly vital to him now, and when he had made shift to crawl out he turned and sat with his legs dangling in water to his knees while he prepared to fill his lamp.
“Well, I wanted water,” he said with a chuckle, when his first startled rage had passed and he was smoothing the water out of his wet beard. “Sooner or later we do get what we want, I’ve noticed, even though the manner of getting is often unexpected.” With the lamp cap opened, he leaned and dipped the lamp in the water, feeling for the depth.
Abington’s nerves were scarcely more susceptible to emotion than wires, but the Stygian blackness and the silence broken only by that tinkling drip, drip, drip, began to press rather heavily upon his consciousness. In spite of himself his fingers shook and fumbled the simple mechanism which provided for lighting the lamp with a spark when matches were not available—as his emphatically were not, after their involuntary bath.
He whirred the little wheel again and again before he succeeded in striking a spark that would ignite the gas, and exhaled a long breath of gratitude when the slender white flame suddenly sprang into life. Solicitously he coaxed it into a brighter radiance and turned its full beam upward, looking for the spot where he had walked over the edge of the fissure. When he found it, his mouth sagged open.
“Call this hole a teapot, and I’d say I fell down the spout,” he grunted. “A pretty problem—getting out again!”
In truth the problem was not pretty, but instead was as ugly a situation as any in which John Abington had ever found himself. The place was not unlike a huge teapot with bulging sides and the fissure for a spout. How deep the water was in the pool, he could only guess; considerably over six feet, he knew, because he had taken a dive of about fifteen feet and he did not remember that he touched bottom at all. As to the diameter of the pool, that too was a matter of conjecture, since the light did not show the farther rim.
He leaned over, dropped a wet match into the water and watched it, edging along the rim of the pool as the match floated gently away from the side where he had fallen in.
Abington’s eyes brightened. “Thought there was a current,” he said with a nod of confirmation. “Some outlet, of course. Some inlet, as well. This pool never filled drop by drop.”
Carefully guarding his lamp, he worked his way along, following the match. He saw it hesitate, poise and sway like something grown suddenly fearful, then up-end and disappear under water as if invisible fingers had reached up and seized it. Abington leaned far over, flung another match into the water and saw it disappear as the first had done.
He dropped his hand into the water, let the fingers dangle passively, and felt the nagging pull of the undertow. The hope of leaving the cavern by following the outlet of the pool died before it had gained more than a flutter of life. For the water flowed out by a subterranean channel which no man could follow.
Abington continued around the pool, turning the lamp this way and that upon water and walls. The place was not unlike a huge cistern, roughly round and slowly drying up, judging from certain marks on the rock rim which in places sloped steeply toward the water. Presently he discovered the inlet, a small stream running down through a crack in the wall. There was no hope Whatever of getting out that way. It was here that the tinkly drip fell into the pool from a finger of rock thrust out of the fissure.
Even in his urgent need of finding his way back to the surface, his scientific mind ruled Abington, for he caught himself turning the lamp rays back for a second look at hieroglyphics carved high up.
“What the deuce!” he muttered. “That can mean nothing but evil—much evil—and the death of many. Aztec and Egyptian—not burial but death, and an evil death at that. Death to many—repeated over there. Well, the carvers were here, that’s certain. Couldn’t have come in as I came. H’m—”
He went on, stepping across the fissure where the water flowed in, and keeping to the dank rim which widened as he proceeded. Although the walls rose roughly perpendicular with here an outward bulge, there a falling back to a steep incline, there was visible no passage nor even a split, save where the water came sliding down the fissure that was no more than a seam. All along the wall, high up wherever a smooth surface offered, there were the carvings, with little variation in their sinister portent, the great chain of evil, and the death of many.